Preserving fallout data called vital for research

Peter Rickards is thrilled about Congress' passing a measure that requires preservation of military records on fallout from nuclear testing. He says he knows what might happen to the records if the government is not forced to keep them.

The provision, sponsored in the House of Representatives by Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, became part of the Defense Department Appropriations Bill that has passed both chambers. Final action came Thursday.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Rickards experienced the destruction of valuable fallout records while he served on a citizens advisory committee for a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study seeking to reconstruct radiation doses from nuclear material that had leaked from the Idaho National Laboratory.

"We had hundreds of boxes of documents earmarked for archiving that were destroyed right at the moment . . . right during their study," he said. "The DOE (U.S. Department of Energy) took boxes that were earmarked for archiving by the CDC and destroyed them."

Rickards, a podiatrist in Twin Falls, Idaho, has closely followed the fallout debate. He believes it's important to save whatever records still remain.

Although the National Laboratory, based in southwestern Idaho, did not produce atomic blast fallout, the Department of Energy facility did leak radiation. And fallout from nuclear weapons testing during the 1950s and '60s contributed to the overall radiation exposure in the region.

Winds blowing from the Nevada Test Site did not always deposit the radioactive dust near the NTS. A 1997 study by the National Cancer Institute says Montana and Idaho were slammed by fallout worse than other parts of the country, even harder hit than southwestern Utah, which is close to the NTS. Four of the five counties with most fallout are in Idaho and the fifth is in Montana, according to the institute.

Sorting out the history of radiation exposure is difficult, with researchers relying on scanty data. That's why Rickards and others feel it is imperative to preserve whatever information is available.

"The government does regularly dispose of older documents," he said, "and in this case they have a vested interest in destroying all of the great fallout data." That was data, he hastened to add, "which the CDC refused to use" in its study.

During many of the nuclear tests, according to Rickards, Defense Department aircraft tracked the plumes of atomic debris. They recorded where plumes went, levels of fallout, and where rain fell, he said.