Lancaster Eagle-Gazette from Lancaster, Ohio • 7

6ALancaster Eagle-Gazette, Sunday, September 26, 1999 Lancaster Eagle-Gazette, Sunday. September 26, 19997A Questions, fears part of Cold War's legacy Piketon workers speak By KRISTOPHER WEISS Thomson News Service PIKETON Michael Tul loh turned down a golf schol arship in 1975 to go to work at the Piketon Uranium En richment Plant. His father had spent 30 years there and United Way -connected to the By funding programs thai help educiHe children, care r'or the elderly, train local leaders and assist neighbors in need, we are helping to lay the foundations For health)', thriving communities. Experienced United Way volunteers assess our local community needs and determine how best to distribute funds to battle the most pressing issues. United making your caring count! the son wanted to follow.

IV A If inow ana living on Amelia Island, Tulloh has had 11 tumors removed over the years, has battled Workers (from page 6A) Tulloh says the government's track record for telling the truth in Piketon is awful. He says he was there in 1978 when 21,125 pounds of uranium hexaflouride escaped into the atmosphere and officials downplayed the incident. "You've seen pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?" he says. "We had a 180-foot mushroom cloud. It looked like we were nuked by the (Russians)." Working conditions today are better at plant, says Elizabeth Stuckle, spokeswoman for the United States Enrichment Corp.

She welcomes the DOE investigation. "We are seriously concerned about a legacy, environmental or health-related, that could affect our employees arising from practices at the plant before USEC took over operations of portions of government operations," she says. Paul Smith, West Portsmouth, speaks with 'a croak after having his larynx removed in an effort to save him from throat cancer. He blames his illness on more than 30 years of work at the plant and says 13 of 43 co-workers have cancer. He doesn't think there's been an intentional cover up but says the government shouldn't investigate its own past practices.

"They're sending the fox to watch the hen house," Smith says. Questions (from page 6A) um, nickel and high noise levels. When the medical project was being put together three years ago, plutonium was not a consideration, said Sylvia Kieding, a Denver-based union official who helped plan it. While Markowitz moved immediately to go after more money for the tests under his control, the Energy Department pursued a broader initiative. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson asked the National Academy of Sciences to look into "the relationship between hazardous exposures and illnesses in our workers at Paducah and other Energy Department sites." Richardson also asked for legislation to compensate workers exposed to radiation at government nuclear sites, and sent investigators to Kentucky.

Sometime next month, the investigators will go to southern Ohio's Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, which is now operated by U.S. Enrichment Corp. The plant about 70 miles south of Columbus enriches uranium to make fuel for power plants, and is under federal contract to buy Russian uranium removed from nuclear warheads and sell it to utilities. With the immediate focus on Paducah, residents in Piketon are taking a wait-and-see attitude. The plant employs 2,100 workers in a part of the state with an above-average jobless Vina Colley was healthy when she went to work at the plant ifi 1980 and was ill when she left in 1985.

Three tumors. Chronic bronchitis. Thyroid problems. Hearing loss. As president of Portsmouth-Piketon Residents for Environmental Safety and Security, she wants to file a class-action lawsuit and wants the Piketon plant to be scrutinized as closely as its sister plant in Paducah, Ky.

"I really think it's a crime," she said. "It's as bad as what the Nazis did." Rick Mingus, Portsmouth, worked at the plant from 1980 to 1986. He regrets it. Now 42, he has been diagnosed with colon cancer and blames his illness on exposure to radioactive materials and a lack of safety procedures. The money was good, he says.

The job, he says, was bad. "It was just bad choices," Mingus says. "I thought, 'Oh boy, I'm getting hired by the U.S. government' and I thought it was a lifetime job." Blaine Beekman, executive director of the Pike County Chamber of Commerce, says it will difficult to uncover the whole story of what happened in Piketon during the Cold War. Still, he welcomes the investigation, which is slated to begin in November, and is hoping for good news.

"I guess you have to separate 1999 from 1959," Beekman says. "The hope is they're going to come back and say nobody was put at risk here. We want a clean bill of health because these are people we know." rate. "Folks are waiting to get more information," said Dan Minter, president of the Piketon local of the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers International. "I don't think we have nearly the frenzy that we see at Paducah." The local congressman, Democrat Ted Strickland, said he's willing to give Richardson a chance to get to the bottom of things, though he finds distressing the exclusion of his constituents from a pilot project offering cash payments to sickened workers.

