Abstract

Original abstract online at
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10653-026-03475-3

 

The Republic of Korea applies a residential soil fluoride standard of 800 mg/kg, while geogenically elevated fluoride occurs in some regions, creating uncertainty about how soil fluoride concentrations translate into potential health risk under multimedia exposure. Because fluoride exposure can also occur through groundwater and food crops, soil concentration alone may not fully characterize total exposure. This study compared health risk assessment guidance and quantify the parameterizations using explainable analyses to support media-integrated management guidance. Fluoride exposure scenarios, including crop intake, drinking water consumption, and soil/dust ingestion, were compared and evaluated using the U.S. EPA risk assessment guidance for superfund (RAGS) and the Korean soil-contamination risk assessment guidelines (KRAG). Simulated fluoride levels ranged from 200 to 4000 mg/kg in soil, 0.5 to 2.5 mg/L in water, and 5 to 40 mg/kg in crops. Additionally, explainable machine learning was applied to identify parameterization inconsistencies and to support guideline-relevant refinement. Children exhibited higher hazard index (HI) to fluoride under RAGS, reaching 9.116, whereas KRAG yielded lower HI estimates under the specified parameterization and, in some scenarios, produced lower HI values for children than for adults. A modified approach, RAGS-K, applies KRAG parameters within the RAGS calculation structure and yielded higher HI estimates than KRAG under the examined scenarios. The results show that intake from water and crops dominates child risk and drives the discrepancy between adult and child risk, supporting further evaluation of media-integrated risk assessment approaches.

Supplementary Information

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Supplementary file1 (ZIP 80 KB) (download ZIP )

Data availability

No datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT (2022R1C1C2003376 and 2021R1A2C2012884). This work was also supported by Aquatic Ecosystem Conservation Research Program (RS-2024-00337326) and the Pollution and Hazard Response and Management Project (RS-2023-00220588), both funded by the Korea Ministry of Environment (MOE). Additional support was provided by the Korea Institute of Energy Technology Evaluation and Planning (KETEP) funded by the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy (RS-2024-00431554).

Funding

Yongtae Ahn, and Byong-Hun Jeon disclose funding from the Korea Ministry of Environment (MOE), and Korea Institute of Energy Technology Evaluation and Planning (KETEP).

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Authors and Affiliations

Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data curation, methodology, and analysis were performed by H. Park, K. Choi, and Y. Ahn. The first draft of the manuscript was written by J. Kwon, and all authors commented on previous version of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. Writing and review & editing were performed by R. Kumar, D. Choi, and K. Kim. Validation was performed by S. Chang, J. Choi, and S. Lee. Supervision, Funding acquisition, and Conceptualization were performed by B. Jeon, and Y. Ahn.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Yongtae Ahn or Byong-Hun Jeon.

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The authors declare that they have no known conflict of financial interest or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.