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Letter Report to Review and Comment on the Phase II Draft Report Prepared for the CDC by the Risk Assessment Corporation (RAC) Titled "Savannah River Site Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project Phase II" (2000)
Commission on Life Sciences (CLS)

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  1. “Do the Phase II results provide adequate information to establisha risk-based screening level for radionuclides?”

At a meeting with representatives of CDC and the Risk AssessmentsCorporation (RAC) in Augusta, Georgia, after a visit to the SavannahRiver Site (SRS) on the afternoon of March 30, 1999, the committeewas further charged with reviewing and commenting on

  1. “The Community Executive Summary prepared by CDC and RAC for publicinformational purposes”.

  2. “Ease of use and utility of the electronic version of the Draft FinalReport”.

In the paragraphs to follow, the committee sets out its overall viewof the strengths and weaknesses of the document and then addressesthe eight points enumerated above.

General assessment:

It would be difficult to read the Draft Final Report and be unimpressedby the care with which RAC has surveyed, collated, and interpretedthe historical information bearing on the radioactive and chemicalreleases from SRS. Clearly, the RAC staff has done an exemplary job.Notwithstanding that, the report is difficult, indeed tedious, toread and is more repetitive than seems necessary. The committee believesthat the report could be improved by more rigorous editing and theuse of internal cross-referencing to avoid some of the repetition.

The report refers to doses throughout—in text, figures, and tables—but, rarely specifies their type (such as effective, equivalent,and committed). An effort should be made to ensure that the typeof dose is always clearly specified; otherwise, information takenout of context can be easily misunderstood. That applies to all figures,tables, and text.

The committee believes that the report should devote more effortto giving overviews of measured levels and tying together variouscollections of measurement data. For example, for I-131 in milk,chapter 10 presents no graph or table of variations in average levelsby year, but presents only levels measured in one specific year;therefore, the reader cannot form an overall picture of the levels.It would also be helpful if a graph showed whether estimated amountsof I-131 released at SRS in various years correlated with the amountsfound in milk in those years, with appropriate adjustments for contributionsfrom global fallout or fallout from Nevada Test Site activities.

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