ESTIMATION OF THE UNCERTAINTY IN INTERNAL DOSE CALCULATION FOR TWO CONTAMINATION CASES.

The assessment of internal dose is subject to a large uncertainty due to the limits of measuring technique and to the assumptions made by the expert. Here, we propose an approach to report the confidence interval associated with the evaluated dose. The sources of uncertainties considered so far include the date of intake, the physico-chemical characteristics of the radioactive material, the counting error and the stochastic variability of excretion. Three successive levels of approximation are suggested, depending on the expected dose, for which increasingly realistic parameter values should be sought and applied. Finally, the results of a Monte Carlo dose calculation are presented in the form of a statistical distribution of possible dose values. This approach has been applied to two cases of uranium and caesium exposure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]