New Recommendations from the European Committee on Radiation Risk
published in April 2010
In 2003 the European Committee on Radiation Risk published its first Recommendations. At that time it was already clear that many types of exposure are far more dangerous than the advice of the International Commission on Radiological Protection suggests. These types of exposure are all internal, following inhalation, ingestion and absorption. Exposures which cause high densities of ionisations close to sensitive targets lead to the greatest discrepancies between the new model and ICRP's. Examples are hot and warm particles, elements with a high affinity for DNA, and elements which decay sequentially. The reason for the discrepancy is that ICRP's key quantity for radiation protection purposes is "absorbed dose" which treats even the most localised energy deposition patterns as averages of energy transferred into large volumes of tissue. Many authorities including ICRP itself have pointed out the limitations of absorbed dose (more information) It leads to a conceptual dilution of high dose effects akin to imagining that the six bullets in a gunman's revolver can do little harm if they are averaged across a large enough number of people. The ECRR 2003 Recommendations provided weighting factors to be applied to such exposures. In the new publication the Committee points out that using these weightings they correctly predicted the post-Chernobyl cancer increase in Belarus subsequently reported by Okeanov. (More information)
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