Vina Colley, a disabled former Piketon worker who believes her numerous health problems stem from exposure to poly-chlorinated biphenyls and other dangerous materials at the plant, said the discovery that Paducah handled 100,000 tons of plutonium-laced uranium has gotten her name in the paper a couple of times but didn't seem to immediately help her cause. She is president of a small local group, Portsmouth and Piketon Residents for Environmental Safety and Security, which wants a more complete accounting of worker exposures and compensation for those who contracted leukemia, cancer and other diseases as a result. Colley says she raised the possibility of plutonium contamination at the plant during a 1993 meeting, though at the time she didn't fully understand what she was talking about. A devoted reader and collec tor of documents related to activities at the plant, Colley had encountered reports making references to transuranic contamination. When she asked about that contamination, she was told amounts were small and the word plutonium never came up.

Transuranics are elements such as plutonium with atomic weights higher than uranium. "I didn't know what that meant," said Colley, who was an electrician at the plant in the early 1980s. "I'm not a scientist." The presence of plutonium and other transuranics was revealed in different ways over the years, in bulletins, reports and at one routine public meeting. "The issue of transuranics has been with us for years," said DOE spokesman Steve Wy-att. The spokesman acknowledged the information wasn't communicated very well.

An expert who works with citizen groups such as Colley's contends poor communication is the same as covering up. "This is a working-class area where people often have no more than a high school education," said Bob Schaeffer of the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability. "To talk about it only in college-physics-or-above terms is to be intentionally deceptive." Agreed Colley: "If they had told us they were going to have a meeting on plutonium, we would have been there. the government in court and speaks out about things that workers because it is more deadly and because they didn't know it was there. Plutonium is 100,000 times more radioactive than natural uranium, and roughly 1,000 times more radioactive than the highly enriched uranium Piketon workers knew they were handling.

Now that it's clear plutonium was handled at the three plants, an ongoing series of medical screenings on former workers seems insufficient, to Dr. Steven Markowitz of Queens College, City University of New York, who's overseeing the tests. His proposal for $3.6 million in additional testing was incorporated into an Energy Department bid to supplement its fiscal 2000 spending request. "We want to include lung cancer screenings for people at highest risk," he said. "That's certainly a plausible cancer related to plutonium exposure." Up to now, the medical screenings have been tests to identify those who suffered liver dam-' age, kidney damage, bladder cancer and hearing loss.

With a limited budget, allowing about $200 per person, with some 18,000 eligible to be tested at the three plants, those health problems were selected as the most likely to result from exposure to solvents, acids, asbestos, berylli- (See QUESTIONS7A.) WASHINGTON (AP) During the Cold War, three big, secretive factory complexes in Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee made nuclear warfare possible, getting uranium ready for bombs that never had to be used. Only recently have workers and nearby residents learned that the gaseous diffusion plant in Paducah, handled uranium contaminated with plutoni-um. Then some of it was sent for further refinement to the plant in Piketon, Ohio, which also got uranium laced with plutonium from other sources. Because of the secrecy imposed on contractors by federal officials in past decades, no one has been able to say with certainty how much plutonium was involved, where all of it came from, or where it ended up. The best guesses of Energy Department officials have changed from week to week as long-ignored documents and reports yield new revelations.

The result has been new attention on Paducah, Piketon and the K-25 plant in Oak Ridge, hew examinations of overlooked information, and renewed questions about why, in 1999, it's still not clear exactly what workers were exposed to in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Both plutonium and uranium are radioactive, and exposure to either one can be harmful, but plutonium is more frightening to are supposed to stay undei wraps. "Shocking," he says when asked about conditions in the plant. "I actually did watch people die there. Radical dis ease.

One gentleman was 36 years old" when he died of a brain tumor. He doesn't believe the De partment of Energy's planned probe of the Piketon UnibedWby plant will do any good. There needs to be an outside inves tigator to get the real story about how much plutonium was shipped to the plant dur ing Cold War years, he says. (See WORKERS7A.) ONLY RECENTLY have workers and nearby residents learned that the gaseous diffusion plant in Paducah, handled uranium contaminated with plutonium. Then some of it was sent for further refinement to the plant in Piketon, Ohio, (pictured here) which also got uranium laced with plutonium from other sources.

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