Radiation Protection Glossary

With respect to Radiation Protection , detriment is a term used to describe the 'total harm' experienced by exposing a population (and their descendants) to Internal Radiation . ICRP uses detriment to effectively sum all the Risks (probabilities) that exposure to ionising radiations might produce. For example it will include probability of fatal cancer induction, non-fatal cancer induction (and therefore years of life lost). It therefore as the dimensions of probability and thus can be expressed as a risk. In ICRP publication 60, radiation detriment is developed and used to derived Dose Limits .