Nuclear decay data – New by ICRP

Committee 2 of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) has the responsibility for providing dose coefficients for intakes of radionuclides by workers who are occupationally exposed and by members of the public exposed to radionuclides in the environment. During the past thirty years, these coefficients have been based on the energies and intensities of emitted radiations tabulated in Publication 38 issued in 1983. That publication, developed during the preparation of Publication 30, addressed 820 radionuclides – 764 with half-lives greater than 10 min and 56 with half-lives less than 10 min as either decay products of a longer lived isotope or a radioisotope of potential interest in nuclear medicine.

The new publication announced by the ICRP supersedes Publication 38 and provides data on the energies and intensities of the emissions of 1251 radionuclides. Unlike in the publication 38, the data are provided in electronic form on a CD rather than printed tables. The data will serve as the basis for calculation of absorbed doses in organs and tissues of the body and the evaluation of localized depth dose distributions. All radioisotopes of elements of atomic number through 100 (hydrogen to fermium) with half-lives greater than 1 min for which the nuclear structure information were sufficient for a meaningful assessment of the nuclear and atomic emissions are included in the publication. This includes 922 isotopes of half-life greater than 10 min and 329 isotopes of half-life less than 10 min. This departure enables presenting the data in a form need by the dosimetrist and the inclusion of the continuous energy distributions of beta particles and that of neutrons which accompany spontaneous fission.
(Source: ICRP Website)