530 N-cancers on isles?

Among the 14,000 inhabitants who lived in the Marshall Islands in the mid-Pacific Ocean during U.S. atomic tests there, an estimated 530 cancers were caused by bombs detonated in the 1940s and '50s, according to a new study by the National Cancer Institute.

The report indicates a plague of radiation-induced illness and death is far from over. More than half of the 530 cases have yet to develop, nearly 50 years after the blasts stopped.

The study has relevance to Utahns because this state also was heavily exposed to fallout, drifting in from open-air nuclear explosions at the Nevada Test Site in the 1950s and early '60s. If similar latency periods extend between exposure and cancer in downwind areas of the United States, Utahns could suffer future illness and deaths from fallout.

Another connection is that standards used by Congress to pay compensation to Utahns from particular areas who suffer certain kinds of cancer were used as a model for compensation awarded to Marshall Islanders.

Although scientists have known for decades that Marshallese were displaced from their homes and harmed by the fallout, until now nobody knew how many would develop cancer because of the tests.

The report, "Estimation of the Baseline Number of Cancers Among Marshallese and the Number of Cancers Attributable to Exposure to Fallout From Nuclear Weapons Testing Conducted in the Marshall Islands," was carried out by the NCI at the request of the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

It was completed in September 2004. But according to a report by Agence France-Presse, cited by Yahoo News, it was only released last week after officials of the Republic of the Marshall Islands saw a reference to it in a report to Congress.

The Deseret Morning News obtained a copy of the study.

The Marshalls were occupied by Japan before World War II and the islands were seized by the United States during that conflict. From 1946 through 1958, the country detonated 66 nuclear bombs, in seven series of tests, at Bikini and Enewetak atolls in the Marshalls, the report notes.

Total explosive yield was about 100 million tons of TNT. Possibly the most dangerous to the population of the Marshalls was the Castle Bravo test of 1954, equivalent to 15 million tons.

Shortly after the explosion, "fallout was unexpectedly deposited on Rongelap, Utrik, and other inhabited atolls to the east and southeast of Bikini Atoll . . . resulting in by far the greatest exposure from any of the tests conducted in the Marshall Islands," the report says.