Increased Radon Exposure From Thawing of Permafrost Due To Climate Change
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Radon is a natural radioactive gas accounting for approximately one in 10 lung cancer deaths, with substantially higher death rates in sub‐Arctic communities. Radon transport is significantly reduced in permafrost, but permafrost is now thawing due to climate change. The effect of permafrost thawing on domestic radon exposure is unknown. Here we present results from radon transport modeling through soil, permafrost, and model buildings either with basements or built on piles. We find that permafrost acts as an effective radon barrier, reducing radiation exposure to a tenth of the background level while producing a ten‐fold increase in the radon activity behind the barrier. When we model thawing of the permafrost barrier, we find no increase in radon to the background level for buildings on piles. However, for buildings with basements, the radon increases to over one hundred times its initial value and can remain above the 200 Bq/m 3 threshold for up to 7 years depending on the depth of the permafrost and the speed of thawing. When thawing speed is taken into account, radiations remain higher than the threshold for all scenarios where 40% thawing occurs within 15 years. This new information suggests that a significant sub‐Arctic population could be exposed to radon levels dangerous to health as a result of climate change thawing of permafrost, with implications for health provision, building codes, and ventilation advice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.046 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".