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U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES

CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL

NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR OCCUPATIONAL

SAFETY AND HEALTH 

+ + + + +

ADVISORY BOARD ON RADIATION AND

WORKER HEALTH 

+ + + + +

WORK GROUP ON SEC ISSUES

+ + + + +

TUESDAY

MAY 11, 2010

+ + + + +

 The Work Group convened in the 

Zurich Room of the Cincinnati Airport Marriott 

Hotel, 2395 Progress Drive, Hebron, Kentucky 

at 10:00 a.m., James M. Melius, Chairman, 

presiding.

PRESENT:

JAMES M. MELIUS, Chairman

JOSIE BEACH, Member

MARK GRIFFON, Member 

GENEVIEVE S. ROESSLER, Member

PAUL L. ZIEMER, Member
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ALSO PRESENT:

TED KATZ, Designated Federal Official

NANCY ADAMS, NIOSH Contractor*

ISAF AL-NABULSI, DOE*

LYNN ANSPAUGH, SC&A*

HANS BEHLING, SC&A

SAMUEL GLOVER, DCAS

EMILY HOWELL, HHS

JEFF KOTSCH, DOL*

JENNY LIN, HHS*

ARJUN MAKHIJANI, SC&A

JOHN MAURO, SC&A

DAN McKEEL, Petitioner*

JAMES NETON, DCAS

LaVON RUTHERFORD, DCAS

*Participating via telephone
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C-O-N-T-E-N-T-S 

Description Page 

Roll Call.................................. 4 

Dow Madison SEC Update..................... 7 

Comments by Dr. McKeel.................... 14

250 Day SEC Discussion.................... 19

Presentation by Arjun Makhijani........... 20

Met Lab Discussion....................... 117

Adjourn
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1 P-R-O-C-E-E-D-I-N-G-S 

2 10:00 a.m.

3 MR. KATZ: Welcome, everyone in 

4 the room and on the line, to the Advisory 

5 Board on Radiation and Worker Health, SEC 

6 Issues Work Group, and we'll begin with roll 

7 call. We will begin with Board members in the 

8 room. Chair?

9 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Jim Melius, 

10 Chair.

11 MR. KATZ: And also since we are 

12 discussing Dow if anyone has, everyone please 

13 state your situation with respect to conflict 

14 of interest with Dow.

15 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I have no 

16 conflict of interest with Dow.

17 MEMBER BEACH: Josie Beach, no 

18 conflict of interest with Dow.

19 MEMBER ROESSLER: Gen Roessler, 

20 Board member, no conflict with Dow.

21 MEMBER ZIEMER: Paul Ziemer, no 

22 conflict with Dow.
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1 MEMBER GRIFFON: And Mark Griffon, 

2 no conflict.

3 MR. KATZ: Okay and are there any 

4 Board members on the line?

5 (No response.)

6 MR. KATZ: Okay. NIOSH-ORAU Team

7 in the room?

8 DR. NETON: Jim Neton, no conflict 

9 with Dow.

10 DR. GLOVER: Sam Glover, no 

11 conflict with Dow.

12 MR. RUTHERFORD: LaVon Rutherford, 

13 no conflict with Dow.

14 MR. KATZ: NIOSH-ORAU Team on the 

15 line? Okay. SC&A team in the room?

16 DR. MAURO: John Mauro, SC&A, no 

17 conflict with Dow.

18 DR. MAKHIJANI: Arjun Makhijani, 

19 SC&A, no conflict with Dow.

20 MR. KATZ: SC&A team on the line?

21 DR. ANSPAUGH: Lynn Anspaugh, no 

22 conflict with Dow.
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1 MR. KATZ: Welcome, Lynn.

2 DR. ANSPAUGH: Thank you. 

3 MR. KATZ: Okay and then other HHS 

4 or federal employees or contractors for the 

5 feds in the room?

6 MS. HOWELL: Emily Howell, HHS.

7 MR. KATZ: And on the line?

8 MS. LIN: Jenny Lin, HHS.

9 MS. ADAMS: Nancy Adams, NIOSH 

10 contractor.

11 MR. KOTSCH: Jeff Kotsch with 

12 Labor.

13 MR. KATZ: Welcome, Jeff.

14 DR. AL-NABULSI: Isaf Al-Nabulsi, 

15 DOE.

16 MR. KATZ: Welcome, Isaf. Okay. 

17 And then any members of the public. There are 

18 none in the room. Any members of the public 

19 on the line who want to self identify?

20 DR. McKEEL: Yes, this is Dan 

21 McKeel. I am the co-petitioner on SEC-00079 

22 for Dow.
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1 MR. KATZ: Welcome, Dan.

2 DR. McKEEL: Thank you. 

3 MR. KATZ: Very well. Then 

4 please, folks on the line, mute your phones, 

5 *6 if you don't have a mute button, *6 to 

6 bring it off of mute. And, Dr. Melius, it is 

7 yours.

8 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Okay. We have 

9 two items on our agenda for today. First sort 

10 of a brief update on the Dow Madison SEC, and 

11 then we will spend most of the time talking 

12 about the SEC evaluation issue, the so-called 

13 250 day issue, which is really the less-than14 250 day issue, I guess, would be a better 

15 descriptor of it.

16 On Dow there are, since our last 

17 discussion of this, there have been, SC&A has 

18 sent out two draft reports on this. I'm not 

19 sure where they exactly are in terms of 

20 clearance. One was their SEC findings on 

21 Appendix C of the TBD-6000. I don't know if 

22 that's on the agenda -- your 6000 Work Group 
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1 is meeting tomorrow, Paul?

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: We haven't been 

3 doing Appendix C since that's Dow Madison.

4 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Okay, okay.

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right.

6 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: But the overall 

7 issue?

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: Is it a TBD-6000 

9 or is it a Dow Madison issue?

10 DR. MAURO: Apparently there is an 

11 Appendix now that updates some of the 

12 information, basically updates the information 

13 we had before. So we took a look at the 

14 Appendix. 

15 MEMBER ZIEMER: That is Appendix 

16 C.

17 DR. MAURO: Right, but right now 

18 the only thing we have is the general 6000 and 

19 GSI, not any of the other specific appendices. 

20 That was my understanding.

21 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right, the 6000 

22 and the GSI we will be covering tomorrow, but 
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1 not Appendix C.

2 DR. MAKHIJANI: I think we did 

3 Appendix D, Electro Met. 

4 DR. MAURO: Oh, no, we have a 

5 number -- yes -- Electro Met is 6001. But we 

6 have a number of appendices that we've done 

7 that are all being sorted out between 6000 and 

8 6001, but we haven't engaged them yet.

9 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: And then the 

10 second report is entitled Evolution of Dose 

11 Reconstruction Approach at Dow Madison and Use 

12 of Surrogate Data. I don't know if the entire 

13 -- this Work Group got that or it might have 

14 just gone to the Surrogate Work Group

15 DR. MAURO: Probably just the 

16 Surrogate.

17 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: So we'll get it 

18 circulated to this Work Group also. I think 

19 it makes sense to try and sort of consolidate 

20 specific issues on DOW into this Work Group 

21 rather than having what would in effect be 

22 three Work Groups dealing with it. There's 
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1 obviously the need for some consistency on 

2 that. 

3 And then we are not going to try 

4 to discuss those, but these reports were both 

5 done in response. I think Dr. McKeel brought 

6 up some issues, and we just need to make sure 

7 we had a good inventory of what were the 

8 issues related to Dow Madison. There are a 

9 lot of different sort of small issues related 

10 to both surrogate data as well as to the TBD11 6000. So we've got these short reports that 

12 address that.

13 The third issue related to Dow 

14 Madison is the possibility of some new data on 

15 that, and I don't know if Ted or LaVon, who 

16 knows that? 

17 MR. RUTHERFORD: We -- this is 

18 LaVon. I can say that we did identify. 

19 Actually recently there is an index of sites 

20 that have classified documentation that we are 

21 working to go look at that. Dow is indicated 

22 on that, but it is not specific whether that 
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1 is Dow Madison or Dow Bay City or Dow -- what 

2 Dow facility it is. We are, as I indicated, 

3 we do intend to go look at the documents, and 

4 we probably will not be able to look at those 

5 documents until some time in early June. We 

6 are going out this week to look at some stuff, 

7 some documents associated with Chapman Valve 

8 but we don't feel we will have time to go 

9 through all the documents. There is roughly, 

10 I can't remember --

11 DR. NETON: Forty-five boxes.

12 MR. RUTHERFORD: Forty-five boxes 

13 of documents to look through. Not all 

14 associated with one facility. There are 

15 roughly 65, I believe, facilities that are 

16 involved in those boxes. 

17 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: And so we would 

18 have an update at least on the content of the 

19 Dow information there roughly mid-June?

20 MR. RUTHERFORD: Yes.

21 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: So there may 

22 still be classification issues and so forth 
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1 with those?

2 MR. RUTHERFORD: Yes.

3 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I think we are 

4 going to have to wait and see what's found and 

5 have a sense if that's relevant to this 

6 particular SEC issue or other issues, I guess, 

7 related to Dow Madison. So I think we would 

8 do is postpone any sort of action or 

9 consideration on Dow. I -- add one other 

10 document this morning. I don't know if 

11 everybody has seen it, but Dr. McKeel did 

12 email this morning a document that raises --

13 sort of summarizes a number of questions and 

14 issues that he and the petitioners have 

15 relative to the Dow Madison SEC. I'll admit I 

16 am aware of the document. I have not had a 

17 chance to read it yet. But I believe it was 

18 circulated this morning. Did other people get 

19 anything?

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: I haven't seen it.

21 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Okay.

22 MEMBER ROESSLER: It came through.
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1 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Okay.

2 MEMBER ROESSLER: About 9:00 I 

3 think.

4 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Okay. Those 

5 that didn't get it, we'll make sure that --

6 which it may have been which email it went to 

7 also. I don't know. So we will do that, and I 

8 think we just wait and see what happens with 

9 this new information and the timing and so 

10 forth on that. We don't know if it is 

11 relevant or not. Paul?

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: Could you quickly 

13 summarize the nature of Dr. McKeel's items, or 

14 you don't have them?

15 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I was -- I don't 

16 have the -- I haven't read -- opened up that 

17 part of the email. The part of the email that 

18 I opened was just his sort of cover email.

19 MEMBER ZIEMER: Oh, you haven't 

20 seen the document.

21 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I didn't have a 

22 chance to look at the actual document.
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1 MEMBER BEACH: I have a copy of it 

2 here.

3 MR. KATZ: I can forward it. It 

4 went to -- addresses.

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: No, no. 

6 MR. KATZ: Okay.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: Without having to 

8 -- I am really asking you if there are some 

9 new issues that Dr. McKeel has raised or maybe 

10 you would permit him to speak.

11 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I was going to 

12 permit him and -- right now was permitting the 

13 Work Group members to say something first. 

14 But, Dr. McKeel, do you have any comments or 

15 questions?

16 DR. McKEEL: Yes, thank you. Good 

17 morning to everybody. The email I sent 

18 everyone in the Work Group this morning and 

19 asked Ted to distribute to the Board. I also 

20 sent to SC&A, to John Mauro, and I sent it to 

21 Stuart Hinnefeld and to Dr. Neton. And in it 

22 what I attempted to do was to take each of the 
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1 major technical reports that had been 

2 generated by both NIOSH and SC&A on Dow 

3 Madison and summarize my comments, including 

4 the two White Papers, draft White Papers that 

5 SC&A distributed in March of this year, which 

6 I have. 

7 I would say I know you all have 

8 other business this morning, but basically I 

9 have many issues that I think still need to be 

10 resolved. I think that the Appendix C review 

11 is certainly -- the SC&A review does not 

12 include the points that I feel are very 

13 important and haven't been addressed. I point 

14 out for example that it's been said that there 

15 were two campaigns to do experimental gamma 

16 phase extrusion at Dow for Mallinckrodt, when 

17 in fact there is a document that I've 

18 retrieved called MCW 1416 which is an AEC 

19 technical report prepared by the folks at 

20 Weldon Spring where they detailed nine 

21 campaigns that were carried out. And there's 

22 a lot more information in there. Some of it 
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1 relates specifically to dose reconstruction, 

2 the issue about extrusion presses not having 

3 vacuum hoods, for example, could affect the 

4 amount of dust generated and that accumulated 

5 during the residual period and undoubtedly 

6 did. That hasn't been taken into 

7 consideration.

8 I show in that report that there 

9 are references to non-destructive testing work 

10 at Dow and mention an old finding that there 

11 was a Kelley-Koett, that's K-E-L-L-Y K-O-E-T12 T, betatron at Dow that was, we don't know 

13 when it was used. It was probably used during 

14 the operational period so it wouldn't affect 

15 the residual period.

16 But anyway there are many issues 

17 about the residual period that I think are 

18 important. I would simply ask you all to 

19 please read and consider that information. I 

20 would point out that the -- Dr. Melius' motion 

21 to look into an extension of the Dow SEC to 

22 cover the residual period took place in May of 
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1 2007. And you know, we are now in April of 

2 2010, and there has still not been a 

3 recommendation from the Work Group to the full 

4 Board about whether or not NIOSH's claim that 

5 it can do dose reconstruction is valid or not. 

6 I think that Dr. Mauro circulated 

7 from the one about the extent of the use of 

8 surrogate data is extremely important. A main 

9 piece of data that's being used for the 

10 residual period there is based on two weeks 

11 worth of film badge data from the Bay City, 

12 Michigan Dow plant. And I personally don't 

13 think that two weeks of film badge data from 

14 another center could possibly be said to be 

15 representative for the Dow Madison plant. I 

16 remind everybody, again, there's absolutely no 

17 direct film badge data for Dow Madison, nor is 

18 there even a good indication there was an 

19 active film badge program there. 

20 So anyway, that's the comments 

21 that I would like to have. I spent quite a 

22 bit of time on that document and it does 
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1 represent my point of view and I wish and hope 

2 that you all will consider it and take that 

3 into consideration when you are making a 

4 decision about the SEC. I appreciate the 

5 opportunity to address you this morning. 

6 Thank you. 

7 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Thank you, Dr. 

8 McKeel. I think our plan would be June NIOSH 

9 looks at the new box, and hopefully we have 

10 information by July. And I think we have to 

11 consider do we do a Work Group meeting 

12 focusing, try to resolve these issues with Dow 

13 Madison -- around July, sometime in July and 

14 then try and put it on the agenda for the 

15 August Board meeting. Although I think all 

16 that will depend on what happens, what is 

17 found with the boxes and some of the 

18 classification or declassification issues that 

19 could arise from that.

20 We'll also do our best to keep you 

21 informed, Dr. McKeel, on what happens with 

22 that. On the surrogate data issue, we have a 
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1 meeting of the Surrogate Data Work Group on 

2 Thursday, a conference call, and a Board 

3 meeting next week, yes, next week coming up, 

4 and we'll hopefully be finalizing surrogate 

5 data criteria with the Board at that meeting 

6 next week and, I think, may be able to address 

7 the other issue that you raised, Dr. McKeel, 

8 also. Let's see, I think this issue with the 

9 information in the box, I think, is the one 

10 that's making us hesitate a little bit in 

11 terms of how to move forward on this until we 

12 see what's there.

13 Any other Work Group members have 

14 comments? Okay. 

15 We'll move to the next item on the 

16 agenda which is the issue of the less-than-250 

17 day SEC. We've been working on this issue for 

18 a long time. I think it started with looking 

19 at the Nevada Test Site and Ames, and we've 

20 thought about different approaches -- and, 

21 boy, that was quick. For the record, LaVon 

22 just left -- Mr. Rutherford just left. And we 
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1 struggled with it. We tried different 

2 approaches. We've been back and forth with 

3 NIOSH. And I think at least some members of 

4 the Work Group believe that we need to address 

5 in some way in order to be fair and equitable 

6 for people to program but it's not people 

7 making claims who have worked for short 

8 periods of time and had high exposures. But 

9 it's not an easy issue to address that. I 

10 thought to help start our discussions today, I 

11 asked Arjun to sort of give some thought and 

12 make a brief presentation of where we are and 

13 where we might go with this issue at least to 

14 get us started, and then we'll go from there. 

15 Arjun?

16 DR. MAKHIJANI: Jim and I had a 

17 phone conversation about this two weeks ago 

18 and discussed some ideas as to where we were 

19 and what might move us forward. What I tried 

20 to do was just to capture that idea and see if 

21 the Work Group wanted to go in that direction 

22 or not and we could prepare a report for you 
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1 on that.

2 So basically, you know, the way 

3 the rule is written for incidents is there are 

4 four criteria for somebody to qualify that has 

5 less than 250 days of employment. 

6 Exceptionally high exposures is an example 

7 given -- criticality accidents or incidents, 

8 similarly high levels of exposure to 

9 criticality incidents and a failure of 

10 radiation protection controls. And we've 

11 discussed these criteria with respect to 

12 external dose, and SC&A prepared a study on 

13 that including cataloguing all the criticality 

14 accidents and the doses that are being 

15 estimated associated with that.

16 And there is also -- there have 

17 been several reports, but there was also a 

18 report on how this might apply to internal 

19 dose, and SC&A prepared a report on blowouts 

20 in Ames showing that there were quite high 

21 internal exposures, quite high intakes with 

22 the dose playing out over a long period of 
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1 time, but the intakes happening over a short 

2 period of time.

3 Just to sort of recap some of the 

4 discussions, and, people, do please correct me 

5 if I'm not representing the discussions 

6 properly. They have been complex, but the 

7 criticality report turned out to make the 

8 discussion more difficult rather than 

9 illuminate it because doses during 

10 criticalities have ranged from well below one 

11 rem into the thousands of rems.

12 And so there has been quite an 

13 extended discussion of what it means to say 

14 exceptionally high exposures. And in relation 

15 to cancer Jim Neton had said that you can 

16 compensate people of less than one rem, but it 

17 seems from a technical point of view that less 

18 than one rem wouldn't qualify for an 

19 exceptionally high exposure. We discussed the 

20 annual dose limit, five rem, ten rem, white 

21 blood cell changes, you know, thresholds for 

22 somatic changes.
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1 We've discussed a number of 

2 different levels from below one rem to about 

3 ten rem or well above ten rem, I think. And 

4 from a technical point of view, I think the 

5 general feeling had been if you are a few rem 

6 or below it's not exceptionally high exposures 

7 the way the health physicist might see it. 

8 For internal, and that's where, so far as I 

9 recall, we left that discussion the last time 

10 we took up the external dose issue.

11 For internal dose issues, the main 

12 issue had been how do you relate doses that 

13 were delivered to the person over a very long 

14 period of time because they are committed 

15 doses even though the intake would have been 

16 during an incident or several incidents. And 

17 what Jim asked me to do was to see if there 

18 were ways to think about this where we could 

19 try to make this, whether there were other 

20 approaches than thinking of dose thresholds in 

21 thinking about this problem, and one thing 

22 that I had discussed with Jim was whether the 
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1 rule for incidents could somehow be related to 

2 the threshold of 250 days of employment.

3 So I reviewed some of that 

4 background, and Jim also asked me to go back 

5 to the Advisory Board discussion of the draft 

6 rule and see what the Board had said during 

7 that time. So I did that, or we did that. 

8 SC&A people actually compiled some of that 

9 information. And so in reviewing that 

10 information, you know, 250 days clearly 

11 derives from the law that has the three 

12 gaseous diffusion plants and that basically 

13 says if you were badged or had a job like 

14 people who were badged and had 250 days, 

15 you're in, and the way I read the transcripts 

16 and the presentation of the rule, that seemed 

17 to be the motivation. Ted, you were the one 

18 who did it, so correct me if I'm wrong. But 

19 so it didn't have a dose threshold. It had a 

20 present threshold, and that has a clear 

21 correspondence in the incidents rule. If you 

22 are present during an incident, and then are 
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1 those other criteria, exceptionally high 

2 exposures and so on.

3 But the presence thing didn't seem 

4 to be an issue because one thing requires 

5 presence for 250 days and the other thing 

6 requires -- so since there's no dose criterion 

7 for 250 days, it seemed that it might be 

8 worthwhile exploring non-dose criteria for 

9 incidents. Within the law the most immediate 

10 thing that is available of course is the 

11 Amchitka SEC.

12 We've discussed this before 

13 briefly during Work Group meetings. I think I 

14 went back and looked at that record or at 

15 least looked at something in relation to 

16 Amchitka. The highest recorded external dose 

17 -- I didn't review the source documents, I 

18 have to say. I just looked at our previous 

19 reports. For Amchitka which required only 

20 presence and didn't have a time threshold, 

21 presence at one of three tests, Long Shot, 

22 Milrow and Cannikin. Is that how it is 
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1 pronounced? Cannikin. And the highest 

2 reported external dose according to the 

3 literature that we've reviewed before is 265 

4 millirems. So quite low in the sub-rem range. 

5 Of course these were planned criticalities 

6 not criticality incidents.

7 Some of the discussion around 

8 including Amchitka was that some of the 

9 legislators felt that the doses were not fully 

10 recorded so that doses were higher than those 

11 recorded. And so there's a question of 

12 uncertainty around doses and whether they 

13 could be reconstructed. So as far as I recall 

14 that's not in the law itself. There's no dose 

15 threshold in the law. It just says if you 

16 were there during one of these three tests. 

