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Re: [cdn-nucl-l] Fw: Nuclear shipyard worker study
I have just downloaded the shipyard study from the NTIS web site for
US$8.95. (You can go to
<www.ntis.gov/search>,
search on shipyard and radiation, and the download
info should pop up -- but see below.)
It's 452 pages, as a 12.5 MB PDF file. For the most part it's
legible, but it's in some sort of graphic form that does not let you copy
selections for pasting elsewhere. I suppose portions could be put
through an OCR (optical character recognition) process if one were
desperate.
Assuming (safely, I suspect) that I don't get swamped with requests, I
can send it as an attachment for free to anyone who wants it (but
remember, it's over 12 megabytes). This would seem to be legal,
since the front page has the notation "Distribution of this document
is unlimited."
Now all I have to do is read it.
George
Stanford
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
At 11:31 PM 7/17/2002 -0400, Jerry Cuttler forwarded:
----- Original Message -----
From: Ted Rockwell
To: Multiple recipients of
list ans-pie
Sent: Wednesday, July 17, 2002 4:02 PM
Subject: RE: Nuclear shipyard worker study
> The report should be available in most good research
libraries.
Friends:
The point is not that you cannot get hold of a copy, if you have friends
in
the system. The point is that, unlike many lesser reports, there
was no
attempt to formally publish this landmark study and submit it to
mainline
journals for widespread scientific review. In fact, when Ethel
Gilbert gave
a report claiming to summarize the studies of nuclear workers worldwide,
she
did not include this one. When I asked her why, on the record at an
annual
NCRP meeting, she said she hadn't been able to get a copy (although
she
works for DOE). LNT advocates use this argument both ways, claiming
as
Gilbert did, that it wasn't available, or arguing as someone else
did
recently that it had never been peer reviewed, so it wasn't
considered
valid.
Yet others will argue, when you accuse them of suppression, "Of
course it's
available. I have a copy right here. Do you want me to send
you a copy?
There's been no suppression!" Does that pass the smell
test?
The other point is that Art Upton was head of the Technical Advisory
Panel
during the whole duration of the study. This panel had no other
function
but to assure the validity of the comparison between the irradiated
workers
and the controls, selected from a population of 700,000 nuclear
shipyard
workers and selected for age, job, gender and other demographic factors
to
match with corresponding irradiated workers. Upton apparently
thought they
were doing a good job for those many years. Now he faults the
study.
When DOE was finally forced to put out a one-page press release on
the
study, DOE attributed the results to the "healthy worker
effect," which is
transparently false, since both subjects and controls were workers
under
similar conditions except for radiation.
This is crooked, people! Not sloppy, nor naive, nor casually wrong.
Just
plain manipulation to distort the science for political reasons.
And after
they argue that you can't learn anything from epidemiology--that you have
to
follow individuals to their death--then they terminate the program to
follow
up the last 1000 radium dial painters to their death. That study was
showing
unequivocally that the threshold for harmful effects from ingested
radium
was about 1000 rad--20,000 rem! "We can't have that sort of
data showing
up, now can we?"
The scientific community, like the business community, the police and
most
other communities, cannot keep protecting their own community by
pretending
there are no bad activities going on. It didn't work for Enron,
Anderson,
the NYPD and others, and it won't work for us. When the lights
suddenly
come on, do you want to be seen holding the flashlight, or scurrying
back
into the woodwork?
Ted Rockwell