Radiological Protection in Transition

After a short review of the build-up of operational radiation protection and emergency management in Switzerland, lessons learned from these experiences and from regulatory work, international cooperation and public relations are presented. Recent developments and trends are critically discussed. Introduction To receive the Bo Lindell Award is a great honour, and I am very grateful to the Board of the NSFS and to its President for this distinction. A look at today's activities often gives me a kind of "déjà-vu"-feeling. Much knowledge from the "pioneer" period of radiation protection has become lost or forgotten again and some is now re-invented by the younger generation. Part of what we developed from scratch does not seem necessary any more because radiation protection has become so perfect. But if something goes wrong we should remember proven survival techniques. Pandora's Box: Operational Radiation Protection, Learning from Mistakes I started my career in radiation protection in 1958 at the Swiss reactor research institute at Würenlingen (EIR, now PSI). As the first full-time radiation protection team in Switzerland we collaborated with the radiation protection and nuclear safety authorities and with commercial nuclear power since the early 60ies. This led to a broad spread of our methods and techniques in radiation protection to the new installations, to a continuous exchange of experiences and to services provided by us. Being primarily an operational division our staff had to deal with many different tasks and problems in parallel which gave them a wide horizon and required flexibility and optimisation of efforts. We aimed at a pragmatic type of radiation protection and practicable solutions for our problems by developing promising ideas and methods from abroad until they worked well in routine situations and could be operated by any technician, not only by the scientist who had invented them. By close contact to producers of instrumentation and protective material they let us test their new products under routine conditions and used our feedback of experiences to improve or develop products according to our specifications. Due to the broad spectrum of activities and installations at Würenlingen we had to solve a variety of protection problems, to measure and analyse a wide range of radionuclides and to deal with radiation fields from background to very high levels. Some of the solutions we developed were meteorological and environmental monitoring instrumentation and methods, ventilated protective suits, air samplers and air monitors, active and passive radon monitoring, personnel dosimetry, incorporation monitoring and analysis from tritium to plutonium. In 1975 we began the first practical application of the effective dose concept for combining external and internal exposures. We improved decontamination methods and optimized conditioning of low and medium radioactive waste in a pilot facility which now has become the national waste management facility.