nuclear-news

Cancers in workers at Israeli nuclear facility

Nuke plant workers exposed to high radiation levels Expert tells court former employees of Dimona nuclear facility who were diagnosed with cancer were exposed to year’s-worth of radiation on a daily basis YNet News, Naama Cohen Friedman  12.07.11, Workers at the Negev Nuclear Research Center were exposed to extremely high radiation levels – some as high as the annual limit – an expert on radiation safety told the court Wednesday.

Dr. Thelma Byrne’s statement was made during a court hearing in a case meant to determine whether former employees of the institute should be recognized as the victims of work-related accidents after they were diagnosed with cancer. The damages suit was submitted by 44 employees of the Dimona-based reactor and the Soreq Nuclear Research Center in
the mid 1990s. Some members of the plaintiff have since died.

“We would get contaminated each time,” Dr. Byrne, who used to head the
radiation safety department at the Soreq center, said in her
testimony. “I worked with materials whose nature was unknown. They
didn’t tell us what we were exposed to. Byrne claimed that some of the
cancer victims could have been spared if they would have undergone
preventative radiation exposure tests, but such tests were not given.

‘Many accidents at plant’
Effie Blecker, whose father worked for the Dimona center and died from
cancer urged the state to recognize the former employees as work
accident victims. He said that his father told him on his deathbed
that “there were many accidents at the plant that were not talked
about.”
He said that at times his father wouldn’t come home from work for
days; only later did it become evident that his father and his
colleagues had to stay at the plant to be  ….
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4158561,00.htm

December 8, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | health, Israel