Joint Industry Position Statement on ICRU Report 95
Issued Wednesday 16 September 2026
World Nuclear Association has joined eight other nuclear industry and medical associations in a joint position statement on ICRU Report 95, which proposes a major revision to the quantities used to measure external radiation exposure. The nine signatories conclude that implementing new operational quantities is not justifiable for the wider nuclear industry. Changing the current, effective methods would take significant cost, time and effort, and risk confusing workers and the public, without any corresponding improvement in radiation protection.
ICRU Report 95, published jointly by the International Commission on Radiation Units and Measurements (ICRU) and the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) in 2020, proposes replacing today's operational dose quantities, which are based on simple tissue-equivalent geometric phantoms - test objects that simulate properties of the human body - with quantities derived using far more detailed adult reference computational phantoms. The stated aim is to bring measured values closer to the dose actually estimated for a person's organs and tissues, and to correct a tendency in the current system to overestimate dose from low-energy X-rays and gamma rays.
The signatories, who represent the commercial nuclear energy, nuclear medicine, irradiation and source-supply sectors, recognise the ICRU's work and the potential benefits for medical and research applications, including nuclear medicine and targeted alpha therapies. It concludes, however, that those benefits do not extend to the much larger group of sectors that rely on these quantities day to day: commercial nuclear power, industries using naturally occurring radioactive material, and other industrial users of ionising radiation.
For those sectors the signatories point to substantial retraining, procedural and instrumentation costs. Initial industry estimates presented to an IAEA technical meeting in October 2024 put the global cost of replacing personal dosimeters alone at up to €500 million. They also expect a transition lasting 10 to 20 years, during which the old and new quantities would have to run side by side, and recorded doses that could fall by 15–20% in everyday working conditions simply because they are calculated differently, not because anyone's actual exposure had fallen. Because the new quantities are tied to those anthropomorphic computational phantoms, which the ICRP revises every 10 to 15 years, the signatories expect recurring recalibration and regulatory revision. Their conclusion is that change has the potential to do more harm than good.
Read the full joint industry position statement, and the list of signatories, here.