Study: Risk small at plutonium site

COLUMBIA, S.C. – A 13-year federal study has found that people living near a site that supplied the nation’s nuclear arsenal with plutonium for decades did not receive major doses of radiation during the Cold War.

The report said few people living near the Savannah River Site had a substantially higher cancer risk from pollution between the early 1950s and 1992, when atomic weapons production reactors shut down.

Scientists used 50,000 boxes of records, some of which had been classified for decades, to reconstruct chemical and radiation releases during the Cold War. The study began in 1992.

It found that people born in 1955 probably received higher radiation doses than those born in the 1960s. But the report said there was a less than a 1 percent chance someone born in 1955 and living near the site would die from cancer related to the nearby nuclear facility.

“This has been a long time coming,” said C.M. Wood with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We have learned that there were not significant doses to the public” from the site near Aiken, S.C., about 60 miles southwest of Columbia.

The findings released Friday will probably end a research project on pollution and its health effects in South Carolina and Georgia, Wood said.

The CDC hired a contractor for the project but will not continue the work unless major new information is discovered in the next few months, Wood said.

But atomic engineer Arjun Makhijani, a critic of federal nuclear sites, said it is hard to believe people’s health has not been threatened because the Savannah River is a source of drinking water and used for recreation, he said.

“Discharges from the Savannah site do pose a risk to the downstream population,” said Makhijani, who has not reviewed the study.