title: Parameter variability and the reliability of radioecological calculations.
abstract: Any attempt to assess the dose to man from releases of radionuclides to the environment faces the difficulty that parameters of radioecological models show a high variability. This variability may result in large uncertainties in the dose estimates. A method based on means and variances of the parameters often used to estimate dose distributions is reviewed and found to give rather unreliable results. For licensing of nuclear facilities, the use of a more precise method based on ranks is recommended. This method leads to estimations with guaranteed confidence limits.
mesh_terms: D004463:Ecology; D011336:Probability; D011829:Radiation Dosage; D011848:Radioactive Pollutants / Q000032:analysis*; D013223:Statistics as Topic
chemical_list: D011848:Radioactive Pollutants