United States Transuranium Registry annual report October 1, 1979-October 1, 1980 to Human Health and Assessments Division, US Department of Energy

One of the primary objectives of the United States Transuranium Registry is to improve health physics models used to evaluate occupational exposure from internally deposited transuranic elements. During FY 1980 emphasis continued to be placed on improving methods for collecting data. The use of a prosector for all cases assures that autopsy tissue samples are properly identified and reasonably well cleaned. A procedure has been developed at the University of California Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory to ash tissue specimens collected as part of this program. This same method is also being utilized at the Rocky Flats Analytical laboratory. A comparison of data collected from thirteen USTR autopsy cases using wet and ashed weights was made. The results suggest that the use of ashed weights improves the agreement of the systemic burden at autopsy to that estimated using ante mortem health physics data by a factor of nearly two.