Leukemia rate reaches a low point at age fifteen and then it gradually goes up for the rest of life. . . . I had been measuring the health effects of one, two, three, four, and five chest X-rays. Then I found that the federal government allows the general public to receive up to five hundred millirems per year. That is equivalent in bone marrow dose to one hundred chest X-rays per year. When you approach it from that direction, from low to high, instead of coming down to the standards from the atomic bomb casualties where people died immediately from high levels of radiation, the impact is different.
Federal standards derive from research on high exposures in a bomb situation.
But it isn't. So I began to study the history of the federal regulations. I started investigating it on my own and reading everything I could find. I started looking at where the utility companies were getting the information they were giving people on the radiation questions. I found out it was pretty much coming from the American military experience at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.