RADIATION STANDARDS, INCLUDING FALLOUT

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eral Radiation Council mainly to provide the Nation with authoritative judgments. Their recent Report No. 3, which we received since
this was written, appears to me to be an excellent example of this as
applied to the specific topic of fallout.
Wesee that the radiation protection standards over the past period,
20 years if you like to use that period, have served the Nation well and
further aggressive research in support of establishing better principles and achieving more resourceful codification of these principles
should help us to make this statement again 20 years from now.
Let us take a brief look at the numbers that we can invoke from
the industrial experience. We are talking about what is looked on as
an explosively expanding industry but it is neither explosive nor
quite so expanding when we remember that there are said to be some
200,000 people in the present work force in atomic energy. This is
small in comparison with major industries. Nevertheless, a reasonable body of experience is accumulating which points, I believe, on
the whole to success in minimizing exposure through prudent desi
and strict enough control. We have to pick small portions of the
total record to put numbers on them, and table 1 shows some of these
for external exposure alone. I will not elaborate these because they
are in the published record by the AEC.
Exposure records show on the whole that the vast majority of
workers in the AEC complex only receive a radiation dose of less
than 1 rem per year and furthermore only in a very few cases—and
we count about 1 worker in 10,000—has the National Committee on
Radiation Protection short-term control limit of 3 rems in 13 weeks
been exceeded. This always seems to come from some kind of accident
rather than from regular planning.
We attempted, since your committee announced these hearings, to
make a survey to get more up-to-date information from all industry
and were not able to obtain data that I would consider comprehensive.

But from a fairly substantial body of representative major users
covering about, 30,000 people who were all actively engaged in this
field, and this includes private work as well as that responsive to
AKC contracts, the average annual radiation exposure for the last 2
years, that is, 1960 and 1961, seems to run at about three-tenths of a
rem per person.
Thinking for a momentof the fairly standard formula for maximum
accumulated dose, the one whichis written as 5(7—18) rems with V
being a number equal to the present age of the individual in years,
replying to your survey and including ours, since we have recently
acquired one, only two cases showed accumulated doses exceeding the
formula values. If you go back to sources that we cannot always document but come from the professionals talking with each other in the
field we know altogether of about 15 cases in the country in which this
formula has been exceeded and we guess that if our sources were com-

plete, this number might be doubled. So there maybe about 30 situations in the whole of industry exceeding the maximum accumulated
dose. I should reiterate that many of these do not represent real inJury to the recipients and some, again by the numbers, will be self-

correcting, since the respective values of V for these people is steadily

mcereasing and most of them are now withdrawn from additional
radiation work.

Sek

HOONPSRDNietet akee tah, etsEERa BOR

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