The descriptive statistics and health implications of occupational radiation doses received by men at the Sellafield nuclear installation before the conception of their children

Abstract

From a database of a quarter of a million births in Cumbria during 1950-89, 10 363 children have been positively linked to paternal employment at the Sellafield nuclear installation in West Cumbria at, or before, the conception of the child, 9256 of these children being associated with paternal preconceptional radiation exposure. The doses of external whole-body radiation received by fathers prior to conception have been estimated from annual recorded doses, and the detailed distributions of these preconceptional doses are presented. The collective paternal total preconceptional dose is 539 person-Sv, a mean individual preconceptional dose per paternally exposed child of 58 mSv. The number of serious hereditary effects predicted to be induced by this collective dose among these first generation children is less than two, and these will not be discernible against the much larger number of background cases. There is no evidence of an excess of hereditary disorders in the immediate vicinity of Sellafield, although comprehensive studies have not, as yet, been carried out. The suggestion advanced by Gardner et al. (1990) that paternal preconceptional irradiation is sufficient to account for the excess of childhood leukaemia cases in the West Cumbrian Village of Seascale is highly unlikely to be correct because, inter alia, of the absence of a comparable excess among children born outside Seascale who are associated with the great majority (93%) of the collective paternal preconceptional dose.