Radiation Panel Makeup Protested

Date: Thu, 2 Sep 1999 17:09:51 -0500

From: "Ruby Bartlett"

Radiation Panel Makeup Protested

By H. JOSEF HEBERT=

Associated Press Writer=

WASHINGTON (AP) _ The threat of cancer from large amounts of nuclear radiation is clear. But will small doses over many years put people at risk?

A panel of scientists formed to answer the question has become entangled in controversy even before its work begins, with critics charging too many of the scientists are tied to the nuclear industry.

A campaign is under way to further relax already weak radiation protection standards,'' more than 130 environmental, health and anti-nuclear activists wrote the National Academy of Sciences this week, protesting the composition of the review committee, which was holding its first meeting today.

The academy's National Research Council, which selected the scientists for the three-year study, added five member. One scientist was forced to withdraw because of the criticism.

Evan Douple, director of the council's radiation studies branch, called the composition of the panel ``balanced'' and said in a recent interview that the scientists have the expertise to examine the issue ``from a scientific point of view without politics and without bias.''

But some scientists who have been involved in low-dose radiation studies say the panel still is heavily skewed to the view that current assumptions about low-dose radiation overstate the health risks. Some of the members have asserted no radiation harm can be found below a certain threshold, contrary to existing dogma.

This is a very lopsided committee with predictable outcome, said Rudi Nussbaum, professor emeritus of physics and environmental sciences at Portland State University.

Nussbaum was one of eight scientists who complained in a letter to the Academy that the panel ``is dominated by individuals whose work has been conducted within institutional settings heavily influenced by organizations with interests in the nuclear industry.

At the same time, the scientists said, the panel ``does not include a significant number of persons who have demonstrated independence from this institutional setting'' including a number of scientists whose studies have suggested elevated cancer levels from low-dose radiation exposure.

Both sides agree much is at stake in the three-year study.

Formally known as the Committee on Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation, or BEIR, the panel's findings are likely to have tremendous impact on radiation levels the government will allowed at abandoned nuclear power plants, in the cleanup of nuclear weapons production facilities and at nuclear waste disposal sites.

The nuclear industry has long argued that the adverse health effects from low-dose radiation have not been scientifically shown and that current maximum radiation exposure levels may be higher than what is needed to protect public health.

Recently Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., asked for the General Accounting Office in Congress to review whether radiation standards could be eased. ``If radiation protection standards are unnecessarily restrictive, the impact on the cost of (nuclear) waste disposals, power plant decommissioning and decontamination and environmental cleanup could be huge,'' said Dominici.

Current risk assessments on low-dose radiation are made by extrapolating from the increased cancers observed from exposure to high doses, principally among victims of the World War II atomic bomb blasts in Japan.

This approach adopted by past BEIR committees assumes that risks from low doses follow a ``linear'' model with the risks declining as dose levels decline, but that each unit of radiation, no matter how small, still is assumed to cause cancer.

But some scientists, including many of the new BEIR review panel, contend the linear theory overstates the cancer risks and that, as a result, the radiation exposure levels may, in fact, be too stringent. A number of the panel members have testified for industry in radiation exposure cases or challenged studies suggesting elevated cancers from low-dose radiation exposure, the critics said.

``The BEIR committee has been loaded up with people from this side of the debate,'' complained Daniel Hirsch, executive director of Committee to Bridge the Gap, a California-based anti-nuclear watchdog group.

But Kenneth Mossman, a professor of health physics at Arizona State University who was dropped from the panel after becoming a prime target of the critics' attacks, said panel members represent a variety of opinions and a ``centrist'' view of the issue.