Jan. 4, 2010
PART 2 OF A SERIES: Paducah, Piketon, Other Workers Deceived (Poisoned?) for Greater National Good
By Tony Rutherford
Huntingtonnews.net Reporter
Huntington, WV (HNN) -- During their Cold War service, employees of the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant “were generally happy in the belief that their efforts were protecting the country,” states Paul Becker (University of Dayton) and Alan Bruce (Quinnipiac University) in the Western Criminology Review article “State Corporate Crime and the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant” (2007).
Due to the threat of missiles from Russia and China, the public supported the nuclear industry, accepted the sense of urgency and as a result “environmental concerns were less important than the pressing demands of the Cold War,” a 2000 Department of Energy report stated.
GREATER NATIONAL GOOD
The need to maintain supremacy in the race to build more and more nukes with larger and larger destructive capacities assured citizens and workers that the U.S. could “win” a confrontation through a so-called mutually assured destruction policy, which, inevitably brought the nuclear nations to a mindful ground zero --- no one wins, everyone loses due to the fallout and destruction. Fears of bombs falling in the Heartland led to a home accessory not shared like a swimming pool --- a fallout and/or bomb shelter.
Under these fearful perceptions, including the posted orange and black public fallout shelter signs on numerous larger structures, health, safety and environment took a back seat as the expedience of goal achievement trumped concerns for the individuals and environment, leading to a culture of “rule bending” at atomic plants and those related thereto, such as by performing recycling of radioactive materials.
With billions of dollars in defensive and offensive weapons, the nuclear program shifted from ‘bombs’ to ‘power,’ which allowed the private corporations that had assisted in Manhattan bomb projects unbeknownst to themselves, to begin developing a new, so-called cleaner energy source.
Relying upon “trust,” workers accepted management’s attitude that exposure to radiation and certain chemicals was minimal, according to an Office of Oversight , Environmental Safety and Health report released in 2000. For instance, Paducah managers encouraged workers to wear personal (rather than protective) clothing. Carelessness and lack of knowledge led to contamination of the plant’s lunch room and theatre, the report stated. In fact, some workers willingly took part in radiation experiments by breathing and drinking uranium, the DOE and journal article state. Paducah was part of the rule, not a safety exception. Edward Teller, head of the AEC’s Reactor Standards Committee, in 1953 responded to a safe distance from reactors by stating, “enforcement of safety regulations must not stand in the way of rapid development of nuclear power,” the criminology article reported.
(Editor’s Note: By contrast, several retired Huntington Pilot Plant workers recall that employees of the facility changed clothes going to work and showed after work.)
Collaborating and essentially exposing the former need to know classified materials, USA Today on August 16 , 2000, published POISONED WORKERS, POISONED PLACES, which explained one conjecture at that time of radioactive contamination on American soil from building bombs , reactors, and other nuclear components.
One method of continuing status quo exposure was simply to not test. For instance, Union Carbide , Paducah’s operator in the 50s, asked for studies concerning “visible radioactive dust” at PGDP in 1953 and 1959. In 1960 , a request was made for neptunium exposure; it didn’t happen due to fears the union would request hazard pay.
The corporate/state culture at Paducah (and as implied in USA Today’s study many other) concealed knowledge of the radioactive truths. As Paducah examples:
1. There were ten leukemia deaths among long term health issues; one was the comparative norm;
2. The Washington Post in 1999 reported workers receiving levels up to 133 times higher than the norm and in 2001 the DOE acknowledged one in ten workers received doses above regulatory limits (and others went Untested)
3. Between 1994-1999 Nuclear Regulatory inspectors observed workers pounding on a uranium process line with a hammer, smuggling beer into the plant, performing tasks without proper training, and sleeping during handling of liquid uranium hexafluoride.
4. Uranium, fission products and other waste was released “into ditches, ponds and streams with subsequent flow into the Big and Little Bayou creeks, ultimately reaching the Ohio River (Office of Oversight, Environmental Safety Health 2000).
5. Scrap materials, such as wood and metals from PGDP property, were not screened for contamination before sold to the public. For instance, a computer donated to a school was contaminated with radiation.
