 Section 56 of Final Report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Kristen Edwards. Final Report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. Case Studies, Chapter 11, Part 3. Secrecy in the Radiological Warfare Program. The U.S. Radiological Weapons Testing Program appears to have remained formally secret until 1974 and remained largely unknown to the public until the GAO's report in 1993. There was a recurring tension at the time between those who wanted to release information to allay unwarranted public fears about radiation hazards and those who thought that publicity would create unwarranted attention and public apprehension that could interfere with the successful prosecution of the program. If there was a concern that public knowledge of the general outlines of the program would undermine national security, none of the available documents state this argument explicitly except through their classification markings. In May 1948, at its first meeting, the noise panel recommended that the entire program be classified secret restricted data. The Chemical Core's RW program was classified at this level. At its second meeting in August, the noise panel revised this recommendation to conclude that the existence of an RW program should be considered as unclassified information. The noise panel was responding to the recommendation by the AEC's ACBM that the advisory committee on biology and medicine urged that the broad subject of radiological warfare be declassified on the grounds that the subject appears in nearly every Sunday supplement in a distorted manner and that better work could be done from the scientific and medical standpoint if the program were declassified. In February 1949, Defense Secretary James Forrest Dahl, responding to requests for greater public disclosure of U.S. nuclear activities, appointed Harvard University President James Conant to chair a confidential ad hoc committee to make recommendations on the information which should be released to the public concerning the capabilities of and defense against the atomic bomb and weapons of biological, chemical, and radiological warfare. This high-level committee's work ended in October 1949 in deadlock without making any strong recommendations. Its report to President Truman was quickly forgotten and, if anything, provided the basis for continuing the existing pattern of secrecy. Among the listed rationales provided by the majority of committee members who opposed the release of further information on the capabilities of atomic weapons was the absence of public demand for the information. The positions taken by certain well-known and probably well-meaning pressure groups they suggested do not spring from any general public sentiment in this regard and should, therefore, be ignored. James Hirschberg, in his biography of Harvard University President James Conant, who chaired the Fishing Party, as the committee was codenamed, has observed, notably missing from this list is any indication that they were worried that the Soviet Union might derive military benefit from the release of data under consideration. The observation of the majority that the public would seem to be more concerned lest their officials release too much classified information rather than too little may have been accurate. But would the attitude have been the same if it were known the government was hiding the information not from Moscow but from its own people because it did not trust them? How else to explain the fear that even a carefully reasoned statement might have a very disturbing effect on the general public and could be misinterpreted by pressure groups in support of any extreme position they were currently advocating? In May 1949, while Conant's panel deliberated and the Chemical Corps was preparing for the initial dugway field tests, the Defense Department's Research and Development Board, RDB, addressed the question of releasing information on radiological warfare. The RDB's Committee on Atomic Energy recommended against a public release of information. Soon after, a joint meeting of the Military Liaison Committee and the General Advisory Council considered, but rejected, a drafted letter to the President, also recommending a press release on the RW program. Later that year, on advice from Joseph Hamilton, the Chemical Corps prepared a release regarding munitions tests at dugway. The Chemical Corps' proposal for a release was discussed with AEC and DOD officials who rejected it, saying such a release was not desirable. At roughly the same time, Defense Secretary Lewis Johnson briefed President Truman on the radiological warfare program. The briefing memorandum, prepared for Truman, said that the planned test posed a negligible risk, but argued that, should the general public learn prematurely of the tests, it is conceivable that an adverse public reaction might result because of the lack of a true understanding of radiological hazards. It also noted that a group of highly competent and nationally recognized authorities is being assembled to review all radiological aspects of the tests before operations are initiated at the test site. The reference in the briefing memorandum was to the Radiological Warfare Test Safety Panel, which was being selected at that time. In August, at the first meeting of this panel, Albert R. Olpin, President of the University of Utah, noted the risk that uranium prospectors might stumble onto the site. Citing Olpin's concern, Joseph Hamilton noted, while the hazards to health for both man and animals can be considered relatively slight, the adverse effects of having public attention drawn to such a situation would be most deleterious to the program. In particular, Dr. Olpin brought up the interesting point that most of Utah is being very carefully combed by a large number of prospectors armed with Geiger counters. Needless to say, it is imperative that such individuals be denied the opportunity to survey any region containing a perceptible amount of radioactivity arising from the various radioactive munitions that are to be employed. Soon after this meeting, Hamilton also proposed a public release of information, perhaps reasoning that a program that was announced, but played down, would attract less attention than one that was discovered accidentally. Hamilton's proposal was refused. Echoing Hamilton's concerns, the Chemical Corps proposed once more that the task be made public, again citing the risk of discovery by uranium prospectors. Robert LaBaron, Chairman of the DOD's Military Liaison Committee to the AEC, turned down this request, claiming the need for review by the Armed Forces Policy Council. The official silence about the prospects for radiological warfare prompted some public speculation about the government's activities, including a report appearing in the bulletin of the atomic scientists. A journal created following the war to give a policy voice in print to many of the physicists who had worked on the bomb. The journal had some following in the general public, as well as the scientific community. The report mirrored much of the analysis of the noise panel and concluded that RW had significant military potential. In September 1949, the AEC's declassification branch recommended that certain general information, civil defense problems, and medical aspects of RW be declassified. Details regarding specific agents and methods of delivery, however, should remain secret. These suggestions appear to have been adopted shortly thereafter, as the AEC and DOD reports at the end of 1949 and into the early 1950s discussed some aspects of the RW program in very broad terms. The closest thing to an official announcement of the field test program appears to have come in a report for the first half of 1951. This report briefly noted that research and development activities in chemical, biological, and radiological warfare were accelerated and that dugway proving ground was reactivated and major field test programs in offensive and defensive toxicological warfare were started, but provided no details. The 1994 summary of declassification policy by the Department of Energy notes that offensive radiological warfare was declassified in 1951 by the AEC, although the Defense Department appears to have kept this aspect of the program declassified until much later. The secrecy that surrounded the radiological warfare field test program raises two related questions. The first question is whether concerns over public reaction are a legitimate basis for security classification. Officials at various levels cited fears of public anxiety, undue public apprehension, and even public hysteria to justify keeping even the most general information secret. The documents reviewed by the advisory committee do not record the actual decisions at various stages to keep the field testing program secret. They refer only to such decisions being made by others. It may be that those decisions reflected other reasons for secrecy, or it may be that public reaction was considered a national security issue. This can be a legitimate argument when the program in question is considered vital to the nation's security. However, the nation has a vital interest in open public participation in representative government, and making exceptions to the rule of openness requires a high standard of national need. The second question is the same as the one raised for the green run. Can potentially important public health information about secret activities be made available to the public without compromising secrecy about the details and purposes of the activity? As described later in this chapter, this remains a live issue today. The RALA tests two decades of experimentation. From 1944 to 1961, the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory used Lanthanum 140, also known as Radiolanthanum, or RALA. In 244 identified tests of atomic bomb components. These tests were critical to the development of the plutonium bomb, which required a highly symmetrical inward detonation of high explosive, known as implosion, to compress the plutonium fuel and allow a critical chain reaction. The RALA method, see, what were the RALA tests, was the only technique available for measuring whether the implosion was symmetrical enough and continued to be used for testing bomb designs until the early 1960s, when technical