Re: FACTS ABOUT TENNESSEE ILLNESSES

[EASlavin@aol.com]

Good morning:

Please allow me to introduce myself.  I am an attorney licensed in Tennessee 
and am honored to represent Oak Ridge and other environmental and nulear 
weapons "whistleblower" workers.  When history is written, IMHO the Michael 
Fumentos of this world will be remembered as bitter partisans who knew not 
the law, and who had contempt for both science and human rights.  Ms. Cheryll 
Dyer makes very good points in her post.  DOE hostility to the sick workers 
and Nashville Tennessean investigation was also indulged in by Tennessee 
state officials, Lockheed Martin managers, and other "professionals" on this 
list.  I've read and analyzed your listserv postings of the last several 
years on the subject, and shared some of them with the sick workers in Oak 
Ridge.  

It seems that at least a vocal minority of radiation protection personnel 
exhibit an almost Manichean "us-against-them" mentality.  They display 
instant hostility to all news media coverage and public scrutiny of nuclear 
and environmental issues.  This attitude does not contribute to radiation 
protection.  It does not create understanding.    It does not fulfill your 
profession's noble goal of saving human lives from horrible painful cancer 
deaths.

Some of your you who write seem extremely unhappy -- even wildly indignant 
about nearly everything critical, questioning or skeptical about radiation 
exposures.  This is not thought, it is anger.  This anger is misplaced.  This 
anger is unfair.  This anger does not help protect the people who do all the 
working, the breathing and the dying in contaminated places like K-25.  

Some of you instantly seize on each new report of worker concerns as 
"evidence" that "everyone's out to get US."  Well, who the heck is "US," 
anyway?  Do y'all want to be part of the solution or part of the problem?  
Since some of you see this as an adversarial, us-against-them proposition, as 
the old labor song said, just "whose side are you on" -- management's or the 
sick workers?  Is that written in a Health Physics or Radiation Protection 
textbook somewhere?

Isn't the idea of radiation protection was to protect worker safety, rather 
than industry reputations and corporate liability?  I guess that I am being 
naive.    No one on this list had anything good to say about the Nashville 
Tennessean articles.  No one wrote that the questions, concerns and issues 
raised were legitimate.  No one wrote to say that independent investigations 
were need.    No one wrote to say that anything could be improved, changed or 
modified at K-25. Where is you compassion?

Although DOE and its contractor had planned to take biological samples of 
K-25 workers, to this day, no one has been tested.  Wonder why?  Meanwhile, 
thousands of workers in Oak Ridge work in ancient, radiologically and 
chemically contaminated buildings.  DOE has never answered my questions about 
how many workers in Oak Ridge workers work in contaminated buildings.  The 
answer is thousands.

ALARA principles would have counseled against locating the Oak Ridge TSCA 
Incinerator -- the Nation's first radioative and toxic waste incinerator -- 
in the midst of ridge and valley topography with complex microclimates that 
have hardly been studied yet, near two enormous polluting TVA coal-fired 
powerplants, in the midst of a Superfund site with 4.2 million pounds of 
mercury, over 13 million cubic feet of radioactive waste (enough to fill in 
Neyland Stadium at the University of Tennessee), and what the State of 
Tennessee has called a "witches' brew" of other hazardous materials.  Yet 
that is exactly what DOE did.  Why?  Who spoke out against it at the time?  
Who said, we need to know more first?  Who said study the microclimates. Who 
out there just said "whoa"?  In fact, although NOAA had an ambitious project 
to study the microclimates with ten towers around Oak Ridge, DOE preferred 
less data at higher cost.

ALARA principles would also appear to dictate that thousands of office and 
lab workers not work in the midst of a giant Superfund site -- particularly 
not one where decontamination and decomissioning of what was once the world's 
largest building is taking place.  Who is advocating the need to build new 
office buildings to house K-25 workers, away from the decontamination and 
decommissioning work?

The entire tone of your listserv discussion about sick Oak Ridge is all too 
reminiscent of that of the tatterdemalion Oak Ridge City Council, which is in 
deep denial.  The City of Oak Ridge is now wasting money on TV advertisements 
with bucolic scences.  Meanwhile, toward the sick workers, Oak Ridge has 
shown condescension and derision, wishing the sick workers would go away or 
just die off.  They're not going away.  It's their country.  It's their boat. 
 They have a right to rock it.  I reckon that they will continue to do so 
until radiation and chemical protection, whistleblower protection and nuclear 
workers' compensation become realities instead of platitudes.

Too much of DOE nuclear weapons plant management culture remains hierarchical 
and authoritarian --  hostile and at best sadistic toward workers raising 
environmental, safety and health concerns.  That culture and that hostility 
can no longer endure.  As Dr. Karl Z. Morgan, the father of health physics 
wrote before his death: "No society that severely restricts freedom of speech 
will ultimately survive."

With kindest regards,

Edward A. Slavin, Jr.
P.O. Box 3084
St. Augustine, Florida 32085-3084
(904) 471-7023
(904) 471-9918 (fax)
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