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RE: BWC HPS Meeting on February 21
To all whom it may concern:
I take great exception to Dr. Makhijani, and his "expert" opinions. Much of
what he stated in what I read was blatanly inaccurate, and insulting to me
personally. I worked in the radiation safety section of the ES&H dept. at
the Feed Materials Production Center Fernald during its operating years, and
was the "keeper" of the external and internal dosimetry records of every
employee and subcontractor that ever worked there from August of 1951, until
I left there in 1991. To say that no air monitoring was done until 1989, may
have simply been the statment of someone unfamiliar with the facts, but it
is blatanly false. I am personally aware of air monitoring records that
went back to the mid 1950's. I personaly took hundreds of them myself.
Chemical plant workers submitted urine samples to screen for potential
uptake on a weekly basis. Metals plant workers submitted urine samples on a
monthly basis. Breathing zone samplers were placed on "High Risk" workers
on a regular basis. Lower risk workers were periodically monitoried to make
sure that they were indead low risk. Annual invivo counting was performed
on all operators. Routine general area air sampling, surface contamination
surveys and external radiation exposure surveys were performed on a routine
schedule. The fact that he does not know what we did, does not mean that we
didn't do it. It simply means that he does not know what he is talkng about.
The professionalism of the health and safety staff there, I would match
against any. Does that mean that everybody there followed the rules.
Absolutey not. How many of us follow every traffic law all of the time?
bUT TO MAKE THE CLAIM THAT WE HID THE FACTS FROM THE WORKERS IS ABSOLUTELY
FLASE. To sy that they completely understood everything we tried to explain
to them, would also be a false statement. The specific details of what they
were manufacturing,and the specific applications of the uses of the
materials were, and in some cases STILL classified. But the occupational
exposure risks were NEVER hidden from the workers. I personnaly trained the
FATLC union safety commitee myself. If you were to ask them about the
course I provided to them, they would tell you that I answered every
question they had, and held nothing back.
Were mistakes made at that sight over the years. Yes, as with every jobsite
of every type that exists in the world. People make mistakes. Do we learn
from them? Usually. Do we try to prevent their reccurrance. Yes. Were we
always succesfull, NO. That can be said about every work place. But to
state that we knowing, secretly and neglegently over exposed workers without
regard to their safety I find personally offensive.
I agree that more could have been done to reduce worker exposures. but that
is true at every job, nuclear or not. Additionally, the concept of judging
past practices by current values is inappropriate. In the battle of
Vocksburg, people at rats to stay alive. I doubt that too many people in
Vicksburg these days have rats as part of their daily diet. But it was
necssary then.
I feel that anyone who claims to be a expert on the "grossly neglegent"
practices of the AEC/ERDA/DOE defense programs group, should become more
familiar with the historical facts before making accusations that are both
inaccurate and politically inflammatory.
These opinions are my own, and are in no way intended to represent the
opinions of any agency, organization or company that I have ever worked for
or with. Additionally, I apologize to anyone else who may be offended by
them. But I take great pride in the work that I did while working as a DOE
defense programs contractor.
-----Original Message-----
From: Rodney Bauman
To: Multiple recipients of list
Sent: 2/21/01 12:23 AM
Subject: RE: BWC HPS Meeting on February 21
Regarding Dr. Makhijani, the following clip was posted this weekend on
the
DOE-Watch website. This should be a interesting meeting.
Source:
http://www.tompaine.com/opinion/2001/02/06/1.html</A>
========================================================
URANIUM AND YOU
How Many Birth Defects and Cancers Should Be Allowed in the Name of
National
Security?
Arjun Makhijani is president of the Institute for Energy and
Environmental
Research in Takoma Park, Maryland.
It's no secret that nuclear weapon states have harmed many people, and
particularly weapons production workers, in the name of national
security.
But how this slow attack on health and the environment was carried out
is
still largely unknown and little understood. Through extensive research
during the last two decades, a picture of the damage has begun to emerge
from
the fog of denial and propaganda in only one nuclear weapon state -- the
United States.
That picture is far from reassuring: The government and its contractors
deliberately emphasized production at the expense of health, routinely
violating health and safety regulations, deliberately misleading workers
so
as not to arouse concerns or give hazardous duty pay when both were
clearly
warranted.
Sloppy, incompetent science was a routine part of this dismal picture.
The
Department of Energy has admitted that, until 1989, no effort was made
to
calculate workers' internal radiation doses -- even though many were
inhaling
and ingesting radioactive materials. IEER's work on data from the
Fernald
plant near Cincinnati, Ohio, where uranium for plutonium production
reactors
was processed, showed that in the 1950s and early 1960s, most workers
were
in
fact overexposed due to uranium inhalation. Many probably also suffered
kidney damage due to the toxicity of uranium as a heavy metal. Yet
officials
reassured them that they were not being harmed.