17 Now, so the -- if there's a non18 dose criterion, you could decide that you are 

19 going to go in that direction, presence during 

20 an incident, and then the question is what is 

21 a serious incident and how do you reconcile it 

22 with the health physics notion of what is an 
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1 exceptionally high exposure? There is clearly 

2 a conflict between looking at Amchitka and 

3 what the exposures were then and saying, okay 

4 they were on the order of one rem or on the 

5 order of the kind of dose that might be in the 

6 lowest dose case to be a compensable cancer 

7 but not be considered exceptionally high dose 

8 in the manner that the Working Group has 

9 discussed before, 10 rem, 25 rem, and so on. 

10 Clearly not an exceptionally high dose in the 

11 regard. But still be an event that is of very 

12 short duration.

13 So I looked at DOE guides for 

14 incidents to see how else presence at an 

15 incident might be considered significant, and 

16 there are a number of them. There's a DOE 

17 standard on internal dosimetry that has quite 

18 an extensive commentary on what is a 

19 significant intake including non-dose 

20 threshold criteria. Significant intakes 

21 usually occur as a result of accidents, and 

22 prompt response is needed. So some of the 
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1 decisions around what significant are whether 

2 prompt response is needed like medical 

3 attention. Diuresis if you have tritium 

4 intake and so on, so there is a fair amount. 

5 I won't detain you in the quite extensive 

6 literature there is from -- and there are 

7 examples of the kind of incidents that lead to 

8 medical response that have radiation 

9 associated with them and so on.

10 There is also a DOE guide 

11 regarding what is an incident-related 

12 significant exposure for workers, which is, I 

13 haven't studied that document. I just got the 

14 URL for it from Joe last night, which is 500 

15 millirems. And then there is the EPA 

16 protective action guide that John pointed me 

17 to for the public which is when do you think 

18 about evacuation of the public, and that would 

19 be on the order of one rem.

20 For internal dose, you know, you 

21 could use a criterion like were the conditions 

22 such as to -- I mean there is no way to avoid 
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1 reference to some kind of dose issue because 

2 you've got exceptionally high dose in the 

3 rule. So there is going to be, within the 

4 rule, there is some, there's got to be some 

5 point of reference to significance of dose but 

6 it could be something like likely or possible 

7 the person got more than the annual limit of 

8 intake during one or more than one incident. 

9 That would make incident comparable in the 

10 internal and external.

11 I looked at the Board discussion 

12 in this regard. I don't think, at least I 

13 couldn't find any Board discussion that 

14 discussed internal compared to external dose. 

15 But there is a fairly lengthy interchange 

16 between Dr. Melius and Dr. Ziemer actually in 

17 one of the discussions where it seemed that 

18 presence during the incident and not the --

19 the duration of the incident and not the 

20 duration of the dose seemed to be what you all 

21 were discussing. But there is no explicit 

22 reference to internal versus external. And I 
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1 could not find any explicit language that 

2 would kind of help resolve the issue. 

3 So these are some ideas for 

4 staying with the previous path that we have 

5 had, summarizing the previous path. And maybe 

6 another alternative approach might be to try 

7 to make presence and exceptionally high doses 

8 relate to 250 days and how incidents are 

9 handled. And I don't think you can easily 

10 reconcile the health physics idea of 

11 exceptionally high dose with some of these 

12 other ideas as to what might constitute a 

13 significant incident. They are not the same 

14 kinds of numbers. 

15 DR. MAURO: I want to just add one 

16 thing that I found interesting. When the 

17 protective action guides were developed by 

18 EPA, I remember the number being one to five 

19 rem and that's when you evacuate. In other 

20 words, if you anticipate a release that could 

21 cause one to five rem, you evacuate or take 

22 some other action like shelter. But I didn't 
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1 remember, but it turns out the one to five rem 

2 includes internal. In other words it's the 

3 dose you would get from external radiation 

4 from a passing plume but also from what you 

5 might inhale. There is a place where they 

6 considered -- they talked about one to five 

7 rem but it is effective whole body dose, and 

8 it includes both what you would get from the 

9 external from the passing plume plus what you 

10 might inhale as the plume passes.

11 DR. MAKHIJANI: So I have no 

12 recommendation or resolution to give you, just 

13 a new dilemma.

14 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well I have a lot 

15 of different comments, and I don't have any 

16 solutions. But I think if we start getting 

17 into population criteria of the type you 

18 suggest which are based on integrated dose 

19 over population and projections of cancer 

20 incidence based on collective dose and have --

21 I -- in my mind very little application 

22 because you look at the population a very 
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1 different way to start with as compared to a 

2 Working Group. And so to me that's a 

3 difficult one. I would think it would be 

4 preferable to stay with the sorts of things 

5 Arjun is talking about. What happens in other 

6 workplace situations?

7 We've gone round and round on this 

8 because one of the issues is to define what 

9 those incidents are, those high-dose 

10 incidents, you end up bounding it. And if you 

11 can do that, then the 250 days doesn't matter. 

12 If a person was there for a week and you can 

13 show that a blowout occurred some time, even 

14 if you don't know if they were in the blowout. 

15 For example, if you went to Ames and the 

16 person said you know during that half year I 

17 worked there, there were probably ten 

18 blowouts, we can bound the dose and do a dose 

19 reconstruction. That -- the very nature of 

20 the thing otherwise is we can't bound the dose 

21 and therefore we go to the SEC type situation. 

22 I think we have all agreed in the 
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1 past the 250 days really is arbitrary. You 

2 get to the argument, well, if 250 days is 

3 good, what about 249 days, is that very 

4 different, and so on. And it's just a 

5 demarcation. So I think it's very difficult 

6 to -- because we can adjust for work times 

7 like we did in the Pacific island cases. If 

8 they are there 24/7, that adjustment can be 

9 made. So it's not 250 calendar days. It is 

10 250-workday equivalence. So those things can 

11 be handled. I sort of intuitively would like 

12 to feel like, at a place like Ames, if the 

13 blowouts were occurring and someone's there, 

14 you include them. But -- I know you can bound 

15 that. 

16 DR. MAKHIJANI: You don't know how 

17 many blowouts there are.

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, you don't 

19 but I think that's like other things. You can 

20 bound the number of blowouts, probably.

21 DR. GLOVER: They had six in one 

22 day once.
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1 MEMBER ZIEMER: There you go. 

2 DR. GLOVER: But then are you 

3 going to assume six every day? I don't think 

4 so.

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, no, but you 

6 have enough information -- well I don't know. 

7 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: No, no, Sam. 

8 That was, I think, what we ran into with Ames 

9 was because we bound with sufficient accuracy 

10 given the uncertainties about when and then 

11 would that even be a practical Class --

12 practical for NIOSH to do or, you know, if it 

13 was based on the number of blowouts you were 

14 present at, could you administer a Class 

15 Definition? It's hard.

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, I agree 

17 it's hard. I'm saying, for example, based on 

18 whatever records you have and worker 

19 testimony, if you could say, well, all right, 

20 a reasonable estimate would be one blowout per 

21 week or something. If a person worked there 

22 for 30 weeks, you would say okay, they could 
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1 have been subject to 30 blowouts and so on. 

2 But if you do that, you are able to -- we 

3 could bound the blowout doses, too, so.

4 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I don't think we 

5 ever reached the point where we felt we could 

6 bound them? Is that correct, Jim?

7 DR. NETON: That's right.

8 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes, that was --

9 we -- at one point that was our approach. We 

10 had a Work Group meeting. We talked, and I 

11 think SC&A had done some calculations or 

12 something.

13 DR. MAURO: Yes.

14 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: And then Jim 

15 went back and tried to do it, and the 

16 conclusion was that it wasn't going to be --

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: Oh, you couldn't 

18 bound them. Is that what --

19 DR. NETON: It all came down to n, 

20 the number of blowouts. I think it was 

21 reasonably okay to --

22 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: To bound one.
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1 DR. NETON: -- bound one to know 

2 what the conditions were but then to determine 

3 the total --

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, I'm sort of 

5 saying can you arrive at a reasonable 

6 estimate, you know, or not. If you can't, all 

7 right.

8 DR. MAURO: I think it's important 

9 to set the context of that particular 

10 analysis. The whole intent was that whether 

11 incidents that occurred at Ames that 

12 theoretically could have -- be considered very 

13 significant, and therefore perhaps we should 

14 grant SEC status to less than 250 days. And 

15 our only mandate, SC&A's work was why don't 

16 you see what you can do to try to get an idea 

17 of what kind of exposures there were. So Hans 

18 did an analysis to the extent where he did the 

19 best he could to say doses could have been 

20 this high and the whole story is told there.

21 Now we are not saying that that is 

22 an accurate characterization, but it is 
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1 certainly a plausible characterization of what 

2 could have occurred following an event, and he 

3 gave his reasons. In some of the cases some 

4 of the assumptions could have been considered 

5 conservative, perhaps not conservative enough. 

6 So I wouldn't want to say that this is a 

7 highly reliable estimation of what the dose 

8 per blowout is. It probably is a pretty good 

9 estimate of what it could be.

10 Now, and I think even Jim agreed 

11 that that probably is a pretty good strategy 

12 per blowout and the numbers we ended up coming 

13 up with which are pretty high for the lungs, 

14 for the bone. And I think we all agree that 

15 those doses are high and maybe we can 

16 reconstruct doses. But the problem we ran 

17 into was, okay, you have a real worker now, 

18 and let's say, well, we can construct his 

19 dose. Well how many of those are we going to 

20 assume he was exposed to? So if you are 

21 saying you can't reconstruct it, you have no 

22 choice but to say well how many did he get and 
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1 get that dose and do his PC. And there's 

2 where things sort of broke down.

3 So I think on two levels, the 

4 experiment we had regarding looking at Ames 

5 gave us some important information on what the 

6 magnitude of exposures could be from a 

7 blowout. But I wouldn't say that necessarily 

8 it was a number that you really want to hang 

9 your hat on as being a reasonable upper bound.

10 DR. H. BEHLING: John, can I make 

11 a comment here?

12 DR. MAURO: Hans, I'm glad you are 

13 here. Go ahead.

14 DR. H. BEHLING: That actually is 

15 more of a real number than you might think 

16 because it was really based on an empirical 

17 data that involved a blowout at Fernald where 

18 I used actual empirical data that involved a 

19 blowout at Fernald and quantified that and 

20 tailored it to the blowouts at Ames. So the 

21 numbers for there are -- have a fairly high 

22 level of credibility. And if you look at the 
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1 actual numbers that I generated on behalf of 

2 several cancers, you could come to the 

3 conclusion that a single blowout would more 

4 than adequately suffice for compensation if 

5 you were to do a PoC. 

6 DR. MAURO: Would people agree 

7 that if we have a site, let's just do Ames for 

8 a second, just to keep -- we have a site where 

9 we know there were blowouts, and we know that 

10 any one blowout could have delivered doses to 

11 some organs that certainly everyone would 

12 agree is very high. But they are internal 

13 dose and dose commitments. Would there be 

14 agreement here that at Ames we should grant 

15 everyone that was there, present at a time 

16 when they could have experienced exposures to 

17 blowouts, that they should be granted SEC 

18 status? It becomes a real simple -- rather 

19 than the big question, it becomes a simple 

20 question. Just for Ames. Let's just look at 

21 Ames. Everyone agrees that these blowouts 

22 were nasty, and Hans' calculations show these 
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1 doses were high. Hans, if I remember, we are 

2 talking on the order of 100 rem?

3 DR. H. BEHLING: Yes, and in fact 

4 if you look at table one on page nine of that 

5 write up that goes back to June of 2007, that 

6 Table 1 identifies a bone surface doses as 

7 well as lung doses, and I graduated by the 

8 integrated dose for the first year, five year, 

9 ten year, and thirty year, and if you go all 

10 the way to a thirty-year integrated dose for 

11 bone, a single blowout would generate a dose 

12 of 214 rem. For the lung, a thirty year dose 

13 would generate a dose of 69.1 rem. So we are 

14 talking about substantial doses from a single 

15 blowout.

16 DR. MAURO: I bring this up 

17 because all of sudden things become simple 

18 now. You have a worker. You know he was at 

19 Ames; it was likely he was at Ames at the time 

20 of the blowout. But he is being denied 

21 because we know he wasn't there for 250 days. 

22 All right? And the question becomes, and 
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1 this, really you have to ask yourself the 

2 question. Do you think this person deserves 

3 to be compensated?

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: But the reason 

5 that we're tending to say yes is because we 

6 know the magnitude of the dose.

7 DR. MAKHIJANI: From one blowout.

8 DR. MAURO: From one blowout.

9 MEMBER ZIEMER: But if you are 

10 saying that all it takes is one, then maybe 

11 that's all you need to assign. If that person 

12 came back and said, okay, I wasn't there 250 

13 days so, therefore, I want a dose 

14 reconstruction. What would NIOSH do? Would 

15 you say, well, he could have been exposed to 

16 at least one blowout in his time there? Would 

17 that be unreasonable? If you don't know when 

18 the blowouts occurred, would you assign him 

19 one?

20 DR. MAURO: What do you do with 

21 that? I mean you reconstruct.

22 MEMBER ZIEMER: Is it unreasonable 
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1 to say that a person could have been exposed 

2 to one blowout some time during his period? 

3 Is that unreasonable?

4 DR. MAURO: No, that's reasonable, 

5 but I don't think it means you can reconstruct 

6 his dose.

7 MEMBER GRIFFON: Yes.

8 MEMBER BEACH: Or if he was 

9 present on the day there were six.

10 DR. MAURO: But you see why do we 

11 have to go there? 

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, I don't know 

13 I'm just saying under the rule, under the SEC 

14 rule we say we can't reconstruct dose, but 

15 here we're saying we are going to give an SEC 

16 because we know the size of the dose.

17 DR. MAURO: We know it was at 

18 least this high. We know there is a very good 

19 chance that this man may have experienced at 

20 least this much of a dose commitment. That's 

21 all we really could say, and possibly a lot 

22 more. We don't know. And that alone is 
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1 enough to grant compensation. I mean, I could 

2 see that line of thinking. And you never 

3 really get quantitative. All we are saying 

4 is, everyone agrees it was high because it was 

5 in a realm where we all agree it was high. 

6 Now if it turned out a blowout ended up being 

7 one rem, would you say that is enough? Well, 

8 then we have a problem. So you're almost 

9 saying on a case by case basis, you have to 

10 deal with it. Can you come up with a general 

11 rule? I'm having trouble with a general.

12 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Well, what if we 

13 have like -- what we've talked about. We came 

14 up with and we used this term when we were 

15 talking about General Electric was sort of 

16 probability of being present and therefore 

17 exposed, and as a general approach say we have 

18 some idea of what the number of -- probability 

19 of being -- of a certain time period being 

20 exposed to a blowout and therefore would use 

21 that as a basis for looking at --

22 MEMBER ZIEMER: A probability 
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1 distribution of blowouts.

2 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes, blowouts 

3 but then also what, coming up with some time 

4 frame. If you worked there for 30 days, you 

5 had a reasonable -- some probability of being 

6 exposed to a blowout.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: X number of 

8 blowouts.

9 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes. We have to 

10 have something that's workable in terms of 

11 defining a Class. Now it could be like 

12 Amchitka present at all though it was hard to 

13 be present for an hour at Amchitka because 

14 once you are there you are stuck on the 

15 island, I think. 

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: I'm guessing that 

17 would be almost a rulemaking, wouldn't it?

18 MR. KATZ: Can I throw something 

19 on the table just that are -- sort of resonate 

20 with what John was saying related to 

21 discussions we had way back when, which is the 

22 whole idea again with the criticalities was 
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1 you know it when you see it. I mean, for the 

2 people with extraordinary -- we weren't 

3 talking about the people that happened to be 

4 at an incident of criticality or what have you 

5 but didn't incur terrible doses. We weren't 

6 really -- that was not what was in mind. So 

7 what John was saying here, I think, is very 

8 resonate.

9 If it's an internal dose of the 

10 magnitude where plainly on the face of it, 

11 that's an enormous dose, I mean, that is the 

12 same idea as what we were wrestling with in 

13 terms of external dose. If there were a 

14 debate about is that an extraordinary dose 

15 then you already know you have a problem, and 

16 that's probably not a dose that qualifies. 

17 But, you know, anyway that was sort of part of 

18 the discussion we were having back then that 

19 we're trying to deal with situations where 

20 plainly on the face of it, this person 

21 incurred -- could have incurred quite an 

22 incredible dose. And the other thing that I -
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1 - 

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: An incredible dose 

3 to certain organs?

4 MR. KATZ: Yes, it may be, right. 

5 That's not an issue.

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, it is on an 

7 SEC because you have a whole lot of organs 

8 covered. I mean, Hans is giving us dose 

9 figures for particular organs which are the 

10 organs of interest for those nuclides. So I 

11 think we have to be very careful to say that 

12 it's a high dose automatically. There may be 

13 some, if you can bound it, see. If you can't 

14 bound it, that's a different thing. Then you 

15 have to say any of the organs could have high 

16 dose.

17 DR. MAURO: You see, if we can't 

18 come to agreement on Ames about what is the 

19 right thing to do here, where I consider this 

20 to be like a flagship problem, I mean, classic 

21 problem. If we can't come to agreement there, 

22 we are going to have an even harder time 
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1 coming to agreement on many other sites. So 

2 it is almost as if -- it is almost like the 

3 easy one to solve. And whatever areas we find 

4 that we can agree about regarding Ames and 

5 perhaps coming to a decision, that becomes a 

6 stepping stone to allow us to move on to the 

7 next, more difficult one which is not as easy 

8 to decide because I know for one, I'll say it 

9 out loud. In my mind, Ames is cut and dry. 

10 If you were there at a time when 

11 those blowouts occurred, you experienced 

12 extraordinary exposures. I realize it's not 

13 comparable to a criticality because it's 

14 internal. But I've got to tell you, I feel as 

15 if a person was there and one of those things 

16 occurred, you've got to pay the guy. I'm 

17 making life feel simple. And it is easy for 

18 me on that one. Now I can't say I could come 

19 that quickly to others, things that may have 

20 occurred at Nevada Test Site or other 

21 facilities. But Ames, if we can't do Ames, I 

22 say we can't do any of them.
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1 MEMBER ROESSLER: So how are you 

2 basing -- you're clear on your decision about 

3 Ames. What is the criteria that you are using 

4 to come up with that?

5 DR. MAURO: When I hear that an 

6 extraordinary event that blew a door off 

7 released the quantities of airborne uranium to 

8 a point where you couldn't even see, people 

9 inhaled enough radioactivity where they were 

10 delivered a committed dose, lifetime committed 

11 dose to the bone, to the lung over 100 rem. 

12 Even in the one year, Hans, what are some of 

13 the numbers for one year? 

14 DR. H. BEHLING: For the one-year 

15 the bone surface according to my calculation, 

16 I think they were also verified by Jim Neton 

17 so that these numbers are reasonably correct. 

18 For the one-year integrated dose for the bone 

19 is 12.7 rem. For the one-year lung it is 53.2 

20 rem and that is for the thorium blowout. They 

21 are quite different between thorium and 

22 uranium. But even a one-year dose would have 
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1 a substantial dose. As I said 12.7 for the 

2 bone surface and 53 rem to the lung.

3 DR. MAURO: And that's one 

4 blowout, one year.

5 DR. H. BEHLING: Yes.

6 DR. MAURO: So, we have to 

7 realize that we are health physics scientists 

8 and we see the world the way we see the world. 

9 When I hear that I say pay the guy. Under my 

10 understanding of SEC.

11 MEMBER ROESSLER: It's a dose12 based thing.

13 DR. MAURO: It is the magnitude 

14 of the dose.

15 MEMBER ROESSLER: Magnitude.

16 DR. MAURO: The insult. The 

17 magnitude of the insult. 

18 MEMBER ROESSLER: So we can't 

19 really -- we can't get away from using what is 

20 a large dose?

21 DR. MAURO: Well, that's the --

22 you know it when you see it. I saw one -- 
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1 DR. NETON: I'll point this out 

2 in very general terms. We've added a number 

3 of SECs because we can't bound dose. Ames is 

4 one of them. I can guarantee you for any site 

5 that handled, that we can't bound dose, things 

6 like plutonium, enriched uranium you can come 

7 up with doses, maybe not as high as a blowout, 

8 but you are going to come up with doses that 

9 clearly would show or demonstrate very easily 

10 that you have endangered health if you are 

11 doing PoC calculation. No doubt. Then that 

12 puts you in the very difficult situation of 

13 how do you parse that down from 250 to 

14 whatever scenario you want to identify as the 

15 time period and it would have to go to 

16 presence anyways.

17 MR. KATZ: You can't parse it 

18 down on a time period. 

19 DR. NETON: What I'm saying,

20 though, is you have in that 250 day, I can 

21 guarantee you that you come up with doses that 

22 are, well much less 250 day will give you 
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1 doses much higher than what it would take to 

2 be over 50 percent on a PoC calculation. So 

3 you kind of got this balancing act then.

