Should you measure the radon concentration in your home
Radon, a naturally occurring radioactive element, was discovered in the year 1900, and high lungcancer rates among miners were recognized hundreds of years before that, but it wasn’t until the1950s that researchers accepted that exposure to radon decay products was one of the major causesof the very high lung cancer rate among miners. Risks to the general population weren’t recognizeduntil the early 1980s, when it was discovered that even homes can have high concentrations ofradon—indeed, the airborne radioactivity in some (very rare) homes is higher than is allowed inuranium mines!Once a risk from radon was recognized, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and otherorganizations including the Department of Energy, launched research eﬀorts to help assess risks andremediation options: what is the statistical and spatial distribution of indoor radon, what methodscan be used to reduce radon concentrations in homes, what is the risk as a function of exposure,and so on. In this chapter, we summarize some of the data on radon distributions and some of therisk estimates, and then discuss how the available information can be used in a decision analysis tomake recommendations on who should perform radon measuremnents or remediation. This chapterfocuses on the decision analysis itself (originally discussed in Lin et al., 1999), and not on thestatistical model, based on Bayesian hierarchical regression, that fed into the decision analysis. Formore information about hierarchical regression, see Gelman et al. (2003, section 22.4).