Dose-Rate Measuring in Hard Tenniscourts

T. Milassin, Á. Kovács, S. Börcsök

Hungarian State Public Health Service, Csongrád County Institute, Szeged, Hungary

CEJOEM 1997, Vol.3. No.4.:333

Everybody says: sports in the open air are healthy.

Really, is a tennis-court that healthy?

The well-known problems around the use some of clinkers in buildings led us to examine the hard courts – what dose-rate can we measure beyond the natural background? All of the examined open-air tennis-courts had been covered with the same red clinker.
    We examined the in situ dose-rate (unit of measurement nGy/h) with a Berthold Umo radiometer, and samples were measured in our laboratory with the high resolution CANBERRA measuring system with a low-temperature Ge-Li detector.
    The in situ measuring gave a dose-map. The dose-map shows the frequented areas of the field very well: these places gave higher radioactivity. This is probably correct, because the thickness of the replaced red clinker coating and the measured dose-rate are in correlation.
    The analysis of the samples produced very interesting spectra. All of them contained a high amount of K40; Th, U and their daughter-elements. The occurrence of the radioactive elements was the same in the three clinker samples. These elements are the primordial radionuclides, they ere as old as the Earth. These nuclides are emitting a and b particles and g-photons. The high rate of the corpuscular radiation is verified in the in situ measurement, the total dosage being reduced fast in the height.
    According to the results sportsmen and workers on the field may acquire higher through no dangerous amount of irradiation during their activities.

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