6. Radioactive black ooze seeped from the ground in 1999 and beryllium was discovered in soil, surface and ground water samples beneath the plant (some 155 times natural levels)
7. Although a recreation/wildlife area has been constructed around portions of the plant as remediation, neptunium was 509 times as high as in a normal environment, cesium was 326 times normal, and eleven contaminants spread extensively (but the truth will remain unknown as more than 25% of safety concern records were destroyed prior to 1993.
8. On May 31, 1994 the PGDP was identified for priority cleanup and added to the EPA’s Superfund national priorities list. Cleanup was to be completed by this year; $1.3 billion was allocated and up to $5 billion estimated. (Huntington had numerous industrial sites on August 11, 1997 added to the Superfund list. Several of the locations are still operating; several have documented remediation undertakings available; some have been archived as no longer of interest to the EPA unless additional evidence is found.)
(Note: These impacts summarized from the State Corporate Crime (2007) article.)
The Paducah plant is undergoing cleanup. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson in 1999 apologized for “concealing information that caused PGDP workers to be placed in danger.” It stated: On behalf of the U.S. government, I am here to say I am sorry … We are apologizing to the workers in Paducah. From the evidence that has been uncovered recently, it’s obvious that the U.S. government was not forthcoming about possible exposure to plutonium, and that was wrong. We should have been straight with our Employees”
AFTER TEN YEARS MANEUVERING, LAW SUIT PROCEEDS
At Paducah, one of many land owners discovered his ground water tainted by pollution from the plant. Among one government proposal (not implemented) was to buy up all the private lands of about 120 families to limit liabilities, the Energy Department for about a decade has been paying the West McCracken Water District about $65,000 a year to provide free municipal water to homes whose well water was tainted by the pollution.
Meanwhile, in 2007, the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled water leaks hurt property values and allowed a federal suit to go forward. It was filed by 16 homeowners who claim 10 billion gallons of polluted water damaged 82 pieces of property resulting in losses of property, plants, crops, livestock and wildlife. (Smith, et al. v. Carbide Chem, et al., from Courier Journal, 2007).
FUNDING CUTS
The Paducah plant ranks #15 among atomic clean up sites. Hanford, a nuclear reservation in Richland, Washington is number one. 75% of funding goes to the ten worst of 65 sites. Paducah and others endured higher percentages of cuts, particularly under the George W. Bush cuts beginning in fiscal 2002. The stimulus package Congress approved under President Obama contained $144,729,000 for the western Kentucky site. The money will accelerate the removal of over 50 years of legacy waste and environmental contamination stemming from enriched uranium production. Among the wastes, 9,700 tons of volumetrically contaminated nickel (mostly nickel ingots). Reclamation of the nickel will bring jobs to compensate for layoffs in decommissioning the Paducah site. Still, in FY 2008, Paducah took a $20 million reduction in clean up funds in Bush’s $96 million budget proposal.
ISSUES
These are a few of the issues highlighted in the 2000 Courier Journal investigation:
A. The levels at Paducah weren't on the scale of Love Canal or Times Beach, but they exceeded standards the state had set for the Energy Department. The contaminated soil is now stored at the plant in more than 11,000 55-gallon drums, most of which are buried;
B. Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which cause cancer and other diseases in animals and possibly in humans, have been found at levels ranging from traces to significant concentrations in fish, hawks, mice, rats, mink, raccoons and a bobcat;
C. Incomplete records suggest that almost 9 ounces of highly radioactive plutonium were released into the air and water and buried at the plant, greater than the amounts released at most other Department of Energy nuclear sites. Traces of plutonium and neptunium were found in soil samples 11 years ago as far as nine miles from the plant, and traces of neptunium were found in apples, but there apparently was no further investigation;
D. Streams that flow off site are now believed to be carrying small amounts of radioactive material into the Ohio River, the DOE recently conceded. Though diluted by the Ohio's huge flow, radioactive substances may build up in sediment and enter the food chain;
E. Underground, three plumes of water contaminated with trichloroethylene, a suspected carcinogen, and radioactive technetium are spreading northward from the plant, and one is believed to have reached the river. Traces of contaminants have penetrated as far as 14 stories below ground.
Although neither the Paducah plant nor the one in Piketon are on the Fortune 500 list of the worst areas, the 2000 article indicated that the Energy Department data is often unknown. Workers have told of employee lists being destroyed. Other records too. The DOE in 2000 told the Louisville reporters, “it’s plan for attacking surface water contamination that documentation pertaining to specific releases from the plant’s storm sewer system currently is not available.” The EPA said “lack of information on the primary pathways for contaminants…. Completely inappropriate.”
