Assessment of damage from radiological and environmental factors of carcinogenic risk: modern international technologies

The priority task formulated in the Fundamentals of the State Policy of the Russian Federation in the field of nuclear and radiation safety is to reduce the risk of long-term consequences of technogenic radiation exposure for human health. At the currently achieved level of radiation safety in Russia, radiation risks for public and personnel health become less than the health risks from existing non-radiation risk factors associated with technogenic environmental contamination. At present, the basic risk metrics for radiation exposure factors are radiological detriment (RD) and radiation-induced decrease in life expectancy (or healthy life) YLL (Years of Life Lost), used by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP). To assess the damage to human health from exposure to various non-radiation risk factors, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends the use of the attributable disease burden ratio DALY (Disability Adjusted Life Years), which expresses the excess loss of years of active human life due to the factors in force. When jointly assessing or comparing the detriment to human health from radiation and non-radiation carcinogenic risk factors, both detriment metrics – RD and DALY – should be calculated for these two factors. In this article such calculation methods are developed taking into account modern international recommendations. As a practical example of calculations, it is shown that carcinogenic radiation risks of the population from annual emissions of the BREST-OD-300 reactor facility do not exceed the negligible radiation risk value of 10-6, while the carcinogenic risk of the population from existing non-radiative environmental contamination is 8 times higher (up to 8х10-6). In the last three years, ICRP has raised the issue of the need for convergence of RD and DALY metrics to address human radiation protection. This study shows that the current methods of calculating RD and DALY are robust with respect to the underlying epidemiological data and transfer well from the reference international populations used by the ICRP and WHO to Russian cohorts and populations. Further research is needed to more fully localize the methods for calculating RD and DALY in the Russian context or to apply them to populations in other countries.