BY RACHEL MELCER
The Cincinnati Enquirer
No one ever told workers at the former Fernald uranium processing plant that they shouldn't taste radioactive materials.
So, without knowing they were ingesting a carcinogen, middle managers would routinely put a uranium oxide called "green salt" on their tongues to check for the telltale metallic taste of a good sample. At the height of the Cold War, they worried that if they sent samples of poor quality to a lab for testing, their productivity records would suffer.
"I'm sure they wouldn't have done it if they thought it was dangerous," said Susan Pinney, associate professor of environmental health at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.
Her story, garnered from interviews with former Fernald workers, stunned a group of officials from the Department of Energy (DOE), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
None of them knew that it had happened. They won't find record of the procedure in any training manual.
That's exactly why the tale is so important.
Guided by the Fernald Health Effects Subcommittee that met last week in Harrison, scientists are spending thousands of hours and millions of dollars to re-create the conditions at Fernald when it was in full operation. They want to know who was contaminated and with what.
With those answers, experts will be able to determine who was harmed by uranium, radon and a variety of non-radioactive contaminants. "Things keep surfacing," said Larry Elliott of NIOSH, who has questioned former uranium plant workers at retiree picnics and through panel discussions.
As administrator of a worker medical health monitoring program established through settlement of a lawsuit against Fernald by its former employees, Dr. Pinney is responsible for asking questions about the plant to form a working database.
"It's almost pitiful the amount of information we have on levels of exposure," said environmental consultant Joseph Farrell, chairman of the Health Effects Subcommittee. "The only people who know where they've been and their exposures are the workers themselves."
But some observers say that should not be the case.
Gene Branham, vice president of the Fernald Atomic Trades Council, recalled monitoring devices that were attached to workers and used in Fernald plants. He remembered reports of tests being conducted on the organs of workers who died after exposure. He says the Department of Energy should have those records.
"We're spending money to reconstruct information that should already exist," he said.
Paul Seligman, in charge of the project for DOE, promised to share whatever information he could obtain. But even he can't find much of the data hidden by Cold War secrecy.
"There's a great body of information out there that I don't even know exists," Mr. Seligman said.
At Hanford, a former nuclear weapons production site in Richland, Wash., DOE conducted a three-year search for records. Ten years later, information is still surfacing, said Mike Sage, deputy chief of the CDC Radiation Studies Branch.
"It makes you wonder, are we missing something?" he said. The information, vital to the health of people in and around Fernald, is also important in building trust.
Louis Doll, Greater Cincinnati Building Trades' representative at Fernald, says the secrecy even affected subcontractors such as himself, who went to work at the defunct uranium plant in the mid-1980s. "I didn't even know what the place was," he said. "You would walk into a building to paint the walls and it's all green (from uranium) and you'd think, "I ain't never seen this color,' and wonder why. That raises concerns.
"After years of secrecy and atrocities, the direction that you (government agencies) take is going to say a lot about your intentions. You're going to have to build a body of truthfulness here."
