Radiation protection and decision-making on cleanup of contaminated urban environments

The system of radiological protection for interventions should be applied to determine an optimised cleanup strategy for environments contaminated from nuclear or radiological accidents. The decision-aiding process of justification and optimisation of radiological protection achieved by cleanup of contaminated environments is presented. In addition, a methodology is presented for deriving generically optimised reference levels for cleanup of urban and semi-urban environments, based on dose reduction and monetary costs of the cleanup measures. These generic reference levels are compared to international recommended reference levels for protection of the public against prolonged exposure and international recommended reference levels for remediation of areas contaminated by past activities and accidents. The necessary inputs to the optimisation of an overall health protection, of which radiological protection only forms one part, are briefly discussed. The experience in the former Soviet Union after the Chernobyl accident was that social and psychological factors formed an important input to decisions on the introduction of countermeasures in contaminated territories. To achieve an optimised overall health protection of the affected population, it might be necessary, therefore, to include measures to reduce e.g. anxiety and to gain reassurance of the affected population, in addition to measures for reducing the radiation detriment. This decision-making process would be much wider than the decision-aiding process of justification and optimisation of radiological protection alone. The process of decision-making will therefore require inputs from experts in radiation protection as well as from experts in social sciences and probably from the affected population, the so-called interested parties or stakeholders. The role of radiological protection experts, experts in social sciences and stakeholders in the decision-making process is discussed. It is concluded that the radiological protection framework should neither include stakeholder involvement nor sociopolitical and psychological factors. Otherwise, the radiation protection community would enter the field of decision-making. This would be conceptually wrong, as the radiation protection community has no mandate to make societal decisions. Consequently, stakeholder inputs, radiological protection inputs and social inputs to the decision-making process on cleanup of contaminated environments must be done in parallel to form an optimised overall health protection being the sole responsibility of the decision-maker.