Radioecological studies in Korea atomic energy research institute, KAERI

Regarding the assessment of the terrestrial food chain dose to man, radioecology may be the field that is focused on the transfer of radionuclides from environmental media to food crops. In Korea, the environmental transfer of radionuclides to staple food crops have been investigated at Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI) for the last 25 y mainly through radiotracer experiments in greenhouses. As a result, several hundreds of parameter values for the prediction of the radionuclide transfer have been produced. Many of them appear in two recent publications of International Atomic Energy Agency. This paper outlines the KAERI's past radioecological work and introduces the ongoing research and future plans.