Nuclear plant workers getting reparations

Many plant workers and nearby residents were
diagnosed with cancer.

APOLLO, Pa. (AP) — Alarms warning of possible radiation contamination sometimes sounded as often as two to three times a month at the Pennsylvania nuclear fuel processing plant where Gloria DeBiasio worked for two decades starting in 1963.

She says she and other employees at Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp., or NUMEC, responded to the pulsating tones by simply walking out of the facility in Apollo, a tiny town about 30 miles east of Pittsburgh.

“When we heard the alarms, we left and whatever was outside we breathed in,” DeBiasio says. “There was no air conditioning, so wherever there were windows, we had windows open.”

Nearly 20 years after being laid off by one of several companies that owned the plant over the years, DeBiasio was diagnosed in 2002 with thyroid cancer — a disease her doctor believes was precipitated by her long-term exposure to radiation at NUMEC.

DeBiasio, 74, is among many thousands of former employees of the facility who became eligible in recent days — after years of struggle — for government aid of $150,000 each to treat their illnesses.

Tens of thousands of Cold War-era nuclear weapons workers across the country have sought reparations under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Act passed by Congress in 2000.

A total of 156,906 claims have been filed by 65,484 individuals under a government program that so far has paid compensation and medical bills totaling more than $3.4 billion.

Its goal is to provide lump-sum compensation and health benefits to eligible U.S. Department of Energy nuclear weapons workers — including employees, former employees, contractors and subcontractors — and lump-sum compensation to certain survivors if the worker is deceased, according to the Department of Labor’s Web site on the program.

Larry Elliott, director of the office of compensation, analysis and support at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an agency under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said investigators have been unable to determine fully the radiation exposure of the Apollo workers because of a lack of data during some periods.

But he said: “It was a dirty site. The conditions were horrible.”

Activists and politicians, including Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, have said the compensation program unfairly excludes many people and moves so slowly that others die before they are paid. They say the now-elderly workers or their survivors face too many obstacles.

Although surgery has freed her of cancer, DeBiasio says she still must take medication for the rest of her life and routinely visit the doctor for evaluations and blood tests.

“Sure, the $150,000 is good,” she says. “But money will not bring back all the people who have suffered or died from all this.”