Seek. bedraeag”ro EXECUTIVE SUMMARY A Critical Review of the Department of Energy’s Epidemiologic Research THE U.S. NUCLEAR weaponsindustry is now approaching its 50th year—a half-century of experience that has cumulatively involved more thana half-million workers. In the years since the Manhattan Project began, some nuclear weapons workers have been exposed to internal and/or external ionizing radiation in doses that are high by any standard. Much larger numbers of these workers have been exposed to low-dose, low-rate external and/or internal ionizing radiation. During those years there were also numerousreleases of radioactive and other toxic materials—someaccidental, some deliberate—into the air, soil and groundwater of unsuspecting populationsliving near the nuclear weapons research, production and testing sites. The profound environmental contamination created by the nuclear weapons complex, revealed only within the last few years, after decades of official denial, has become a ‘National scandal. Yet today there is far less knowledge of the health risks to workers, and far less certainty in the estimates of risk that do exist, than might have been expected from this vast body of experience. There is evidence of environmental contamination at most,ifnotall, nuclear weaponssites. But even less is known about the impact of weapons complex contamination on the health of surrounding communities. The protection of workers and the public, as well as scientific understanding of the biological effects of low-dose ionizing radiation, has therefore suffered immeasurably. A Wall of Secrecy From the first days of the Manhattan Project onwards, the Department of Energy (DOE) andits predecessor agencies, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), have been responsible both for the creation of threats to health and safety consequent to their work and for protection against those hazards. There is an inescapable conflict between the goals of nuclear weapons production and those of pub- lic, occupational and environmental health. Historically, the DOE,its predecessors, and associated agencies such as the Transuranium Registry, have operated behind a wall of secrecy. They had a virtual monopoly on the collection and analysis of data on the radiation exposures and health outcomesofthe nuclear weapons workforce and on radioactive and toxic releases from weaponsfacilities. In the nameof “national security,” access to these data was generally denied to scientists not directly employed by the AEC/ERDA/ DOEand their contractors. The scientific commu- nity—and the public—knew little beyond what the agencies chose to publish, in a policy that violated the fundamental principle of free and open sciennific inquiry. For the first two decades of nuclear weapons pro- duction, although measurementofradiation exposures (of some, not all) of the workers was ongoing, the governmentfailed to initiate research adequate to e¢s- tablish the effects of exposures on health. The first adequate epidemiologic study wasinitiated in the mid1960s, and it produced disturbing indications of excess risks of several types of cancer. These study findings were disputed, and their authors were denied further access to the nuclear weapons workforce health data. From that time on, even as the nuclear weapons complex grew enormously and epidemiologic research expanded, the AEC/ERDA/DOErepeatedly maintained that the necessary health and safery precautions were in effect at all facilities, chat their nuclear operations were safe, that there rarely had been serious accidents, that few significant radioactive or toxic releases to the environment had occurred, and that there was no immi- nent threat to the health of the workforce or the public. Althoughthere werecriticisms and inquiries during the 1970s, the wall of secrecy did not really begin to crumble until 1986, when a cascade of investigations by other governmentagencies, scientific and congressional oversight committees and investgative journal- DEAD RECKONING UN ELAS CT =D 9