Study Finds Little Cancer Risk at Plutonium Site
A 13-year federal study has found that people living near a site that supplied the nation’s nuclear arsenal with plutonium did not receive major doses of radiation during the Cold War.
The report said few people near the Savannah River Site, near Aiken, had a substantially higher cancer risk from pollution between the early 1950s and 1992, when production shut down.
Scientists used 50,000 boxes of records, some of which had been classified for decades, to reconstruct chemical and radiation releases during the Cold War. The study began in 1992.
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