Radiation protection culture: a global challenge.

The central motto 'Radiation Protection Culture-A Global Challenge' of the fourth European IRPA Congress is discussed on the basis of the IRPA Guiding Principles Establishing a Radiation Protection Culture and the contributions presented in the plenary sessions of the conference.

Concepts of ISO for the monitoring of workers for internal exposure and the present approach for the dose assessment.

Besides ongoing developments in the dosimetry of incorporated radionuclides, there are various efforts to improve the monitoring of workers for potential or real intakes of radionuclides. The disillusioning experience with numerous inter-comparison projects identified substantial differences between national regulations, concepts, applied programmes and methods and dose assessment procedures. Measured activities were not comparable because of severe differences between measuring frequencies and methods, but also results of case studies for dose assessments revealed differences of orders of magnitudes. Besides the general common interest in reliable monitoring results, at least the cross-border activities of workers (e.g. nuclear power plant services) require consistent approaches and comparable results. The International Standardisation Organisation (ISO) therefore initiated projects to standardise the monitoring of workers, the requirements for measuring laboratories and the processes for the quantitative evaluation of monitoring. This presentation is intended to give an introduction into some important aspects addressed in these standards: the need for a monitoring programme, the design of a monitoring programme: methods and intervals, reference levels and approaches for dose assessments.