Volume 67, Issue 1

Since August 2001, German radiation protection law is governed by a new Radiation Protection Ordinance, implementing two new Euratom Directives and taking into account new scientific developments, which provides a comprehensive basis for the protection of man and the environment. The Ordinance has been completely re-structured; however, it is still a very complex piece of legislation comprising 118 provisions and 14 annexes, some of them highly technical. Reduced dose limits for occupationally exposed persons and members of the public, a detailed provision on clearance of radioactive substances, a new part aiming at the protection of man and the environment against ionising radiation emanating from natural sources, and regulations dealing with the protection of consumers in connection with the addition of radioactive substances to consumer goods are some of the centre pieces of the new legislation which shall contribute significantly to the further prevention or at least minimisation of the adverse effects of radiation exposure.

The Radiation Protection Ordinance implements a recommendation developed by the International Commission on Radiological Protection on terms of granting a practice to be carried out without reporting and prior authorisation, i. e. on conditions of exemption of justified practices from regulatory control. According to this recommendation, a practice may be exempted from regulatory control, if the radiological risk associated with the practice is, under normal conditions as well as in diverging situations, sufficiently low as not to warrant regulatory concern, and there are no reasonable control procedures that can achieve a significant reduction of the radiological risk. This article deals with the radiological criteria for the derivation of exemption values below which regulatory procedures are unwarranted, and goes into further subjects (design approval, consumer goods) for which the concept of exemption is applicable.

For the first time the modalities for the clearance of relevant materials have been laid down in the amended Radiation Protection Ordinance in a comprehensive form. A distinction is made between unconditional clearance and cases of clearance in which disposal, recycling, and re-use is prescribed. The focus of attention in the case of unconditional clearance consists in special consideration of large volumes of building rubble and excavated soil. Material can only be released from supervision under the Atomic Energy Act, when the radiation-related risk, and correspondingly, also the dose from material issued with clearance, are at negligible levels. In order to facilitate the practical application of clearance, values have been derived on the basis of scenarios which cover all radiation exposures which can reasonably be considered.

The General Administrative Regulation under Paragraph 47 of the amended Radiological Protection Ordinance was revised according to the requirements of the Council Directive 96/29/ Euratom and the amendment of the Radiological Protection Ordinance. Its basic structure and the degree of conservatism with regard to dose assessment for members of the public were maintained. According to the requirements of the Council Directive, reference subjects of six different age groups have to be considered, instead of only two as hitherto. Age-dependent living habits (consumption and ventilation rates') were established, including the exposure pathway “human milk”. Suitable dose and dose rate coefficients were compiled and recalculated if necessary. The potential consequences of the amendment of the General Administrative Regulation were demonstrated by the results of comparative dose calculations.

Within the scope of the amendment of the Radiation Protection Ordinance, it became necessary to lay down new limit values, as a result of both the modifications made in the stipulations of the EU directives, and improvements in the level of scientific and technological advancement. This led, at the same time, to the necessity of recalculating the permitted levels for activity concentrations in exhaust air from applications involving isotopes (mostly from medical installations). The following article provides an overview of the approach applied in the recalculation of the permitted activity concentration levels in exhaust air for around 800 radionuclides, along with a comparison of the limit values which have been applied up until the present.

In the present article, the formulas for calculation and the parameters and scenarios applied in the recalculation of the permitted activity concentrations for waste water from areas subject to radiation protection controls at the sites of those applying isotopes, performed on the basis of the amended version of the Radiation Protection Ordinance and Council Directive 96/29/Euratom, are discussed. The concentration values calculated for approximately 800 radionuclides are compiled in Table 4 in Appendix VII of the 2001 version of the Radiation Protection Ordinance. Modifications have been made by comparison with the values from the old version of the ordinance, due to the new dose coefficients and indications for dietary habits applied.

Die Richtlinie 96/29 EURATOM des Rates vom 13. Mai 1996 zur Festlegung der grundlegenden Sicherheitsnormen für den Schutz der Gesundheit der Arbeitskr ä fte und der Bevölkerung gegen die Gefahren durch ionisierende Strahlung fordert von Mitgliedsl ä ndern Strahlenschutzmaßnahmen bei natürlichen Strahlenquellen, auch wenn deren Radioaktivit ä t nicht genutzt wird, wenn die natürliche Strahlenexposition erheblich erhöht ist. Diese Forderung wird in der neuen Strahlenschutzverordnung (StrlSchV) in nationales Recht umgesetzt, die dafür einen eigenen Regelungsbereich enthält. Da die Einwirkungsmöglichkeiten auf die natürlicherweise vorhandenen Strahlenquellen wesentlich geringer sind als bei der Anwendung der Radioaktivität oder der ionisierenden Strahlung unterscheiden sich die Regelungen in mancher Hinsicht. Die Regelungen beschränken sich auf solche Handlungen, die für Beschäftigte oder Personen der Bevölkerung zu Strahlenexpositionen von mehr als 1 mSv fuhren. Die Regelungen wenden sich vor allem an den Arbeitgeber. Sie definieren seine Verantwortung für diesen Teil des Gesundheits- und Arbeitsschutzes. Umfangreiche behördliche Genehmigungen und Überwachungen werden vermieden.

The German Radiation Protection Ordinance issued in 1989 – as well as ICRP Publication 30 – included tables of annual limits on intake (ALIs). These are secondary limits derived to indicate those intake values which are not allowed to be exceeded within a year to meet the primary annual dose limits. The latest ICRP Publications dealing with doses for workers give no ALIs any more and also the IAEA Basic Safety Standards and the Council Directive of the European Commission do not list such values. And also the new Radiation Protection Ordinance as well as the federal gazette with dose coefficients do not include such values any more. However, it may be that they will be included as guiding levels in the calculation principles for the assessment of internal doses. This paper will give reasons why there are no ALIs given any more, it will show how ALIs could be calculated, it will show the influence of additional dose restrictions for female workers of child-bearing age, and it will discuss if radiation protection for the unborn child would be fulfilled if the dose limits of the radiation protection ordinance are met.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has statutory functions for the development of radiation safety standards. Its basic safety standards have, for many years, been based on the recommendations of the International Commission on Radiological Protection, taking account of the information on the biological effects of radiation exposure provided by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation. The latest version – the International Basic Safety Standards – was published in its final form in 1996, and, since then the Agency has been assisting with their implementation in a large number of States. The experience gained, combined with a more general reflection on these Standards, has led to the identification of a number of issues that will need to be considered in any future revision. A number of these issues arise largely through an insufficient recognition of the problems associated with turning the principles of protection into regulatory style requirements, which, out of necessity, need to be legally precise, but at the same time, enforceable. Some of these issues are discussed here.

The basic recommendations of the International Commission on Radiological Protection, ICRP, are either re-stated or revised at intervals of about 15 years, most recently in ICRP Publication 60, adopted in 1990. ICRP plans to issue its next recommendations around 2005. Through extensive consultation, the active participation of the radiological protection community was recruited already at the conceptual stage. Based on the vast input received, ICRP is currently preparing draft recommendations. These are likely to emphasise egalitarian values more than utilitarian ones, to be holistic rather than anthropocentric, and to be formatted as a relatively concise set of actual recommendations underpinned by separate publications with more detail. The draft will again be circulated world-wide and comments will be discussed in 2004 with a view to approval of the recommendations in 2005 and publication in 2005 or 2006. Thus, integration into legislation would be possible sometime between 2006 and 2010, say.