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In December, the USTUR mailed its 2023 Registrant newsletter to living Registrants and deceased Registrants’ next of kin. This year’s newsletter included a note from the USTUR’s director, as well as information about the USTUR’s special session at the Health Physics Society’s winter workshop on internal dosimetry; resumption of in-person advisory committee meetings and active inventory of historical NHRTR samples; and background information about the radium studies that were carried out by Argonne National Laboratory and other institutions.

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The USTUR’s 2023 Annual Report has been completed and is available for download. The document summarizes organization, activities, and scientific accomplishments at the USTUR from April 1, 2022 to March 31, 2023 (fiscal year 2023). Research summaries include: bias in plutonium systemic and lung activity predictions, use of USTUR data to develop site-specific biokinetic models for dose reconstruction at the Rocky Flats Plant, modeling chelation for a female nuclear worker, and misclassification of underlying causes of death.

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George Tabatadze visited the Centre for Energy, Environmental and Technological Research (CIEMAT) in Madrid, Spain on June 21, 2023. CIEMAT staff provided him with a tour of multiple laboratories, including their whole body counting facility, ICP-MS lab, bioassay lab, and neutron dosimetry lab. While there, he had many good discussions with CIEMAT staff including conversations about USTUR materials and research.

PHOTO: George Tabatadze with Begoña Pérez López and Juan Francisco Navarro (left) and Maria Antonia Lopez (right) at the CIEMAT whole body counting facility

Sergei Tolmachev, George Tabatadze, and Maia Avtandilashvili attended the annual European Radiation Dosimetry Group (EURADOS) meeting in Porto, Portugal from June 12-15. This year’s annual meeting included a EURADOS school on the “contribution of dosimetry in the field of nuclear emergency preparedness and radiological accident management” as well as meetings of the EURADOS working groups (WG). USTUR faculty participated in the WG7 task group on internal dosimetry, and Maia Avtandilashvili provided an example of a plutonium contaminated wound case for the EURADOS/Radiation Emergency Medical Preparedness and Assistance Network (REMPAN) wound contamination project.

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The USTUR has completed its data quality objectives (DQO) document, which addresses the sample collection and data analysis needs in support of the United States Transuranium and Uranium Registries’ (USTUR) mission. The DQO process was originally developed by federal agencies to ensure that data of acceptable completeness and sufficient quality would be available to inform decisions about environmental cleanup. The USTUR generally does not make decisions based on its radiochemical measurement data, but rather uses the data it generates to quantitatively describe the biokinetics of uranium and transuranium elements in the human body. In this document, the USTUR presents its … » More …

We want to welcome the newest member of the USTUR research faculty, Xirui Liu. Ms. Liu has worked with the USTUR as a student collaborator since 2019, where her research focused on using autopsy reports to determine how often the underlying causes of death found on death certificates are incorrect. Ms. Liu has both a master’s degree in health informatics from Weill Cornell Medicine (2022), and a master’s in public health in international health and development from Tulane University (2021). She also earned her Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery degree from Huazhong University of Science … » More …

USTUR research assistant professor, Maia Avtandilashvili, and adjunct professor, Daniel Strom, have been selected to serve on the science advisory board that will conduct a peer review of the Environmental Protection Agency’s draft document Federal Guidance Report No. 16. FGR 16 “Cancer Risk Coefficients for Environmental Exposure to Radionuclides” is an update to FGR 13, which was published in 1999.

Join WSU Tri-Cities and the Herbert M. Parker Foundation to hear Werner Rühm discuss the process of updating International Commission on Radiological Protection’s (ICRP) recommendations for protecting people and the environment against radiation exposure. Dr. Rühm is the ICRP Main Commission chair and leads the Medical and Environmental Dosimetry Group at the Helmholtz Center, Munich Institute of Radiation Medicine in Germany. Visit the link below to watch.

Wednesday November 2, 12 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. PST
bit.ly/parkerlecture
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