Calls for change in nuke program

Pair look at ideas to streamline workers' claims

By Laura Frank, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published August 1, 2008 at 11 p.m.

Text size

More Local News

The time has come for change in the federal compensation program for sick nuclear weapons workers, two men who have held key roles in the program said this week.

More than 165,000 sick workers or their survivors - including more than 10,000 from the former Rocky Flats site near Denver - have applied to the eight-year-old compensation program. The aid program, which has been subject to multiple congressional hearings, also was the subject of a three-part investigative series in the Rocky Mountain News last week called "Deadly denial."

The Rocky found that one in 17 workers nationwide who would have been granted aid died before their years-long fight for approval was over. The newspaper also found that administrative decisions by the agencies overseeing the program had made it more difficult for claimants to prove they qualified for help.

Peter Turcic, the U.S. Department of Labor's outgoing director of the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program, said this week that he favored scrapping part of the program.

The part he would eliminate falls under the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. NIOSH is part of the Department of Health and Human Services. Scientists there estimate workers' radiation doses. DOL then uses these "dose reconstructions" to determine which cases get paid.

NIOSH also handles petitions from workers who say records from their Cold War-era sites are missing or inadequate for dose estimates. If the government agrees, those workers can bypass that process and be named a "special exposure cohort" to get streamlined aid.

"I believe that the most significant complaint that gets to me involves either the dose reconstruction process or the process of evaluating to add new special exposure cohorts," Turcic said on KBDI's Studio 12 this week.

"It may be time for Congress to look at a new, a different approach, an approach that wouldn't require dose reconstruction, wouldn't require an evaluation for a special exposure cohort or wouldn't require all of the oversight and delays that are associated with the advisory board and that whole process."

Turcic was referring to the White House Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, which advises the Health Department.

Dr. John Howard, the outgoing director of NIOSH, said the upcoming change in administrations made this "a natural time" to alter the program.

Howard said when changes are discussed, three options often arise:

* Scrapping dose reconstruction in favor of a list of diseases presumed to be linked to radiation exposure. The program lists 22 diseases that are presumed to be work-related for employees who qualify under special status for streamlined aid.

* Keep dose reconstruction, but don't make it "all or nothing." Currently, DOL uses the dose reconstructions to determine the chance that a worker's cancer is job-related. If that chance falls below 50 percent, the worker gets nothing.

* Keep dose reconstruction, but make it more efficient so workers are not waiting years for answers.Howard added that some combination of the ideas also might work.

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News