North American Passive House Network Conference 2018

Radon is the 2nd highest cause of lung cancer after tobacco smoke. Most building professionals are never taught that radon emissions don’t just come from the soil and get sucked into leaky buildings, there are trace amounts of uranium in many common building products like concrete that emit significant amounts of radioactive radon gas, and there are no regulations requiring the testing and disclosure of radon emissions from building products. Anything mined from the earth could potentially be the culprit for high levels of radon emissions in your airtight passive house that far exceed the actionable level. With examples from the presenter's original research, learn how to prevent a radon problem in your planned passive house, and how to mitigate radon in one already built, without blowing your thermal/ energy budget.

 Learning Objectives
1. Be able to explain how radon gas gets emitted, and what the health risks are.

2. Learn how to prevent radon from leaking into buildings from soils, and/or to mitigate radon from sources
external to a building.

3. Learn which common building materials can emit radon and how to test building materials to prevent bad
emitters from being included in your new passive house.

4. Learn how to test existing passive houses for radon and how to mitigate it if you have a problem, with the
least damage to the buildings energy performance.