STEVEN RAY GREEN AND ASSOCIATES 

NATIONALLY CERTIFIED COURT REPORTING 

404/733-6070 

THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES 

PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE 

CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION 

NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH 

convenes the 

WORKING GROUP MEETING 

ADVISORY BOARD ON 

 

RADIATION AND WORKER HEALTH 

BLOCKSON CHEMICAL

 

The verbatim transcript of the Working 

Group Meeting of the Advisory Board on Radiation and 

Worker Health held in Cincinnati, Ohio, on 

June 5, 2008. 
2

C O N T E N T S

June 5, 2008 

WELCOME AND OPENING COMMENTS 6 

DR. CHRISTINE BRANCHE, NIOSH 

INTRODUCTION BY CHAIR 10 

MS. WANDA MUNN 

RADON ISSUES 12 

ACTION ITEMS 83 

WORK GROUP’S GOAL 87 

SUFFICIENCY OF DATA 113 

THE PATH FORWARD 153 

COURT REPORTER’S CERTIFICATE 171 
3

TRANSCRIPT LEGEND

The following transcript contains quoted material. Such 

material is reproduced as read or spoken. 

In the following transcript: a dash (--) indicates 

an unintentional or purposeful interruption of a 

sentence. An ellipsis (. . .) indicates halting speech 

or an unfinished sentence in dialogue or omission(s) of 

word(s) when reading written material. 

-- (sic) denotes an incorrect usage or pronunciation 

of a word which is transcribed in its original form as 

reported. 

-- (phonetically) indicates a phonetic spelling of 

the word if no confirmation of the correct spelling is 

available. 

-- "uh-huh" represents an affirmative response, and 

"uh-uh" represents a negative response. 

 -- "*" denotes a spelling based on phonetics, 

without reference available. 

-- “^”/(inaudible)/ (unintelligible) signifies 

speaker failure, usually failure to use a microphone. 
4

 P A R T I C I P A N T S 

(By Group, in Alphabetical Order) 

DESIGNATED FEDERAL OFFICIAL

BRANCHE, Christine, Ph.D. 

Principal Associate Director 

National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health 

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 

Washington, DC 

 

1 

BOARD MEMBERS

2 

GIBSON, Michael H. 

President 

Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical, and Energy Union 

Local 5-4200 

Miamisburg, Ohio 

3 MELIUS, James Malcom, M.D., Ph.D. 

4 Director 

5 New York State Laborers' Health and Safety Trust Fund 

6 Albany, New York 

MUNN, Wanda I. 

Senior Nuclear Engineer (Retired) 

Richland, Washington 

ROESSLER, Genevieve S., Ph.D. 

Professor Emeritus 

University of Florida 

Elysian, Minnesota 
5

IDENTIFIED PARTICIPANTS

ADAMS, NANCY, NIOSH 

BURGOS, ZAIDA, NIOSH 

CHMELYNSKI, HARRY, SC&A 

ELLIOTT, LARRY, NIOSH 

GRIFFON, MARK, ABRWH 

HOWELL, EMILY, HHS 

KOTSCH, JEFF, DOL 

MAURO, JOHN, SC&A 

NETON, JIM, NIOSH 

PHILLIPS, CHICK, SC&A 

STANCESCU, DANIEL, OCAS 

TOMES, TOM, NIOSH 
6

JUNE 5, 2008 

P R O C E E D I N G S

1 (9:30 a.m.) 

WELCOME AND OPENING COMMENTS

2 DR. BRANCHE: Ms. Munn, are you ready? 

3 MS. MUNN: I believe I’m ready. I’m 

4 concerned about the lack of two of our crucial 

5 members here. 

6 DR. BRANCHE: Would you like to wait? 

7 MS. MUNN: I think it would be a wise idea 

8 for us to wait for about five minutes. 

9 DR. BRANCHE: We’ll wait a few more minutes. 

10 If you can please mute the line. 

11 (Whereupon, the working group recessed until 

12 9:35 a.m.) 

13 DR. BRANCHE: Good morning and welcome to 

14 the Blockson work group. I am Dr. Christine 

15 Branche, and I have the pleasure of being your 

16 Designated Federal Official this morning. If 

17 the Board members who are in the room could 

18 please announce their names, I’d appreciate 

19 it. 

20 MS. MUNN: Wanda Munn, Chair of the working 

21 group, member of the Board. 

22 MR. GIBSON: Mike Gibson. 

23 DR. ROESSLER: Gen Roessler, working group 
7

1 and member of the Board. 

2 DR. MELIUS: Jim Melius. 

3 MR. GRIFFON: Mark Griffon, member of the 

4 Board, not member of the working group. 

5 DR. BRANCHE: Are there any other Board 

6 members who are participating by phone? 

7 (no response) 

8 DR. BRANCHE: We do not have a quorum so we 

9 can move forward. 

10 Would the NIOSH staff who are in the 

11 room please announce your names and whether or 

12 not you have a conflict with Blockson. 

13 MR. ELLIOTT: Larry Elliott, Office of 

14 Compensation Analysis and Support, NIOSH, and 

15 I have no conflict with this site. 

16 MR. TOMES: Tom Tomes, I am with NIOSH also, 

17 and I have no conflict with Blockson. 

18 DR. STANCESCU: Daniel Stancescu, I also 

19 work in OCAS. I don’t have any conflict with 

20 Blockson. 

21 DR. NETON: Jim Neton, OCAS, no conflict. 

22 DR. BRANCHE: Are there any NIOSH staff 

23 participating by phone? And if so, will you 

24 please announce your names and say if you have 

25 a conflict with Blockson? 
8

1 MS. ADAMS (by Telephone): Nancy Adams, no 

2 conflict. 

3 MS. BURGOS (by Telephone): Zaida Burgos, no 

4 conflict. 

5 DR. BRANCHE: ORAU staff who are in the room 

6 would you please announce your names? 

7 (no response) 

8 DR. BRANCHE: None. 

9 ORAU staff, by phone, would you please 

10 announce your names and say if you have a 

11 conflict with Blockson? 

12 (no response) 

13 DR. BRANCHE: SC&A staff who are in the room 

14 could you please announce your names and say 

15 if you have a conflict with Blockson? 

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

17 MR. PHILLIPS: Chick Phillips, SC&A, no 

18 conflict. 

19 DR. BRANCHE: SC&A staff who are 

20 participating by phone, would you please 

21 announce your names and say if you have a 

22 conflict? 

23 DR. CHMELYNSKI (by Telephone): Harry 

24 Chmelynski, no conflict. 

25 DR. BRANCHE: Other federal agency staff in 
9

1 the room or by phone, would you please 

2 announce your names? 

3 MS. HOWELL: Emily Howell, HHS, no conflict. 

4 MR. KOTSCH (by Telephone): Jeff Kotsch, 

5 Department of Labor. 

6 DR. BRANCHE: Any petitioners or their 

7 representatives who would like to announce 

8 their names please? 

9 (no response) 

10 DR. BRANCHE: Workers or their 

11 representatives who are participating who 

12 would like to announce their names please? 

13 (no response) 

14 DR. BRANCHE: Members of Congress or their 

15 representatives who are participating by phone 

16 please? 

17 (no response) 

18 DR. BRANCHE: Are there any others who would 

19 like to mention their names? 

20 (no response) 

21 DR. BRANCHE: Before we get started I would 

22 simply ask that those of you who are 

23 participating by phone if you would please 

24 mute your phones it will add tremendously to 

25 the quality of the phone participation so that 
10

1 everyone who is on the phone can hear. If you 

2 do not have a mute button, then please dial 

3 star six to mute your phones, and then use 

4 that same star six to unmute your line. If 

5 those of you who are in the room would please 

6 mute your phones, that would also enhance the 

7 quality of our court reporter. 

8 And Ms. Munn, it’s all yours. 

9 INTRODUCTION BY CHAIR

10 MS. MUNN: Thank you. 

11 For those of you in the room we are 

12 planning to work right through to the end of 

13 wherever we get to today. We hope to be able 

14 to bring this to resolution. We have two 

15 items and only two items before us. If you 

16 are not aware of the fact that we plan a 

17 working lunch, please be aware of the fact 

18 that’s the case. 

19 And in front of you, you should find a 

20 menu for your use. Please put your name, 

21 indicate your choice and send it to the head 

22 of the table to Dr. Branche here. They’ll 

23 pick those up in about an hour, and we will be 

24 served lunch here at 12:00 o’clock. We don’t 

25 intend to take much of a break other than 
11

1 that. 

2 As a bit of background the original 

3 report from our technical contractor had seven 

4 findings on it. This work group worked 

5 through those findings one at a time and 

6 reached the point where either the suggestions 

7 had been adopted or we had agreement from the 

8 contractor that the position that had been 

9 taken by the agency was acceptable. When that 

10 was reported at our Board meeting, there were 

11 two objections. One that the radon data had 

12 some outstanding questions, and two, that the 

13 data themselves were inadequate. We have 

14 convened this meeting for the express purpose 

15 of addressing those two items and those items 

16 only. If there are any other items that are 

17 outstanding or that we need to address, would 

18 someone please bring that to my attention 

19 right now? 

20 (no response) 

21 MS. MUNN: Otherwise, we are going to 

22 respond to the questions that were asked at 

23 the Board meeting. Both Dr. Melius and Mark 

24 Griffon have been good enough to provide us 

25 with their written questions so that we know 
12

1 precisely what their concerns are. Because 

2 the most complex one from an overview 

3 standpoint appears to be the radon issues 

4 because there are more of them involved, it 

5 would be wise for us to begin with that. 

6 RADON ISSUES

7 I understand our contractor has been 

8 working since our last meeting in an attempt 

9 to try to respond to the specific questions 

10 that Mark brought for us. Am I correct? 

11 DR. MAURO: Yes. 

12 MS. MUNN: Are you, John and Chick, are you 

13 ready to talk about that now? Shall we 

14 address those, first thing? 

15 And before we do, Mark, that’s your 

16 understanding. We’re all on the same page? 

17 MR. GRIFFON: Those are my questions. I’m 

18 not sure if they’re -- SC&A did look at these 

19 issues. I’m not sure if these questions might 

20 be better directed to NIOSH. 

21 MS. MUNN: Do you want to review your 

22 question specifically before we start? Would 

23 that be appropriate? 

24 MR. GRIFFON: No, that’s fine. I don’t even 

25 have them in front of me so if you have them, 
13

1 you can read them. 

2 MS. MUNN: I think all of us have received 

3 them, have we not? 

4 (affirmative responses) 

5 MS. MUNN: We all do. All right, fine. And 

6 I think if we do not, if your questions are 

7 not addressed by the information that the 

8 contractor is now going to provide, then I’m 

9 assuming that our NIOSH folks also have 

10 information that they can help respond, too, 

11 if that’s meaningful to everybody we’ll pursue 

12 that. 

13 John, would you please? 

14 DR. MAURO: I’d be happy to open it up and 

15 sort of what I say set the table, get 

16 everybody on the same page. And then from 

17 there I believe Chick and Harry Chmelynski, 

18 who’s on the line as our statistician, will be 

19 able to dive more deeply into these issues as 

20 required. 

21 MS. MUNN: Thank you. 

22 DR. MAURO: With regard to radon the 

23 strategy adopted by NIOSH effectively used -- 

24 in order to reconstruct exposures to workers 

25 at Blockson from radon, NIOSH took advantage 
14

1 of data available from facilities in Florida. 

2 There were data at Blockson itself regarding 

3 airborne radon levels and radon progeny were 

4 insufficient to reconstruct doses or exposures 

5 from radon. 

6 So they drew upon the extensive 

7 dataset that was compiled from phosphate 

8 industry in Florida. There’s a great deal of 

9 information on the subject put out by the 

10 Phosphate Institute of Florida. I’m sorry, 

11 Florida Institute. 

12 DR. NETON: Florida Institute, FIPR. 

13 DR. MAURO: Florida Institute, okay, FIPR. 

14 And that data was extracted from the 

15 publication, major publication, from FIPR, and 

16 incorporated and used into an OTIB, 0043, I 

17 believe the number is. And the basis of that 

18 data NIOSH has opted a radon concentration 

19 that they feel is bounding for exposures at 

20 Blockson. And the number is approximately 2.3 

21 picocuries per liter airborne radon. 

22 And that number was selected because 

23 it represented an upper-end value of the 

24 observed levels in the Florida facilities for 

25 locations at Florida facilities other than 
15

1 mines and other facilities in Florida that 

2 really were not applicable to Blockson. We 

3 were asked to look into that and take a look 

4 at the data and to see if in fact we come out 

5 in the same place. 

6 And so what happened is that Chick and 

7 Harry Chmelynski together did a little data 

8 diving so to speak going into the original 

9 reports and records, writing the numbers, 

10 doing some statistical analysis to see if we 

11 come out about in the same place that NIOSH 

12 did. Because in principle the idea of picking 

off let’s say the upper 95th 13 percentile from 

14 relevant data would be at first blush a very 

15 claimant favorable approach. 

16 But there are questions. The data set 

17 that was used, is that applicable to Blockson? 

18 And if so, and if it meets what one would say 

19 a reasonable criteria for the use of surrogate 

20 data and was used appropriately, which, of 

21 course, is a subject of great concern to the 

22 Board, one could argue that, well, we have a 

23 strategy that seems to work. That would be 

24 the way that we look at it. 

25 And so we looked at it from first of 
16

1 all can we duplicate the numbers that NIOSH 

2 generated. Second, do we agree that they used 

3 those numbers correctly and that the numbers 

4 themselves represented the source of the 

5 information, were reasonable as applied to 

6 Blockson. 

7 And with that as sort of setting the 

8 table, I’d like to pass it off to Chick and to 

9 Harry to go into a little more detail on where 

10 we come out with regard to our investigations, 

11 which, by the way, were ongoing right up until 

12 yesterday to get more and more information. 

13 So we’re about to hear some materials 

14 much of which everyone has seen because as 

15 Chick and Harry produced their, what I would 

16 call, let’s call them white papers, we fired 

17 them out. But that work didn’t end. It 

18 continued right up until I guess you got on 

19 the plane. So with that I’d like to pass this 

20 off to Chick. 

21 MS. MUNN: Would you like me to distribute 

22 these? 

23 MR. PHILLIPS: Yes, if you would, and those 

24 were revised on the plane yesterday. And the 

25 information that’s different from what you had 
17

1 in the previous version of this should be 

2 highlighted so that you can go directly to it. 

3 Most of it’s just clarification. I believe 

4 what we tried to do is address the three, I 

5 believe you had four listed, but I think there 

6 were really three basic issues marked that we 

7 had to deal with, what we dealt with on the 

8 radon. 

9 The first one which John was referring 

10 to is the appropriate usage of the radon data 

11 which was in OTIB-0043 extracted from the FIPR 

12 1998 report that John referred to. I think 

13 that may be what we need to address first. 

14 And I believe Harry would be better addressing 

15 that than me, just say what he did and what he 

16 concluded from that. And then we’ll address 

17 the, I will address the other remaining, I 

18 believe, one issue really. There may be two. 

19 So, Harry. 

20 DR. CHMELYNSKI (by Telephone): This is 

21 Harry Chmelynski working with SC&A. I looked 

22 at the values in the Appendix B to the OTIB23 0043 and looked in particular at the ones that 

24 were not grayed out because NIOSH had marked a 

25 lot of entries that were not appropriate. 
18

1 And basically what I did was try to 

2 recreate their analysis first which was to 

3 treat each of the values -- there are about 

4 130 of them or 128 is what I found -- to treat 

5 the values as individual measurements even 

6 though some of the measurements were reported 

7 as means of groups of samples. And when I did 

8 that I essentially arrived at the same 

9 lognormal distribution that NIOSH had derived. 

10 So I didn’t have much concern that the 

11 lognormal distribution was estimated correctly 

12 given their assumptions of each data point 

13 should be considered as an individual value 

14 and all of them given equal weight. 

15 Most of the entries in the appendix 

16 all we know is the value that’s reported. If 

17 it’s a mean, they don’t tell you usually a 

18 whole lot more about what the other statistics 

19 were. But there is one table, which was Table 

20 B-3, which covered quite a few in terms of 

21 sample sizes, quite a lot of the numbers that 

22 are in the Appendix B. 

23 And this table did report not only the 

24 sample mean but where they collected 

25 measurements, but also the sample variance and 
19

1 the number of measurements and the standard 

2 deviation, and there’s a bunch of other 

3 statistics. So this gave me a sort of a shoe 

4 horn into looking at what the data that 

5 underlied (sic) all these mean values would 

6 look like. 

7 And even though only Table B-3 

8 provided the variances, what we tried to do 

9 was to recreate what the sample variance for 

10 all the Appendix B data would be if indeed we 

11 had the individual measurements that were 

12 simply reported as means in that appendix. 

13 And in order to do that you need to have some 

14 information on the variances. When you only 

15 use the mean, you don’t consider the 

16 variability around the mean, and in some cases 

17 this variability is quite large. And by 

18 leaving that variability out you end up with a 

19 biased low estimate perhaps of what the actual 

20 doses were. 

21 So we reconstructed the variances for 

22 each of the entries in Table B-3 and added up 

23 the sum of squares treating the remaining 

24 entries in Appendix B still as individual 

25 values and came up with a variance and a mean 
20

1 for the entire Appendix B data. What you 

2 would call a weighted mean analysis and 

3 samples in the Appendix B-3 Table anyway had 

4 been expanded. 

5 When I did that I came up with a 

6 different lognormal distribution. And I 

computed the 95th 7 percentile of that 

8 distribution, and it ended up being quite a 

9 bit higher than the one that was calculated 

10 using just the unweighted individual mean 

11 values. That was up near about seven 

12 picocuries per liter. 

13 But that was an example of one thing 

14 you can do with the tables that are presented 

15 there. And even that was an incomplete 

16 attempt because only Table B-3 tells you 

17 anything about the variances. 

