Thousands Who Lived By Hanford Offered Checkups Agency’s Plan To Monitor Effect Of Radiation Hits Funding Hurdle

Some 14,000 people exposed as children to Hanford’s clouds of radioactive iodine will be eligible for medical exams over the next few years.

The checkups will be for thyroid cancer and other thyroid diseases - long-term risks of exposure to radiation spewed from Hanford’s plutonium factories in the mid-1940s.

The federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry announced Thursday it has agreed to launch the pioneering medical monitoring program, the first ever around a former U.S. weapons site.

But funding for the effort, including a $4 million startup cost this year and $9.5 million for 1998, is still up in the air.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., is balking at paying for the medical monitoring program. It may have to compete with Hanford cleanup funds, already stretched thin by congressional budget cuts.

People who were infants, small children and teenagers and who lived downwind of Hanford in a 1,300-square-mile area of the Inland Northwest from 1945 to 1951 will be the prime subjects of the new medical program.

Those at highest risk for thyroid disease were 5 years old or younger in 1945 - the peak year for the radiation releases - and lived in Benton, Franklin or Adams counties for that entire year.

But many more people - including thousands who lived in the Spokane area during the Cold War - also may be eligible for checkups.

That’s because the study will include all people who received an estimated 10 rads of radiation from Hanford’s radioactive iodine 131 pollution.

Ten rads is the dose at which the lifetime risk of thyroid cancer is expected to double, according to federal health studies.

Current federal standards prohibit a radiation dose to a member of the public that exceeds .025 rads annually.

“Even though 50 years have elapsed, these people are still at risk” for thyroid cancer and disease, said Bob Spengler, assistant director for science in ATSDR’s division of health studies in Atlanta.

Children exposed as infants or while they were very young have the biggest lifetime risk for developing thyroid disease, Spengler said.

“It’s very age-dependent. The older you are, the less risk you have,” he said.

The radiation escaped from Hanford factories during the making of plutonium, one of the world’s deadliest substances. The early plants had very crude filtering devices, and most of the iodine 131, a byproduct of plutonium production, escaped up the stacks.

The particles settled on grass and were eaten by cows. They entered the human food chain in milk, much of it consumed by children.

State health agencies in Washington, Idaho and Oregon will be offering individual dose assessments to Hanford downwinders by this fall, Spengler said.

They’ll be based on a recently completed study, the Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project, which estimated doses to exposed people.

The ATSDR is a branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Under federal law, it has the authority to monitor the health of residents living around Superfund sites, including Hanford.

ATSDR may conduct additional health monitoring near Hanford, Spengler said.

But the agency decided to start with thyroid disease because there’s a huge body of evidence that shows the risks to Hanford’s downwinders were substantial, he noted.

The agency has asked the Department of Energy to fund the monitoring program, which could last for several years. But that has triggered a new controversy.

Downwinders and Hanford watchdog groups don’t want it to be paid for out of Hanford cleanup funds, as some DOE officials have suggested. That’s because Hanford’s $1 billion cleanup budget is already stretched thin.

“It’s a disgrace that they want to pay for this out of cleanup funds,” said Gerald Pollett of Heart of America Northwest.

DOE headquarters is handing its Hanford operations office an “unfunded mandate” for the thyroid monitoring, said Lynne Stembridge, director of the Hanford Education Action League of Spokane.

Stembridge is also the chairwoman of the ATSDR subcommittee that recommended the thyroid-monitoring program. Members recently agreed it shouldn’t be pitted against Hanford cleanup, Stembridge said.

“Our position is we’ll work with the Northwest congressional delegation to secure the extra funding,” she said.

Before the ATSDR announced the new program Thursday, agency officials met with Northwest congressional staff in Washington, D.C. , DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Graphic: Hanford medical monitoring area