advances allowed the use of alternative techniques. What were the RALA tests? Implosion devices used carefully timed detonations of carefully shaped high explosive charges to generate a spherically symmetrical inward directed shockwave. The shockwave in turn compresses the nuclear fuel of an atomic bomb, usually plutonium, causing it to go critical and undergo a nuclear chain reaction. In the RALA tests, the plutonium core was replaced by a surrogate heavy metal with an inner core of Lanthanum. Lanthanum 140 has a half-life of 40 hours, emitting a high energy gamma ray in its decay. Some of these gamma rays were absorbed as they passed through the outer components of the implosion device, the degree of absorption depending on how compressed those components were. Radiation measurement devices placed in various directions outside the device would indicate the overall compression and whether that compression was symmetrical or instead varied with direction. The Lanthanum sources typically ranged from a few hundred to a few thousand curies, the average being slightly more than one thousand curies, and were dispersed in the cloud resulting from the detonation. In 1950, the Air Force flew a B-17 aircraft carrying an atmospheric conductivity apparatus in four radiation tracking experiments at Los Alamos. These four experiments were identified subsequently by the General Accounting Office and appear in the advisory committee's charter. A historical analysis undertaken by the Los Alamos Human Studies project team in 1994 identified three of these experiments in which the environmental release of radiation was incidental to the experiment as part of the series of 244 intentional releases mentioned above. The presence of the tracking aircraft is all that distinguishes the three in the advisory committee's charter from the other 241. The Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory was established in 1943 as the Atomic Bomb Design Center for the Manhattan Project on a mesa overlooking the Rio Grande Valley, about 40 miles northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The RALA tests were conducted in Bayou Canyon, roughly three miles east of the town of Los Alamos, which grew up next to the lab. Although radioactive clouds from the RALA tests occasionally blew back toward the town, the prevailing winds usually blew those clouds over sparsely populated regions to the north and east. Aside from a small construction trailer park and a pumice quarry within three miles, the nearest population center was the San Ildefenso Pueblo, roughly eight miles downwind of the test site in the Rio Grande Valley. Several Pueblo Indian and Spanish-speaking communities lie within 12 miles of Los Alamos. Risks to the public. Concerns over risks to the public arose at the beginning of the RALA program. In the early years, Los Alamos planners and health physicists worried that the detonations could cause some contamination in areas outside the test site, such as the construction trailer park and nearby hiking trails. As the RALA program continued, several patterns of public safety practices developed. Initially, the principal way to protect people was to keep them out of the immediate test areas, but in later years it became the practice to test only when the weather was favorable and later still to survey surrounding roads to detect whether contamination had reached hazardous levels. Perhaps because early atmospheric monitoring had produced only negative results and because surveys in Los Alamos had indicated only minimal levels of contamination, ground contamination was not believed to be a significant problem at first. Environmental surveys after RALA tests indicated significant contamination at some locations within three miles of the release, but not at greater distances. This observation and the opening of a pumice quarry within three miles of Bayou Canyon led to intensive studies of fallout from the RALA tests in 1949 and 1950. These studies led Los Alamos to conclude that any area which is two miles or more from the firing point may be regarded as a non-hazardous area. As a result of these studies, Los Alamos restricted RALA testing to take place only when the winds were blowing away from the town and laboratory of Los Alamos. Systematic weather forecasting therefore began only in 1949 after more than 120 tests had been carried out and maintaining the capability to forecast wind conditions for these tests remained an important requirement over the years. The meteorological constraints presumably reduced the radiation exposures in Los Alamos itself. Exposures in more distant communities, while probably more frequent, remained lower than Los Alamos. At the advisory committee's public meeting in Santa Fe on January 20, 1995, however, Los Alamos activist Tyler Mercier commented that most of the shots were fired when the wind was blowing to the northeast. At this point in time, that's where most of the population of this region lived. I mean, half of it is Spanish and half of it Native American. Mercier concluded that there appears to be a callous disregard for the well-being and lives of the Spanish and Native Americans in our community. The RALA tests were suspended from July 1950 to March 1952. Routine radiological survey procedures were put into place when testing resumed. Surveyors would drive along roads in three sectors, monitoring radiation hazards. Readings were typically below one millirad per hour, but reached levels of up to 15 millirad per hour at nearby locations and up to three millirad per hour at distances of several miles. Readings in excess of six millirad per hour required further action, including possible road closure. If the surveyors detected significant levels, they would continue monitoring in the next canyon downwind. On at least one occasion, ground contamination at relatively large distances from Los Alamos led monitors to extend their survey to a nearby town, Espanola, where they detected no radioactivity. The RALA tests were understood from the beginning to be hazardous, but they were also critical to the design of nuclear weapons. Los Alamos officials took significant steps to understand and limit those risks. On at least two occasions, in late 1946 and from 1950 to 1952, they suspended testing amid questions about the continuing need and decided to continue testing. When the RALA tests finally ended in 1961, an alternative means of obtaining needed information had become available. Risks to workers. From the beginning, the RALA tests also raised concerns over hazards to workers, particularly the chemists, in spite of elaborate measures adopted to limit these chemists' radiation exposures. Lanthanum 140, with a half-life of 40 hours, is itself the decay product of barium 140, which was separated from spent reactor fuel at Oak Ridge, or Idaho National Engineering Laboratory in later years, and transported in heavily shielded containers to Los Alamos. There, chemists would periodically separate out the highly radioactive lanthanum for use in the implosion tests. Soon after testing began on September 21, 1944, the RALA program posed a puzzle for radiation safety. On October 16th, Lewis Hempelman, director of the Health Division at Los Alamos, wrote to Manhattan Project medical director Stafford Warren about blood changes observed in the chemists working on the most recent RALA test. It looks now as though I was too excited about the blood changes, but at that time it seemed to me to be such a clear-cut case of cause and effect that I thought the measurements of dosage must have been incorrect. Now I feel reasonably certain of the dosage. It was a case where risk was taken knowingly and willingly because it seemed necessary for the project. It is my feeling that it should be the decision of the director whether or not risks of this type should be taken. In August 1946, Hempelman termed the exposures of personnel in the chemical group excessive and recommended that no more RALA shots be attempted until replacements are obtained for each member of this team. The tests were suspended temporarily because of overexposure of personnel to radiation. Los Alamos was faced with the alternative of increasing its staff so that individual exposures could be reduced or shutting work down until safety measures were installed. RALA testing resumed in December 1946 after a review to determine whether it was still necessary, but no documents are available to determine whether safety procedures or staffing were changed. What did change was that researchers began a formal study of the relationship between the radiation exposures and blood counts of the Bayou Canyon chemists. The chemists' depressed white blood counts, Lymphopenia, presumably the same changes noted two years earlier, posed a puzzle that continued for at least a decade, resulting in three scientific reports. In 1954, Thomas Shipman, who had replaced Hempelman as health division director, wrote to the AEC that the blood counts were done with extreme care and we are satisfied that the changes in counts are actual and not imaginary. It is our belief, however, that they don't mean anything. If they do mean anything, we don't know what it is. The cause of these blood effects remains uncertain. The reported doses of roughly 10 rad per year are well below levels expected to produce any detectable blood changes, a fact that was known by 1950. While it is possible the effect could have been due to undetected internal contamination, a more likely explanation may be that the chemists were exposed to chemical compounds that produced the observed blood changes. It appears that in the latter part of the 1940s some Los Alamos officials worried about the possible consequences of publicly releasing data on health effects, including those related to the chemists. A 1946 internal Los Alamos memo records that Dr. Oppenheimer asked that all reports on health problems be separately classified and issued at his request. The author of the memo indicated his belief that the purpose was to safeguard the project against being sued by people claiming to have been damaged. Two years later, Norman Knowlton, a Los Alamos hematologist, reported on the blood changes in 10 workers at the lab. A 1948 memo from the AEC's insurance branch argued that releasing this report on blood counts could have a shattering effect on the