A new approach for harmonisation of internal dosimetry: The IDEAS Guidelines

The need for harmonization of the procedures for internal dose assessment has been formulated within an EU research project under the 5 Framework Program. The aim of the project IDEAS (partly funded by the European Commission under Contract No FIKR-CT2001-00160) has been to develop general guidelines for standardizing assessments of intakes and internal doses. The IDEAS project started in October 2001 and ended in June 2005. The project is closely related to some goals of the work of Committee 2 of the ICRP and since 2003 there has been close cooperation between the two groups. To ensure that the guidelines are applicable to a wide range of practical situations, drafts have been discussed with dosimetry professionals from around the world by means of a virtual workshop on the Internet, early in 2004, via the IDEAS web site. The guidelines have been refined on the basis of the experiences and discussions of a workshop celebrated at the IAEA headquarters in April 2005 after a joint IDEAS/IAEA Intercomparison Exercise on Internal Dose Assessment aimed at testing the application of the guidelines. The work of refinement of IDEAS guidelines was continued in the frame of the CONRAD Project, partially funded by the European Commission under the auspices of the Euratom 6 th Framework Program for research and training in nuclear energy, Contract No FI6R-012684. The general philosophy of the guidelines is here presented, focusing on the principles of harmonization (any assessors should obtain the same estimate of dose from a given data set); accuracy (the “best” estimate of dose should be obtained from the available data) and proportionality (the effort applied to the evaluation should be proportionate to the dose – the lower the dose, the simpler the process should be). The proposed level of task to structure the approach of internal dose evaluation is also reported. Finally some information about the dissemination of the IDEAS Guidelines and supporting software is provided.