Preface

Article Outline

• Copyright

The Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté (IRSN) is a French advisory public expert body serving French authorities with research and assessments concerning nuclear and radiological risks.

When the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) decided to review and amend its 1990 Recommendations, IRSN decided that for its own purposes, it needed a compilation of numerical protection level values in currently valid ICRP recommendations and advice, combined with an overview of the rationales underlying each such value recommended by ICRP.

In order to obtain such a compilation, IRSN requested the assistance of the Centre d’étude sur l’Évaluation de la Protection dans le domaine Nucléaire (CEPN), a non-profit French expert organisation created in the late 1970s jointly by the French Atomic Energy Commission (Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique - CEA) and the French utility (Electricité de France - EDF).

CEPN launched a Task Group to carry out such a project, with the following membership:

C. Schieber, France, Chair P. Croüail, France J. Lochard, France

T. Schneider, France

The report of the Task Group, CEPN Report No. 277, was delivered to IRSN in May of the year 2005.

Realising that the CEPN report could be of interest to a wider audience, IRSN contacted ICRP and, in consultation with CEPN, offered the report for publication in the Annals of the ICRP.

The Commission noted that the report would provide a useful background and source of compiled information in relation to its project to review and amend the fundamental ICRP Recommendations, and gratefully accepted the offer of IRSN and CEPN. The report was approved in principle as an ICRP Supporting Guidance document at the Commission’s meeting in Paris in March 2005. In the final editorial review of the document, Caroline Schieber kindly checked it again and amended it with certain references to recent ICRP Publications that had not been taken into account in the original version.

The membership of the Main Commission when the report was approved for publication as an ICRP Supporting Guidance document was: