Improving estimates of exposures for epidemiologic studies of plutonium workers

Epidemiologic studies of nuclear facilities usually focus on relations between cancer and doses from external penetrating radiation, and describe these exposures with little detail on measurement error and missing data. We demonstrate ways to document complex exposures to nuclear workers with data on external and internal exposures to ionizing radiation and toxic chemicals. We describe methods for assessing internal exposures to plutonium and external doses from neutrons; the use of a job exposure matrix for estimating chemical exposures; and methods for imputing missing data for exposures and doses. For plutonium workers at Rocky Flats, errors in estimating neutron doses resulted in underestimating the total external dose for production workers by about 16%. Estimates of systemic deposition do not correlate well with estimates of organ doses. Only a small percentage of workers had exposures to toxic chemicals, making epidemiologic assessments of risk difficult.