4 MS. HOWELL: Can I ask a clarifying 

5 question, a non-scientist? Is the reason that 

6 you understand what magnitude Ames was because 

7 blowouts have an objective magnitude or you 

8 just know enough about Ames to know what the 

9 magnitude of the blowouts there would be?

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well I think that 

11 is site-specific for Ames knowing the source12 terms. Was it not? Hans can you clarify?

13 DR. H. BEHLING: Actually the 

14 numbers that are used to derive those dose 

15 estimates were actually numbers that involved 

16 a specific blowout that occurred at the 

17 Fernald facility. However, I tailored it in 

18 proportion to the quantities that were used in 

19 the actual reduction process. So with a 

20 combination of empirical data that involved a 

21 single event that was well documented for 

22 Fernald but then I tailored that document --
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1 those documented values to quantities of 

2 material used for thorium as well as uranium 

3 material that were reduced at the Ames 

4 facility.

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: You really 

6 complicated it now, sir. Just joking. 

7 DR. MAURO: You see magnitude --

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: I'm okay with 

9 that part of it. I think, in a sense, it is 

10 site-specific. I mean a blowout somewhere else 

11 would have to be, you wouldn't say blow outs 

12 per se --

13 DR. MAURO: I agree. You see one 

14 of the things we are doing to ourselves and 

15 maybe it's not fair. When we are looking at 

16 Ames we are almost afraid to talk about it 

17 because we are afraid of where it may lead us 

18 when we go someplace else. So it's not -- to 

19 me let's come to agreement on Ames.

20 You would like to be able to use 

21 that as a stepping stone. So listen, if we 

22 all agree on Ames, the reason we agree with 
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1 it. The question then becomes when we move on 

2 to the next one, the same sensibility that we 

3 all collectively developed on Ames, if we do 

4 have that same sensibility. I'm not sure if 

5 we do. How is that going to serve us on the 

6 next one? So it almost becomes a case-by-case 

7 basis and these general rules that we are 

8 looking for will emerge from that process. 

9 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Or they may 

10 not.

11 DR. MAURO: They may not.

12 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: If there was an 

13 easy general rule I think we would have found 

14 it by now. We've struggled with Ames. We've 

15 struggled with all, at one point I think with 

16 Nevada Test Site we are thinking well maybe 

17 it's an individual, until NIOSH does the dose 

18 reconstruction and goes to a detailed 

19 evaluation of a person, we wouldn't be able to 

20 make a determination about an incident that 

21 they might have been exposed at which is a 

22 very different approach. And then we weren't 
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1 sure that was practical and got away from it. 

2 I would also add though, I think 

3 it would obviously make a difference to have 

4 to change the regulation. The 250 day versus 

5 incident is not based on the law per se. It 

6 is based on what regulation was written. So 

7 it was nothing, I mean, we thought it was 60 

8 days or something else. There is a basis for 

9 it but it doesn't mean that couldn't be put in 

10 place if that was appropriately justified. It 

11 would obviously be cumbersome and not an easy 

12 thing to do. But I don't think we should 

13 necessarily totally dismiss that sort of 

14 thought simply because we are tied to the 

15 present regulation. 

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: And I don't think 

17 it makes any difference if you change the 

18 number. You could change it to 200 days or 

19 100 days. There is always going to be someone 

20 below the line. So the problem still emerges. 

21 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: It is the basis 

22 for how you make this determination.
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1 MEMBER ZIEMER: And also I think 

2 the only reason we are using the 250 days was

3 sort of the precedent on the other sites. And 

4 we can't compare them too well. Even Amchitka 

5 is 265 millirem. The implication though was 

6 that we don't even really think that's a good 

7 number. I think the congressional implication 

8 was we can't hang our hat on that. In fact if 

9 we were reconstructing doses there we wouldn't 

10 have ended up using that number because there 

11 is missed dose. There is all the other issues 

12 anyway.

13 DR. MAKHIJANI: There was some 

14 reference to Dr. Bertell, Rosalie Bertell dose 

15 reconstruction. We've discussed that before 

16 too.

17 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: There was an 

18 index --

19 DR. MAKHIJANI: I think maximum 

20 estimate of 17 gram -- but this is from 

21 memory. So I would have to go back and check 

22 it.
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1 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Can I 

2 elaborate? The index case so to speak at 

3 Amchitka was a worker with leukemia whose 

4 records were withheld. First the claim wasn't 

5 monitored and then they were withheld by DOE 

6 for security reasons for many years. So it 

7 went to the Supreme Court in Alaska over a 

8 worker's compensation case and it was clear 

9 once even the records were made available that 

10 the monitoring, Bertell had done some sort of 

11 a study estimate basically saying that 

12 whatever that person was exposed to was orders 

13 of magnitude higher than what was recorded for 

14 them at that site. I think that was some of 

15 the basis for the decision and in particular 

16 they just weren't --

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, I'm just 

18 saying I don't think we should assume that low 

19 doses of --

20 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: No, no, that's 

21 why I was --

22 MEMBER ZIEMER: The implication 
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1 was the doses were higher than they recorded.

2 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes.

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: But, right. I'm 

4 in sympathy with what you are saying John. 

5 I'm uncomfortable with the idea that we have 

6 to in a sense reconstruct dose to get to that 

7 point and I would sort of like your idea of a 

8 probability distribution, Jim's idea. But I 

9 don't know how you would put that into play in 

10 terms of practicality. I mean it would make 

11 sense if a person was there like 100 days. 

12 You would say it's likely that they were 

13 exposed to this many blowouts. But therefore 

14 you would reconstruct dose based on that I 

15 assume. Or do you just go the other way and 

16 say you know, anyone working there less than 

17 that probably was exposed to one or more 

18 blowouts and therefore the doses were probably 

19 high enough.

20 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: A known number 

21 of blowouts I think is what makes the 

22 uncertainty or the inability to do dose 
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1 reconstruction.

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: If the number of 

3 blowouts is great enough, that makes the dose 

4 very uncertain then, too.

5 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Right.

6 DR. GLOVER: There is some 

7 language there about the discreteness of the 

8 incidents, though. If the number of blowouts 

9 is like a continual thing. 

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well in my mind 

11 the blowouts would be sort of if you want to 

12 make the analogy like a series of criticality 

13 accidents. They are discreet and here's a 

14 blowout maybe three weeks later then another 

15 one. 

16 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: To my mind 

17 those are discrete incidents. They are 

18 obviously multiple but they are not routine. 

19 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well I was assuming 

20 incident by nature is discrete. I mean until 

21 you all discussed it in the Board meeting 

22 whether an incident would last an hour or a 
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1 day or a few days. And you didn't actually 

2 come to any resolution during the Board 

3 discussion. I don't know whether there's 

4 another document.

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well you know.

6 DR. MAKHIJANI: I didn't know what 

7 it was.

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: I don't think you 

9 can put a time table on that. Just like the 

10 oil spill going on is an incident. The 

11 incident extends for a while. You know, Three 

12 Mile Island was an incident and you know. 

13 DR. MAKHIJANI: Chernobyl lasted 

14 for ten days.

15 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right, an 

16 incident. 

17 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well that's exactly 

18 what you said five years ago or seven years 

19 ago.

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: I'm glad you 

21 remember.

22 MS. HOWELL: Do you have a date on 
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1 that?

2 DR. MAKHIJANI: Actually I looked 

3 at the Board discussion. That's how I know.

4 I do have a date on that.

5 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: We struggle a 

6 lot with this part of the regulation.

7 DR. MAKHIJANI: May 28, 2003.

8 DR. NETON: In this situation I 

9 think I need to refresh my memory as to what 

10 exactly was done by SC&A and their analysis. 

11 If I recall correctly the Class was added 

12 because we couldn't reconstruct thorium dose. 

13 Is that right? I think that's the basis. 

14 And therefore I think we had enough uranium 

15 dose to reconstruct.

16 DR. MAURO: Ames?

17 DR. NETON: Yes, is that right? 

18 Thorium? I thought the basis was thorium. 

19 DR. MAURO: We can look it up.

20 DR. NETON: This is where I'm 

21 going is if it was for thorium exposure and we 

22 are reconstructing uranium based on urine and 
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1 if the blowouts were somewhat equivalent you 

2 kind of have a bounding analysis of intake for 

3 thorium, for uranium. I don't know, I'm just 

4 trying to remember.

5 DR. MAURO: Trying to find a way 

6 to reconstruct it.

7 DR. NETON: Well I'm just saying, 

8 I think it was thorium. Hans did you do 

9 urinalysis for thorium intakes?

10 DR. H. BEHLING: I did it for 

11 both. I did both thorium and uranium. I 

12 think I gave two sets of tables and I even 

13 fragmented the exposure by the first five 

14 minutes versus the term of 30 days from 

15 residual resuspension. So there's a whole 

16 series of data that I created for both 

17 thorium, uranium and the exposure that 

18 resulted from the initial distribution of 

19 material in air following by 30 days of 

20 resuspension of residual contamination. 

21 DR. NETON: I'm looking up the 

22 Ames letter here.
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1 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I think I've 

2 got it.

3 DR. NETON: Okay. And the basis 

4 was? I think the second one was talking about 

5 thorium.

6 MEMBER GRIFFON: Thorium 

7 production.

8 DR. NETON: Which was the first 

9 one?

10 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: The letter 

11 doesn't say the first one.

12 DR. NETON: Federal Register 

13 notice.

14 DR. MAKHIJANI: I don't think this 

15 refers to uranium.

16 MEMBER GRIFFON: The second one, 

17 the sheet metal workers, it says --

18 DR. NETON: That was thorium.

19 MEMBER GRIFFON: Yes, thorium.

20 DR. NETON: The second one was 

21 sheet metal workers.

22 MEMBER GRIFFON: It says potential 
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1 internal radiation exposure associated with 

2 the maintenance and renovation activities of 

3 the thorium production areas.

4 DR. NETON: This was the 42 

5 Class. There is very little monitoring data 

6 available. Okay. Maybe it was. I was 

7 thinking of thorium for the second class. 

8 DR. MAKHIJANI: Thorium was at Y-12 

9 for the first one.

10 DR. NETON: Never mind, I've 

11 refreshed my memory sufficiently.

12 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: What difference 

13 would it make?

14 DR. NETON: Well I was thinking 

15 if it was only based on thorium and it was 

16 thorium blowouts and we could reconstruct 

17 uranium intake based on uranium urinalysis 

18 data. If the blowouts were not preferentially 

19 occurring thorium versus uranium, you could 

20 sort of come to some idea of -- for instance 

21 like that -- I won't talk about Fernald.

22 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: But what I 
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1 think that is the -- that was the thought at 

2 the time and then I think reconstructing a 

3 blowout may have been feasible. What was not 

4 feasible was I think estimating the number of 

5 blowouts. I thought that was --

6 DR. NETON: I recall going back 

7 at one time and saying, well, we have thorium 

8 analysis urinalysis data. And I went back and 

9 looked at the thorium urinalysis data and it 

10 was just so far removed from the time of the -

11 - you know, they start collecting data, you 

12 know, twenty, ten years later. It made some 

13 implausibly high intake calculations. That's 

14 why I recall looking at the thorium intakes. 

15 I thought the uranium intakes were 

16 reconstructing doses for --

17 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I don't think 

18 we are trying to pin anybody down with a 

19 specific agreement on a specific site.

20 DR. NETON: I agree.

21 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Let's keep it 

22 more --
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1 DR. NETON: I know, but John was 

2 making a pretty good argument about it.

3 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes. And I 

4 think we can talk about it hypothetically. 

5 Assuming that a single blowout would be 

6 sufficient, or what determination would be, 

7 given the fact that there were so many, the 

8 blowouts were so frequent at that site for 

9 such a significant period of time then it 

10 should -- say presence at an incident would be 

11 enough. So presence working at the site would 

12 be, would qualify a person. 

13 DR. NETON: And Mark and I at the 

14 same time came across the table, just to 

15 clarify. It was based, we said we can 

16 reconstruct uranium exposures at Ames. And 

17 presumably then we are using the urinalysis 

18 data that bounds the blowouts that occurred 

19 for the intakes. That's what I thought. I 

20 don't know where that goes. I understand what 

21 you were saying earlier but the fact that 

22 there were a number of uranium blowouts as 
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1 well and we are using urinalysis data kind of 

2 gives you a handle on the upper magnitude of 

3 the exposure the worker received during these 

4 blowout conditions.

5 MR. KATZ: But since, you could 

6 take the urinalysis off the table. If you are 

7 trying to speak theoretically -- forget and 

8 say you don't have the urinalysis to do that 

9 and you have the same situation.

10 DR. NETON: Agreed. That's what 

11 I think Dr. Melius was saying. But that was 

12 arguing for this specific targeted of Ames and 

13 I was pointing out that the unreconstructable 

14 dose at Ames is thorium. It brings a different 

15 light to it.

16 DR. MAURO: It does.

17 MEMBER GRIFFON: You still, 

18 though, and I have been reflecting on kind of 

19 what John said that the you know, it might be 

20 a case by case, because as I am sitting here 

21 thinking some of the discussions I had with 

22 Arjun off-line was this notion of, if you have 
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1 an SEC -- this all assumes you have an SEC in 

2 place, obviously. Then if you could have a 

3 qualitative metric like a person within their 

4 file showed presence at an incident, then the 

5 problem is incident is defined different over 

6 time, certainly at all these sites.

7 You really have to know more, I 

8 think. Because an incident obviously in the 

9 early 90s, the reporting requirements were 

10 different, you know. An incident in the 50s 

11 at Oak Ridge would be totally different than 

12 in the 90s or whatever. So I'm not sure. But 

13 on the flipside if we are looking at the Ames 

14 example, we are sort of going back to this 

15 sort of quantitative thing, you know. You 

16 know it when you see it. I'm just trying to 

17 think of another metric that would be more 

18 qualitative but also it might be a guideline 

19 that we say consider reportable incidents. 

20 And then it still is a case by case thing but 

21 you actually, you would have to then look back 

22 and say okay, these are reportable but the 
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1 cost is in the 80s and 90s and here is the 

2 criteria for reporting. It is a very low 

3 threshold. We can't rely on this. I don't 

4 know.

5 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes, Paul?

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: I wanted to ask 

7 Jim Neton, right now for Ames if a person had 

8 less than 250 days and came in for dose 

9 reconstruction, you would reconstruct uranium 

10 and then what? Is that it? You would stop? 

11 DR. NETON: I think external 

12 exposure.

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: And external and 

14 medical X-ray.

15 DR. NETON: But there would be no 

16 thorium.

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: There would be no 

18 thorium and the only real difference is that 

19 for those more 250 days they're in the SEC and 

20 I can't bound thorium. For these guys you 

21 still can't bound the thorium but they don't 

22 qualify because of the presence issue.
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1 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Do those --

2 just sort of procedurally do people that are 

3 with a SEC cancer who work -- have a work 

4 record for less than 250 days, does DOL send 

5 those to you for reconstruction?

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: Sure.

7 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I know they 

8 said that non-SEC cancers --

9 DR. NETON: Anyone who doesn't 

10 qualify for the SEC.

11 MEMBER ZIEMER: Okay, okay. 

12 DR. GLOVER: You can get people 

13 who have qualified for the SEC, you may get 

14 their prostate cancer, a non-SEC cancer. We 

15 may still do a dose range.

16 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: That was less 

17 than 250 days.

18 DR. NETON: It would be a latency 

19 issue for instance with a solid tumor. We 

20 will get them in even if they work two years.

21 MEMBER ZIEMER: So we really have 

22 already said we can't bound the blowouts then 
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1 as far as thorium is concerned?

2 DR. NETON: I don't think that 

3 was the way we described it. As a matter of 

4 fact I think the way it is discussed is that 

5 it is one of these, there is no evidence of 

6 these exceptionally high, because that 

7 standard boilerplate when we talk about the 

8 250 day requirement in our write-up. It says 

9 we have evaluated the exposure scenarios and 

10 we believed it was sort of a chronic exposure 

11 scenario. 

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: No, but someone 

13 who qualifies for the SEC and they were 

14 presumably exposed with a blowout too. You 

15 are still saying we cannot bound -- based on 

16 the uranium bioassay we can't bound thorium 

17 dose?

18 DR. NETON: Correct.

19 MEMBER ZIEMER: So there is not a 

20 correlation on uranium and thorium. I'm 

21 trying to get a feel for it. I'm much more 

22 comfortable if it's an unbounded incident than 
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1 one where we say well I know the dose was at 

2 least this high. Because once you've bounded 

3 it I think you are back to dose 

4 reconstruction.

5 DR. MAURO: I'm not saying you 

6 bounded it but we know something occurred 

7 where the doses were exceptionally high and we 

8 really can't bound it. We can't bound it 

9 because of the nature of the individual 

10 incident or the number of incidents. And in 

11 the case of Ames, it is almost as if that we 

12 all have the sensibility that we think 

13 something happened here that certainly was in 

14 a realm of a dose that was high, exceptionally 

15 high and it was an incident and it was 

16 uncontrollable. Now I keep thinking back to 

17 something that we didn't bring up. That is, 

18 they're looking for, okay, we know when it 

19 appears. There's an incident, and everybody 

20 knows this is pretty bad. It is when it 

21 starts to get a little lower and when does it 

22 become an incident of concern. Now you have 
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1 brought something up, like the last time we 

2 talked about this, what's your trigger? And 

3 the idea that you came up with, well something 

4 would certainly be considered uncontrolled 

5 incident if an individual got radiation 

6 exposure during an incident which caused him 

7 to have more than his allowable occupational 

8 exposure. And the number of three rem full 

9 body per quarter came up or five rem for the 

10 year as being this is a circumstance where 

11 clearly it wasn't my intention. It had to 

12 have resolved from a breakdown of some kind of 

13 controls. And quite frankly I am hearing a 

14 number, three rem per quarter, which starts to 

15 fall in the area where we generally have been 

16 talking. It is not small. We are delivering 

17 three rem. So I am struggling right now to 

18 say what's the trigger. Okay, we've got an 

19 incident report that just came out about 

20 1960s, an incident report. And we know 

21 something happened. We have some information 

22 regarding what happened. The question we would 
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1 ask ourselves is there reason to believe that 

2 the exposure this person experienced as a 

3 result of an incident could have put him what 

4 would be allowed as the occupational limit at 

5 that time? Is that a criteria that may 

6 trigger? Yes, this person it falls -- it 

7 meets all these criteria. I am testing the 

8 waters to expand the generalization that we 

9 are trying to get to.

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: Of course Mark 

11 pointed out that trigger has changed over 

12 time. You know you go back in the Ames 

13 period. What were they working on? 50 rem a 

14 year maybe?

15 MEMBER GRIFFON: Yes.

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes. The thing 

17 has come down for a while. It was a running 

18 thirteen week rather than a calendar quarter. 

19 So, in a thirteen week period the three rem 

20 triggered them at the calendar quarter. So 

21 March 31, you are okay. You can get three 

22 there. And then you get three the next day, 
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1 it's all right. These things change. So I 

2 don't think you can use that kind of a -- and 

3 in current, modern times, what people call an 

4 incident may be a few atoms of tritium down in 

5 the creek by Savannah River. So I think the 

6 concept of incident that we are talking about, 

7 if we could agree in more general terms what 

8 it is. A breakdown of controls. Sometimes a 

9 breakdown of controls is very different than a 

10 violation of regulations.

11 MEMBER GRIFFON: Yes.

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: I mean, your guys 

13 are working and they are wearing a pocket 

14 dosimeter and the pocket dosimeters says they 

15 are five mR below the thing and they are okay 

16 and then they send in their TLD badges and 

17 they are 5 mR over and it is the thing of 

18 record so it is reportable. The controls 

19 haven't broken down but there is a technical 

20 difference. So I don't think we want to mess 

21 with those.

22 MEMBER GRIFFON: Okay.
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1 MEMBER ZIEMER: We are talking 

2 about what's clearly a breakdown of controls 

3 and I don't know how you define that. I think 

4 intuitively you sort of know it when you see 

5 it. The blowouts are an example. No one is 

6 planning for that to occur. It is clearly an 

7 accident kind of thing. It's not -- I don't 

8 know.

9 DR. MAKHIJANI: There is some 

10 modern DOE guidance about these things. 

11 That's what Joe said. I haven't had time to 

12 study this. It had things like loss of

13 radioactive material they received hundred 

14 times. The quantity specified it, 10 CFR part 

15 835.

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: But those are 

17 microcuries. 

18 DR. MAKHIJANI: Five hundred 

19 millirem exposure in a short period of time. 

20 No, I'm just saying that there are.

21 MEMBER ZIEMER: Those are 

22 administrative incidents.
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1 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I think we'd be 

2 better off to finding, describing at the upper 

3 end, not a threshold. So it is similar to, 

4 which is what we are trying to do with 

5 criticality. We were naive about criticality, 

6 but I think as I recall the discussion x years 

7 ago, the rule was we will recognize it. That 

8 was, it would be something similar. We didn't 

9 have examples then. 

