ISOE - Information System on Occupational Exposure

The IAEA activities within the Information System on Occupational Exposure (ISOE) forms an integral part of the IAEA Occupational Protection Programme. ISOE is co-sponsored by the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) and the IAEA.   It is based on an agreement reached in 1993 by which the IAEA invites IAEA Member States with operating nuclear power plants and who are not members of the OECD States to participate, cost-free, in this project, through the IAEA ISOE Technical Centre.   Subsequently the IAEA has formed a Joint ISOE Secretariat with OECD/NEA.

ISOE Objectives

According to the Terms and Conditions for the operation of ISOE, the objective of the ISOE Programme is to make available to participants:

• Broad and regularly updated information on methods to improve the protection of workers and on occupational exposure in nuclear power plants;

• A mechanism for dissemination of information on these issues, including evaluation and analysis of the data assembled, as a contribution to the optimisation of radiation protection.
  

Thus ISOE is promoting and co-ordinating international co-operative undertakings in the area of protection of workers at nuclear power plants, at the same time providing a forum for communication between radiation protection experts. For further information see the ISOE report for 2000 and the ISOE programme of work for 2001 (.pdf - 750KB). 

ISOE Databases

All information included in the ISOE database is supplied by participating utilities that have full access to all such data. Participating authorities have access only to a reduced database, which includes data from utilities in their own country. Both the participating utilities and participating authorities benefit from the ISOE communication network, the data analysis and summary reports.

The database is organized as follows:

ISOE 1:

Dosimetric information from commercial nuclear power plants in operation, which includes for each participating information such as:

the annual collective dose for normal operation;
the maintenance/refueling outage;
unplanned outage periods; and
the annual collective dose for certain tasks and worker categories.

ISOE 2:

Plant-specific information pertinent to dose reduction, such as materials, water chemistry, startup/shutdown procedures, and cobalt reduction programme.

ISOE 3:

Radiation protection related information for specific operations,
procedures, equipment or tasks such as:

effective dose reduction;
effective decontamination;
implementation of work management principles;

ISOE D:

Dosimetric information from nuclear power plants that have been shut down or are in the process of decommissioning

Information Flow

The ISOE communications network is an information pipeline to facilitate the real-time exchange of experience and information among participating utilities and authorities. The network consists of all ISOE participants as well as the four Technical Centres (Asian Technical Centre, European Technical Centre, IAEA Technical Centre and North American Technical Centre). Any participant - utility or authority - may question the network for information on a particular problem, technique, procedure, etc. The appropriate Technical Centre will perform a survey of all participants, via the other Technical Centres, collect and summarise the desired information, supply the information to the requester, and - if appropriate - prepare an ISOE information sheet for distribution to all other participants.

Further information on ISOE can be found on the NEA Web site  in the or by contacting Monica Gustafsson