State, Nye County propose nuke study

Monday, March 8, 1999 | 11:20 a.m.

Nye County and the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects want to follow up on studies done two decades ago tracking leukemia cases and thyroid disease in people exposed to radioactive fallout.

They are proposing new studies that would look at the current health of people who live downwind of the Nevada Test Site and Yucca Mountain, where the federal government wants to build a repository for the nation's high-level nuclear waste.

The idea is to look for lingering effects from fallout of nuclear weapons experiments done at the Test Site and to establish a point from which to measure possible future health problems should the repository be built 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

"Nye County is the poster child of impacts from previous fallout and a future repository at Yucca Mountain," Ginger Swartz, intergovernmental relations and communications director for Nye County.

Health studies related to DOE activities have been completed at various sites in the United States, but Nye County's would be unique, because the county is sponsoring and coordinating it, Swartz said. Both the Test Site and Yucca Mountain are in Nye County.

The studies would build on the work of Marie Boutte, a University of Nevada, Reno anthropology professor, who conducted a search of previous investigations into thyroid problems and leukemia developed by people living downwind of the Test Site, where more than 1,000 nuclear weapons exploded above and below ground from 1951 through 1992.

What she found disturbed her, and in 1996 Boutte warned the state that those studies deserved more attention.

The same year Congress cut the $5 million a year given to state's Agency for Nuclear Projects, and Boutte's research for the state ended.

Boutte uncovered studies conducted by the University of Utah in the 1970s that showed a slight increase in leukemia among children living in Utah and Arizona who were exposed to the nuclear fallout from the Nevada Test Site in the 1950s.

Another study Boutte found recorded above-average rates of cancer of the thyroid among 3,000 Nevada, Arizona and Utah children. Radioactive iodine-131 from fallout settled on downwind fields, where cows fed and then produced contaminated milk. The iodine collects in the thyroid gland.

Critics of the studies questioned their validity, saying the populations under study were too small and the research did not continue for a long enough time period.

That has not discouraged Nye County and the state office from laying plans to apply for separate federal grants to survey Nye and Lincoln counties before any nuclear wastes would arrive at the proposed Yucca Mountain repository.

The county health assessment proposal has not been written yet, Swartz said. But the state plans to build on Boutte's work in Lincoln County, the closest area lying in the path of the fallout.

The study would tell the county if any diseases were increasing or any new illnesses were developing from old fallout, she said, by reviewing death certificates to study the causes of death.

But more importantly, if experts find a trend in any given disease, they will try to glean from old records how much radiation the average county resident has been exposed to.

Swartz said results will be reviewed by an independent, credible scientific organization such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. The CDC came under fire by environmentalists and critics after it found no harm to residents living downwind of DOE's Hanford, Wash., site.

County officials will seek federal funds, although no cost estimates have been made, Shawn Gerstenberger, a toxicologist teaching in the UNLV Environmental Studies program, said.