Atom workers denied government benefits

Though a federal panel, the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, voted June 12 to expand compensation for ex-workers at Rocky Flats—a former weapons facility 16 miles northwest of downtown Denver—75 percent of the facility’s former work force will still be ineligible for automatic compensation.

The compensation will only cover those that worked at Rocky Flats from 1959 to 1966. Workers there from 1952-1958 had been recommended for compensation earlier.

The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s Rocky Flats weapons production facility first began production in 1952 under management of the Dow Chemical Co., producing detonators or nuclear triggers. It was later operated by Rockwell International.

A sprawling facility composed of several buildings on 6,500 acres, the plant was closed in 1991 after being raided in 1989 by the FBI.

The new decision has yet to go before U.S. Health and Human Services Department, which will have to make a recommendation on compensation to Congress—from which the final decision will be made.

The panel’s recommendation is ultimately a defeat of justice for the over 15,000 workers who worked under dangerous conditions being exposed to high levels of radiation and chemicals.

There were many incidences of accidents during the facility’s 40-year lifespan, ranging from fires to leakages to improper storing of waste—all leading to contamination

of the ground soil and water sources in the plant’s vicinity.

In 2006 the facility’s owners were made to pay millions of dollars in fines and damages to owners of property in a class-action lawsuit that had lasted 16 years

Justice denied

These workers are called “Cold War veterans.” The Department of Energy’s official history on Rocky Flats states that “the urgency of the nuclear arms race placed a national priority on weapons production and testing,” which illustrates the U.S. government’s callousness toward even those it deems “heroes,” something especially seen today with U.S. imperialist wars against the Iraqi and Afghan peoples.

The panel’s argument is that the question of whether the facility exposed the workers enough to these deadly chemicals to justify compensation has proved inconclusive.

Currently, according to a study conducted by the University of Colorado, there are 1,259 cases of cancers among these former workers.

In a document titled “Rocky Flats A Local Hazard Forever. Citizen’s Guide to the ‘Cleanup’ Wildlife Refuge A Bad Precedent For Other Sites,” LeRoy Moore, Ph.D, indicates that there was a great deal of plutonium released into the environment by the plant and that two studies—one by the Department of Energy and one by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health—found increased cancers in workers exposed to 5 percent of the permissible level according to DOE.

Many workers who are already sick are afraid they will die before receiving any compensation. The Rocky Mountain News studied the number of workers who were awarded compensation and never received it, and found:

• “In cases where the worker’s illness was linked to radiation, beryllium or silica, 46 workers died before claims were paid; their survivors were paid $6.9 million; 279 workers received compensation totaling $41.7 million; 159 workers were dead when survivors filed claims and they were paid $23.7 million.”

• “In cases where the worker’s illness was linked to chemicals or other toxic exposures, 21 workers died before claims were paid; their survivors were paid $2.6 million; 16 workers received compensation totaling $1.5 million; 153 workers were dead when survivors filed claims and they received $19.2 million.”

Moore goes on to refute the government’s claim that the $7 billion allocated for cleanup of the area—$36 billion was necessary—was enough and that the cleanup was successful enough for the government to use Rocky Flats as a wildlife refuge and to open it to the public.

According to Moore, regarding evidence from autopsies on bone samples done from 1975 to 1979 and closer to the actual site of the plant: “The researchers in this DOE- funded study sorted the bone samples according to place of residence within three areas defined by concentric circles drawn at intervals of 25 kilometers (about 15 miles) out from 903 Pad at Rocky Flats. They found the highest plutonium concentrations in bone samples from the inner ring closest to Rocky Flats, with concentrations decreasing as they moved progressively away from the facility.”

He cited the study in response to a 1998 report released by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. Moore states, “In 1998 the Colorado Central Cancer Registry of CDPHE weighed in on the public health issue with a report asserting that there is no evidence of adverse health effects in residential areas near Rocky Flats by comparison with areas elsewhere in the Denver area.”

He quotes a German radiation specialist named Bernd Franke, who said the report was meant to “calm people down, for public relations purposes.”

Former FBI agent Jon Lipsky, who was part of the Rocky Flats raid and investigation, has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice in order to unseal records of contamination. He has filed this lawsuit with Wes McKinley, the former leader of the Rocky Flats grand jury, and Jacque Brever, a former chemical operator who suffers from radiation exposure.

In an article in Muckraker, Lipsky said: “I left so I could help expose the truth. Without the truth there can be no real understanding of the extent of this environmental crime, and there can be no thorough cleanup.”

According to Lipsky, Brever and McKinley: “The department allocated $7 billion to the cleanup, a sum initially criticized as far too low to enable a thorough job. And less than 8 percent of the allocated sum is even being used to decontaminate the site. ... The rest is going to administrative costs and decommissioning the plant.”

And the article reports, “She [Brever] said several fields and hillsides that had been dumping grounds for toxic and radioactive wastes have been excluded from the cleanup. Additionally, she said, the sampling techniques for determining contamination levels are misleading, and the standards for soil and water purification are weak.” (Jan. 21, 2005)

The workers are being denied their just due from the government—in the name of expanding profits worldwide for U.S. capitalism—that also lied about the dangers of the poisons workers and those in the surrounding communities were being exposed to.