Radiation Protection Trends in the United States

Following the last major change in radiation protection standards introduced by the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP) in 1957, the basic protection criteria have been under continuous review. During the ensuing period no breakthrough has occurred in our fundamental knowledge that justifies any significant changes in protection standards. New data tend to show that standards adopted two decades age were overly conservative although not sufficiently to warrant upward revisions now. The 1970 report on Basic Radiation Protection Criteria will show some minor adjustments, mainly in the direction of numerical simplification. In spite of the fairly well stabilized position of radiation protection philosophy, especially in comparison with other environmental pollutants, radiation hazard as a “headline catcher” continues to flourish in the U.S. This causes undue alarm and concern among patients reading death-calculating stories about radiation and fosters an undesirable and even dangerous public fear of radiation. Improvement in the efficiency of radiation usage is nevertheless progressing in an orderly manner, but vast numbers of professional man-hours are being wasted fighting radiation hazard windmills instead of performing useful work. An important trend in the U.S. is toward governmental control of all uses of radiation. Applied rationally, this promises to be useful, but radiation control is already better than for most pollutants and there is dubious need for continued frenetic attacks on the problem.