International Commission on Radiological Protection
The ICRP is a not-for-profit organization registered as a charity in the United Kingdom and has its scientific secretariat in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
It is an independent, international organization with more than two hundred volunteer members from approximately thirty countries on six continents, who represent the world's leading scientists and policy makers in the field of radiological protection.
The International System of Radiological Protection has been developed by ICRP based on the current understanding of the science of radiation exposures and effects, and value judgements.
[4] These have become one of the main means of communicating advances by the ICRP in the form of technical presentations and reports from various committees drawn from the international radiological protection community.
The discovery of X‑rays had led to widespread experimentation by scientists, physicians, and inventors, but many people began recounting stories of burns, hair loss and worse in technical journals as early as 1896.
Hawks, a graduate of Columbia College, of his suffering severe hand and chest burns in an x-ray demonstration, was the first of many other reports in Electrical Review.
[12] Many experimenters including Elihu Thomson at Thomas Edison's lab, William J. Morton, and Nikola Tesla also reported burns.
Elihu Thomson deliberately exposed a finger to an X-ray tube over a period of time and suffered pain, swelling, and blistering.
The second ICR was held in Stockholm in 1928 and the ICRU proposed the adoption of the roentgen unit; and the 'International X-ray and Radium Protection Committee' (IXRPC) was formed.
[1] After World War II the increased range and quantity of radioactive substances being handled as a result of military and civil nuclear programmes led to large additional groups of occupational workers and the public being potentially exposed to harmful levels of ionising radiation.
[1] Against this background, the first post-war ICR convened in London in 1950, but only two IXRPC members were still active from pre-war days; Lauriston Taylor and Rolf Sievert.
Early recommendations were general guides on exposure and thereby dose limits, and it was not until the nuclear era that a greater degree of sophistication was required.
The Commission therefore asked a working group to consider these, and their report, Publication 8 (1966), for the first time for the ICRP summarised the current knowledge about radiation risks, both somatic and genetic.
On the other hand, the principle of applying dose limits aims to protect the rights of the individual not to be exposed to an excessive level of harm, even if this could cause great problems for society at large.
[1] Consequently, the concept of the collective dose was introduced to facilitate cost–benefit analysis and to restrict the uncontrolled build-up of exposure to long-lived radio nuclides in the environment.
Some recommendations remain because they work and are clear, others have been updated because understanding has evolved, some items have been added because there has been a void, and some concepts are better explained because more guidance is needed.
