Reed Hayes: One false step, 41 years of pain

by Joe Hanel
Herald Denver Bureau

Monday, August 10, 2009

July 1967. Graveyard shift at the Atlas uranium mill in Moab, Utah. A light bulb is out on the second level over one of the vats of yellowcake - sludge of concentrated uranium ore.

Reed Hayes eases himself down the walkway, a replacement bulb in hand. But someone on the swing shift forgot to put up a rope to block off the yellowcake tank. Suddenly Hayes falls. He splashes into the tank.

He's a strong swimmer, and he swims out through the sludge. The shift boss tells him to go home, shower, change clothes and get back to work.

A month later, shortly after he left his job, painful rashes break out all over his body, "head to toes." It's an affliction Hayes has carried to his retirement home, a tidy ranch house with an immaculate garden at the western tip of the Paradox Valley.

Hayes' words come slowly, with long pauses between sentences, as he describes dozens of different drugs and tests he's endured over the decades.

"I've got it today. I've got parts of it on my body right now," Hayes says.

He wears a thick, long-sleeved shirt, sunglasses and a hat every time he goes outside to work in his garden and orchard. For some reason, this year, he's been able to grow apricots - 56 of them, to be precise - while many of the Western Slope crops failed.

Atlas was no help to him. The company is defunct. He applied to the government for compensation for sick nuclear workers, but he couldn't get it because the program was for only lung disease. He's applied to another program, and his case has been pending since last fall.

"I think I'm on the back burner, basically," he says.

"I've been in misery, sometimes literally hell, for 41½ years," Hayes says. "My wife has taken me to the emergency room probably seven or eight times. Sometimes it breaks out and gets in my mouth, starts choking me. Sometimes it gets in my eyes. It moves around."

Steroid balms help a bit, along with antihistamines.

"It never does get rid of it. It just calms it down. It's just a Band-Aid," Hayes says. "That's my story."

http://durangoherald.com/sections/News/2009/08/10/Reed_Hayes_One_false_step_41_years_of_pain/

Health Risks From Mines Covered Up: Department of Energy Files Reveal Legacy of Secrecy and Negligence

Disgusting and infuriating but not surprising, unfortunately. Can we really expect any better protection or information dissemination in Virginia? Let's learn from the past and leave the U in the ground. Let's let integrity triumph over greed.

by Joe Hanel
Herald Denver Bureau

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

URAVAN - Health experts working for the state of Colorado and the federal government knew about the dangers of working in uranium mines and mills 60 years ago, but they hid their knowledge from the workers. As a result, workers died from cancer.

This has been public knowledge since the mid-1990s, when the Department of Energy published the results of its "Openness Project," an extraordinary catalog of government failures in the decades after World War II.

The report blames state and federal bureaucrats for "intergovernmental buck passing and decades of study, a course that resulted in the premature deaths of hundreds of miners."

State and federal regulators did plenty of studies. According to the archives of the Department of Energy's Openness Project: On Aug. 25, 1949, Colorado health officials met with U.S. Public Health Service employees to discuss uranium mine and mill safety. The same month, the Colorado Health Department and Colorado Bureau of Mines asked the Public Health Service to do a formal study of the mines and mills.

Public Health Service official Duncan Holaday was in charge of the study, and he quickly found evidence that unventilated mines were exposing workers to cancer-causing levels of radiation. Vents would have helped lessen the danger.

But the Public Health Service couldn't get access to the mines without permission from mine owners. To get permission, inspectors promised the mine owners not to warn workers of radiation hazards, Holaday testified in a lawsuit brought by Navajo uranium miners.

"You had to get the survey done, and you knew perfectly well you were not doing the correct thing ... by not informing the workers," Holaday said, according to the Openness Project report.

In May 1952, the Public Health Service gave its initial results in a report that was released to only state and federal officials and mining companies. A news release said "no evidence of health damage from radioactivity had been found." But the Openness Project report notes lung cancer takes 10 to 20 years to show itself, and public health regulators knew about the risks as early as the 1940s.

In 1960, the Public Health Service at last gave the governors of uranium states such as Colorado what it said was a conclusive link between uranium mining and lung cancer. Yet the Atomic Energy Commission, the Public Health Service and the states continued their talks and studies.

The biggest radiation hazard for miners was radon, a radioactive gas that is formed when uranium decays. Although uranium is radioactive, the radioactive particles are most dangerous when ingested. That happens most often when radon is inhaled in mines with poor ventilation.

It wasn't until 1967 that the federal government finally set a standard for radon in uranium mines, about the same time Colorado and Utah started serious enforcement. Most small Colorado mines weren't ventilated until the 1960s, more than two decades into the uranium boom.

By 1990, miners in one study group had seen 410 deaths from lung cancer - almost five times the rate that statisticians would expect.

The judge in the Navajo miners' case called it the "tragedy of the nuclear age."

Congress in 1990 passed a law to compensate the surviving miners and millers called the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. But of the 165,000 claims filed, only 43,000 have been paid, according to Labor Department statistics cited in a 2008 Rocky Mountain News investigation.

http://durangoherald.com/sections/News/2009/08/11/Health_risks_from_mines_covered_up/

Radioactive Revival in New Mexico

By Shelley Smithson

June 10, 2009

Mitchell Capitan points to a flock of sheep grazing in the shadow of a sandstone mesa. The sheep belong to Capitan's family, along with a few head of cattle and twelve quarter horses standing in a corral near his mother-in-law's house in Crownpoint, New Mexico.

