Much of the radioactive iodine may have fallen from the air as it drifted to the east. But fallout is believed to have reached as far west as the Yakima area. According to information from the Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project, those who grew their own food and drank milk from a cow grazed on their property are most likely to have consumed Hanford's radioactive iodine. Sanders' brother and sisters were close in age - the youngest a toddler and the oldest in grade school by the time they left Yakima County for the Midwest. They returned, however, to spend much of the their childhood in Kennewick in the 1950s.
Children are particularly susceptible to radioactive iodine, which is taken up by the thyroid.
Infants and adults would have absorbed the same amount of iodine. But because an infant's thyroid is a 10th the size of an adult, the dose is effectively 10 times larger. Sanders went to work at Hanford in the 1970s - and was proud of the job she did at the Fast Flux Test Facility. But she no longer trusts Hanford officials. A lot of people are dead or don't live here anymore.