Standards

IEC standards for radiation protection instrumentation

Start here when you know the standard, or want to see the field. Every class of radiation measuring instrument has its own standard, and the standard determines which characteristics must be evaluated and how. This page identifies the committee that writes them, how its working groups divide the field, and which standard applies to which instrument.

Working the other way — you have an instrument in hand and need to know which standard governs it — start from Instruments instead.

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The IEC

The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) is the international standards organisation for electrical, electronic and related technologies. It was founded in 1906 and publishes International Standards through technical committees staffed by experts nominated by national committees — one per member country.

An IEC standard is a consensus document, not a regulation. It acquires force in one of two ways: a regulator or a purchaser cites it, or a regional body adopts it as its own standard. Both routes matter in practice, and the second is the source of most confusion about edition years.

Designation and edition

A publication is cited as IEC nnnnn:yyyy — the number identifies the subject, the year identifies the edition. A standard with more than one part carries the part after a hyphen. The year is not the year you bought it or the year your country adopted it; it is the year that edition of the international standard was published.

Development stages

A project passes through fixed stages before publication: a new work item proposal, working drafts within the working group, a committee draft circulated to national committees, a committee draft for vote (CDV), a final draft International Standard (FDIS), and publication. A standard under revision is therefore identifiable long before the new edition appears, and the stage tells you how settled the technical content is.

TC 45 and SC 45B

Radiation measuring instruments are not covered by a general instrumentation committee. They belong to IEC Technical Committee 45, which prepares international standards for electrical and electronic equipment and systems for instrumentation specific to nuclear applications. TC 45 works through two subcommittees:

Scope of SC 45B

SC 45B covers radiation protection instrumentation for the measurement of external and internal individual exposure under both normal and accident conditions — to workers, to the public, and in the workplace and the environment. Its remit also extends to instruments for detecting radioactive material outside regulatory control and to radiation-based security screening.

The consequence for an instrument owner is direct. The standard follows the instrument class, not the radiation type. A gamma survey meter, a gamma personal dosimeter and an installed gamma area monitor measure the same radiation and are evaluated under three different standards, because the requirements that matter differ: what a survey meter must do about angular response is not what a body-worn dosimeter must do about it.

Working groups

SC 45B distributes its work across seven working groups. Each owns a group of standards, and finding the right working group is normally the fastest way to find the right standard for an instrument.

Working group structure and the standards attributed to each group are taken from the subcommittee's own reporting. Membership and work programmes change; the IEC committee pages carry the current position.

Standards covered on this site

The standards below are the ones this site describes in detail. Where an evaluation tool exists, it computes the characteristics that standard specifies and applies its acceptance rules. Where it does not, the page is reference material only, and says so.

The wider catalogue

SC 45B publishes considerably more than the classes above. The listing below is the subcommittee's output grouped by working group. It is here because the most common question about an unfamiliar instrument — which standard governs this? — is answered by a number and a title, and those are not collected anywhere convenient.

Numbers and titles identify the publications; no part of their content is reproduced. Titles are those under which the publications were reported and may differ in a later edition, as IEC 61526's did when it moved to active personal dosemeters in its fourth edition.

Editions and regional adoptions

Regional and national bodies adopt IEC standards under their own numbers and their own publication dates, and those dates are almost always later than the international edition. A report citing 2014 for a standard whose international edition is 2009 is normally citing an adoption, not a revision.

Three rules keep this straight. Cite the international designation in an English-language report. Where a regional adoption carries common modifications, those modifications — not the date — are the thing to check, because they can change requirements. And where your assessor works to a national adoption, hold that version, since it is the one they will ask to see.

Obtaining the standards

IEC standards are copyrighted works, sold rather than distributed freely. They are available from the IEC and from authorised national distributors, and are commonly included in subscription packages for radiation protection instrumentation, so many laboratories already hold access.

A test cannot be performed from a description of it. This site cites clause numbers and describes methods in its own words so that the work can be planned and the arithmetic checked; the acceptance limits, reference conditions and coefficient tables are in the standard, and holding it is a precondition for producing a defensible result.

Relationship to this site

RadiMeter is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the IEC, the ISO, or any standards or accreditation body, and nothing here carries their authority.