10 DR. MAURO: I'm looking at the 

11 protective action guides that the EPA wrote 

12 and what you are saying is correct for the 

13 public. But the criteria for the one to five 

14 rem, I'm going to read them to you, acute 

15 effects on health. This would be for an 

16 individual now. We are talking about if a 

17 person were to experience, acute effects on 

18 health, those that would be observable within 

19 a short period of time which I have a dose 

20 threshold below which such effects are not 

21 likely to occur should be avoided. Okay, so 

22 acute effects and the other one, the risk of 
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1 delayed effects, primarily cancer and genetic 

2 effects. And it goes on to explain. So in 

3 other words when they pick the one to five rem 

4 that's why we are going to evacuate. It was 

5 because there were concerned that if you don't 

6 evacuate, people could experience two things 

7 that we are very concerned with here. So at 

8 least they made that judgment. They made that 

9 call. And in an accident situation, primarily 

10 for nuclear power plants, members of the 

11 public who project are going to get exposures, 

12 that could have acute effects and result in 

13 risks of delayed effects, genetic and cancer 

14 that are considered to exceed what is 

15 acceptable. You evacuate. So I mean what I'm 

16 getting at, we actually have some regulatory 

17 precedent here.

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: You know I would 

19 say on non-stochastic effects, if those occur. 

20 I mean these are immediate effects. I would 

21 call that an incident. I don't have any 

22 trouble with that. One to five rem? Yes I 
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1 can calculate a probability that cancer will 

2 occur in 50 years in somebody and that's not 

3 even calculated the way we do. I think that's 

4 what they are talking about there. 

5 DR. MAURO: They're doing both. 

6 They are saying that, if you get one to five 

7 rem, apparently there is some evidence that 

8 you do see a subtle drop in white blood cell 

9 count in five rem, acute. I remember 

10 Casarett, Radiobiology 101. That's the lowest 

11 I've ever seen it. But most people talk about 

12 25 rem. We could debate that.

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, they are 

14 talking about stochastic effects. 

15 DR. MAURO: But they also add in 

16 one of the second criteria. This is EPA now. 

17 The second criteria is also they pick that 

18 number because they don't like the risk of 

19 cancer at that dose. They are uncomfortable 

20 with that. 

21 MEMBER ZIEMER: But John, you 

22 know very well the risk of cancer with a 
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1 population of calculated risk. What's the 

2 number? And if not.

3 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: We already have 

4 a risk assessment so to speak. That's how the 

5 dose calculations are done. So I think we've 

6 got to be careful about bringing in a 

7 different risk assessment, cancer risk 

8 assessment as a criteria for this particular 

9 part of the program.

10 DR. GLOVER: I would point out 

11 even the missed dose for plutonium could take 

12 bioassay can be tens to, you know, many dozens 

13 of rem from missed dose from an incident. It 

14 is very hard to do plutonium very well so you 

15 can very quickly get into these numbers that 

16 are just missed dose. 

17 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I'm trying to 

18 come up with like sort of general criteria for 

19 this based on our discussion. So, one is what 

20 we've been talking about is what is an 

21 incident? Can we come up with some general 

22 descriptors that would help us identify what 
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1 type of incident would qualify? Criticality 

2 and so forth, lack of controls, some sense of 

3 what the magnitude is. The second general 

4 criteria would be that not able to, it is not 

5 feasible to bound the dose, do the dose 

6 reconstruction -- or not feasible to determine 

7 the number of incidents of the person they've 

8 been present at.

9 MEMBER GRIFFON: Well that's 

10 bounding the dose.

11 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes, part of 

12 the bounding the dose but I think it, I guess 

13 the way I have it written here is not feasible 

14 to bound the dose for an incident or the 

15 frequency. It is the same. You are right, it 

16 is the same.

17 DR. MAKHIJANI: Just as a 

18 supplement to your comment here, I think is 

19 the way technically the language of that rule 

20 reads to me is you can't avoid an individual, 

21 case-by-case approach. It would be very hard 

22 to come up with a rule like 250 days that it 
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1 is always black and white. You know there is 

2 documentation. Did they work for 250 days or 

3 not. There is going to be a judgment if the 

4 intent was you will know it when you see it. 

5 Then you have to see it. Those -- then there 

6 has to be documentation about an incident and 

7 some judgment about how severe it was. I 

8 think part of our problem has been there are 

9 not enough examples in the rules and none 

10 relating to internal dose about what severe 

11 means. So maybe it might be useful to give 

12 more examples as to what we need and include 

13 internal dose. That was part of the intent of 

14 how I heard what John was saying regarding 

15 Ames. It is, this seems to be a case of we 

16 know it when we see it and somebody was there 

17 during an incident or in this case, because 

18 incidents were not documented, we might make a 

19 judgment about their frequency. If they were 

20 there for a few days they're more likely to 

21 experience an incident and do it that way. 

22 But I don't think the dose reconstructor's 
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1 judgment is avoidable in this case. I mean 

2 you've got, if you are going to look at that 

3 and interpret it in a way that we would be 

4 talking about and say exceptionally high 

5 exposures and we know it when we see it then 

6 the dose reconstructor has to see it.

7 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Or we have to 

8 see it for a Class. We are trying to define a 

9 Class. One way of defining -- that is what 

10 came up with NTS, was that we really wouldn't 

11 be able to see it until we were at a point of 

12 doing individual dose reconstruction. So we 

13 are saying we will have to do individual 

14 83.14s or, you know, because it wasn't going 

15 to be possible to find an incident, a 

16 qualifying incident. It would be until you 

17 couldn't do the dose reconstruction.

18 DR. MAKHIJANI: That is actually a 

19 very good example because now we are in a 

20 different place now with NTS than we were 

21 then.

22 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes.
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1 DR. MAKHIJANI: How would you look 

2 at the main variants where there were so many 

3 people involved in being in the club? Would 

4 that constitute an incident under what we are 

5 talking about? I don't know.

6 DR. H. BEHLING: This is Hans. 

7 Is it possible to bring in the Metallurgical 

8 Laboratory at this point because that 

9 represents a very, very different scenario 

10 where we are not necessarily talking about 

11 incidents but the conditions that over a short 

12 period of time would have potentially

13 triggered a substantial dose from either 

14 external or internal. I think in my White 

15 Paper I give various examples of radium 

16 sources for individuals who were exposed to 

17 dose rates over an r per hour and over a 

18 period of even a few days which resulted in a 

19 significant external dose from radium. Also 

20 we talked, in my report I talked about 

21 tolerance doses and they even offered 

22 tolerance doses for the maximum concentration 
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1 of airborne material that one could inhale in 

2 a given day in one of the examples that I 

3 showed in one of the exhibit one was that the 

4 air exposure for single day would have 

5 resulted in a total intake of 280 microcuries 

6 of iodine-131. That would have resulted in 

7 excess of 300 rems to the thyroid. So those 

8 are examples that are not necessarily

9 incidences in a classical definition. But at 

10 the same time would have resulted over a very, 

11 very short period of exposure in substantial 

12 doses from both internal and external doses. 

13 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I was going to 

14 try to do that next after we talk a little bit 

15 out NTS. I'm glad you stopped at two 

16 examples. Because I think it is another 

17 situation. What has changed with NTS? What 

18 else? Before we were talking about I think we 

19 were mostly talking about the above ground.

20 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well before the 

21 position was that we know enough to 

22 reconstruct doses up to 1963. So if you have 
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1 internal dose data then presumably and NIOSH 

2 already documents a number of these incidents.

3 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Right.

4 DR. MAKHIJANI: And I don't 

5 remember how many events there were but 

6 between 1963 and 1970 but there are a number 

7 of significant ones. And so if you have the 

8 data to do that then the question about 

9 separating incidents into an SEC doesn't 

10 arrive because you already said that you have 

11 the data to do that. And the thing that has 

12 changed is now the number of radionuclides, 

13 the short term to exposure, the fact that 

14 exposures were mostly non-routine. I mean 

15 that led to a special consideration for Nevada 

16 Test Site. So I think the question of people 

17 who were present less than 250 days but may 

18 have been involved in one of the incidents is 

19 quite interesting. It is a new context. At 

20 least I think it is.

21 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes. So I am 

22 just trying to think of -- how does that, how 
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1 do we think about those incidents in terms of 

2 being extraordinary or whatever?

3 DR. MAKHIJANI: Baneberry was an 

4 extraordinary venting. He had millions of 

5 curies that were vented but I don't know how 

6 we think about it in terms of this rule. I 

7 don't have any particular. Jim might have.

8 DR. NETON: I'll defer to Sam. 

9 He took the lead.

10 DR. GLOVER: I haven't looked at 

11 the Baneberry that carefully so fortunately 

12 it's -- go ahead.

13 DR. MAURO: I was going to say. 

14 This does represent a very nice stepping 

15 stone. What I mean by that is I think we have 

16 a sensibility regarding Ames right now, even 

17 though we haven't said anything definitive. 

18 Now we move on, you leave Ames and you move to 

19 NTS. You say okay, how were things different 

20 here or the same? Well I would say in many 

21 respects they are very similar. That is we 

22 have from time to time an event where a 
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1 substantial amount of radioactive materials 

2 leaves the environment over a relatively short 

3 period of time. In the case of Ames we all 

4 accept that because of the special 

5 calculations that Hans did that well yes we 

6 all agree, that's a pretty big dose. Now 

7 what's different here? Well, we all agree 

8 that both during above-ground and below-ground 

9 tests, of course they are all covered now 

10 under the SEC, there were incidents whereby 

11 there were ventings. Let's talk about 

12 Baneberry as being an example. Now, the thing 

13 that we haven't talked about, well the 

14 Baneberry resulted in enough emission where 

15 the doses that people might have experienced, 

16 external/internal could have been 

17 extraordinarily high, comparable to the kinds 

18 of things we saw, we estimated for Ames. Now 

19 I would argue that if we say yes to that then 

20 we've established Ames as a stepping stone and 

21 that would bring that stepping stone over to 

22 NTS. Is it possible we would agree? I'm not 
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1 saying we should. Is it possible we would 

2 agree? Yep. The Baneberry would be something 

3 like that where there is an incident, 

4 uncontrolled, and from best we can tell, the 

5 kinds of exposures that could have occurred 

6 were pretty big. I don't have those numbers. 

7 Those numbers may exist. But if we find that 

8 they are in the tens of rems or even higher 

9 delivered effective whole-body dose if you 

10 want to use that as a criteria. That could 

11 have occurred to some people who were present 

12 during that. Well, as far as I'm concerned we 

13 have just made another step in the process. 

14 Now does that mean that applies to other 

15 ventings? There are a lot of ventings that 

16 have occurred. Yes, we've got a problem 

17 there. I'm not sure. What I'm getting at is 

18 it isn't a very nice progression to go. 

19 That's why I like the idea that we worked out 

20 Ames in my head and if there is agreement on 

21 it. In my head, I'm working it out. I'm 

22 talking --
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1 (Laughter.)

2 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Lobotomy.

3 DR. MAURO: I don't know if you 

4 buy in to how I'm thinking but I lay it out. 

5 This is where my thinking is taking me. 

6 Whether you want to get on that roller coaster 

7 with me, I don't know. But that's how I'm 

8 thinking about it right now.

9 MEMBER ROESSLER: I think the 

10 problem is that we each have our own head.

11 DR. MAURO: Yes.

12 MEMBER ROESSLER: Each of us 

13 maybe have a different line or trigger point 

14 for that thing you talk about as significant 

15 dose, or big releases. Somehow we are going 

16 to, if we are going that route we have to 

17 define what we mean by that and then I think 

18 we are all going to have a different --

19 DR. MAURO: Well I got to tell 

20 you I threw it on the table. I mean, naked in 

21 the world, this is what I think. 

22 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: The problem is 
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1 we're used to defining these things 

2 quantitatively and we are in a situation where 

3 I guess the first step is that you can't 

4 quantify it, sufficient for dose 

5 reconstruction. So I'm as interested is it 

6 like NTS, what would we call an incident? Or 

7 some other example but we wouldn't call it an 

8 incident.

9 DR. MAKHIJANI: It might be some --

10 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Extraordinary 

11 incident.

12 DR. MAKHIJANI: -- NTS in that 

13 regard because Baneberry was the last big 

14 venting except I think there was one in 1986 

15 that is regarded as extraordinary. 

16 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Most of the 

17 other vents are usually regarded as small, 

18 right? Would we agree on that? And they were 

19 also -- most of them or many of them were 

20 operational vents that were deliberate because 

21 after Baneberry, mostly the tests were pretty 

22 well contained. I think it was much less than 
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1 Baneberry in terms of total releases. 

2 DR. ANSPAUGH: This is Lynn 

3 Anspaugh. I would like to make a couple of 

4 comments about that. You know there were some 

5 Ploughshare events that took place in 1965 and 

6 1968 and those vents were certainly comparable 

7 to Baneberry. There were several significant 

8 releases and a lot of insignificant releases 

9 but if you wanted to define it an incident, 

10 then you would have to define how large the 

11 release was.

12 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes, Lynn, that's 

13 where I was going is what Jim asked is can we 

14 say what are not large releases? And that's 

15 why I, you know, after 1970 we know there were 

16 many large ones because they were in the 

17 millions of curies. But after December 1970 

18 there were many what I think mostly we could 

19 say were small and I don't know if you would 

20 agree with that.

21 DR. ANSPAUGH: Well I agree with 

22 that. You know the 1970 Baneberry event 
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1 resulted in a completely new operational mode 

2 at the test site where they wanted to make 

3 sure that never happened again and it didn't. 

4 As far as atmospheric tests are concerned, 

5 every time you set off a nuclear weapon, I 

6 think that's an incident, isn't it?

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, I guess you 

8 also have to place the workers in some 

9 location relative to that. I don't know in 

10 Baneberry where they were, were there large 

11 groups exposed or would we know in a given 

12 claimant if they were actually exposed or not 

13 or that was an unknown factor.

14 DR. ANSPAUGH: Baneberry exposed a 

15 lot of people because the cloud went right 

16 over a work camp. So there were I would say a 

17 few hundred people who were exposed but the 

18 doses were in the few rem level as nearly as I 

19 remember.

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: But you're saying 

21 we know what their doses were and we know who 

22 the people were.
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1 DR. ANSPAUGH: I think it's knowing 

2 who the people were and they were all 

3 screened. They were particularly concerned 

4 about thyroid. They were all screened. Some 

5 people were sent for whole body counts and 

6 further analysis.

7 DR. GLOVER: I remember the NTS, 

8 one of the issues that it made it an SEC was 

9 we have all this bioassay data and because 

10 there is a number of different incidents that 

11 we couldn't necessarily link it to, the 

12 analysis didn't really, wasn't conducive to 

13 doing that type of work. If an incident with 

14 linked whole body count data it becomes a 

15 little more pliable to make some kind of 

16 analysis. So there, the overall thing, the 

17 250 days when you have a lot of these all 

18 compiled together, to try to look at one.

19 DR. MAURO: So this short-lived, I 

20 know during the decision to grant SEC status 

21 to post-63, part of that had to do with this 

22 mix of radionuclides, some of which can be 
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1 relatively short-lived and therefore any chest 

2 counter bioassay data really isn't going to be 

3 too helpful. What I am hearing is if you have 

4 an incident and you hit the person with a 

5 whole body count and do whatever needs to be 

6 done shortly thereafter, that probably may be 

7 trackable. But if not, one could argue that 

8 no, there are still these very short-lived 

9 radionuclides that could have gone through and 

10 even if it didn't measure the person say for 

11 several days, a few days before he got him 

12 into to the chest counter or whole body 

13 counter, you could miss something important. 

14 And then all of a sudden you could miss 

15 something important. I'm not sure. 

16 DR. ANSPAUGH: Well you know the 

17 Baneberry was a very peculiar situation 

18 because the people who were exposed were 

19 substantially downwind of the actual vent 

20 point. People who got the higher doses I 

21 think were the ones who were very close to 

22 some vents so that the concentration that they 
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1 were exposed to was much higher than the large 

2 number of people who were exposed to 

3 Baneberry.

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: But see here we're 

5 talking about incidents where we know when 

6 they occurred. We even have names for the 

7 incidents. But you go to a place like Ames, 

8 we don't have, you know, we don't have the 

9 dean's blowout or the provost's blowout or you 

10 know, name them whatever you want. We don't 

11 even know when they occurred at Ames, nor 

12 their magnitude, nor who was exposed to them. 

13 I think in places like Nevada Test Site where 

14 these things have occurred and they were 

15 incidents but they are characterized in a much 

16 better way. There may indeed be cases where 

17 we can't bound the dose but at least we can 

18 put people in locations at certain times and 

19 do things with them. I'm not as concerned 

20 about those kinds of incidents where we can 

21 characterize them. I mean even the SL-1, we 

22 know when that occurred, we know who the 
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1 people were that were exposed there and 

2 there's -- and the Oak Ridge impromptu barrel 

3 reactor. We know who was there and how long 

4 and the dose has been reconstructed. But what 

5 we're concerned about are these incidents that 

6 we can't characterize. 

7 DR. MAURO: Well Jim --

8 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: But are we 

9 because in some ways there are complementary. 

10 The NTS you can't reconstruct the dose. We 

11 said that, and yet we have people that worked 

12 there for less than 250 days.

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right.

14 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: And so what do 

15 we do about them? In Ames we can characterize 

16 an incident but we, presumably can do the dose 

17 for an incident, presume that, but we don't 

18 know the presence, the number of the incidents 

19 and therefore the total dose is impossible to 

20 reconstruct. And so you know, do the people 

21 from NTS, you know, what's the criteria there? 

22 Are there criteria where people should 
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1 qualify at less than 250 days? So the people, 

2 you know, or those close to the incident, how 

3 do we make that determination? Can that 

4 determination then be applied based on is it 

5 practical in terms of work records or other 

6 information.

7 MEMBER GRIFFON: For example, if 

8 they can show less than 250 days but they were 

9 present at Baneberry or present at an incident 

10 then what do you do?

11 DR. MAURO: What do you do?

12 MEMBER GRIFFON: You might say you 

13 can bound that.

14 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well I don't know. 

15 I don't know if you can bound it.

16 MEMBER GRIFFON: If I have enough 

17 data.

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: But I don't know 

19 if presence on the site is the criteria or 

20 some location.

21 MEMBER GRIFFON: Or present at 

22 the, yes.
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1 MEMBER ZIEMER: That's a detail.

2 MEMBER GRIFFON: Right. 

3 DR. MAURO: But isn't that what it 

4 comes down to? You have a guy, let's say he 

5 is covered by the SEC period under NTS, has 

6 prostate cancer. Going to do his dose 

7 reconstruction and it turns out in his 

8 records, is information that he was present or 

9 could have been present during Baneberry. 

10 Okay? What do we do with that? And 

11 reconstruct his doses without including 

12 internal because you don't include internal 

13 and you come up with a low dose. Meanwhile 

14 can you reconstruct his dose from the 

15 Baneberry incident. Do you have enough --

16 DR. NETON: That's exactly like 

17 what Dr. Melius just mentioned. When you try 

18 to do a dose reconstruction and you can't do 

19 it -- and it could be based on presence. But 

20 if you have sufficient monitoring data to 

21 reconstruct it from the Baneberry you would do 

22 it. They have it at SL-1. We reconstructed 
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1 doses at SL-1. There was arguing one point 

2 that we couldn't but we obtained enough data 

3 for that particular accident. 

4 DR. MAKHIJANI: Isn't part of what 

5 the drift this discussion the you know it when 

6 you see it, the idea that you can only make a 

7 determination through a dose reconstruction in 

8 an 83.14? Is that the drift of the 

9 discussion?

10 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: No, I don't 

11 think so. I think there is some general, will 

12 be some general classes and there will be some 

13 that may be only when you do an individual 

14 dose reconstruction do you have enough 

15 information to know that you can't.

16 DR. NETON: But I think it's 

17 essentially what this entire discussion is 

18 about is can you identify an incident that 

19 would be like an 83.14? Even if Ames were to 

20 be added, there has to be an 83.14 because 

21 there is no Class based on an incident. Right 

22 now there is a Class based on a chronic 
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1 exposure scenario. Can you identify 83.14 

2 classes essentially that need to be added?

3 DR. MAURO: Is that the answer?

4 DR. NETON: Well that's what we're 

5 talking about.

6 DR. MAURO: I mean in the end 

7 bypass. Help me out, maybe I have the wrong 

8 line of thought. In other words, every 

9 claimant that shows up with a cancer, we can 

10 try to reconstruct his dose. If you can't 

11 because he was involved, there is information 

12 on the record that he might have been involved 

13 in an incident that we don't know how to deal 

14 with. You grant him, he falls within this 

15 Class. This Class called people who develop, 

16 you know -- but no, wait a minute. Wait a 

17 minute. That's right. Because if he is not 

18 covered by the SEC, because he has prostate 

19 cancer. You could certainly get an 83.13 

20 petition for instance. I don't know that we -

21 - 

22 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I think we 
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1 actually, I thought we had, with Ames we had 

2 reserved our review for follow up. 

3 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes, we did.

4 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: The statement 

5 confused me a little bit earlier. I think we 

6 have an active consideration for Ames for less 

7 than 250 days.

8 DR. NETON: You're right. That's 

9 correct. You're right. I forgot about that.

