Fallout Study Mishandled, Says Report Senate Panel Suggests Project Director Had Conflict Of Interest

The National Cancer Institute mismanaged and “virtually shelved” a congressionally mandated study of atomic bomb fallout, a U.S. Senate investigation concludes.

The study was finished in 1992 but wasn’t released until last fall. Americans then learned that millions more people than previously thought had been exposed to radioactive fallout - and are at increased risk of getting thyroid cancer.

Among those with the highest risks: children exposed in the 1950s to fallout clouds in Idaho and Montana. The two states were among the “hot spots” where fallout touched ground as nuclear clouds swept across the nation from the test site in Nevada from 1951 to 1962.

The draft report from a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Government Affairs was obtained this week by The Spokesman-Review.

The report concludes a yearlong congressional probe into the government’s fallout study that was published last Oct. 1 - 14 years after it had been ordered. The report will be the centerpiece of a hearing Wednesday in Washington, D.C.

The investigation was requested by Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio, ranking minority member of the Government Affairs Committee.

The report does not say why release of the study was delayed. But it calls the current controversy “part of a continuing legacy of downplaying or even distorting the health effects of radiation from nuclear weapons.”

Among the report’s conclusions:

The fallout study “does not meaningfully inform the American public” of dangers to its health from fallout because the agency didn’t do what Congress asked - develop a detailed estimate of thyroid cancer risk. The study’s risk task force stopped meeting in the late 1980s.

The NCI damaged its credibility by failing to have conflict of interest guidelines in place. That could have prevented an official of the Cold War agency that spread fallout across the country from directing the study.

The NCI and its overseer, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, performed “virtually no oversight or tracking of the project.”

There was no public participation in the study. An advisory committee of radiation experts was disbanded in the ‘80s.

The report raises conflict of interest questions about project director Dr. Bruce Wachholz, a former weapons bureaucrat with the Atomic Energy Commission and the U.S. Department of Energy who moved to NCI to run the study in 1983, the year Congress mandated it.

The Energy Department is the successor agency to the AEC, which took over nuclear weapons development from the military in the early years of the Cold War.

Wachholz is also in charge of the government’s huge Chernobyl study - which also has been seriously mishandled, the report says.

Wachholz couldn’t be reached for comment on Monday.

By putting the fallout study in NCI’s hands instead of the Energy Department, Congress signaled it didn’t want a nuclear weapons agency in charge of assessing fallout damage from bomb tests, the report notes.

“Yet, the individual selected by NCI to lead the study had been hired directly from DOE, where he had directed or participated in a number of projects related to the health impacts of weapons testing,” the report says.

Wachholz was also a DOE adviser to the U.S. Justice Department “in current and potential litigation issues against the U.S. Government” and “provided and coordinated” expert witnesses to defend the government on legal matters, the Senate investigators found.

Wachholz told subcommittee investigators he had only limited contacts with Justice Department attorneys, the report says.

“Nevertheless, his activities on these matters raise questions of potential if not actual conflicts of interest,” the report says.

A former AEC official should not have been allowed to direct the fallout study, said Dan Bushnell, a Salt Lake City attorney and Mormon Church official who tried unsuccessfully to get damages for Utah sheepmen who lost millions of dollars when their herds were killed by fallout in 1953.

At trial, “the AEC lied, cheated and covered up. They lied under oath that they’d never observed similar damage” from fallout when a Hanford lab had already found it in laboratory sheep, Bushnell said.

U.S. District Judge Sherman Christensen ruled in 1982 that the AEC had committed “fraud upon the court” and ordered a new trial. But Bushnell lost when an appeals court overturned the verdict.

The NCI fallout study is the largest ever undertaken and could have a dramatic impact on the government’s legal liability, the Senate report says.

“It is therefore surprising that the NCI selected someone to head the study who was so closely tied to the issue without first reviewing and making a determination on the matter,” it says.

No NCI official was willing to address the conflict of interest issue on Monday.

“I was told the people who did the hiring of Wachholz are all gone,” said NCI spokesperson Nancy Nelson.

Nelson said, however, that it’s “inflammatory” for the Senate to raise the conflict of interest issue.

“Bruce Wachholz is one of the most distinguished researchers in radiobiology in the country,” she said.

A colleague who worked with Wachholz on the Chernobyl studies, and quit in frustration over long delays, disagreed.

“Bruce was convinced if they just sat on the fallout study, it’d never get out. He shouldn’t be running these studies,” said Lynn Anspaugh, a retired Lawrence Livermore scientist working on DOE-funded radiation studies around the Soviet Union’s former plutonium production facility near Chelyabinsk.

The Senate report says Wachholz has shown little interest in being responsive to the public about fallout.

Although all the fallout data had been collected by 1992, a final draft of the report didn’t get to his desk until October 1994. It sat there for “approximately two years” and no further work on the study took place for three years, the report says.

Wachholz displayed “an indifference, almost a reluctance, to share information…with the public, states and federal entities in a complete and timely manner,” the report says.

A U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention health studies panel tried to see the 100,000-page study in 1996, but the NCI didn’t respond, said Tim Connor of Spokane, a panel member.

The NCI finally released the report after The Spokesman-Review and USA Today published stories about the issue last July, Connor said.

In 1994, U.S. Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., asked for fallout data for his state after North Dakota public health officials detected a rise in childhood leukemia and thyroid cancer rates in the 1960s that appeared to be associated with the previous decade of open-air bomb tests.

In a memo to NCI’s Office of Legislative Affairs, Wachholz called Dorgan’s inquiry “a pointless effort” while he was busy with more important matters.

This spring, Wachholz’ lack of response angered Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., who had asked for similar fallout data for his state.

Daschle fired off a letter to NCI Director Richard Klausner, saying the delay “raises serious questions about NCI’s commitment” to fulfill Congress’ mandate to report fully to the American people on fallout and its health risks.