Whither ALARA?

["Vargo, George J" <vargo@pnl.gov>]

Jerry Cohen wrote:

"Otto,
    Your point is well stated.  Of course a key consideration  that follows
is that if  LNT is an invalid concept,  it would logically appear  that  the
concept of  collective dose is also invalid , and   the whole business of
ALARA is also bogus.       How about that?           jjcohen@prodigy.net"

I disagree.  Even in a world without a LNT-based system of dose limitation there
will still be individual dose limits for workers (if even only to prevent
deterministic effects).  There will always be some economic incentive to
maintain worker doses below the dose limits to maintain operational flexibility
in the event of unforeseen events and to avoid the cost of training and
qualification of replacement workers.  The latter can be fairly expensive and
there are some well documented very valid cost-benefit models based solely on
replacement worker costs.

In most nuclear facilities there is a positive synergy between ALARA and good
operational performance.  Witness the correlation between collective dose,
outage length, and overall O&M costs at US nuclear power plants over the last
10-15 years.

George J. Vargo, Ph.D., CHP
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
International Nuclear Safety Program
PO Box 999
902 Battelle Boulevard
Richland, WA  99352-0999
509-375-6836; -2019 (fax)
vargo@pnl.gov
http://insp.pnl.gov:2080

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