Generic intervention levels for protecting the public in the event of a nuclear accident or radiological emergency

Many international organizations are in the process of developing common safety standards for protection against ionizing radiation and for the safety of radiation sources. This document is intended to provide input to the final specification of intervention levels, at which actions of various kinds to protect members oft the public after an accident are advised. It provides the radiation protection principles underlying such intervention levels and proposes numerical values for these levels based on an analysis of some of the more directly quantifiable factors involved. Factors such as social disruption, psychological factors and political considerations are discussed, but are explicitly excluded from the derivation. Refs, figs and tabs