The environment contains an abundance of man-made and natural radionuclides, as well as polluting heavy metals. Their accumulation and the inevitable adverse impact on human health is a matter for serious international concern. Such modern environmental problems are reviewed in an integrated fashion here.The book's highlights are: the accumulation of actinide nuclei in the human body, including data on Pu and Am in some of the most seriously damaged regions of Russia, Belorussia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan; fundamental and applied aspects of heavy metal waste deposits; advances in analytical techniques (NAA, XRF, ICP-MS, AAS, PIXE, HPLC); the use of mosses and lichens to study heavy metal atmospheric deposition; research on toxicology, food and nutrition, speciation and scalp hair as a biological indicator; new model of the Earth's crust allowing the reconstruction of the real origin of seismic catastrophes including a real possibility to predict earthquake or volcanic activity by studying radon gas, gamma and neutron activity in combination with hydrogen and helium isotope flow and complemented by satellite data on the state of the ionosphere; and data on accelerator driven transmutation experiments (protons accelerated as JINR Synchrophasotron and 660 MeV Phasotron) with Pb blocks and 3000 kg natural uranium targets.
