New A-Bomb Studies Alter Radiation Estimates

Some of the most important data on the effects of nuclear radiation on humans may be wrong, according to new research being done at the Lawrence Livermore Weapons Laboratory in California and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The new findings are far from welcome, as one consultant in this work says, for all the revisions are moving in the wrong direction - a direction that will worry the advocates of nuclear power. Government physicists have recalculated the data on the radiation fields created by the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and produced some unexpected results. Their statistics show that most of the cancer caused by those bombs came from low LET gamma rays, suggesting that this common type of radiation is more hazardous than had been assumed before.