Other fallout data were gathered in the period, he said. Weekly samples of Iodine-131 were taken from dairies around the lab from 1957 onward. "They have spikes in that data from Nevada Test Site," he said.

Exposure to the thyroid gland could be via contaminated milk. If a child drank a great deal of milk with radioactive Iodine-131, the exposure would be more hazardous.

But researchers claimed they could only use fallout data from 100 gummy strips, like flypaper, that supposedly caught contaminated dust or droplets.

Rickards wonders how researchers could ignore what were sure to be spikes from fallout in the milk studies.

In 1997, the National Cancer Institute released a 14-year study showing nationwide exposure to radioactive iodine from fallout. Four of the five hardest-hit counties were in Idaho; the fifth was in Montana, he said.

Montana and Idaho were hit harder than the rest of the country by fallout, says the study — even more heavily dosed than southeastern Utah. Part of Utah's Washington County was listed ninth on the list, while part of Kane County was 14th and another part of Washington County was 20th.

In 1999, the advisory panel passed a resolution "to basically add the Nevada Test Site doses" to the INEEL doses.

Yet when a draft study was released, it depended on the 100 gummy strips. As far as solid data about fallout, he said, the study just had what he calls "fuzzy estimates" and footnotes citing lack of data.

"No use of specific spikes from the Nevada Test Site," Rickards said.

Another conflict concerned calculating doses to a fetus whose mother may have eaten a duck exposed to radiation at INL ponds. Researchers said the cesium dose to the woman would be about 12 millirems, "or a little over (the dosage from) a chest X-ray," he said. "But they claimed that the dose to a fetus was only 0.3 millirem" when in fact the fetus could also have a 12 millirem dose. It took six months to get the erroneous information corrected, he added.

"Not long after that, they basically said that the funding for the dose reconstruction was cut, and we would no longer study the whole picture, with all the accidents and the total releases."

The focus would be on only three incidents at the laboratory. Fallout was not to play a role, he said.

"It became obvious to our panel that the Nevada Test Site dose was overwhelmingly larger than the accidental and intentional release of radiation" from the laboratory, he said.

After the panel passed its resolution advocating use of the Test Site doses and specific information gathered at the laboratory, "the CDC promised to follow through but never did."

---

E-mail: bau@desnews.com