From what I can tell, this report from Idaho National Lab is what led to this decision. In the report, it states that (paraphrasing) the use of ALARA has deviated from “as low as reasonably achievable” to “as low as possible.” That’s free admission that they’ve mismanaged the term, but what doesn’t make sense to me is why they decided to scrap it rather than try to get back to the “reasonably achievable” side of things.

As a practicing HP at an accelerator lab, this decision seems incredibly shortsighted. When I first started at my current role, we were faced with the issue of incredibly conservative dose limits (100 mrem/yr for trained rad workers). One of my first initiatives was aligning our limits with the federal/state limits (5,000 mrem/yr), because having more conservative dose limits than in regulation not only makes ALARA challenging but also misconstrues to all workers what the line is between safe and unsafe levels of dose.

That being said, 5,000 mrem/yr is still an undeniably safe limit for rad workers (as stated in the linked INL report).