UNKNOWNS
USA Today completed an investigation August 16, 2000 titled POISONED WORKERS AND POISONED PLACES which included “Preliminary Partial Dose Estimates From the Processing of Nuclear Materials at Three Plants during the 1940s and 1950s. Although USA Today commissioned an impartial study of three plants: Simonds Saw & Steel Co. (Lockport, NY); Harshaw Chemical Co. (Cleveland, Ohio); and Electro-Metallurgical Co., (Tonawanda, NY), the study generalizes these conditions as common place at nearly all of the atomic plants operating in that era.
Of specific interest to Huntington readers, the report indicates inadequate safeguards when a plant was selected for a standby shutdown, such as the Huntington Pilot Plant, which remained in that status from about 1960-1979, when it was demolished and buried.
The article contains a map of states where recycled uranium was handled. Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia, as well as Kentucky are listed.
The USA Today series begins with the following statement:
"A USA TODAY investigation finds that the government's reliance on a vast network of private plants, mills and shops to build America's early nuclear arsenal had grave health and environmental consequences. Federal officials knew of severe hazards to the companies' employees and surrounding neighborhoods, but reports detailing the problems were classified and locked away.
"The full story of the secret contracting effort has never been told. Many of the companies that were involved have been forgotten, the impact of their operations unexamined for half a century. Yet their history carries profound implications for the thousands of people they employed, as well as for the thousands who lived — and still live — near the factories.
"At a time when the nation is reassessing the worker ills and ecological damage wrought by large, government-owned nuclear weapons plants, the record of the private companies that did the work before those facilities were built has had little scrutiny.
"Most of the contracting sites were in the industrial belt: through New England, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, around the Great Lakes and down the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys. They were in big cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago and St. Louis. And they were in smaller communities, such as Lockport, N.Y., Carnegie, Pa., and Joliet, Ill."
COMING SOON : RETIREE INTERVIEWS
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PART 2 OF A SERIES: Paducah, Piketon, Other Workers Deceived (Poisoned?) for Greater National Good
By Tony Rutherford
Huntingtonnews.net Reporter
Huntington, WV (HNN) -- During their Cold War service, employees of the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant “were generally happy in the belief that their efforts were protecting the country,” states Paul Becker (University of Dayton) and Alan Bruce (Quinnipiac University) in the Western Criminology Review article “State Corporate Crime and the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant” (2007).
Due to the threat of missiles from Russia and China, the public supported the nuclear industry, accepted the sense of urgency and as a result “environmental concerns were less important than the pressing demands of the Cold War,” a 2000 Department of Energy report stated.
GREATER NATIONAL GOOD
The need to maintain supremacy in the race to build more and more nukes with larger and larger destructive capacities assured citizens and workers that the U.S. could “win” a confrontation through a so-called mutually assured destruction policy, which, inevitably brought the nuclear nations to a mindful ground zero --- no one wins, everyone loses due to the fallout and destruction. Fears of bombs falling in the Heartland led to a home accessory not shared like a swimming pool --- a fallout and/or bomb shelter.
Under these fearful perceptions, including the posted orange and black public fallout shelter signs on numerous larger structures, health, safety and environment took a back seat as the expedience of goal achievement trumped concerns for the individuals and environment, leading to a culture of “rule bending” at atomic plants and those related thereto, such as by performing recycling of radioactive materials.
With billions of dollars in defensive and offensive weapons, the nuclear program shifted from ‘bombs’ to ‘power,’ which allowed the private corporations that had assisted in Manhattan bomb projects unbeknownst to themselves, to begin developing a new, so-called cleaner energy source.
Relying upon “trust,” workers accepted management’s attitude that exposure to radiation and certain chemicals was minimal, according to an Office of Oversight , Environmental Safety and Health report released in 2000. For instance, Paducah managers encouraged workers to wear personal (rather than protective) clothing. Carelessness and lack of knowledge led to contamination of the plant’s lunch room and theatre, the report stated. In fact, some workers willingly took part in radiation experiments by breathing and drinking uranium, the DOE and journal article state. Paducah was part of the rule, not a safety exception. Edward Teller, head of the AEC’s Reactor Standards Committee, in 1953 responded to a safe distance from reactors by stating, “enforcement of safety regulations must not stand in the way of rapid development of nuclear power,” the criminology article reported.
