|
20 Radioactive Dangers We All Face |
|
|
|
Watchdogging Radiation Cover-ups
...Did you fall for the 'We don't know what caused your cancer ' line?
Doctor says CDC ignored effects of fallout in Idaho
By Joe Bauman
Deseret Morning News
5 April 2005
It's no surprise to Dr. Peter Rickards that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is refusing to continue paying for a study of fallout health effects on Utahns who lived near the Nevada Test Site.
Earlier studies showed thyroid abnormalities among the Utahns, and scientists from the University of Utah have been doing follow-up examinations. But citing the $8 million already spent and two extensions of deadlines, the CDC says it will end funding on Aug. 31. Dr. Joseph L. Lyon, who heads the U.'s study, says the project was slowed by CDC bureaucracy and cost more because of overhead.
The CDC's apparent failure to dig hard for fallout facts sounds like old news to Rickards, an Idaho Falls podiatrist.
In the 1990s and earlier this decade, he was part of a citizens advisory committee for a CDC-funded study -- the INEEL Dose Reconstruction Project. The study was supposed to compute radiation doses to residents living near the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, now known as the INL or the Idaho National Laboratory, in southeastern Idaho.
The lab has experimented with nuclear material for decades and, according to the CDC, it is known to have released radiation.
After seven years of involvement with the project, Rickards said, he has come to believe the CDC wants to "downplay the overwhelming impact of the Nevada Test Site on Idaho and the rest of the country."
Telephone messages left Monday with the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes CDC, and with authors of a radiation study at the Idaho laboratory were not immediately returned.
When the CDC agreed to sponsor a dose reconstruction effort to determine radiation doses to Idahoans, Rickards was delighted.
The study began in 1992. He helped advise the study starting in 1993 and was officially made a member of the panel in 1995.
"I was removed from the panel in 2002, so I officially served seven years, but actually served and worked with CDC for nine years," he noted.
Now, Rickards said bitterly, he thinks the panel was established "to provide the illusion of openness and honesty."
"It basically took two years . . . before I could see they actually had no intention of reviewing real doses," he said.
One issue that concerned him involved how much radiation area residents received from fallout drifting into Idaho after open-air atomic bomb blasts at the Nevada Test Site, in addition to the lab's releases.
"I had been told that the alarms used to go off frequently" in the lab. "They would check the equipment and nothing had melted down or anything at that moment." The cause was fallout.
Other fallout data were gathered in the period, he said. Weekly samples of Iodine-131 were taken from dairies around the lab from 1957 onward. "They have spikes in that data from Nevada Test Site," he said.
Exposure to the thyroid gland could be via contaminated milk. If a child drank a great deal of milk with radioactive Iodine-131, the exposure would be more hazardous.
But researchers claimed they could only use fallout data from 100 gummy strips, like flypaper, that supposedly caught contaminated dust or droplets.
Rickards wonders how researchers could ignore what were sure to be spikes from fallout in the milk studies.
In 1997, the National Cancer Institute released a 14-year study showing nationwide exposure to radioactive iodine from fallout. Four of the five hardest-hit counties were in Idaho; the fifth was in Montana, he said.
Montana and Idaho were hit harder than the rest of the country by fallout, says the study -- even more heavily dosed than southeastern Utah. Part of Utah's Washington County was listed ninth on the list, while part of Kane County was 14th and another part of Washington County was 20th.
In 1999, the advisory panel passed a resolution "to basically add the Nevada Test Site doses" to the INEEL doses.
Yet when a draft study was released, it depended on the 100 gummy strips. As far as solid data about fallout, he said, the study just had what he calls "fuzzy estimates" and footnotes citing lack of data.
"No use of specific spikes from the Nevada Test Site," Rickards said.
Another conflict concerned calculating doses to a fetus whose mother may have eaten a duck exposed to radiation at INL ponds. Researchers said the cesium dose to the woman would be about 12 millirems, "or a little over (the dosage from) a chest X-ray," he said. "But they claimed that the dose to a fetus was only 0.3 millirem" when in fact the fetus could also have a 12 millirem dose. It took six months to get the erroneous information corrected, he added.
"Not long after that, they basically said that the funding for the dose reconstruction was cut, and we would no longer study the whole picture, with all the accidents and the total releases."
The focus would be on only three incidents at the laboratory. Fallout was not to play a role, he said.
"It became obvious to our panel that the Nevada Test Site dose was overwhelmingly larger than the accidental and intentional release of radiation" from the laboratory, he said.
After the panel passed its resolution advocating use of the Test Site doses and specific information gathered at the laboratory, "the CDC promised to follow through but never did."
Idealist's public document archives: 1. 
2.
'The
greatest irony of our atmospheric nuclear testing program is that
the only
victims of U.S. nuclear arms since World War II have been our own people.'
- Forgotten
Guinea Pigs Report, 1980
In 1986, the U.S. Dept. of Energy used the cover of the Chernobyl fallout cloud over the United States to release huge amounts of radiation into the air from a failed underground Nevada nuclear test. It was called Mighty Oak.
learn more on our global fallout page
This site best viewed
in Firefox
