Transcript, Human Experience-from the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards Plutonium Information Meeting

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left at this saint. Thank you for staying. What I would like to do, very briefly,isto kind of sumnarize for you the extent of the information available on liman experience with plutonium. What .I propose to talk about are these following areas: the UPbU group -- a colloquial isn, an acronyn 1'11 mention later -- early Mznhattan Project workers; a group of Uraniurr, Registry; SEE tissue sam?ling prorpans; a f e w niscellaneoris thin qs ; and some conclusions. You've heard bits and pieces of this in tne last day-and-a-half, and perhaps this trill give you a little better feeling of how these all fit toPt2er. The first group I would like to speak about, the UPPU groQp -- I should explain the acronym: this is really sone te-minology t h a t was develoced by 77,right Langhai many years ago, who wished -- originally it was SPPU. Wright thought this was a little too personal; and another advantage of UPPU was the symetry -- --but these were people who were exgosed very earl7

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i n thz developnent of t h e atomic weapons, back i n 1 9 4 4 or 1945,1 about two dozen (in round nui i ers ] people. This data i s extremely L qo et ant because the people have been followed up bi one dic ally for almost three decades. Now, why is this important? One of the important things that keeps coning U? isthe fact that it takes time to develop effects. decades is getti.ng t o be extremely interesting, as con?ared with exposures, for example, that are only weeks or months or a few years of age. So these are the crene de l a creme, i f I you will, of the human experience, of people who have been This infomation is summarized in a recent issue of Iiealth Physics, and I won't spend alot of time on it.14 There are soiae copies of this publicatior? available for the Coinrnittee nernbers and oLAers. As to the future,there is a Group 2that we a t17 LASL are currently considering, some 42 nen who were also exposed i n the early days. and have responded t o questionnaires, and will be included i n SOne 25 of these have been located 21 this type bio ned ical follow u ~study. Another group represents a larger group of people,22 not all of whom were expose2 many, many years ago. We are - 24 in the process of identifying and locating these peogle. I'd like t o make one point. Zven with 25 people,

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1if one considers .Lye vital statistics data this is an impor2tant because the effects that one generally sees f ron 3 experimental animals are effects -- are late effects,I ' m 4 soeaking of -- are tumors of t h e lung, bone and liver. A large fra.ction of this number of people will normally di efron cancer of some kind, but of we look specffi call yat those who will die from liver cancer or.bone cancer 8or lung cancer, it turns out that it will be very significant 9if one of these people develops a bone tumor. If one develops a lung tumor i t ' s not that important, because you would expec: o n ' the order of one for this size group. 2eoFle t o give you any meaningful information, necessarily,I 14 in this type followup. 16 Now this i s what has been done, although a l l these 17 eight it ens have not been done every four or fi vs years since 18 they've bben studied. But the most recent comprehensive fol19 lowuy?, in 1971 and 1972, for most of these 25 men included 20 medical history and examination, X-rays, looking a t chromosomes, 21 looking a t rnaterizls, cells that are shed from the lung, urine 22 radiochemistry, chest counting that Jim Lawrence explained, 23 blood chemistry po files, and hematology. 25 grog?. There are n o adverse effects that Save been detected To make.al cng story short, this is a very healthy

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that could be attributed to t'le radiation insults, people in their late fifties. P?o one has done a careful study of their offspring,but it seem a5 though thsy have had noma1 faqily sizes, And, interestingly,this may be something of inter - est t o follotr up on: studies have been don2 on the number of c3i'tdren produced by t h e females, the young females, who conp rise the body of data that is basic to the bone standard. It ap2eared that they had normal family ' size ; the point I ' m getting at here is that there nay be an approach here t o even Set sorne est in at es on potential genetic effects of hight LET carefully looked at to date, although it has been talked abouz These are some of the est.imates of the body burdens, Now, I would not like to get invoived in detail, although I will be glad to talk to anyone about it. The point is that the estimates of the body burden have varied, depending on when hey have been calculated. I third: this reflects the uncertainties in the 22 equations, the metabolic models that are used. I think tie 23 in port ant thing that has been shown from other studies -- the 24 autopsies, saxnpling, tissue programs, and others that I will 25 speak about, tead to verify the fact that the body burden ol Reporters. inc.

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>tSS l based on the metabolic model i s conservative in that they almost always predict more plutonium in the body tf.,ari one finds i f one goes after death and autopsies and tries to account 5 One other point: there is one case where the body 6 burden may be on the o r d e r of 0.4 microCuries, 420 nanoCuries, 7tenfold the permissible occupational body burden. 8 I've only shown some of these : those that have 9 more than t h r e e permissible bone burdens. The message is thaz lo these people have h2d relatively large burdens of Blutonium 11 for almost t h r e e decades. They have been followsd very careOne of the people -- and this i s presented on the l 6 handout I gave -- had a hematama rsmoved from the Lung i n 17 1971. This i s a non-nalignant type growth, but it afforded l8an opportunity to get pieces of the lung tissue,pieces of the tumor, pieces of the lynph tissue and bone, and t o do some This is a photomicrograph -- autoradiograph of a P3 photomicrograph of some pieces of plutonium in a piece of lymph tis s uz. They could have been there as long as 27 years, s in cs the man vas exposed i n 1SC4-45 ar?d then not re-exposed)1 25 tc my significant extent for the intervening two-plus decades.