18 And I guess that’s it. If anybody has 

19 any questions, I could go further into the 

20 calculations, but they’re written up in a 

21 document I sent to Mark. 

22 MS. MUNN: Is that quite acceptable? Anyone 

23 have any concerns with Harry’s description of 

24 that particular point? 

25 MR. GRIFFON: They’re not concerns. I just 
21

1 think NIOSH needs to respond. 

2 DR. NETON: I’d like to say a few words -- 

3 MS. MUNN: Please. 

4 DR. NETON: -- if it’s appropriate at this 

5 point. 

6 MS. MUNN: It is. 

7 DR. NETON: I don’t have anything in 

8 writing. There’s been so many documents going 

9 around here it’s just been difficult to keep 

10 up with it. So I apologize for just verbally 

11 discussing this right now. 

12 But we looked at the analysis that 

13 SC&A did and at face value, Dr. Daniel 

14 Stancescu, who’s our statistician on our 

15 staff, looked through it for me. And 

16 computationally we agree with it. The 

17 calculation is done correctly. There’s no 

18 errors in there or anything like that. 

19 But where we do feel there’s a little 

20 bit of a disconnect is in the application, in 

21 looking at the application of what we’re 

22 trying to establish here. If we were trying 

to determine what the highest 95th 23 percentile 

24 sample ever taken at the phosphate plant was, 

25 then the calculation done by SC&A is correct. 
22

1 What we’re really trying to establish 

though is what the 95th 2 percentile of the work, 

95th 3 percentile work station is. Because if 

4 you think about it, we use these data to 

5 establish chronic exposures over the entire 

6 year. We establish a single value to assign 

7 to that worker for an entire year. And we 

8 believe that the mean values of the work 

9 locations are actually more representative, 

the 95th 10 percentile of the work location 

11 itself, not the variability of the individual 

12 data. 

13 In fact, it’s somewhat flawed in the 

sense that the 95th 14 percentile could be 

15 anything you want depending on the number of 

16 samples that a facility arbitrarily chose to 

17 take at a given location. You could weight 

18 the values extremely high because maybe you’re 

19 concerned about a station that’s high. You’ll 

20 take ten times more samples at that location. 

21 Now when you rank these, you’re going to get 

an artificially high 95th 22 percentile because of 

23 that construct. 

24 And a second point I’d like to make is 

25 that there are many more mean values included 
23

1 here. If you look at the data, Table B-4 also 

2 has the variability data associated with it. 

3 One could use a similar analysis. But also, 

4 many of the other values are six month terrace 

5 cut measurements. 

6 And since they are integrated six7 month values which are in a sense weighted 

8 means in themselves. There are picocurie per 

9 liter days divided by days exposed, and you 

10 get picocuries per liter. That’s how those 

11 work. So in a sense almost all of these data 

12 represent integrated mean values at the 

13 various work locations. 

14 So I think one needs to think about 

15 this maybe a little more, but that’s at least 

16 our current position that we believe that the 

95th 17 percentile work location is more 

18 appropriately representative of the exposure 

than the 95th 19 percentile of the highest sample 

20 ever taken at the facility. 

21 DR. MELIUS: But, Jim, and this comes up in 

22 the uranium issue also, we’re supposed to be 

23 doing individual dose reconstruction, correct? 

24 DR. NETON: True. 

25 DR. MELIUS: So why are we not interested in 
24

1 someone was at the high exposure work station? 

2 DR. NETON: We are. That’s what I’m saying. 

3 DR. MELIUS: Yeah, but why are we ignoring 

4 the, why are we using an average -- 

5 DR. NETON: Because he was not -- 

6 DR. MELIUS: -- of the work stations as the 

7 -- 

8 DR. NETON: -- because the highest exposure 

9 didn’t exist the entire 200 workdays in the 

10 year. That’s why. The sample, the mean value 

11 of all the samples times the end, the days 

12 that he worked, is actually his integrated 

13 exposure at that work station. That’s why 

14 we’re saying that. It would be inappropriate 

15 to take one sample that was high for one day 

16 and assume he breathed that sample at that 

17 work location for all 200 days of the work 

18 year. 

19 MR. GRIFFON: Let me step back one further 

20 though. Do you have this raw data or do you 

21 just have the means from these final reports 

22 and that’s why you’re kind of stuck with using 

23 that anyway? I mean, do you have the raw 

24 data? 

25 DR. NETON: No, we do not have the raw data. 
25

1 Daniel has actually gone back, Dr. Stancescu 

2 has gone back and actually reconstructed the 

3 data points based on all the nice statistical 

4 summaries that they provided us. And we’ve 

5 gone back and remodeled it and essentially got 

6 exactly the same number SC&A did. So we’re 

7 comfortable with the SC&A analysis if we had 

8 the real data. So it’s a valid -- 

9 MR. GRIFFON: That one table doesn’t have 

10 statistics to be able to do that, does it? Or 

11 B-4 I think it is. 

12 DR. NETON: B-4 does have statistics. In 

13 fact, if you include -- it’s in the FIPR, 

14 Florida Institute of Phosphate Research 

15 report; it wasn’t included in the NIOSH 

16 report. If you go back and actually include 

17 the variability associated with Table B-4, you 

18 even get a somewhat, slightly higher value 

19 than what SC&A calculated. 

20 But again, I think if we think about 

21 what we’re really doing, we’re establishing 

the workers’ exposure at the 95th 22 percentile 

23 work location, not the workers’ exposure to 

the highest sample ever taken or the 95th 24 

25 percentile sample ever taken at the facility. 
26

1 I think that’s appropriate. But that’s our 

2 position. 

3 DR. MAURO: Yeah, but we’ve been in this 

4 situation before, and I think as a ground rule 

5 that I think we all agree to is that when we 

6 have a circumstance where we have a range of 

7 values, and individual samples taken at 

8 different locations at different times at a 

9 facility. And let’s say we know -- and it has 

10 a very broad distribution, these are actual 

11 spot samples, could vary over orders of 

12 magnitude. 

13 You say to yourself, but what do we do 

14 when we have that data now. One would argue 

15 that, well, if we know the workers that worked 

16 in that facility, spent a little time here, a 

17 little time there, a little time there; and 

18 therefore, no one worker spent all this time 

19 at one location where we saw the highest value 

20 over some short period of time. I agree with 

21 that a hundred percent. I mean, that’s not 

22 plausible; it’s not reality. 

23 But on the other hand but we do agree 

24 that in a given facility there may be 

25 locations where the levels are relatively high 
27

1 on the distribution, chronically, and there 

2 might have been job categories where the 

3 person’s job category would place him at that 

4 location for relatively long periods of time. 

5 So on the former case where the person 

6 is in a lot of different places, under those 

circumstances you would use the upper 95th 7 

8 percentile on the mean, which is basically 

9 what you ^. And I would agree with that 

10 because there’s good reason to believe that 

11 the kinds of exposures that people would get 

12 over a long period of time, over a year, two 

13 years or three years, reflect an integration 

14 of the activity in the building. 

15 But it was plausible that a person 

16 might have had a job where it placed him where 

17 he was at the high end, then all of a sudden 

18 things get, well, you know, maybe the upper 

95th 19 percentile of the mean really is not the 

20 best number unless we know better. And I 

21 guess that’s where we are right now. 

22 I think in principle we agree in 

23 philosophy. The question is in this 

24 particular application do we work off the 

upper 95th 25 percentile mean or do we say, well, 
28

1 you know, there might have been locations or 

2 job categories where a person may have been 

3 chronically exposed to some of the higher end 

4 values that were observed. 

5 DR. NETON: Which higher end values? The 

6 ones that we have the means for? 

7 DR. MAURO: Well, I mean, the distribution -

8 - in other words -- 

9 DR. NETON: If the person was at that 

10 location for the entire year, the mean has a 

11 number of workdays. Would you disagree with a 

12 representative of this -- 

13 DR. MAURO: For that location. 

14 DR. NETON: That’s equal to his picocurie 

15 per liter days’ exposure. 

16 DR. MAURO: So what I’m hearing is that the 

17 data and our understanding of the practice 

18 that took place there was that at one location 

19 you may have a large exposure. You have high20 end locations. 

21 DR. NETON: We do, and I can speak to that. 

22 DR. MAURO: At those high-end locations 

23 where, say, that would be, let’s say, our 

24 critical person. And we don’t know who those 

25 people are perhaps, but let’s assume then if 
29

1 we don’t know who those people are, we’ll give 

2 the benefit of the doubt and assign that 

3 category where that high-end location is. 

4 DR. NETON: Yes, exactly, that’s what we’ve 

5 done. 

6 DR. MAURO: And it would be the mean for 

7 that high-end location, and you’re saying 

8 that’s what was done. 

9 DR. NETON: That’s what we’ve done. 

10 Let me point out one more thing before 

11 we go further. If you look in the Florida 

12 Institute for Phosphate Research report -- and 

13 I assume people don’t have it. It’s a 300 

14 page document, but I happen to have it in 

15 front of me -- on page 20 there’s a sentence 

16 in here that I think is important. It says, 

17 “One company supplied radon measurements taken 

18 from 1989 through 1996.” 

19 Now if you look in the data, that’s 

20 clearly the data that are in Tables B-3 and B21 4 that we have. B-3 goes through like ’92 or 

22 ’86, and then the other one goes, so those two 

23 tables are from one company. “The locations 

24 that exceeded four picocuries per liter are 

25 listed in Table 7, although the levels were 
30

1 extremely variable. All of these locations 

2 were low or negligible occupancy areas.” 

3 Now the thing I’d like to emphasize 

4 here is all of the locations that exceeded 

5 four picocuries per liter are listed in Table 

6 7. Table 7 lists the locations that are in 

7 Table B-3. So in other words it seems clear 

8 to me that they have extracted and only 

9 reported what’s in Table B-3 are the high-end 

10 values that they found. 

11 In fact, the means aren’t exceeding 

12 four picocuries per liter in most cases, it’s 

13 the maximum value. If you look on that column 

14 in Table B-3, the maximum value exceeded ^ 

15 picocuries per liter. So it appears what we 

16 have here are the extracted high-end samples. 

17 There were many more sampling locations that 

18 weren’t reported. They just merely reported 

19 the high end ones. So that kind of also helps 

20 to, I think, emphasize that we were bounding 

21 these high end, because those were clearly the 

22 highest values contributing to the high-end 

23 bounds. 

24 DR. ROESSLER: In looking at all these 

25 numbers and talking about taking the very high 
31

1 values and so on, I wanted to evaluate just 

2 what is the impact of these numbers. And 

3 we’re used to thinking in terms of dose. And 

4 according to my calculations if we take the 

5 7.7 -- which was in the report -- picocuries 

6 per liter, and we take that into working level 

7 months per year, which is what we think of in 

8 terms of occupational limits and doses, I come 

9 out with that even using all of this, top 

10 numbers and everything else, everything being 

11 very, very claimant friendly, it’s still below 

12 the occupational limit for a year. And I 

13 think we need to think about that. It’s even 

14 with all this conservatism, it’s still below 

15 the occupational limit. 

16 DR. NETON: It’s well below that. 

17 DR. ROESSLER: Well below it. So I think we 

18 need to keep this perspective in mind. We 

19 still need to talk about what we’re talking 

20 about, but think in terms of the very, well, 

21 think in terms of comparing it to the 

22 occupational limit. 

23 DR. NETON: Well, you raise a good point, 

24 Gen. This contribution of the dose, first of 

25 all, is only going to be relevant at these 
32

1 levels for lung cancers. Radon causes lung 

2 cancer. It’s well established. It does 

3 migrate throughout the body, and there’s a 

4 very small percentage that would be 

5 contributed to the other organs, but it’s a 

6 lung cancer issue. 

7 If you look at the doses that we are 

8 assigning to the workers in the drumming 

9 operation in Building B55, in Building 55, the 

10 doses are quite large from the inhalation of 

11 all the uranium and the thorium and all those 

12 other products. So the fact that whether 

13 we’re talking two picocuries per liter or 

14 seven picocuries per liter is a very small 

15 component of the overall internal dose we’re 

16 assigning. 

17 That doesn’t mean we don’t need to 

18 nail this down, but I’m just saying that it is 

19 a very small component of the overall dose 

20 assigned to the workers. 

21 MS. MUNN: And ultimately, that really and 

22 truly is what we need to be concerned with as 

23 we look at the individual worker. How 

24 significant is the dose that this particular 

25 item contributes. 
33

1 DR. NETON: And the other issue is -- 

2 MR. GRIFFON: We need to look at whether we 

3 can reconstruct dose. ^ disease cohort ^. 

4 DR. NETON: No, I know. 

5 MR. GRIFFON: I understand ^. 

6 DR. NETON: Yeah, I was not raising this 

7 other than just to point out, put in 

8 perspective what we’re looking at. 

9 DR. MELIUS: We’ve discussed this before. 

10 DR. NETON: The other thing to consider is 

11 that these radon levels are considered to be 

12 uniformly distributed throughout the plant. 

13 And, in fact, we are reconstructing doses in 

14 Building 55, the drumming station, giving a 

15 fairly large exposure at the drumming station. 

16 It’s unlikely that the highest radon 

level that occurred in the 95th 17 percentile 

18 existed at the drumming station, Building 55, 

19 but we are assigning that as such because we 

20 can’t forget, you know, where it may have 

21 concentrated. So that’s another issue I think 

22 that we kind of give them double dose here 

23 almost. These just all sort of add to the 

24 claimant favorability, I think, of this entire 

25 calculation. 
34

1 MR. PHILLIPS: Harry, did you have any 

2 comment on that? 

3 DR. CHMELYNSKI (by Telephone): Well, there 

4 was the one issue that was raised way back at 

5 the beginning that perhaps they measured more 

6 often in the high ^. I don’t see that as 

7 being true since Table B-3, for example, has 

8 the highest numbers in it than the gypsum 

9 stack is the high one, and they only made 24 

10 measurements there which happens to be the 

11 smallest number they made at any of the 

12 locations. 

13 DR. NETON: I wasn’t suggesting that it was 

14 true in this case. What I’m suggesting is 

15 that if one takes any dataset at face value 

16 and that were the case, the type of analysis 

17 that was done by SC&A would be biased high if 

18 someone did that. 

19 I mean, if you’re looking for the 

20 highest sample taken, your analysis is 

21 absolutely correct. But if you’re looking for 

22 the highest work location then it’s subject to 

23 some bias depending on how they chose to do 

24 their sampling at the various locations. 

25 DR. CHMELYNSKI (by Telephone): And that is 
35

1 a relatively large issue here. Even when I 

2 went back to the FIPR study and tried to find 

3 out how this data was collected, you find out 

4 that, well, they just took a table and put it 

5 back in the appendix. And that one sentence 

6 that you quoted is about all they say about 

7 it. 

8 DR. NETON: Which to me indicates -- 

9 DR. CHMELYNSKI (by Telephone): This whole 

10 table is very hard to trace. 

11 DR. NETON: Well, it’s the highest values of 

12 the ones that were provided by this company is 

13 the way I read that. 

14 DR. CHMELYNSKI (by Telephone): Well, I 

15 don’t know if that’s what it is or not. It’s 

16 hard to say what it is. 

17 DR. NETON: Well, that’s the way I read it. 

18 It says there are only four, the only sites 

19 that exceeded four picocuries per liter of all 

20 the data supplied are included in the table. 

21 That seems pretty clear to me. 

22 DR. CHMELYNSKI (by Telephone): Well, that’s 

23 possible. But again, whether they were 

24 measuring work locations even here, I’m not 

25 sure what they were measuring. 
36

1 MR. GRIFFON: Is this data from one 

2 facility? I -- 

3 DR. NETON: Yes. Well, Tables B-3 and B-4 

4 are from one facility. There are other 

5 facilities represented. And, in fact, I did 

6 point out the other values are six-month 

7 integrated cup measurements. So those are 

8 also weighted samples by nature. 

9 I think I guess with this particular 

10 issue it seems to me that this is, we might 

11 have some disagreement on how to handle the 

12 data, but I don’t hear anyone at this 

13 particular issue is saying that the data can’t 

14 be used right now. 

15 I mean, that might come up later, but 

16 right now this is the difference between an 

17 analytical computation which at this point 

18 would not appear to me to be an SEC issue. I 

19 mean, further discussions may arise, but on 

20 this particular issue I don’t view this as a 

21 somewhat relevant to the ability to 

22 reconstruct dose. 

23 MR. GRIFFON: I mean, I’m just not sure, I 

24 mean, right now you’re sticking with the TIB25 0043 as it stands. 
37

1 DR. NETON: Right now I’d say that we -- 

2 MR. GRIFFON: I haven’t seen -- I just got 

3 the e-mail from SC&A with how they unfolded 

4 this. My question, which I brought into this, 

5 was do we have the raw data to see -- but 

6 you’re saying it’s an issue anyway. I know. 

7 DR. NETON: I’m confident if we had the raw 

8 data we would get very close to what SC&A -- 

9 MR. GRIFFON: I didn’t realize you had the 

10 information for that other table because I 

11 thought well how are you handling this other 

12 table -- 

13 DR. NETON: We can do that. It can be done. 

14 MR. GRIFFON: -- so I didn’t look at all the 

15 source documents. 

16 DR. NETON: But Daniel has gone through and 

17 actually statistically picked data points 

18 based on all of the information provided. 

19 There’s kurtosis information, all kinds of 

20 stuff, so we have a very good feel for what 

21 the data distribution looked like. And then 

22 he picked new values and generated 

23 distribution and got extremely close, not 

24 surprisingly, to what SC&A did using the 

25 squares of the means without using the 
38

1 variances. And I’m confident that that 

2 analysis would be the same if we had the raw 

3 data, or very close. 

