Developing population estimates for dose reconstruction projects

The Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction (HEDR) Project was established in 1987 to estimate radiation doses that people received from nuclear operations at the Hanford site since 1944. To achieve this objective, demographic information was developed that describes the study population in enough detail to allow researchers to identify potentially exposed groups and the number of people in each of those groups. This type of information is central to most dose reconstruction projects. The purpose of this paper is to detail how historical population estimates can be reconstructed in a reliable manner by comparing results using three different estimation methods