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- The exhumed bones of a long-dead uranium worker have
given a powerful boost to current employees' claims of dangerous exposures
inside a government-owned Kentucky plant that supplied radioactive fuel
for the nation's nuclear bombs.
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- The long-overlooked medical evidence from the case of
Joseph Harding suggests that for some workers radiation doses at the Paducah
Gaseous Diffusion Plant were far higher than previously believed, and may
have been dozens of times above federal limits, according to one analysis
of the data.
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- The hazards for uranium workers are further underscored
by unpublished research from a sister plant in Tennessee. A draft study
of workers at the K-25 plant in Oak Ridge shows unusually high death rates
for former uranium workers, as well as sharply higher rates of lung and
bone cancers.
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- The results of Harding's posthumous tests, conducted
as part of a lawsuit in 1983 but never published, offer the strongest corroboration
to date of hazardous conditions inside the Paducah plantstrongest corroboration
to date of hazardous conditions inside the uranium , where workers labored
for decades in a haze of radioactive dust that was sometimes laced with
deadly plutonium.
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- "Uranium content of the bone was far in excess of
normal expectations," wrote Alice Stewart, an internationally known
British researcher who reviewed the results of laboratory tests of Harding's
remains for his estate. "The terminal finding overrules all earlier
impressions [from U.S. government officials] of NO internal depositions
of uranium."
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- Lab technicians were unaware of the presence of plutonium
at the plant and did not test for it. Plutonium is about 100,000 times
more radioactive per gram than uranium and can cause cancer if inhaled
in microscopic amounts. Workers only recently learned that plutonium and
other highly radioactive metals entered the plant in contaminated uranium
shipments from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s.
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- The Department of Energy has launched an extensive investigation
into claims of worker exposures at the Paducah plant as well as the K-25
plant and a third facility in Ohio. While the department had not evaluated
the results of Harding's bone tests as of last week, agency officials said
it is now clear that uranium workers were not properly protected until
at least 1990, when new safety guidelines were implemented.
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- "This reaffirms our decision to get out of the business
of fighting sick workers," David Michaels, assistant secretary for
environment, safety and health, said in an interview Friday. "This
case is an example of how the DOE placed mission and secrecy in a paramount
position in the past. Right now, we should be bending over backward to
help those workers who helped win the Cold War for us."
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- Both the Paducah and K-25 plants were owned by the federal
government and operated by the same group of corporate contractors: Union
Carbide from the 1950s to the early 1980s, followed by Martin Marietta
and Lockheed Martin Corp.
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- The latter two are the targets of a lawsuit filed by
a group of current employees who allege unsafe working conditions and environmental
contamination. Former workers also have alleged that radiation monitoring
equipment at the Paducah plant was defective; in some cases, they say,
"film" badges used to monitor exposures contained no film.
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- "The dose evidence corroborates our allegations
that the health physics program at Paducah has been essentially nonexistent,"
said Thomas Cochran, nuclear program director at the Natural Resources
Defense Council, which joined workers in the lawsuit. "The contractors
have been operating in callous disregard for the health and safety of the
work force."
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- Harding, an 18-year veteran plant worker who died of
cancer in 1980, was hailed last week by Energy Secretary Bill Richardson
as a "hero of the Cold War." But for the nine years before his
death his claims of radiation exposure were vigorously challenged by contractors
and Energy Department officials, who said conditions in the plant were
safe.
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- The department disputed Harding's allegations verified
years later by other workers of a dense fog of uranium dust and smoke
that would cling to workers' skin and coat their throats and teeth. A department
study in 1981 attributed Harding's death to a combination of smoking and
eating country ham.
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- Eventually Harding developed stomach cancer along with
an array of unusual maladies that are sometimes linked to radiation exposure,
including perforations in his lungs and strange fingernail-like growths
on his palms, wrists and shoulders. But after being discharged from the
plant in 1971, Harding was denied a disability pension and lost his medical
insurance. His widow's efforts to reclaim the pension were opposed by lawyers
for Union Carbide and the Energy Department, and she eventually settled
her claim for $12,000.
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- The exhumation of Harding's remains in 1983 was a final
attempt by Harding's widow to verify his assertions of exposure to radioactive
uranium dust in the plant. His bones were analyzed by a Canadian lab for
uranium, but for reasons now unclear the results were never published.
