Los Alamos National Laboratory released far more airborne plutonium just after World War II than what it reported, but a health scientist says it's not clear what that means for public health.
The lab's plutonium processing work released 42.83 curies of plutonium from 1948-1955, although the lab's official report for that period showed a release of 0.724 curies of plutonium.
Some housing at Los Alamos is as close as a quarter-mile from the lab's original plutonium processing area, according to an interim report from (Thomas) Widner's team, a private contractor hired by the CDC. (on the Los Alamos Historical Document Retrieval and Assessment project).
Los Alamos lab spokesman James Rickman, who noted the lab's current managers were not in charge during the plutonium releases...
Widner's San Francisco-based company, ChemRisk, heads the effort to review lab documents from 1943 to the present to try to identify releases of radionuclides and chemicals...
Posted by Stubbornson at July 26, 2007 06:23 AM