Conclusions and recommendations from the 17th Workshop of the European ALARA Network ‘ALARA in emergency exposure situations ’
The European ALARA Network regularly organises workshops on topical issues in radiation protection.
In light of the Fukushima accident, the most recent workshop questioned the application of the ALARA
principle in emergency exposure situations. This memorandum presents the conclusions and
recommendations of this workshop. One of the outcomes is that the process of optimisation in
emergency exposure situations should be flexible enough to be able to modify or refine decisions
over the course of an accident. In the urgent phase, decisions must be made in a very
time-constrained environment, based on scarce, uncertain and sometimes unreliable information. In
this phase, optimisation and protection strategies are therefore developed and applied on the basis
of conservative assumptions or ‘reasonably foreseeable worst-case scenario’ which could lead to an
overestimation of the consequences. In the intermediate phase, knowledge of the situation improves,
and more time is available to ...
Source: Journal of Radiological Protection - Category: Physics Authors: Sylvain Andresz, Julie Morgan, Pascal Cro üail and Fernand Vermeersch Source Type: research