Radiation Exposure Study
Offers Rare Opportunity
The international collaborative study is sponsored and funded by the U.S.-Russian Joint Coordinating Committee on Radiation Effects Research (JCCRER). Researchers from PNNL, which is operated by Battelle for the U.S. Department of Energy, are working with the University of Utah, Urals Research Center for Radiation Medicine, and other institutions to evaluate the radiation exposures in this community located in the Techa River basin. Epidemiological studies using the doses are under way to evaluate the possible human health impacts. Studies began in 1995 and will continue through 2003 or beyond. 
The Techa River basin, near the southern Ural Mountains, was a strategic location for military production centers in the 1940s and 1950s and housed the country’s largest plutonium production facility at the Mayak Production Association. Accidents at Mayak’s reactor and radiochemical plant, along with sloppy operations and nuclear waste disposal practices, resulted in substantial radionuclide releases to the basin between 1949 and 1956. Extensive information on the release of radionuclides has been collected for more than 40 years at the Urals Research Center for Radiation Medicine. At the time of the releases, there were 39 villages along the river with a total population of 26,500. The population was not informed about the releases, and protective measures implemented by local authorities, such as evacuations and land- and water-use restrictions, were ineffective and too late. As a result of reproduction and immigration, the population studied in this health impacts assessment exceeds 65,000. The combined dosimetric and epidemiologic study of this population is important because this group is among the few that can be studied to examine the question of a dose-rate-reduction factor in the initiation of stochastic effects by radiation. Specifically, researchers are analyzing the data to determine if the radiation dose delivered at low dose rates is equally as effective in causing cancer and other adverse health effects as the same dose delivered at high dose rates. This question represents a central issue in determining overall radiation protection practices of workers and the public. For more information, please contact Bruce Napier (509) 375-3896, bruce.napier@pnl.gov. 
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Since World War II, scientists have sought to understand the human health effects of radiation exposure in an effort to help protect workers and the public. A former Soviet Union community exposed to radiation for more than eight years is the subject of research by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and other institutions. The total number of people exposed and the magnitude of the radiation doses puts these studies on par in importance with the long-term studies of the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. 