Rongelap
Our study of the habitability of Rongelap Atoll was completed in May 1994. Rongelap is one of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific that was contaminated by fallout from the March 1, 1954 hydrogen bomb test at Bikini. IEER Senior Scientist and Executive Director, Bernd Franke, was part of an international scientific management team appointed jointly by the representatives of Rongelap Atoll, the government of the Marshall Islands, and the Departments of Energy and Interior. The project concluded that the fears of the people of Rongelap, who went into self-imposed exile in 1985, were well-founded. The doses to maximally-exposed persons eating locally-grown food on the less contaminated portions of the atoll would exceed 100 millirem per year, the maximum allowed for civilians under U.S. regulations, and far in excess of what is now being proposed for clean-up rules. The work of the Scientific Management Team was accepted by an independent oversight panel of scientists. Project reports are available from IEER.

Workers' doses at the Fernald, Ohio plant
In July 1994, IEER completed several years of study on doses received by workers at the DOE-owned uranium plant near Cincinnati, commonly called the Fernald plant. This work was submitted to the court as expert testimony in a class action lawsuit filed by Fernald workers against the former contractor, National Lead of Ohio (NLO). Project reports are available from IEER.

The DOE and NLO claimed that overexposure occurred rarely, if ever. IEER concluded that, in almost every year in from 1952 to the early 1960s, more than half of the workers were exposed to uranium in excess of then-prevailing legal limits (15 rem dose to the lung), mainly due to inhalation of uranium. The DOE and NLO had actually never calculated internal radiation doses due to uranium, even though NLO's records on lung burdens of uranium and uranium content in workers' urine samples allowed approximate estimation. Workers' dose records only contained external dose estimates (of questionable accuracy in many cases).

The DOE settled the lawsuit on behalf its contractor, who was immune from all liability. The settlement provides for medical monitoring to all workers who worked at the Fernald plant for more than two weeks. The DOE also has promised not to fight workers compensation claims in court, but to submit them to a panel of three doctors for a decision. And there is also a compensation fund of $15 million to be distributed among workers. The staff and consultants who worked on this project at various times were: Bernd Franke, Kevin Gurney, Mike Thorne, Milton Hoenig, and myself.

IEER staff and consultants created a new technique for dose reconstruction for workers that provides an approximate indication of population dose. In the Fernald case though, the records are too poor to give reliable estimates of individual doses in most cases. This case may have historic implications for present and former workers across the DOE weapons complex.

Nuclear Wastelands
IEER's six-year collaborative project with the International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) to research the health and environmental effects of nuclear weapons production also came to a close this year, with the acceptance by MIT Press of our joint manuscript, Nuclear Wastelands: A Global Guidebook to Nuclear Weapons Production and Its Health and Environmental Effects. This book is scheduled to appear next July; it has 17 authors and was edited by Howard Hu, Katherine Yih, and myself.

IPPNW and IEER have jointly published two other books. The first in 1991, Radioactive Heaven and Earth, published by Apex Press, was on nuclear weapons testing. It has been translated into German and a summary has appeared in Japanese. The second, Plutonium: Deadly Gold of the Nuclear Age, was the first global assessment of the health and environmental effects of plutonium production; it also addressed many security aspects of the problem of plutonium after the Cold War. It has been translated into Japanese and German.

Mending the Ozone Hole
In its August meeting, the MIT Press Editorial board also accepted another IEER manuscript for publication. This book is on ozone depletion. Entitled Mending the Ozone Hole: Science, Technology and Policy, it will appear next spring.

This manuscript is the culmination of seven years of effort by IEER staff. We made many contributions to the protection of the ozone layer along the way. In 1988 we produced our first report on the subject for the Environmental Policy Institute. The report became a guidebook for activists trying to persuade corporations to phase out the use of ozone-depleting chemicals more rapidly.

In 1989, we persuaded the Environmental Protection Agency that its initial analysis regarding carbon tetrachloride -- a toxic, highly ozone-depleting chemical -- was incorrect. The EPA originally believed that emissions of this chemical were low and that it did not appreciably contribute to ozone depletion, but an IEER analysis led EPA to conclude that carbon tetrachloride should be phased out along with chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Carbon tetrachloride was included in the 1990 London revision of the Montreal Protocol as one of the ozone-depleting chemicals to be phased out by the year 2000; the date has since been brought forward to 1996.

IEER was the first (1990) to point out the role of anthropogenic biomass burning in the build up of ozone-depleting chlorine in the stratosphere. This analysis was subsequently accepted by other scientists in 1992, at an international meeting sponsored by NASA.

In 1992, we pointed out that so-called "low-ozone-depleting" compounds were several times more damaging to the ozone layer than conventional analytical techniques indicated, since those conventional techniques were based on the outdated assumption that the use of CFCs would go on indefinitely. Since this conventional analysis was the basis of EPA regulation of these chemicals, we filed a petition with the EPA to change its assessment. A similar analysis was first published in the peer-reviewed literature about three months after IEER published its report for use by activists. The EPA has agreed to take the new analysis into account in its regulation of these chemicals. IEER's ozone layer project was initiated by Annie Makhijani. Other current and former staff members who have worked on the project are Kevin Gurney, Amanda Bickel, David Kershner, and myself. Mending the Ozone Hole is authored by Kevin Gurney and me.

Plutonium as a liability
We also began a new project in 1994 focused on plutonium. It is our first major national and international outreach effort. Our aim is get the U.S. and other plutonium-producing and plutonium-owning countries to declare plutonium an economic, security and environmental liability, and to decide on its disposition on that basis. For a description of the program go to article "Dozens of Organizations Send a Letter to Clinton."

Institute for Energy and Environmental Research

Comments toOutreach Coordinator: ieer@ieer.org
Takoma Park, Maryland, USA

Last updated: September 1996