Sunday, August 22, 1999
Excess radiation found in worker's bones
Exposures high at Paducah plant
BY JOBY WARRICK
The Washington Post
The exhumed bones of a long-dead uranium worker have given a powerful boost to current employees' claims of dangerous exposures inside a government-owned Kentucky plant that supplied radioactive fuel for the nation's nuclear bombs.
The long-overlooked medical evidence from the case of Joseph Harding suggests that radiation doses to some workers at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant were far higher than previously believed, and may have been dozens of times above federal limits, according to one analysis of the data.
The hazards for uranium workers are further underscored by unpublished research from a sister plant in Tennessee. A draft study of workers at the K-25 plant in Oak Ridge shows unusually high death rates for former uranium workers, as well as sharply higher rates of lung and bone cancers.
The results of Mr. Harding's posthumous tests, conducted as part of a lawsuit in 1983 but never published, offer the strongest corroboration to date of hazardous conditions inside the Paducah plant, where workers labored for decades in a haze of radioactive dust that was sometimes laced with deadly plutonium.
“Uranium content of the bone was far in excess of normal expectations,” wrote Alice Stewart, a British researcher who reviewed the results of laboratory tests of Mr. Harding's remains for Mr. Harding's estate. “The terminal finding overrules all earlier impressions (from U.S. government officials) of NO internal depositions of uranium.”
Lab technicians were unaware of the presence of plutonium at the plant and did not test for it. Plutonium is about 100,000 times more radioactive per gram than uranium and can cause cancer if inhaled in microscopic amounts. Workers only recently learned that plutonium and other highly radioactive metals entered the plant in contaminated uranium shipments from the 1950s to the 1970s.
The Department of Energy (DOE) has launched an extensive investigation into claims of worker exposures at the Paducah plant; the K-25 plant; and a third facility, in Portsmouth, Ohio. Agency officials said it is now clear that uranium workers were not properly protected until at least 1990. “This reaffirms our decision to get out of the business of fighting sick workers,” David Michaels, assistant secretary for environment, safety and health, said in an interview Friday. “This case is an example of how the DOE placed mission and secrecy in a paramount position in the past. Right now, we should be bending over backward to help those workers who helped win the Cold War for us.”
Both the Paducah and K-25 plants were owned by the federal government and operated by the same group of corporate contractors: Union Carbide from the 1950s to the early 1980s, followed by Martin Marietta and Lockheed Martin Corp.
The latter two are the targets of a lawsuit filed by a group of employees who allege unsafe working conditions and environmental contamination.
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