10 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I was looking at 

11 Emily. I wasn't sure if I understood that. 

12 And the NTS one would, I think, I'm not sure 

13 if we reserved that or what we actually 

14 reserved with the above ground one because we 

15 were actively considering it and our good 

16 friend [identifying information redacted] was 

17 reminding us they had concerns about it. It 

18 is going back in time. I can't guarantee from 

19 my memory but I think it's, but I mean that's 

20 why I think go back sort of the criteria had 

21 to be that one is, is it a big incident, 

22 whatever you call that. Emily put the 
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1 regulation you know it when you see it or 

2 something? I don't think that will slide 

3 through.

4 MS. HOWELL: No.

5 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: One or two 

6 layers of --

7 MS. HOWELL: We don't all need to be 

8 Potter Stewarts.

9 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: And secondly is 

10 this issue, can you set criteria for the dose 

11 reconstruction? Can you reconstruct our base 

12 number of incident issue? And so the NTS 

13 situation --

14 DR. MAKHIJANI: You did reserve it.

15 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: You make -- the 

16 first criteria, yes. It could have been a big 

17 exposure. Second, we may not know when we can 

18 reconstruct it until they actually do. You 

19 may not be able to define a Class ahead of 

20 time. So it may just be something that would 

21 come across in individual dose reconstruction. 

22 Maybe that becomes a little bit bigger of a 
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1 Class but it may not. It -- maybe it could 

2 even be individual. As I recall when we were 

3 discussing this, it was the ability among what 

4 kinds of exposure monitoring individuals had 

5 and the information where they were in 

6 incidents.

7 DR. MAKHIJANI: You did reserve for 

8 51 to 62 but less than 250 days at NTS.

9 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes, Paul?

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: I sort of have to 

11 think in specifics, though. Let me ask a 

12 question this way. Let's take Ames. Suppose 

13 we have a claimant who was there less than 250 

14 days but who knew specifically, maybe we have 

15 an affidavit that says, I was there during a 

16 blowout or two blowouts. And we know that. 

17 And you say but we can't reconstruct dose. 

18 Suppose that occurs. Then it still reverts 

19 back to the 250 day issue under the, if you 

20 can't reconstruct dose and they were still 

21 there less than 250 days, under the current 

22 reg, you could not compensate. The only way 
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1 you could would be if you had, if we had said 

2 presence at a blowout qualifies.

3 DR. NETON: I'm not sure of that.

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well that's what 

5 I'm asking. If you say I can't reconstruct 

6 dose for an individual who was there in that 

7 facility less than 250 days.

8 DR. MAURO: And has a cancer.

9 MEMBER ZIEMER: And has a cancer.

10 DR. MAURO: That's not covered, a 

11 prostate cancer.

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well a covered 

13 cancer.

14 DR. MAURO: Oh okay. 

15 MEMBER ZIEMER: It's a covered 

16 cancer.

17 MEMBER GRIFFON: Cancer, less than

18 250 days.

19 DR. NETON: You'd have to go back 

20 and look at the reason that we decided why we 

21 couldn't reconstruct dose. And typically it's 

22 because there was no monitoring information 
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1 for an extended period of time. 

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right.

3 DR. NETON: If someone presented 

4 with an affidavit that said I was involved in 

5 this, somewhat unique, or maybe not unique, 

6 this exposure scenario, I suspect that we 

7 would do something. 

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: If you can't 

9 reconstruct dose, then what?

10 DR. NETON: If you can't 

11 reconstruct it, then yes there would be no 

12 dose assigned for that person. But, that may 

13 itself develop another Class. It would be a 

14 Class of workers that we haven't previously 

15 identified in our 83.13 evaluation. The 83.13 

16 evaluation says there are no evidence in our 

17 opinion of the incidents that led to this very 

18 high dose. And so then if a claimant presents 

19 while we are doing these with evidence of that 

20 we would either have to be able to 

21 reconstruct it or if you can't and then 

22 recommend a Class.
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1 MEMBER ZIEMER: And then you find 

2 the Class but does the Class always have the 

3 250 day attached to it? That's what I'm 

4 asking.

5 MR. KATZ: You don't have to 

6 reconstruct it. You have to determine that it 

7 meets the criteria.

8 DR. NETON: No, no. If we 

9 reconstruct it, we don't even have to make a 

10 determination.

11 MR. KATZ: But even if you 

12 reconstruct it -- if you find you can't 

13 reconstruct it, it's still -- you still have 

14 to make that determination that this is a 

15 discreet incident.

16 DR. NETON: Yes.

17 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: But I think at 

18 Ames with the thorium you couldn't reconstruct 

19 then you wouldn't and that's really the basis 

20 for most of the exposure during the incident 

21 also. You wouldn't, I mean I don't think they 

22 need to pry or you wouldn't go very far 
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1 because the major dose would be 

2 unreconstructable. I mean that would be a 

3 determination made ahead of time that they 

4 wouldn't even attempt to do the dose 

5 reconstruction on the incident I don't 

6 believe.

7 DR. NETON: Well, for the thorium.

8 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Lacking any 

9 evidence on a person's exposure history they 

10 have these blowouts in their file. You are 

11 right. We would just not do it. But if there 

12 was a situation such as Dr. Ziemer suggested. 

13 I have an affidavit. Five people saw me. I 

14 was at this incident. We have to address it.

15 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, but if you 

16 say then that I cannot reconstruct it. What 

17 happens then? That's what I'm asking.

18 DR. NETON: Then, that's criteria 

19 for, he doesn't make a judgment. It is very 

20 high. 

21 MEMBER ZIEMER: Under the current 

22 rules unless you say that is an incident --
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1 MEMBER GRIFFON: Like a 

2 criticality.

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: -- then the 250 

4 day issue has to be invoked.

5 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Right. They can 

6 make it independent of 83.14. They could make 

7 it independent. I don't think they've ever, 

8 they've never done that. 

9 DR. GLOVER: It hasn't been done.

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: But it could be 

11 done.

12 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: But it could be 

13 done, right.

14 MEMBER ZIEMER: We don't say that 

15 blowouts are incidents. They decide, the 

16 person -- that takes care of cases where it is 

17 unknown. Then you have the issues of well I 

18 think I was but I don't know for sure issues. 

19 Or I worked there six months and yes.

20 DR. ANSPAUGH: I think you'd also 

21 have a problem with Ames in the Chicago Met 

22 Lab that many of these claims are probably 
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1 filed by survivors and actual workers have 

2 already passed away.

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: Understood, and 

4 that complicates the issue because they don't 

5 know whether the worker was present.

6 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes, also I think 

7 even in the simpler case say at Ames where the 

8 worker has an idea that they were in a 

9 blowout. It is highly unlikely they would 

10 know there was a thorium blowout or uranium 

11 blowout, you know, after 60 years. I mean 

12 this is not -- one of the things that I kind 

13 of try to think through to some extent was 

14 thinking it out of the realm of number of 

15 thresholds. If you say you can't reconstruct 

16 dose, you already passed the stage where you 

17 are putting numbers to things for whatever 

18 bound you set. So, in the health endangerment 

19 area then you are not trying to make a 

20 radiation dose determination. You are trying 

21 to make a circumstantial determination. In 

22 the 250 day case, the circumstantial 
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1 determination is, did you work there for a 

2 certain amount of time. And in this case I 

3 think we keep going back to the dose-threshold 

4 issue because it says exceptionally high 

5 exposure. So there is no escape from that to 

6 a certain extent. But I think if the spirit 

7 of the health we can't reconstruct dose is 

8 maintained then an SEC has already been 

9 granted by the site or certain group of four 

10 persons. Then I think it may be more useful 

11 to go to the circumstantial basis of present 

12 during an incident. And would it be regarded 

13 as serious and not by certain criteria that 

14 aren't explicitly dose related because you 

15 already said you can't reconstruct dose?

16 MEMBER ROESSLER: I thought it was 

17 defined incident if we can't relate it to 

18 dose. That's where I think our problem is. 

19 We still get that. I can't get away from 

20 that.

21 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: But I think 

22 that's why the guidance or whatever we would 
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1 have would say one is how to identify the 

2 incident. What incident qualifies? Second, 

3 we can't reconstruct the dose or the number of 

4 incidents the person was exposed to. There 

5 are cases where I think you may already have 

6 the Class but you may be able to potentially 

7 reconstruct the incident. And the third would 

8 be some probability of being present at the 

9 incident. So either documentation of the 

10 incident, or, as in the case of Ames, where a 

11 person worked during the time period when 

12 there were -- I don't remember enough about 

13 Ames to recall.

14 MEMBER ROESSLER: So we need to 

15 define incident.

16 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: We have to start 

17 with criteria for incidents, yes.

18 MEMBER ROESSLER: Yes.

19 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: We have to do it 

20 non-quantitatively.

21 MS. HOWELL: Is it at all possible 

22 to work backwards to say there are these 
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1 quantifiable levels that we consider incidents 

2 but what are the characteristics of those 

3 aside from the dose exposure and if you could 

4 look at it across the test sites. There is 

5 always probably going to be exceptions to the 

6 rules, but to say these are the things that we 

7 see that qualify incidents and we know in a 

8 handful of situations that it met this 

9 quantifiable number that we were comfortable 

10 with. 

11 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Certainly the 

12 criteria we might have for incidents would 

13 include a number of parameters to that. 

14 MS. HOWELL: Can you arrive at the 

15 parameters by, since everybody is so, having 

16 such a hard time getting away from numbers?

17 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I think the 

18 numbers are going to be implicit. The problem 

19 is when we make them explicit, then we get 

20 sort of a slippery slope.

21 MS. HOWELL: But in the, no, because 

22 I completely -- I recognize the problem with 
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1 that, not having explicit numbers when you get 

2 to it, but can you just -- to start the 

3 conversation.

4 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: No, no. That's 

5 what we've done.

6 MS. HOWELL: Because you keep 

7 talking about these blowouts, but I get the 

8 impression that a blowout is different, at a 

9 different site. So, a blowout at Ames seems 

10 to -- you all seem to perhaps have an idea 

11 that might be an incident but it is unclear to 

12 me that a blowout at another site would be. 

13 So what is it, was it about Ames that makes 

14 that blowout an incident?

15 DR. H. BEHLING: Perhaps I can 

16 just quickly give you an answer. It was based 

17 on, as I said the data regarding a blowout at 

18 Fernald. But it also was based on the actual 

19 quantity of the uranium that was used in the 

20 blowout.

21 DR. MAURO: It was big. Everybody 

22 agrees those doses are big.
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1 DR. GLOVER: And there is no 

2 bioassay.

3 DR. MAURO: Yes, so I mean the 

4 funny thing about it is when you hear a 

5 hundred rems, there is very little dispute. 

6 And that's our only problem. We are trying to 

7 say, can we come off that some. And I don't 

8 think we are going to be able to do that.

9 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: But we can 

10 describe it by examples and that will help to 

11 find it and it is going to be a judgment that 

12 we would have to make, I think. 

13 DR. ANSPAUGH: I would also like to 

14 bring up the issue of equity particularly 

15 concerning Amchitka. Now there were no 

16 incidents at Amchitka, and I was on the island 

17 during the time between or before Cannikin 

18 went off. And I can assure you everybody was 

19 wearing a dosimeter, and I can almost 

20 guarantee you that none of these things that 

21 Frank Murkowski was alleged to have happened 

22 really did. And I think that dose 
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1 reconstruction and Rosalie Bertell did was not 

2 a good job. I did read the paper carefully. 

3 I don't believe it for a minute, though. Here 

4 you have this precedent of granting an SEC 

5 without the 250 day requirement to a site 

6 actually had nothing, no reason at all to be 

7 included, yet there it is. And so I think 

8 there is a serious issue of equity here.

9 MR. KATZ: Lynn, I mean the 

10 federal agencies cannot do what the 

11 legislature can do. I mean they have, they 

12 are not bound the same way as federal agencies 

13 are in terms of their -- the basis for which 

14 they can take actions like this. So the fact 

15 that the legislator did what it did, it had 

16 that authority to do that. And we can match 

17 in terms of for equity reasons.

18 DR. ANSPAUGH: That brings me up to 

19 the next thing on my mind which is one 

20 solution to this is to ask Congress to simply 

21 get rid of the 250 day rule.

22 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I don't think, 
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1 it's not the Board.

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: That's your job, 

3 Lynn, not ours.

4 DR. ANSPAUGH: Well, you know I've 

5 listened to you guys worry about this for four 

6 years and I don't think you are any closer to 

7 resolution amongst yourselves and with NIOSH 

8 than you were when you started. So I think 

9 the only reason or solution is congressional 

10 action. 

11 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Well, we'll see. 

12 Some of us think we are closer, so we'll see. 

13 And on that note, since it's almost noon 

14 we'll take a break, call our congressmen. But 

15 we can come back at 1:00. What I would like 

16 to do at 1:00 is talk about the other example 

17 we have which Hans described already but I 

18 think we should need some further discussion, 

19 which is the Met Lab and then secondly sort of 

20 talk about general criteria or can we make 

21 some progress on this area. So until 1:00.

22 (Whereupon, the above-entitled 
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1 matter went off the record at 11:57 a.m. and 

2 resumed at 1:03 p.m.)

3 MR. KATZ: Everyone welcome back, 

4 this Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker 

5 Health, SEC issues, Work Group and we've been 

6 talking about 250 days, or less than 250 days 

7 matter. And we are just ready to get started 

8 again. Do you want me to check on anyone on 

9 the phone?

10 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes, let's 

11 identify who is on the phone so we know.

12 MR. KATZ: So first of all do we 

13 have any Board members who've joined us? Okay 

14 and do we still have Dr. McKeel with us? 

15 Folks from SC&A? Hans do we have you back 

16 again?

17 DR. H. BEHLING: Yes you do.

18 MR. KATZ: Great. And Lynn 

19 Anspaugh?

20 MR. ANSPAUGH: I'm here.

21 MR. KATZ: Great. Okay.

22 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Okay. It just 
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1 helps to recognize those. What we do this 

2 afternoon, we failed to solve this problem at 

3 lunch but we tried, was to move on and talk a 

4 little bit about the Met Lab situation. I 

5 think that's our other example that sheds 

6 light or darkness on trying to solve this 

7 problem. Yes Sam?

8 DR. GLOVER: Since I've come to 

9 this issue sort of late in the game, I was 

10 just going to make maybe a suggestion, good or 

11 bad. We have an existing rule. Sometimes it 

12 is unclear to me where, if we are talking 

13 about changing the rule or if it's only 

14 reviewing things under the existing rule or if 

15 there are things about making suggestions to 

16 maybe about how to make it fit better. Is 

17 there any thought that you guys have had maybe 

18 making like, here's a case study. If we use 

19 it on the existing rule and then you are going 

20 to propose language, things maybe we think 

21 your rule could be done better. There are 

22 certain things perhaps we take up that aren't 
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1 covered under the existing, this rule, and how 

2 that discussion could be done like whether it 

3 is internal dose maybe or if it's 

4 exceptionally high obviously is very hard to 

5 quantify. And whether that needs to be 

6 quantified perhaps better. But we thrown out 

7 a bunch of case studies, some of them seem 

8 like we are trying very hard to make them fit 

9 under the existing rule but maybe the rule 

10 needs to be clarified. So I just wasn't for 

11 sure if -- how your Working Group was going to 

12 be.

13 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: We're not sure 

14 either. As I said earlier, I think what we 

15 want to take is a broader look to what is, you 

16 know appropriate for this program. But it is 

17 in the context of what we have for the current 

18 health endangerment regulation, the 250 day 

19 and for the incident, part of that health 

20 endangerment. Whatever conclusions we reach 

21 may or may not require a change in the 

22 regulation. I think we, we're not trying to 
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1 be that precise at this point in time. In 

2 fact our discussions before this meeting I 

3 think, the last meeting the full Board meeting 

4 or what but Emily and I had a conversation of 

5 the same. We are not going to try to do 

6 something say to turn to Emily and say does 

7 this meet the current regulations, if we word 

8 it this way, does this meet the current 

9 regulations? I don't think this judgment, if 

10 you can necessarily opinion she can give us 

11 immediately anyway. And secondly I don't 

12 think that is the intent of what we're, we are 

13 not trying to craft examples that don't fit 

14 the rule. Let's try to get a little bit 

15 broader than that but at the same time 

16 understand that there's a context which is the 

17 current regulation and at least in a broader 

18 sense it should be consistent with what we've 

19 done. We can say throw the whole thing out. 

20 This current thing isn't workable but I'm not 

21 sure at that point. I don't think anything 

22 we've talked about so far is that distant from 
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1 what is in the current regulation. We are not 

2 trying to fine tune that and I don't think 

3 it's fair to ask Emily to give us an opinion 

4 because we haven't been precise enough in what 

5 we've said to really ask for an opinion and to 

6 be able to judge that. That's my sense. 

7 Emily is that fair?

8 MS. HOWELL: It's fair.

9 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Okay. 

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: And I agree with 

11 that too. I think initially if you go way 

12 back there were two things that we were trying 

13 to do at the starting point. One was to sort 

14 of pin down what an incident was because 

15 that's one of the things that says, aside from 

16 the 250 days if you have an incident. So we 

17 are trying to grapple with that a little bit. 

18 The other thing was I don't think initially 

19 we recognized that Labor, I think Labor has 

20 the ability to adjust the 250 days according 

21 to the number of hours in the workweek. I 

22 think we were concerned about places where 
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1 people were there 24/7. At least early on we 

2 thought the 250 days was calendar days. We 

3 found that we don't really have to worry about 

4 that if they can show that their work weeks 

5 were longer. Those adjustments are made, I 

6 think automatically by Labor in terms of what 

7 they said. So it sort of evolved over a bit 

8 of time.

9 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Two other 

10 comments. One is we said earlier I think we 

11 recognized that we can't like say well this is

12 the 30-day SEC, this is a 60-day. That's 

13 beyond what I think can be done under current 

14 regulation. It is not possible to do under 

15 the law I think. But it's not, it is a 

16 definition of endangerment but not under the 

17 current regulation. I think we all thought or 

18 assumed that when we used the analogy or for 

19 example criticality incidents with the 

20 language there. We thought it was providing a 

21 description or something in terms of least 

22 doses and I don't think we quite recognized at 
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1 the time what a wide range of exposures 

2 represented and it really didn't by itself 

3 sort of narrow it down to the potential 

4 situations that might qualify. Is that 

5 helping you?

6 DR. GLOVER: Within the context 

7 just explore the language that's fully in the 

8 rule. 

9 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes.

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: How do we take 

11 care of these kind of things like the blowout? 

12 I think certainly it arose in that context.

13 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes and I think 

14 there may be some situations that can't be 

15 covered by the current rule. I don't know. 

16 Just because of some specific language in that 

17 or because of what information is available. I 

18 think situations are different and the Met Lab 

19 is very different and that's why I thought it 

20 would be helpful to talk a little bit about 

21 that before we talk about more general 

22 criteria or how to get it. Arjun do you want 
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1 to bring us up to date?

2 DR. MAKHIJANI: I actually haven't 

3 reviewed the Met Lab situation. Maybe Hans 

4 can do it.

5 DR. H. BEHLING: Okay. This was 

6 a report that I had submitted for review back 

7 in June of 2009 so we're almost coming up to a 

8 year when the report was initially issued. 

9 And I do believe that it was briefly discussed 

10 at a previous meeting. However, at the time 

11 when it was issued, I don't believe that NIOSH 

12 had a reasonable chance to review it in it's 

13 entirety. I remember Jim Neton making some 

14 comments and also at the time he said he 

15 needed to review in greater detail to perhaps 

16 add additional comments regarding the validity 

17 of some of the comments I had introduced in 

18 the report. But for those who have had a 

19 chance to read it, you realize that the Met 

20 Lab was in fact the first incidence of AEC, 

21 DOE issues that relate to the weapons program. 

22 It started in 1942 and of course that 
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1 comprised one more thing. That is we were 

2 very uninformed about a lot of things 

3 involving radiation, especially in large 

4 source-terms and quantities and some of our 

5 information was extremely limited with regard 

6 to what those radiations do to living cells, 

7 to living organisms. And one of the things I 

8 brought out in the report was the concept of 

9 tolerance levels and they established 

10 tolerance levels for external exposure for 

11 airborne concentrations, for in body 

12 concentrations, etc. And now in retrospect we 

13 do come to realize that many of these 

14 tolerance levels were either orders of 

15 magnitude higher than what we would allow for 

16 in current day standards and I provided some 

17 examples about polonium and other particular 

18 radionuclides where tolerance levels in the 

19 body were more than, up to fifty thousand 

20 times higher than what they would be allowed 

21 in today's world. Also there were 

22 misconceptions. For instance, one of the 
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1 things that stood out was their concern about 

2 radium. They considered radium to be ten 

3 times more detrimental as an internal 

4 radionuclide than plutonium. So given all 

5 those things we have to realize that the 

6 environment in which workers worked during 

7 that time frame were quite different and they 

8 were based on understanding that in today's 

9 world we would potentially realize we are very 

10 much in error. Tolerance doses whether it was 

11 external/internal were very, very high. 

