The Hanford data - a reply to recent criticisms

According to the authors of this paper the records of several thousand men who died from various causes after working in a US nuclear facility show evidence of a rising cancer risk with rising dose. The records also showed that there was no quetion of the dose levels lying outside the range of permissible doses, and it was finally concluded that the cancer risk from low level radiation could be ten to twenty times higher than estimates based on A-bomb survivors. This conclusion has been hotly disputed and the present paper is an attempt to show that none of the objections which have so far been raised is soundly based. The paper concludes with a suggestion that since the A-bomb radiation was a known cause of early deaths from bone marrow depression, there could easily have been some masking of later cancer deaths as a result of potentially active bone marrow being replaced by scar tissue. (Orig.)