(Editor’s Note: By contrast, several retired Huntington Pilot Plant workers recall that employees of the facility changed clothes going to work and showed after work.)
Collaborating and essentially exposing the former need to know classified materials, USA Today on August 16 , 2000, published POISONED WORKERS, POISONED PLACES, which explained one conjecture at that time of radioactive contamination on American soil from building bombs , reactors, and other nuclear components.
One method of continuing status quo exposure was simply to not test. For instance, Union Carbide , Paducah’s operator in the 50s, asked for studies concerning “visible radioactive dust” at PGDP in 1953 and 1959. In 1960 , a request was made for neptunium exposure; it didn’t happen due to fears the union would request hazard pay.
The corporate/state culture at Paducah (and as implied in USA Today’s study many other) concealed knowledge of the radioactive truths. As Paducah examples:
1. There were ten leukemia deaths among long term health issues; one was the comparative norm;
2. The Washington Post in 1999 reported workers receiving levels up to 133 times higher than the norm and in 2001 the DOE acknowledged one in ten workers received doses above regulatory limits (and others went Untested)
3. Between 1994-1999 Nuclear Regulatory inspectors observed workers pounding on a uranium process line with a hammer, smuggling beer into the plant, performing tasks without proper training, and sleeping during handling of liquid uranium hexafluoride.
4. Uranium, fission products and other waste was released “into ditches, ponds and streams with subsequent flow into the Big and Little Bayou creeks, ultimately reaching the Ohio River (Office of Oversight, Environmental Safety Health 2000).
5. Scrap materials, such as wood and metals from PGDP property, were not screened for contamination before sold to the public. For instance, a computer donated to a school was contaminated with radiation.
6. Radioactive black ooze seeped from the ground in 1999 and beryllium was discovered in soil, surface and ground water samples beneath the plant (some 155 times natural levels)
7. Although a recreation/wildlife area has been constructed around portions of the plant as remediation, neptunium was 509 times as high as in a normal environment, cesium was 326 times normal, and eleven contaminants spread extensively (but the truth will remain unknown as more than 25% of safety concern records were destroyed prior to 1993.
8. On May 31, 1994 the PGDP was identified for priority cleanup and added to the EPA’s Superfund national priorities list. Cleanup was to be completed by this year; $1.3 billion was allocated and up to $5 billion estimated. (Huntington had numerous industrial sites on August 11, 1997 added to the Superfund list. Several of the locations are still operating; several have documented remediation undertakings available; some have been archived as no longer of interest to the EPA unless additional evidence is found.)
(Note: These impacts summarized from the State Corporate Crime (2007) article.)
The Paducah plant is undergoing cleanup. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson in 1999 apologized for “concealing information that caused PGDP workers to be placed in danger.” It stated: On behalf of the U.S. government, I am here to say I am sorry … We are apologizing to the workers in Paducah. From the evidence that has been uncovered recently, it’s obvious that the U.S. government was not forthcoming about possible exposure to plutonium, and that was wrong. We should have been straight with our Employees”
AFTER TEN YEARS MANEUVERING, LAW SUIT PROCEEDS
At Paducah, one of many land owners discovered his ground water tainted by pollution from the plant. Among one government proposal (not implemented) was to buy up all the private lands of about 120 families to limit liabilities, the Energy Department for about a decade has been paying the West McCracken Water District about $65,000 a year to provide free municipal water to homes whose well water was tainted by the pollution.
Meanwhile, in 2007, the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled water leaks hurt property values and allowed a federal suit to go forward. It was filed by 16 homeowners who claim 10 billion gallons of polluted water damaged 82 pieces of property resulting in losses of property, plants, crops, livestock and wildlife. (Smith, et al. v. Carbide Chem, et al., from Courier Journal, 2007).