12 Earlier this morning I identified for instance 

13 one tolerance level that was identified in 

14 behalf of iodine 131 where in a given day they 

15 would allow up to two hundred eighty something 

16 microcuries to be inhaled which translates to 

17 over three hundred some odd rads to the 

18 thyroid. So given that we realize that we 

19 were dealing with a time frame when things 

20 were quite different from what they are today 

21 and the 250 day standard that applies across 

22 the Board for all time periods may have to be 
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1 looked at in different terms when we go back 

2 in time. And of course Met Lab is really 

3 ground zero for the time frame of the weapons 

4 production. And in my report I identified the 

5 number of things in addition to tolerance 

6 levels which gives sort of a qualitative 

7 assessment as to how things were done during 

8 that time. I also provided some additional 

9 information regarding certain potential 

10 exposures both external and internal in places 

11 on page 22 of my report. I took some verbatim 

12 statements out of some of the reports that 

13 were available for review. And for external 

14 exposures that involved sources of radium that 

15 were used in a very careless way in handling 

16 the radium sources people were exposed to 

17 radium at a rate where they would exceed their 

18 tolerance level for external radiation 

19 exposure in a matter of an hour or two on a 

20 daily basis. So one can conclude that on the 

21 basis of just a single radium source that was 

22 used for calibration and other purposes one 
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1 could receive a fairly large dose from 

2 external radiation in the matter of days to 

3 weeks. In addition I talked about examples 

4 about contamination level and of course 

5 plutonium was used during those time frames 

6 and there were levels of plutonium where 

7 workers were monitored both at home as well as 

8 at work and one of the examples that I 

9 provided was part of Exhibit 4 and 5 that 

10 talked about contamination levels of plutonium 

11 that involved things such as and I'm looking 

12 here at items that were assessed for 

13 contamination levels in the individual, in one 

14 of the worker's homes from the floor to the 

15 table to the couch, kitchen tables, 

16 refrigerator food and the quantities of 

17 plutonium were found as contamination levels 

18 were very, very high in the thousands. And we 

19 still haven't quite figured out what the 

20 metric was but obviously we speculated that it 

21 was metric that would have translated into 

22 sizable levels of contamination in a worker's 
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1 home. And of course that would imply that the 

2 worker was exposed to fairly large quantities 

3 of plutonium in an airborne environment in 

4 order to be transported from the workplace 

5 into the home. In addition to that I also 

6 provided some assessments of plutonium samples 

7 in fecal samples that were collected for 

8 several workers. And again when we talk about 

9 a positive fecal sample one can reasonably 

10 conclude that exposure was a relatively acute 

11 exposure because of the relatively high 

12 appearance rate of material that is either 

13 inhaled, brought up in the upper respiratory 

14 tract and swallowed or potentially transported 

15 from a surface that's contaminated by hand to 

16 mouth and then introduced into the 

17 gastrointestinal tract. So when you have a 

18 fairly high fecal sample that suggests the 

19 presence of plutonium one can reasonably 

20 conclude that those were also acute exposures 

21 as opposed to long term low level chronic 

22 exposures. And lastly I introduced a number 
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1 of documents that involved -- one of the 

2 concerns at the time was obviously damage to 

3 the hematopoietic tissues, meaning that there 

4 was a risk to workers both external and 

5 internal that might perhaps reduce the 

6 circulating blood, peripheral blood cells and 

7 that was one of their concerns and they would 

8 test people routinely and in many instances 

9 they did find people who had suppressed white 

10 blood cell counts and again we suggest 

11 relatively high doses in acute exposures. And 

12 contrary to and at the expense of sounding a 

13 little bit contrary to what John said, the 

14 threshold for hematopoietic damage is not as 

15 slow as we normally think. John mentioned 

16 this morning about five rem or 20 rem. The 

17 truth is when you really do hematopoietic 

18 tissue damage what you really would like to 

19 know is the starting point because you can 

20 take a 100 people in any given room and even 

21 have them relatively consistent in terms of 

22 age and sex and so forth and your baseline in 
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1 terms of what your neutral fills and your 

2 basal fills and your lymphocytes and et cetera 

3 will vary not only among individuals but even 

4 for given individuals over time. And so 

5 unless you have a baseline for that individual 

6 you really have a very limited understanding 

7 of what shift may occur as a result of 

8 exposure. Now I did in my write up include 

9 the Y-12 accident and in that particular Y-12 

10 accident in 1958 they had the benefit of 

11 baseline levels for a total of eight workers 

12 who were exposed to the criticality accident. 

13 Five of those individuals were exposed to 

14 very high doses in the hundreds of rad but 

15 three were exposed to lesser levels. And in 

16 fact some of the earlier documents that I 

17 looked at, NIOSH looked at those values as 

18 well. But they had exposures among the three 

19 people who had lower exposures. Their 

20 exposures to photons and neutrons combined 

21 were somewhere around at the high end 70 rem 

22 whole body exposure external, photon/neutron. 
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1 And yet as a result of that high exposure 

2 they observed no significant reduction in the 

3 hematopoietic or in the cellularity of 

4 peripheral blood cells. So that gives you an 

5 indication that the sensitivity of the 

6 hematopoietic tissue is not as high as we 

7 think it is and in this case they clearly had 

8 the ability to make that statement because 

9 they had in fact the baseline values for those 

10 three individuals and of course the dose 

11 reconstruction generated a dose to the 

12 hematopoietic tissues around 70 rads with no 

13 significant reduction. And yet in the case of 

14 the Metallurgical Laboratory we have people 

15 there who did in fact show significant changes 

16 in blood cellularity as a result of radiation 

17 exposure. So in collective terms, not to 

18 belabor this, we have instances where 

19 exposures were potentially very high based on 

20 tolerance levels. We have sources of 

21 radiation exposure such as radium that would 

22 have resulted in significant doses in 
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1 relatively short periods of time days to weeks 

2 perhaps. And we had fecal exposures and 

3 potential contamination exposures of plutonium 

4 that would have suggested very, very high 

5 exposures as well as hematopoietic changes. 

6 So given the variety of source-terms that were 

7 available for work exposures and the potential 

8 for acute exposures or acute exposures meaning 

9 days to weeks. 

10 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: We'll let you 

11 and John figure out your threshold issue 

12 later. 

13 DR. MAURO: I defer to Hans.

14 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I guess the 

15 question though, Arjun and I talked about this 

16 a little bit which is one reason we couldn't 

17 focus on this initially is are these, are 

18 these incidents? I think that's what is 

19 brought up here. These are working 

20 conditions. I think what Hans referred to as 

21 a acute but acute over days or weeks of 

22 exposure. Are they incidents and are the 
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1 incidents and sort of fit the criteria we've 

2 talked about this morning on incidents?

3 DR. H. BEHLING: I would say 

4 probably not, because, as I said if these 

5 exposures occurred over short periods of time 

6 and the doses were large, it was probably more 

7 a matter of our level of limited understanding 

8 of issues and ignorance more than an 

9 accidental event that triggered these 

10 exposures. And in the classical sense, if you 

11 want to classify an incident as something that 

12 was unforeseen, unpredicted or there was no 

13 conscious effort to allow this to happen then 

14 clearly these cases would not qualify as 

15 incident cases.

16 DR. MAKHIJANI: The difference 

17 between say during testing where soldiers went 

18 near ground zero because they were doing 

19 exercises and somebody getting caught in the 

20 Baneberry cloud. I mean exposures might be 

21 comparable but one was not intentional and the 

22 other one was intentional.
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1 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: There's also an 

2 issue of control measures.

3 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes.

4 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: And the other 

5 question I would have here is were some of 

6 these exposures incidents in the way we've 

7 been talking about it? I'm trying to remember 

8 back.

9 MEMBER ZIEMER: The Oak Ridge one 

10 was clearly an incident.

11 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes, the Oak 

12 Ridge one, but I'm talking about the Met Lab.

13 DR. H. BEHLING: Well Dr. Melius 

14 you could potentially construe some of them as 

15 sort of hybrids. For instance, they were 

16 portholes for neutron exposures that people 

17 simply walked by and there was a limited solid 

18 angle for a fairly high neutron exposures. 

19 Again, were the people aware that they were 

20 potentially leaving themselves vulnerable to a 

21 high neutron exposure by walking past these 

22 beams of neutrons or was it again simply 
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1 indifference. It is hard to really label 

2 these situations as being an incident when you 

3 realize these were scientists. They knew they 

4 were being exposed to neutrons but didn't 

5 really care enough to worry about it. 

6 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Be careful about 

7 the something else.

8 I also think we have to be careful 

9 about how do we try to account for intent or 

10 whatever in terms of any exposure. Be hard to 

11 put that in a Class Definition. Unintended 

12 exposure.

13 DR. MAKHIJANI: This neutron thing 

14 is interesting because there were no radiation 

15 controls. I don't know whether you call it 

16 failure radiation control but clearly they 

17 were in a hurry to do something. And they did 

18 not, you know, they knew they were. They had 

19 a certain number of neutrons. There was 

20 neutron exposure incidental to that and not 

21 part of the experimental setup. So, 

22 conceivably you could consider that piece of 
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1 evidence. 

2 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: The failure of 

3 controls what is the knowledge of appropriate 

4 controls? Is our knowledge contemporary or is 

5 it knowledge at the time? I think --

6 DR. MAKHIJANI: I think the whole 

7 dose reconstruction is done on a contemporary 

8 basis.

9 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes.

10 DR. MAKHIJANI: I think the 

11 radiation controls have to be taken on a 

12 contemporary basis. We are kind of looking 

13 back saying for a lot of reasons people were 

14 exposed back then and we are going to 

15 compensate them under certain conditions and 

16 the dose reconstruction method using old data 

17 but you are using modernized ERPs and you are 

18 not using dose reconstruction methodology from 

19 the time or the framework in the time or 

20 anything like that. So I would say it would 

21 fit the rest of the philosophy to say failure 

22 of radiation controls would be by today's 
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1 standards. How you actually factor that in 

2 with exceptionally high exposures is obviously 

3 very hard. But the radiation control piece I 

4 would say should be by today's standards 

5 because it fits.

6 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: But if and I 

7 don't know the details of the work schedule 

8 there and operational schedule to know that 

9 but certainly a significant number of the --

10 say we agreed that those were incidents under 

11 our best we have. A significant number of the 

12 workers during that time period would, you 

13 know, would potentially have been exposed. 

14 There had been a probability that they would 

15 have been exposed to one of those incidents. 

16 And I don't know if we could document it or 

17 not document it. So I think we would have to 

18 make some assumption about that. And so under 

19 that construct they could qualify. Some of 

20 the longer term exposures, the acute closures 

21 over weeks or something I think are harder to 

22 think of as an incident, I guess.
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1 DR. MAKHIJANI: Dr. Ziemer did back 

2 then.

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: Did that?

4 DR. MAKHIJANI: Long things at an 

5 incident of potential, longer than one hour, 

6 one day, might be something less than 250.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well we talked 

8 about that earlier today too.

9 DR. MAKHIJANI: Right, that's what 

10 I'm saying. And I think we came up with some 

11 examples of that.

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: We are talking 

13 about Metallurgical Lab. Those were, that was 

14 controlled, those were accidental excursions 

15 that was controlled. They were very carefully 

16 adding fuel and making measurements and 

17 approaching criticality and we all know that 

18 the protective things were very crude. They 

19 had the axe man. The guy with the rope and 

20 what was it, the boron. A jug of boron or 

21 something. Anyway, or cadmium rod, I forget 

22 which is was. That was the scram system, a 
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1 guy with a hatchet and a rope. But the output 

2 of that was very well documented. I mean they 

3 are going to criticality. They were measuring 

4 the multiplication. The neutron fluxes were 

5 pretty well known, I guess.

6 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: But the control 

7 of exposure was by today's standards would be 

8 considered uncontrolled.

9 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well Hans talked 

10 about the tolerance level and people thought 

11 in those days there was a value below which 

12 there were no effects. So, I think the dose 

13 limits are very high. Those can be 

14 reconstructed though, can't they? Where did 

15 we end up in the Met Lab?

16 DR. NETON: Well I was just looking 

17 at the ER right now and neither are internal 

18 nor external is considered to be 

19 reconstructable.

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: Why was the 

21 external not? 

22 DR. NETON: We only had one result 
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1 for one person, one external badge. We had no 

2 dosimeter data, except for that one person and 

3 he was not monitored for neutrons.

4 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: An inadequate 

5 source of information.

6 DR. MAKHIJANI: I think the control 

7 system probably calculating, had to been 

8 calculating neutron flux.

9 MEMBER ZIEMER: Basically it was a 

10 criticality experiment where you keep adding 

11 fuel and measuring the multiplication of the 

12 neutrons.

13 MEMBER ROESSLER: Well I keep 

14 thinking of what John Morrow said about 

15 situations where we know it when we see it and 

16 that's not the worst approach. When I look at 

17 these time periods that we are dealing with on 

18 anything and I think of 1942 to 1940 whatever 

19 there was consideration of the job that needs 

20 to be done, the lack of technology for making 

21 these measurements and the lack of knowledge 

22 about what the effects were. To me I start to 
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1 factor that time period is one in which the 

2 rules might be different for some other time. 

3 Maybe the effects are not different but I 

4 think time period we need to think about.

5 MEMBER BEACH: I have a question. 

6 Jim, back in December 2008 when we started 

7 talking about Met Lab we had four cases that 

8 had less than 250. Do you know, probably not 

9 offhand, if there has been any other cases 

10 that have come in?

11 DR. NETON: I don't know.

12 DR. MAURO: Hans, didn't you have 

13 an attachment to that report which listed a 

14 number of workers that were there and how long 

15 they were there?

16 DR. H. BEHLING: Yes I do. In 

17 fact I think that was stricken because of the 

18 Privacy Act issue but in one of the documents 

19 I identified a citation of sixty some-odd 

20 workers who by definition for being on that 

21 list had been there for less than one year. 

22 And one can obviously conclude that it 
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1 provides a termination date and you already 

2 know when the starting date was so yes, there 

3 were a substantial number of people who had 

4 been employed for less than the year's time, 

5 yes.

6 MEMBER BEACH: Thank you.

7 DR. GLOVER: Some of these 

8 facilities because of the claimants.

9 DR. NETON: Those are not 

10 claimants that Hans was referring to.

11 DR. GLOVER: A lot of college 

12 professors, like the Los Alamos and there may 

13 during the war effort time but people don't 

14 hit the 250 days because of those.

15 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, and in this 

16 particular case once they showed that they 

17 could produce the chain reaction then people 

18 scattered. They built other piles at Argonne 

19 and Oak Ridge, Hanford and a lot of those 

20 people left for other sites anyway.

21 DR. H. BEHLING: Excuse me. I have 

22 to correct myself. I said 67. Actually 
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1 paging to the portion of the report where I 

2 identified and I'll read to you on page six 

3 and seven of the report and it's called the 

4 Metallurgical Project Personnel Report. They 

5 identified 169 individuals who were classified 

6 as resigned or cut off. And on the basis of 

7 the termination dates and the start of the lab 

8 they were all obviously people who were less 

9 than 250 days at the facility. So 169 is the 

10 number.

11 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: So there's some 

12 probability where we can, could consider this 

13 concluded. I agree with what Gen said, it 

14 does seem something, I don't know if it's the 

15 time period or what. To me it's the concept 

16 of -- by modern standards of radiation control 

17 it is uncontrolled and in a situation where 

18 there would be exceptional exposure that 

19 occurred and obviously not able to reconstruct 

20 it all. 

21 MEMBER ROESSLER: If you could 

22 think of another word for uncontrolled. 
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1 DR. MAURO: How much leeway, I mean 

2 understand sort of the dilemma we have. We 

3 have the information that has been 

4 communicated to us regarding these various 

5 sites and they are different. And we also 

6 have the constraints imposed upon us by the 

7 law, by the statutes and the regulations. And 

8 clearly there is a certain amount of leeway I 

9 presume we have within the definition of the 

10 terms and the way in which the language is 

11 structured. Could we actually reach a point 

12 where we feel that for example, this business 

13 of loss of control or breakdown or an 

14 incident. These are terminologies that we are 

15 sort of saddled with because the way in which 

16 the regulations are written. But we just 

17 heard a very interesting example of one where 

18 really, everything was being done the way it 

19 was suppose to be done, we just didn't have 

20 the knowledge. So to what degree do we make 

21 our judgments. Do we make our judgments --

22 let's say we are talking about this site. 
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1 Okay? We have 168 people that worked there 

2 for less than a year. I'll just take a guess, 

3 if it is the way it is now one out of four 

4 probably developed cancer at some time in 

5 their life. Throwing a number out. That's 

6 what happens. In theory there may be some 

7 fraction of that 40 people or whatever it 

8 comes to. But and so common sense dictates 

9 that here we have a significant population of 

10 people that clearly probably were exposed to 

11 substantial exposures while they were working 

12 there based on the story that Hans just told. 

13 Now are we at a place where but we can't 

14 grant that SEC status because of the way that 

15 the language in the law is written because it 

16 just cuts us off. Could that happen here. 

17 Can we just say listen, the language is the 

18 language but we are not going to stop 

19 ourselves and when we see a situation that has 

20 to be fixed. I'm not, I've got to tell you 

21 I'm not that worried about the language of the 

22 law. I didn't mean it to sound the way it 
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1 sounded. I'm saying as a scientific body, as 

2 a scientific body, we are deliberating over 

3 what's the right way to deal with the problem. 

4 Then once we discuss it and we come to place 

5 where we feel that the way I have just done. 

6 Certain people should be compensated. 

7 However, we've got a problem. The law is a 

8 little ambiguous here. Or the law is not 

9 ambiguous and draws a line. You know, what do 

10 we do in a situation like that and that is all 

11 I'm saying. I think we might be there.

12 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: The regulations.

13 DR. MAURO: The regulations, the 

14 laws.

15 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: The regulations 

16 provide some guidelines for what has to be 

17 met. I think do these situations we've talked 

18 about all three of them, do they, with people 

19 we think have exceptionally high exposures, 

20 could they be addressed through the current 

21 regulation? I don't know for sure because I 

22 think they've got to get more specific about 
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1 how we think they should be addressed and how 

2 the Class is defined. But I think in a 

3 general sense maybe they could be and they 

4 probably could be. I don't think we would do 

5 it quite the way you said John. Just hell 

6 with the law.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: I have an 

8 additional thought. Let me approach it this 

9 way. I'll ask Hans this question. Hans, the 

10 old tolerance doses came out of what we would 

11 now call the NCRP and they were related to X12 ray and radium things. They didn't have legal 

13 force. Here we have a situation which 

14 eventually led to the Atomic Energy Commission 

15 but do you recall whether I know the Manhattan 

16 Project eventually developed some dose limits. 

17 But I'm not sure they even existed at the 

18 time of the start of the Metallurgical Lab.

19 DR. H. BEHLING: No they did not. 

20 I think they probably were recommendations and 

21 I believe most of the recommendations were 

22 geared towards external exposure and the use 
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1 of radium because those were the only areas 

2 prior to --

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well I know the 

4 tolerance dose was the NCRP concept that 

5 certainly had no legal force.

6 DR. H. BEHLING: No.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: What I'm sort of

8 getting to is I'm wondering if for the time 

9 period that preceded legal dose limits. We 

10 didn't have legal dose limits, I don't think, 

11 at the time of the Manhattan Project. I 

12 suppose one could argue that in the absence of 

13 any legal dose limits, one might make the case 

14 that exposures were not being controlled. 

15 That is just a thought. 

16 MS. HOWELL: The regulation doesn't 

17 -- it talks about failure of radiation 

18 controls. It doesn't speak to the absence. 

19 Like we had --

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: Okay. I'm sort of

21 asking that question, yes.

22 MS. HOWELL: That's an issue. I 
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1 mean there are probably about five or six 

2 phrases in the current regulation right now 

3 that are undefined terms.

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: Failure of controls 

5 not absence.

6 MS. HOWELL: Right, creating a

7 loophole. 

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, yes, okay. 

9 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: So is it failure 

10 of controls that were placed or like what you 

11 were saying current standards.

12 MR. KATZ: Current standards.

13 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Current standards 

14 or is it -- there were guidelines though.

15 DR. MAKHIJANI: There was a 

16 plutonium guideline and --

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: Wait a minute. At 

18 the time of the Manhattan Project there was a 

19 plutonium guideline?

20 DR. H. BEHLING: There were just 

21 basically tolerance levels and those are sort 

22 of reference levels but again one would 
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1 certainly not assign the horsepower to those 

2 tolerance levels as we do to current 

3 regulatory limits defined by the DOE or the 

4 NRC. So one has to make a distinction between 

5 what is a tolerance level and what is a 

6 regulatory limit.

7 DR. MAKHIJANI: I agree with that. 

8 I was just saying in terms of trying to make 

9 the situation more comparable to failure of 

10 radiation control, a guideline is obviously 

11 not a regulation enforceable in that sense but 

12 I think in 1941 actually went back to the 

13 radium dial painters situation and tried to 

14 assess what the limit.

15 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes the old Robley 

16 Evans radium thing and everything else was 

17 kind of related to that.

18 DR. MAKHIJANI: And I think they did 

19 set a guideline for plutonium on that basis in 

20 `41.

