The new recommendations on emergency exposure situations of the International Commissionon Radiological Protection (ICRP) advise a reference level for the residual dose in arange of between 20 and 100 mSv effective dose (acute or per year). At the same time, theprotection strategy should account for the simultaneous consideration of all the exposurepathways, as well as all of the protective actions. Similarly to other countries, theactual Belgian nuclear emergency plan is based on individual projected doses (thyroidcommitted dose and total effective doses) and independent protective actions that mainlyfocus on the early phase of an emergency situation. The two approaches are compared inthis study on the basis of the projected and residual dose calculations obtained usingJRODOS and the Belgian Noodplan models for different radiological or nuclear accidentalscenarios. The comparison has been made by considering separately the early and the latephase contributions. The ingestion dose has been investigated from the predicteddeposition values and compared to the single level of the ICRP 109 recommendations.