Radiological protection of non-human biota: International safety standards, national implementation, and policy implications
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Radiological protection was historically focused on human health, based on the International Commission on Radiological Protection’s premise that “If man is adequately protected then other living things are also likely to be sufficiently protected.” In recent decades, however, international frameworks have evolved to include direct protection of non-human biota. This study reviews the evolution of conceptual and regulatory frameworks for non-human biota protection, focusing on changes in international recommendations concerning reference organisms or reference animals and plants, dose criteria, dose coefficients, relative biological effectiveness, as well as the development and application of dose assessment tools. In addition, case studies of nuclear facilities—including nuclear power plants and radioactive waste repositories—are compared across Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, which apply country-specific dose criteria, and Finland and Sweden, which adopt the European Union screening value (10 μGy/h). No ecologically significant effects have been assessed at the population level in these case studies. Despite international recommendations for the direct protection of non-human biota, the extent and scope of national implementation differ considerably. Therefore, this study proposes a screening approach to evaluate whether direct protection of non-human biota is warranted, based on retrospective assessments of potential radiological impacts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.059 | 0.042 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".