Interview with Fred Cross and Ray Palmer

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This section of interview was not transcribed - General review of Cross career - What should be included in book without fail?, etc. - Artificial heart - calculations of dose rate to recipient - with Pu-238 - used a LASL program for calculations - No danger to wife from radiation if remained close to her for - Interest of National Heart Institute - Plans to implant Pu-238 sources in aorta to measure tissue effects and dosage - never done - Early duties at Kanford in dosimetry to skin of sources to be used on swine - related to fallout problems - Cross - Early dosimetry work at Hanford - interfaced with Biology Department - partly with ilivision of Isotopes Development - ad hoc - all problems associated with uranium miner work-- - Sununary of work worldwide - Cross - got involved with a program that frightened him Retrospective look at U miners to determine what standards should have been set (this for NIOSH) and why they weren't set Usefulness of the standard current at the time Possible involvement with politics

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Cross and Palmer - page 2 Went through all the congressioad records ana othir Asked him to send a copy of the N I O S H report - in house This was Cross, et ~ s l1974 Evaluation of methods for setting occupational health standards for U miners - Research Report f o r NIOSH, no number Early in house was BNW L-CC-1613,1968. Project development report on U miner radiation hazards - Ad Hoc Task Force on U miners This section of interview was transcribed - Their and other's experiments with intratracheal soot, and cigarette smoke in combined exposures to radon - Development of first standard for radon - Evans and Goodman - General comments on use of safety factors - Early measurements of radium body content - Palmer's early work with whole body counter and procedures - GI tract experiments

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Cross and Palmer - page 3 - Re/Higher specific activity isotopes of uranium - Emergency exposure to internal emitters - need for work Re/models for reactor accidents - relatively high doses

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have been able t o fin6 with polo~umthat they could produce tmrs in the lung, I think that was inter-tracheally administered. r d-, relate2 t o the hot wide program where they intrzvenously adr his te red them and. got no tumrs. fran polonium by inter-tJacheally administering it, i f you tried t o give it t o the ammil through inhalation, it just d i d not work. The hamster for scme reason seems t o perhaps just clean his lungs mch mre efficiently than other animls. This was true wIth the hamsters - these studies were partly with NIMS. PaZtly, it was w i t h diesel engine exhausts, uranium ore dust, radon daughters alone - a canbination of things. The dog studies here were the AEC-Wed ones, m a t is your general feel about that work - that the adjutant agent had alot of influence on the carcinogenicity of the initial radiation source, or maybe you had t o have it there to get any developxit of cancer? CROSS: I don't knw. On the dcgs or the hamsters, I think we killed them before they had a chance t o get tumors because there we exposed un+Ll death occurred. They usually, I believe, died of sccnething other than m r s . But a@n, w e did a parallel study With hamsters wd racks in the same chamber. and ill owed thm to live out their life q an [tco fzint to pick up] .... We exposed them Simultaneous exposure - the rats would develop it, but the hamsters W e got out o-f a little over 400 hamsters being exposed to radon daughters sanething like four W r s of the lungs, totid. that had the radon Caughters with the ore dust. the most (tumrs) were the ones The ones with diesel exhaust and

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e could talk about, but as far as actual cancer ( t w r s ) mclueinc the acqs that ha? heen expseci to cig a et te srroke as well, like diesel exhaust, it seemed to confer saw relative protection for t mr develop t, which is a surpricinq thing because alot of people think that it isa "baddy", an6 if that is also of the eqxs'lre, you would have mre t m r s forrnhg. There were other lesions implicated, but as far as tmrs 90, both i n the dogs and in the hamsters, the cigarette and the diesel exhaust soot i n the hamsters seerred t o confer s m relative protection. PALMER: It could haw been j u s t an increase of the normal clearance - increased clearance would work a little better maybe. I thmk Dr. Bair thought of this t a y back when the first srroking verses non-sroking plutonium animals were used. (First w e had to teach a 2og how to srroke.) results indicated that mking seems t o confer same protection, but the u.S. Our dog studies seem to Fall el the Swedish zinc and lead miners. Our uranium miners' stuciies were the o p p s i t e - smking does - and in those groups, there is an increased risk. STANNF3u): For a while there was a l o t of 6iscussion that =king did play w WSS : Well,I think the initial group of miners that sh& up with tunas, 95t percent of tl an were srrokers. Then there was a s'age in there where "hey were backwatering very much the material recently. CROSS: I don't remaker either, I ' m efrzid I ' m zt fault there. Dr. Saccognanno, I believe, mule s q ',hat if you mke -id Iiiine urznim. you will Get it. zzsociation wit5 'he in cres e in ad the faster onset of cccurrence i f you smoke,

