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transmitted to LLNL last January, so it has been available
almost a year.
Even so, LLNL states that their report had
been essentially completed at the time of receipt of this
information.
3. Looking at the “imports available” column in the draft
for the adult female diet, page 71, when 50% of the food is
imported, the intake of pandanus, breadfruit, and coconut meat
drops by a factor of 3. I would want to see much more information on real world experiences before accepting this large
level of reduction.
~~
4. There is another feature of the MLS diet that seems
questionable.
Using data in the subject draft, pages 71 and 75,
the daily liquid intake for adult females can be obtained.
This shows that when imports are available, the total liquid intake is 1,890 grams per day, or just over 4 pints per day. When
imported food is not available, the total liquid intake drops to
747 grams per day, or about 1.6 pints, which is less than 1
liter per day. This later value sounds far too low.
I would have trouble trying to guess how many 12 ounce beverage
cans of liquid I consumed over a year’s time or even yesterday,
and it would be even tougher to guess the volume of solid foods
I have consumed. We do not know how strong the preference for
local fresh food is, compared to dried, powdered, and canned
foods, i.e., the im,ported foods. We can assume 50% of the diet
will be imported, but the degree to which imports actually
replace use of local foods is only a guess. Efforts to provide
imported food to residents of Bikini Island were largely a
failure. Little if anything was learned about the impact that
imported foods may have had on use of local food crops. We
have a chicken and egg situation where dietary measurements are
needed to support any resettlement plans while people must be
resettled to get valid measurements.
My current view, and this
is based in part on the experience of underpredicting Marshall
Island doses in the past, is that because of use of the MLS
diet, the dose estimates in the LLNL draft are not conservatively derived, and if used as average doses for imports and no
imports, may be too low by a factor of two or more.
On the issue of what kind of assessments and evaluations are
needed to make good decisions on resettlements, decisions that
will be vindicated post-return when the cesium and strontium
body burdens have peaked, dose assessments must be conservatively derived and then evaluated against radiation standards
in a conservative manner. This was the key to the dose
assessments
and evaluations in the Enewetak EIS that stood up
under many reviews. I expect that these assessments will be

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