Sources of environmental radionuclides and recent results in analyses of bioaccumulation. A review

In principle, there are two sources of environmental radionuclides, namely natural and man-made. In comparison with other environmental pollutants as, e.g., heavy metals, some scientific and technical disciplines profit by the natural radionuclides, using them for age determination of the samples, e.g., hydrology, geology and archaeology. Nevertheless, the environmental radionuclides represent mostly risk for a human health. Therefore, in this review, their sources are shortly described and original recent analyses of some bioaccumulation methods are presented, using either selected plant species or microorganisms, respectively. The different uptakes in all systems were measured to evaluate the possibility of application of the tested biological materials as markers of environmental contamination. It was also demonstrated that the detection methods developed for analyses of bioaccumulation of environmental radionuclides could be applied in radiotracer methodology for a study of bioaccumulation of heavy metals. While gamma spectrometry for soil samples and liquid scintillation spectrometry for water samples were used, autoradiography was applied to analyze the distribution of radionuclides during and/or after bioaccumulation.