To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > News May 6, 2000 URL: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2000/05/06/nuclear America's Cold War casualties A former Energy Department official dissects President Clinton's new plan to help the sick workers who built the country's nuclear arsenal. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Robert Alvarez Barely noticed in the media blizzard swirling around Elián González, the stock market crash and street protests in Washington last month, the Clinton administration quietly proposed a plan to compensate Department of Energy workers ailing from illnesses related to beryllium and radiation exposure. This is the U.S. government's first real response to a long-term problem it has only recently admitted: The stockpiling of nuclear missiles during the Cold War era came at a considerable human cost. The DOE now acknowledges that radiation exposure at its nuclear plants has led to an increased risk of cancer for the agency's own employees. Spurred by Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson, the White House proposes to spend an estimated $400 million over the next five years and give the DOE sweeping powers to determine how and if workers should be compensated. Though still subject to congressional approval, this plan is deeply flawed, because it roughly equates to giving the tobacco industry authority to decide who, if anyone, should be compensated for smoking-related diseases. Furthermore, the DOE would allocate funds to the program from its overall budget -- forcing sick workers and their families to compete for cash during the congressional budgeting process with other departmental priorities, like the powerful nuclear weapons laboratories, massive environmental cleanup programs and ongoing research and development efforts. Given the clout of the weapons program alone, it doesn't take a nuclear rocket scientist to figure out how well the sick workers will fare. Nevertheless, the decision to even try to compensate nuclear weapons workers -- with payments as high as $100,000 in extreme cases -- is an acknowledgment not only of the cost of disease in the workplace but also of the DOE's past abuse of power in putting people at risk without their informed consent. Richardson first announced his agency's shift in tack last July, when he said that President Clinton would seek to establish a federal compensation program for sick Energy Department employees. As part of an interagency effort convened by Clinton, the DOE compiled recent health studies (both published and unpublished) of its employees. All told, workers at 14 DOE facilities were found to have increased risks of death from various cancers and nonmalignant diseases after exposure to radiation and other substances. Some of the studies also supported the controversial 1976 findings of Thomas Mancuso, Alice Stewart and George Kneale, who documented a tenfold increase in radiation-caused cancer risks in employees at the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington state. Since the days of radium's discovery by Marie Curie, Americans have struggled with the dangerous health effects of atomic energy. Curie's own denial of radiation dangers is emblematic of the legacy we now face as America's long romance with the atom slowly degrades into a bad memory that won't fade away. The once-dynamic and sprawling federal nuclear weapons industry and its civilian counterpart are phasing down, leaving behind serious environmental and health issues that will need to be addressed for centuries to come. The DOE's long-standing indifference to sick workers originated in the Cold War culture of isolation and secrecy, wherein sick workers who filed claims were looked upon as threats to the nation's goal of nuclear deterrence. The DOE relies on contractors to perform about 90 percent of its work, including the day-to-day operation of its nuclear plants, and to guarantee a safe working environment. But the agency has perpetuated its disturbing record by blocking any outside regulation of worker safety. No other federal entity engaged in hazardous activities has been permitted to maintain such sweeping self-policing powers, without outside accountability. As a result, the DOE still does not have a meaningful worker safety regulatory regime in place. And until 1988, DOE contractors were shielded from any criminal and legal liability for the extraordinary dangers of nuclear production, with the U.S. government picking up the tab for any lawsuits brought against them, even for criminal acts of willful negligence. Legal protections afforded to contractors were used to block compensation of sick workers in workplace-exposure lawsuits. In the not-so-distant past, the DOE even went to illegal extremes to shield itself from worker suits. In the early 1980s, it was discovered that the state of Nevada had had a secret agreement with the DOE and its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission, dating back to the 1950s that allowed the agencies to determine radiation compensation claims filed by Nevada test site workers or their survivors. In 1984, a federal appeals court ruled that the program was illegal. This aggressive policy to avoid legal liability for worker compensation at all costs persists, despite the best efforts by a succession of energy secretaries to change it. For instance, on May 14, 1997, an explosion occurred at Hanford, exposing 11 workers to dangerous materials. They suffered blistering, hearing loss, coughing fits and headaches minutes after being marched outside under the toxic explosion's plume. Mandatory equipment to test for radiological exposure, such as nasal swabs and urine-testing equipment, suddenly disappeared when it was most needed. The workers were told to drive themselves to the hospital, but after consulting with Hanford officials, physicians refused to perform blood and urine testing. The workers were then sent home in their contaminated clothing. Today, many are still sick and can't return to work. Only after direct intervention that year by then-Energy Secretary Federico Peña did the DOE and its Washington contractor grudgingly agree, after lengthy delays, to fund limited independent medical tests. But after Peña's departure from the department, the Hanford victims were effectively ignored, their case buried in bureaucratic mire. The only public acknowledgment of negligence the victims received was an indirect apology on television by the contractor's president -- after a scathing report by the state was released. In recent years, workplace safety has steadily decreased at several DOE sites. The skilled and qualified personnel needed to ensure safe storage and processing of nuclear materials are rapidly graying. "Some sites are in danger of losing this expertise through retirement and have not implemented provisions to maintain