Legislative aspects

Abstract

This chapter contains a lot of information on the new European approach to regulate natural radioactivity in building materials.

The main Directive that deals with natural radioactivity in building materials is the Euratom- Basic Safety Standards Directive (EU-BSS) and its approach to regulate building materials is described in Section 4.3. Some additional information on the link with the Construction Products Regulation (CPR) is provided in Section 4.3.1.

For the reader who wants to explore the history of the EU-BSS and several important earlier documents in greater depth we refer to Section 4.2.

For the reader who wonders how the Euratom drinking water Directive might impact on building materials we refer to Section 4.4.

In Sections 4.5 and 4.6 current national legislations on natural radioactivity in building materials are considered in more detail.

Several tools are described for the screening of the radiological properties of building materials. These tools are discussed in Section 4.7.