morale of the employees if they became aware that there was substantial reason to question the standards of safety under which they are working and concluded that the question of making this document public should be given very careful study. The report was not classified, however, though later reports were stamped official use only. While the remaining information on the Los Alamos chemist is fragmentary, the experience raises an enduring question. What are the obligations of the government and its contractors to notify and protect employees whose work may expose them to continuing hazards even when the risk is known to be small or is uncertain? As is discussed in Chapter 12 during the same period, issues of worker protection and notification were raised much more starkly in the case of the uranium miners who were placed at significant risk, a risk they had not knowingly and willingly taken. Informing the public, although many in Los Alamos, those who worked on bomb design, knew of the RALA program and its potential hazards, there is no indication of any discussion with other workers or local communities. For example, from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, many Pueblo people who may not have been informed worked at the lab as day laborers, domestics and manufacturers of detonators. The first public mention appears to have come in 1963 when the Los Alamos Laboratory Newsletter printed an article describing the cleanup of Bayou Canyon. Los Alamos reports that its first concerted efforts to tell the Pueblo people about the RALA program did not occur until 1994 when Los Alamos began its review of the RALA program. Representatives of the Pueblos near Los Alamos most likely to be affected by the RALA tests have complained about past and continuing failures of laboratory officials to communicate with Pueblo workers or communities. Recent efforts at Los Alamos to undo this legacy of secrecy have created a continuing sense of frustration. Pueblo representatives state that information and other relations with the lab are still too tightly controlled to be trusted completely. It is difficult for any outsider to appreciate fully the unique cultural and religious viewpoint from which the Pueblo Indians perceive the effects of environmental releases. In addition to having several holy sites located near Los Alamos, the Pueblo have a deep respect for the land which appears to have been violated by many of the activities at Los Alamos. The Pueblo continue to rely to some degree for the basic necessities of food, heat, and shelter on plants, animals, and the earth, and they suspect that they may be at added risk of exposure to radioactivity in the environment. George Voles, a Los Alamos physician who was at the lab during some of the RALA tests, told the advisory committee as far as I know there was not much communication going on with the people in the area and that in retrospect was a mistake. As a result of these failures of communication, Los Alamos now faces a difficult challenge five decades later of attempting to establish trust with neighboring communities that have become more suspicious because of what they have learned. Here, as in Hanford, credibility is the casualty of silence and secrecy. End of Section 56. Section 57 of final report of the advisory committee on human radiation experiments. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Kristen Edwards. Final report of the advisory committee on human radiation experiments. Case studies, Chapter 11, Part 4. Studies of environmental risks and safety. The Green Run and the Radiological Warfare and RALA programs were by no means the only government-sponsored experiments in which radioactive materials were intentionally released into the environment. Scientists undertook a wide variety of studies designed to understand the risks of environmental exposure to radioactive materials. For example, tests of experimental nuclear reactors at the National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho and the National Reactor Development Station in Nevada were designed to simulate possible accident scenarios under carefully controlled and isolated conditions. Similarly, tests at the Nevada test site were designed to understand the possible effects of an accidental non-nuclear explosion of a nuclear weapon. In addition to intentional releases designed to test the safety of nuclear machinery, safety was also a concern in studies designed to understand the fate of radioactive materials in the environment. Many of these studies simply took advantage of releases that occurred accidentally or were incidental to other projects. In 1943, studies of the exposure of salmon in the Columbia River to the radioactive effluent from Hanford's reactors set in motion the growing and largely public science of radio ecology. The environmental analog of radioisotope tracer studies designed to better understand the workings of the human body, these studies were intended both to follow the course of radionuclides released into the environment during nuclear weapons production and testing and use radionuclides to trace the basic workings of the environment. The deliberate release of very small quantities of radioactive material provided the opportunity for more controlled environmental study than those studies that simply observed radionuclides already released into the environment. The advisory committee did not attempt to survey the entire field of radio ecology, but we have reviewed the following examples in some detail. Project Chariot. Project Chariot was a component of Project Plowshare, the brainchild of physicist Edward Teller who helped develop the first hydrogen bomb. Plowshare arose in the late 1950s in response to public protests against atmospheric nuclear testing and was intended to demonstrate that clean nuclear explosives would provide safe, peaceful uses of atomic energy. In 1958, Teller selected a site in Northern Alaska for Project Chariot, the proposed excavation of an Arctic seaport using a series of nuclear explosions. The site chosen was near Cape Thompson, roughly 30 miles from the Inupia Eskimo village of Point Hope. This proposal, which was the subject of public debate, died in 1962 in the face of popular opposition. However, extensive observations of the Alaskan ecosystem were undertaken between 1958 and 1962 to provide a baseline for comparison with results of the planned nuclear explosions. These observations led to the first awareness of the environmental hazards of cesium-137 from distant, primarily Soviet, atmospheric nuclear tests and led to a series of studies on cesium in the food chain and in humans. Most of the environmental studies in Project Chariot were purely observational, but one series of studies involved the intentional release of small quantities of radioactive materials, a total of 26 millicuries of iodine-131, strontium-85, cesium-137, and mixed fission products. In several studies, researchers from the US Geological Survey spread radioactive materials on the surface of small plots of land and observed their spread across the surface when sprayed with water to simulate rainfall. In another, researchers placed mixed fission products in a small pit and measured their transport through the subsurface clay, and in yet another, researchers studied the spread of radioactivity in a creek contaminated with radioactive soil from Nevada. After these studies, the contaminated soil was removed and buried in above-ground mounds. Although this was a technical violation of regulatory requirements, an AEC memo expressed general satisfaction with the cleanup, noting that burial in the permafrost would have been too difficult. After the initial cleanup, the site remained dormant for 30 years until 1992 when a researcher discovered correspondence between the AEC and USGS about the tracer studies. In response to public concerns, the Department of Energy undertook to clean up the mounds' potentially contaminated soil. A survey indicated no externally observable radioactivity, and very little, if any, measurable radioactive material was believed to remain. In 1993, the mounds of soil were removed for disposal at the Nevada Test Site. Caroline Cannon, an Inupiat Indian resident of Point Hope, told the advisory committee at its public meeting in Santa Fe, I have lived in Point Hope all my life and eaten the food from the sea and the land and drank the water of Cape Thompson along with the others. I have to wonder about my health, what impact the poison on the earth will have all throughout my lifetime, emotionally, physically, and most of all for my children and my grandchildren. Although the risk to the population was minimal, residents still wonder whether other experiments might have occurred and remained secret. Here again, government secrecy in the past is undermining government credibility in the present. How much comfort are Ms. Cannon and others like her able to take in reassurances from the government about risks to future generations, a government that they perceive unjustifiably kept them in the dark? Controlled Radioiodine Releases A small number of intentional releases involved the deliberate exposure of human subjects to trace quantities of radioisotopes in the environment. The most systematic of these were five of the roughly 30 controlled environmental radioiodine tests, C-E-R-T, carried out at Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, I-N-E-L, between 1963 and 1968. Small quantities of I-131 were released into the atmosphere under carefully monitored meteorological conditions. In one study, seven volunteers drank milk from cows that grazed on the contaminated pasture. The quantity of iodine was measured carefully in the air on the grass, in the milk, and later in the volunteers' thyroids, allowing a quantitative reconstruction of the full environmental pathway. The maximum exposure among these volunteers was reported as 0.63 rad to the thyroid, nearly a factor of 50 below the contemporary annual occupational exposure limits. In four other studies, a total of about 20 volunteers stood downwind at the time of the release. Their exposures, from inhaling I-131 in the air, were much lower. Apparently, all these volunteers were members of the I-N-E-L staff. Measurements of the radioactivity in their thyroids provided a quantitative reconstruction of the inhalation