As such information has become public, workers and their advocates have
demanded justice. The United States recently passed legislation giving
most
injured radiation workers the right to apply for compensation and
medical
treatment.
The harm has extended well beyond factory boundaries to workers'
families,
neighbors and the general public. For example, an official study by the
U.S.
National Cancer Institute showed that during the 1950s, a large portion
of
the U.S. milk supply was contaminated with iodine-131, a carcinogen, due
to
fallout from the Nevada test site.
No other government has yet made as broad an admission of potential harm
from
radiation as the United States, though some modest programs are in
effect
for
a limited number of people in some places.
In Russia there are still practically no raw data available to
independent
researchers. Secrecy also holds sway in the other relatively open
countries
-- France, India, and Britain. The situation in China, Pakistan, and
Israel
is far worse.
The pattern of keeping health and environmental abuses of their own
people
secret in the name of national security is anti-democratic to the core.
It
presumes that the people would not make sacrifices for the security of
their
countries, and it presumes that top nuclear bureaucrats can make life or
death decisions in defiance of established laws without the informed
consent
of the people.
Moreover, the damage caused by the nuclear states has extended well
beyond
their borders. Though the maps of contamination published by the
National
Cancer Institute magically stop at the borders of Canada and Mexico,
atmospheric testing nonetheless permeated their milk too. Uranium miners
in
non-nuclear weapon states have also been injured. And test sites have
polluted former colonies, such as Algeria and Polynesia. Yet, no proper
accounting has been done. But then, why would nuclear weapon states be
accountable to people beyond their borders when they have failed to be
accountable to those within?
Much of the harm from nuclear weapons production and testing was
knowingly
inflicted. For instance, a 1960 editorial in the engineering alumni
magazine
of the University of California noted that "nuclear testing has so far
produced about an additional 6,000 babies born with major birth defects
[worldwide]." Yet, it added "you must weigh this acknowledged risk with
the
demonstrated need of the United States for a nuclear arsenal." The
editorial
did not explain why children in Nigeria or Costa Rica or Indonesia
should
have major birth defects so that the United States could have a nuclear
arsenal.
All of this raises troubling questions about how national security
policy
has
been formulated. If the nuclear weapons establishment can knowingly and
secretly harm the very people it claims to protect, how can one be sure
that
the security policies themselves are not largely motivated by
bureaucratic
self-preservation rather than by the interests of the community at
large?
This is by no means a rhetorical or theoretical question. There is
strong
evidence, for instance, that the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki
was
motivated in part by the desire to justify the huge expenditure on
nuclear
bombs during the Manhattan project. The nuclear establishment feared
that if
the bombs were not seen as highly useful in the war effort, there would
be
relentless investigations for waste of money after the war. Such
investigations would, no doubt, also have dimmed the prospects for
continued
large nuclear weapons budgets after the war.
The public needs to engage in a wide-ranging discourse about the health
and
environmental harm that nuclear weapon states have inflicted upon their
own
people as well as those beyond their borders.
An International Truth Commission to lead this discourse should not only
examine the nature of that harm, and whether it was deliberately
inflicted;
it should recommend ways in which people can hold nuclear weapons
establishments accountable. It should also determine whether the
security
arguments that have been claimed for nuclear weapons have been
constructed
to
perpetuate the nuclear weapons industry and bureaucracy. Such an
examination
would be of some considerable relevance today, given that nuclear
weapons
establishments are still refusing to meet their nuclear disarmament
commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and that people
are
still getting ill and dying from the harm that nuclear weapons
establishments
have inflicted upon them.
-----Original Message-----
From: BobCherry@aol.com [mailto:BobCherry@aol.com]
Sent: Friday, February 16, 2001 4:51 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: BWC HPS Meeting on February 21
Baltimore-Washington Chapter of the Health Physics Society
February 21, 2001
Estimating Worker Doses in Nuclear Weapons Plants
Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D.
Arjun Makhijani is President of the Institute for Energy and
Environmental
Research in Takoma Park, Maryland. He earned his Ph.D. in engineering at
the
University of California, Berkeley, specializing in nuclear fusion. A
recognized authority on energy issues and nuclear issues in particular,
Dr.
Makhijani is the author and co-author of numerous reports and books on
topics
such as radioactive waste storage and disposal, nuclear testing,
disposition
of fissile materials, energy efficiency and ozone depletion. He is the
principal editor of Nuclear Wastelands: a Global Guide to Nuclear
Weapons
Production and Its Health and Environmental/ Effects, published by MIT
Press
in July 1995, and subsequently nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
Dr. Makhijani has served as a consultant to numerous organizations
including
the Tennessee Valley Authority, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and several
agencies of the United Nations.
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