Sickened Pantex workers could get more cash

For nearly three decades, Rubin Covey worked at the Pantex Plant, ensuring nuclear weapons parts were routed to the right department, scrapped or shipped off to defense plants across the nation.

After he retired in 1986, Covey developed a slew of health problems, including stomach and colon cancer, two illnesses often found in workers exposed to radioactive materials.

He later sought government compensation under a 2000 federal program that provides payments for eligible nuclear weapons workers sickened by exposure to radioactive or toxic materials.

"I got $150,000, the same as everybody else, for them lying to us, saying it was a safe place to work," Covey said.

Now, Covey and some Pantex workers could be eligible for another $150,000 payment in the wake of a recent recommendation from a radiation advisory panel.

In August, the federal Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health recommended certain Pantex workers be

considered for government compensation because of possible internal exposures to depleted uranium or thorium, radioactive materials used in atomic weapons.

"The board also determined that health may have been endangered for these Pantex Plant employees during the time in question," the board's recommendation letter said.

Josh Kinman, a spokesman for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, said the agency hasn't yet received required notices from Health and Human Services Secretary Katherine Sebelius's office, but he said the addition of the new class of workers eligible for compensation could come by the end of October. After that, the claims will be administered by the Labor Department.

New group

The panel's recommendation marks the second class of Pantex workers that would be added to a Special Exposure Cohort, a group of employees or contract workers that is eligible for government checks if the employees worked during a specified time, developed at least one of 22 covered cancers and worked for at least 250 days.

The newest group proposed for Special Exposure Cohort status includes employees who worked at Pantex between Jan. 1, 1984, and Dec. 30, 1991.

"Basically, they reviewed the nature of the exposures for the time period we're talking about and the exposure records that were available," said Ted Katz, a member of the radiation advisory board. "The doses associated with intakes of uranium or thorium, those doses could not be reconstructed with sufficient accuracy."

No evidence

Covey, 90, who started work at Pantex in 1957, said a review of plant records found no evidence he ever was contaminated, but he noted Pantex often received radioactively contaminated tooling and parts from sister weapons plants across the United States. He said he thinks he could have been contaminated by working in close proximity to contaminated materials.

Over the years, he has watched as dozens of other workers, particularly craftsmen who worked closely with tooling, died of cancer and other illnesses.

"They were falling off at a fair rate at one time. Nearly all the craftsmen have died," Covey said. "We handled all the tooling for the big boy," the B53, the largest nuclear weapon ever assembled for the U.S. atomic arsenal, a massive 4-ton atomic bomb.

"If you were in the building, you had exposure. .... I think it just destroyed my immune system, because it started with prostate problems, and it just ballooned from there - cancer of the stomach, cancer of the colon and artery problems."

No warning

In 1991, the GAO issued a scathing report on Pantex safety that found workers were exposed to depleted uranium, a black gritty dust, for years without being informed of possible health hazards. Workers had observed the black dust during nuclear weapons dismantlements since 1984, the report said, but nothing was done about it.

"Consequently, workers were exposed to the black dust for years without being aware of its radioactive hazard," the report said.

According to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, workers with high exposures to thorium can develop cancers of the lung, pancreas and blood. Studies on the health effects of depleted uranium exposures are less definitive, but the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Defense Department contend there is no link between depleted uranium exposure and cancer in humans.

"Based on credible scientific evidence, there is no proven link between depleted uranium exposure and increases in human cancers or other significant health or environmental impacts," according to the IAEA. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, depleted uranium is toxic and can cause kidney damage if inhaled or ingested in large amounts.

"We really don't know how many people this will help," Sarah Dworzack Ray, a former Pantex employee who tracks worker issues, said of the radiation board's recommendation. Her husband, Michael, also a Pantex worker, died of cancer years ago, and Ray later worked to establish a group that monitors Pantex health issues. "This will help people who are still working and who are not sick yet. This will help the younger workers."