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- The lab report obtained last week by The Post
not only supported Harding's claims of radiation exposure but also suggested
hazards at the plant were far greater than previously believed: More than
a dozen years after Harding left the plant, his body contained uranium
at levels up to 133 times higher than is normally found in bones.
-
- Moreover, the type of uranium found was "not from
natural sources," and apparently came from the plant's uranium enrichment
process, the report said.
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- Because uranium is slowly purged by the body over time,
the levels in Harding's bones would have been "several-fold higher"
during the time he was employed, the lab report stated.
-
- Exactly how much higher is unclear. But Carl Johnson,
a Colorado physician and radiation consultant who analyzed the test results
for Harding's widow in 1983, said Harding's uranium "bone burden"
in the 1970s would have been between 1,700 and 34,000 times higher than
normal. Based on those levels, the annual radiation dose to Harding's bone
tissue would have been 30 to 600 rems a year. Under current standards,
U.S. nuclear industry workers are allowed a maximum full-body dose of 5
rems a year.
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- Radiation experts who reviewed the data for The Post
said the results could have been skewed by a number of factors, including
the possible presence of plutonium in Harding's bone tissue. But by any
measure, the exposure was certainly high.
-
- Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy
and Environmental Research, said conditions at Paducah appear to have been
similar to an Energy Department site at Fernald, Ohio, where concentrations
of radioactive particles in the air are now known to have far exceeded
then-allowable limits, in one instance by 97,000 times.
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- "The DOE and its contractor Union Carbide committed
a gross injustice on Joe Harding," Makhijani said. "The DOE is
perpetuating that injustice upon the half-million people who worked in
the nuclear weapons complex since it has not yet provided the vast majority
of the survivors among them with medical monitoring and medical help."
-
- Energy Department officials are now pledging increased
medical tests and possibly compensation to thousands of men and women who
were exposed to chemical and radiological hazards at Paducah and other
facilities in the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. The department's investigative
team at Paducah in coming weeks will attempt to determine exactly what
the hazards were, and who was exposed.
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- The task is fraught with obstacles, including a dearth
of monitoring data from the early years when radiation exposures were likely
to be highest. Unlike the K-25 plant, no comprehensive study of worker
histories has been attempted at Paducah.
-
- The draft study of uranium workers at the K-25 plant
appears to offer further support for concerns about hazards inside such
facilities. The mortality study of about 11,000 former workers at the plant
was conducted by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education. Although
the research essentially was completed in 1994, funding for the study was
dropped before it could be peer reviewed and published in a scientific
journal.
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- The draft report, obtained by The Post, shows higher
rates of death for all causes among former workers, a finding that is significant
in itself, given that government workers are typically healthier than the
general population because of higher salaries and access to health care.
-
- The study also shows higher rates of cancers of the lung
(19 percent) and bone (82 percent) among white male workers compared with
the general population. Both cancers are sometimes linked to radiation
exposure.
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- Researchers point to several factors that could have
skewed the results, including the inclusion in the survey of a sample of
thousands of people who worked at the K-25 plant for a relatively brief
period during World War II.
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- Since many able-bodied men were in the military during
that period, the remaining work force may have been less healthy than the
general population, the authors said.
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- A new study is underway to track death rates among K-25
workers who were exposed to the highest amounts of radiation. Similar mortality
studies at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Ohio have shown relatively
low rates of cancer.
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- Another possible problem in evaluating risks for Paducah
workers is the reliability of the data. Previous Energy Department audits
of the plant's safety records cited extensive problems with monitoring
programs and equipment. And former and current workers at the plant say
they believe radiation monitoring was shoddy in the past.
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- Al Puckett, a retired union shop steward who worked at
the gaseous diffusion plant in the 1960s and 1970s, said workers would
sometimes open their "film" badges only to find no film inside.
Suspecting that no one ever examined workers' radiation monitors, Puckett
and his colleagues sometimes exposed the badges to radiation by leaving
them for hours on top of barrels of enriched uranium.
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- "We turned the badges in and that was the last we
heard of it," he said. "No one ever said anything to us."
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- © 1999 The Washington Post Company
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