The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit organization of scientists that provides advice to the federal government. It prepared the report under a contract with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. According to Hatch's office, it was commissioned by Congress.

Main recommendations in the report, according to its executive summary, are:

• Pre-assessment. The National Cancer Institute or other agencies should carry out a pre-assessment survey of diseases related to radiation to provide guidance about how likely a person is to be compensated. It would be nationwide, including Alaska, Hawaii and also study populations of U.S. overseas territories. It would include factors like residence at time of exposure and age.

• Computing compensation. Present law gives compensation payments to residents of certain counties who lived downwind of the Nevada Test Site during open-air testing of the 1950s and early '60s and who contracted specific types of cancer.

The report says Congress should establish a new method of awarding compensation, based not on residency in particular counties but on on figuring the probability of causation and assigned share of the risk (shortened to PC/AS).

The PC part is based on a formula developed in 2003 by the National Centers for Disease Control to assess the likelihood of a particular cancer developing from exposure to a dose of radiation. The assigned share involves the amount of exposure an individual had.

Julian Preston, the chairman of the committee that prepared the report, told the Deseret Morning News that the group does not make any judgments on whether the present system should be eliminated. That would be a policy decision not up to the academy, he said.

But the report does recommend that all Americans be eligible if they meet the scientific criteria, since the whole country was exposed and sometimes hot spots showed up where fallout was deposited thousands of miles from the Nevada Test Site.

Subjects covered by the report include:

• Coverage of others in the uranium industry. RECA should be expanded to include certain uranium millers and ore transporters not presently covered because of geographic restrictions.

• Geologists and core drillers. "The committee concludes that core drillers and geologists who worked in the underground mines should be considered in the same category as uranium miners."