pathway. Studies similar to the C-E-R-T took place at Hanford in 1962, 1963, and possibly in 1965. The 1963 Hanford test involved human volunteers from Hanford's health physics staff, as did studies of iodine uptake from milk. The subjects in all these studies are referred to as volunteers in the relevant documents. No evidence is available bearing on what these subjects knew or were told about the experiments or the conditions under which they agreed to participate. The subjects were all staff members of the agency or its contractors conducting the research. The documents suggest that these staff members included knowledgeable individuals who participated in these experiments in the spirit of self-experimentation. Reconstructing, comparing, and understanding risks. Thus far, we have only briefly characterized the risks associated with the intentional releases reviewed in this chapter. Just how risky were those intentional releases and how much of this risk materialized? Although these questions cannot be answered with certainty, the answers can be approximated. Actual and suspected failures to respect public health and the environmental practices of the past have often led to efforts to reconstruct the basic facts and estimate the likely harm from environmental releases of radioactive materials. This process of environmental dose reconstruction has become an essential part of informing the public. The task of estimating past environmental exposures to radioactive materials is a complex multi-step process. The first step is to collect data from historical records on the amount of material released. The second is to use records on weather, actual measurements of radioactivity in the environment, and computer models to reconstruct where this material went. The third step is to estimate how this distribution of material might result in radiation exposures to humans. Finally, these exposure estimates can be combined with mathematical models of radiation risks to estimate the resulting harm to people who were exposed. Radioactive materials released into the environment can affect humans in two ways. First, they can be a source of radiation external to the body, beta radiation which affects the skin or more penetrating gamma radiation. Second, they can enter the body from contaminated air, food or water, and provide an internal source of radiation. Of these environmental pathways to radiation exposure, the food pathway is by far the most complicated. Radionuclides can enter the food chain at many points through contaminated air, water, and soil, resulting in contaminated fruits, vegetables, meat, and dairy products. The hazards from environmental exposures to radionuclides differ in important quantitative ways from those due to medical procedures or participation in biomedical research. The natural dilution of materials in the environment means that individual exposures, even from massive releases, are often quite small. Although the chemical and biological processes involved in exposures through the food chain can lead to effects that counteract this dilution. Finally, many more people may be exposed with exposures that vary widely from person to person. Because individual exposures are generally too low to produce any acute effects, the main form of injury possible from environmental radiation exposure is cancer, which may occur many years after the exposure, and the number of cases attributable to such exposures can be expected to be relatively small. Evidence of cancer from exposure to radiation is difficult to separate out from other possible causes of those injuries. For the intentional releases discussed in this chapter, it is essentially impossible. Instead, we must rely on models of risk based on studies of other human radiation exposures. Increased cancer rates among Japanese survivors of the atomic bombings provide the basis for most current radiation exposure risk estimates. Health effects from the massive accident at Chernobyl and from other sites in the former Soviet Union should also be detectable and eventually may improve our understanding of the risks of chronic low-level radiation exposure. The uncertainties in these scientific analyses are a major component of the uncertainty and risk estimation from environmental exposures. In addition to individual exposures, it is important to know how many people were exposed. The population dose, obtained by adding up the individual exposures, provides a measure of the overall risk to the exposed population. According to models used by the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, we can expect about one induced fatal cancer for every 1,940 person REM of radiation exposure. While the risk to any one person may be small, the exposure of a large population can lead to a statistically significant increase in the number of fatal cancers. But it will be impossible to attribute any particular cancer to radiation exposure. The committee was not equipped to reconstruct historical doses from intentional releases but can make some rough judgments based on more formal analyses performed by others. The Green Run The Green Run took place after years of routine emissions of radioiodine from the wartime and early postwar operations of the Hanford plant and it added a relatively small amount to the overall risk. See the accompanying Table 1 magnitude of radioactive releases. In 1987, the Department of Energy established the Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction, HEDR, project, to provide an estimate of all the exposures that might have resulted and continues to refine its estimates of the resulting radiation doses to people. These exposures, primarily through the food chain, may have produced a measurable excess in thyroid disease. A follow-up study of the exposed population is attempting to ascertain whether excess thyroid disease can indeed be seen. The Green Run represents only about 1% of all the radioiodine releases from Hanford. Fortunately, for most nearby residents, it occurred at a time of year when people were not eating fresh garden vegetables or drinking milk from cattle grazing in open pastures. The estimated radiation dose to members of the public from Hanford's operations for all of 1949 probably did not exceed 600 millirad to the thyroid and doses 10 times lower were more typical of the most highly exposed population. The committee estimates that the Green Run may have increased the expected number of fatal thyroid cancers in the exposed population by 0.04 within broad error margins. This means it is highly unlikely that even one person died as a result of the Green Run. A larger incidence of benign thyroid conditions is likely, but there is no evidence to support a connection between the intentional releases and any other possible medical conditions. Radiological Warfare No formal dose reconstruction has been done on radiological warfare field tests at Dugway. Although the radioactive Tantalum used in these tests does not concentrate in the food chain, because of its long half-life, there may have been many opportunities for people to be exposed. Weather and vehicle traffic could have spread some of the contamination outside the proving ground and even repeated low-level exposures to uranium prospectors or hikers who regularly wandered into the site may have been possible. Whatever public health hazard the RW tests at Dugway may have posed at the time, the radioactive decay of the Tantalum caused the risk to dissipate over time. By 1960, no more than a few millicuries of Tantalum remained, dispersed so widely that by this time it posed no conceivable human or environmental hazard. RALA Tests Los Alamoses 1995 report on the history of the RALA test program contains basic information necessary for an environmental dose reconstruction, including the amount of radioactivity released, a rough indication of the amount of high explosive used in each test, and meteorological and fallout data were available. Advisory committee staff reviewed the process by which this information was assembled and reported that the historical reconstruction appears to be a reasonably accurate representation of what actually occurred. Los Alamoses is using this historical information to produce an environmental dose assessment, which it is providing to the state of New Mexico and plans to submit for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The committee was not in a position to judge the adequacy of the dose reconstruction, but the sources, methodology, and results will be available for review by outside experts. Individual exposures from the full series of RALA tests were somewhat higher than for the single release of the green run, and the exposed population was somewhat smaller. According to a preliminary dose reconstruction by the Human Studies project team at Los Alamoses, the total dose for someone living continuously in Los Alamoses for all 18 years of the program was roughly 110 millirems. With a population of approximately 10,000 in Los Alamoses County, 0.4 excess cancer deaths might be expected. The average dose would have been 60 millirems for someone living in Los Alamoses. The General Accounting Office noted an Air Force report that a B-17 airplane detected radioactive debris from one of the tests as far as 70 miles away over the town of Huatres, New Mexico, but it is unlikely that any significant risks extended to this distance. The Human Studies project team concluded, however, that the cloud could not have gone as far as claimed at the time of the observation and suggest that the atmospheric conductivity apparatus used by the Air Force was sensitive to effects other than radioactivity. Los Alamoses has not attempted to reconstruct the doses to the Bayou Canyon chemists. Using data from one of the reports, however, it would appear that the total exposure for these chemists was high enough to place these individuals at some increased risk for developing a radiation-induced cancer. Other Intentional Releases No risk estimates are available for the other releases the committee has studied, and aside from DOE's Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, no dose reconstructions have been undertaken. It does appear, however, that the human health risks were small, even compared with the minimal risks of the intentional releases discussed above, and with other, more