Health, social and economic impact of some tritium watches in Italy. Regulations, derogations and proposed scenarios for dose assessment

The Italian Radiation Protection regulations issued in 1995, valid since the beginning of 1996, ban the trading, production, import, use, handling and anyway keeping of 'products for personal use containing deliberately added radioactive materials'. Tritium watches belong to such a category of consumer products. A derogation to this ban may be asked to the Italian authorities provided that a Qualified Expert performs a dose assessment for all the possible scenarios involving users, non-users, workers and general population for the use, distribution, repair and disposal of tritium watches in normal and accident a conditions. We have carried out this assessment for watches imported by some large Italian comparies and the general results are here reported. In this context we have also compared the Italian legislation with the present one of other European countries, just few months before the deadline for the compulsory implementation by the EU member states of the 1996 Euratom Directive, laying down Basic Safety Standards for the protection of the health of workers and the general public against the dangers arising from ionising radiation. We have also traced the evolution of the Italian legislation in the matter of radioluminescent watches in the last thirty years. The dose assessments have been carried out considering scenarios both reported in international literature and suitably set out by the authors. It can be pointed out that, considering credible hypotheses, the maximum committed dose to the user of a tritium watch, in normal conditions of use, is less than 10 micro Sv/y and that in many cases neither in the worst and unlikely scenarios such a value is exceeded; the other categories of potentially exposed people (non-users, repairmen, distributors) are affected by much lower 'doses'. In all cases the individual doses are well below the annual limit set out by the Italian legislation for practices involving radioactive man-made material. Nevertheless, these values have been compared with the constraints suggested by the IAEA Basic Safety Standards and by the 1996 Euratom Directive, below which the doses are considered trivial. Few, cheap and easy countermeasures to be taken for reducing the doses to trivial ones have been proposed in those rare cases in which the values slightly exceeded in the trivial dose. Though the concept of 'cost of detriment' is not accepted by the Italian authorities in such a context, using values found in literature and referred to nuclear power plants as well as to consumer products, we can conclude that the ALARA principle can be applied with success to the tritium watches taken in consideration, especially with reference to the social and economic factors. (author)