The Nation - News from July 10, 1985

The health of people living around the Oak Ridge, Tenn., National Laboratory has not been endangered by the burial of nuclear waste in the hills around the facility, a National Academy of Sciences panel reported. The committee said small amounts of leakage of radioactive material have occurred over the last 40 years but, it said, “Impacts on the health of people living off-site are so small as to be trivial. Neither calculated nor measured cumulative radiation doses to residents of Oak Ridge appear to be different from natural background radiation levels.”