Federal Guidance Report No. 15: External Exposure to Radionuclides in Air, Water and Soil
Federal Guidance Report No. 15 (FGR 15), External Exposure to Radionuclides in Air, Water and Soil, tabulates age-specific reference person effective dose rate coefficients for 1,252 radionuclides based on external exposure to radionuclides distributed in air, water or soil.
FGR 15 updates and expands the 1993 Federal Guidance Report No. 12 (FGR 12), External Exposure to Radionuclides in Air, Water, and Soil. Compared to FGR 12, FGR 15 incorporates six different age groups (whereas FGR 12 had one), updated tissue weighting factors (as recommended in ICRP Publication 103) and radionuclide decay data (as provided in ICRP Publication 107), and improved computing power to provide more precise calculations.
Previous versions of this report (EPA 402-R-18-001 and 402-R-19-002) contained errors in the dose coefficient tables. The revised report with corrected tables is available for download below; the previous versions should be discarded. A summary of revisions document is provided below and is also included at the end of FGR 15.
This page also includes a link to download a .zip folder containing the following FGR 15 data tables as ASCII text files:
- Effective dose rate coefficients for each exposure scenario.
- Tissue equivalent dose coefficients for each exposure scenario and age.
- Equivalent dose rate coefficients for monoenergetic photons.
Federal Guidance Report No. 15: External Exposure to Radionuclides in Air, Water and Soil (pdf)
FGR 15 Summary of Revisions (pdf)
Related Documents
The Center for Radiation Protection Knowledge (CPRK) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) performed an extensive reexamination of the methods and published values of FGR 15 (2019 version). The findings of CPRK's review and explanation of changes implemented are detailed in 2025 Review and Revision of Federal Guidance Report 15 (ORNL/SPR-2025/3803).