Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
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.
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