FUNDING CUTS
The Paducah plant ranks #15 among atomic clean up sites. Hanford, a nuclear reservation in Richland, Washington is number one. 75% of funding goes to the ten worst of 65 sites. Paducah and others endured higher percentages of cuts, particularly under the George W. Bush cuts beginning in fiscal 2002. The stimulus package Congress approved under President Obama contained $144,729,000 for the western Kentucky site. The money will accelerate the removal of over 50 years of legacy waste and environmental contamination stemming from enriched uranium production. Among the wastes, 9,700 tons of volumetrically contaminated nickel (mostly nickel ingots). Reclamation of the nickel will bring jobs to compensate for layoffs in decommissioning the Paducah site. Still, in FY 2008, Paducah took a $20 million reduction in clean up funds in Bush’s $96 million budget proposal.
ISSUES
These are a few of the issues highlighted in the 2000 Courier Journal investigation:
A. The levels at Paducah weren't on the scale of Love Canal or Times Beach, but they exceeded standards the state had set for the Energy Department. The contaminated soil is now stored at the plant in more than 11,000 55-gallon drums, most of which are buried;
B. Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which cause cancer and other diseases in animals and possibly in humans, have been found at levels ranging from traces to significant concentrations in fish, hawks, mice, rats, mink, raccoons and a bobcat;
C. Incomplete records suggest that almost 9 ounces of highly radioactive plutonium were released into the air and water and buried at the plant, greater than the amounts released at most other Department of Energy nuclear sites. Traces of plutonium and neptunium were found in soil samples 11 years ago as far as nine miles from the plant, and traces of neptunium were found in apples, but there apparently was no further investigation;
D. Streams that flow off site are now believed to be carrying small amounts of radioactive material into the Ohio River, the DOE recently conceded. Though diluted by the Ohio's huge flow, radioactive substances may build up in sediment and enter the food chain;
E. Underground, three plumes of water contaminated with trichloroethylene, a suspected carcinogen, and radioactive technetium are spreading northward from the plant, and one is believed to have reached the river. Traces of contaminants have penetrated as far as 14 stories below ground.
Although neither the Paducah plant nor the one in Piketon are on the Fortune 500 list of the worst areas, the 2000 article indicated that the Energy Department data is often unknown. Workers have told of employee lists being destroyed. Other records too. The DOE in 2000 told the Louisville reporters, “it’s plan for attacking surface water contamination that documentation pertaining to specific releases from the plant’s storm sewer system currently is not available.” The EPA said “lack of information on the primary pathways for contaminants…. Completely inappropriate.”
UNKNOWNS
USA Today completed an investigation August 16, 2000 titled POISONED WORKERS AND POISONED PLACES which included “Preliminary Partial Dose Estimates From the Processing of Nuclear Materials at Three Plants during the 1940s and 1950s. Although USA Today commissioned an impartial study of three plants: Simonds Saw & Steel Co. (Lockport, NY); Harshaw Chemical Co. (Cleveland, Ohio); and Electro-Metallurgical Co., (Tonawanda, NY), the study generalizes these conditions as common place at nearly all of the atomic plants operating in that era.
Of specific interest to Huntington readers, the report indicates inadequate safeguards when a plant was selected for a standby shutdown, such as the Huntington Pilot Plant, which remained in that status from about 1960-1979, when it was demolished and buried.
The article contains a map of states where recycled uranium was handled. Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia, as well as Kentucky are listed.
The USA Today series begins with the following statement:
"A USA TODAY investigation finds that the government's reliance on a vast network of private plants, mills and shops to build America's early nuclear arsenal had grave health and environmental consequences. Federal officials knew of severe hazards to the companies' employees and surrounding neighborhoods, but reports detailing the problems were classified and locked away.
"The full story of the secret contracting effort has never been told. Many of the companies that were involved have been forgotten, the impact of their operations unexamined for half a century. Yet their history carries profound implications for the thousands of people they employed, as well as for the thousands who lived — and still live — near the factories.
"At a time when the nation is reassessing the worker ills and ecological damage wrought by large, government-owned nuclear weapons plants, the record of the private companies that did the work before those facilities were built has had little scrutiny.
"Most of the contracting sites were in the industrial belt: through New England, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, around the Great Lakes and down the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys. They were in big cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago and St. Louis. And they were in smaller communities, such as Lockport, N.Y., Carnegie, Pa., and Joliet, Ill."
COMING SOON : RETIREE INTERVIEWS
Share This Story:
Make HNN Your Homepage (IE Users Only)
