Committed dose
measure of radiation health risk
The committed dose in radiological protection is a measure of the stochastic health risk due to an intake of radioactive material into the human body. Stochastic in this context is defined as the probability of cancer induction and genetic damage, due to low levels of radiation. The SI unit of measure is the sievert.
A committed dose from an internal source represents the same effective risk as the same amount of effective dose applied uniformly to the whole body from an external source, or the same amount of equivalent dose applied to part of the body. The committed dose is not intended as a measure for deterministic effects, such as radiation sickness, which are defined as the severity of a health effect which is certain to happen.
The radiation risk proposed by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) predicts that an effective dose of one sievert carries a 5.5% chance of developing cancer. Such a risk is the sum of both internal and external radiation dose.
ICRP definition
The ICRP states "Radionuclides incorporated in the human body irradiate the tissues over time periods determined by their physical half-life and their biological retention
within the body. Thus they may give rise to doses to body tissues for many months or years after the intake. The need to regulate exposures to radionuclides and the
accumulation of radiation dose over extended periods of time has led to the definition of committed dose quantities".
“Committed dose” enters the record as measure of radiation health risk. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Committed, dose and measure can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5152911. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Committed dose” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.