4 MR. GRIFFON: And from what I understand the 

5 only data excluded -- because I looked at the 

6 numbers for the 2.3 ^ that number from the 

7 data in your report. But I think that the 

8 only data that was excluded is the tunnel 

9 data. 

10 DR. NETON: Uh-huh. 

11 MR. GRIFFON: And I don’t disagree with 

12 that, but there was no other data that was not 

13 included in the distribution analysis report? 

14 DR. NETON: Correct. 

15 DR. MAURO: In effect what we have here is 

16 we’re really talking about the Florida data we 

17 have here and which is okay. We’re sort of 

18 compartmentalizing our discussion. So what 

19 I’m hearing is if we were doing a dose 

20 reconstruction for Florida, what I’m hearing 

21 is that there’s a philosophy here. There are 

22 different buildings, different locations, 

23 different job categories at that period of 

24 time where we have airborne radon measurements 

25 or radon progeny measurements taken over 
39

1 varying time periods. 

2 Sometimes they’re relatively short 

3 periods in these individual measurements, and 

4 sometimes taken over longer periods of time. 

5 Some of the numbers represent the mean of a 

6 number of measurements taken at that location, 

7 some are individual values. 

8 DR. NETON: None of them are individual 

9 snapshots, no ^ samples. They’re all cups. 

10 DR. MAURO: And in the end I think we’d all 

11 agree that our objective is to say that given 

12 the array of data characterizing 

13 concentrations of radon at the various 

14 locations in buildings at one or more 

15 facilities in Florida, your argument is that 

16 2.3 picocuries per liter would probably place 

17 a bound on what the chronic exposure of any 

18 given year that any worker at that facility 

19 might have experienced. 

20 And because even though there may be a 

21 great deal of variability, that variability 

22 changes over time. So that over a long time 

23 period it’s going to, the average is going to 

24 come down to something less than 2.33. 

25 Certainly over any one day or maybe an hour in 
40

1 a given location it could be a hundred times 

2 higher. And since over time it flattens out, 

3 and if that in fact is the case, I think that 

4 what you’ve just described is the right way to 

5 come at and place a plausible upper bound on 

6 what people who worked in Florida might have 

7 experienced. 

8 Now, I have to say that in reading the 

9 material it’s -- and because I haven’t read as 

10 closely as others though -- but that’s an 

11 important story to tell. That is, in the end 

12 you basically, 2.3, my reaction to that is 

13 surprise. Two point three is kind of low. My 

14 house, my basement is 2.3. 

15 DR. NETON: Your basement’s a lot more 

16 enclosed than these chemical factories. 

17 DR. MAURO: These were open and closed. 

18 DR. NETON: We need to talk about that. 

19 That’s another issue. 

20 DR. MAURO: I’d like to say I think that in 

21 principle, the concept and the philosophical 

22 approach to the problem I completely agree 

23 with. And with that story, the way you’ve 

24 presented it, this is what you tried to do, 

25 and if that’s in fact what was done, I mean, 
41

1 we would agree and come to the same place, 

2 that 2.33. And I would agree that the fact 

3 that perhaps there’s a number in there that’s 

4 a hundred times higher, I don’t know if there 

5 are any numbers higher. 

6 But if that was just a relatively 

7 short period of time or for a given location 

8 then it really would be inappropriate and 

9 plausible for a person to have spent a long 

10 period of time in that setting. And we could 

11 make a pretty good case for that. And I would 

12 say, okay. 

13 But we have had other locations where 

14 the variability was very large, but it was a 

15 function of location where one particular 

16 location was always high. And we found out, 

17 yeah, there was a guy that worked there all 

18 the time. And under those circumstances we 

19 had to work with the high-end numbers. 

20 DR. NETON: Yeah, that’s true. 

21 DR. MAURO: You see where I’m going? Right 

22 now I guess we don’t have that, that story. 

23 DR. NETON: I’ve looked at this a lot more 

24 closely maybe than others because Tom and I 

25 looked at this. And you have to look at sort 
42

1 of what the process sample values were. And 

2 they’re much lower. They jive with what was 

3 measured at Blockson itself in terms of 

4 working levels in 1976. So we have some high5 end values that we believe are high end from 

6 the Florida Phosphate Industry that are, 

7 they’re like vent stack, you know, stack 

8 values and such. Those are not relevant when 

9 constructing dose at Blockson, but we put them 

10 in there. We believe that they are high-ended 

11 values. If we were to take those values out 

12 and just use the ^ values that were measured 

13 at the various process locations that are more 

14 similar to the wet phosphate process, we would 

15 come up with a much lower number. But we felt 

16 comfortable saying, well, given the 

17 uncertainty in all of this that we will go 

18 with the higher value to make sure that we 

19 bounded it. And I think that’s what we’ve 

20 done. We can get into the Blockson data 

21 later. 

22 MR. GRIFFON: You’re already at outdoor 

23 background levels. I’m not sure how much 

24 further ^, I mean 0.75 ^. 

25 DR. NETON: Two picocuries per liter is not 
43

1 background levels. I don’t know where you -- 

2 MR. GRIFFON: Point seven five isn’t? 

3 DR. NETON: I’m not assigning 0.75 

4 picocuries per liter. 

5 MR. GRIFFON: I mean your mean value of your 

6 distribution is 0.75. I know you’re assigning 

7 2.33. The average value that you’re getting 

8 from all this study from this plant suggests 

9 that the outside was -- 

10 DR. NETON: Well, let’s talk about the 

11 measurements that were taken at Blockson 

12 Chemical. I mean, they’re actually working 

13 level values in 1976 that were taken, and 

14 those values are all below what we’re 

15 assigning as well by a factor of two. The 

16 highest value measured in the plant, I think, 

17 is a factor of two lower than what we’re 

18 assigning. So we’ve looked at a lot of data. 

19 We’re not making this up. 

20 MR. GRIFFON: Yeah, yeah. 

21 DR. NETON: We looked at the Blockson data 

22 when we were developing TIB-0043 and when we 

23 developed the Blockson site profile, and we 

24 felt, well, there were not a lot of samples. 

25 I think actually five or six. I’ve forgotten 
44

1 how many. So again, we felt more comfortable 

2 using the two picocurie per liter bounding 

3 value that we got out of the FIPR data. 

4 If you look at the Blockson data 

5 during production, this was not a shutdown 

6 facility, the values are smaller than what 

7 we’re assigning. It’s actual working levels. 

8 We don’t have to worry about equilibrium 

9 ratios or anything. So if you look at the 

10 whole story of all the values we’ve looked at, 

11 I think it’s a pretty good story that we’ve 

12 bounded the exposure. 

13 MR. PHILLIPS: I guess from our standpoint 

14 what we did in this particular instance is we 

15 went back and made as much use of the data 

16 that had been used in OTIB-0043 and 

17 regenerated the numbers. And so we used 

18 exactly the same data that you did in your 

19 analysis. We just extracted more of the 

20 individual measurements out, so that’s what we 

21 did. 

22 DR. NETON: I think to talk about the 

23 Blockson data is probably the next place to 

24 go. That’s Florida as John has correctly 

25 stated. If we’re trying to reconstruct dose 
45

1 for workers in the Florida phosphate industry 

2 maybe we’ve got a good story and a good 

3 approach. 

4 DR. BRANCHE: Before you go there, before 

5 you continue rather. Those of you 

6 participating by phone if you could please 

7 mute your phones. Everyone please. And also 

8 the information that Chick distributed is not 

9 Privacy Act reviewed just to remind you all of 

10 that. Thank you. 

11 I’m sorry. Please continue. 

12 MR. GRIFFON: I was just going to say before 

13 you go into the Blockson data, I thought the 

14 reason for TIB-0043 was that there wasn’t, the 

15 Blockson data wasn’t sufficient or there’s 

16 some for concern. 

17 DR. NETON: There are ten samples at 

18 Blockson that we have. They weren’t mentioned 

19 in TIB-0043 by the way. They are mentioned in 

20 the Blockson TIB. 

21 MR. PHILLIPS: Which really leads us to the 

22 second point, and that is how representative 

23 are these data of the Blockson situation. So 

24 if you want to, in the ‘50s, I guess -- 

25 DR. MAURO: In that time period. 
46

1 MR. PHILLIPS: -- in the time period and 

2 under the same operating conditions. 

3 DR. NETON: We have ten samples or ten 

4 locations where samples were taken. This was 

5 when Herman Cember was under contract to help 

6 them do this analysis. I think he did most of 

7 the calculations, but ten samples were taken, 

8 very low samples. Chick has gone and 

9 established what -- 

10 MR. PHILLIPS: That’s the table on page two 

11 of the handout you just received. 

12 DR. NETON: But in general, I mean, the 

13 samples are fairly low if you use the 

14 conversion factors. I think Chick’s done this 

15 properly. You end up with some pretty low, 

16 low values that indicate that our use of 0.1 

17 working level month per year is bounding based 

18 on the data taken at Blockson in 1976 when the 

19 plant -- this was not shut down. This was not 

20 a FUSREP analysis. This was actually the 

21 plant in production of phosphate products. 

22 MR. PHILLIPS: It was called an industrial 

23 hygiene survey and was done by Olin. 

24 DR. NETON: So we don’t see any large values 

25 in the plant. 
47

1 DR. ROESSLER: What does S-T-P-P stand for? 

2 MR. PHILLIPS: Super triple phosphate. 

3 DR. ROESSLER: I’m having a hard time 

4 visualizing those locations with regard to 

5 where people are working. Maybe you have 

6 looked at the report more closely and why you 

7 chose the number eight which says 40. That 

8 must mean Building 40, Filtration. I’m trying 

9 to picture what the worker is doing at that 

10 location, workers. 

11 MR. TOMES: Building 40 was where they 

12 produced the acid. They took the, they 

13 digested the rock in that building. 

14 MR. PHILLIPS: And presumably from what we 

15 can gather, the grinding operation was also, 

16 pulverizing I think they call it, was done in 

17 Building 40 as well as the production of the 

18 phosphoric acid. 

19 DR. ROESSLER: So you’re taking that value 

20 then as representative of probably the high 

21 value that someone could have received in that 

22 operation. 

23 MR. PHILLIPS: Well, if you look, there are 

24 three measurements made presumably in Building 

25 40. That’s what it appears to be. Two of 
48

1 them they got no counts. One grinder 

2 operation which I assume was close to the 

3 pulverizing or ball mill or rod mill or 

4 whatever they used -- 

5 DR. ROESSLER: You’d think that would have 

6 been, I would have visualized that without 

7 seeing the numbers as being the one that would 

8 be high as far as radon released. 

9 MR. PHILLIPS: One would think so. 

10 DR. NETON: It depends. I mean, this is, if 

11 there’s a matrix, a rock-type matrix, 

12 emanation fractures. This is not a lot of 

13 radium in the material. I mean, it’s elevated 

14 above background by what, a factor of two or 

15 three? I mean, these are not Belgian Congo 

16 ores that were processed at Mallinckrodt. I 

17 mean, they’re orders of magnitude lower in 

18 radium. 

19 MR. PHILLIPS: And radon is not as freely 

20 released from solid material as you’d think it 

21 would be even for grinding operations. 

22 DR. ROESSLER: So it’s more in the calcining 

23 step that you’d expect the releases? 

24 DR. NETON: No, I think the filtration makes 

25 sense to me where you actually had more of it 
49

1 in solution and it’s available for -- 

2 MR. PHILLIPS: It’s after you put the 

3 sulfuric acid and the phosphate rock together, 

4 and then you filter out the gypsum. That’s 

5 the point where that would be -- 

6 DR. MAURO: That’s wet. 

7 DR. NETON: It’s a wet process. 

8 DR. MAURO: There’s a trade-off there. 

9 Okay, you’ve grounded up your, but now it’s 

10 wet and as opposed to before with the ^ where 

11 it’s dry. So you’ve got these trade-offs 

12 going. 

13 DR. NETON: They’re already in solution and 

14 then precipitated out what ^ ^ radium 

15 followed the sulfuric acid precipitate. 

16 DR. ROESSLER: I just want to establish that 

17 this particular location is one that is valid 

18 for doing this calculation. 

19 MR. PHILLIPS: What we were trying to do is 

20 look at the radon values in Building 40, 

21 whatever we had. And those are the three 

22 measurements that we included that we could 

23 identify in Building 40 from this set of ten 

24 measurements. 

25 DR. ROESSLER: So the one in number seven, 
50

1 the STPP would have been in 55, Building 55, 

2 probably. 

3 MR. PHILLIPS: Wherever the final products 

4 were stored. No, not in 55. 

5 DR. MAURO: No, that would -- 

6 MR. PHILLIPS: Fifty-five was, I believe 55 

7 was torn down at this time. 

8 DR. NETON: Well, not before -- 

9 MR. PHILLIPS: Used for storage; is that 

10 correct? 

11 DR. NETON: Yeah, it was not in use. 

12 MR. PHILLIPS: But not product storage. 

13 DR. MAURO: You see, what we’re looking at 

14 as I understand it is that the phosphate 

15 operation continued, and it’s no different in 

16 principle than the phosphate operation took 

17 place -- 

18 DR. NETON: Workers were exposed to this 

19 radon before, during and after AEC operations 

20 which is another issue. 

21 DR. MAURO: So in concept, in simplest terms 

22 one could say, well, listen, whatever the 

23 radon levels are that they measured in the 

24 ‘70s as they were doing their phosphate 

25 operation, is there any reason to believe that 
51

1 the radon levels were any different in the 

2 1950s when they also had this kidney unit 

3 going on where they were -- 

4 MS. MUNN: Just because I had one separate 

5 separation. 

6 DR. MAURO: -- now the only thing -- 

7 MR. PHILLIPS: The only thing we don’t know 

8 was what the production rate was at the two 

9 various -- 

10 DR. MAURO: -- and whether or not, there may 

11 have been some design changes, so building 

12 ventilation changes, things like that, which, 

13 of course, are questions that are reasonably 

14 asked, and I guess I don’t know whether we 

15 have an answer to that. It sounds like a 

16 weight of evidence thing now. 

17 So where we really are is, okay, 

18 listen, we have the Florida stuff, transfer 

19 the Florida information, which given 

20 everything we talked about and given your 

21 argument, the story you told, certainly I 

22 think that you present a very compelling 

23 argument that the numbers for Florida are good 

24 for Florida. 

25 Now we’re saying, all right, now, 
52

1 let’s use those numbers over here. And say, 

2 well, how do we judge whether or not you can 

3 transfer that information and use it at 

4 Blockson. What I’m hearing -- I sort of like 

5 -- well, one way to crack the problem is, oh, 

6 we do have some radon measurements at 

7 Blockson, but they’re not in the ‘50s. 

8 They’re in the ‘70s. And when you look at 

9 them, and you try to pick the area where you 

10 think it might be elevated, you find out that 

11 the numbers that they actually measured are 

12 lower than the transferred values. 

13 DR. NETON: By a factor of five. 

14 DR. MAURO: By a factor of five. So and now 

15 we say, but wait a minute, we still want to 

16 test it and say wait a minute, what might be 

17 wrong with this story. I mean, all of a 

18 sudden the weight of evidence is building in 

19 favor of this process. But then you have to 

20 say, but hold the presses. Was there anything 

21 about what was going on in the ‘50s at 

22 Blockson by way of design, throughput, 

23 operations that might have been substantially 

24 different than what was going on in the ‘70s 

25 when these measurements were made. 
53

1 And that’s a reasonable question, and 

2 right now I guess I don’t know if there is an 

3 answer to that. Whether or not is there any 

4 reason to believe there might have been a 

5 difference or maybe reason to believe there 

6 might not have been a difference. 

7 DR. NETON: No, we don’t have any definitive 

8 proof although we did ask this question of 

9 Brian Burke (ph) who was the author of the 

10 FIPR report, one of the authors of the FIPR 

11 report. And in -0043 we have some 

12 communication with him where we ask were there 

13 any significant changes in phosphate plant 

14 processes between the ‘50s and -- we were 

15 asking for FIPR in the ‘90s, but in the last 

16 40 years or so. 

17 And his opinion was there were no 

18 significant changes in the construction of wet 

19 process plants between 1950s and even the 

20 ‘90s. The process remained essentially the 

21 same. The chemistry remained the same. 

22 He did go on to further say that while 

23 environmental regulations led to decreased 

24 overall emissions from the plants which is 

25 true, the controls had little or not effect on 
54

1 the occupational radon levels in his opinion. 

2 So we have that little piece. We’ve not gone 

3 back because heretofore it’s not been brought 

4 up in issues what the plant looked like in 

5 1950 versus 1976. I mean, we certainly have 

6 workers who worked there during those periods. 

7 MR. PHILLIPS: But to be fair, his 

8 experience would be in Florida. 

9 DR. NETON: Well, yeah. 

10 MR. PHILLIPS: As far as the process itself, 

11 I expect that’s true. But whether they were 

12 different ventilation situations in that 

13 building from the ‘50s to the ‘70s, we don’t 

14 know. 

15 DR. NETON: Not with certainty. 

16 DR. MELIUS: How did they control emissions, 

17 environmental emissions? 

18 MR. ELLIOTT: They probably didn’t. 

19 DR. MELIUS: Well, he said they lowered 

20 them, that’s why I was -- 

21 MR. ELLIOTT: Scrubbers. 

22 DR. NETON: Charcoal. 

23 MR. ELLIOTT: Charcoal in the beds. But 

24 that probably didn’t come on until the ‘70s or 

25 so. 
55

1 MS. MUNN: I don’t recall any comment from 

2 the worker groups about significant change in 

3 process that would have, I mean, additional 

4 buildings, additional ventilation, additional, 

5 any kind of change of process. I don’t recall 

6 that anything -- 

7 DR. NETON: Did we ask them, yeah. 

8 DR. MELIUS: The ‘80s, I don’t think it was 

9 the focus -- 

10 DR. NETON: It was not an issue, I mean -- 

11 DR. MELIUS: Yeah, I know -- 

12 DR. NETON: -- this whole ^ had been blessed 

13 off about six months ago and now it’s back on 

14 the table. 

