The Chairman made a statement concerning an article written and published by two members of the Committee. The Chairman stated that the article contained falsehoods and innuendoes about members of CERRIE and the Secretariat. Second, the article was in breach of undertakings by Committee members at the beginning of CERRIE to observe the Chatham House Rule. This Rule stated that comments or views could be disclosed but should not be attributed to named persons on the Committee. The article referred to matters which only persons present at the meeting would know and identified named individuals and attributed wrong information about these individuals. Third, the article discredited the work of the Committee, its Chairman and Secretariat. The Chairman requested the withdrawal of the allegations and falsehoods, with equal prominence to the retractions as to the original article, and an apology to the Committee. The two members concerned refused and stated they had never promised to observe the ground rules of the Committee.


The Committee considered a number of changes to the draft Preliminary Report and agreed to send the amended draft to Cerrie Workshop delegates. It was agreed to accede to a request to send delegates a brief note on different philosophical approaches to science, to be cleared by the Chairman before sending out.
The Committee considered a reply from the National Public Health Service for Wales concerning claims on possible health effects from tritium discharges at Cardiff. It was noted that the Service was pursuing the recommendations of Professor Macfarlane's report and would keep the Committee informed.
Further to its consideration of uncertainties in risk estimates and in RBEs, the Committee considered uncertainties in biokinetic and dosimetric models. Many uncertainties existed in the assumptions used in biokinetic models, including the use of animal vs human data and data for chemically similar elements vs the element concerned; the use of allometric principle; and the wide variability in the biokinetics of nuclides in humans. The Committee noted the results of an uncertainty analysis undertaken by dosimetry experts from the US and the EU. The study estimated that very large uncertainties (expressed as the ratio of the 5% to 95% values in the relevant distributions) may exist in some biokinetic parameters and in some organ dose coefficients. However some of the denominator values were close to zero resulting in large values for uncertainty ranges.

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