Yes and I disagree with it.
Using that study's threoies, we should have all been glowing in the dark 40 years ago from the nuke testing done outside of Vegas.
Actually, many did 'glow' a bit here...
 National Cancer Institute Study Estimating Thyroid Doses of I-131
Received by Americans From Nevada Atmospheric Nuclear Bomb Tests The NCI's 'worst case' estimate is that fallout from nuclear weapons
testing likely generated from 10,000 to 75,000 cases of thyroid cancer! Executive Summary of that report here. |
Also, remember, it's always the children who are at the highest risk of injury from radioactive iodine and eventually developing thyroid cancer from that exposure. Each year, more than 12,000 Americans find out they have thyroid cancer, though from various causes. About 1000 here in the U.S. die from it yearly.
-Shane Connor,
author of Potassium Iodide Anti-Radiation Pill FAQ
Also, while I'm generally not a fan of the "Physicians for Social Responsibility" for their anti-gun, anti-nuke and pro-environment at-any-cost positions, one critique they offer of the above NCI report brings up some interesting facts. They feel the numbers are much too low and at
http://www.psrus.org/rush.htm they say that:
"There are examples of how the NCI report seems to downplay the seriousness of the situation. The average estimated cumulative exposure to every U.S. resident from fallout from U.S. tests is estimated to be two rads (defined as 100 ergs of energy deposited in one g of tissue; 100 rads' one Gray). Instead of comparing this fallout dose of two rads to every U.S. resident with the average dose Americans would have received if there had been no atmospheric nuclear explosions, a mere 0.1 rad a year from cosmic radiation and naturally-occurring background radiation, the NCI repeatedly compares the two-rad dose to the 200 to 300 rads produced by an I-131 diagnostic scan in the 1950s, or to a dosage of 0.4 to 4 rads from such a scan today. Such scan exposures were experienced by a relative handful of people, not the average U.S. citizen. It is entirely inappropriate to compare a diagnostic medical procedure, performed to help sick patients, with atmospheric nuclear tests that were indiscriminate in their effects and designed to help no one. These NCI tactics simply obscure the fact that the radiation exposures due to fallout from atmospheric testing were an order of magnitude greater than the background radiation to which all of us are exposed."
"This is not the only purposeful distortion: all exposures in the summaries are given as average dose among all residents in a given county. But buried in the text is the nugget that exposures for children under five were three to seven times the average, since almost all exposure was from ingested milk (cows eat contaminated feed, and concentrate the I-131 in milk). Some children drink much more milk than average, so they could be getting, say, nine to 21 times the average exposure; and some farm children drink unprocessed, fresher milk, so they could be ingesting far more of the short-lived isotope I-131, which has a half-life of eight days, than those getting milk processed commercially. Finally, a few may be drinking goat's milk, with much higher concentrations of I-131 than cow's milk. In other words, the use of average intake is both meaningless and misleading. In the five western counties which received an "average" exposure of 12 to 16 rads, small children had at best three times that intake, and possibly 25 times as much or more."
-Shane