Investigation of radon and its progeny in ceramic cooking dishes

Background: recently, the concentration of radioactivity in the ceramic cooking dishes is found to exceed the reference level values. therefore, there is a need to measure the radon concentration in ceramic cooking dishes, especially radon gas inhalation which is considered to be the second largest cause of lung cancer. materials and methods: in this work, a collection of 19 different kinds of ceramic cooking dishes is measured using cr-39 ssntd (solid state nuclear track detector). results: the obtained results showed that the highest value of radon concentration is found to be 23.07 ± 1.44 bq/m3, 148.41± 5.99 bq/m3 and 783.03± 35.96 bq/m3for high quality, low quality and handmade ceramic cooking dishes, respectively. indicating that the radon concentration for 18.19% of handmade ceramic cooking dishes is exceeded the internationally accepted levels 600 bq/m3. conclusions: all values of radon concentration for handmade ceramic cooking dishes are found to be higher than the measured values for high quality and low-quality manufactured ceramic cooking dishes. in addition, the mean values of annual effective doses of handmade ceramic cooking dishes are found to be varied from 2.20 to 22.47msv/y, exceeding the internationally accepted action level from icrp 2007 agency (1). hence, this study recommends that care must be taken when using the handmade ceramic cooking dishes.