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The point I want t o make i s these are prodigiously high radiation doses around theee particles. There are no observed effects, And the msssage I would personally like to make here is that I think tre all tm often think about dose rate as a primary radiation standard, and this is well i3grained i n our thinking and literature. ButI would like to remind people that the biologicdl effect is the real primary standard, i f you will. then mechanistically derive numbers and models and calculate thing,that the effect !.s the primary thing of interest, as But, I think, all too often we forget the im;?ortant DR. RIC1llX)MD: This was removed in 1971. There is What year w a s the sample removed? an appendix i n the Health Physics paper that will give you One other point: we had an opportunity t o do chest counting on Llis person, End also estimate the amount i n the chest by measuring a piece of t-he lung and lyph tissue, by making some assumptions, end the agreement was q u i t e good. As I remerber, wit.?.?in a factor of two or so. These are act u a i numbers from Case Nmber 2 in Nay,

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The concentration of plutoni~r~i-239and - 2 4 0 i n t h e lung i s sonething like 0.4 nicroCuries per gram, which is considerably higher -- a factor of lo4, roughly -- higher than the a noun t ' in virtually all of us that we have accumulated from weapons-produced plutonium o r from -- most of it which was put into the atqosphere before the limited test treaty The lymsh node has, as .you can see, a sixty-seventyfold higher concentration -- again, not huge orders of magniI think that ' sall the detail in that particular Another group, Number2in the original slide, plutonium inject ees, eighteen inject ees -- again, many, may dvears ago: 1 9 4 4 , ' 4 5 , ' 4 6 -- with tracer doses of plutonium. Most of then are older than age 45 and are a selective group. All but two were given plutonium-239; one received ?lutoniurn-238; and one received a combination of plutcnium-231 Pat Durbin, who isin the audience, has done a remarkable detective job, of you will, of following up this qrou? of people, and there are some very fascinating pieces of deta that one can find in this interesting study. For exanple, the person with the large dose of

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f o r approximately twenty years. I have not estimated doses or anything, but I: aq sure they are extremely large. Doses ranged up to 6 microcuries, again relative t o 40 nanoCilries, 0.04 microcuries for occupational pemissible body burden. This data provided the basis for the excretion functions, which are still quite valid and used today, that were derived by Langharn and an pli fie d by others. More recently, it turns out four of these people are still alive today, almost three decades later. Three of the four are now under study. One hes been exhumed. burial. This affords us an opportunity to go back and look and see, or attempt to see, if w e can learn anything about burial of plutonium i n the bone. VOICE: VJere these four persons still alive,were they terminal patients in 1945 and 19463 DR. RICHNOND: You just answered the question. That ' s why w e have vital stati.stics. ject Llese things and use your best judgement. not always one hmdred percent right. I use this a s an example of how cautious scientists

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are, and they should be, These were canclusions nade 23 years ago by t ? right Langham relative to the studies. He says, "Admittedly the observations made here in this study provide no evidence of what mQht happen in ten to thirty years." We now have a little better feeling for these The point of the experiment and the intent of the original investigators was t o look for early effects for relatively high doses. Without acute subjective or objective clinical effects. Eut agzic, we csn get a lot nore information now And they concluded that they were from snore modern followups on the study, Very recently, people a t Argonne and LASL have tried t o estimate the body of Oiie of these rather old wonen, and the agreement is remarkable. It's within a factor of four o r five, using the Langham equations and anything i n - volved in that kind of an estimate. Where do accidents -- what kind happen? This is from a TransUranum technical group report by gersent cf body burden, by route of entry : through loud and clear in all the analyses, tc be the prominent route o r modality of exposure',

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I'd like to point this out, Most of our experiencz w i t h contamination cases has cone from production-type fscilities, weapons-related, massive amounts, a lot of nitty - gritty production type work; and t h i s , possibly, will riot be the experience in reactors and future uses of plutonium -- and that ' s only my opinion. And, as you would expect, as you look a t the i n - creasing burdens there are, generally, fewer people exposed. The base of the pyramid is down a t the relatively lower body 70 (Inf onnation f ron AEC Operational Safety) , This, again, is several hundred people froin 57 to There are nther sources of information. I'll show This was reported in IIealth Physics about I - Iarch, inhalatj-on ex2osures. There w e r e estimates made of the number of persons in terns of occu2ational lung burdens, rul tip lcs .oE 1 6 . 0 1 nicroCuries. Twenty-f i v e people were involved, sone as high as a factor of ten above the permissible body burden. These people ere measured periodically, like four It gives an accident in _Pocky Flats, times a year. Several of them have died. havz Seen involved in the prog rmI will speak about ina minute. They've gone t o autopsy, and information has bee obtained on them. Several of them The point is, we do try extremely hard t o

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gain m y information we can t o take advantage of previous ac-::a 3 Don't put too much fzith in that number, (Indicatd 4 ing.) It's an estinate thzt ' s very, very uncertain. DR. 14ASOI.I: Is there anything t o report on the basis of the excminztioas maze so far ? DR, RICHXOND: Nothing t o date. As I mentioned, two people have died: of the bladder, The person was not excreting plutonium: it was very insoluble, and most of the insult Slutoniwn has remained i n the body, a host specifically in the lung, one of a heart attack, one of a car c in ma Elany of you have probabiy heard about this,This 15. cribed by Lushbough i n the open literature, inthe axchives I 17 It's aFi sce of pahar skin. It vas a very, very 18 highly radioactive concentration of plutonium. This is the 19 tissue section ; and then autoradiographs, and these are es20 sent i ally the same piece of tissue. 21 The dose rate after four years was calculated t o! fl 22 ve 75 nil lion rad total dose. The point is, wedon ' t know 23 whet cells were arol-lnd that,or for how long, so the number i 25 This is the thesis I am pushing, I think -- that

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it's the effect one is interested in. This has been called npre-caacerousn, but let me read what the author said on this. He said, "Although no malignancies of the skin of man have ever been shown auto radio graphically to be associated with such alpha-emitting foreign bodies, L5e changes here would seem to indicate that the developnent of such alesi on is Idon ' t think that anyone would argue with this. He also points aut that, …