[ RadSafe ] Article: Jury Blames Nuclear Plant For Cancer

[John Jacobus]

This was in today's Washington Post.  You will have to
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/19/AR2005051901734.html?sub=AR

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Jury Blames Nuclear Plant For Cancer

Associated Press
Friday, May 20, 2005; A09

SPOKANE, Wash., May 19 -- A federal jury awarded a
total of more than $500,000 Thursday to two people
with thyroid cancer who blamed their disease on
radiation from the government's Hanford nuclear
installation, which made plutonium for bombs for four
decades.

The jury deadlocked over whether another plaintiff's
thyroid cancer was caused by Hanford radiation, and it
ruled against three others with thyroid-related
autoimmune diseases.

The lawsuit was brought against three government
contractors that ran operations at Hanford -- General
Electric Co., DuPont and UNC Nuclear Inc. Under law,
the government will pay the damages and the costs of
defending the contractors.

In their lawsuit, the six plaintiffs said they were
exposed to radiation during the 1940s when they were
children living downwind from Hanford, near Richland,
Wash.

Both sides claimed victory.

"The Department of Energy should take a hard look at
this," said plaintiffs' attorney Richard Eymann, who
represents about 2,300 people with similar claims.

Kevin Van Wart, whose law firm represented the
contractors, said the six people in this case were the
strongest of the potential plaintiffs. Van Wart also
said that the awards -- $227,508 for Steve Stanton and
$317,251 for Gloria Wise -- fell far short of the cost
of bringing the case to trial.

The 560-square-mile Hanford site began with the
top-secret Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb
during World War II. The plutonium for the bomb
dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, was made there.

Today, work at Hanford centers on a $50 billion to $60
billion cleanup that is expected to be finished by
2035.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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"Embarrassed, obscure and feeble sentences are generally, if not always, the result of embarrassed, obscure and feeble thought."
Hugh Blair, 1783

-- John
John Jacobus, MS
Certified Health Physicist
e-mail:  crispy_bird at yahoo.com

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