A study of worker dose distributions with respect to ICRP dose limitation recommendations

This paper describes an investigation into the distribution of radiation doses to workers, undertaken at the request of ICRP Committee 4. Three main questions are considered. Firstly, the distribution of annual doses to workers is described. Doses are generally well below the ICRP dose limits and most are below 15 mSv y-1. However, doses are not distributed randomly from year to year. The second part of the paper examines recording levels in use and the implications of using the recording level recommended by the ICRP. The data presented here show that little dosimetric information would be lost and many fewer doses would need to be stored if the ICRP-recommended recording level were used. The last part of the paper considers the distribution of doses in individual monitoring periods. It is shown that the distribution of doses to all individuals in a particular monitoring period is not necessarily the same as the distribution of doses to a particular individual in all monitoring periods. This places limitations on the extent to which missing doses may be estimated from doses to the workforce as a whole.