Basement ventilation needed to lower indoor radon to acceptable levels.

Although many remedial measures have been proposed for excessive indoor /sup 222/Rn concentrations, their general effectiveness in given situations is not well established, in part because of the number and complexity of the factors that influence indoor /sup 222/Rn. The strategy considered here is the use of basement ventilation to control upstairs indoor radioactivity. A simple two-compartment model is described and used to derive ventilation rates that are needed to lower radon concentrations to specific levels. Previously published indoor radon measurements are used to derive the parameters needed for the calculations. The results of the two-compartment model differ typically by a factor of two from the simpler, more often used one-compartment approximation.