Although some people were exposed to radiation by direct exposure — the atomic dust actually landed on their bodies and wafted through their windows — there was also another, more insidious route: air-to-grass-to-milk. The isotope Iodine-131 (just one of several radionuclides in fallout) lands on grass, is eaten by cows, collects in milk and is deposited in human thyroid glands. Because children have a higher metabolism and generally drink more milk, they are most affected by I-131. Those who drank milk from back-yard cows and back-yard goats in the 1950s, got the highest doses, but commercial milk was also a culprit.

From her stack of documents and articles — and letters from other people who have cancer — Dickson produces a report called "Exposure of the American People to IODINE-131 from Nevada Nuclear-Bomb Tests." Published in 1999 by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine, it notes that data from the 1986 nuclear reactor accident at Chernobyl points to a clear link between thyroid cancer and exposure to I-131.

The accumulated fallout exposure from the Nevada Test Site was three times as much as that from Chernobyl, noted scientist Owen Hoffman in 1998 congressional testimony. Hoffman is former chief scientist for the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The National Cancer Institute's Web site provides a "dose calculator" for fallout from the Nevada Test Site: rex.nci.nih.gov/INTRFCE_GIFS/radiation_fallout/radiation_131.html. Chose a state and a county and type in a birth date and you'll be given fallout doses for "average diet milk consumption," "high milk consumption" etc. But don't expect to understand the numbers; they're expressed as geometric standard deviation rather than as absolute rads. And the dose range they provide is enormous, because scientists still aren't sure what the exact doses were. In addition, as the NCI notes, "we don't know exactly how much the risk (of thyroid cancer) goes up with each rad of exposure."

Type in Mary Dickson's birth date and county (and get a scientist to explain what the numbers mean) and you'll discover that above-ground tests plus leaks from underground tests added up to between 3.7 and 39 rads of I-131 for Dickson, who drank a lot of milk as a young child.

Currently the FDA's protective action guides for radiation exposure is 1.5 rad to 15 rad (the latter is the level at which the government confiscates milk from market before distribution).

According to Chuck Wiggins, director of the Utah Cancer Registry, rates for thyroid cancer in the United States have increased "consistently" since 1973 (the national registry's first year). There is no way to prove, though, that this increase is a result of nuclear testing.

Joseph Lyon, a chronic disease epidemiologist at the University of Utah, is waiting for the federal government to free up funding for a thyroid study of 5,000 southern Utahns exposed to fallout in the 1950s. This would be be third part of a longitudinal study, begun in the late 1960s, of adults who were children when exposed.

"I don't think the federal government wants to know the answer, because guess who the polluter is," says Lyon.

"It's so frustrating to be the people who are sick and trying to figure anything out," Dickson says. As usual, she says, the burden of proof lies with the victim.

She spends many of her evenings now attending meetings — Families Against Incinerator Risk and HEAL Utah — because stopping the storage of spent nuclear rods "is the most important issue we can be fighting now."

She expects no compensation as a downwinder, she says. "I just want the government to admit the fallout was more widespread than they've ever admitted."

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E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com