21 DR. H. BEHLING: Except it was 

22 considered one tenth as toxic as radium. So 
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1 the guideline was obviously a goofy one 

2 because it obviously didn't make or account 

3 for the higher level of radiotoxicity for 

4 plutonium.

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: Of course 

6 plutonium available at that time was like 

7 nothing, micrograms or something.

8 DR. MAKHIJANI: The only thing that 

9 I would suggest that maybe a stretch of the 

10 definition of failure to impose certain or 

11 failure to enforce some kind of radiologic 

12 controls is to expand the definition saying 

13 the failure to have a dose limits to begin 

14 with would not constitute in a broader sense 

15 the failure of radiation controls when you 

16 have no dose limits to speak of. You would 

17 think it would be an extension of the 

18 definition. 

19 DR. GLOVER: I would toss out 

20 though that stretching the thing versus 

21 rewriting it I think the Agency is much more 

22 comfortable with you making something that is 
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1 consistent with the feeling of the Board 

2 versus stretching the rule into areas where it 

3 is not meant to have gone. We have 

4 circumstances now that you have found that it 

5 didn't perhaps cover. But I'm afraid if we 

6 stretch it, Emily is going to say that we do 

7 have a law we have to follow.

8 MS. HOWELL: Right.

9 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: But I do think 

10 it's also -- the problem with that approach, 

11 Hans, is I mean it still begs the question of 

12 well is it an exceptional incident? Is it not 

13 reconstructable and so forth? So it's not 

14 just you know whether or not there were 

15 regulatory limits in place. What were the 

16 actual exposures at the time and can we or can 

17 we not reconstruct them. We have to be 

18 careful that we don't put forth the stretch 

19 criteria in a way that then allows everything 

20 in and this becomes where we end up having to 

21 screen every potential acute exposure up 

22 there. I think at some point we, what's going 
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1 to be key here is how do we know it when we 

2 see it? How do we describe that in a way that 

3 there's a, that it, I can't say threshold, but 

4 it's a limited universe that we really can all 

5 agree on would qualify. Because I think the 

6 other criteria would follow from that. Then 

7 could there be situations that don't meet the 

8 regulatory definitions of incident and so 

9 forth that ought to be compensated in some way 

10 with short term exposure. There may be. I'm 

11 not sure we -- I don't think we've ruled them 

12 out but at least the three we've talked about 

13 I think there's some reasonable possibility 

14 that they could be dealt with in terms of the 

15 rule. I think we have some work to do to get 

16 there. So I don't want to jump ahead too far 

17 on that.

18 DR. NETON: I just was thinking 

19 while you were talking that it seems in this 

20 instance -- I remember reviewing the original 

21 Hans' report and one of the compelling 

22 arguments I think that meets one criteria 
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1 possibly which is exceptionally high because 

2 of the lymphocyte blood cell depression that 

3 occurred in these workers. I think that's 

4 actually one of the examples offered up in the 

5 regulation as evidence of exceptionally high 

6 exposure. So it seems like it meets, could be 

7 exceptionally high criteria. I'm not sure it 

8 meets discreet incident or failure of 

9 radiological control. Maybe one of those 

10 three seems to be there.

11 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Maybe in the Met 

12 Lab we are not going to be able to tell if 

13 that is a -- it could have occurred from acute 

14 exposures, these porthole incidents. Those 

15 may be incidents. I'm not sure but we may not 

16 be able to tell for the individual worker 

17 there, and we may have to say well but there's 

18 a probability that they could have been 

19 exposed there. It's a complicated situation, 

20 we have limited individual information.

21 MEMBER ZIEMER: Do we know in the 

22 Met Lab if once they achieve criticality did 
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1 they do further criticality experiments? I 

2 got the impression that once they achieved 

3 that they started work on the reactors, the 

4 real reactors and the Met Lab stuff with the 

5 other stuff.

6 DR. NETON: I don't know, but my 

7 impression was that these large external 

8 exposures were not necessarily the result of 

9 the criticality but these radium sources that 

10 Hans was talking about where they could have 

11 received, I forget what his calculations was, 

12 a thousand R in a day or something like that.

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: And I think 

14 probably Arjun is correct that although they 

15 may not have formal dose limits, they did have 

16 the guidelines. There was a reason that they 

17 were up on the balcony away from and they had 

18 some idea and actually didn't stay at 

19 criticality very long once they achieved it. 

20 I mean, they were there and then they shut 

21 down and they drank their wine and went home. 

22 That's how the story goes pretty much. So I 
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1 guess in my mind I'm certainly comfortable 

2 with using non-stochastic effects as evidence 

3 of a high dose and saying that would be a 

4 criteria without anything else and you 

5 wouldn't be able to reconstruct it but it's 

6 got to be "high" if it is causing, certainly 

7 -- and certainly in those time frames. It is 

8 not like today where you can find a couple of 

9 chromosome breaks. I mean, if they could see 

10 blood changes in the 40s they must, they've 

11 got to be over 50, maybe in the 100s.

12 MEMBER ROESSLER: Because as Hans 

13 talked about the changes in response with 

14 individuals too, you have a to put a big range 

15 on that.

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes.

17 DR. H. BEHLING: And it's 

18 important to note that really their focus and 

19 concern during those periods of time early on 

20 was really not towards cancer or other 

21 stochastic effects. They were really looking 

22 only at the potential avoidance of acute 
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1 radiation exposure issues. 

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right. 

3 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: So we've solved 

4 that.

5 (Laughter.)

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: We don't currently 

7 have a criteria for the less than 250, the 

8 presence of or do we? The presence of non9 stochastic effects as a criteria for 

10 eligibility?

11 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes, that's one 

12 of them.

13 DR. NETON: Well one of the 

14 examples offered in the regulation was like a 

15 criticality and I forget the exact findings. 

16 Maybe someone could pull it out. It talked 

17 about blood cells.

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: So that's already 

19 in place.

20 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: But it's tied to 

21 the incident issue. So that's the, I think, 

22 maybe more of a hurdle.
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1 MEMBER ZIEMER: Oh, but evidence 

2 of an incident --

3 DR. NETON: I'm not actually sure 

4 it's actually in the regulation or the 

5 preamble.

6 MS. HOWELL: It's in the preamble

7 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: The preamble.

8 DR. NETON: It's in the preamble.

9 DR. MAKHIJANI: I don't believe it's 

10 in the regulation.

11 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: It's in the 

12 preamble.

13 MR. KATZ: That's in the preamble.

14 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: That's right.

15 MEMBER ZIEMER: What does it say?

16 MR. KATZ: The regulation itself 

17 doesn't go to that.

18 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: It's in the 

19 preamble

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: But the preamble 

21 expresses intent.

22 DR. NETON: Yes.
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1 DR. MAKHIJANI: The thing with the 

2 white blood cell changes and measurable

3 somatic effect lost your internal -- I mean 

4 it's a step from the external.

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: It's one indicator.

6 DR. MAKHIJANI: Right.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: It's not the only 

8 one necessarily.

9 DR. MAKHIJANI: Right.

10 MEMBER ROESSLER: So that helps us 

11 with the Met Lab, but it doesn't help us with 

12 this. Jim wanted for us to come up with some 

13 general.

14 MEMBER ZIEMER: But that's a fairly 

15 general one.

16 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes, it's one.

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: Is it already 

18 included by being in the preamble or not? 

19 Does it have to be explicit?

20 MR. KATZ: Well it's already 

21 considered in effect that's already under 

22 consideration at DCAS because that's in the 
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1 preamble. It might even be addressed in their 

2 guidelines too. 

3 DR. GLOVER: If it's a point that 

4 we are still discussing it here, then it may 

5 not hurt to have it, that's your magnitude of 

6 large, right? It is one of the things that 

7 says what do we mean by big, we agree that 

8 seems to make --

9 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: The description

10 of the -- you know it when you see it. That's 

11 one of the things you see.

12 MS. HOWELL: The failure of 

13 controls is the actual language at the reg.

14 DR. NETON: 83.10 actually includes 

15 white blood cell depression. Section I, 

16 medical evidence that one or more members of 

17 Class may have incurred a high level of 

18 radiation dose from the incident such as 

19 depressed white blood cell count, associated 

20 with radiation exposure for the application of 

21 chelation therapy.

22 DR. MAKHIJANI: So that is internal 
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1 dose. 

2 DR. MAURO: That's the internal.

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: Which means they've 

4 taken steps to do something, so it indicates 

5 an incident.

6 DR. MAKHIJANI: This goes along the 

7 line of what I was saying earlier in the 

8 morning. There are specific guidelines that 

9 call for medical intervention, and chelation 

10 is one of them. So if you want to go away 

11 from a quantitative dose idea because you 

12 can't reconstruct the incident and you know it 

13 happened, you've got to establish presence 

14 someway, an affidavit, somebody said they were 

15 there or a record or special incident index. 

16 I mean you have to have something like that, 

17 otherwise you can't get there. But I think --

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: Or these medical 

19 records.

20 DR. MAKHIJANI: Or medical records. 

21 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: But I think there 

22 are members of the Class. You don't have to 
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1 document it for every Class member.

2 DR. MAKHIJANI: I think chelation, 

3 internal dose could be gotten at.

4 DR. MAURO: I've got to tell you 

5 that's very important because, you know, we 

6 have had some strong arguments regarding 

7 external, whether that's captured by the 

8 definition. I have to say this is the first 

9 time I have heard some language bringing 

10 internal into the picture.

11 MEMBER GRIFFON: We forgot that was 

12 in there.

13 MEMBER BEACH: So when did 

14 chelation come into play though? This was in 

15 `42 to `46.

16 DR. NETON: John's right. It 

17 clearly, I don't think the intent of the 

18 regulation was to discount internal. I think 

19 the way it was defined as a discrete incident 

20 sort of precludes these expended internal 

21 exposures that give you very high doses. That 

22 is sort of the disconnect in my opinion.
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1 DR. MAURO: So you would agree 

2 then -- see one of the things that is a little 

3 disturbing right now. I went through three 

4 examples, and I sort of stuck my neck out. 

5 That sounds like the first one, Ames, you got 

6 to pay those guys. You know the second one, 

7 Baneberry my goodness. That was pretty bad. I 

8 don't know how high the doses were, but they 

9 sounded like they were pretty serious. Now we 

10 hear this story. Now in each one of these 

11 cases, I'm not afraid to -- you got to pay 

12 those guys. They came down with cancer and 

13 they were there for less than 250 days, and 

14 the guy has one of the list of cancers. So in 

15 my mind I just heard three examples that 

16 scream to me it is the right thing to do. 

17 Now, quite frankly I haven't heard 

18 anybody around the table say the same thing. 

19 Do you agree? In light of what we know, we 

20 know a lot about the subject do you think that 

21 the right thing to do here is at least in 

22 those three cases notwithstanding what the 
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1 regulations say. Granted, I know we are 

2 trying to get to the big picture. But I'm 

3 staying to the small picture. We just went 

4 through three cases. I know how I come out on 

5 the three cases. I don't know where everybody 

6 else comes out on the three cases. I know, it 

7 seems obvious to me. Now, what that tells us 

8 about the generalities is other matters, but 

9 if some folks don't believe every one of those 

10 cases warrant granting a SEC for those people, 

11 then we are still at, like, square one to me. 

12 I know what that tells me.

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, I think on 

14 the first one the difficulty was establishing 

15 presence in those logs, right?

16 DR. MAURO: Well, that's the 

17 mechanics of it. If it can be established 

18 that a person were present when one or more 

19 blowout occurred, even though he was there for 

20 less than 250 days and we know that. But we 

21 also know that he got one of the listed 

22 cancers, as far as I'm concerned, we're done. 
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1 That is the right thing to do. 

2 MEMBER BEACH: Well we can 

3 establish the dates of the blowouts or the 

4 dates in between when those blowouts occurred 

5 fairly well, can't we?

6 DR. H. BEHLING: Not really, no.

7 MEMBER BEACH: No, not really?

8 DR. H. BEHLING: No. We just know 

9 that they occurred at a fairly consistent 

10 frequency and from the records with Dr. 

11 Spedding who was the head of that department 

12 there at Ames he in his own personal accounts 

13 and memoirs talks about the frequency and he 

14 cites the one day when they had six explosions 

15 in a single day. And there is persistent 

16 reference to the frequency of these blowouts. 

17 So one could reasonably assume that in any 

18 given, let's say 30 day period there was at 

19 least perhaps one blowout, so establishing a 

20 person's presence at the site for 30 days 

21 would almost reasonably guarantee you that he 

22 was there doing at least one blowout. 
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1 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, that's right 

2 back where we were talking about before. 

3 That's Dr. Melius', you know, what's the 

4 probability you got exposed to one blowout? If 

5 you were there 30 days it is one and 60 is two 

6 and so on. Okay. 

7 MEMBER GRIFFON: I was just going 

8 to answer John's question. For me, I think 

9 Ames fits it, I'm convinced anyway. But for 

10 Nevada Test Site, I'm not sure. I mean 

11 there's some subtleties on these other ones I 

12 think. What I heard on Nevada Test Site is 

13 that if you are involved in an incident, if I 

14 understand it right, the Class was defined 

15 because of this -- having several sort of 

16 acutes and the difficulty in reconstructing. 

17 But if you could show presence from what I'm 

18 hearing from folks on the phone as well as in 

19 the room is that if you were at one of the 

20 incidents, they did do a fair amount of follow 

21 up immediately on some of these, so there may, 

22 may be records to reconstruct.
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1 DR. MAKHIJANI: I think in Baneberry 

2 did.

3 MEMBER GRIFFON: Yes. I'm not 

4 sure it's true.

5 DR. MAKHIJANI: I'm not sure that 

6 there was an intercept between the people and 

7 events in the same way. 

8 MEMBER GRIFFON: So I don't know if 

9 you were just out there for one event and you 

10 worked there 20 days or whatever and were 

11 involved in one of the events and but they did 

12 follow up immediately and your records have 

13 enough to reconstruct. So yes I can't answer 

14 that so easily for Nevada Test Site is what I 

15 am saying. And then the last one, I guess my 

16 trouble with the last one in Met Lab is the 

17 same question Jim is raising is that sure you 

18 had the medical effects there, which is a 

19 strong argument for it but then it doesn't 

20 seem like there's any discreet incident that 

21 caused it necessarily so you had a longer term 

22 exposure maybe.
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1 DR. H. BEHLING: Mark, except that 

2 when you have a suppression of lymphocytes and 

3 neutrophils it's usually a strong indication 

4 of a short term exposure, and I'm going back 

5 to criticality accidents but also the Marshall 

6 Island experience that I studied intensely and 

7 you probably would not get a significant 

8 suppression of blood cells if you were 

9 chronically exposed even to substantial doses. 

10 They would appear to be short term duration 

11 exposures that would significantly suppress 

12 neutrophils of lymphocytes.

13 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: That's a good 

14 point.

15 MEMBER GRIFFON: I mean how did 

16 they decide to take those measurements anyway? 

17 It obviously wasn't just a regular physical, 

18 was it?

19 DR. H. BEHLING: No, no. They 

20 would routinely get people down there and 

21 assess their peripheral blood much like you do 

22 when you take an annual physical exam.
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1 MEMBER GRIFFON: But it is routine?

2 DR. H. BEHLING: Peripheral blood 

3 sample and put it on a slide and count the 

4 number of cells and determine what the number 

5 of cells are per unit volume, per milliliter, 

6 and determine whether or not this differs 

7 from a baseline value which they had and then 

8 come to some conclusion that radiation might 

9 have been or likely have been the cause of 

10 that suppression. 

11 MEMBER GRIFFON: No I'm just saying 

12 they didn't do it in response to a known 

13 excursion or whatever?

14 DR. MAKHIJANI: In Baneberry, they 

15 did.

16 MEMBER GRIFFON: I'm talking about 

17 the Met Lab.

18 DR. H. BEHLING: Well, I think in 

19 Met Lab it may have been something that was 

20 done more or less routine that says, okay 

21 we're concerned about the avoidance of non22 stochastic effect and so rather than let's say 
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1 have a bioassay every -- pretty much I think 

2 you have to look at the serological tests at 

3 the Met Lab much like you do a bioassay. You 

4 schedule people every 30 days to see what 

5 their excretion rate is for a certain isotope 

6 in urine or something else and I think this is 

7 basically how they assess people in those days 

8 for peripheral blood disorders. It would be 

9 used as a bioassay test.

10 MEMBER ROESSLER: They had animal 

11 studies that they probably were basing it on?

12 DR. H. BEHLING: Yes, absolutely.

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well and keep in 

14 mind they didn't -- there was no lifetime 

15 exposure records kept. Everybody thought it 

16 was like a weekly limit and as long as you 

17 controlled that and didn't have any stochastic 

18 or non-stochastic effects in a week you were 

19 okay. There were no lifetime limits. People 

20 didn't keep them, and I might add, I entered 

21 the field in the 50s, we were still taking 

22 baseline blood counts on every rad worker. 
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1 You had that in the files in case you 

2 suspected it.

3 DR. MAURO: So you had baseline?

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes.

5 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: So what do we do 

6 next?

7 DR. MAKHIJANI: Do you want some 

8 exploration, some kind of guided exploration 

9 of these three things?

10 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: No, I have an 

11 answer.

12 DR. GLOVER: Rhetorical.

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: We have to guess 

14 the answer.

15 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Paul will stay 

16 after class and complete his napkin. It's got 

17 many sides. This isn't -- I'm not going to 

18 say who should do this and talk about how to 

19 do this, one of the things I think we need to 

20 document, let's call it a guidance document 

21 that tries to capture what we've talked about 

22 in a general sense. How high is high enough? 
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1 And some of the other sort of baseline 

2 criteria and I think we need to probably 

3 include in that some thought -- Emily alluded 

4 to the five key words or whatever they are in 

5 the current regulation and sort of flesh that 

6 out, at least take those into account in 

7 writing up this guidance document. The second 

8 thing I think we need to do is refresh 

9 ourselves on the three examples based on what 

10 we've discussed today, the three sites. And 

11 are they -- have we in our discussions have we 

12 characterized -- we all agree on the 

13 characterization of them in terms of that they 

14 would fit this loose construct that we have of 

15 how we would approach this issue. Some of 

16 that, well can we really not count the number 

17 of incidents at Ames. Were they that high? 

18 And things like that just to make sure we are 

19 factually in agreement on what we know and 

20 don't know about all three. I think the 

21 Nevada Test Site is going to be the harder one 

22 because it's just bigger and more complicated. 
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1 Maybe that will be harder to do that. Then I 

2 think we need to bring the two together with 

3 another meeting. I would like to put the goal 

4 of trying to have something to present to the 

5 Board, including potentially if we agree on 

6 it, that we would be able to make SEC 

7 recommendations on these sites by the August 

8 meeting. I do think we need to bring this to 

9 the Board for discussion. We've spent a long 

10 time on it. It is difficult but I think at 

11 least for the people at Ames and Met Lab and 

12 NTS at least to have a path forward on those 

13 and relatively soon. I'm not quite as sure 

14 that we would be ready for Nevada Test Site by 

15 August, but we could be. The facts are less 

16 clear.

17 DR. MAKHIJANI: I think the 

18 documentation on Baneberry is there and, Lynn, 

19 are you still there? Lynn, are you familiar 

20 with all the documentation from Baneberry that 

21 we could kind of guide us?

22 MR. ANSPAUGH: I'm fairly familiar 
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1 with the documentation on Baneberry but I 

2 certainly have it within my files.

3 DR. MAKHIJANI: Okay. Maybe we 

4 could put it together for you. We can try.

5 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes.

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: What are we looking 

7 for there? Is that the only one we were 

8 looking at?

9 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well all three in 

10 fact, right?

11 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: All three. Let's 

12 back up a little bit. I think on Ames, I 

13 don't think, I think we have enough 

14 documentation. I think we need to refresh our 

15 memories and sort of re-look at that and make 

16 sure that what we, the way we've talked about 

17 it is accurate. It has been a long time since 

18 we talked about it. The same on Met Lab. It 

19 is a little bit more recent but I think I 

20 certainly need to refresh on that and how this 

21 could fit into this issue. And then the third 

22 one I think is the Nevada Test Site. I think 
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1 that, I don't think we've ever documented 

2 that, at least taking into account some of the 

3 recent findings in terms of SEC and so forth 

4 with that. That's what has changed with the 

5 Nevada Test Site. As a result of the work on 

6 the SECs there, I think there may be more 

7 other documentation out there that we didn't 

8 have before when we considered, which was over 

9 two years ago, maybe even longer with that. So 

10 that may require an updated document from SC&A 

11 on that.

12 MEMBER GRIFFON: And do you have in 

13 mind too that that first part, I agree with 

14 that, drafting of a guidance.

15 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes.

16 MEMBER GRIFFON: A straw man, sort 

17 of, but are you going to task that?

18 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I was going to do 

19 that.

20 MEMBER GRIFFON: Okay.

21 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: We would do that 

22 as a group.
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1 MEMBER GRIFFON: It might be useful 

2 to have a written thing to start from.