15 MR. PHILLIPS: It was asked about Building 

16 55. 

17 DR. NETON: Yeah, 55. We never really -- 

18 MR. PHILLIPS: And they described that as 

19 having large fans in the upper part which ran 

20 continuously. But I’m not sure that I ever 

21 saw anything relative to Building 40. 

22 DR. NETON: No, we never -- 

23 MR. TOMES: We have asked workers who worked 

24 in 40, locations about ventilation. And all 

25 of them that had commented on it said that the 
56

1 facility, any place had dusty operations ^ 

2 ventilation back in that era. So that’s about 

3 all I know from the details. 

4 MS. MUNN: Yeah, but, Tom, you and Chick 

5 both were at one of or more of those worker 

6 outreach meetings, weren’t you? 

7 MR. TOMES: Uh-huh. 

8 MS. MUNN: And I don’t recall any indication 

9 that there was a significant change. They 

10 didn’t say anything about changes in building 

11 structure or anything. 

12 MR. PHILLIPS: Well, the problem is most of 

13 the focus of that was on Building 55 and 

14 relatively little on Building 40. But we were 

15 focused on Building 55 at that time. 

16 Is that correct? Is that basically 

17 correct? 

18 MR. TOMES: I think it’s correct. I have 

19 had conversations other than meeting with some 

20 workers, and it’s basically the same. I did 

21 ask some details with one of the workers 

22 specifically about Building 40 just to get a 

23 better idea of how the process, material 

24 flowed through the facility. But none of the 

25 conversations indicated, like you said, 
57

1 indicated that there was -- 

2 MS. MUNN: No, change. 

3 MR. TOMES: -- substantial change other than 

4 when in the ‘50s when they built Building 55 

5 and made some changes. 

6 MS. MUNN: Well, we know about that. That 

7 was incorporated in the original site profile. 

8 MR. TOMES: Excess capacity, things like 

9 that. 

10 MS. MUNN: Correct. 

11 MR. GRIFFON: This report that we were just 

12 discussing, this is 1976. ^ ’83. 

13 DR. NETON: Was it ’83? I’m sorry. I was 

14 thinking that there’s another EPA report that 

15 was in ‘76. 

16 MR. GRIFFON: And I’m sure we have this 

17 reference on our, I mean, this source 

18 document, right? 

19 DR. NETON: Yes. 

20 MR. GRIFFON: Because I’m just looking at 

21 these calculations. So they only reported one 

22 working level, and then you just did ratios to 

23 convert for the other -- 

24 MR. PHILLIPS: If you look at the references 

25 here -- 
58

1 DR. NETON: Yes, it’s been out on the O 

2 drive for a long time. 

3 MR. TOMES: And there was that ^ in Building 

4 55 in 1970 done by the FUSREP program, and 

5 they were all in the lower ranges we’ve been 

6 discussing. 

7 DR. NETON: We wouldn’t expect the radon 

8 levels to be high in ’55 because the radium 

9 was gone by the time it got here. We’ve 

10 established that. So again, I’ll point out 

11 we’re giving people these radon levels and 

12 working in Building 55 at the same time which 

13 one could argue is double dipping. We can’t 

14 predict where radon would, our theory was we 

15 can’t predict where radon was sort of diffused 

16 throughout the plant. 

17 MR. GRIFFON: Well, especially since you 

18 could look at this data. I mean, your work 

19 location study there. Some of your higher 

20 values are in the auto shop and the admin 

21 trailer. That’s what makes me just raise the 

22 question about any of this data. It could 

23 well be, but that’s, you know. 

24 DR. NETON: I think 40 is relevant here. 

25 That’s part of the phosphoric acid production. 
59

1 You’ve got to look at what the definition of 

2 Blockson Chemical is, right? I mean, it’s the 

3 Building 55, and I think it says related 

4 activities. So we can’t start going out onto 

5 the vent stack on the phospho-gypsum pile and 

6 taking samples and saying that that’s relevant 

7 to this reconstruction I don’t think. 

8 MR. GRIFFON: But my point, I mean, you’re 

9 making points that like these stack samples 

10 are some of the highest ones in your 

11 distribution. I’m going back to TIB-0043. 

12 But in fact, some of the other higher means 

13 are actually in places that I wouldn’t have 

14 expected to be on the high side of the mean. 

15 DR. NETON: Right, which could be right next 

16 to the vent stack. 

17 MR. GRIFFON: It could be, yeah. 

18 DR. NETON: I don’t know. I really don’t 

19 know. 

20 MR. PHILLIPS: The highest source of radon 

21 is the gypsum stacks, gypsum piles. So I 

22 don’t know the relative location to the gyp 

23 pile that you’re referring to. 

24 DR. NETON: I guess that’s what I’m saying 

25 is the process, the samples that were taken 
60

1 near process equipment tend to be on the low 

2 end of the distribution from everything that 

3 I’ve looked at. You don’t go into a 

4 filtration area or a digester tank area and 

5 start to see huge levels of radon. I think 

6 it’s primarily because the concentration of 

7 radium in the source term is pretty low, and 

8 it doesn’t emanate -- 

9 MR. GRIFFON: I just expected it to be 

10 higher than the auto shop or the admin 

11 trailers, but they could be next -- 

12 DR. NETON: I don’t know. That’s why I feel 

13 those were the highest, in my opinion they 

14 were the highest samples that were identified 

15 at that plant that were provided. That’s what 

16 the document says. 

17 MR. PHILLIPS: And all of this relates to 

18 the outdoor versus indoor operations which is 

19 also part of this. And for the time period 

20 that I had I just tried to verify to the 

21 extent that I could whether the, in general, 

22 the Florida phosphate plants were a more open, 

23 well-ventilated situation than would have been 

24 Building 40 based on what we know. 

25 We believe that Building 40 was fairly 
61

1 enclosed based on the information that I could 

2 find as opposed to the Florida situation which 

3 -- and I think most of you got that PowerPoint 

4 presentation if we could look at it -- and I 

5 think that’s pretty typical of the Florida 

6 operations to the best of my knowledge based 

7 on my conversations with the people who would 

8 know that. And the fact that the grinding 

9 operation was within Building 40 came from one 

10 of the workers, I guess in a telephone 

11 interview. 

12 Is that correct, Tom? 

13 MR. TOMES: Yes. 

14 MR. PHILLIPS: So I think it’s fairly clear 

15 from that that there was a difference relative 

16 to the potential ventilation situation in 

17 Building 40 as opposed to generally the 

18 Florida phosphate plants. Now, we don’t know 

19 from the FIPR report exactly -- well, I guess 

20 you can discern a couple of them -- exactly 

21 what plants were included in that dataset. So 

22 you can’t say that those were representative 

23 of the general industry in that it was a 

24 fairly open operation, but we believe that to 

25 be the case. I’m not sure that there’s any 
62

1 argument in that. 

2 DR. NETON: Right. 

3 DR. ROESSLER: Chick, what is your 

4 conclusion then the numbers that have been 

5 proposed for the Florida operation, which we 

6 agree was probably much more open, compared to 

7 what you have here, the actual numbers from 

8 Blockson in 19 -- I think -- 83? To me, when 

9 I look at the numbers, the projected or the 

10 proposed Florida numbers are much higher than 

11 what your data from Blockson actually shows. 

12 MR. PHILLIPS: A factor of four or five 

13 based on those measurements. 

14 DR. ROESSLER: I’d let you make the 

15 conclusion from that. 

16 MR. PHILLIPS: Well, I don’t know that I can 

17 draw any other conclusion than this is the 

18 data that we have for Building 40 under 

19 conditions which we presume to be fairly 

20 consistent with what the operation was during 

21 the covered period. So those are the numbers. 

22 And then we know we can compare those to the 

23 bounding numbers that were generated in OTIB24 0043. We may argue which the bounding number 

25 might be, and that’s still an open question. 
63

1 But they’re well within that bounding number. 

2 DR. MAURO: The way I look at that when I 

3 was thinking about it I said, hmm, if the 

4 Florida data that we’re hanging our hat on is 

5 fundamentally more or less an open area and 

6 then we’re going to transfer that over to the 

7 Blockson which sounds like was more or less 

8 closed areas, we’ve got a problem. 

9 But then you say, but we do have data 

10 for Blockson a little later, and that sort of 

11 offsets that concern. And again, we’ll get to 

12 that point where we’ve got a weight of 

13 evidence. So I would say without that -- I 

14 guess 1970 Blockson data? 

15 DR. NETON: ‘Eighty-three. 

16 DR. MAURO: ‘Eighty-three data for Blockson, 

17 the open versus closed could have been a 

18 pretty serious conversion problem; how do we 

19 go from here to here. But that sort of 

20 offsets it. It sort of says, wait a minute, 

21 yeah, that difference might very well have 

22 existed. The difference is open versus 

23 closed. But obviously it could not have had a 

24 profound impact because we wouldn’t have seen 

25 such low values. So that ameliorated a little 
64

1 bit my concern of the open versus closed. 

2 MS. MUNN: So the bottom line now is, has 

3 this discussion been focused enough to respond 

4 to items A, B, C and D that marks our 

5 concerns. A, distribution includes not only 

6 individual data points but also means. SC&A 

7 recently identified this. That’s been 

8 addressed. I don’t know if it’s been put to 

9 bed. 

10 B, Table B-3, some of the data seems a 

11 bit strange. Auto shop, gypsum stack, office, 

12 all have 95 percent CLs less than the medians. 

13 MR. GRIFFON: I think we didn’t really talk 

14 about that one, but I think Harry looked at 

15 the source report and gave me an explanation 

16 of that one. So -- 

17 MR. PHILLIPS: That’s not what it seems. 

18 MR. GRIFFON: -- I was misinterpreting that 

I don’t think that’s a 95th 19 percentile. I was 

20 misreading that table. I didn’t go to the 

21 source document. That’s sort of off the table 

22 as a question. 

23 MS. MUNN: C, measurements for Florida study 

24 were down in the ‘90s. Blockson operated in 

25 the ‘50s. Is it possible to demonstrate basic 
65

1 ^ improvements especially ventilation wouldn’t 

2 have drastically lowered the airborne levels 

3 of all contaminants in the ‘90s. And we did 

4 discuss that. 

5 MR. GRIFFON: I mean, we have a new piece 

6 for me anyway, I knew it was referenced, but I 

7 didn’t think we were, but it’s in the ‘80s 

8 again. It’s not in the ‘50s, but there’s some 

9 evidence at least Blockson-specific so pretty 

10 close to a ‘50s. 

11 DR. MELIUS: Yeah, it’s getting closer. 

12 DR. NETON: It’s at the facility, and it’s 

13 within, you know -- 

14 DR. MELIUS: But I think we have open 

15 questions on were there changes in the 

16 facility -- 

17 DR. ROESSLER: But we also have that one 

18 remark from, we have the comment by FIPR that 

19 you just read that he doesn’t have any 

20 evidence that things really changed over time 

21 with regard to ventilation. 

22 DR. NETON: In his opinion. 

23 DR. ROESSLER: Yeah, in his opinion. So we 

24 have that. 

25 DR. NETON: There’s that piece. 
66

1 DR. ROESSLER: But I agree, it would be -- 

2 MR. GRIFFON: It might be process focused 

3 rather than -- yeah, I don’t know. 

4 DR. NETON: And the conservatism built in as 

5 a factor of five different is also there, I 

6 mean, so even if there were some changes, one 

7 has to wonder would the changes be sufficient 

8 to reduce the levels by a factor of five. I 

9 mean, there’s ways one can get about that I 

10 suppose. 

11 MR. GIBSON: That’s putting an awful lot of 

12 weight into what one man says about one issue 

13 that’s completely away in another state. I 

14 mean, you know, we don’t put that kind of 

15 weight in a worker’s statement so -- 

16 DR. ROESSLER: That’s only one supporting -- 

17 DR. NETON: It’s just one piece of a -- like 

18 John’s argument, weight of the evidence kind 

19 of situation. The weight of the evidence is 

20 we have no evidence that the radon exposures 

21 in the phosphate industry have been much 

22 higher than what we’re presenting here. 

23 MR. PHILLIPS: I think the way that I would 

24 look at that is his statement I think is 

25 correct in that the processes have not changed 
67

1 over that time period. Now, again, his 

2 experience is in Florida, and you would not 

3 expect a ventilation situation to change 

4 because that’s mostly outdoors. I mean, not 

5 outdoors. It has a top over the facility. 

6 So you wouldn’t expect anything to 

7 happen relative to ventilation, but I don’t 

8 know that you can directly apply that 

9 statement to Building 40 because we don’t know 

10 in Building 40 if any of the, anything was 

11 done to improve or the ventilation in Building 

12 40 so that the radon levels were less. So I 

13 think that we don’t know. 

14 MS. MUNN: But, Mike, as we said earlier, we 

15 have discussed these issues in both broad 

16 stroke and detailed with the workers at 

17 Blockson, and the two meetings that we had 

18 there, none of the three people who are here 

19 who attended those meetings recall any comment 

20 about changes to the process. 

21 MR. GRIFFON: And you weren’t talking about 

22 Building 40. I think everybody said that, 

23 too. 

24 MS. MUNN: Yeah. 

25 DR. MELIUS: One, you weren’t talking about 
68

1 Building 40. Number two, you weren’t talking 

2 about the 1980s I don’t believe. 

3 MS. MUNN: The overall process. 

4 DR. MELIUS: And I think it would be helpful 

5 to go back and, I mean, the way I look at it 

6 is let’s find out, you know, which we should 

7 be able to, were there changes between the 

8 ‘50s and 1980s in Building 40’s ventilation, 

9 production rate and so forth. Is that doable? 

10 DR. NETON: It’s attemptable. I mean, if 

11 that’s what’s the desire of the working group, 

12 we can certainly -- 

13 MR. GRIFFON: The other question I had asked 

14 John -- I realize it was sort of misdirected. 

15 I should have been asking NIOSH -- was did you 

16 have the numbers -- and maybe this would be a 

17 quick no on this one -- but did you have 

18 anything, enough information about source term 

19 or production levels to actually go back and 

20 do a sort of from the source term calculation 

21 of what sort of radon levels could have 

22 existed in the process buildings, you know, 

23 using conservative factors like building size 

24 and ventilation rates, air exchange rates, 

25 whatever. I don’t know if you had enough 
69

1 source term information to even attempt that. 

2 DR. NETON: We have production numbers 

3 through ’61, I guess, but I don’t think we 

4 have production levels through, but yeah, we 

5 would have production numbers for ’53 and ’61 

6 and based on building -- 

7 MR. GRIFFON: The reason I say that is just 

8 that that smell test that I’m asking about. 

9 Like these levels are upper background levels, 

10 and if you’ve got a big source production -- 

11 DR. NETON: When you start ventilating 

12 building one air change per hour, you’re going 

13 to reduce considerably. There are, I mean, we 

14 didn’t go to this level, and I’m not promising 

15 to do this, but there are red rad build 

16 incorporates radon contamination, but then you 

17 get into other contamination fractions and all 

18 that kind of stuff and it’s -- 

19 MR. GRIFFON: And the parameters are key. 

20 The air exchange is key so we don’t know any 

21 more information about that. 

22 DR. NETON: I think what one could establish 

23 possibly is what increase in ventilation would 

24 be required to reduce a building -- I think 

25 Building 40 might still be there actually. 
70

1 What ventilation would be required to reduce 

2 it by a factor of five, for example, over what 

3 was measured in ’76. And does that seem -- 

4 DR. MELIUS: ‘Eighty-three. 

5 DR. NETON: ‘Eighty-three, I’m sorry. I’ve 

6 got this ’76 FUSREP report in my brain. So 

7 there are some things that could be done. I 

8 mean, if that’s the desire of the working 

9 group, we could certainly ascertain that. I 

10 don’t know how quickly we could do that 

11 though. 

12 MS. MUNN: Would that satisfy the concerns? 

13 That’s the only real question is would that 

14 kind of calculation, would that kind of -- 

15 MR. GRIFFON: Well, again, in my opinion 

16 that would add to the weight of the evidence. 

17 If you do that it’s just another piece. 

18 DR. MELIUS: If not, I’d need some further 

19 information or understanding on overall on 

20 this issue of sort of northern operations 

21 versus southern operations. Because we know 

22 ventilation’s a key factor, and we have these 

23 open-sited facilities down in Florida that 

24 we’re using as data. 

25 DR. NETON: But I think Chick pointed out, 
71

1 well, if the FIPR data represents the high end 

2 of their facilities, and then the FIPR data 

3 bounds the high-end value that we measured in 

4 Building 40, I think that sort of that open5 ended building kind of goes away. The 

6 question is -- 

7 MR. GRIFFON: Is that the high end? 

8 DR. MELIUS: That’s the last question. What 

9 I’m saying is this question. ‘Eighty-three, 

10 looking at what data we have is the first 

11 priority. If we can’t get further 

12 information, then I’d like to better 

13 understand if the potential for any other data 

14 that might exist from other facilities that 

15 might address this issue. Now maybe it’s so 

16 variable and so facility-specific once you 

17 enclose because then it becomes an issue more 

18 of what your ventilation rates are and how 

19 those might have changed over time that that’s 

20 -- 

21 DR. NETON: I agree. 

22 MR. PHILLIPS: There is another piece of 

23 evidence that I tried to get literally as I 

24 was coming up here, but there was a study 

25 done, I think it was in ’77, of a phosphate 
72

1 plant in Idaho. I suspect it represented more 

2 of a closed building situation. We have the 

3 radon numbers in there. I just can’t get to 

4 the right person to find out whether that was 

5 an open or a closed operation. But I have 

6 phone calls to that, so that may be -- and 

7 those were relatively low, too. They were 

8 like 0.22 picocuries. 

