Salt Lake City visual artist Cara Despain’s work over the past several years has focused on the Cold War — specifically the nuclear weapons development and testing of that era. Think dramatic depictions of mushroom clouds after a nuclear explosion in stark black and white or cloaked in neon. It hasn’t been out of curiosity. For her, the connection is personal.
Despain’s mom Bonnie grew up in the southern Utah town of Newcastle, about 130 miles east of the Nevada Test Site where the government conducted 100 atmospheric nuclear weapons tests in the years after World War II. People exposed to that radiation are known as downwinders.
Her mom didn’t have many memories of the testing itself and always described a “quaint, bucolic rural life” in her hometown.
“She was always outside playing, picking apples in the orchard, doing all this fun stuff as a kid,” Despain said. “She just adored her life in the desert. So it kind of paints this other nice picture with a dark underbelly.”
In February, her mom died at the age of 81 of ALS, a rare neuromuscular disease. Knowing her mom’s proximity to nuclear testing, Despain submitted brainstem and spinal cord samples for ALS research. She also sent a post-cremation bone fragment to Purdue University professor Aaron Specht, who specializes in radiation safety and environmental health studies.
“He got back to me about a month later and was shocked to find the highest levels of cesium he's ever seen or been aware of measured in a human sample, and he was kind of stumped,” she said.
Radioactive cesium is created during nuclear fission and is incredibly toxic to humans.
While the link between radiation exposure and health issues like cancer is well documented, the revelation in Despain’s bone sample kicked off a new study spearheaded by the University of Utah focused on lesser-known long-term effects of radiation exposure.
“What's interesting is that this whole phenomenon has really been understudied,” said Daniel Mendoza, a University of Utah atmospheric science professor working on the project. “I think that this is really important for many reasons, particularly to understand the public health implications.”
The study comes as Utah’s nuclear research and energy conversation ramps up again. The state was selected as a finalist for a massive federal nuclear energy hub in July, and the campaign to drum up public support for the effort has already faced its share of controversy.
One of the biggest reasons there are gaps in radiation research is that the populations that could be studied are shrinking. The U.S. stopped atmospheric testing in 1963, and the people impacted by those tests are slowly getting older and dying out. The same can be said for other populations around the world, like the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 or Chernobyl in 1986.
“We worked really quickly as soon as we decided to coalesce as a group to try to get approvals because this is an intrusive study,” Mendoza said. “We want to make sure that we capture as much of the population available as we can.”
Researchers are looking for people who lived in Utah, New Mexico, Nevada or Arizona between 1951 and 1962 to send in fingernail samples. Although Despain first submitted a bone fragment, fingernails are an ideal sample because living people can supply them and they can be used to measure past radiation exposure.
“One of the big things that we would like to get out of this is just an understanding of how these old exposures are impacting both health and whether or not those radioactive signatures still exist in the body,” said fellow researcher Naomi Riches, a professor at the University of Utah’s medical school in obstetrics & gynecology.
Riches is particularly interested in exploring radiation’s long-term effects on the human reproductive system, something she said is a relative blind spot.
“I think there's a lot of anecdotal stories where you hear about someone that years later they have either problems with conceiving or continuing a pregnancy,” she said. “It's definitely worth exploring.”
The study has only been live for a few weeks, and they already have over a dozen respondents to their surveys. Riches and Mendoza said they want 300 samples for a good representation of the population and hope to gather enough by the end of the year for some preliminary findings.
Despain said, for her, today’s conversation around nuclear power in Utah makes the research even more important because “the implications to the present, and certainly the future, are huge.”
“I think all of these things are so meaningful for people that got sick,” she said. “Because we don't know what we're going to find, I think it could crack the door to a lot of other studies in science that could maybe draw lines to other illnesses that people have frankly been curious about for a long time.”
Editor’s note: KUER is a licensee of the University of Utah but operates as an editorially independent news organization.
