Enrichment and Reactors
Labor anger and questions of radioactive workers’ safety are also epidemic in America’s uranium enrichment industry. Enrichment—the process of turning milled uranium ore into high-grade reactor fuel and weapons material—involves huge quantities of energy, thousands of workers, and billions of dollars in taxpayer investments and subsidies.
These are three major enrichment plants in the U.S.—at Paducah, Kentucky; Piketon, Ohio; and Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
At Paducah, which is operated under government contract by the Union Carbide Corporation, a worker named Joe Harding has charged that company management put a tight lid on all discussions of plant safety. Words like radiation were banned from conversation, he said. "Before you worked there, the FBI ran a security check. And after you were hired, the FBI would keep an eye on you."75
Through his eighteen and a half years at Paducah, Harding, a maintenance worker, regularly breathed radioactive gases "so thick you could see the haze in the air when you looked at the ceiling light, and you could taste it coated on your teeth and in your throat and lungs. After a couple hours of work the uranium dust on the floor was so thick you could see your tracks when walking around." Leaks were rampant, Harding added, and protective clothing was minimal. "There was no particular lunch room or lunch hour. You just sat down somewhere, blew away the uranium dust and had your lunch."76
According to Dr. Karl Z. Morgan, working in air laden with uranium hexafluoride gas, prevalent at the enrichment plants, can contaminate the lungs and entire gastrointestinal tract and can give the body heavy doses of alpha, beta, and gamma radiation. Serious beta radiation to the skin can also result. There is a double risk because the hexafluoride, which is combined with the uranium, is itself highly corrosive and toxic.77
By late February of 1980 Harding—at age fifty-nine—had lost 95 percent of his stomach and suffered from chronic lung problems and skin sores that would not heal. There was a large tumor wrapped around his spine in the abdominal cavity, and fingernail-like growths protruded from his joints. Despite confinement to a wheelchair, Harding spent the last years of his life speaking out against conditions at Paducah. When he had started work at age thirty-one, he said, he was a strong, vigorous man who was "never sick" and "could eat anything." His plant supervisors had told him "you will not get any more radiation in this work than you get from wearing a luminous dial wristwatch."78
Three decades later, an eighty-pound cripple racked with constant pain, Harding extracted a promise from the DOE that his case would be fully evaluated. But after he died, his widow, Clara, was told her husband had rarely been monitored for radiation "because of the low potential for exposure" among workers in his field.79
The DOE records did reveal that at one point in Harding’s career he had produced a urine sample which showed ten times the allowable limit of radiation. But a sample taken the next day was said to have shown a dramatic drop in radiation levels. According to Dr. Morgan it takes several days for uranium to pass through the body, and thus "either the second sample taken of Mr. Harding’s urine was mistakenly analyzed, or it was falsified."80
Ironically, though no reliable studies have been done of worker health at Paducah, the Kentucky Health Department has found that the counties around the plant have the highest cancer rate in the state, well above the national average. Breast cancer among women and prostate cancer in men were the most prominent. Communities near the plant showed excesses of colon and lung cancer among both sexes—diseases commonly linked to radiation.81
Unfortunately conditions at Paducah do not appear to be unique. According to Dennis Bloomfield, president of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers local union at Piketon, one incident there spread so much contaminated dust that workers were forced to destroy their shoes for fear of carrying radiation home to their families. "The lunch table we were eating on was so contaminated it had to be destroyed," he said.82
In 1979 Bloomfield’s union waged a long and bitter strike for improved health and safety conditions at the plant. Among other things it demanded that monitoring of worker conditions be taken out of the hands of the DOE and given to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which the union hoped would offer better protection for its workers. According to a 1980 GAO report the DOE had inspected all three enrichment plants only a total of three times in the five years from 1975 to 1980. Neither the NRC nor OSHA were allowed to monitor radiation exposures inside any of the enrichment plants, and the GAO noted that by and large company management was very slow to respond to worker complaints of unsafe conditions.83 Finally, after the workers’ costly strike, Goodyear—which operates Piketon under federal contract—gave in to some of the union’s demands. The DOE, however, still dominates access and monitoring of working conditions at all enrichment facilities.
Because of such lack of controls, many American enrichment workers live in fear of what their jobs might be doing to them. Two such Piketon employees—Mike and Kathy Schuller—were interviewed by British television in 1980. They were both contaminated after having been told by Goodyear that their particular jobs were safe from radioactivity. When Kathy complained, she was told "either you do it, or you get sent home."84 Pregnant at the time, she told the TV crew, "I kind of worry about what is going to happen to my unborn child." Kathy said she "will feel better after it gets here, and that it’s got everything—all ten fingers and ten toes."85 On December 18, 1980, the Schullers’ son was born with only one hand.
Fears like those of the Schullers are also starting to surface in the nuclear power field. Since 1957, when operations began at the first commercial demonstration power reactor at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, a burgeoning industry has evolved employing more than eighty thousand people. In 1972 the EPA predicted annual exposure levels per worker would not exceed .225 rem by the year 2000. Within six years the reported average exposures at atomic reactors had more than tripled that EPA prediction.86 Ironically efforts to reduce exposures to the general public may be partly at fault. By trapping radiation on site that would normally be vented, levels within the plant go up—at peril to the employees.
