Regulatory structures and issues in the European Union

Abstract

RADIATION PROTECTION has been one of the issues on the minds of European legislators since the inception of the European Union (EU); indeed, the foundations of the extensive radiation protection legislation and documentation in our possession today can be found in the Euratom treaty of 1957 (EAEC 2012). From that time several directives (and revisions of said directives) concerning radiation protection have been adopted culminating in the revised European Basic Safety Standards (BSS) directive adopted in 2013 (EURATOM 2013). This chapter first describes briefly the more important milestones leading to the revised BSS and its general regulatory structure. This is followed by a description of the role of the Medical Physics Expert (MPE) in the directive, a discussion of the issues of concern to the Medical Physics (MP) profession originating from the revised European BSS, and finally how the more immediate of these concerns have been addressed in the European Commission (EC) funded project, "European Guidelines on the Medical Physics Expert" Project (EU 2014b).