"All of this area," Capitan says, gesturing to the valley of sage and shrub brush below, "there's a lot of uranium underneath there. That's what they're after."

Capitan and his Navajo neighbors are battling a license granted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to Hydro Resources Inc. (HRI)--a subsidiary of a Texas company, Uranium Resources--one of several firms that have laid claim to the minerals beneath thousands of acres on and around the lands of the Navajo Nation and three American Indian pueblos in northwestern New Mexico. A group called the Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining is suing the NRC to block mining in Crownpoint and another Navajo community. A panel of federal judges in Denver heard the case in May 2008 but has yet to issue a ruling.

A resurgence of interest in building nuclear power plants, touted as a nonpolluting alternative to carbon-fueled plants, has sparked a uranium rush. Since 2007 the NRC has received seventeen license applications for twenty-six new reactors, causing a flurry of applications for uranium mining permits across the Four Corners region, where New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado meet. In February Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced that the Energy Department would expedite the approval process for $18.5 billion in federal loan guarantees for utilities that are building nuclear plants. The guarantees, along with other Bush-era incentives, are meant to spur construction of new plants.

The anticipated rise in demand for uranium has led the industry back to the very places it deserted three decades ago when it abandoned hundreds of mines, seven polluted uranium mills, billions of gallons of contaminated groundwater and mountains of radioactive waste. Congress is only now beginning to press agencies to clean up the mess, an undertaking that could cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

Plenty of people in this economically distressed corner of New Mexico are thrilled about the 8,000 new jobs and $1 billion in economic benefits the uranium industry promises. They point to claims made by industry lobbyists in a concerted PR campaign that new technology will make mining safer and that cast doubt on the connection between uranium mining and the illnesses that plague people who worked in mines and mills or lived near them.

Many others, especially American Indians like Capitan, remain unconvinced. They are afraid the companies will leave behind another trail of environmental destruction, illness and death like that of thirty years ago.

Sitting in his wood-paneled office in Window Rock, Arizona, Navajo Nation president Joe Shirley Jr., a tall, thin man with silver hair and a fierce opposition to uranium mining, declares, "I don't believe there is any safe technology that can be used to mine uranium. Many of my people died because of mining of uranium ore here on Navajo land. Back at that time, the US government did not apprise my people of the dangers that are inherent with the mining of uranium ore. And as a result, a lot of people came down with cancer." Shirley has watched several family members suffer from uranium-related illnesses. "It is devastating. It has wrecked the lives of our families," he says.

Finish reading this article here.

New Proposal Would Help Sick Nuclear Workers

Mar 31, 2009 2:39 PM
By KRISTEN WYATT, AP

DENVER (Map, News) - A Colorado senator is taking another crack at helping sick nuclear workers who say they were poisoned from their jobs at Cold War-era nuclear weapons sites.

But the bill introduced Tuesday by Democratic Sen. Mark Udall expected to cost $2 billion, and with few federal dollars to go around it's unclear whether the long-proposed idea will succeed.

Udall insists it's time to revive attempts to cut red tape for thousands of people sickened after working at nuclear sites such as Rocky Flats northwest of Denver, which made plutonium triggers for nuclear warheads until it was closed almost 20 years ago.

"It's a new time, and there's a new focus on doing the right thing here," Udall told reporters when asked whether the proposal he'd brought unsuccessfully while in the House had a shot.

Udall's proposal would lessen the burden for sick workers to prove their cancers were caused by work at the sites, instead forcing the government to defend claims. Estimates say the changes could cost $2 billion.

Families of sick nuclear workers complain that despite federal promises to assist them, victims face too many roadblocks trying to prove their claims. Some 167,000 claims have been filed to the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program, most of them unpaid or still pending.

"It was just on and on and on, and it seemed to be never-ending," said Kathy Wolf, whose husband Charlie worked at Rocky Flats and died of brain cancer.

Kathy Wolf is an engineer who also worked at Rocky Flats, though she hasn't gotten sick. She told reporters Tuesday that getting money from the program requires too much from sick workers.

For example, she said, workers are asked to prove levels of exposure or give detailed lists of what they touched over the years, something workers themselves may not have known on classified projects.

"Think about the poor widow who had no clue because of the secrecy [about] what her spouse was doing," Kathy Wolf said.

Similar proposals to speed payment to sick workers, though, have stalled for years. Bills were pushed unsuccessfully by former Colorado Sens. Ken Salazar and Wayne Allard, and several congressional hearings have been held on the problem. Congress moved the fund from the Department of Energy to the Department of Labor in 2004, but worker complaints persist.

Udall and other proponents are hoping the new administration and fresh plea for justice will improve the bill's chances.

"You're talking about a group of workers who are really Cold War veterans. They defended our nation," said Marissa Padilla, spokeswoman for Democratic New Mexico Sen. Tom Udall, cousin to Mark Udall and a co-sponsor of the bill.

Another attempt to reform the payouts to nuclear workers is also likely this year in the House. Despite years of failure, Mark Udall seemed optimistic Tuesday that this would be the year the nuclear payout system is finally reformed.

"It's time to act," he said. "Enough is enough."

http://www.examiner.com/a-1935191~New_proposal_would_help_sick_nuclear_workers.html