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which is wny itwou ? d show u peer li ~ remon: ;ne sm rk inc pop uic rion. U.S. studies we are now Getting enough tixe lcged that we are beclnnina t o SCE. more cases o f czncer arnona non-snokers. lem in the early aeys of our studies in this country - we just didn ' theve5 I think that wes probtbly the prob - long enough follow-up time. total cases of lung cancer i n uranium zine rs ? i t was three or four hundred now. the latest figure is. Well, the cases keep appeering regularly. How many are there now I wes under the impression thet I t was 250 i n 1974. Idon ' t know what Next to alot of things - i t ' s not very many, but in the radiation field,everything is on a different s cile. CROSS: It cer"Lain1y is. I w i s h that could be changed, but I don't knm how e are going to do it. have another general question on the uranium miner story because Idon ' t think there is any single subject that there has been mre conferences on or mre synpsium volums, e.g., this TACUM th mg with the Rrench canko; in. Yes, it would be nice t o get a little better balmce,woulcb't it. I They had a meeting dawn a t the Nation& Acadq of Sciences.) I lam you could reaci yourself half blind because there is so much t o read. handle on relative to many others considering that so much w r k has k e n done? speaking, that were dying of luna cancer. Ages that European uranium miners were dying, they didn ' t know for some time 2 s t o what; in fact,they weren ' t even alerted to the problem except that they began t o note that some of the miners' wives were marrying five and six times, and that G!hy has this subject been so hard to get a I think in thls case it was becase there were so few people, relatively Even though we knew from t h e Middle gave them the first clue that sm thing ms wrong. feeling that the European experience would not be the experience in this country. European miners, i t may be so in the U.S. miners - and there was no large sce le There sem-ed to be a general

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rnininc until the Second World War effor:, you see. before the first cancer czses started cor;,inc in, so i: is2relatively nevr thing on the U.S. scene. O f course there is some embroiling of politics and m:L e t ' s take sm thing like le&. That's been aroda long, long time, and it has been well knm that it isa hazard. I: took a number of years I am not wanting to dig into that. You can find out a m s t as much on radon problem as you can on lead. either the subject was technically very hard to manage, o r there was an awful lot of reluctance to accept whatever had been done, s o the general response was This means that there was some reason - that i think there was a great deal of that going on. When I was looking a t tfie historical d we lop zn t of the protection standard that finally did care out, i think one of the very first,and perhaps one ofthe most protective and potentially useful that we could have developed,was the one by Evans and Goodman, back i n 1940. They did something thet was quite simple, and I think inthe whole field of toxicology i t could very well be dated. That is, they lake5at the level of the a9ent (or the concentration of the hazardous material i n the air) and then they looked a t *e incidence - in this case, luna cancer - and they reasond back. say .=s it was in the European setting - 50% were dying of lung ca.?cer. L e t ' s say that the average exposure level w z s 1,000 picocuries per liter of radon - there, which would have been ten pico curies per liter. Then let ' s take a protective number of 100 and go d m from That would have been me lou sly protective. lower, (I don't h m h m you put a nunker on what's 1 m and what's high) perhaps a safety factor often would have applied instead of 100. Because this w z s an US down toa very reasonable first - stab approach, end everything that has been Naw, had the incidence benlm, say only 10% or even &ne since then is dosinetry and bioassay and epidemiology and . = nytUg you want.

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to thuk about that would relate t o protectinq of the miner. That w z s one ~f the veql first back m:Just about the same time as the radium standard was set as l/lOth And I thlnk these safety factors are, in ger~erzl,w ise.If you don ' t else about it, look a t the general level of the hazard and use safety factors of 1 0 or 100. PAIMER: In that early radium standard I remember my first experience was hearing of the analyses of cadaver ashes by h D r . c;hleen of the Oregon Medical m u n t of radium in a bunch of people +hthe analyzed and found forty percent of what they then sed was the MPC. Pad to first say, well,we ry k dy ' s got 40 percent already. W hester took up the study. -&ere - I don't know where they 5ot t h e i r s [K.I?.-Frcpn hospital cremtorium, for cadaver she sfr m Oregon. Dr. Queen of the Oregon acal School would take - the remains of the cadavers that the med students used f o r their auto?sy study, and he would cremate them on a special stainless steel pan. H e had a standard There was aDr. Krebs, was it, in Germany? H e came up with the natural So any standard we were aoing toset,we They did the first study. They analyzed stme ashes My first manager here put me on it t o analyze these he wauld give me an z liq ot ELS an ice cream Won fill& other things, and here I am back with it in uranium miners again. mat wzs my first ul vol v mt with radium, and then I got off on mat did _you do i n the in cairn ? You say , "Now I 'm back on it. I'

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mml calcium i s [supposed t o be3 a constant, pretty much. vary this trenwdously in the animal by varymg the d i e t - rather extremely. PALMER: Iwas involved in that, and then Iwt into man a gmt for a few years and essentially ceased being a scientist. miners with Dr.Stuart. There I backed volved with the diesel exposure pr tion. we got our "anti-sunshme umt". Qlril C m first worked w i t % the W e found results that were not totally in aqreement Tne original sunshine unit, the ratio of calcium t o strontium 90 to We found we coald Then the next t r i p back was into uranium fran the side d m r by first being inH e was having problems and didn't have time himself t o get in there, so I had. that as a job t o do, and being in the s m rcan with the expsures t o radon daugnters with the others going on, I couldn't very well stay out of them. to wrk w i t h , in many respects, is the rat. of the cost, we are going t o settle on the rat, and once w e have studied t h a t Fett y m ch to its end, we may do sane dog [work] for extra plat ion purpses. We m y go back t o the dog ifwe can get funds for that, but the hamster was not I ended up working With Bruce on those studies. It looks as though the animalnn3el that is going to be the best for us W e do it also in dogs, but because to upzr respkztory infections. It looked so gocd, too, because it is not 2s susce?tible DO you b v e rzis ti-zt are mre resistent now ? CROSS: Well, we thought we did - w e ' r e having a few doubts n w - but they are .getting cleaned up - e had a bacterium cde in fran one of OUT suppliers that raised great havoc in ouz colony. this one exp sure level (I think it was 9,200 worki?g level mnths) a 60% incidence. Tnet is not w unreasomble direct cmqazison, actuzlly, t o sme of the early exposure …