with the same treatment. Without these last data we would 

 be inclined to suppose that the Wiscasset worms, whose ex- 

 posure occurred during residence in a very small area of 

 reactor-contaminated mud, simply had not yet come to equi- 

 librium with the higher tracer concentrations; this is a 

 reasonable contrast to the Portland worms, all of whose 



lives had, by definition, been spent in environments con- 

 taminated by fallout. The solubilization data suggest 

 strongly, however, that there are differences in metabolic 

 reactivity of the tracers from fallout or from reactor 

 effluent, that fallout tracers are considerably more avail' 

 able to nereid worms for tissue uptake, than are reactor 

 tracers, but that the distributions within the tissues are 

 still different. Evidently this is an area of investi- 

 gation that should be of real interest to NRC as it is to 



us . 



30 