familiar exposures to radioactivity in the environment. See the accompanying table, Magnitude of Radioactive Releases. Section 58 of Final Report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Kristen Edwards. Final Report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. Case Studies, Chapter 11, Part 5. Policies and principles governing secret intentional releases, the effectiveness of current regulations. Policies and practices in the early years. When the federal government set out to apply atomic energy to national needs, there were no specific rules or policies to govern the deliberate release of radionuclides into the environment. Nonetheless, the declassified record of the releases just reviewed shows that those responsible considered the basic issues that concern us today and that are today the subject of federal regulation. These include the need to limit risks, the question of who should bear those risks, and the extent of the obligation to inform affected citizens. This record indicates that, for intentional releases as for biomedical experimentation, the government was most concerned with the highest priority on limiting human health risks. At Hanford, for example, this was done by establishing limits for the permitted level of radioactive contamination. Some of these guidelines were exceeded, if only temporarily, by the green run. For the Radiological Warfare Program, the Department of Defense established a panel of outside experts to safeguard against excessive risks to the general public. The federal government struggled throughout these early years to clarify its obligations to protect the general public from the risks of radioactive contamination in the environment, particularly from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, C Chapter 10. The 1953 Nevada test series raised serious concerns about whether and how radioactive fallout from the expanding testing program was exposing nearby people and livestock to risk. An analysis that seems equally apt for intentional releases, Richard Elliott, Information Director of the AEC's Santa Fe Operations Office, argued at the time that the AEC had the obligation to show that the testing program was vital to the nation and that it was conducted as safely as possible. He also asserted, however, that the agency had duties in addition to limiting risk, including, one, concerned publics of the hazards created and of preventive action which may be undertaken. Two, to warn people in advance of potentially hazardous situations or of situations which may alarm them. Three, to report after the fact not only with reassurances but also with details and interpretations. Four, and to the extent of the agency's responsibility to reimburse the public for its losses. For most of the intentional releases described in this chapter, information was withheld entirely even when that information might have enabled the public to reduce its risk, however small of exposure to ionizing radiation. This secrecy appears to have been motivated by legitimate national security needs in the case of the Green Run and the RALA program. The Radiological Warfare Field Testing Program was kept secret primarily to avoid public awareness and controversy that might jeopardize the program. The extent of secrecy abated in later years and many of the intentional releases that occurred from about 1960 onward involved relatively low risks and were made known to the public. Obligations to limit risk to consider who should bear the risk and to inform the public while recognized were often subordinated to concerns for national security, which were sometimes joined or melded with concerns for public relations. The information that is available indicates that the physical harm from the radiation is probably less than the damage to individuals, communities, and the government, caused by the initial secrecy, however well motivated, and by subsequent failures to deal honestly with the public thereafter. The legacy of distrust, as described in the histories presented above, is probably more significant than the legacy of physical harm. Regulating the levels of risk the government may impose. The past 50 years has seen the development of a body of laws and regulations governing releases into the environment, including releases of radioactive materials. These laws and regulations give legal standing to moral considerations about limiting risk, fairness in the imposition of risk, and disclosure to and involvement of the public. When environmental releases take place today, for example, in the cleanup of the nuclear weapons complex, they are subject to rules that provide procedures for public review and comment on proposed federal actions, and to rules that limit the amounts of radiation that can be released into the environment. Environmental law contains a variety of quantitative standards designed to limit the risk to human health from exposure to environmental hazards. These limits apply both to private companies and to the federal government. The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and the Clean Air Act of 1970 impose the most important constraints on intentional releases of radioactivity into the environment. Regulations under both of these laws limit the maximum exposure to any one person. These limits are often supplemented by secondary standards, for example, on concentrations in air and water, designed to prevent exposures from exceeding this limit. This basic form of regulation remains largely unchanged from the early days of radiation protection, although the quantitative limits have been greatly reduced over the years. The actual limits on radiation exposures to members of the public have dropped dramatically over time. The initial post-war standard was for occupational exposures 0.1R per day. If a person were exposed at such levels for his or her entire working lifetime, about 50 years, a rough extrapolation of current risk models would predict that he or she would be more likely than not to die of radiation-induced cancer. In practice, however, it is extremely unlikely that any worker would be even close to that level of lifetime exposure. Once it was recognized that standards for the general public should be stricter than those for a potentially hazardous workplace, the exposure standard for members of the public was set a factor of 10 below the occupational standard. In 1960, when the occupational standard was reduced to 5 REM per year, the standard for exposures to members of the general public was reduced to 500 millirem per year from all artificial environmental sources. Since that time, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, NRC, were established as separate regulatory agencies, and radiation protection standards have been tightened further. The DOE and NRC have adopted the stricter limit of 100 millirem per year for general population exposure, and the EPA has proposed adopting a similar standard. The EPA's standard for atmospheric emissions under the Clean Air Act is a factor of 10 lower 10 millirem per year. A lifetime exposure at this level would produce an expected excess in cancer deaths of a few in 10,000. By way of comparison, the average human exposure to background radiation from naturally occurring cosmic rays and radioactive materials is roughly 300 millirem per year. Exposure limits that were initially much higher than natural backgrounds have since fallen substantially below those levels. Actual public exposures are much lower still with average medical exposures of roughly 50 millirem per year and exposures from nuclear power at roughly 1 millirem per year for people living closest to nuclear power plants. Although the risk associated with the maximum allowed exposure from human controlled sources has fallen over the years so that it is now below that from natural background levels, it remains higher than that for exposure to chemical carcinogens which range from one in 10,000 to one in a million. However, standards based solely on limiting individual exposures would not address the possibility that, as in the case of intentional releases, large numbers of people might be exposed to risk though likely at low levels. As described above, the population dose obtained by adding up all the individual doses provides a measure of the overall risk to a large exposed population. A more universal application of the population dose in the regulatory process would give greater weight to this overall risk. Under some circumstances, however, the federal government may invoke exceptions to these baseline standards, imposing greater risks on its citizens where national need dictates. Under the Clean Air Act, only the President may invoke such exceptions and only on the basis of national security interest. The President must report to Congress on any such exceptions at the end of the calendar year. Under the Atomic Energy Act, however, the Department of Energy is largely exempt from external regulation. When its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission, developed regulations for the Civilian nuclear power industry, it also committed to operate its own nuclear facilities according to certain safety provisions, but allowed itself an exemption when overriding national security considerations dictate. Such an exception under the Atomic Energy Act could still be invoked today. These exemptions clearly allow national security interests to take precedence over public health concerns. The Advisory Committee is concerned that this could occur without adequate consideration or oversight, and without adequate protection of the public's interest in a safe environment and public notice. Once the exemption is invoked, there is no formal limit on the risks to which members of the public may be exposed, although the requirement to report to Congress could deter some actions. Public Disclosure and Formal Review Today's environmental laws require public disclosures of the likely environmental impacts of federal government actions, subject to public and EPA review, and EPA oversight of federal compliance with environmental regulations. As we will discuss below, the classification of information for national security purposes requires certain exceptions to the general rules described here. The National Environmental Policy Act, NEPA of 1969, requires that the federal government