Implementation of current ICRP recommendations in the United States of America

On 27 January 1987, President Ronald Reagan of the United States of America issued to Federal agencies new guidance on occupational radiation protection. The guidance, developed by an interagency committee under the leadership of the Environmental Protection Agency, is based on the current recommendations of the International Commission on Radiological Protection. Affected Federal agencies are now in the process of modifying their radiation protection standards accordingly. In the case of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), extensive participation by interested members of the public is involved in this process. A major revision of the NRC basic standard, 10 CFR Part 20, has been published for public comment. More than 800 comment letters were received. All of these comments are being carefully considered, and adoption of many of them will be recommended by the NRC staff. Rationales for decisions regarding the comments will be made available to the public in a Federal Register Notice which will publish the new regulation in the final form, scheduled for late 1988. Major concerns expressed by the commenters are the relatively high costs associated with implementing the proposed regulations and the relatively low potential for associated reductions in risk; these factors result in an unfavorable cost-benefit ratio. Other basic concerns include unnecessary complexity and the need for training to facilitate the transition process. A national transition education program is being planned by the Health Physics Society under which specially prepared textbooks and videotapes, at three different levels of technical difficulty (health physicists, health physics technicians, management personnel), are to be used. They will be highly focussed to include instructions regarding only the changes that are being made, and they are to be sufficiently general for applicability to all activities involving personnel exposures to ionizing radiation. They will be used in classes conducted by employers at their own facilities and normally taught by one of their own health physicists