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RE: FACTS ABOUT TENNESSEE ILLNESSES
Mr. Slavin
I read your letter with great interest. As a Health Physics professional, I
too am concerned about the health and welfare of the people in the area
around Tennessee. I think most Health Physicist care a great deal about
these types of issues. It is one of the reasons we selected and remain in
this field.
I do agree with your statement regarding the rapid and vigorously negative
comments that may arise when "radiation" health effects are suggested. We,
as professionals, should ensure that we maintain an open mind with respect
to developments in the science. I believe that our failure to maintain, and
communicate, that perspective is one of the reasons that we are not well
received by the press and the public.
On the other hand, the press and the public, are all too willing to assume
every debilitating illness is due to radiation. I am quite willing to
believe that residents in the Oak Ridge area are suffering from a number of
health issues. Your comment regarding the "witches brew" is quite apt.
There are a number of confounding environmental factors present in the area.
To assign the end result to "radiation exposure" is misleading and
inappropriate. Environmental restoration, and preferably preservation,
should be a priority. But focusing on miniscule and inconsequential levels
of ANY environmental contaminant is not appropriate. Every dollar that is
needlessly spent chasing these low levels of contaminants is a dollar not
spent finding and fixing the real areas of concern or investing in proven
life saving resources such as ambulances, drug rehabilitation programs,
schools and job education programs.
There are parties on both sides of these types of issues that do little to
help resolve the actual problems. Those of us in the HP profession that are
too quick on the attack are just as bad as the non-professional HPs that
rely too readily on poorly performed studies to support their particular
point of view. Both positions merely serve to more firmly entrench the
other party.
... mine and mine alone...
Ron LaVera
Lavera.r@nypa.gov
-----Original Message-----
From: EASlavin@aol.com [mailto:EASlavin@aol.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2000 9:30 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: Re: FACTS ABOUT TENNESSEE ILLNESSES
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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