Radioactive Dogs Buried In Hanford

Some 828 dead dogs, the remains of an unusual Cold War radiation experiment, were shipped to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation for burial last month.

Coming next: 17.5 tons of their radioactive excrement.

``Hanford has reached the pinnacle of waste disposal; we're now accepting doo-doo,'' said Bill Whiting, spokesman for Westinghouse Hanford, which operates the 560-square-mile reservation for the U.S. Department of Energy.

The dead beagles, shipped from California in 55-gallon drums, were buried in trenches in Hanford's 200 West area a few weeks ago. Their remains had been stored in freezers at the Institute of Toxicology and Environmental Health on the University of California-Davis campus.

The last dog died at the age of 18 in 1986, 27 years after the government-funded beagle experiments

began at UC-Davis.

The dogs left behind tons of urine and feces, which are still being studied in California. Since the wastes are radioactive, they also must be buried and shipped under regulations governing low-level radioactive waste. No date has been set for delivery to Hanford.

The beagle cleanup, estimated to cost $22 million, is part of a nationwide Department of Energy effort to

clean up radiation contamination at university labs where government research was conducted.

The burial closes a chapter in a government effort to test the effect of radioactive fallout. The Atomic Energy Commission, the

precursor to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, gave grants to several West Coast universities to conduct animal experiments in the late 1950s, when public concern about fallout from open-air nuclear weapons tests was mounting. UC-Davis' share eventually totaled $65 million.

The beagle project compared canine reaction to certain radioactive particles with human cases of radiation overdose, said Dr. Otto Raabe, the UC-Davis professor who has directed the beagle research for the last 15 years.

In the UC-Davis experiment, the dogs either were put on a diet of bone-seeking strontium-90, irradiated with cobalt-60 or injected with radium. About a year and a half later, the treatment would stop and the dogs would be sent to live in outdoor cages until they died.

The experiments have shown that dogs fed high doses of radiation get cancer more quickly than people. The dogs that received the lowest doses didn't get cancer, Raabe said. Raabe plans to publish 15 papers over the next two years on the experiments.

Even after death, the dogs were radioactive. Strontium, an extremely toxic substance, loses half its radioactivity every 27.7 years.

Cleanup at the Davis research site started three years ago. It has included inch-by-inch studies of contaminated buildings and a detailed search of an acre-and-a-half area for radiation contamination.