take into account and publicize the environmental impact of its actions. NEPA's requirements serve the dual purposes of informing the public and forcing federal agencies of the federal government to inform themselves of the environmental impact of their actions. NEPA requires an agency to prepare an environmental impact statement, EIS, for any proposed major federal action having a significant impact on the human environment. As long as an agency has followed the requisite procedures and rationally explained its choices in the EIS, it may choose whatever course of action it likes, even the alternative that poses greater environmental risks. Nonetheless, the public process can have dramatic effects on the way agencies make decisions. Assessments that are subject to public comment and decisions that are open to public scrutiny force agencies to consider public reaction when they choose policy alternatives. The adequacy of the process is subject to review by EPA and, if members of the public sue, by the courts. However, environmental impact statement may be classified in whole or in part. The EPA is obliged to review and comment on the classified portions. The EPA is also charged with making sure the federal government complies with the substantive requirements of the Clean Air Act and other environmental statutes and shares oversight responsibilities under the Atomic Energy Act with DOE and the NRC. For example, EPA must approve the construction or expansion of a facility, certifying that such action would not exceed the limits of the Clean Air Act. Furthermore, agencies are required to report on their admissions to EPA and are subject to fines if they violate the admissions limits. Under the Federal Facility Compliance Act, EPA must list and review environmental compliance at all federal facilities. Selection of sites and affected communities. The sites selected for intentional releases and thus the populations affected do not appear to have been chosen arbitrarily, but rather for reasons that are arguably defensible, albeit open to a charge of unfairness. Most of the releases took place in and around atomic energy communities and military sites, a choice that had several obvious advantages. First, the sites offered the expertise and facilities, both indoors and out, for the evaluation of releases involving radioactivity. Second, the locations of most of these facilities were originally chosen because of their relative, if not complete, isolation from major, civilian population centers. Residents near these sites were generally accustomed to secret government activities in their midst. The selection of these sites for repeated exposure to releases of radioactivity, whether experimental, accidental, or routine, probably resulted in fewer people being exposed, but it also meant that the same groups were repeatedly exposed to higher than normal risks. While there is no formal analog to the research rules regarding fairness in the selection of subjects in the context of environmental releases, the environmental impact process does provide for public review of and comment on the rationale for the choice of taking an action in one locale as opposed to another. In addition, by a 1994 executive order, President Clinton called on decision-makers to consider whether actions affecting the environment may have disproportionate impact on the environment of poor or minority populations. When the environmental review and decisions are made in secret, however, opportunities for any group of citizens to make their concerns known are limited. The effects of secrecy on current policies and protections. As we have seen, current law permits the conduct of intentional releases in secret. Secret intentional releases pose two kinds of problems for the interests of the public. Loss of assurance that secret releases comply with laws regulating risk exposure and loss of the protections afforded by public disclosure and comment. Formally, at least, the regulations limiting radiation exposures to the public and requiring official environmental review and oversight of government programs apply equally to classified programs as to public ones. In practice, however, classification creates complications that have yet to be resolved. Efforts are now underway to put procedures into place to better address proper environmental compliance in classified programs. For example, security classification can interfere with official oversight of environmental compliance. Even in recent times, environmental oversight of classified programs has not been the rule in practice. Until 1994, the Federal Facilities Enforcement Office at EPA, which is charged with environmental oversight of all federal facilities, had no personnel with suitable clearances to oversee, quote, black programs, programs so highly classified that their existence is not acknowledged. Lack of oversight creates opportunities for violations of environmental law to go undetected and unpunished. Some have charged that the Department of Defense, as recently as 1993, used secrecy as a cover for violations of environmental law. Recent lawsuits against the Department of Defense and the Environmental Protection Agency alleged that, one, illegal open-air burning of toxic wastes took place at a secret Air Force facility near Groom Lake, Nevada, and that, two, EPA has not exercised its required environmental oversight responsibilities for this facility. Responding to the second of these lawsuits, EPA reported that in early 1995, it had seven regulators on staff with special access clearance who inspected the Groom Lake facility. The Committee believes that the federal government has a particular obligation to provide environmental oversight of classified programs and that there is no fundamental barrier to environmental oversight in classified programs. Regulators can be granted the appropriate clearances. For example, before its existence was openly recognized, the F-117 stealth fighter base in Nevada was subject to oversight by Nevada state regulators who had received the necessary clearances. Such oversight is not automatic. It requires active cooperation between the regulatory agencies and the agencies subject to regulation. The Department of Defense has undertaken a review of environmental compliance in its black programs and is working with EPA to establish mechanisms to provide continuing environmental oversight of those programs. Even when regulators have the appropriate clearances, however, other aspects of secrecy can create barriers to oversight. Providing clearances often entails lengthy background investigations which can result in delays. Furthermore, it remains unclear what EPA can do if it detects a violation that results in a dispute with the agency in charge of the program. This is a basis for concern about the credibility of environmental oversight that occurs in secret. The limits on outside oversight are ameliorated by the fact that both DOE and DOD have established environmental and health offices that are largely independent of their respective agency's operational programs. Under most circumstances, these offices can probably provide adequate oversight over their agency's classified programs. Because of the potential institutional conflict of interest, however, it would be preferable to have further oversight by an independent entity. The conduct of intentional releases in secret necessarily deprives the public of information to which it would otherwise be entitled. Security classification modifies or eliminates the various requirements for providing public disclosures. The agency states that its normal practice is to send an EPA employee with appropriate clearances to the agency in question to review the classified information. EPA, however, does not keep copies of the reviewed document or any other records of such reviews. Moreover, review by an EPA employee is no substitute for a process open to public comment and scrutiny. The agency, especially to the degree of black programs, severely limits or eliminates the ability of the public to influence decisions about environmental health, either through political action or through the courts, and undermines public confidence that officials are carrying out their responsibilities to safeguard public health. As in the secret releases of the past, there are also concerns about environmental and public health effects when releases are classified and if restrictions on information compromise the ability of members of the public to take protective actions. Conclusion While the intentional releases described in this chapter put people at risk from radiation exposures with limited exception, they were not undertaken for the purpose of gathering research data on humans. Thus, in contrast with the biomedical experiment studied by the advisory committee, they were not intended as human experiments. Fifty years ago, unlike today, there was no formal and published body of laws that defined and limited the ability of the government to release potentially hazardous substances into the environment. Nonetheless, the duty to limit risk and by implication, the duty to balance risks against potential benefits was understood by those who engaged in intentional releases. In the case of the green run, risk from the intentional release could be gauged against pre-existing guidelines for operational releases. In the case of radiological warfare tests, a separate safety panel was established to consider releases. The intentional releases studied by the committee often engaged in national security interests and were conducted in secret. However legitimate and well-motivated the releases were, security classification prevented any public notice or discussion of the green run, an experiment conducted for intelligence purposes, the radiological weapons field tests, or the RALA experiments testing atomic bomb components. The essentially complete secrecy surrounding these tests prevented any warnings that might have allowed members of the public to protect themselves from whatever risks might have been inherent in the tests. In retrospect and with limited information it is difficult to know whether and how national security interests affected the decisions to conduct these intentional releases. In the case of the green run, for example, how did decision makers seek to balance the national security