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

May 6, 2000 | Barely noticed in the media blizzard swirling around Elian Gonzalez, 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 As part of an interagency effort convened by Clinton, the DOE compiled recent health studies (both published and unpublished) of its employees.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.

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