although a few received higher exposures and many received
none at all.
Exposures at these low levels have long been
thought to involve negligible health risk.
(and still today)
For many years
Federal exposure standards for radiation
workers have generally been set at 3 rem per quarter and
5 rem per year.
These values were,
to be on the safe side,
in the past, believed
and many still think this;
but some
scientists now believe the risks may be greater, and the
issue is currently the subject of some controversy in the
scientific community.
Recently the President established an Interagency Task Force
on the Health Effects of Ionizing Radiation.
The Report
of this Task Force may serve to put the very slight degree
of risk in its proper context.
cancer statistics,
The Report points to national
which show that cancer
is the cause of
death for about 16 percent of the population.
Thus,
of
the 250,000 DoD personnel who participated in the atmospheric
nuclear tests,
about 40,000 could be expected eventually
to die of cancer which is not related to the nuclear tests.
By contrast, the Report notes that if our current data and
assumptions are correct, there might eventually be about
12 cancer deaths from among the 250,000 which bear a statistical
relationship to test radiation exposure.
‘