W. J. Bair June 18, 1979 Page 2 task but in view of the scrutiny this dose assessment will receive, I feel LLL needs this kind of documentation to lay out the available information. Desert Research Institute statisticians at Las Vegas would seem to be the logical choices for spearheading this project. However, their work should be reviewed by statisticians outside the DOE community as well as by ourselves (Advisory Group). General Comments on Working Draft As acknowledged by Robison, the present preliminary manuscript is incomplete in a number of important areas. The main areas of deficiency from my statistical point of view are: 1) Inadequate description of how the diet survey was conducted and how the resulting data were statistically analyzed. Since the dose estimates are based on these diet data, it is crucial that the magnitude of sampling errors by quantified. It is discouraging, to say the least, that the authors did not indicate the number of people interviewed in the survey. Any statistician (or lawyer) worth his salt would choke on that omission. Also, no details are given on how the survey was actually conducted. This methodology must be known before we can evaluate whether the survey data are more reliable than expert opinion. 2) Completely inadequate description of how the soil data were statistically analyzed and summarized in preparation for use in the dose models. For example, we do not know how "Jess-than" concentra- tions were handled statistically. It is my understanding that on Engebi there were few "less than" concentrations obtained. However, on other islands most of the data at depth were less than detection limits. I suggested to W. A. Phillips several weeks ago that they compute the dose estimates using average soil concentrations computed in two ways: (1) using the MDA (minimum detectable activity) for each less-than number, and (2) using the actual concentration reported whether it be negative, positive or zero. This would indicate how much dose estimates might differ depending on how these “less-than” data are treated.