the necessary knowledge base," stated a September 1998 DOE oversight report. More recently, in a stinging professional dissent in February, a senior nuclear weapons safety official noted: "The department delegated safety to those running the hazardous operations. The tradition of 'leave it to those who know best' colored and compromised" safety at the DOE's nuclear facilities. Between 1991 and 1999, there were at least 18 incidents at a high-level radioactive-waste incineration facility at the DOE's Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory in which workers were exposed to excessive levels of radiation, a separate September 1998 report noted. "Workplace safety at INEEL has deteriorated since 1994 ... corrective action plans found that deficiencies were not resolved and that lessons learned from previous accidents were not being effectively applied ... One-fifth of all INEEL occurrences in 1997 were related to radiation protection (personnel contamination)," the report read. From the 1940s to the present, the senior ranks of the DOE and its predecessors were well aware of continuing problems of exposure at nuclear weapons sites across the country. But they chose to suppress this information and avoid taking necessary protective measures. According to once-classified records, from the late '40s through the '60s, the leadership of the AEC was told on several occasions that numerous workers had been exposed at federal nuclear sites in New Mexico, Washington, New York, Ohio, Colorado and Tennessee. In some instances, workers showed current medical evidence of harm. In 1951, the AEC's Advisory Committee on Biology and Medicine was told that exposure to radiation at AEC plants was "a very serious health problem. This problem is present in other AEC manufacturing plants and will be important in new installations not only from the standpoint of real injury but because of the extreme difficulty of defense in cases of litigation." The same year, after repeated efforts to persuade the AEC to conduct radiation-related cancer studies, the advisory committee's vice chairman, Ernest Goodpasture, wrote to AEC Chairman Gordon Dean, stating, "Cancer is a significant industrial hazard of the atomic energy business ... The committee recommends the cancer program be pursued as a humanitarian duty to the nation." His plea went unheeded, and the AEC decided not to inform workers of their exposure or to take any medically protective action because, according to a 1960 memo uncovered at a Paducah, Ky., facility, the release of such information "is reflected in an increase in insurance claims, increased difficulty in labor relations and adverse public sentiment." The recent disclosure by the Washington Post of lax working conditions at the DOE's plant in Paducah demonstrates that this pattern of behavior has not changed much. For decades, Paducah workers were not told they were being exposed to dangerous radioisotopes such as plutonium-239, neptunium-237 and technetium-99. The government and its contractors chose not to tell them because they feared the workers would seek compensation for harm to health and the unions would demand hazardous-duty pay. In February, the Post revealed that an unknown number of nuclear weapons components are buried and stored at Paducah, posing additional risks to workers there. From the dawn of the nuclear age, researchers recognized that the risks posed to nuclear weapons workers over time were poorly understood. Robert Stone, head of the health division of the Manhattan Project, noted shortly after World War II that worker radiation protection ... rested on rather poor experimental evidence." He concluded, "The whole clinical study of the personnel is one vast experiment. Never before has so large a collection of individuals been exposed to so much irradiation." Beginning in the mid-1970s, studies of DOE workers engendered considerable controversy, in large part because of concerns over the DOE's conflict of interest as an employer. The person who sparked the controversy was Mancuso, a quiet, unassuming researcher. The Atomic Energy Commission approached Mancuso in 1964 to study the potential long-term health impact on workers at several government nuclear facilities. As an AEC advisor described it, "Much of the motivation for starting this study arose from the 'political need' for assurance that AEC employees were not suffering harmful effects." But instead of reducing pressures in the AEC, the research Mancuso did with Stewart and Kneale only exacerbated matters. Indeed, the DOE, the AEC's successor, expressed its ingratitude for their groundbreaking work by terminating their research contract. In 1990, the DOE was forced by Congress to turn over data from other DOE sites to Stewart, who had, along with her colleagues, continued the research with independent funding. The same year, also as a result of congressional pressure and a growing lack of public trust, the DOE entered into a formal agreement with the Department of Health and Human Services to manage and conduct DOE worker health studies. Yet these studies have been obscured from public attention, largely because the controversy within the DOE had died down. As the DOE confronts its nuclear legacy, the pattern established by Curie is repeating itself. First, the early warning signs appear -- as when young journalist Florence Pfaltzgraph in 1926 told Curie about the young women at a radium plant in Essex, N.J., who were dying from necrosis of the jaw after blithely ingesting deadly amounts of radium, which their managers had told them would add to their vitality. Today, the signs are still either ignored or attacked as not being credible. Then official disbelief sets in until the evidence becomes overwhelming. (Curie herself refused to accept that radiation had anything to do with the New Jersey tragedies, only to die herself less than a decade later of bone marrow cancer.) By the time officials acknowledge the problem, it's too late. Even though the American victims of the Cold War have a powerful supporter in Energy Secretary Richardson, he will soon be gone, perhaps even before the end of the Clinton adminstration. In his wake, many questions will remain: Will the next energy secretary be as committed as Richardson to helping the sick workers? Even if Congress enacts compensation legislation this year, will it be enough? And will Congress be willing to continue the program next year? If the DOE is allowed to decide on compensation, will sick workers get as much priority in the next administration as nuclear weapons production and environmental cleanup? What form of justice, if any, will America's Cold War veterans ultimately get? salon.com | May 6, 2000   - - - - - - - - - - - - About the writer Robert Alvarez served as senior policy advisor for environment, safety and health to Department of Energy Secretary Bill Richardson.