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Uranium plant overdose Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.courier-journal.com/localnews/2001/01/11/ky_uran.htmlhttp://www.courier-journal.com/localnews/2001/01/11/ky_uran.html
Plant's radiation dwarfed limits
Up to 400 Paducah workers got doses 20 times current cutoff
By JAMES MALONE, The Courier-Journal
A C-J in-depth look: The Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant
PADUCAH, Ky. -- As many as 400 former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant workers received an annual radiation dose up to 20 times the limit now considered safe, a Department of Energy report said.
Assistant Energy Secretary David Michaels called the 180-page report released yesterday a "groundbreaking study" that has "important implications for the future -- for workers to get compensation."
President Clinton issued an order last month setting up a program to compensate workers with job-related illnesses at the Paducah plant and similar government facilities where uranium was enriched for use in nuclear weapons.
The Energy Department report did not identify exposed workers, nor did it suggest that the government intends to track down those at greatest risk to offer medical testing. Such tracking "isn't planned at the moment," Michaels said.
However, the department will discuss the report at a public meeting Feb. 1 in Paducah. Michaels said he hopes publicity about the findings and the public meeting will encourage former workers to step forward.
The report's researchers estimated that up to 4,000 workers performed duties between 1952 and 1985 in plant areas where they could have received high radiation exposure. One in 10 received doses "that approached or exceeded" regulatory limits, the report said, and many more workers went untested because managers did not think it necessary.
Based on an analysis of workplace air, the report's authors determined that some workers in the plant's riskiest jobs could have been exposed from 7 rem to nearly 100 rem of radiation a year. The current Energy Department limit for safe exposure for nuclear workers is 5 rem a year. A rem is a measure of radiation biological damage.
The report said workers at greatest risk would have been in one of three plant buildings, including a decontamination and cleaning building and a metals recovery building. It said maintenance workers and operators of uranium-processing equipment also showed evidence of high exposure, based on urinalysis records.
Workers in the decontamination and cleaning building "were possibly exposed to large quantities of radioactive materials in the form of aerosols," the report said. It also said the potential for radiological exposure was high in jobs to clean residue out of large metal casks used to ship uranium.
The conclusions were based in part on recently discovered results of airborne dust monitors in plant work areas.
William McMurry, a Louisville attorney in a $10 billion lawsuit brought on behalf of workers against former plant contractors, said the report "certainly does verify what we have believed and what we have uncovered." He said the report "is consistent with, and compatible with, air filtration information we have already received and have an opportunity to go through."
Excessive radiation exposure can cause leukemia and cancers of internal organs, notably the kidneys and lungs. Records show the Energy Department was tracking leukemia and lymphoma cases at the plant in the mid-1980s.
The yearlong exposure assessment project, conducted with help from the Paper Allied-Industrial Chemical and Energy Workers International union and researchers at the University of Utah, examined records at the uranium-enrichment plant to see what jobs held the most risk and what the exposure to workers may have been.
The report, coming amid numerous lawsuits alleging that Paducah workers were harmed by unknowing exposure to radiation, concluded that some exposure was either under-reported or missed. "It is likely that some or perhaps many worker radiation doses are not in the record," the report said.
But the report also cautioned that its focus on "work locations" means that "the data presented should not be used to infer exposures that may have occurred to individuals."
Last fall, officials from the Energy Department's operations office in Oak Ridge, Tenn., sharply criticized a draft version of the report, saying it could lead to "unfair conclusions" and "confuse (a) layperson."
But the final report largely supported the draft. In one change, the final report "recommended" a further study to compare radiation-exposure database records at the plant to its paper files. The draft had said the comparison would be conducted.
An Energy Department spokesman said the change was made to leave the decision to the incoming Bush administration.
Mark Griffon, a health physicist who worked on the study, said it's important for the new administration to verify the data. Griffon said the study showed for the first time a "significant potential exposure for thorium," a radioactive metallic chemical, and established doses that workers received for neptunium and plutonium, two other radioactive metallic chemicals.
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