9 DR. MELIUS: Larry, didn’t NIOSH, they had 

10 that phosphate study. I remember most of it 

11 being in Florida, but I remember -- 

12 MR. ELLIOTT: I don’t know if that came out 

13 of Idaho or how many northern sites, if any, 

14 that they looked at. 

15 DR. MELIUS: Someone look back and see -- 

16 MR. PHILLIPS: But there is that study, and 

17 the radon value is available in that building 

18 where the grinding operation took place. If I 

19 can get to the right person to confirm whether 

20 that was an enclosed or an open situation, 

21 that would be another piece of data to add to 

22 this. 

23 MR. TOMES: That was the EPA report. 

24 MR. PHILLIPS: Correct. 

25 DR. NETON: We used that for some of our 
73

1 other stuff. We used it for the airborne. 

2 But we didn’t look at the -- 

3 MR. PHILLIPS: I called the author and got 

4 him in a national park somewhere, but he only 

5 wrote the report. He didn’t do the field 

6 study so he wasn’t -- 

7 MR. ELLIOTT: Have you talked to Tom Bloom? 

8 DR. NETON: No, we have not. 

9 MR. ELLIOTT: We need Tom Bloom who’s a 

10 NIOSH investigator on this phosphate study, 

11 and he’s retired now, but we ought to call him 

12 and get his take on what the data contains. 

13 DR. NETON: He’s already working for us on 

14 the RECA. 

15 MR. ELLIOTT: We may have to go look at the 

16 data. 

17 DR. NETON: I think the first thing though 

18 is maybe to talk to some of these workers who 

19 worked in the buildings and say what were the 

20 changes between the ‘50s and 1970s. And if 

21 they say nothing happened, then maybe -- 

22 MR. GRIFFON: Especially as OSHA came in. I 

23 think you want to... 

24 DR. NETON: That’s unlikely to be the case. 

25 Somebody can remember some change. But we can 
74

1 sort of say what effect would that have and 

2 then couple that with an analysis saying, 

3 okay, we feel like we’re a factor of five 

4 above what we think is reasonable, even a 

5 highest value, and if those changes that we’ve 

6 discovered, what would it take to make it so 

7 much higher, sort of a bounding based on 

8 ventilation changes. If you know the size of 

9 the building, and you know -- then you put the 

10 radon in there, and you know the ventilation -

11 - 

12 MR. GRIFFON: Actually on parameter 

13 basically. 

14 DR. NETON: You can actually come up with 

15 the effect I think. It shouldn’t be that 

16 difficult. 

17 MR. ELLIOTT: Didn’t we take a set of 

18 questions to Blockson workers from the focus 

19 group? But we didn’t talk about 40. 

20 DR. NETON: Yeah, but we never asked them. 

21 MR. TOMES: There was some mention in 

22 passing but later on outside the public 

23 meeting we interviewed five people at one 

24 point, and then I called another person back. 

25 So I talked to at least six people by phone, 
75

1 and one of those gentlemen worked the Calciner 

2 which was right next to Building 40 so he 

3 should know if there was any major structural 

4 changes during that time period. It won’t 

5 answer air change ratio or anything like that, 

6 but he would be aware of any major changes. 

7 And there are also a couple of other people 

8 that we talked to who worked in that building 

9 that -- 

10 DR. NETON: Well, we could get approximate 

11 dimensions of the building, the closedness of 

12 it, you know, was it completely, any sort of 

13 parameter that we could use to -- 

14 MR. ELLIOTT: To expedite this might I 

15 suggest that Chick and Tom, you guys get on 

16 the phone together with your list of contacts 

17 including Tom Bloom and at one time both of 

18 you hear what they have to say. 

19 MS. MUNN: It would appear to be very 

20 helpful -- 

21 MR. GRIFFON: It might be useful to have a 

22 work group member on there, too. 

23 MR. ELLIOTT: If you want, Mark, that’s 

24 fine. I’m just saying -- 

25 MR. GRIFFON: I mean since -- 
76

1 MR. ELLIOTT: -- let’s not have too many 

2 different efforts going out to touch these 

3 people. Let’s do it one time and hear the 

4 answers at once. 

5 DR. NETON: You’re honorary work group. 

6 MR. GRIFFON: I’m honorary work group 

7 member. I wouldn’t mind being on that call. 

8 DR. BRANCHE: If that’s okay with you, 

9 Wanda, I could have a work group member there, 

10 too. 

11 MR. GRIFFON: Can I ask one -- I think we’re 

12 kind of leaving this subject with some 

13 actions. But on page 13 in the TIB-0043 

14 there’s a reference to this Virginia-Carolina, 

15 Chick mentioned this 0.2. But my point on 

16 this one is, this is a reality check for me, 

17 this last sentence. 

18 Basically, they conclude that the 

19 levels are between 0.6 and 0.9 picocuries per 

20 liter at this facility. And the last sentence 

21 says, “However, the measurements occurred 

22 before remediation and after the uranium 

23 extraction facility ceased operation and was 

24 torn down, only a concrete pad remained.” I 

25 don’t know that there was much more 
77

1 ventilation than that. I mean, the building 

2 didn’t exist, right? 

3 DR. NETON: But we didn’t use this for 

4 anything. 

5 MR. GRIFFON: But -- you didn’t use it for 

6 anything, right. But your mean and your 

7 distribution falls right in the middle of 

8 that. So when we’re saying, you know, when 

9 we’re looking to some data for use in dose 

10 reconstructions, all I’m saying is, wait a 

11 second, 0.75 is the mean. 

12 I know we’re using 2.3, right? But 

13 the average that we’re measuring in these 

14 operating facilities supposedly in Florida 

15 that are supposed to be representing exposures 

16 in the ‘50s fall right in the middle of an old 

17 concrete pad from a facility that was torn 

18 down. I think if people look at this they 

19 say, wait a second. 

20 DR. NETON: I don’t know, Mark. 

21 MR. GRIFFON: Am I misinterpreting this? 

22 DR. ROESSLER: Are you talking about, this 

23 is picocuries per liter. What was the number 

24 that you referred to? Is that working 

25 numbers? 
78

1 MR. GRIFFON: I thought 0.75 was picocuries 

2 per liter. Am I wrong? 2.33 is picocuries 

3 per liter. 

4 DR. NETON: I think it is somewhere in that 

5 vicinity. 

6 DR. ROESSLER: Yeah, 2.33. 

MR. GRIFFON: Well, that’s the 95th 7 and the 

8 mean was 0.75. 

9 So again, I’m saying not that it 

10 couldn’t happen, but -- 

11 DR. NETON: Well, what it strikes me as 

12 being if these things were sufficiently open, 

13 if they were almost equivalent to outdoor 

14 operations -- 

15 MR. GRIFFON: Well, and that’s the question 

16 of going back either -- 

17 DR. NETON: But then we’ve got the Blockson 

18 data to suggest that that’s not inappropriate. 

19 So I think to me the key thing is to take the 

20 ’80 Blockson data and try to give people some 

21 assurance that it’s appropriately bounded for 

22 the ‘50s given what we know about the building 

23 size, ventilation rates or changes that may or 

24 may not have happened. 

25 MR. ELLIOTT: I was just about to ask for 
79

1 the record could somebody succinctly and 

2 concisely state what it is that is at issue 

3 here so that we can pursue it to ground. I’m 

4 wandering back and forth in my mind thinking 

5 this is below any occupational limit, the data 

6 that we’re working with. So what is at risk 

7 here? What’s the problem? I really want to 

8 hear that on the record so that we can make 

9 sure we pursue this to ground. I mean, are we 

10 losing a lot of dose here? Is that what’s 

11 being speculated? 

12 DR. MAURO: Along those lines I know you’re 

13 making reference to the occupational, but if I 

14 recall the lung dose of picocurie per liter is 

15 on the order of rems for the year. Is that 

16 correct? In other words the effect of whole 

17 body dose from one picocurie per liter is on 

18 the order of 200 millirem per year. That’s 

19 the effect of whole body dose. Then lung dose 

20 has got to be a factor of ten higher than 

21 that. So we’re not, even though we’re within 

22 the occupational limit, even one picocurie per 

23 liter is going ^ with its associated progeny 

24 is going to deliver a pretty high dose. 

25 DR. NETON: Be careful. IREP doesn’t use 
80

1 dose at all. We go directly from working 

2 levels to risk -- 

3 DR. MAURO: Right, and that’s fine. But I’m 

4 saying assuming that the dose is somehow a 

5 surrogate for risk, I do think it doesn’t take 

6 very much -- 

7 MR. ELLIOTT: Well, I agree -- 

8 DR. MAURO: -- for radon to give you a nice 

9 dose is all I’m saying. 

10 MR. ELLIOTT: I think we’re all in agreement 

11 on that, but the point still remains. We need 

12 to be very succinct and concise for the record 

13 here so that we pursue this to ground. 

14 MR. GIBSON: Larry, this isn’t going to be 

15 for this working group, but just for the 

16 record from my point of view, the whole thing 

17 is not going to be satisfied until we get to 

18 the bottom line of this whole surrogate data 

19 issue. You don’t have data for Blockson, and 

20 -- 

21 MS. MUNN: Yes, we do. 

22 MR. ELLIOTT: We do have data for Blockson. 

23 MR. GIBSON: But you’re using surrogate data 

24 to try to recreate doses, and it just -- 

25 MR. ELLIOTT: And it’s our position that 
81

1 we’re allowed to do that in our regulation. 

2 MR. GIBSON: I understand that. But it’s my 

3 position that until I understand it better, 

4 I’m just not comfortable with the use of 

5 surrogate data. It’s not the data that 

6 actually took place at the site. I know that 

7 the scientific people can establish why it’s 

8 justified. I know that’s your position that 

9 you’re allowed to do that. But for the record 

10 it’s my opinion I’m not comfortable with it at 

11 this point. 

12 MR. ELLIOTT: And I respect that, and I 

13 understand that. It’s just that in the 

14 balance here we have a number of claims that 

15 we need to move forward. 

16 MR. GIBSON: I just want to put my 

17 overarching -- 

18 MR. PHILLIPS: Can I go back and comment 

19 just briefly on this Virginia-Carolina issue? 

20 What you have to remember with the Florida 

21 plant is you have additional sources of 

22 outdoor radon. You have the lines which are 

23 in proximity, and you also have large rock 

24 piles with the tunnels in close proximity to 

25 these plants, whereas you don’t have that 
82

1 situation at Blockson. So those are large 

2 sources of out -- 

3 MR. GRIFFON: Would you have those in the 

4 Virginia, you were saying -- 

5 MR. PHILLIPS: This is the Florida plant. 

6 DR. BRANCHE: It’s Virginia-Carolina, but 

7 it’s in Florida. Is that right? 

8 MR. ELLIOTT: Is it a mine or a quarry? 

9 DR. BRANCHE: That’s a revelation. It’s 

10 called Virginia-Carolina, but it’s in Florida? 

11 MR. ELLIOTT: When you say mine, are you -- 

12 DR. BRANCHE: Is that correct? 

13 MR. ELLIOTT: -- is it an actual mine or is 

14 it a quarry? 

15 MR. PHILLIPS: Well, they call them mines, 

16 but they’re open pit mines. 

17 MR. ELLIOTT: Open pit. The majority of 

18 these, in Pennsylvania there’s one mine, 

19 underground facility, that I know of that they 

20 took. Generally, it’s an open pit quarry. 

21 MR. PHILLIPS: I don’t know if they showed 

22 it in that slide presentation, but you see 

23 these tunnels. What that is are when they 

24 mined the phosphate ore, and they put it in 

25 large piles of phosphate ore, and it has 
83

1 varying amounts of phosphate in it. And they 

2 would do tunnels under these in order to blend 

3 that. And that’s where the tunnels, that’s 

4 the radon in the tunnels. So you have two 

5 additional sources of outdoor radon at the 

6 Florida plant that they’re in close proximity 

7 to the mine and large piles of rock. 

8 ACTION ITEMS

9 MS. MUNN: Before we go any further let me 

10 go down, I have five items that I have 

11 recorded that we’ve discussed as possibilities 

12 for further action. One can’t help but be 

13 concerned over the continuing question of how 

14 relevant this is to dose reconstruction and 

15 where we really need to be going. I’m going 

16 to go through these five items. 

17 First, I have there’s going to be any 

18 changes in the building process or the process 

19 ventilations in Buildings 40 or 25. Talk to 

20 workers and find out if there is any 

21 additional information we’ve missed. 

22 Two, what kind of ventilation could 

23 have resulted in a factor of five reduction 

24 from the ‘50s to the ‘80s. 

25 Three, Chick’s going to check on data 
84

1 from the western regions to see of the author 

2 and the folks who worked on that have specific 

3 data that would be helpful. 

4 Four, NIOSH is going to involve Tom 

5 Bloom in what we’re doing here. 

6 And, five, there’s going to be a 

7 technical call with Tom, Chick, myself, Mark 

8 to discuss pulling all of this together and my 

9 sixth item is the one that Larry brings up. I 

10 still don’t have a concise specific about what 

11 we’re trying to achieve here. What exactly do 

12 we want all of this activity to end up with? 

13 If we are not going to accept surrogate data 

14 for any reason, then we need to get that out 

15 on the table. 

16 DR. MELIUS: Can I make one -- 

17 MS. MUNN: You were out when that was 

18 brought up. 

19 DR. MELIUS: I know, but I have one minor 

20 correction to your first point which was 

21 looking at Building 40 and 55. It’s not just 

22 worker interviews. There may be 

23 documentation, too. I don’t know what’s 

24 available, and so let’s investigate that in 

25 some way. I’m not saying generate new reports 
85

1 or anything, but let’s see what would be 

2 available. Because I’m just not sure the 

3 question’s ever been asked, and it may be 

4 available in some of the other histories of 

5 the -- other documentation that’s been done. 

6 DR. BRANCHE: Is it Building -- I know 

7 Building 40, but is it Building 25 or 55? 

8 MS. MUNN: Fifty. 

9 DR. MELIUS: Fifty-five. 

10 MR. TOMES: Twenty-five is another name 

11 you’ll hear called for Building 40. At one 

12 time it was called 25. They changed the name 

13 to Building 40. 

14 DR. BRANCHE: Okay, so 40 is 25 and 

15 Virginia-Carolina is in Florida. 

16 DR. NETON: We’re all juggling a lot of 

17 data. 

18 MS. MUNN: My concern about these five 

19 issues still is, and what does this bring us 

20 to. And if we are not going to accept 

21 surrogate data at the outset, then there’s no 

22 need in doing any of this because if you will 

23 not, one, accept the Blockson data that we 

24 have as being adequate for what we have to do, 

25 and two, will not accept the surrogate data as 
86

1 being referenceable and a reasonable standard, 

2 then we’re wasting our time and spinning our 

3 wheels by going further. 

4 So if we can get that -- I suggest 

5 that we take a ten-minute comfort break and 

6 have everybody give some thought to what are 

7 we trying to achieve, the bottom line, and 

8 what we’re going to do here, and is it going 

9 to get us any further down the road. So let’s 

10 all sign off for ten minutes, well actually, 

11 back here at 11:15. 

12 DR. BRANCHE: Back here at 11:15. We’ll 

13 mute until then. 

14 (Whereupon, the working group recessed from 

15 11:05 a.m. until 11:15 a.m.) 

16 DR. BRANCHE: The Blockson meeting is 

17 beginning again. 

18 Ms. Munn. 

19 Oh, excuse me. Those of you who are 

20 participating by phone I really risk sounding 

21 like the phone police, but you’d be amazed how 

22 difficult it is for people who are 

23 participating by phone to hear if a person 

24 leaves their line open. If someone who’s on 

25 the line could please acknowledge that you can 
87

1 hear me, I’d appreciate it. 

2 UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER (by Telephone): Yes. 

3 DR. BRANCHE: Okay, thank you. 

4 And again, if everyone who’s 

5 participating by phone could please mute your 

6 phones, we would appreciate that. If you 

7 don’t have a mute button on your phone, then 

8 please dial star six, and then when you’re 

9 ready to speak, then use that same star six. 

10 It’s important for everyone participating by 

11 phone to mute your lines so that everyone on 

12 the phone can hear the conversation here in 

13 the room. 

14 Ms. Munn. 

15 WORK GROUP’S GOAL

16 MS. MUNN: Has anyone given any considered 

17 thought to my request that you give us a 

18 bottom line? What do we have as a bottom line 

19 for this work group? What are we trying to 

20 accomplish by these five things we’ve 

21 indicated we will try to attempt to do? 

22 This is a little disconcerting because 

23 if we have these five additional actions to 

24 take care of between now and the time that 

25 we’ve tentatively committed to have a comment 
88

1 for the Board with regard to our efforts, then 

2 we have a lot of work to do in the next two 

3 weeks and there’s a lot of work being done on 

4 other things as well. 

5 So bottom line? Anyone’s bottom line? 

6 Are we going to be able to accept surrogate 

7 data at all or are we going to be able to come 

8 to some conclusion with respect to the 

9 completeness of the data that we do have? Can 

10 we do that here before we leave or not? 

11 DR. MELIUS: Well, I can tell you that where 

12 my bottom line is that I am quite skeptical of 

13 using, relying on Florida data for a site in 

14 Illinois. But I think that the information 

15 that we are going to be collecting -- and this 

16 is for radon obviously -- is the information 

17 that these actions will help. And I agree 

18 that, as John and Jim have put it, it’s a 

19 weight of the evidence issue, and let’s see 

20 what the evidence shows. And I think we’ve 

21 outlined issues and we’ll weigh the evidence. 

22 MS. MUNN: So what I think I’m hearing then 

23 is go forward with these five items as quickly 

24 as we can. I’ll summarize them by e-mail and 

25 send them to everyone to make sure that I 
89

1 have, we have them reasonably agreeably. 

