Date

Jan 5, 1951

Description

This study is listed on OpenNet as being in the NTA collection and the editor has requested a PDF from the Department of Energy. Only the excerpts collected by Ferenc Szasz and his notes are available at present.

In this research update, the UCLA scientists reported that they had found plutonium in soil and plants collected from various locations “along the line of Fall-out for at least a distance of eighty-five miles from the Fenced Area.” They also found “alpha emitters, presumably plutonium, … in airborne material from the Crater Region and the Chupadera Mesa.” While concentrations in the soil were variable, the “maximum concentrations ... outside the Fenced Area are found approximately twenty-eight miles from Zero in the downwind trail of the Fall-out.” The scientists suggested that the “air-borne material ... because of its particle size and level of alpha activity appear[ed] at this time, to be of greatest concern.”

The researchers studied rodents that had been collected 28 to 30 miles from the Crater and found alpha activity in their bones, liver, muscle and connective tissue. By contrast, they did not find alpha activity in rodents that were collected in and near the Crater. With respect to the data’s “biological significance,” they could not evaluate it because it was not “possible under the present circumstances ... to assess the potential hazard of plutonium found to the people and cattle living on the Chupadera Mesa.” According to the report, “this area is not suitable for the collection of field data on food ordinarily consumed by humans and no good study has been possible with cattle in the area.”

Source

University of New Mexico, Center for Southwest Research, Ferenc Szasz Papers, box 7, folder 34

Document published in following posting(s):

The First Atomic Explosion, 16 July 1945

Jul 16, 2024

H. Larsen et al., University of California Los Angeles, School of Medicine, Atomic Energy Project, “Alpha Activity Due to the 1945 Atomic Bomb Detonation at Trinity, Alamogordo, New Mexico --- An Interim Report,” UCLA-108, Submitted 5 January 1951, notes and Annotated excerpts, unclassified