Monday, September 06, 1999
Feds declined to study leukemia rate among Paducah workers
The Associated Press
PADUCAH, Ky. — Researchers from the federal government considered investigating reports of leukemia among workers at the uranium enrichment plant in Paducah, but decided against it.
A team from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) spent a week at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in 1992 looking for records for a possible study on the health effects of worker exposure to uranium and electromagnetic fields, the Courier-Journal of Louisville reported Sunday.
The researchers found plenty of employee data in paper files and computer databases, including a file on worker leukemia deaths. Through interviews with plant officials and union leaders, the team learned of worries about the disease among employees.
“The leukemia concerns should have been followed up,” said James Stebbings, who led the team that visited the plant in December 1992. “Chances are 50-50 or better it would have turned out to be nothing. But it should have been done.”
A NIOSH official said the agency had decided instead to first complete a study of the health of workers at a sister uranium enrichment plant in Ohio, where metal was proc essed to a higher level of radioactivity than at Paducah. That study is still under way.
Mr. Stebbings, now an Illinois epidemiologist, said last week that the Paducah plant's industrial hygiene department had maintained a file on leukemia cases that ended in 1981. He said an employee had informed the NIOSH team about it.
Mr. Stebbings said he did not know whether there were more instances of leukemia among plant workers and their families than would be expected for the general population.
But he said that the fact that the plant processed uranium contaminated with highly radioactive plutonium, which can cause leukemia and other cancers, was another reason the reports should have been investigated.
Three plant employees filed a whistleblower lawsuit in June alleging that workers were unknowingly exposed to plutonium and other radioactive contaminants. They claim the exposure came from spent uranium fuel sent from the U.S. Department of Energy's Hanford, Wash., nuclear weapons reactor to Paducah for reprocessing.
Steven Ahrenholz, now assistant chief of NIOSH's Health Related Energy Research Branch in Cincinnati, was another member of the team that visited Paducah. He said concerns about leukemia there were based on a NIOSH study of worker health at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio. That 1987 study found higher-than-expected incidence of leukemia and stomach cancer, but the results were not statistically significant.
A follow-up study was launched at Portsmouth.
“We were trying to determine whether it was appropriate at that time to add in that Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant with the Piketon study,” Mr. Ahrenholz said, “or whether we wanted to do the Piketon mortality study update and see what the outcome of that was before we made any other decisions about what we would do.
“At that time we felt that we should just proceed with the Portsmouth plant itself.”
He said that while there were similarities between the two plants, the Ohio plant produced much more highly enriched uranium — with more potential for radiation exposure — for use in nuclear weapons. Both plants now make uranium for nuclear power plants.
The Piketon study is scheduled to be completed around Jan. 1.
The only study of worker health at Paducah is just beginning and involves the union and researchers from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. It is being done in response to a law passed by Congress in 1993 that required such studies at all Department of Energy nuclear facilities.
Jimmie Hodges, now the Department of Energy's Paducah site manager, was the agency's health and safety director for the plant when NIOSH investigators visited Paducah in 1992. He said he didn't know about any files being kept on leukemia.
“I've not heard anything like that,” Mr. Hodges said. “I'm just not familiar with that at all.”
The Kentucky Cancer Registry, which has tracked cancer cases since 1991, has not noted any unusual cancer incidence in McCracken County, where the Paducah plant is located.
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