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Executive Summary
Pages 1-8

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From page 1...
... The draft report, which was prepared at the request of the US Congress, presents a limited evaluation of the potential public-health impact of atmospheric nuclear-weapons testing and suggests ways In which a more detailed evaluation could be performed. To review the report, the National Research Council formed a committee consisting of members of its Committee on An Assessment of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Radiation Studies from DOE Contractor Sites and other experts.
From page 2...
... In addition to its value for evaluating exposure to fallout, the committee believes that such work is well justified as a record of a historically Important period in the nation's history. If substantial new knowledge of radiation biology and markers of radiation injury are developed, data that are of limited current interest may be able to support the testing of new hypotheses that relate low doses of radiation to human-health effects.
From page 3...
... Methods used to estimate doses and health effects The dos~etnc modeling for the feasibility study has been built on the substantial body of work that was previously performed to estimate the amounts of radionuclides released by the Nevada Test Site (NTS) atom~c-bomb tests, We amounts deposited within 100 miles of the site, and the amount of HI fallout throughout the coterminous United States.
From page 4...
... The risk-estimation models considered uncertainties associated with several factors: dose uncertainties, uncertainties in risk estimates, extrapolation to low doses and low dose rates, transfer of risk estimates from the Japanese to US populations, uncertainties in relative biological effectiveness for venous kinds of radiation, and temporal projections of risk. The authors of the draft report did not consider several other types of uncertainty, such as uncertainties in selection of the particular risk mode!
From page 5...
... The committee believes that the particular findings that the authors of the draft report chose to emphasize and the manner of presentation were not optimal and were in some cases misleading. The primary emphasis with respect to risk is on the population-summed risk, that is, the total number of expected excess cancer deaths in the exposed population over a lifetime, on the basis of the collective dose to that population.
From page 6...
... The draft report indicates that the dose and risk estimates stemming from the feasibility study are population averages and therefore should not be used to estimate risks to specific individuals. The committee concurs with that caveat; to generate adequate estimates of individual nsks, one needs to account for a person's age, dietary sources and habits, geographic locations at particular times, and other factors.
From page 7...
... Apart from the 3-relate risk of thyroid cancer, the drabs report indicates that the likely risks associated with the other fallout radionuclides are small, so the increased precision gained by performing a fullfledged dose and risk estimation will probably be of little added value. Developing more precise estimates than given in the feasibility study about total collective dose to the American people Tom all radionuclides, and resulting total risk of all cancers may be reasonably motivated by academic and historical interest in this extraordinary chapter in our nation's history, and to show that the US government is not attempting to keep veiled in secrecy the true consequences of the era of nuclear testing.
From page 8...
... The NTS HI communication plan sponsored a well-developed risk-communication conference to which it invited various stakeholders and Marty distinguished US leaders In health communication, risk perception, arid risk communication. The conference provided excellent information about the communication effort being planned.


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