2 MR. GRIFFON: The only other item, Wanda, I 

3 just keep on the table, I don’t think there’s 

4 any action, but the statistical analysis. I 

5 just got those files. I’d like to look at 

6 them. And it may end up, if that’s like the 

7 final thing, I think it may end up as that’s a 

8 non-SEC issue, but I still want to have an 

9 opportunity to look at that data, you know, 

10 the proposed ^ by SC&A at least. 

11 MS. MUNN: And, Mark, I’ll rely on you to 

12 relay to both John and Chick and Tom what 

13 those specific points are that you want to 

14 make as you’re going through that, and I’ll -- 

15 DR. BRANCHE: With copies to you, right? 

16 MS. MUNN: -- with copies to me. And please 

17 let me know when we can have that 

18 teleconference, hopefully sooner than later. 

19 DR. BRANCHE: I’d like to use this 

20 opportunity given that request. It’s come to 

21 my attention that there have been a number of, 

22 at least a few requests that have happened for 

23 this work group, assignments as it were, to 

24 SC&A, that were not necessarily copied to 

25 Wanda and certainly didn’t copy me. And I’ll 
90

1 be sending out a general announcement to all 

2 the Board members, but that we ought not to 

3 have that happen. 

4 So when you make your requests, 

5 specifically for requests for SC&A to do their 

6 work. It’s important that Wanda as the work 

7 group Chair be copied so that it really is 

8 under her, under the aegis of her leadership 

9 for this work group. But it’s also important 

10 that you copy me. Thank you. 

11 MR. ELLIOTT: Can I take a stab here? 

12 MS. MUNN: Yes, please. 

13 MR. ELLIOTT: I would offer that what these 

14 items, these action items are staged to do is 

15 to inform the working group as to whether or 

16 not the radon dose modeling for Blockson based 

17 upon data from similar facilities is 

18 appropriate to use or not. Does that get it? 

19 MR. GRIFFON: Or is sufficient to bound 

20 dose. 

21 DR. NETON: Have we bounded the dose. 

22 MR. ELLIOTT: I’m just trying to get a 

23 clear, concise, for the record what we’re 

24 trying to do. 

25 DR. MELIUS: You reached a conclusion in 
91

1 doing the site profile and so forth that the 

2 radon data that you had from Blockson was not 

3 sufficient by itself so you relied on the 

4 Florida data for the most part and so forth. 

5 And so the question is is that appropriate. 

6 And I think we’re looking for what’s the 

7 evidence that would support that, supporting 

8 the Blockson data, and so we have some 

9 evaluation of that. Supporting that may be 

10 more general stuff related to the OTIB but as 

11 applicable to the Blockson site and northern 

12 sites and close types of information. 

13 DR. NETON: I think I’ve got a pretty good 

14 handle. I do have one question though. In 

15 the first item you mention process ventilation 

16 changes in 40, and I think you also said 55. 

17 Are we, I’m not sure we need to look at 

18 Building 55. It’s not really, 40 is the 

19 relevant building that we’re concerned. 

20 MS. MUNN: Forty is the relevant building 

21 for me, but I was hearing concerns expressed 

22 about when 55 came into this. 

23 MR. GRIFFON: I think I might have said 

24 1955. 

25 DR. MELIUS: I was quoting Wanda. 
92

1 DR. NETON: Fifty-five I think we all agree 

2 would be low potential for radon because the 

3 radium source term had been removed before the 

4 material got there. 

5 MS. MUNN: Well, that was my understanding, 

6 but I had thought I heard concerns expressed 

7 but do we know whether there was an increase 

8 or a decrease in production and something that 

9 had gone on in 55 that would affect us. If 

10 that’s -- 

11 MR. GRIFFON: I thought I said in the ‘50s. 

12 I don’t know. 

13 DR. BRANCHE: I thought you were talking 

14 about the time period as opposed to a 

15 building. 

16 MR. GRIFFON: Yeah, the time period that I 

17 was talking about, but maybe someone else said 

18 Building 55. 

19 MS. MUNN: Okay, that’s wonderful. I would 

20 be more than happy to take Building 55 off 

21 the, we’re just talking about Building 40. 

22 Yes, Gen. 

23 DR. ROESSLER: I have one additional thing 

24 that was brought up and I want to point it 

25 out. That as you talk to people and analyze 
93

1 all of this, the difference between the 

2 Florida plant and the Blockson plant, of 

3 course, general operation is important. But 

4 keep in mind what was said about the 

5 difference between Blockson and Florida is not 

6 only the open ventilation that didn’t occur in 

7 Building 40, but the background levels which 

8 it was pointed out that in the Florida 

9 situation this was in an environment probably 

10 enhanced radioactivity with it being in a 

11 mining area and with it being in the vicinity 

12 of other levels. I think that was an 

13 important point that we have to keep in mind. 

14 MS. MUNN: Which would increase the 

15 background. 

16 DR. ROESSLER: Which would increase the 

17 levels, and it would I think answer perhaps 

18 Mark’s comment about how come the levels were 

19 high in the auto shop and other places. 

20 There’s probably a high background there which 

21 wouldn’t have occurred at Blockson. 

22 DR. MELIUS: This is a quantitative 

23 comparison so it’s going to be, it’s not going 

24 to be ventilation yes, ventilation changes no 

25 or something. It’s going to be we’ll have to 
94

1 look at it overall. 

2 DR. ROESSLER: Yeah, but it’s something to 

3 keep in mind. 

4 MR. GRIFFON: And I don’t know if there’s 

5 any more information on the source data, or 

6 I’m sure you guys have exhausted that 

7 possibility that there might be results, raw 

8 data, from the phosphate study, the Florida, 

9 whatever it’s called, FIPR. 

10 DR. NETON: We can get the raw data. Well, 

11 the raw data are probably there. I mean, I 

12 don’t know if we can; I’m in contact with the 

13 person, Brian Burke’s still in the system, and 

14 he’s still in the Florida Institute of 

15 Phosphate Research. In fact, I’ve got an e16 mail in to him now regarding some other 

17 questions. But I’m not sure the raw data 

18 would be meaningful though. I guess I’m not 

19 clear, I think we believe the statistical 

20 analysis that SC&A has done to reconstruct 

21 the, to use the variants to reconstruct the 

95th 22 percentile if we had the individual data 

23 points, I’m fairly confident that that number 

24 is correct if we’re given their -- 

25 MR. GRIFFON: I haven’t looked at it the way 
95

1 you have, and I do want to ^ that. But I was 

2 thinking while we’re at the meeting if it’s 

3 not difficult to get your hands on that, you 

4 know, it would just, it might be nice to have 

5 it there, you know, just wondering how less 

6 than technical things were treated, were they 

7 -- I haven’t looked at the data the way you 

8 have but the raw data might clear up some of 

9 those questions. 

10 DR. ROESSLER: When you talk about raw data, 

11 and you talked about source, in this report, 

12 the surrogate data report that came out on 

March 29th 13 , there’s a page talking about the 

14 amount of ore processed at each of the 

15 facilities. And I think that’s sort of the 

16 foundation for this source term calculation. 

17 MR. GRIFFON: I mean more of the radon 

18 measurement results. 

19 DR. ROESSLER: Yeah, but I think this is 

20 another. When you speak about source 

21 apparently the data exists for the amount 

22 processed. 

23 DR. NETON: When you -- I’m sorry, Gen. 

24 DR. ROESSLER: No, that’s it. 

25 DR. NETON: When you have the mean and the 
96

1 variants and n, you have basically what you 

2 need to come up with how that would expand out 

3 in an analysis. I can ask to see if we can 

4 get the raw data. I mean, that’s certainly 

5 doable. I don’t know whether we can get -- 

6 MR. GRIFFON: That’s the easy thing. I 

7 think you’re right especially if that Table B8 4, you said that you have the variants and 

9 other information for that table as well? 

10 DR. NETON: Yeah, and -- 

11 MR. GRIFFON: It’s not in your report. It 

12 was in the -- 

13 DR. NETON: -- it’s in the source document, 

14 and in fact, if you add that set of data it 

15 increases, essentially the medium value stays 

16 pretty much the same. And what happens is you 

17 increase the geometric standard deviation 

18 because of the variability that’s not been 

19 included. And that makes sense. 

20 MR. GRIFFON: In these values there was no 

21 effort to subtract out a background radon 

22 level, was there? 

23 DR. NETON: Not to my knowledge. 

24 MR. GRIFFON: I didn’t think so. That was 

25 the other reason for ^. 
97

1 DR. NETON: I think one of those values that 

2 you see southwest of the plant may be one of 

3 those kind of attempts to establish 

4 background. You see there’s one column that 

5 you questioned; it’s southwest. It’s the only 

6 one that didn’t exceed four picocuries per 

7 liter in that column, and that was put there 

8 sort of as a, what is baseline in this area, 

9 and I think it was about two, three-tenths of 

10 a picocurie per liter. 

11 MS. MUNN: So do I have another action item 

12 here regarding exchange of data? 

13 DR. NETON: Well, I can request the 

14 information. I mean, that’s easy. Whether we 

15 get it or not is beyond our control. 

16 MR. ELLIOTT: And how quickly -- 

17 DR. NETON: How quickly. I may or may not 

18 be successful. I can at least try. 

19 MS. MUNN: All right, I’ll try to get this 

20 out to you tomorrow when I’m back in harness, 

21 and we need to then establish the earliest 

22 possible date for us to have that technical 

23 call that we were talking about. 

24 DR. BRANCHE: Excuse me. 

25 There are some people participating by 
98

1 phone. Could you please mute your line? If 

2 you don’t have a mute button, then please use 

3 star six. Thank you. 

4 Sorry, Wanda. 

5 MS. MUNN: That’s quite all right. 

6 I’m a little concerned because our 

7 schedule in St. Louis does not have us meeting 

8 any time before things pick up, and there’s -- 

9 DR. BRANCHE: If you dare, there’s Monday 

10 evening. 

11 MS. MUNN: Yeah, there is Monday evening. 

12 That’s the only time that I see it would be 

13 possible at all for us to get together to see 

14 if we’ve been able to resolve these questions 

15 reasonably enough. We have essentially a week 

16 and a half in which to do that. 

17 So I’ll get the information out to 

18 you. I will hope any of you who have action 

19 items here will keep me posted especially. 

20 Dr. Branche and I need to know whether we’re 

21 progressing to the point where we’re going to 

22 be able to provide any kind of report at the 

23 St. Louis meeting or not. 

24 DR. ROESSLER: Should we take an 

25 availability for Monday evening of the group? 
99

1 MS. MUNN: It probably would be a good idea. 

2 I don’t see that we can possibly have anything 

3 prior to that time. And personally, I would 

4 be loathe to make any kind of recommendation 

5 to the Board without our having cleared up 

6 these issues that we’re talking about here 

7 today. So let’s do the best we can with the 

8 time. 

9 DR. MELIUS: I mean, I’ll make it easy in 

10 terms of what Gen was asking. I’m not 

11 available Monday evening. I’m not coming out 

12 until some time on Tuesday. 

13 MS. MUNN: Okay. By telephone are you 

14 available? 

15 DR. MELIUS: No, I have a commitment. 

16 DR. ROESSLER: Review for us what’s going on 

17 on Monday again, Christine. 

18 DR. BRANCHE: There’s a Nevada Test Site 

meeting the morning of the 23rd 19 . Then our site 

20 visit to Weldon Springs, the Mallinckrodt 

21 Interpretive Center, and then you have a free 

22 evening. 

23 DR. ROESSLER: But we’re tied up all 

24 afternoon. 

25 DR. BRANCHE: No. I would say that my 
100

1 understanding is that the tour, et cetera, 

2 would take about an hour. It’s going to take 

3 about 45 minutes at the most to get from the 

4 hotel to the location. We’re leaving the 

5 hotel at 12:15, sorry, 12:30 arriving around -

6 - I’d say we’d be finished at the site by 

7 three o’clock at the latest and probably back 

8 at the hotel by four o’clock at the absolute 

9 latest. I mean, that’s if we just really take 

10 our, just really drag our feet. 

11 DR. ROESSLER: So we would have a four 

12 o’clock time available for those of us who are 

13 there and for participation by phone. 

14 MS. MUNN: For a five o’clock. The other 

15 question then becomes, Jim, if you’re coming 

16 in on Tuesday -- 

17 DR. BRANCHE: You’ve got the Procedures 

18 meeting, and I believe you’re taking us right 

19 up to lunch -- 

20 MS. MUNN: Oh, I am. 

21 DR. BRANCHE: -- Ms. Munn. 

22 MS. MUNN: Absolutely. Yeah, we’ll go right 

23 to lunch with Procedures. And I don’t 

24 remember what the agenda -- 

25 DR. BRANCHE: That’s because you haven’t 
101

1 seen it. 

2 MS. MUNN: We don’t have public hearings 

3 Monday night, do we? 

4 DR. BRANCHE: Yes, we do. The evening 

5 period that is after the dinner hour is on 

6 that Wednesday. Currently, I have scheduled -

7 - I haven’t set it up because I haven’t 

8 finished my discussion with Dr. Ziemer about 

9 the agenda. But at this juncture the public 

10 comment period is scheduled from 4:00 p.m. to 

11 5:00 p.m. which is a little earlier than what 

12 you’re accustomed to. 

13 DR. ROESSLER: On Tuesday? 

14 DR. BRANCHE: On Tuesday, so the afternoon, 

15 the public comment period that immediately 

16 follows the Board meeting is currently 

17 scheduled from four to five. That could 

18 change before I send it out. But we’re not 

19 starting on that Tuesday until 1:00 p.m. 

20 DR. ROESSLER: So we’re back to Monday at 

21 maybe four o’clock. 

22 MS. MUNN: Well, but if we do -- 

23 DR. BRANCHE: But Dr. Melius is not going to 

24 be there. 

25 DR. ROESSLER: He said he wasn’t available 
102

1 that night. 

2 MS. MUNN: Yeah, he says he’s not going to 

3 be there, not be available until Tuesday. 

4 DR. MELIUS: Yeah, I’ve got to be in New 

5 York City Monday night, and I’m going to be 

6 most likely not available even by phone 

7 because I’ll drive down to the city late, and 

8 the New York State Thruway does not have cell 

9 phone service. 

10 DR. BRANCHE: Especially if you’re driving. 

11 DR. MELIUS: I have a hands-free. 

12 DR. BRANCHE: I’ll remind you guys I come 

13 from an injury prevention background. 

14 DR. MELIUS: Hands-free, Bluetooth, whatever 

15 it’s called. And I’m sure Wanda would not 

16 distract me during the call. 

17 MS. MUNN: I certainly would be as 

18 distracting as possible during the call so 

19 it’s not a wise idea. If you’re going to be 

20 in Tuesday, and public comment is early in the 

21 day, is there any possibility that we can 

22 schedule a one-hour meeting late Tuesday like 

23 seven to eight or something of that sort on 

24 Tuesday? Can we do that? Because we’re 

25 certainly not going to have the kinds of 
103

1 discussions we’re having here. It’s going to 

2 be fairly straightforward I think. We will or 

3 will not have -- 

4 MR. GRIFFON: You’re talking like 30 to 45 

5 minutes, right? 

6 MS. MUNN: Yeah, right. 

7 DR. MELIUS: Excuse me. I was distracted. 

8 What time does the meeting end on Tuesday? 

9 DR. BRANCHE: Currently I have the public 

10 comment period scheduled from four to five on 

11 that first day. 

12 DR. MELIUS: Why don’t we just meet at five 

13 o’clock? 

14 MS. MUNN: Or at the end of the public 

15 comment period, whichever comes first. 

16 DR. MELIUS: We’re all there. 

17 MS. MUNN: Good, fine. Then one hour for us 

18 at the close of public comments. 

19 DR. BRANCHE: I’ll write this down because 

20 I’ve got to get this to Zaida. So the 

21 Blockson work group is going to meet on 

Tuesday, June 24th 22 -- 

23 MS. MUNN: At the close of public comment. 

24 DR. BRANCHE: Shall I say ten minutes after? 

25 Fifteen minutes after the close? 
104

1 MS. MUNN: Yes, fifteen minutes after close 

2 for one hour. 

3 DR. BRANCHE: All right, we’ll send this in. 

4 For one hour. 

5 MS. MUNN: And I’m going to -- 

6 DR. BRANCHE: Excuse me. For one hour or -- 

7 MS. MUNN: For one hour. 

8 DR. BRANCHE: Thank you. 

9 MS. MUNN: You bet. 

10 And I hesitate to leave here without 

11 establishing a time for our next telephone 

12 call. 

13 DR. BRANCHE: The technical call? 

14 MS. MUNN: The technical call, but we need 

15 to accomplish some of these other things I 

16 think before we can do that. So all I can ask 

17 at this moment is if you’ll send me your 

18 availability for phone calls. 

19 DR. BRANCHE: But don’t you need to include 

20 people who are workers on that technical call 

21 and Mr. ^? 

22 MS. MUNN: On that technical call, no, I 

23 think the NIOSH attorney talked to Mr. Borum* 

24 separately. And if we need any input from 

25 that, then we’ll include that in the technical 
105

call. But the week of the 16th, 17th, 18th 1 , 

19th, 20th 2 that’s obviously the week that we’re 

3 going to have to have that call, preferably 

4 mid-week. 

5 DR. NETON: I’m out of town the whole week, 

6 but I think Tom’s available. Tom is 

7 available. 

8 MS. MUNN: Okay. 

9 MR. TOMES: Are you referring to -- excuse 

10 me. Are you referring to the calling the 

11 workers? 

12 MR. ELLIOTT: I think she’s referring to a 

13 working group technical call which may not 

14 comprise the whole working group. 

15 MS. MUNN: No, it doesn’t comprise the whole 

16 group. It’s a technical call. 