3 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes and I'll do 

4 a first draft and then work off of that, 

5 certainly primary author, to get moving 

6 forward. I think it is important that we sort 

7 of be collaborative from the Work Group but 

8 also with NIOSH on that so that when we get to 

9 the point of having to agree to this at a 

10 Board meeting that it is something that we 

11 have generally agreed on. We can disagree 

12 about at some point about the application, 

13 criteria and so forth but it's something that 

14 we agree and certainly on the initial examples 

15 that is something that everybody is 

16 comfortable moving ahead with. Or if there 

17 are differences, then we can focus on those 

18 differences and try to figure out how to 

19 resolve them because it may be is this an 

20 incident, it's not incident, things like that. 

21 DR. MAKHIJANI: I'm just trying to 

22 be clear. The way I read what you are saying 
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1 is we're trying to do two things. One is get 

2 clear enough on -- for now -- NTS aside. Get 

3 clear enough on Ames and Met Lab so you can 

4 take the less-than-250 day recommendation to 

5 the Board that there were significant 

6 incidents here. One way or the other, you 

7 should recommend it since those things were 

8 left pending and the second thing is like 

9 considering those two, do some guidelines 

10 emerge for the bigger picture? Is that the 

11 purpose of this?

12 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: No, well the 

13 purpose, you are correct, but I think the 

14 timing is wrong. I think they need to be done 

15 in parallel so that when we get to a Board 

16 meeting in August, we can present our Work 

17 Group's consensus to the extent we have a 

18 consensus on the guidelines. And NIOSH, we 

19 have consensus with NIOSH on that also, in a 

20 general sense. And that we have a 

21 recommendation that the lawyers feel is 

22 legitimate under the regulations. 
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1 MEMBER GRIFFON: So for the --

2 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: But I think the 

3 criteria are important because if we are 

4 presenting examples, I think we need to be 

5 able to say this is the universe where they 

6 are going to fit and you know, maybe it is, 

7 you know, we will know it when we see it but 

8 we'll narrow it down so we don't have to --

9 MEMBER ROESSLER: So somebody else 

10 can know it when they see it.

11 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Right. There may 

12 be examples but we don't want to have to re13 screen every --

14 MS. HOWELL: But the answer -- I'm 

15 sorry. The answer could then be, we figured 

16 out what we know when we see it but it doesn't 

17 fit within the regs so here are our 

18 recommendations to change.

19 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes, or this part 

20 of it does, this part of it doesn't. 

21 DR. MAURO: A little help on the 

22 NTS side. Now, what I heard is that we have 
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1 at least one event, Baneberry, where we all 

2 suspect that there were considerable quantity 

3 releases. There is some evidence that there 

4 was some follow-up to dose reconstruction. 

5 That is, the people that they thought might 

6 have experienced fairly large releases and 

7 they may very well be feasible for certain 

8 people who were involved in that event to have 

9 the doses reconstructed. Now, but of course

10 they have also at the same time fall within 

11 the scope of the SEC. So we have this person 

12 say we feel we can reconstruct his dose from 

13 Baneberry but at the same time he's going to 

14 be granted SEC.

15 MEMBER GRIFFON: Not if he was 

16 only there for 30 days.

17 DR. MAURO: Okay but if it was less 

18 than, okay. So where -- let me play this out 

19 in my head. So here we have this person at 

20 Baneberry. We reconstruct his dose. We know 

21 we can reconstruct his dose and he is there 

22 for less than 250 days. He is either 
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1 compensated or not. Everything is pretty 

2 straightforward. Now, but there are the other 

3 people that might have been involved in 

4 Baneberry that say they were. Let's say they 

5 say they were but may have been. But they 

6 didn't get this treatment, a good follow-up, a 

7 reconstruction of doses. What happens to 

8 them? And I would say the same thing goes for 

9 other incidents beside Baneberry.

10 MEMBER GRIFFON: Well I don't know 

11 that they can't bound their doses. I don't 

12 know.

13 DR. MAURO: So you would say --

14 MEMBER ZIEMER: I would think you 

15 could bound them in that case of Baneberry 

16 only, right?

17 DR. NETON: We'd have to look at 

18 it. If you recall that the reason we added 

19 the SEC Class is because the monitoring 

20 programs appear to be incident-driven. We 

21 couldn't reconstruct chronic exposure models 

22 based on that. So we, we have a lot of 
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1 bioassay data that is collected in response to 

2 known incidents. So, I am not sure where that 

3 goes.

4 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: It may come down 

5 to what was collected on a particular 

6 individual. Some individuals may have been, 

7 had adequate data and some may not. 

8 DR. NETON: I think it's open. We 

9 haven't really looked at it.

10 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes, I mean that 

11 is sort of that is one of the things that I 

12 thought we had talked about a couple of years 

13 ago. That may have been where we --

14 DR. GLOVER: On the Ames discussion 

15 that we've had, whether they fit in or not, 

16 there was a lot of conjecture back and forth. 

17 Well let's forget about them having bioassay 

18 and imagine if it was these things. We do 

19 need to make sure we very carefully review the 

20 records because there is bioassay for these 

21 people. We do have groups of uranium bioassay 

22 and so we will start composing that. There is 
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1 a lot of hypothetical discussions and so we 

2 need to make sure we are very careful about 

3 the record.

4 DR. NETON: At Ames, we clearly 

5 indicated that we could reconstruct uranium 

6 exposure with incidents or not. I did go back 

7 and look at the document and it appears, I 

8 recall now that the uranium monitoring 

9 program, as Arjun suggested, ended very early 

10 on. The uranium production program, 1943 time 

11 frame, and it was primarily thorium after 

12 that, through 1955. So there is the 

13 disconnect. So we may have a lot of uranium 

14 bioassay but only for the very early periods. 

15 How that is relevant to the thorium16 production period, I don't know, but as Dr. 

17 Melius suggested I think everyone needs to go 

18 back and look.

19 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I think we can 

20 go back and clarify maybe, there's lots of 

21 possibilities. Maybe it is just a certain 

22 time period, I don't know.
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1 MEMBER GRIFFON: Are you asking 

2 for all parties to go back to these documents 

3 that have been written already or are you 

4 asking for, I mean, I thought what might be 

5 useful is an executive summary of the relevant 

6 facts for each one at Ames -- especially Ames 

7 and Met Lab. Nevada might be a broader thing 

8 that SC&A has to look at.

9 MEMBER BEACH: Well SC&A put 

10 together a report in October 2007 that showed 

11 various different claims and different 

12 incidents based on what you are talking about 

13 now, that I was just looking up.

14 DR. MAKHIJANI: For the Nevada Test 

15 Site?

16 MEMBER BEACH: Yes.

17 DR. NETON: That was criticality18 based though.

19 DR. MAKHIJANI: No, no. no. We 

20 actually had a separate report, the one that 

21 Josie is referring to on Nevada Test Site 

22 where I believe we compiled all the incidents 
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1 at Nevada Test Site. So there is a special 

2 report we did on Nevada Test Site. It may not 

3 cover all the bases that you want covered, but 

4 there is one to start from.

5 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Let me ask the 

6 Work Group. Would it be useful to have a, 

7 given all the documentation there is on, 

8 actually on all three of these sites --

9 Nevada, I definitely thought there was a need 

10 for a further document focused on this. Would 

11 it be helpful for Ames and Met Lab to have 

12 something that at least summarizes what's 

13 there?

14 MEMBER GRIFFON: I thought it would 

15 be useful and I think you can juxtapose the 

16 cases. This one had this kind of a situation. 

17 You know you had the blowouts at Ames. You 

18 had the -- they are very different situations 

19 that we considered in considering our less20 than-250 day policy. So it might be 

21 reasonable to summarize. When I say relevant, 

22 as they apply to our decision on this 250 day 
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1 criteria. We don't need all the detail. We 

2 can refer back to the big reports for that.

3 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: One of the 

4 problems we've had with the 250 day issue is 

5 that we go from site to site and, by the time 

6 SC&A does a report, NIOSH responds and we have 

7 a discussion, somebody goes off and does

8 further work. Then we jump to another site. 

9 And then we lose track of the earlier site. 

10 So maybe a three-part report from SC&A that 

11 would deal with Nevada Test Site, Met Lab and 

12 the Ames from the perspective -- see how 

13 quickly we forget about these things? From 

14 the perspective we've been talking about.

15 MEMBER GRIFFON: And you'll start 

16 an initial draft of the overall guidance.

17 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: And I'll start 

18 an initial draft, like I said, like an outline 

19 at first for that.

20 MEMBER GRIFFON: And can I ask 

21 before I forget to ask this question of Emily. 

22 The five key words or phrases. I think I've 
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1 got three.

2 MS. HOWELL: Yes, I'm just pasting 

3 this off of 83.13(c)(3)(I): presence, health 

4 endangerment stuff. So discrete incidents, 

5 exceptionally high-level exposures, similarly 

6 high-level exposures.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: What is that?

8 MS. HOWELL: It says, the full 

9 phrase is such as nuclear criticality 

10 incidents or other events involving similarly 

11 high-level exposures. So the issue with that 

12 is, it's more how do similarly high levels of 

13 exposure compared to exceptionally high levels 

14 of exposure. Are they the same? Are they 

15 different and et cetera? Then failure of 

16 radiation protection controls versus, in the 

17 next sentence, unprotected exposure. Again 

18 are they the same or are they different? And 

19 presence.

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: What was the 

21 fourth one? After failure?

22 MS. HOWELL: Failure of radiation 
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1 protection control and then there is no 

2 absence. Absence is not in there. And 

3 unprotected exposure. 

4 MEMBER BEACH: If you look at the 

5 conference call notes from January 4. That 

6 full paragraph is in there if anybody has 

7 that.

8 DR. MAURO: Say that again.

9 MEMBER BEACH: It was a conference 

10 call to prepare for this meeting to bring Sam 

11 up to date on January 4. And that's the 

12 pending, notes conference call on 250 day SEC, 

13 January 4, 2010 final. And that whole 

14 paragraph is in there.

15 MS. HOWELL: So the fourth was 

16 failure of radiation protection controls. The 

17 next one was unprotected exposure. And then 

18 the last one, which is six actually is 

19 presence. And with presence I think you need 

20 to verify that is, you know, instantaneous 

21 presence of like one second, to think about it 

22 practically speaking, not just technically 
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1 what scientifically makes sense. But then how 

2 do you apply these practically, because that's 

3 where some of this stuff you guys have 

4 mentioned today, that's where like the rubber 

5 meets the road. Some of what you are talking 

6 about may make sense from a scientific 

7 perspective but in terms of practical 

8 application it is a little unclear. 

9 MEMBER ZIEMER: What was the very 

10 first one on your list?

11 MS. HOWELL: Discrete incidents.

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: Oh, discrete.

13 MR. KATZ: Can I point out these 

14 terms that you've listed, they are not 

15 independent criteria. A bunch of this is an 

16 example, all laid out as an example. If I 

17 could just read. For Classes of employees 

18 that may have been exposed to radiation during 

19 discreet incidents likely to have involved 

20 exceptionally high-level exposures such as 

21 nuclear critical incidents or other events 

22 involving similarly high levels of exposures 
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1 resulting from the failure of radiation 

2 protection controls. Such as is always is an 

3 example of that initial.

4 MS. HOWELL: Right but when we, I'm 

5 saying this because we've actually gone 

6 through hypotheticals and tried to apply these 

7 hypotheticals that DCAS has provided for us 

8 and so I'm just saying like we need to think 

9 about, those are the individual phrases that 

10 are strung together in this example, but we 

11 need to think about the individual phrases too 

12 because we were just having, that's where I'm 

13 talking about practical application being 

14 difficult. I know that they are all modified 

15 with likely to, such as, and that's a whole 

16 other kettle of fish.

17 DR. MAKHIJANI: In making these 

18 summaries it might be helpful if we made a 

19 table, a side by side table to feature these 

20 cases so you can look at them. I mean, not 

21 every element in the table might be filled 

22 because there may be question marks in some of 
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1 them. If we had a side by side, you know, in 

2 relation to some of these terms, we could 

3 maybe --

4 DR. MAURO: I agree with that but 

5 that can't happen until you have your 

6 narrative.

7 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Let's do the 

8 narrative first then, and then go back and 

9 also be a little careful about doing legal 

10 interpretations.

11 DR. MAKHIJANI: No I wasn't talking 

12 about legal interpretations. I was talking 

13 about putting the characteristics of the 

14 incidents side by side so you could see in one 

15 table.

16 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: The ghost of 

17 counsel past to haunt you.

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: I think tying these 

19 together though as you suggested is an 

20 important factor because I continue to see 

21 assertions, for example from petitioners, that 

22 failure of rad controls are grounds for an SEC 
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1 and that would be for example, failure to take 

2 a leak test within six months and it was a 

3 week over. And therefore, so it's got to be 

4 tied to something that has a particular 

5 outcome.

6 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: It's also why I 

7 hesitate to tie it to an operational or 

8 regulatory guidance document. It really 

9 follows different legal bases. Is everybody -

10 - were you trying to get this done by making 

11 significant progress by August?

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes.

13 DR. MAKHIJANI: August. So you 

14 would want a report for that?

15 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes.

16 DR. MAKHIJANI: And the Working 

17 Group meeting before the August?

18 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes.

19 DR. MAURO: Is this an SC&A report?

20 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: The summary is 

21 an SC&A report. The guidance summary, the 

22 summary is an SC&A report. The guidance 
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1 document is not. That is a Work Group --

2 that is a NIOSH collaboration.

3 DR. MAKHIJANI: And Jim, when you 

4 say summary, the Baneberry piece, were you 

5 looking for more of an elaboration on that as 

6 a separate document than the summary of 

7 everything we've got?

8 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: No, the summary 

9 would include -- you decide whether to use 

10 part one or part two. I think we need some 

11 more -- I don't think we have as good detailed 

12 documentation for Nevada Test Site in the 

13 context of this 250 day issue as we do for Met 

14 Lab and --

15 DR. MAURO: So it's factual 

16 information. I just want to make sure I got 

17 this right. Factual information, for example, 

18 of the list of events that are identified, 

19 obviously, and the degree to which -- how much 

20 information do we have regarding those events 

21 that represent a resource to make a judgment 

22 whether or not it is adequate. We wouldn't 
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1 make this judgment, whether or not this, we 

2 have this situation where there is adequate 

3 information to reconstruct a person's dose and 

4 place a bound on the event. So what we are 

5 really summarizing is factual information that 

6 is available on the record. We are compiling 

7 it in a way that is crosscutting to all the 

8 matters that we are concerned with as it 

9 applies to 250 workdays. So it is almost like 

10 a repackaging of the information in a 

11 different way. 

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: I think we have the 

13 information we just need to get it.

14 DR. MAURO: Repackaged, so in a --

15 DR. MAKHIJANI: It's just a summary 

16 of what we know and what we don't know from 

17 the reports we've already done.

18 DR. MAURO: Within the context of 

19 the 250 workdays.

20 MEMBER GRIFFON: As it is relevant 

21 in making the 250 day decision, yes.

22 DR. MAURO: Okay.
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1 MEMBER GRIFFON: I think for the 

2 Nevada Test Site, you keep talking about 

3 Baneberry but there are other events before 

4 that. And then what might be relevant is each 

5 one of these incidents we know a) there is a 

6 good log of all personnel that were in the 

7 area and b) we know that they all got in vivo 

8 rate, you know. But that not might be true 

9 for all the incidents.

10 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: The population 

11 was closed.

12 MEMBER GRIFFON: Right, right.

13 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: We will have to 

14 address that we are thinking about this.

15 MEMBER GRIFFON: Right. 

16 DR. MAKHIJANI: We've certainly done 

17 enough work on these three sites that this 

18 should be able to give you the ability to pull 

19 it all together for a summary.

20 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Right.

21 DR. MAURO: It is re-crafting it 

22 out there in a way that is more useful to 
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1 folks. 

2 MR. KATZ: I'm just wondering, Jim, 

3 whether it might be helpful when they get to 

4 addressing the issue of what information is 

5 available for reconstructability of these 

6 doses for example, with Bainbridge and so on, 

7 if we want them to be in some sort of 

8 communication with DCAS since there is not 

9 going to be -- you don't have a lot of time 

10 for iterative process, but if DCAS folks view 

11 things differently in terms of whether all 

12 those records are there to reconstruct, for 

13 example Bainbridge, if they view that 

14 differently than SC&A you don't want to have 

15 an iterative process of getting to the end of 

16 that question, right?

17 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Right, yes.

18 MR. KATZ: So do you want some 

19 consultative process from SC&A?

20 DR. MAURO: We don't there to be 

21 any disagreements on the factual information. 

22 It is essential that, when we bring that from 
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1 there --

2 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Some of the 

3 factual may be so detailed or so you just 

4 can't get to it right now. I think -- so we 

5 shouldn't spend a lot of time.

6 MEMBER GRIFFON: Right. 

7 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Are we going to 

8 be able to reconstruct from this -- I mean 

9 have some technical consultation start and 

10 then if we get stuck we are going to have to, 

11 we deal with it with the Work Group and it may 

12 be that with Nevada Test Site we are not going 

13 to -- I'm not sure August is feasible. It may 

14 be or may not be. Like these other two sites, 

15 I don't think there is any more factual 

16 development needed at these other two sites.

17 DR. MAKHIJANI: No.

18 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: It's not a 

19 question -- except Jim may need to refresh on 

20 the particularly on both of them.

21 DR. MAKHIJANI: I need a little 

22 guidance. We are doing these summaries of 
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1 existing reports. Some of these reports 

2 haven't gotten out for DOE review and so on. 

3 Now we are going to summarize them. Can we 

4 put them on the O: drive? Do we need to send 

5 them for DOE review? How can we have a 

6 technical call and NIOSH can't see it? 

7 MS. HOWELL: Why would NIOSH not be 

8 able to see it?

9 DR. NETON: I think we should be 

10 able to see it.

11 MS. HOWELL: Because it is at DOE?

12 DR. NETON: No, no. We are all 

13 government employees.

14 MS. HOWELL: Yes.

15 DR. MAKHIJANI: Just a process 

16 point, if something is at DOE review can NIOSH 

17 see it while it is at DOE review or do we 

18 wait?

19 MS. HOWELL: That's a question --

20 DR. NETON: It just can't be 

21 circulated external to the Working Group 

22 that's all.
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1 MEMBER GRIFFON: You can share it 

2 on the O: drive or whatever.

3 DR. MAKHIJANI: Something that's in 

4 DOE review can still be shared with the 

5 Working Group?

6 MS. HOWELL: DOE not PA.

7 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes, not PA.

8 DR. NETON: We routinely send these 

9 reports to the Board while DOE review is being 

10 conducted as long as it is held internally. 

11 That's not a problem.

12 DR. MAURO: When we think, when we 

13 have compiled, I've been working real close 

14 with Joe on this. When we assembled from 

15 whatever sources there are, whether it is 

16 interviews, data capture and we write a report 

17 where we have collective, disparate sources, 

18 factual information put into one place, it has 

19 to go to DOE before it goes to NIOSH or 

20 anybody else. It has to go to DOE for 

21 clearance. However, if we prepare a report 

22 from material that's already been cleared and 
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1 published and on the website --

2 DR. NETON: That's not what I was 

3 talking about.

4 DR. MAURO: Okay, good. And I 

5 would say right now my instincts tell me 

6 whatever we prepare is going to result from 

7 materials already cleared and already in the 

8 public domain, it is just re-crafting it. So 

9 there is no DOE --

10 DR. MAKHIJANI: I just wanted us to 

11 be clear on that.

12 DR. NETON: For the record, that's 

13 what I was talking about.

14 DR. MAURO: I'm sorry.

15 DR. MAKHIJANI: If there are several 

16 steps then the time table is less feasible and 

17 then we can just stick it on the O: drive and 

18 then Jim and Sam, and everybody can see it. 

19 MEMBER ROESSLER: Jim, are you 

20 thinking of a teleconference Work Group 

21 meeting before August? Then should we pick a 

22 date?
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1 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: No, we will pick 

2 date next week in Buffalo. Plus, my calendar 

3 is out in my car. 

4 MEMBER ROESSLER: Okay. 

5 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Good. Anything 

6 else? If not, we can adjourn.

7 DR. MAKHIJANI: Broadly, you'll 

8 schedule for July, right?

9 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: There may be, 

10 there's a possibility we may try to do 

11 something -- a short conference call in June 

12 of the Work Group to talk about the guidance 

13 document. But in terms of the SC&A report and 

14 the application, that's July. So no vacations 

15 this summer. 

16 MS. HOWELL: So the meeting 

17 regarding Dow in July would also be 

18 teleconference or are we having two separate 

19 meetings or one meeting?

20 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I don't know yet. 

21 Most likely it will be a teleconference. I'm 

22 not sure what they are going to find when they 
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1 open that box. 

2 MS. HOWELL: That's fine.

3 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I'm skeptical 

4 that they'll share it. If there is 

5 information that may be useful there that they 

6 can get through declassified and that process 

7 will take some time, in which case I'm not 

8 sure we will be able to do it in July. If 

9 they determine there's nothing there, then it 

10 maybe. Okay.

11 MR. KATZ: Thank you, everybody.

12 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Thank you 

13 everybody.

14 (Whereupon, the above-entitled 

15 matter went off the record at 2:33 p.m.)

16 

17 

18 

19 

20 

21 

22 
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