External doses reconstructed under Part B of the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act include not only those that were recorded by personal dosimeters, but also those that were not recorded. Recorded doses may require corrections to account for measurement bias or limitations in the dosimeters' capabilities. Unrecorded doses that have been reconstructed include (1) those missed due to limits of detection associated with personal dosimeters, (2) external ambient doses that may have been inadvertently omitted from the monitoring results (or were not monitored altogether in the case of nonradiation workers), and (3) doses incurred as a result of medical x-ray examinations required by employers. Additionally, some workers were not monitored (or their dosimetry data are not available) even though there was a potential for exposure; doses to such workers are typically assigned based on the records of coworkers who performed the same, or similar, tasks. Additional issues that complicate the dose reconstruction process include the requirements that (1) all external doses must be partitioned according to radiation type and energy, and (2) the accompanying doses to specific body organs must be estimated. Since the external dose reconstruction process typically incorporates many claimant-favorable methodologies, parameters, and assumptions, the doses assigned do not necessarily reflect either realistic or actual estimates of the doses received, and external doses assigned to workers under the Act often are substantially higher than those contained in the dosimetry records.

There are many claimant-favorable factors inherent in both the reconstruction of radiation dose and the calculation of probability of causation under Part B of the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act of 2000. These factors result in an approximate 30% compensation rate for claims filed under EEOICPA, which is roughly an order of magnitude greater than the likely incidence of increased cancers as predicted by epidemiology studies and risk models. Additionally, there is essentially no chance that a claim that is denied compensation actually involves a radiation-induced cancer. The claimant-favorable nature of the Part B program is often misunderstood or ignored when the merits of the program are reported and debated. This paper provides details on how the technical aspects of the EEOICPA program that favor the claimants are being implemented.

In 1993, the U.S. Supreme Court set forth the standard for determining the admissibility of expert scientific evidence in litigation. This standard is known as the Daubert criteria, named after the pertinent case, Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. The Daubert criteria require the courts to determine whether an expert's testimony reflects scientific knowledge, whether his/her findings are derived by the scientific method, and whether the work product is based on good science. The Daubert criteria are especially important in radiation litigation because issues involving radiation doses and effects are often complex and thus a jury will typically rely heavily on the analysis and opinions of experts. According to the Daubert criteria, scientific opinions must be based on a methodology that has a valid, testable hypothesis; has been subject to peer review; and is generally accepted in the scientific community. Additionally, the expert must be qualified to present opinions based on the methodology. Although the application of the Daubert criteria in radiation litigation is highly dependent on the specific court and judge presiding over the case, there have been recent high-profile cases in which application of the criteria has resulted in the dismissal of analysis and opinions offered by scientific experts. Reasons for the dismissals have included basic scientific errors such as failure of the expert to consider all possible explanations for an observed phenomenon, the selective use of data by the expert, and the failure to acknowledge and resolve inconsistencies between the expert's results and those of other investigators. This paper reviews the Daubert criteria as they apply to radiation litigation and provides examples of the application of the criteria from recent judgments involving the Three Mile Island and Hanford Downwinders cases.

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Six numerical examples of optimization of radiation protection are provided in the appendices of International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) Publication No. 37 (1983). In each case, the calculations were based on well-defined parameters and assumptions. In this paper, we examined three different numerical examples that were based on empirical data and less-certain assumptions. In the first example, the optimum sampling frequency for a typical 3H bioassay program was found to be once every 2 mo. However, this result depended on assumed values for several variables that were difficult to evaluate. The second example showed that the optimum frequency for recalibrating a group of "cutie pie" (CP) ionization chamber survey instruments was once every 85 d. This result depended largely on the assumption that an improperly operating CP instrument could lead to a serious overexposure. In the third example, one continuous air monitor (CAM) was determined to be the optimum number in a workplace at a Department of Energy (DOE) Pu facility. The optimum location of the CAM was determined from past glove-box release studies. These examples demonstrated that cost-benefit analysis of individual elements of radiation protection programs can be useful even if limited data are available.