2001:11 Ethical Problems in Radiation Protection

In this report the authors survey existing international radiation-protection recommendations and standards of the ICRP, the IAEA, and the ILO. After outlining previous work on the ethics of radiation protection, professional ethics, and the ethics of human radiation experiments, the authors review ethical thinking on seven key issues related to radiation protection and ethics. They formulate each of these seven issues in terms of alternative ethical stances:

  1. equity versus efficiency,
  2. health versus economics,
  3. individual rights versus societal benefits,
  4. due process versus necessary sacrifice,
  5. uniform versus double standards,
  6. stakeholder consent versus management decisions, and
  7. environmental stewardship versus anthropocentric standards.