17 DR. ROESSLER: You’re talking about NIOSH, 

18 SC&A, as many of the work group as can be -- 

19 MS. MUNN: Mark, me. 

20 MR. ELLIOTT: So you want to have your work 

21 done before, as much as you can, before that, 

22 I guess. 

23 MR. GRIFFON: I thought the original concept 

24 was actually what Larry was saying was we’re 

25 going to talk to these individuals who might 
106

1 know something about process history to have 

2 SC&A and NIOSH on the phone at the same time, 

3 and I said maybe the work group also. I 

4 thought that was what we were, you know, when 

5 it was initially brought up I thought we were 

6 going to have these people, experts or worker 

7 experts, you know, whoever, on the phone with 

8 us. 

9 DR. NETON: Yeah, I thought that was part of 

10 item number one which is determine the process 

11 ventilation documentation interviews. 

12 MR. GRIFFON: That’s fine. I thought I 

13 heard Larry suggest that maybe we could get -- 

14 DR. NETON: No, that’s true. I think that’s 

15 all part of number one. 

16 MR. GRIFFON: I’m not sure what we’re going 

17 to talk about on a technical call. 

18 DR. NETON: Yeah, I don’t know. Wanda added 

19 that. I’m not sure -- 

20 DR. ROESSLER: What we want to see is if 

21 NIOSH and SC&A sorting out with the work group 

22 being there to ask questions and sorting out 

23 what they concluded. 

24 DR. NETON: As a kind of status? 

25 DR. ROESSLER: Yeah, just where are we at 
107

1 this point before we get into the work group 

2 meeting. 

3 MR. GRIFFON: So it should be as close to 

4 the Board meeting as possible probably, right, 

5 toward the end of that week then. 

6 DR. NETON: See, that’d be better for me. 

7 I’m coming back I think Thursday that week. 

8 MS. MUNN: I guess now I’m confused. And 

9 one of the reasons I’m confused is because I 

10 know how difficult it is to arrange a time 

11 when you can get together with workers and 

12 trying to arrange a time for the workers, 

13 Chick, Tom -- 

14 DR. ROESSLER: No, this isn’t including the 

15 workers. It was my understanding. I thought 

16 that -- 

17 DR. BRANCHE: There’s two different 

18 understandings about what this technical -- I 

19 thought that what Mark said reflects my notes. 

20 MR. GRIFFON: Originally that’s what I 

21 heard, but if it’s a different construct, 

22 that’s fine. 

23 DR. BRANCHE: But it’s up to you, Wanda, 

24 what you want. 

25 MS. MUNN: Well, it’s my understanding that 
108

1 these contacts, the individual contacts, were 

2 going to go on from the various individuals 

3 involved. And then Tom, Chick, you and I were 

4 going to discuss that and try to relay the 

5 core of the information or any new information 

6 that was gathered to the entire group. I was 

7 seeing these action items as a separate thing 

8 entirely, as individual action items. If I’m 

9 mistaken and misunderstanding what the desire 

10 of the group is, please let me know. 

11 MR. ELLIOTT: It just seems to me and the 

12 suggestion that I made if Tom Tomes is going 

13 to talk to Tom Bloom, he ought to have Chick 

14 and anybody else that wants to be privy to 

15 that conversation on the line. If Chick’s 

16 going to call a prior worker, contact his, or 

17 Tom’s going to call the prior worker contacts 

18 that we have, then we ought to do that jointly 

19 with whoever wants to be engaged. 

20 And then I think your paradigm could 

21 still play out where you still have a 

22 technical call with all the members of the 

23 work group that you want or those that can be 

24 in participation to cover the bases of what 

25 you learned in those other contacts. That’s, 
109

1 I think, where I saw this going, but it’s only 

2 a suggestion I’m offering. 

3 MS. MUNN: I think that’s appropriate 

4 because my thought when I said earlier as we 

5 go through each of these steps, please keep 

6 Christine and me involved in what you’re doing 

7 so that as you’re going along, as we can join 

8 in, we will if it’s possible. But you’re not 

9 going to get very many members of this group I 

10 think sitting in on many of these calls 

11 because we’re all busy doing other things. 

12 MR. GRIFFON: So you’re suggesting -- I 

13 think this makes sense, Wanda, that as you 

14 make these contacts, maybe by e-mail you can, 

15 Tom or John or Chick, can say, can let the 

16 work group know. 

17 MS. MUNN: Advising us. 

18 MR. GRIFFON: Yeah, I’m going to interview 

19 by phone this individual on whatever. Because 

20 you’ve got to be, you’ve got to go by their 

21 schedule. 

22 MS. MUNN: We have to do that, absolutely. 

23 MR. GRIFFON: And if you’re available and 

24 want to join us, here’s the 1-800 number or 

25 whatever, you know. 
110

1 MS. MUNN: Yes, that’s exactly -- 

2 MR. GRIFFON: -- that’s fine. 

3 MS. MUNN: Yeah, that’s what I have in mind 

4 -- 

5 MR. GRIFFON: And have the technical call to 

6 sort of pull it all together. 

7 MS. MUNN: Is just pull it all together. 

8 That’s my grand plan because I don’t see how 

9 we can do anything else in coming to the next 

10 ten days. All right, I’ll get that out to 

11 you. 

12 MR. ELLIOTT: John, I’m sorry. I didn’t 

13 know that -- I didn’t want to commit. Who do 

14 you want, Chick or -- I want to know who Tom 

15 can coordinate with on this. 

16 DR. MAURO: Why don’t you contact me. I’ll 

17 make sure everybody that needs to be involved 

18 ^. 

19 MR. ELLIOTT: Okay, thank you. 

20 I’m sorry. 

21 MS. MUNN: That’s quite all right. 

22 Are we where we need to be with 

23 respect to the radon issues then? 

24 DR. MELIUS: Can I make one more comment? I 

25 would just remind everybody that there’s also 
111

1 a petitioner and other people from the site 

2 and a congressional interest in this case. 

3 And I think we need to be operating as much as 

4 a -- is the information available and as open 

5 a fashion as possible on this. And the 

6 tighter we get with timetables and so forth, 

7 the more difficult that gets to be. And let’s 

8 see where we are, but in terms of the types of 

9 information and so forth. 

10 MS. MUNN: Who do you want us to have on 

11 copy, Jim? 

12 DR. MELIUS: I don’t think there’s anything 

13 to copy on right now because I haven’t heard 

14 anything being developed or whatever. 

15 MS. MUNN: No, but as these individual 

16 contacts are put together, if you feel that we 

17 need to have other individuals other than this 

18 working group aware of what we’re attempting 

19 to do in the next ten days, please let me 

20 know, and then I’ll try to make sure that 

21 they’re on copy. 

22 MR. GRIFFON: And then it also may be wise 

23 to contact the petitioner and say we’re 

24 looking to interview some people that have 

25 particular knowledge of, and do you have any 
112

1 suggestions. I don’t know if that’s, you 

2 know. 

3 DR. BRANCHE: Who are you suggesting would 

4 contact the petitioner? 

5 MR. GRIFFON: NIOSH. 

6 DR. BRANCHE: Okay. 

7 MR. ELLIOTT: Well, we have our lists of 

8 contacts, I think, and certainly we try to 

9 keep these petitioners apprised of all our 

10 activities on a petition. So that doesn’t 

11 typically go to inviting them or -- it’s 

12 mainly notifying them. It doesn’t include in 

13 all regards an invitation. We’ll welcome if 

14 they want -- 

15 DR. NETON: We may get a list of some -- 

16 MR. ELLIOTT: -- we don’t want to overwhelm 

17 one individual with 15 people on the phone. 

18 DR. MELIUS: No, no, no, I’m not suggesting 

19 that. I think it’s, just make sure they’re 

20 kept informed. 

21 MS. MUNN: Just let them know what we’re 

22 doing. 

23 MR. ELLIOTT: Yeah, yeah, they have a -- 

24 DR. MELIUS: We have a staff person who’s 

25 been very involved in this who just, you know, 
113

1 keep everybody up to date on process and what 

2 reports have been, that we have reports here 

3 that have, clearly have not been Privacy Act 

4 cleared yet. 

5 SUFFICIENCY OF DATA

6 MS. MUNN: Very good. I think we know where 

7 we’re going with radon. The only other item 

8 that we have on the table is the question of 

9 sufficiency of data. There have been concerns 

10 expressed that the data that we have is not 

11 sufficient for us to come to conclusions. I’m 

12 not sure exactly how to begin to address that, 

13 and exactly what needs to be said or how we 

14 can address it. I’m open totally to any 

15 suggestions. 

16 DR. MELIUS: I have a number of questions, 

17 one of which I raised earlier which is more of 

18 a general question about the approach used. 

19 And that is that as I understand it, NIOSH has 

20 taken the uranium monitoring data and 

21 calculated uranium intakes based on that data 

22 or based on what was available for, well, a 

23 number of people that were in these 

24 operations. It doesn’t cover their complete 

25 years of operations. There’s two or three 
114

1 years that are missing unusually at the end, 

2 not the beginning. Usually we have the 

3 opposite issue. 

4 And as best I can tell without trying 

5 to go in and match up all the information and 

6 so forth, we have limited information about 

7 the individuals that are covered by that 

8 monitoring data. And my concern is what I 

9 expressed earlier when we started talking 

10 about the radon, is we are treating this as a 

11 single distribution and a value was taken from 

that, in this case, 95th 12 percentile. 

13 And that has been applied to anybody 

14 who, as I understand it, that would apply for 

15 compensation, be a claimant, and for whom 

16 there was not monitoring data available or 

17 some limitation to that monitoring data. And 

18 my concern is that we’re taking a single 

19 distribution based on everybody that was 

20 monitored, and then applying that to people 

21 that worked in different job tasks who would 

22 have different exposures. 

23 And that’s explored a little bit in 

like Chick’s report dated March 27th 24 , 2008. I 

25 doubt that’s been Privacy cleared, and I’m not 
115

1 sure that matters in terms of this discussion. 

2 It would seem to me that it would be, that 

3 that approach is not appropriate for 

4 individuals in high risk, in higher exposed 

5 populations, people handling the material and 

6 so forth. Because they, in fact, would have a 

7 different distribution. 

8 We have enough information to believe 

9 that these people would have higher exposures 

10 than they would actually have a different 

11 distribution of exposure. So that when we 

12 have an unknown from that group, then one 

13 should be applying their distribution in some 

14 estimate based on their distribution, not 

15 based on the distribution of everybody that 

16 was sampled at the facility. 

17 MR. TOMES: Well, the data that we have we 

18 believe it to be for the workers who were 

19 mainly working in Building 55. And the basis 

20 for our assumption that is favorable, that 

21 those workers in Building 55 received the 

22 highest exposures. And we have on some of 

23 those workers we know what they did, and we 

24 have data for people who actually handled the 

25 materials they were trimming up after it was 
116

1 dried and the operators in that building. 

2 So it’s our belief that we have 

3 captured the data for those workers who were 

4 most highly exposed in... And even though 

5 there is a small amount of data, it’s in line 

6 with the amount of workers who actually worked 

7 in the building. 

8 DR. MELIUS: When capturing that, you are 

9 mixing those with people that have much lower 

10 exposures. In fact, the people get the 

11 detailed information there are people in job 

12 categories that are not comparable to people 

13 that would be in process operators or whatever 

14 within that building. And the question is, my 

15 question is, is the distribution you’re using 

16 that mixes everybody together, everybody 

17 that’s sampled together, are the appropriate 

18 distribution to be using for people that 

19 apply, individuals that apply. 

20 DR. NETON: I think there’s maybe a slight 

21 misunderstanding, and maybe I’m misunderstood. 

22 We actually do two separate analyses, do we 

23 not? I mean, we do an intake based on what we 

24 believe to be the highest exposure in Building 

25 55. But then do we not also look at the 
117

1 exposure in the balance of the plant and the 

2 worker would get the highest dose. So we 

3 picked the highest exposure that was out in 

4 essentially the calcining area I think, the 

5 calcining area where we thought is the other 

6 highest operation in the plant. And we would 

7 pick the highest dose of those two to apply to 

8 the workers. So it’s not just a single 

9 distribution. 

10 DR. MELIUS: Albeit, it’s still, you know, 

11 it doesn’t reflect the distribution for people 

12 that are working in that building. 

13 DR. NETON: It doesn’t. It’s hot. It’s the 

95th 14 percentile. So are you suggesting that we 

can’t use coworker data then and pick a 95th 15 

16 percentile? I mean, that’s what we’ve done. 

17 It’s a coworker study. 

18 DR. MELIUS: What I’m actually questioning 

19 is your basic coworker model, which is that -- 

20 DR. NETON: You don’t think it’s high 

21 enough? 

22 DR. MELIUS: -- that you’re not, what I’m 

23 saying is that you’re not actually using 

24 coworkers. What should be the definition of 

25 coworker? Is a security guard a coworker for, 
118

1 you know, the chemical plant operator? 

2 DR. NETON: We’ve done that substantially on 

3 almost every site, and you’re saying that it’s 

4 not -- we believe that that’s a bounding 

5 analysis for that worker. It’s high. It’s 

6 certainly on the high end, but it’s bounding, 

7 plausibly bounding. 

8 DR. MELIUS: Is it bounding is my question. 

9 DR. NETON: I don’t know why it wouldn’t be. 

10 Can you posit a scenario that’s higher in 

11 Blockson than what we’ve assigned? It’s all 

12 documented in the site profile, why we believe 

13 that that value is sufficiently bounding. 

14 There’s no one that could have gotten a higher 

exposure than that or 95th 15 percentile. I’d be 

16 interested to hear why you think that that’s 

17 not plausibly bounding. 

18 DR. MELIUS: I don’t think that that’s the 

19 appropriate methodology to be used to develop 

20 a bound, in particular to develop a bound, but 

21 then doing two things. One, applying it to a 

22 person -- two steps -- one, applying it to a 

23 person that’s within the time period when 

24 there was monitoring. Secondly, you’re then 

25 applying it to a person that worked during a 
119

1 time period when there was not monitoring, 

2 which is a separate -- 

3 DR. NETON: I’m confused as to what your 

4 argument is. I don’t see it. 

5 DR. MELIUS: My argument is that the basis 

for your 95th 6 percentile distribution is the 

7 wrong basis. 

8 DR. NETON: We have reconstruction exposures 

9 to uranium in Building 55 that is covered 

10 under the facility. We’ve taken urine samples 

11 from workers who were exposed to the uranium 

and taken a 95th 12 percentile intake and assigned 

13 that to all workers and saying that that is a 

14 bounding value for all workers who were 

15 exposed in the plant. I don’t know where else 

16 -- 

17 DR. MELIUS: What I’m saying is you should 

18 be only taking the distribution for, if I’m a 

19 chemical operator in that plant, then you 

should be using the, apply to me the 95th 20 

21 percentile for the distribution for chemical 

22 operators who worked in the plant, the 

23 available monitoring data for them. 

24 DR. NETON: When we have no monitoring data, 

25 we are allowed to use coworker data, and 
120

1 that’s what we’ve done. And we defined 

2 coworker data as a bounding analysis. We’ve 

3 done this at Bethlehem Steel. This is not 

4 just a Blockson issue. You’re raising a much 

5 larger issue. 

6 MR. TOMES: I would like to mention this 

7 distribution on this particular set of data. 

8 I’ve analyzed this numerous ways just to make 

9 sure that I’m faithful for the specific issue 

that you’re referring to. The 95th 10 percentile 

11 value of this distribution is actually higher 

12 than the highest individual exposed data we 

13 have. And so basically we’re saying that this 

14 data covers the operators because we know a 

15 few operators who were in the upper end 

16 distribution. But when we fit the data and 

17 the way we ranked it, fit it, that we are 

18 actually exceeding that value. So we are 

19 saying that there is, that this covers the 

20 highest exposed person. So that we -- 

21 DR. MELIUS: Yeah, but that’s 

22 misunderstanding the statistics. You’re now 

23 modeling -- the question is how are you 

24 applying it to people that haven’t been 

25 monitored. And you don’t know if the people 
121

1 that haven’t been monitored would have a 

higher or not. I mean, using the 95th 2 

3 percentile is what it is. And simply one 

4 would expect it to be higher. Some of it 

5 depends on your sample size and the basic 

6 distribution of your raw data. It’s a 

7 statistical analysis. 

8 MR. TOMES: Well, it’s based on assumption 

9 that we do have data on those operators in 

10 Building 55 that is based on the assumption, 

11 and we do have -- 

12 DR. MELIUS: You’re mixing them in with 

13 other people. I’m saying that I don’t think 

14 it’s appropriate. This is what the individual 

15 dose reconstruction, that if I have somebody 

16 that’s a chemical operator, I ought to be 

17 looking at the distribution -- an unknown 

18 exposure chemical operator -- that I should be 

19 using the distribution for chemical operators 

20 in some point on that distribution. 

MR. TOMES: It actually lowers the 95th 21 

22 percentile value if you exclude the lower 

23 values because -- 

24 DR. NETON: We’re confident that all those 

25 exposures are lower than what we’re assigning. 
122

1 DR. MELIUS: Why are you confident? 

DR. NETON: Because it’s the 95th 2 percentile 

3 of the plausible exposure scenario that 

4 generated the highest dose in the building. 

5 DR. MELIUS: You don’t know that. 

6 DR. NETON: Yes, we do. 

7 DR. MELIUS: No, you don’t, Jim. You know 

8 it based on what you, what samples you have. 

9 You don’t know it based on what people that 

10 weren’t sampled. 

11 DR. NETON: We’ve looked throughout the 

12 balance of the plant and picked out the 

13 calcining operation at the highest airborne 

14 area in the plant in Building 40 and are using 

15 that in Building 40. And we’re using the 

16 uranium drumming operation in Building 55 as 

17 bounding. I can guarantee you that no one 

18 received a plausible higher dose than that in 

19 those two facilities. I think it’s well 

20 described in our site profile. 

