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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Latest News
INL makes a case for eliminating ALARA and setting higher dose limits
A report just released by Idaho National Laboratory reviews decades of radiation protection standards and research on the health effects of low-dose radiation and recommends that the current U.S. annual occupational dose limit of 5,000 mrem be maintained without applying ALARA—the “as low as reasonably achievable” regulatory concept first introduced in 1971—below that threshold.
Noting that epidemiological studies “have consistently failed to demonstrate statistically significant health effects at doses below 10,000 mrem delivered at low dose rates,” the report also recommends “future consideration of increasing this limit to 10,000 mrem/year with appropriate cumulative-dose constraints.”
Oyeon Kum, Seung Uk Heo, Sang Hyoun Choi, Yongkeun Song, Sung-Ho Cho
Nuclear Technology | Volume 192 | Number 3 | December 2015 | Pages 208-214
Technical Paper | Accelerators | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-121
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Because of the encouraging results obtained at worldwide heavy-ion therapy facilities, the first hospital-based heavy-ion accelerator therapy facility is under construction in Busan, Korea, at the Korea Institute of Radiological and Medical Sciences. The compact accelerator will deliver beams of heavy ions, specifically carbon ions of energy 430 MeV/u. This study focuses on radiation protection aspects concerning materials activation and facility shielding. Radiation shielding was evaluated with two different Monte Carlo codes (MCNPX and FLUKA), and materials activation studies were performed using FLUKA and a combination of MCNPX+CINDER’90 codes.
