Emergency reference levels

Linsley, G.S., Crick, M.J., Simmonds, J.R., Haywood, S.M. (1986) Derived emergency reference levels. National Radiological Protection Board Report DL10. Chilton, Oxon. 

NRPB, Emergency reference levels of dose for early countermeasures to protect the public. Documents of theNRPE, vol. l,no4, 1990. 

Baverstock KF, Vennart J. 1976. Emergency reference levels for reactor accidents A re-examination of the windscale reactor accident. Health Phys 30 339-344. 

C. Emergency Reference Levels in the United Kingdom and Elsewhere... 

Emergency Reference Levels of Dose from Earlier Medical Research Council Recommendations... 

In the UK these levels are called Derived Emergency Reference Levels , or DERLs for short. A selection of these DERLs is given in Table 4.3. 

Table 4.4 Peak values of activity in 1986 compared with UK Derived Emergency Reference Levels (DERLs)...

Central to the general science of complexity is the concept of emergence. Emergence refers to the appearance of higher-level properties and behaviors of a system that -- while obviously originating from the collective dynamics of that system s components - are neither to be found in nor are directly deducible from the lower-level properties of that system. Emergent properties are properties of the whole that are not possessed by any of the individual parts making up that whole. 

In accidents, there is a possibility for deterministic (non-stochastic) and stochastic health effects. The principles for planning intervention in the case of a radiation emergency are set out in ICRP Publication 60 and 63 (ICRP 1991a, b, respectively). Intervention is the term applied to steps taken, in an accident situation, to restrict the exposure of member of the public and to minimize the consequences of unavoidable exposure. The assessment of the radiological situation and the implementation of the individual protection measures make up an overall protection strategy that is recommended to be justified and optimized. In the process of optimization, reference levels are to be applied and particular attention should be given to the prevention of severe deterministic health effects. 

Active—Using controls, safety interlocks, and emergency shutdown systems to detect and correct process deviations e.g., a pump that is shut off by a high level switch in the downstream tank when the tank is 90% full. These systems are commonly referred to as engineering controls. 

The full explanation of why the 4s 3d configuration is adopted in scandium, even though the 3d level has a lower energy, emerges from the peculiarities of the way in which orbital energies are defined in the Hartree-Fock procedure. The details are tedious but have been worked out and I refer anyone who is interested in pursuing this aspect to the literature (Melrose, Scerri, 1996).6,7... 

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