SPOKANE - A federal advisory panel has finished its critique of a controversial study that found no adverse health effects from Cold War radiation releases from the Hanford nuclear reservation.

The critique was set for release today.

The National Research Council was asked to review the findings of a nine-year, $18 million study of Hanford radiation doses and increased incidents of thyroid disease among people living downwind from the nuclear reservation in the 1940s and 1950s.

The council, part of the National Academies, was asked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to analyze the scientific soundness of the study, released in January as a "draft"without the traditional scientific peer review.

The council also agreed in April to review whether the draft results were "appropriately communicated"to skeptical Hanford downwinders, who attacked the study.

The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle conducted the study, which found no link between offsite releases of radioactive iodine and increased thyroid disease among nearly 3,500 people born near Hanford between 1940 and 1946.

The Research Council's 217-page critique examined the Fred Hutchinson data and how it was interpreted and communicated, spokesman Bill Kearney said.

Since the study's release, several prominent scientists have criticized such aspects as its statistical power, reliance on computer-modeled dose estimates and failure to explain why it found so much thyroid disease and early death in the group of people studied.

Other scientists who critiqued the study for the CDC also asked why the study group had a death rate 20 percent higher than normal. An unusually high number died at or near birth, especially in Franklin County, they noted.

At a public meeting in May in Spokane, CDC epidemiologist Dr. Paul Garbe said the study also showed that thyroid disease and cancer were found in the study population.

Although it found no correlation between higher radiation doses and increased thyroid diseases, the study results "do not prove there is no link between thyroid disease and Iodine 131,"Garbe said.

Fred Hutchinson officials had no immediate comment Monday.

The study examined the thyroid health of 3,441 people born between 1940 and 1946 in seven Eastern Washington counties. Those people were children when substantial amounts of Iodine-131 were released into the air around Hanford between 1944 and 1957 and carried by the wind toward the northeast.

Children are particularly susceptible to radioactive iodine, which concentrates in the thyroid gland. Researchers have found that downwinders who grew their own food and drank milk from a cow that grazed in the area were most likely to have ingested radioactive iodine from the Hanford releases.