The Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project: A public communications effort toward credibility, understanding, and independence

Beginning in the early 1940s, the federal government's Hanford Site in southeastern Washington State contributed greatly to the US nuclear legacy. For decades its secrets lay undisturbed in classified records, unavailable to the public. Many of these documents, however, may reveal how and why hundreds of thousands of curies of radioiodine and other radioactive materials were released into the Northwest environment beginning nearly 50 years ago. Shortly after the release of nearly 19,000 pages of once-secret documents in the spring of 1986, a project driven by public concern evolved - the Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction (HEDR) project. The study would estimate the exposures that thousands of residents living in the area had received from radioactive materials release from the Hanford Site since 1944. A technical steering panel (TSP) of scientists and experts was assembled to direct this comprehensive study. The US Department of Energy (USDOE) pacific Northwest Laboratory (PNL) located in Richland, Washington, was selected to conduct the research, data gathering and analysis. Without question this complex project will require an enormous public communications effort to be successful. The paper discusses the following aspects of the effort: public trust, total independence, enhanced public understanding, and preliminary dose estimates