The task of official personal monitoring in Germany using electronic dosimetry systems

Full text: Since the establishment of the first German personal monitoring services as competent measuring bodies in the year 1952, official personal dosimetry is carried out using passive dosimeters such as film batches, RPL- and TL-dosimeters solely. On the other hand, electronic dosimeters are in use in some big institutions like Nuclear Power Plants, hospitals or industrial units for operational purposes. In most cases, these dosimeters are regulated by competent authorities. For more than 20 years electronic dosimeters proved their worth of being appropriate personal dosimeters. Since 2001 concepts to implement electronic personal dosimeters into the official individual monitoring of occupational exposed workers were developed in different research projects. The EU market of personal dosimetry changes to an open and competitive one, the number of outside workers, especially during the outages of Nuclear Power Plants increases, the landscape of customers is getting more and more heterogeneous. Being able to face these tasks of a sustainable personal monitoring requires the introduction of modern electronic dosimeters into to the official monitoring. Doing so, the needed prompt exchange of dose-data between different monitoring services as well as between the customers and the related monitoring service can be warranted. In cooperation with the industry, competent authorities and a research centre a method for official dosimetry using electronic dosimetry systems was developed, realised and tested successfully by the three big monitoring services of Germany. These investigations are supported by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety. For this purpose a network between customers and monitoring services was built up in order to monitor people, who work in different places related to different measuring bodies in only one period of surveillance. (author)