Re[2]: FACTS ABOUT TENNESSEE ILLNESSES

[steve.rima@DOEGJPO.COM (Steven Rima)]

     Ed Slavin wrote, in part:
     
As noted by several of you, DOE has been arrogant lord of all that it sureyed 
for half a century, creating a colossal wasteland, from sea to shining sea, 
from Long Island to Oak Ridge to Rocky Flats to Hanford.  It is the world's 
worst managers in charge of the world's most hazardous materials.   
     
As noted by several professionals on this list, there is a huge amount of 
hubris  on the part of DOE nuclear bomb factory managers.  In Oak Ridge, some 
of the nuclear bomb factory managers and lawyers are the third generation of 
their famliies to tell workers to shut up, keep quiet, there's no problem. 
There must be a gene somewhere, or a bad seed.  :)  
     
DOE does things that no nuclear powerplant in the country does.  It's like 
the joke about substituting lawyers for lab mice at NIH because, among ohter 
reasons, "there are some things that rats just will not do."  :)  Seriously, 
you should not think  of DOE as being a part of the nuclear industry -- it is 
a pariah.  You do not need to defend it any longer.  
     
To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, DOE is like a baby, "all appetite on the one 
end, and alll irresponsibility on the other."  As Hazel O'Leary said, DOE 
sites are not unlike what your house would be like if you "had a party every 
day for fifty years and never cleaned up."  Like a baby, DOE also has a 
tendency to go WAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! to try to get its way.  Hence, several years 
worth of anti-worker posts on this listserv.
     
Don't take criticism of DOE as criticism of nuclear powerplants -- they have 
nothing in common but the word "nuclear."  I appreciate that no one in the 
U.S. nuclear power would put 4.2 million pounds of mercury into creeks. 
     
Don't ever again let DOE managers hide behind the nuclear powerplant 
industry, using y'all as human shields or indefensible.  They don't deserve 
defending.  What they did was indefensible. You know it, I know it, 
Congress knows it, Bill Clinton knows it, Bob Dole knows it, and the whole 
world knows it.  DOE is not the nuclear industry.  DOE is the Nuclear 
Weapons industry. 

     It's real easy to make DOE (and AEC, ERDA, et al) the scapegoat, but 
     let's consider a little history here. At the height of the cold war, 
     much of the information that is now coming to light *was* highly 
     classified and not made available to employees. We can argue now 
     whether this was proper or not, but it was done in the name of 
     national security when the real or perceived threat to this country 
     from the USSR was quite different. Let's also remember that the 
     present-day DOE is a cabinet level agency of the federal government, 
     and therefore reports directly to the President.
     
     Just as DOE contractors do what their customer (DOE) tells them to do 
     (hopefully within the law), the DOE does what the President tells them 
     to do (maybe not always within the law). There's much more to this 
     story than just "evil DOE management."
     
     In decades past, nuclear weapons workers were looked upon very 
     similarly to soldiers on a battlefield. I'm not defending any of what 
     was done in the past, but let's keep the right perspective on things 
     that were done long ago under very different circumstances.
     
     Steven D. Rima, CHP, CSP
     Manager, Health Physics and Industrial Hygiene
     MACTEC-ERS, LLC
     steve.rima@doegjpo.com
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