Audit: Exposure can't be assessed

The workers will win if the government can't reconstruct its records.
MIAMISBURG, Ohio (AP) -- Poor monitoring and record-keeping could make it impossible for the federal government to assess past radiation exposure to workers at a former nuclear weapons plant, according to an independent audit.
Advocates say the audit should help the workers qualify for lump-sum payments without having to prove that radiation at the Mound plant made them ill.
"There are possibly significant doses here," which were missed by faulty monitoring, said Richard Miller of the Washington-based Government Accountability Project, an advocacy group.
The audit, released this month, suggests several changes to the former Mound plant's site profiles, which are documents detailing how workers may have been exposed to radiation that the government has relied on in rejecting hundreds of workers' claims.
Those claims would have to be reopened if the federal Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health revises the profiles because of the audit, said Amanda Harney, spokeswoman for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. The board, which meets next week in Mason, will start discussions on the profiles this year, she said.
If the government decides it is unable to use science to reconstruct how much radiation exposure the workers received, they would qualify for a status that allows them to collect payments and medical benefits for certain cancers. People who worked at a weapons program in Dayton before the Mound plant was opened in Miamisburg are close to approval for the status because of similar audit findings.
About the audit
Sanford Cohen and Associates of Vienna, Va., conducted the audit based on records reviews and interviews with 17 former workers and other experts on the site, about 35 miles north of Cincinnati. It was written in July.
The Labor Department has paid 197 claims out of 1,465 filed by 719 former Mound workers. About 88 percent have been processed based on information in the site profiles, and 70 percent of those claims have been denied.
The audit detailed several problems with the site profiles. Among them:
Workers were not monitored properly for possible exposures to certain toxic metals and a form of plutonium that enters the lungs and stays hidden for a long time when it is heated at very high temperatures. "Thus, significant unknown exposures may have occurred and remained undetected for months." But monitoring was discontinued on radiation workers as soon as they were moved to other projects, and administrative and support staff who worked near the substances weren't monitored at all.
The document doesn't take into account possible exposure to high levels of radon, which causes lung cancer.
Officials at Mound often ignored or didn't record high radiation doses recorded on film badges worn by employees because they assumed the workers put the badges directly near radiation sources so they would be moved off of hazardous assignments.
Other monitoring procedures were inadequate and would have led to underreporting or completely missing doses of radiation.
Several worker records are inaccessible because they were buried in a radioactive waste landfill at Los Alamos, N.M.
Here's an example
Sherrie Neff was among the support staff, such as security and maintenance workers, whom the audit says weren't monitored. She helped clean up Mound buildings in the 1990s to prepare the plant for closure.
The Germantown woman has lost a breast, a leg and a lung to cancer, and doctors recently discovered more cancer in her chest. She remained in critical condition Sunday at the Ohio State University Medical Center in Columbus.
Federal officials turned down her compensation claim based on the site profile. The letter arrived Jan. 18, two days after the audit was posed on the NIOSH Web site.
"She won awards, all kinds of plaques; anywhere they wanted her to work, she'd go," said her husband, Bob. "She's paying for it with her life right now."