ICRP Main Commission Meeting

1996 March 19-22 Bethesda MD, USA

The Commission agreed the Scientific Secretary should report in November on ways of producing CR-ROMs with tables of dose coefficients from select ICRP reports.

The Commission received a summary of progress from R Cox regarding Task Group on Genetic Suceptibility to Cancer. Experiments indicate that expression of common cancers requires a mutation of the second copy of a gene.

A report was given to the commission by F Mettler regarding the Report on Radiological Protection and Safety in Medicine. Recommendations were made regarding costs and benefits of optimising radiation protection. The report was adopted.

The Commission discussed and made decisions regarding the Draft Report on general Principles for the Protection of Workers. Some of the decisions made involved: Clarifying statements to definitions and terms, indicate relationship between operational and protection quanitities, contamination of radionuclides in environment, and hot particle monitoring.

H J Dunster gave a report on the applications and justifications for radiation protection related to waste management. The Commission decided that there was a case to publish a document related to policy issues regarding waste disposal but the document ‘Protection Recommendations as applied to Disposal of Long-lived Solid Radioactive Waste’ was not an appropriate document to reference these matters. A schedule for this task group was approved.

The Commission concluded with respect to The Use Of Age-Dependent Detriment Coefficients For Radiopharmaceuticals And The Risks Associated With The Medical Use Of Ionising Radiation At Different Ages that there was no need to apply age-dependent detriment coefficients for assessing detriment in diagnostic radiology.

The Commission discussed the matter of obsolete ICRP publications and agreed that Committee Charimen would present Chariment views on reliability status of ICRP publications.

The following changes were made to the membership of the ICRP:

• RH Clarke and C B Meinhold were nomainted as Chairman and Vice-Chairman respectively
• H J Dunster, W Jacobi, H Jammet, D Li, J Liniecki, and W K Sinclair are to retire effective June 1997
• R Cox, A Kaul, F Mettler and B Winkler were elected to Committees 1-3 respectively