PHCHCC - U.S acknowledges radiation killed workers

After decades of denials, the government is conceding that since the dawn of the atomic age, workers making nuclear weapons have been exposed to radiation and chemicals that have produced cancer and early death.
The new finding -- that the exposure led to higher-than-normal rates of a wide range of cancers among workers at 14 nuclear weapons plants -- raises the prospect of compensation to them. Although officials cautioned that any decision on that was a long way off, they said a package could amount to tens of millions of dollars for a group that might well include hundreds of families.

The new conclusion comes from the government's most comprehensive review of studies of worker health and related raw health data. The review accepts the conclusion of many of those studies, some done under contract for the government, that workers were made sick by their exposure.

The finding goes far beyond an acknowledgment by the government last July that one substance handled by weapons workers, beryllium, a toxic metal, had caused some of them to become ill from breathing beryllium dust.

Of the new conclusion, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said in an interview, ''This is the first time that the government is acknowledging that people got cancer from radiation exposure in the plants.''

The finding is detailed in a draft report prepared by officials of the Energy Department and the White House with the cooperation of a dozen government agencies.

President Clinton ordered the study in July, when the Energy Department concluded that some workers at plants that had supplied beryllium to the government for bomb-making had developed beryllium disease, an incurable lung ailment. The president asked then for a broad study that would look at the effects of radiation and chemical hazards from uranium, plutonium and other substances.

Mr. Clinton also asked the group to develop a policy on compensation, but that work has not been completed.

Legislation proposed by Representative Paul E. Kanjorski, a Pennsylvania Democrat whose constituents include some of the beryllium disease patients, calls for payments to an estimated 500 to 1,000 former workers who either have the illness or are at high risk of developing it. Under that bill, total payments in the beryllium cases could range from $15 million to $30 million a year, officials said.

One question that Congress would have to resolve in the beryllium compensation, and that would have to be addressed in any compensation plan developed as a result of the cancer finding, is whether to make payments to survivors.

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