interests in learning about Soviet bomb testing and the risks of not performing the green run and thus not gaining relevant information against the potential risks of the local population of the release? The health and safety risks posed by the intentional releases appear in retrospect to have been negligible, the green run, for example, in comparison with other exposures at Hanford. But this does not mean that the intentional releases were without negative consequences. The secrecy that surrounded the conduct of these releases and the failure to deal forthrightly with citizens after the fact has taken a substantial toll. People living in the affected communities have been robbed of peace of mind and the government has lost the trust of some of its citizens. Could this happen again? Could there be another green run? The answer is a qualified yes. In fact an intentional release like the green run probably would not be contemplated because the scientific and strategic value would seem minimal. But actions that raise similar concerns if undertaken in secrecy could still happen. Environmental regulations apply to secret programs but the oversight procedures are not fully in place to ensure adherence to these regulations. The public review process that is at the heart of current environmental protections could be limited or rendered non-existent if the government were to invoke exceptions for national security interest to avoid these constraints. Any government action that is conducted in secret is likely to cause suspicion and distrust even if the risks to members of the public are minimal or non-existent. Public policies should operate with a strong presumption favoring public disclosure and openness. Their doubtless are limited circumstances under which it is justifiable to conduct an intentional release in secret. The lesson of the green run and the other intentional releases is however that unless great care is taken to preserve and honor the public's trust the cost to the body politic of such an action is likely to be substantial. The committee believes that the current regulatory structure does not go far enough in this regard. Provisions must be made for timely public disclosure and records must be created and maintained capable of satisfying the affected populations that their interests have been protected. And mechanisms need to be developed to approximate the scrutiny of the public when security interests require the classification of environmental impact statements or otherwise limit disclosure of information to the public. Without such protections the greatest casualty of the green run the distrusted and gendered cannot be prevented in the future. Where this happens official concern that the public cannot be trusted and sometimes complex information about health and safety will become an ever more corrosive self-fulfilling prophecy. End of section 58 Final report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments Case Studies, Chapter 12 Part 1 Observational Data Gathering Supplies of uranium to build atomic bombs a remote sparsely inhabited site to test the bombs information about the health effects of both the raw material and the bomb. These were the cold war needs to see to the events with which this chapter is concerned. This chapter examines whether the U.S. government wronged or harmed uranium miners in the American West and Marshall Islanders in the mid-Pacific in both cases by exposing them to radiation hazards. In the case of the miners by failing to inform them about the risk and failing to mitigate it. And in both cases perhaps to different degrees by studying them without having obtained adequate consent. Although the mines of the Colorado Plateau and the seas surrounding the atolls of the Marshall Islands were seen by the U.S. policy planners as ideal sites for the government's primary missions, mining uranium and detonating atomic and hydrogen bombs, they became laboratories for studying radiation damage to humans. We also touch briefly on a radiation experiment conducted with a view to the natural laboratory in which the subjects were set. In 1956 and 1957 the Air Force administered Iodine 131 to Alaskan residents to determine the role of the Thyroid Clan in adapting to extreme cold. The uranium mines, the Marshall Islands and Alaska were not, of course, the first occasions for studying the effects of radiation on people. As has been reported in earlier chapters, radium dial painters were studied and in the largest epidemiological study of radiation effects ever, the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs continued to be followed. The Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission now the Radiation Effects Research Foundation began its work soon after World War II. This organization's projects include a mortality study, a periodic health examination study, a study of people exposed in utero and a genetic effect study. Some of the most important data available on long-term radiation risks have come from these studies. These data have also provided the basis for most current radiation exposure standards. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki studies are different from the cases of the uranium miners and the Marshall Ease, however, because the exposure ended before the epidemiologic study got underway. While the miners and the Marshall Ease after their high initial exposure were subjected to continuous exposure to radiation, relatively high for the miners, relatively low for the Marshall Ease, they were not exposed for the purpose of treating the effects of radiation on their health. But the exposures resulting from the mining and bomb tests provided the government an opportunity and some would say a duty to collect needed information on radiation effects on human beings. In both cases, researchers were interested in determining the health consequences of exposure to specific and quantified forms and levels of ionizing radiation over a long term. For the miners, it was radon gas and its radioactive decay product. For the Marshall Ease, it was the fallout products of nuclear explosions such as iodine-131, strontium-90, and cesium-137. Also, in both cases, the United States has provided and in the case of the miners continues to provide financial compensation. In addition, a class-action lawsuit, Begay vs. United States was brought on behalf of a group of Navajo miners. There were, however, major differences between the situation of the miners and that of the Marshall Ease. In the case of the miners, the research was conducted even though there were data from European studies clearly indicating that uranium miners were at high risk for lung cancer, which could have been substantially mitigated by ventilating the mines. The study of the miners, conducted by the public health service, was epidemiological in nature and unrelated to their clinical care. The Marshall Ease were the first population exposed to amounts of fallout perceived as acutely dangerous. The long-term effects of exposures to fallout were unknown. Therefore, it was important to gather data while treating the exposed population. It appears that the population was directly integrated with the management of their health care. Together information on the health effects of radiation, federal government agencies mounted observational studies, a term indicating that the conditions of exposure were not under the control of the investigator who was studying the health effect. For a long time, while they were being studied, it seems evident that no one seems to have told the miners the extent to which their exposure to radiation might be hazardous, and in many cases, lethal. Nor it appears where they told that ventilation of the mines could significantly reduce the hazard. And evidently no one seems to have told the miners the true purposes of the research. With respect to the Marshall Ease, efforts to explain to them the purpose of the studies and hazards of their contaminated environment were inadequate well into the 1960s. And the difference between medical care and treatment-related research was not clearly explained. The advisory committee reports here on both studies and concludes with a discussion of the cold weather experiment in Alaska in which servicemen, Eskimos and Indians were given tracer amounts of iodine-131. We begin with the uranium miners. The uranium miners. The competition with the Soviet Union to build atomic arsenals spurred a uranium boom. In the late 1940s there was a perceived need for a large and reliable domestic source of uranium to replace supplies predominantly from the Belgian Congo and to a lesser degree Canada. The Ease's announcement in 1948 that it would purchase at a guaranteed price all the ore that was mined set off a stampede on the Colorado Plateau. Hundreds of mines ranging from mines run by the prospectors themselves to larger corporate operations were opened in the four corners of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado and several thousand miners many of them Navajo and Mexico. Some of the mines were large open pits but most were underground networks of shafts, caverns and tunnels short up by timbers. Because uranium milling and open pit mining is conducted above ground, radon levels tend to be quite low as radon is readily dispersed into the atmosphere. However, millers are exposed to uranium dust and thorium 230 both of which may have chemical toxicity as well as additional chemicals used in the extraction process. In the remainder of this chapter we focus on the underground miners who are exposed to much higher levels of hazards that are the principal cause of lung cancer in the miners. The American boom followed centuries of experience with uranium mining in Europe where a mysterious malady had been killing silver and uranium miners at an early age in the Erzibirge or mountains on the border between what is now Czech Republic and Germany. In 1879, true researchers identified the D's as enthrous thoracic malignancy. They reported that a miner's life expectancy was 20 years after entering the mine and about 75% of the miners died of lung cancer. By 1932 both Germany and Czechoslovakia had deemed the miners' cancers a compensable occupational disease. In 1942 Wilhelm C. Hubert a German emigrate who was founding director of the environmental cancer section of the National