Fallout
April 26, 1953
A grad student in Dr. Herbert Clarke’s physics lab at RPI in Troy, New York, was shocked when the readings in lab Geiger counters went off-scale the morning of April 26, 1953.
Thirty-six hours earlier, a nuclear detonation test was initiated at the Shot Simon nuclear test facility in Nevada.
The federal government denied that these were related. Testing later suggested an exposure of 2 rem/ person in Upstate New York.
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The radiobiology is, that atomic testing as was done that week, releases radioactive particles into the atmosphere up to 40,000 ft where the Jet Stream could carry contamination East, and where rain could collect and drop radioactivity to the ground.
Of the more than 200 fission products generated that day, two radionuclides, strontium-90 and iodine-131, represent a medical risk greater than simple surface exposure.
The half life degradation of I-131 is a mere 8 days, whereas Sr-90 degrades over 30 years.
Sr-90 is an analogue of calcium which the body deposits in bone, in a concentrating effect. I-131 is physiologically concentrated into the thyroid gland where normal dietary iodine is linked to to the normal thyroxine hormone.
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Under the Two-Hit Hypothesis of mutation biology, recessive cancer-generating mutations in DNA are dangerous when a mutation event occurs on both members of a homologous pair of chromosomes. For this reason, it may take 30 years or more for the recessive damaging mutation to express itself biologically.
It is thought that sustaining two hits at the same locus may take upwards of three decades to result in a cancer-causing effect.
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When a nuclear accident occurs, the two factors impacting a medical change are level of radioactivity and time of exposure.
In this case, malignancies of the bone (leukemia) and thyroid would be the endpoint to measure. Likewise, a comparable unaffected population (such as lactose intolerant children who were not exposed to milk) must serve as control to see if the treated populations has sustained a statistically higher incidence of these cancer types associate with radiation.
(…to be continued)
See: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/fallout-from-nuclear-weapons-tests-and-cancer-risks