Conspiracy to suppress the shipyard study?

[dj_strom@ccmail.pnl.gov (Daniel J Strom)]

Jim Muckerheide wrote:

> DOE suppressed the evidence of the Shipyard Workers Study, including 
its inclusion in the IARC study; and Hanford gets $100 million on "dose 
reconstruction" and "health effects research" from the release of 
(8-day) I-131 designed with a "public outreach program" with the sole 
purpose of promulgating public fear. After all, Hanford gets $1.5 
Billion/year to "clean up" the site. They tell the Congress that they 
are protecting Oregon, without pointing out that radioactivity down the 
river is millions of times less than the operating site, and billions of 
times less than natural radioactivity down the river. 

I offer my views on why the conspiracy theory is unsupported.  

1.  DOE did not suppress the shipyard study (Matanoski, G.M.  Health 
Effects of Low-Level Radiation in Shipyard Workers. DOE/EV/10095T2.  
Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Energy; 1991.).  All 460-some odd 
pages of it are readily available from NTIS (National Technical 
Information Services (NTIS), 5285 Port Royal Road, Springfield, VA 
22161-0002; (703) 487-4650; Phone orders accepted (VISA/MC/AMEX); 
http://www.ntis.gov/).  Scientific journals do not publish studies of 
this size.  I have a copy of a memo dated October 17, 1991, from Paul 
Ziemer, PhD, CHP, then Assistant Secretary of Energy for Health Safety 
and Envrionment (EH-1), distributing a press release on the study to 94 
people in DOE and its contractors.  This does not appear to be an 
effective strategy for a cover-up.

2.  I've examined the shipyard study.  It contains much discussion of 
its weaknesses.  The one really remarkable feature of the study is that 
it has one of the *unhealthiest* control groups in the history of 
occupational epidemiology (SMR = 1.11).  This is clearly an uncontrolled 
bias.  The rest of the workers had rather ordinary healthy worker 
effects (SMRs around 0.9).  The real finding of the study is not that 
radiation is good for you, but that the control group was remarkably 
unhealthy compared with the US population.  In general, people who are 
healthy enough to work are healthier on average than all people put 
together, since the latter group contains people who are not healthy 
enough to work.

3.  I can't think of any outfit that would be happier than the DOE to 
find *good* evidence of a threshold.  A true threshold makes many of 
DOE's problems go away, including loads of costly lawsuits from 
downwinders.  I personally certainly would be happy to see believable 
evidence for thresholds for *all* cancers and heritable ill-health 
(a.k.a. genetic effects).  In fact, I used to believe that the 
well-established practical thresholds for bone cancer from radium and 
liver cancer from thorotrast, and some of Otto Raabe's findings 
(published in Science in 1980), actually informed us about other cancers 
like thyroid, digestive, and leukemia *at low doses*.  On close 
examination, I now believe those findings don't inform us about other 
cancers.  And, by the way, nobody at DOE tells me what to believe.

4.  I have heard that Dr. Matanoski's explanation for not publishing the 
shipyard study in the open literature is "It wasn't in the contract."  
Anyone who has worked on a government contract knows that when the 
funding runs out, you're on your own.  If you feel the shipyard study 
should be published, why not take her explanation at face value?  You 
might consider writing your Congress members and Senators to request 
that funding be provided for the purpose of publishing the shipyard 
study in the open literature, either by Dr. Matanoski or perhaps the 
Centers for Disease Control, which now does epidemiology of DOE workers. 
 
5.  Remember the Mancuso study of Hanford workers (Mancuso, T.F.; 
Stewart, A.; Kneale, G.  Radiation Exposures of Hanford Workers Dying 
from Cancer and Other Causes.  Health Physics 33(5):369-385; 1977.)?  
With the help of the vast majority of epidemiologists, DOE openly spent 
a lot of money and effort rebutting that poorly-designed proportional 
mortality study that was (and is) mostly inconsistent with other 
epidemiologic findings (the one finding that has stood up is multiple 
myeloma).  Is DOE's open institutional behavior following the Mancuso 
study consistent with a conspiracy to cover up a threshold?

6.  The Hanford cleanup is ultimately driven by the public, not by DOE.  
Many if not most members of the public have perceptions about radiation, 
and believes things about radiation, that I think no one on this 
listserver agrees with.  Nonetheless, the public drives Congress, and 
Congress drives DOE.

"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the 
people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to 
exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to 
take it from them but to inform their discretion."  Thomas Jefferson, 
Letter to William Charles Jarvis (Sept. 28, 1820)

I feel that the FRONTLINE show was a fine answer to Jefferson's call.  
However, it is not necessary to postulate that DOE is part of a 
conspiracy to explain the current situation with electricity generation 
in the USA, or the absence of the problem-laden, ran-out-of-funding 
shipyard study from the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

The opinions expressed above are my own, and have not been reviewed or 
approved by Battelle, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, or the 
U.S. Department of Energy.

Daniel J. Strom, Ph.D., CHP
Staff Scientist
Health Protection Department K3-56
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Battelle Boulevard, P.O. Box 999
Richland, WA 99352-0999 USA
(509) 375-2626
(509) 375-2019 fax
dj_strom@pnl.gov