A challenging path to rational and harmonised international regulation of indoor radon

Abstract

Abstract The main trends of indoor radon regulation in Europe are expressed through the standard ISO 11665-8. This standard, however, ignores the short-term tests (2–7 days in practice)—the main tests in the USA, and instead requires conducting long-term tests only (2–12 months)—without any justification. Moreover, the temporal (key) uncertainty of indoor radon is ignored altogether, a fact that does not allow the assessment of a room’s conformity with a normative at a given reliability (usually 95%). Thus, the current international regulation is neither harmonised nor rational. This paper reports the interim results of storming discussions within the ISO 11665-8 Focus Group, in charge of revising the aforementioned standard. Proposed are the rational criterion for conformity assessment of a room with a normative for both short- and long-term measurements, as well as the indicative values and the algorithm for determining indoor radon temporal uncertainty depending on the measurement duration.