nuclear-news

Sloppy health data collection in the history of America’s nuclear workers

Nuclear workers: Projects’ results were worth illnesses, deaths Amarillo.com  December 28, 2015 Tribune News Service  “…………The death toll for American workers has never been disclosed. The U.S. Department of Labor, which administers the compensation program, makes routine reports on how much it spends and how many people it serves, but never on the number who have died.

At first, department officials told TNS they do not even bother to collect information on the cause of injury or deaths for deceased workers. But later they said they do, on a limited basis, to comply with federal law.

The investigation also found vast differences in the way the federal program is run. As an example, workers at the nuclear facility at Hanford are nearly twice as likely to win money from the government as workers at their sister plant at Savannah River.

The department goes to great lengths to protect its data, taking several months to release it and comply with a request under the Freedom of Information Act. Then the department refused to release the names of companies that have provided medical care for sick workers under the program, formally called the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act. The department cited privacy concerns, but TNS is appealing that decision.

An examination of the data reveals the program that began accepting applications in 2001 has far surpassed anything envisioned by its founders.

The explosive growth of the program surprised even its chief architect.

Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico who served as energy secretary under President Bill Clinton, said sloppy record-keeping at the nuclear sites made it difficult to predict the ultimate size of the program.

“See, you don’t know when you enter a program like this what the result is going to be, except you need to be guided by: Is it the right thing to do?” he said in September.

Richardson said the federal government had shown “a lack of conscience” in its decades-long refusal to help workers who had legitimate claims until Congress finally reversed course.

He said getting the program passed became easier after the Washington Post in 1999 first reported that thousands of unsuspecting workers had been exposed to plutonium and other highly radioactive metals for 23 years at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in western Kentucky.

Richardson, who apologized at the time for the government’s denial of any plutonium exposures, said the program’s dramatic growth is a good sign, adding that no one’s getting rich, with individual payments capped at $400,000.

James Melius — the chairman of the federal Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, a presidential panel that examines compensation claims — said it’s hardly a surprise that the program has grown so rapidly.

“The DOE complex is huge,” he said, with “literally hundreds of thousands of workers who are potentially eligible who worked at various times within the complex.”……..

Congress passed the program in 2000 after the Department of Energy submitted studies covering 600,000 people that showed workers at 14 sites had increased risks of dying from cancer and nonmalignant diseases……….http://amarillo.com/news/latest-news/2015-12-28/nuclear-workers-projects-results-were-worth-illnesses-deaths#.VoMfhne5dh0.twitter

December 30, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | employment, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA