Although the Rocky Flats nuclear facility northwest
of Denver began its transformation into a wildlife refuge in 2001,
its Cold War history lingers on in hundreds of workers who
developed cancer and other illnesses from radiation and chemical
exposure. Under a federal program started in 2000 to compensate
sick nuclear workers from the Cold War era, roughly 775 Rocky Flats
employees – out of 3,500 who have applied – have
received payment. But the process of assessing an employee’s
past exposure takes time, and many end up dying while they wait.
Now, a small group of workers from Rocky Flats have been approved
for fast-tracked compensation – but critics say too many
others are left behind, still unpaid and fighting with a
frustrating bureaucracy.
The Department of Health and
Human Services recently approved part of a petition to add a new
class of employees to the “special exposure cohort,” a
group of workers from nuclear facilities around the country who
qualify for expedited compensation if they develop certain types of
cancer. Most ill workers seeking compensation must wait while the
Department of Labor, the National Institute of Occupational Safety
and Health, and the Department of Energy piece together personal
information, employment records and data about the facility to
reconstruct the worker’s individual dose of radiation or
chemical exposure. Normally, an employee only receives compensation
if the agencies find that there is a greater than 50 percent chance
his or her illness is work-related.
But if the government
determines that it doesn’t have the records it needs to
estimate the exposure levels of a particular group of workers,
those workers are exempted from the dose reconstruction process and
added to the expedited group. The agencies prefer to use individual
monitoring records to assess workers’ exposure levels,
according to Chris Ellison, health communication specialist for the
National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s
Office of Compensation Analysis and Support. But many of the
records are decades old and filed in ways that make them difficult
to access. In those cases, adding the workers to the special cohort
gives them the benefit of the doubt.
At Rocky Flats, the
agencies concluded that the records were adequate for most
employees, but a small group did qualify for the special exposure
cohort: those workers believed to have been exposed to neutron
radiation – a strong form that readily damages human tissue
– while working at the Colorado facility between 1952 and
1966. “We’ve taken that proposed class and whittled it
down and said here’s what we can’t do,” says
Ellison.
While the decision is welcome news for those who
meet the government’s parameters, the majority of the
facility’s past workforce does not qualify. Excluded workers
who become sick will still face the difficult and often lengthy
process of parsing out their individual exposure levels in order to
seek payment. “It was a good thing that they included the
ones they did,” says to Terry Bonds, district director for
the United Steel Workers, which supported the original petition to
add all Rocky Flats workers to the cohort. “But they are
still excluding people who should be covered.”
The
dose reconstruction process has many flaws, according to critics
like Bond and LeRoy Moore, a consultant working on the Rocky
Mountain Peace and Justice Center’s Nuclear Nexus Program.
While the government does give workers a chance to add their own
accounts to the mix, the process relies heavily on historical DOE
records, many of which are incomplete or inadequate. In some older
cases the dosimeters that workers wore to track exposure levels
were primitive and inaccurate, and they were not always worn where
they would detect the full amount of radiation absorbed by a
worker’s organs. In other cases, workers didn’t wear
dosimeters at all.
In addition to relying on incomplete
records, the compensation program entirely ignores many
work-related illnesses, according to Moore. At first glance, using
a list of 22 approved cancers seems valid, he says. But some
workers have developed strange illnesses, which Moore believes may
be the result of multiple exposures to toxic substances.
“There is very little known about the combined effect of
toxic materials,” he says. “But because these workers
don’t fit the standard pattern, they’re left
out.”
To date, the federal government has paid more
than 150,000 claims nationwide, totaling over $3.2 trillion
dollars. The 54,000 of those claimants who reside in Western states
have received $976 million. But Bond believes that many more
workers, from Rocky Flats and other nuclear facilities, also
deserve compensation. “These are people who fought in the
Cold War,” he says. “And the government should take
care of them.”
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