A report like no other

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The present document differs in a number of ways from the ‘average’ ICRP document. It comprises a review and analysis of existing advice from the International Commission on Radiological Protection, rather than providing any new guidance or recommendations, and therefore is not a numbered ICRP ‘Publication’ but belongs to the much shorter series of Supporting Guidance documents.

Furthermore, the document did not come about in the usual fashion as a proposal from one of the ICRP Committees followed by a Commission decision to appoint a Task Group. Instead, it is the result of an initiative by IRSN (Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire), a public expert organisation advising the French authorities on nuclear and radiological risks, and was drafted by a Task Group of another French expert organisation, CEPN (Centre d’étude sur l’Évaluation de la Protection dans le domaine Nucléaire). The draft was then offered to ICRP for possible publication in order to make it available to a wider audience than that constituted by IRSN itself.

However, the main distinctive feature of this document is that it focuses entirely on the question ‘Why?’ – more specifically, it brings out the Commission’s rationale behind each numerical value provided as ICRP advice.

Because of this, the report comes very timely. In 1997, the Commission decided to launch a project ‘to consolidate or re-iterate Publication 60 (ICRP, 1991)’. That project continued with a series of conceptual reports published in the open literature, as accounted for in Supporting Guidance 4 (ICRP, 2004), followed by two rounds of world-wide public consultation on full draft texts of the next ICRP Recommendations, and at the time of writing is close to completion and formal publication.

Thus, the present compilation of protection level values serves at least three different purposes for ICRP and the users of the Commission’s reports. In the first place, it has already been a valuable tool in the Commission’s own work when drafting its next fundamental Recommendations.

Secondly, it consolidates in an accessible manner all the formal quantitative advice provided by the Commission in its 1990 Recommendations and in subsequent reports containing explicit recommendations. The next ICRP Recommendations will include a summary table comparing the various protection levels in the 1990 and the next Recommendations. Many readers will find the present summary useful as a background when assessing the developments between the two sets of Recommendations.

Finally, the summary of rationales behind each protection level value in currently valid recommendations and guidance will facilitate the understanding of the next Recommendations.

For these reasons, we believe that this Supporting Guidance will be quite helpful. We are most grateful to IRSN and CEPN for putting the draft at our disposal – the candid truth is that if they had not come up with the idea, we would probably have had to invent a report of this kind!

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References 

1. ICRP, 1991. 1990 Recommendations of the International Commission on Radiological Protection. ICRP Publication 60, Ann. ICRP 21 (1-3).
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2. ICRP, 2004. Development of the Draft 2005 recommendations of the ICRP: a collection of papers. ICRP Supporting Guidance 4. Ann. ICRP 34 (Suppl).
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