There Was Death in the Milk

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Growing up in Moses Lake, Wash., Vicki Skipper suffered stomach cramps that continued even after her family moved to Connecticut in 1962, when she was eight. Later, she reports, "I got swollen glands under my arms, and I had my thyroid removed, and they never figured out what it was. I always thought it was from the plant, but I could never prove it." A federally sponsored panel of scientists and medical experts last week, however, indicated that her suspicions -- and those of thousands of others who, from the late 1940s until well into the 1960s, lived in eight Washington and two northern Oregon counties near the Hanford, Wash., nuclear reservation -- are far from groundless.

The panel found that between 1944, when it opened, and 1947, the Hanford weapons plant poured so much radioactive iodine into the air that 1,200 children living nearby were exposed to cumulative doses ranging from 15 to 650 rads (one rad is roughly equal to the radiation from a dozen chest X rays). About 13,500 people, or 5% of the area's total population, may have taken in doses of 33 rads or more -- about twice the three-year dosage the Nuclear Regulatory Commission considers safe for workers exposed to radiation as an occupational hazard.

The iodine was released as a gas when fuel rods were chemically dissolved in acid as the last step in producing plutonium, the explosive material in some nuclear weapons. It got into humans mostly because they drank milk from cows that had grazed on grass contaminated by airborne iodine. In human bodies the iodine tended to concentrate in the thyroid in amounts that would have been enough to cause at least some cases of cancer.

Though the releases were heaviest between 1944 and 1947 -- one reason the panel picked that period for study -- they did not stop then. "Regulatory standards were not developed until the 1950s," the study noted, and not until 1973 did the amount of radiation in the atmosphere decrease to the point that it could no longer be directly measured. The panel, funded by the Department of Energy, also studied releases of radioactive substances from nuclear reactors into the Columbia River between 1964 and 1966, when some of the heaviest discharges occurred. River water was pumped through the reactors to cool them. Radioactivity -- in lower doses than the airborne iodine -- entered the bodies of people who swam in the river or lived or played near it or ate fish caught in it.

The Hanford plant and reactors were shut down in the late 1960s; milk, fish and vegetables from the area by now ought to be radiation-free. But that is no consolation to those exposed to dangerous radiation earlier. A study of health effects of the radiation by the Centers for Disease Control will not be complete until 1993. If the government is unwilling to offer compensation to people who lived near the plant and fell ill during the time of heavy discharges, or to their relatives if they have died, Washington Senator Brock Adams promises to introduce legislation to compel it to do so. Meanwhile, Vicki Skipper has perhaps the last word: "When Chernobyl hit, I remember thinking that the U.S. sure had a lot of nerve talking about Russia when we've been doing the same thing to our people."

With reporting by Ellis E. Conklin/Seattle and Rosanne Spector/Washington