And during crisis situations at a plant conditions become even worse. Utilities often hire "jumpers," short-term workers who handle high-exposure jobs, where legal limits of exposure are quickly consumed. The practice is sometimes called "body banking," whereby unskilled and often uninformed laborers are sent into "hot" areas at high hourly wages for brief but dangerous stints. In 1971 the Nuclear Fuel Services reprocessing facility at West Valley, near Buffalo, New York, used nearly one thousand jumpers to handle an emergency. According to Dr. Marvin Resnikoff, a professor of physics at the nearby Rachel Carson College, the jumpers were often "high school graduates with minimal job experience, unable to find employment in the depressed job market in Buffalo. They were given extremely limited information regarding radiation hazards."87 Though federal standards dictated that they not work with radiation for at least three months after their initial employment, many of the jumpers returned to NFS within days bearing false identification, and were sent back in for more doses. Former President Carter served as a jumper after a nuclear accident at Chalk River, Canada, in 1952. Carter got a year’s dose in less than ninety seconds.88
One of the problems that makes "body banking" and all other nuclear work even more dangerous is that few if any of the workers involved may be getting reliable exposure records from their employers. Much of the monitoring relies on the use of dosimeter "badges," which are usually worn while a person works in a hot area. The badges are generally built around a special film designed to record gamma radiation.
But other lethal forms of radiation escape the badges. And even for gamma radiation they may not be reliable. A 1980 study by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission found that 80 percent of all radiation monitoring devices tested failed to come within 50 percent accuracy. Conducted by the University of Michigan, the study covered fifty-nine processing firms and involved a sample of about 90 percent of the radiation-dosimetry industry. By mixing in "control" badges with those coming from work sites, the Michigan researchers found that a large part of the dosimetry work being done at American nuclear sites was unreliable at best. When test badges were exposed to levels of radiation corresponding to a major nuclear accident, the extreme doses went undetected.89 The response by the Health Physics Society, which sets monitoring standards, however, was not to improve the technology—but rather to relax the dosimetry standards, making it easier for the industry to pass future tests.90
Meanwhile preliminary indications from reactor work are not encouraging. According to death certificates obtained by the union representing workers at the Shippingport and Beaver Valley I reactors in Pennsylvania, multiple myeloma and leukemia rates among former workers at those two plants are far above normal state rates.91
Indications are also strong that there may have been serious damage incurred by workers at Three Mile Island (TMI). According to the Kemeny Commission, which was established by President Carter to study the accident, workers at TMI were exposed to levels that "exceeded the limits of the licensee’s measurement capability of one thousand rads per hour." During the accident several repair parties entered these high-radiation areas without knowledge of radiation protection supervisors. According to an NRC report on the accident, "items of protective clothing were not worn, resulting in several instances of head contamination." Sample containers of highly radioactive water were "handled directly without the use of remote tools or shielding."92
75. Joe Harding, interview with Pierre Fruling, published in newsletter, "Uranium Killed Joe" (available from the National Committee for Radiation Victims, 317 Pennsylvania Ave. SE, Washington, D.C. 20003).
76. Ibid.
77. Karl Z. Morgan, letter to Robert Hagar, Esq., February 4, 1981 (hereafter cited as Morgan letter).
78. Joe Harding interview.
79. Department of Energy, letter to Clara Harding, January 1981 (available from Robert Hagar, Mrs. Harding’s attorney, 1471 N. Capitol St., NW, Washington, D.C.).
80. Morgan letter.
81. Sun Democrat (Paducah, Ky.), November 2, 1977, p. 1.
82. Dennis Bloomfield, interview, For My Working Life, film transcript, copyright ATV, April 28, 1981 (hereafter cited as ATV Transcript).
83. Sheila Hershow, "Atomic Plant Probe Confirms Charges Aired Six Years Ago," Federal Times, August 25, 1980, p. 13.
84. ATV Transcript.
85. Ibid.
86. Scott/NlOSH Report, p. 30.
87. Marvin Resnikoff, "On the Job at NFS—Occupational Hazards in the Reprocessing Business," Sierra Club Radioactive Waste Campaign, Buffalo, N.Y.
88. Jimmy Carter, Why Not the Best? (New York: Bantam, 1976), p. 60.
89. "Performance Testing of Personnel Dosimetry Services, Report of a Two Year Pilot Study, October 1977—December 1979," NUREG/CR 1304 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission).
90. Ibid.
91. Deaths Among Operating Engineers Who Worked at the Shippingport Site
1 accident (crushed chest)
9 cancer: 5 non-bone-marrow related cancers
4 bone-marrow related cancers
2 bone-marrow leukemias
2 multiple myelomas
12 heart and other diseases
22 deaths total among operating engineers at Shippingport (1970-79)
92. J. G. Kemeny, et al., The President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, the Need for Change: The Legacy of TMI, Washington, D.C., 1979, Appendix iii, Nos. 4 and 18. (hereafter cited as Kemeny Report).