The Portsmouth Naval Shipyard
No such bias was apparent in the work of Dr. Thomas Najarian, a blood specialist at Boston Veterans’ Hospital. In the fall of 1977 Najarian was examining a former nuclear welder named Adolph Pohopek, who was suffering from leukemia. Pohopek had worked at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in New Hampshire, and asked Najarian if radiation exposure at the shipyard might have had anything to do with his leukemia.
Portsmouth, which is about sixty miles north of Boston along the Atlantic coast, has been building warships since 1800. It constructed the first American military submarine in 1917. Between 1954 and 1977 a total of sixty-three atomic subs were either built, overhauled, or repaired at Portsmouth. The General Dynamics Corporation operates the yard on government contract, and roughly a third of the 24,525 workers listed as having worked at PNS have been exposed to radiation, among them Adolph Pohopek.65
Pohopek told Najarian that numerous Portsmouth workers seemed to die unusually young, and that working conditions in the yards were not all they should be. Pohopek then gave Najarian the names of fifty people who had
recently worked at Portsmouth. Najarian found that ten of them were already dead, and he asked the VA for funds to do some follow-up research. The VA turned him down, saying exposures at Portsmouth were too low to have caused any of the deaths.66
But Najarian persisted. Using his own money for postage and paper, he mailed questionnaires to about forty past and present Portsmouth workers. Within a week the head of the VA’s research division in Washington called Najarian, demanding to know who was funding his research and asking for all his correspondence with naval personnel. When Najarian asked that the request be put in writing, he never heard from the VA official again.67
When the questionnaires themselves began coming in, they revealed what Najarian considered an alarmingly high rate of leukemia deaths. In mid-November of 1977 Najarian asked The Boston Globe for help. Although the Navy had refused to give Najarian any of its records, he and an investigative team from the Globe were able to gather some seventeen hundred death certificates relating to Portsmouth workers. The Navy also refused to release any worker exposure records. But with the help of statistician Dr. Theodore Colton, Najarian was able to isolate those workers whose families could confirm that they were exposed to radiation at Portsmouth. In June of 1978 Najarian and Colton published a paper in Lancet, indicating a leukemia rate among exposed Portsmouth workers that was four times normal.68
The study was soon attacked by Admiral Hyman Rickover, chief of the Navy’s nuclear programs and pioneer of the atomic submarine. A hard-driving perfectionist who was former President Jimmy Carter’s mentor while Carter was in the Navy, Rickover has an almost legendary reputation for turning out the best-trained personnel in the nuclear field. In 1958, under his watchful eye, an enlarged version of the nuclear sub reactor opened at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, as the world’s first commercial demonstration reactor to produce electricity. Rickover also had a great stake in the Portsmouth operation, and vigorously defended the record of the nuclear Navy. In 1978 he told a congressional hearing that "we have had no accidents which caused people to be injured or which had a radiobiological effect on the environment." But he scrupulously added that "I do not include the long-term effects of low-level radiation."69
And that was precisely what was at issue. Rickover, after congressional pressure, soon agreed to have the Center for Disease Control (CDC) evaluate Najarian’s findings. The CDC turned the study over to its subagency, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which asked—among others—Dr. Thomas Mancuso to serve on its independent scientific "watchdog" panel which had been mandated by Congress.
Controversy soon clouded the study. Mancuso refused an appointment to the watchdog panel after NIOSH refused to guarantee him access for an on-site evaluation of the data sources. In December 1980 several NIOSH researchers concluded that "excesses of deaths due to cancer and due specifically to cancers of the blood and blood forming organs were not evident" at Portsmouth.70 But on January 5, 1981, the Globe reported that five of six advisory committee members they polled felt that the NIOSH data had in fact revealed "a trend toward higher leukemia rates among workers who received higher doses of radiation." One panel member, Dr. George Hutchinson, who is generally known to be pronuclear, conceded to the Globe that "there is a trend of leukemia with dose"—that the evidence indicated the more radiation the Portsmouth workers received, the more likely they were to contract leukemia.71
In fact NIOSH submitted its final report for publication without giving its full congressionally mandated advisory committee a chance to discuss its conclusions. Committee member Irwin Bross threatened to sue NIOSH to get them to send him the data, and then charged that the numbers "flatly contradict statements made by CDC/NIOSH." Bross found a large excess of lung cancer linked to radiation exposure.72
Though controversy still rages over the Portsmouth studies, there seems little doubt in the minds of the people working there that something might be seriously wrong. In January of 1979 Dr. John Cobb of the University of Colorado Medical School, a member of the NIOSH advisory panel, visited Portsmouth to evaluate the situation for NIOSH director Dr. Tony Robbins. When he got there, Cobb found "antagonistic" and "explosive" differences between the unions and the Navy over health and safety issues, and that the unions felt "the Navy would lie, cheat and do anything to cover up their deficiencies in management."73
Cobb also discovered "that there could be an incentive for workers to keep their recorded radiation exposure lower than actual exposure," and that the Navy would often issue "waivers" to workers to keep them working in radioactive areas even after they had exceeded exposure limits. Cobb said he "was told that workers were led to believe that radiation exposure would not harm them."74 Because radiation work brought higher pay, employees were reluctant to wear film badges for fear of being put in lower-paying jobs if they "burned out."
65. "Epidemiologic Study of Civilian Employees at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, Kittery, Maine," National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, released December 3, 1980 (hereafter cited as "NIOSH/PNS Report").
66. "Statement of Thomas Najarian," Effect of Radiation on Human Health, February 28, 1978, p. 1236.
67. Ibid.
68. Thomas Najarian and Theodore Colton, "Leukemia among Shipyard Workers," Lancet, June 1978.
69. "Statement of Hyman Rickover, Adm. H.G., Deputy Commander, Nuclear Power Naval Sea System Command, USN, Department of Defense," Effect of Radiation on Human Health, p. 1272.
70. "NIOSH/PNS Report," p. 31.
71. N. Breslius, "Questions Raised in Shipyard Cancer Study," Boston Globe, January 5, 1981, p. 22.
72. Irwin D. J. Bross, director of biostatistics, Roswell Park Memorial Cancer Research Institute, memorandum to "Competent and Responsible Members of the Oversight Committee," January 26, 1981.73. John C. Cobb, Report of Visit and Recommendations Regarding Studies of Cancer Incidence at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, NIOSH Report, January 30-31,
1979, p. 5 (hereafter cited as Cobb/NIOSH Report).
74. Ibid., p. 6.