Last year WCInsights reported on sick workers who were employed at a Washington nuclear site and were struggling to get benefits, and now workers from another nuclear site say their claims were wrongly denied.

In Portsmouth, OH there is a gaseous diffusion plant which used to house weapon-grade uranium. Security guards there used to transport cylinders of uranium between buildings in a truck that put them in very close proximity to the nuclear containers, which emitted radiation. They had no specialized protective gear and were exposed to the radiation for long periods of time. They also stood guard directly outside the hazardous, taped-off, areas of the plant without protective equipment while workers on the other side of tape in the hazardous zone wore respirators and hazmat suits.

Many of the guards developed prostate cancer which they say is linked to radiation exposure. Congress has created a compensation program for workers like this group but many at Portsmouth have had their claims denied. The record keeping for this kind of thing at the height of the Cold War was not what it is today, and many workers either have no record of their toxic exposure or have a patchy history of what their job entailed. Their places of work were under tight security at the time, after all. That makes it hard for them to provide convincing evidence of their occupational illness to the Labor Department.

For a worker’s claim to be approved there must be at least a 50 percent chance that the illness was caused by radiation exposure, but it can be hard to get an accurate measure of a person’s radiation dosage over time especially when some details entered into the reports so many years ago were not all that accurate or specific.

The Depart of Labor tries to estimate past exposure with “Dose Reconstruction”. This uses information gathered from the work site and the worker to try and account for all the possible radiation they may have come into contact with. Then investigators try to determine the probability that their disease was caused by radiation, but the information they go off of is not always accurate or complete. Almost two-thirds of claims the program has reviewed with dose reconstruction have been rejected.

“If your input variables are lousy, your output will be lousy,” said David Manuta, a former chief scientist at Portsmouth between 1990 and 2000. If poor information went into the reports in the first place it would be very hard for investigators to accurately determine if work related factors played a part in the employee’s illness.

Within the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program there is a Special Exposure Cohort which consists of cases that do not have enough information about the worker’s exposure. If a claimant develops any of 22 kinds of cancers their claim is accepted outright without dose reconstruction. Even though the Portsmouth site is in this special cohort, prostate cancer is not one of the 22 listed acceptable cancers so the guards mentioned at the beginning of this story still have a battle ahead of them. Some other nuclear sites where workers were exposed to radiation, like the Hanford site in Washington, were initially left off of this cohort and former workers struggled to get benefits. Specific contractors who worked on the site in the late 1980’s are still left out of the exposure cohort even as other employees have fought and won to have their claims accepted by the cohort. That site, like Portsmouth, also kept minimal records of where workers were assigned and what duties they were performing.

The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has pointed to certain substances as carcinogenics, and exposure to such things are more likely than not a factor in causing or aggravating disease. Officials from the government’s occupational illness program say that just because something is a probable cause of an illness, that cannot be used as reason to establish blanket causation for all cases. Individual cases may be overturned as they are reviewed and an employee presents compelling evidence, but the bar for all cases must still be set fairly high, they say.

“We have to evaluate the likelihood that this cancer is due to work or not due to work, and … there (are) always going to be people that are going to get an answer that they don’t want to hear,” said the program’s policy chief John Vance.

From PublicIntegrity.org