The International Commission on Radiological Protection has given general guidance on the precautions to be taken in the storage, handling and disposal of unsealed radioactive material in hospitals and medical research establishments in ICRP Publication 5. The present publication replaces the previous recommendations of the Commission given in ICRP Publication 5 and is primarily directed towards the competent national authorities. By utilizing the practices outlined in the present report, it should be possible to keep radiation doses well below the maximum permissible levels recommended by...

ICRP Publication 26 summarized the recommended basic system of dose limitation into three interrelated components, abbreviated as:

(i) The justification of the practice.
(ii) The optimization of radiation protection.
(iii) The limits of the individual dos equivalent.

This report is concerned primarily with the second of these components of te system of dose limitation, the optimization of radiation protection, and with the rationale and techniques to establish what is reasonably achievable in the control of radiation exposures. A wide range of techniques...

The International Commission on Radiological Protection issued its last basic recommendations in 1977. The recommendations have been used widely throughout the world to limit exposure of both radiation workers and members of the public to ionising radiations. Supplementary statements to the 1977 recommendations were issued when necessary by the Commission, but developments in the last few years have made it necessary to issue a completely new set of recommendations, officially adopted in November 1990. In publishing these recommendations, the Commission has had three aims in mind: to take...

This report describes a revision of the model used in ICRP Publication 30 to calculate radiation doses to the respiratory tract of workers resulting from the intake of airborne radionuclides. This revision was motivated by the availability of increased knowledge of the anatomy and physiology of the respiratory tract and of the deposition, clearance, and biological effects of inhaled radioactive particles, and by greatly expanded dosimetry requirements. To meet fully the needs of radiation protection, a dosimetric model for the respiratory tract should: provide calculations of doses for...

ICRP Publication 74 provides an extensive and authoritative set of data linking the operational quantities defined by ICRU with the dosimetric and protection quantities defined by ICRP. The operational quantities provide a satisfactory basis for most of the measurements for radiation protection against external radiations. In those cases where it is not so, the data given in the report provides a basis for designing special measurement programmes, properly interpreting their results and relating them to the protection quantities. The report should be useful to operational health physicists,...

ICRP Publication 78 replaces the previous ICRP Publication 54 on individual monitoring programmes and the interpretation of results of measurements for intakes of radionuclides by workers. The updating was considered necessary because ICRP published new dose coefficients for intakes of radionuclides by workers in 1994 (ICRP Publication 68). Those new dose coefficients were based on the most recent general recommendations of the Commission (ICRP Publication 60). The present report uses this new information and takes account of the new principles for the radiological protection of workers...

In its 1990 recommendations, the ICRP considered the radiation risks after exposure during prenatal development. This report is a critical review of new experimental animal data on biological effects and evaluations of human studies after prenatal radiation published since the 1990 recommendations. Thus, the report discusses the effects after radiation exposure during pre-implantation, organogenesis, and fetogenesis. The aetiology of long-term effects on brain development is discussed, as well as evidence from studies in man on the effects of in-utero radiation exposure on neurological and...

This report presents detailed information on age- and gender-related differences in the anatomical and physiological characteristics of reference individuals. These reference values provide needed input to prospective dosimetry calculations for radiation protection purposes for both workers and members of the general public. The purpose of this report is to consolidate and unify in one publication, important new information on reference anatomical and physiological values that has become available since Publication 23 was published by the ICRP in 1975. There are two aspects of this work. The...

The proposed framework is designed to harmonise with the ICRP's approach to the protection of human beings, but does not intend to set regulatory standards. Instead, the proposed framework is intended to be a practical tool to provide high-level advice and guidance for regulators and operators. An agreed set of quantities and units, a set of reference dose models, reference dose-per-unit-intake (or unit exposure), and reference fauna and flora are required to serve as a basis for the more fundamental understanding and interpretation of the relationships between exposure and dose and between...

The effect of ionising radiation is influenced by the dose, the dose rate, and the quality of the radiation. Before 1990, dose-equivalent quantities were defined in terms of a quality factor, Q(L), that was applied to the absorbed dose at a point in order to take into account the differences in the effects of different types of radiation. In its 1990 recommendations, the ICRP introduced a modified concept. For radiological protection purposes, the absorbed dose is averaged over an organ or tissue, T, and this absorbed dose average is weighted for the radiation quality in terms of the...