The Fallout Chronicles VII - The Evidence Mounts and Efforts are Made to Suppress It
The Fallout Chronicles VII - The Evidence Mounts and Efforts are Made to Suppress It
In 1977, Samuel Glasstone and Phillip Dolan published the third edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons. A complete revision of the 1950 edition of the Effects of Atomic Weapons had been published in 1962 after the advent of the hydrogen bomb, and reprinted with a few changes in 1964. In this 1977 edition, an effort had been made, said the editors, to make the work more accessible to the general reader. Each chapter would contain a “non-technical section” followed by a more technical one.
Chapter 9 was entitled “Residual Nuclear Radiation and Fallout.” It discussed kinds and rates and distribution of fallout, showing, among other things, how unpredictable the distribution of fallout could be. It did not touch upon health effects.
In 1977, the year that the latest edition of Effects was published, Alice Stewart, with others, published some new findings. In the 70’s, Stewart had been invited by an American professor from the University of Pittsburgh, Thomas Mancuso, to join in a study of the health effects of low-level radiation on workers at the Hanford Reservation. Hanford was the huge facility in western Washington state where we had been producing plutonium since 1944. The plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb had been produced there.
Mancuso was a physician and occupational health professor who had been asked by the AEC join the project it had established in the early 60’s to study health effects of low-level radiation throughout nuclear weapons complex. They had asked Mancuso to start with Hanford. They were confident, it seems, that he would find no significant effect. Or hoping, anyway.
While Mancuso was collecting data, Congress replaced the AEC with the Energy Research and Development Administration and then in 1977 with the the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which for the first time split the responsibilities between the use of atomic energy for weapons and for peacetime use.
In 1974, a doctor in the health department of Washington state, Dr. Samuel Milham, published a paper that showed a higher rate of cancer in employees at Hanford than in other industries. The AEC’s project director, Dr. Sidney Marks, wanted Mancuso to go public with the fact that he hadn’t found a higher rate. Mancuso hadn’t found a higher rate so far, but he declined to let the AEC use his findings to refute Milham. His study wasn’t complete, Mancuso said. For all he knew, he said, Milham might be right.
Alice Stewart and her colleague George Kneale joined Mancuso’ research project in 1974. In the end, they found that workers at Hanford were far more susceptible to radiation-induced cancer than had been thought, as much as twenty time more susceptible.
When this finding was reported to ERDA (the Energy Research and Development Administration that had replaced the AEC but not yet been replaced itself by the DOE and NRC), ERDA removed Mancuso from the project and cut off his funding. They even cut off Mancuso’s access to the data he had gathered, as well as the access of Stewart and Kneale. Using data they had saved and their own funds and with some help from foundations, the three found ways to continue their study.
They published their findings in the November 1977 issue of Health Physics,1 a journal edited by the health physicist from Oak Ridge Karl Morgan. “We were finding that there was a 6 or 7 percent increased cancer effect,” reported Alice. “It wasn’t much of an effect, but the shock was that there was any effect at all since the cancers were occurring at radiation exposure levels well below the official limit of five rads per year. It meant that the current standard for nuclear safety might be as much as twenty times too high.”
In February 1979, a Utah epidemiologist, Dr. Joseph Lyon published a study in The New England Journal of Medicine. He reported that five years after the tests began at the Nevada Test Site, an epidemic of leukemia was killing children in the downwind zone. Throughout the fallout area in Utah, he reported, cancers were two and a half times higher than normal.
The “fallout area” wasn’t only in Utah, of course. Fallout, like climate, is no respecter of borders.
Congress held hearings on fallout in 1979. Documents were declassified that showed the duplicity of the AEC in the trial about the sheep kill in Utah in 1953. In 1982, the same judge who had found for the AEC in 1955, Sherman A. Christensen, found that the AEC had committed fraud in the earlier proceedings. He ordered a new trial.
The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the order. It’s hard to win a case against the government.
In 1979 a group called the National Association of Atomic Veterans was formed by a veteran of the Desert Rock operations at the Nevada Test Site. Its purpose was to lobby Congress for compensation for veterans who suffered from “radiogenic” health problems. At first, the “atomic veterans” was taken to include only those who had been part of the Desert Rock operations and those who had been exposed during the atmospheric testing at NTS.
Soon enough it was recognized that the list of those who might be eligible for compensation would have to be expanded. It would have to include also those who had occupied Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombs were dropped there (cutoff date the end of 1946) and those who had been American POWs in those cities when the bombs were dropped. Also veterans who had been exposed in the testing at the Pacific Proving Ground (though not, for some time, those who worked on cleanup afterward). Also veterans who had worked with the nuclear power plants that had proved to work so well on our Navy submarines and ships.
The first cutoff date for exposure was specified as 1962 because atmospheric testing had ended then in the U.S. and the S.U. But as the Hanford study had shown, that date would also have to be extended. And more people than veterans would have to be considered eligible for compensation.
Next: Compensation Begins
Mancuso, Thomas; Stewart, Alice; Kneale, George (November 1977). "Radiation exposures of Hanford workers dying from cancer and other causes". Health Physics. MacLean VA: Health Physics Society. 33 (5): 369–385.