More on Nuclear Power Plant Worker Cancer Studies

I was mistaken in stating there have been no studies on American nuclear power plant workers - the truth is that there are VIRTUALLY no studies. The attached is the largest to date, done by Columbia University.

It found an excess of leukemia deaths, solid cancer deaths, and arteriosclerotic heart disease deaths for workers employed during 1979-1997 for 15 nuclear utilities.

But there are problems:

1. The excesses aren't statistically significant, since the numbers are small (26 leukemia deaths, 368 solid cancer deaths)

2. Only deaths, not cases are examined. Workers are more likely to have access to good medical care that can help them to survive cancer. Studying cancer cases is much more revealing than deaths.

3. Workers who work less than 18 years may not have had enough exposure. I suspect they include even those who worked for a brief timeat nuclear plants.

4. The average age of workers at the end of follow up is 45 years, an age when cancer rates are still relatively low. It often takes much longer than that for cancer to manifest.

5. The healthy worker effect is a big issue. They compare actual worker deaths with expected (the entire population). That's not a fair comparison, since workers are much healthier than the general population.

This is a large study of workers at Canadian nuclear power plants. Elevated mortality rates of leukemia and solid tumors were found (although just borderline statistical significant).

This article suffers from the problems I stated before, but they should be taken with great concern. The literature has no other studies of U.S. nuclear power plant workers, other than a very small one of Calvert Cliffs in Maryland.

I hope this helps.

Joe Mangano
FUSE USA
Advisory Board

Cancer & Nuclear Workers

Workers at nuclear weapons plants were federal employees, and their health records (minus personal identifiers) are publicly available. But after Dr. Tom Mancuso and Dr. Alice Stewart published a paper in 1976 stating that Hanford workers had higher-than-average cancer rates, the government withheld the records.

Lawsuits followed, and the government only relented in 1990 (after the Cold War ended).

In 2000, DOE issued a report on a series of studies of worker health, concluding that cancer rates were higher. Congress passed a law later that year allowing workers with a variety of cancers to be compensated - although the progress has been very slow since then.

Workers at nuclear power plants are different, as they work for private companies, who are under no obligation to share health records or records of exposure (all employees wear badges measuring radiation exposure each day). As a result, there has been virtually no studies on this topic.

There was one for the Calvert Cliffs plant in Maryland years ago, but it was small and inconclusive. I know of one for Canadian workers that was in a journal a few years ago, but again, that found nothing.

Truly, I don't know of anything we can do to force the release of these records.

Joe Mangano
Executive Director
Radiation and Public Health Project

Advisory Board
FUSE USA