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Draft Report for Consultation - Environmental Protection: Transfer parameters for Reference Animals and Plants
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The draft ICRP report "Environmental Protection: Transfer parameters for Reference Animals and Plants" is now available for public consultation. The draft abstract is shown below.
ICRP welcomes comments from individuals or groups. The draft document can be downloaded, and comments submitted, through the
ICRP consultation page.
Comments must be submitted no later than October 1, 2010.
Draft Abstract
The Commission has based its approach to environmental protection upon using the concept of a limited set of Reference Animals and Plants as a basis for relating exposure to dose, and dose to radiation effects, for different types of animals and plants in an internally consistent manner. The results of this approach has, so far, resulted in the derivation of a set of Dose Conversion Factors for the Reference Animals and Plants, which enables dose rates to be calculated when the concentrations of radionuclides within and without these organisms have been established by direct measurement. The resultant dose rates can then be compared with evaluations of the effects of dose rates on the different Reference Animals and Plants. These data have been compiled in such a way that Derived Consideration Reference Levels can then be established, each of which constitutes a band of dose rates for each Reference Animal and Plant within which there is likely to be some chance of deleterious effects occurring in individuals of that type of animal or plant. Site specific data on Representative Organisms can then be compared with such values and used as a basis for decision making.
In many cases, however, direct measurements of the radionuclide concentrations within and without animals and plants are not available. Resort has then to be made to modelling techniques. These, in turn, require data to enable the concentrations of radionuclides within animals and plants to be estimated relative to the concentrations in the ambient soil, water, or air, as appropriate. This report therefore examines these issues, and how they may best be approached given the relative paucity of data available and the unstructured manner in which they have been acquired over many decades of observation and experimentation. An enormous data base has been brought together and used to provide the most up to date data available.
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