nuclear-news

Robert and Sharon Houser are part of a “Special Exposure Cohort.”

It’s an honor they’d just as soon have done without.

What it means is that it may be marginally easier for them to get compensation from the government for the cancers they’ve suffered, which could be related to radiation exposure from when they worked at the Spencer Chemical Co.’s Jayhawk Works just north of Galena.

They were there when the company made a brief foray into processing uranium for the fledgling nuclear power industry in the 1950s and 1960s.

Since then, Sharon Houser, 73, has had a mastectomy for breast cancer and a hysterectomy for cervical cancer. Doctors got all the cancer both times, but she said she’s just waiting for the next outbreak.

Robert Houser, 75, has had two active skin cancers and more than 100 pre-cancerous lesions removed from his body. He said he’ll probably lose some more skin in a few weeks when he goes to the dermatologist for his three-month checkup.

The Special Exposure Cohort designation means in essence that so few records exist from 55 to 60 years ago that it’s impossible to tell exactly what went on in the nuclear materials division at the Jayhawk Works – and what the potential radiation exposure was for workers there and in the rest of the sprawling industrial-chemical complex.

More than 100 former workers have filed claims in connection with Jayhawk Works, according to Dan Lord, a claims consultant who has worked with residents in southeast Kansas.

A 2008 government investigation uncovered processes that produced radioactive dust that workers would have inadvertently breathed in and eaten – and buildings given a soap-and-water cleanup and repurposed after Spencer sold off its nuclear operations.

In the petition that sparked the investigation, workers alleged that they ate in the same room where they changed their dusty work clothes and that unfiltered ventilation hoods sucked the dust out of their buildings to the outside air…….

According to government licensing records, Spencer entered the nuclear age when it started enriching uranium with a small pilot project in 1957.

Two years later, the company’s founder, Kenneth Spencer, announced a major expansion of the nuclear effort and built a plant to process about 50 tons a year of uranium dioxide, the highly radioactive compound used in nuclear reactor fuel rods.

According to its in-house employee publication, Spencer News, the company had developed a process for continuous enrichment of uranium, a more efficient method than was in general use at the time…….

Government investigators who tried to reconstruct what exactly had gone on in the nuclear division at the Jayhawk Works were stymied by the lack of records. Only a handful of memos remain attesting to the way nuclear materials were handled and how employees’ exposure to radiation was monitored, documents show.

In 2008, investigators from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health – a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – reported that there was no way to credibly estimate how much radiation any particular worker had been exposed to.

NIOSH did conclude that because of deficiencies found in the way materials were handled, it was likely that workers outside the nuclear operation were also exposed to dangerous levels of radioactive materials….

1 1/2 years of red tape

In 2000, Congress established the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program, a government fund set up to pay Cold War-era atomic workers who were exposed to carcinogenic radiation in the name of national security.

It was an acknowledgment that the government had allowed and in some cases encouraged companies to cut corners in what was then a feverish effort to stay ahead of other countries in the nuclear race.

Jayhawk Works employees were designated as a Special Exposure Cohort by the Department of Health and Human Services in 2008. That status extends to workers throughout the plant who were there at least 250 days from 1956 through 1961, not just those who worked in the uranium enrichment shop.

Theoretically, that means former Jayhawk workers like the Housers don’t have to directly prove they were exposed to radiation to qualify for compensation. They only have to prove they’ve had one of 22 types of cancer linked to radiation exposure.

In practice, the Housers have had their applications in more than a year and a half and have yet to see any return other than more forms to fill out……..http://www.kansas.com/news/local/article49479255.html