Cancer Institute, NCI, one of the National Institutes of Health published a review in English of the literature on the European miners suggesting that radon gas was implicated in causing lung cancer. He eliminated non-occupational factors because excess lung cancer showed up only among miners. He also eliminated occupational factors other than radon because these other factors had not caused lung cancer in other occupational settings. Among Hubert's peers dissenters such as Egon Lorenz also of the NCI focused on the contaminants other than radon in the mind the possible genetic susceptibility of the population and the calculated doses to the lung would seem too low to cause cancer because of the role of radon daughters which the radioactive polonium bismuth and lead decay products of radon gas are known as was not yet understood. At the time its own program began the AEC had many reasons for concern that the experience of the Czech and German miners portended excess lung cancer deaths for uranium miners in the United States. The factors included the following 1. No respected scientist challenged the finding that the Czech and German miners had an elevated rate of lung cancer 2. These findings were well known to the American decision makers 3. As Hubert points out genetic and non occupational factors could be rejected and 4. Radon standards existed for other industries and there was no reason to think that conditions in mines ruled out the need for such standards. Moreover as soon as the government began to measure airborne radon levels in the western U.S. uranium mines they found higher levels than those reported in the European mines where excess cancers had been observed. As public health service PHS sanitary engineer Duncan Holliday who spent many years studying the miners recalled in 1959 congressional testimony there was early recognition that while there were substantial differences between European and American settings the exposure levels in the U.S. mines were high. In 1946 our American mines were not as deep as those in Europe the men did not work long hours furthermore a great many of them are more or less transient miners in and out of the industry. However our early environmental studies in these early American mines indicated that we had concentrations of radioactive gases considerably in excess of those that had been reported in the literature. An important hole in Hubert's argument was that the calculated dose of radiation from the radon in European mines did not seem high enough to cause cancer. But when William Bale of the University of Rochester and John Harley a scientist at the AEC's New York Operations Office, NYOO who was working toward his doctorate at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute were able to show and explain in 1951 the importance of radioactive particles that attached to bits of dust and remained in the lung. They discovered how to tremendous impact. When doses to the lung were recalculated using Bale and Harley's models they increased 76 times making them high enough to explain the observed cancer rates. Recognizing the importance of radon daughters also explained why animal experiments using pure radon gas had not caused cancer. In the absence of Atomic Energy Commission willingness to press for relatively safe tolerance levels for radon in the U.S. mines and to institute an effective program of mine ventilation to reduce the hazard and a mixed but mainly unsatisfactory response from the states the stage was set for the intergovernmental buck passing and decades of study a course that resulted in the premature deaths of hundreds of minors. An analysis of 11 underground minors studies published in 1994 by the National Cancer Institute supports the view that radon daughters are responsible for an even greater number of lung cancers than previously believed. The advisory committee heard from many minors and their families the information wrought by the experience in the mines and the government's ability to prevent it. Dorothy Ann Perley from the Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico told advisory committee members at a public meeting in Santa Fe quote, nowadays people come out and say, did you know so-and-so died of cancer? I have a brother-in-law who has got cancer. He worked at the mine close quote. A spokesman for Navajo minors and their families told the advisory committee that in New Mexico mines the working conditions were sometimes unbearable. Their government knew all along what the outcome would be and initiated studies of the minors without their knowledge and consent. A standard for a beryllium but not for uranium. In 1948 Meryl Eisenbud industrial hygienist was recued by the AEC's New York operations office to help set up a health and safety laboratory. The NYOO was responsible for all raw materials procurement for the AEC. At the request of the AEC raw material division Dr. Eisenbud and Dr. Bernard Wolff, a radiologist reported on potential health hazards in the mines to the NYOO field office in Colorado and to AEC headquarters staff. Dr. Eisenbud and the NYOO operations office recommended that the AEC write requirements for health protection into its contracts with the mine operators. The AEC had used contract provisions in the case of beryllium, another key but not radioactive element in bomb production. One month before Dr. Eisenbud called his report on the uranium mines the Cleveland News reported on a conference convened to discuss cases of beryllium poisoning at plants in Massachusetts and Lorraine, Ohio. Among the fatalities in Lorraine were five residents living near the Beryllium Corporation plant. The plant owner Dr. Eisenbud recalled in 1995 was eager to have conditions study because he wanted to know what his liability was. That same month, June 1948 responding to the considerable publicity given by the press to cases of berylliosis among plant workers and residents, the AEC set a tentative standard for the permissible levels of exposure to beryllium. The NYOO with the approval of the Division of Biology and Medicine has insisted AEC recommended tolerance levels be met in all plants processing beryllium or beryllium compounds for the commission. Despite the fact that by September 1949 there had been at least 27 deaths attributed to beryllium in plants where the AEC had contracts no one became sick with berylliosis after the tolerance limits had been set in place. The DBM objected to the AEC establishing and enforcing standards or regulations pertaining to health and safety conditions and wanted to turn the matter over to the states. Nevertheless, the NYOO enforced standards for beryllium. The uranium and beryllium situations had much in common. In both cases the AEC was the sole or primary purchaser. The AEC's New York Operations Office sought to control the hazard and in both cases they were arguments to be made for inaction. The causation mechanism for the disease was poorly understood and the legal authority of the AEC to regulate private production was questionable. The essential difference between the two cases was that the illness caused by beryllium appeared shortly after exposure and aroused publicity and associated public concern. By contrast it would take more than a decade before uranium miners would begin to die of lung cancer and causality would be harder to infer. The DBM and the AEC raw materials division rejected Dr. Eisenbud's recommendation for health protection arguing that the Atomic Energy Act did not give the AEC authority over uranium mine health and safety. The New York Operations office took the same possession that it had taken on beryllium. If it was going to procure uranium it was going to control radon in the mines. The AEC responded by transferring uranium procurement to a newly created section of the raw materials division in Washington. According to Dr. Eisenbud, the director of the New York Operations office and many of its employees quit over this move. At least some of them because the shift was intended to keep the AEC out of health related matters in the uranium mining industry. Eisenbud's perspective was echoed in at least part of the AEC's Washington office. In May 1949 A. E. Gorman, a A. E. C. wrote a memo for the files in which he reported on a meeting with Lewis A. Young, director of the Colorado Department of Health's division of sanitation and Dr. John C. Bowers, deputy director of the division of biology and medicine. Bowers indicated that health conditions on the Colorado plateau were not satisfactory and Mr. Young reported that conditions under which uranium ore was being mined in process were not good. Bowers, the memo recorded, said his office did not want to recommend drastic steps to require correction of deficiencies but prefer together facts about the hazard and cooperate with mine operators and state agencies to correct unsatisfactory conditions. Gorman, however, recorded I expressed the opinion that if the state of Colorado had only two inspectors to cover industrial hygienic conditions in all mines in the state it would not be realistic to expect very extensive follow-up of the hazard problems involving silicosis and radioactivity. Also, that since the AEC was purchasing a very large percentage of the uranium produced we had a more responsibility at least to improve any unsatisfactory condition which was known to exist involving the health of the workers. I suggested that this might be taken care of by a clause in our contracts even though it might result in a higher cost of production. I questioned the point that such action might seriously affect the production of uranium. Gorman's perspective did not win out. By the 1950s occupational standards or guidelines existed not only for radium, a maximum permissible body burden but also for radon. By 1941 the data from the European mines had been used to establish a radon standard for air implant, laboratory or office of 10 pachyl curies per liter. But when it came to the mines the federal government took nearly two decades to issue enforceable standards and actions to protect all those miners known to be exposed to significant risk. Instead it debated responsibility for action while it pursued a long course of epidemiological study. The episode the judge would declare in the Begay case decision in 1984 was a tragedy of the nuclear age. End of section 59