since there ain't nuttin but people tellin everybuddy else that 'it's all what you can get yer regulator to agree to
SloGlo: Everybody is using MARSSIM now, except Grandfathered sites. MARSSIM is not a regulation, but a guideline. MARSSIM reiterates through the whole document that you have to sell your survey plan and release limits to you regulators. That is why you have seen that phrase hundreds of times.
You seem to be dealing with building limits. Most people are dealing with soil limits. The problem is from State to State, the State regulations vary. In our State, we have a moratorium from the Governor that says that no debris from D&D may go to a regular landfill, even if you prove it clean through MARRSIM. We quit doing MARRSIM surveys on buildings. We just prove they are clean through DOE standards (we survey them like a tool going out of a control point, get the State's approval through their confirmatory survey and demolish the clean building and ship the debris to a controlled hazardous waste site. That site will not accpt the debris without a letter from the Stae regulatory agency. We are in constant contact with them. We get preapproval of our plans before we even start.
You wanted numbers. We are a DOE site, so our release criteria are based on DOE's basic release criteria. We never had pure strontium here so our beta release limits for the debris are based on a mixture of beta-gamma emitters. They are less than 5,000 dpm/100 cm2 when averaged over a one square meter area. You can have hot spots up to 15,000 dpm/100 cm2 as long as your average over one square meter limit is not exceeded.
For soil, we went with the EPA recommended 15 mRem/year limit. That limit never passed as law, so we are lower than the law requires. This 1E-6 limit thing is preposterous! We ran RESRAD and got limits for each isotope and for isotope mixtures, we do the sum of fractions. For our site parameters, family farm scenario, our limt for Cs-137 is 9.2 pCi/g. Since we have a mixture of isotopes, Cs-137 generally drops to ~ 7.0 pCi/g. That limit makes the sum of fractions under the 15 mRem per year, but we recalculate it for every project.
We always use ALARA for every cleanup though. We are generally below MDA for every project. If it were to get cost prohibitive for a site, we would discuss the limits and how far we could reasonably get below it.
Hope these numbers and comments helped you and everyone. We have been doing D&D since the 1970s.