21 DR. MELIUS: Well, I guess we’ll just 

22 disagree. 

23 DR. ROESSLER: Well, Jim, are you bringing 

24 this up -- I don’t quite follow this unless 

25 you’re bringing it up as a fairness criteria 
123

1 which I read the surrogate data criteria, and 

2 there’s one that was brought up but not really 

3 listed in there. And that was the fairness. 

4 Are you saying that because the doses would be 

5 calculated so high that that’s not fair to use 

6 this? 

7 DR. MELIUS: No, no. 

8 DR. ROESSLER: I just wanted to make sure. 

9 DR. MELIUS: What I’m basically questioning 

10 is the approach NIOSH is using in their 

11 coworker model that lumps everybody together 

12 in terms of all those people within the 

13 facility together or within parts of a 

14 facility together. And the people actually 

15 have, we know that those are the sum of a 

16 number of different distributions. There are 

17 operators. There are whatever. I don’t want 

18 to violate Privacy stuff. But there’s people 

19 with lesser exposures. They’re all thrown 

20 into that. 

21 MS. MUNN: So let me see if I can restate 

22 the position. As I am hearing it, the 

23 position is you find unacceptable any coworker 

24 data that is not based on workers with similar 

25 job titles and similar job experience. 
124

1 DR. MELIUS: Correct. 

2 MS. MUNN: So that any aggregate which looks 

3 only at the highest numbers although we’ve 

4 determined that that would be more than 

5 claimant favorable and would, in fact, result 

6 in a much larger number of people being 

7 potentially compensated than otherwise. 

8 DR. MELIUS: It’s not a question of that it 

9 may be claimant favorable for the person in 

10 the low exposed group. The question is what’s 

11 an appropriate and claimant favorable for the 

12 person in the higher exposed population. 

13 MS. MUNN: Well, what I think -- 

14 Go ahead, Jim. 

15 DR. NETON: That’s what we’ve done. We 

16 picked the highest exposure scenarios and 

modeled them and picked the 95th 17 percentile. I 

18 would challenge someone to show us an exposure 

19 scenario that is potentially higher than what 

20 we’ve modeled in the plant. We’ve looked very 

21 closely at this operation, and this is it. I 

22 don’t -- 

23 DR. MELIUS: Well then we just disagree. 

24 That’s all I, okay. 

25 MS. MUNN: But if we disagree, then this 
125

1 brings our entire process to a screeching halt 

2 because if we disagree on the ability to use 

appropriate 95th 3 percentile coworker data as it 

4 has been used. And if we disagree on the 

5 adequacy of data that is presented, then I do 

6 not believe that it’s possible for us to come 

7 to any conclusion other than it can’t be done. 

8 DR. MELIUS: What can’t be done? 

9 MS. MUNN: What this program is attempting 

10 to do can’t be done. 

11 DR. BRANCHE: That’s not what I heard Jim 

12 say. 

13 MS. MUNN: Well, try to rephrase it for me. 

14 DR. BRANCHE: Certainly. I understand that 

15 Jim has a contention, and his contention is -- 

16 and you’ll correct me if I’ve misunderstood 

17 you -- it’s not that the coworker model is 

18 invalid, but rather that there should be 

19 categories for the coworkers for which doses 

20 apply. 

21 So as you said, workers with similar 

22 experiences, should their dose if unavailable 

23 for a particular individual, the individual 

24 for whom a dose is not available, the coworker 

25 information that’s used to reconstruct their 
126

1 dose should be of a similar work experience or 

2 a similar job title. 

3 Is that correct? You’re asking for a 

4 categorization. 

5 DR. MELIUS: Yeah, it should be their 

6 coworkers. 

7 DR. BRANCHE: However, now, given that 

8 that’s what you’re saying -- 

9 Did you want to say something, Emily? 

10 MS. HOWELL: I actually have a question. I 

11 usually refrain from asking questions during 

12 these meetings, but I just want to be clear. 

13 Is it proper -- maybe this is a factual, 

14 scientific question -- would it be proper to 

15 be categorizing workers if we were to do so by 

16 their job title? Because I would assume that 

17 a person could have a job title, but one 

18 production engineer could work in Building 40, 

19 another could work in some other building. 

20 And would it be proper then to just 

21 lump all of those production engineers 

22 together? Would it be more proper if you’re 

23 going to need a categorization to categorize 

24 them based on the buildings that they were in? 

25 Because couldn’t a security guard in Building 
127

1 40 have more, have a more close exposure rate 

2 to the production engineer in Building 40 than 

3 two different production engineers? 

4 DR. MELIUS: You’re absolutely right, but 

5 and I think we’re using chemical operator as a 

6 hypothetical or a factor that would impact 

7 exposure. The mean exposure for a chemical 

8 operator -- I was actually keeping within a 

9 single building, would be a certain. Now if 

10 you had chemical operators that roamed from 

11 building to building, moved from building to 

12 building, had multiple buildings, then there’d 

13 be other ways at looking of how to take into 

14 account their characterization. 

15 My concern is lumping everybody into 

16 one large coworker model and assuming that 

that is claimant favorable taking the 95th 17 

18 percentile, that is claimant favorable. And 

19 to apply it to everybody even though the 

20 individual claimant that’s applying would be 

21 someone that is, you know based on your CATI 

22 interview or whatever, that that person is a 

23 chemical operator. 

24 DR. BRANCHE: I can’t imagine that your 

25 question, this is the first time that your 
128

1 question has come before this group. So how 

2 have you responded to that in the past? 

3 DR. NETON: It’s not been an issue until 

4 this point. 

5 DR. BRANCHE: Oh, it’s not? 

6 DR. NETON: No. 

7 MS. MUNN: This is one of the things that we 

8 have heard repeatedly though in site after 

9 site after site in worker group after worker 

10 group after worker group. We don’t do the 

11 same job all the time. We don’t work in the 

12 same place all the time. And so the final 

13 concern then is since you can’t identify where 

14 I was at any given time, and you can’t tell 

15 from my job title what my actual work or where 

16 my actual work position was, how can you 

17 possibly tell me what my dose has been. 

18 And the approach that has been taken 

19 as being the most favorable for all claimants 

is our 95th 20 percentile approach based on the 

21 record that we have. The highest exposed 

22 individuals form the basis for that. If we 

23 cannot identify where each of these people 

24 were, and that’s the argument we hear all the 

25 time, then if we take the position that I 
129

1 think I’m hearing presented here, that leads 

2 me to the conclusion that we cannot do what 

3 we’re charged with doing, and what we have 

4 done successfully for a number of years. 

5 DR. MELIUS: Some of us would argue whether 

6 it’s been done successfully, but I think the 

7 point is that, I mean, the fact that 

8 Christine’s question is, the point is the way 

9 we’ve approached reviewing these -- 

10 DR. BRANCHE: It’s not my question. I was 

11 simply restating your -- 

12 DR. MELIUS: Well, no, your observation was 

13 that we have, the way we’ve reviewed these 

14 we’ve tended not to ask these questions. We 

15 review procedures in a very general fashion. 

16 We don’t apply them to particular sites. 

17 We do dose reconstructions and 

18 reviews, and we don’t look at the procedures 

19 behind those reviews. And we do SEC 

20 evaluation reviews, and we tend to focus on 

21 certain issues, and this has not been one of 

22 the issues that’s been focused on for some 

23 reason, usually because some other issue 

24 becomes more important. 

25 MR. GRIFFON: But I mean where it has come 
130

1 up -- I’m sorry. I had a phone call, but 

2 where it has come up is that we have delved 

3 into the question of representativeness. And 

4 again, I haven’t looked at this. I mainly 

5 came in for the radon thing. But we have 

6 asked the question of with the data you have 

7 do you, does it adequately represent, and I 

8 think SC&A might have explored this already -- 

9 DR. NETON: I think they have. 

10 MR. GRIFFON: -- adequately represent, and 

11 does it adequately represent the higher 

12 exposures. 

13 DR. NETON: Well, I’d like to speak to that 

14 because we actually have two distributions at 

15 Blockson Chemical. We have the uranium urine 

16 samples that were used to bound the exposures 

17 and dust concentrations that existed in 

18 Building 55. And then in this Table 2, we 

19 have a list of 15 or so upper loaded dust 

20 concentrations in the phosphate industry in 

21 milligrams per cubic meter. And by a factor 

22 of ten the highest value is 50.4 milligrams 

23 per cubic meter in the phosphate industry; we 

24 applied that to workers. 

25 And so we would take the highest dose 
131

1 from either of those two and assign it to the 

2 case. So I think we have covered the balance 

3 of the plant. I don’t see where there’s a 

4 situation where there are subpopulations of 

5 workers out there that are receiving lower 

6 dose than they could have received. 

7 Now, if the issue is though that we 

8 should use the coworker exactly for the type 

9 of worker that they, a model for the type of 

10 job they did, that is not practical in this 

11 program because 50 year old data workers 

12 oftentimes survivors don’t know the job title 

13 of their spouse or whatever. They’ve 

14 forgotten. They were on temporary work 

15 assignments for two years, and it doesn’t show 

16 up in the personnel record. It’s just not 

17 practical to develop, even if we could, 

18 individual models for job categories. It’s 

19 just not possible. And so without this 

20 approach, we try to bound given the 

21 distributions we can and pick the highest of 

22 the two. That’s what we’re doing, and I guess 

23 I’m at a loss -- 

24 DR. BRANCHE: I’m looking at the law. 

25 DR. NETON: -- as to why that’s not 
132

1 appropriate. 

2 MR. ELLIOTT: I don’t think the law says 

3 anything about coworker distribution. 

4 DR. BRANCHE: Not the distribution, just 

5 that you can use data. 

6 DR. NETON: And this is clearly not 

7 surrogate data in the sense that it’s data 

8 from the facility, in my opinion. 

9 MS. HOWELL: Well, we’ve always defined 

10 coworker and surrogate data distinctly. 

11 They’re not the same thing. 

12 DR. NETON: So now whether the data within 

13 the plant can be applied to all workers in the 

14 plant and bound that, and I think is what’s 

15 being brought to question here. 

16 DR. MELIUS: Does that ^ give you ^ dose 

17 reconstructions with sufficient accuracy? 

18 DR. NETON: And I’d submit that we’ve done 

19 that for virtually every site. 

20 DR. MELIUS: And I think you’ve made an 

21 assumption that doing -- again, for the sake 

22 of argument -- there’s not adequate data to do 

23 it by job title, and I don’t think you’ve ever 

24 tried. 

25 DR. NETON: Yes, we have. We have done that 
133

1 in the past, and Mark remembers very well. At 

2 Y-12 we tried to do job title analysis at Y3 12, and we could not. 

4 MS. MUNN: And there were good records at Y5 12. 

6 DR. NETON: Oh, yes. 

7 MS. MUNN: A lot of good records. 

8 DR. NETON: It gets down to 50 year old data 

9 -- and I forget the number now, but 50 percent 

10 of our cases are survivors who know very 

11 little about their spouses’ job duties. Work 

12 history’s always a problem. 

13 MS. MUNN: We’ll be on mute for five or ten 

14 minutes and be right back. 

15 (Whereupon, the working group recessed from 

16 12:10 p.m. until 12:20 p.m.) 

17 DR. BRANCHE: We’re back. If someone who’s 

18 on the line could indicate that they can hear 

19 me, I’d appreciate that. 

20 UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER (by Telephone): I can 

21 hear you. 

22 DR. BRANCHE: Wonderful, thank you. 

23 An issue’s come up and I just wanted 

24 to make certain that everyone understands that 

25 according to the regulations and the rules in 
134

1 the Federal Register, NIOSH can use coworker 

2 data. Now legally NIOSH is fully functioning 

3 within authorized territory. The question 

4 here is really scientific issues. I don’t 

5 want anybody on the phone to be concerned that 

6 we’ve been spending all these years doing 

7 something illegal. 

8 MS. MUNN: I’m at a bit of a loss to know 

9 where to proceed from here. The agreement to 

10 disagree doesn’t quite seem to get us to where 

11 we need to be. 

12 DR. MELIUS: I will look at the points that 

13 Jim made and review the situation again and 

14 see where I am on this. 

15 MS. MUNN: This is a crucial issue since it 

16 is a potential showstopper. 

17 DR. MAURO: I might want to just put some 

18 factual information that sort of enriches 

19 without drawing any conclusions. 

20 MS. MUNN: It would be welcome, John. 

21 DR. MAURO: We’ve looked at the number of 

22 people that worked in Building 55 each year 

23 while they were doing uranium production. 

24 There weren’t very many in any given year, 

25 between ten and 15 people. So we’re talking 
135

1 about a relatively limited number of people in 

2 Building 55. This is the building that was 

3 under control, access control, because of 

4 security issues and radiation protection 

5 issues. 

6 I think Jim’s point is well taken in 

7 terms of when we’re dealing with a site where 

8 we have thousands of workers, we may only have 

9 bioassay data for a small group of people. 

10 Let’s say ten percent. And then all of a 

11 sudden you could ask yourself how are we going 

12 to take data, ten percent of a population of 

13 thousands of people, and convince ourselves 

14 that the upper bound or the upper-end value 

15 from that small population of workers is going 

16 to be representative of such a large group of 

17 people with such diverse activities. 

18 And we run into this problem all the 

19 time, and we’re struggling with it right now 

20 at Nevada Test Site where we have 1,500 

21 claimants and the number of bioassay samples 

22 we have are relatively limited. So we need to 

23 revisit this issue again. It’s going to come 

24 up again and again. 

25 As you know in our report we looked at 
136

1 this issue very carefully, and I think that in 

2 this case though we have a situation where we 

3 have in any given year about ten, 15 people 

4 and bioassays about 125 bioassay samples were 

5 collected from 25 people that worked at the 

6 facility over a period of a number of years. 

7 So now we’re talking about sampling the urine, 

8 grab samples of urine, from the working 

9 population. 

10 Now all of them didn’t get the same 

11 number; some may not have gotten any. But by 

12 and large what we’re saying is that most of 

13 the workers that were operating, working in 

14 this facility, it’s almost as if we were 

15 working -- right around this table -- it’s 

16 about the right number of people. 

17 Let’s say we were all working in 

18 Building 55, all of us, back between 1953 and 

19 ’57. And we all were in that building, and 

20 some of us may have worked for different 

21 operations. And every so often we collect a 

22 urine sample from you, from you, from you, 

23 from you. And then six months pass. 

24 We grab another one. And we collect 

25 them all. And we say, okay, we’ve got 120 
137

1 urine samples collected from different people, 

2 different times. And then we say to 

3 ourselves, all right, now remember that any 

4 given urine sample just reflects the intake 

5 you may have accumulated up to that point in 

6 time. And it may have been taken shortly 

7 after a large intake or a long period of time 

8 after a chronic intake. We really don’t know. 

9 And in any given person you don’t 

10 really know whether that person was being 

11 exposed to relatively high levels for a long 

12 period of time or a short period of time. So 

13 you’re sort of at a loss. But then you say, 

14 but if I collect 122 samples, in effect, I 

15 feel as I spot sample from everybody, most of 

16 the people. And I say I’m going to down that 

list and pick off the highest 95th 17 percentile 

18 value. 

19 That, in my mind, the way I look at 

20 it, that says, that’s one of the highest 

21 concentrations in a uranium in urine that was 

22 seen, and now I’m going to say we’re going to 

23 assign that value at that point in time -- and 

24 it may only be a short-term thing. That high 

25 concentration does not necessarily mean that 
138

1 person experienced that concentration in his 

2 urine always. 

3 But we have to pick one, and we’re 

4 picking a high one. And we’re going to say, 

5 you know what we’re going to do, we’re going 

6 to assign to everyone an intake rate that 

7 would cause that urine concentration as if he 

8 was exposed continuously at a level that would 

9 give him that urine concentration all the 

10 time. 

11 When we looked at that from that, I 

12 would say, commonsense perspective, and 

13 there’s a lot of statistical work up and Chick 

14 could go into the analysis, and there’s a lot 

15 of analysis we did. But when I look at it I 

16 say to myself do I feel convinced that by 

17 assigning that number, that intake, to all 

18 workers for all years that were in Building 

19 55, do I feel as if it’s unlikely that anyone 

20 could have gotten more than that. 

21 And I’ve go to say that SC&A looked at 

22 this very, very carefully, and it’s a thought 

23 problem, you know? What’s the likelihood that 

24 everyone would have been exposed at that upper 

95th 25 percentile level day after day after day, 
139

1 and in my mind it’s probably highly unlikely. 

2 So we walked away, and, you know, in 

3 this particular application because we have 

4 the number of workers was limited and in a 

5 number of workers where the urine was sampled 

6 was largely -- I’m not saying they were all 

7 sampled, but a large fraction were sampled. 

8 In this case this surrogate model 

9 seemed to pass our test of robustness. As 

being, yeah, we can talk about the upper 95th 10 

11 percentile from this population of workers and 

12 then apply it to all workers at all times, 

13 you’ve placed a plausible upper bound. 

14 Under other circumstances I would say 

15 there are a thousand workers here, and you 

16 only had samples from 25 workers, I would say, 

17 yeah, Jim. I would agree with you a hundred 

18 percent. We’ve got a problem, and we’ve got 

19 to make sure that those 25 workers sure as 

20 hell better have been the upper end subgroup 

21 within that thousand workers. 

22 But in this case we’ve got them all, 

23 well, most of them. So I’m trying to keep as 

24 looking at this story, we do walk away feeling 

25 that NIOSH did place a plausible, SC&A’s upper 
140

1 bound. This approach and the data that was 

2 available seemed to be, place a reasonable 

3 upper bound. 

4 And I understand Jim’s concern, and I 

5 think in this particular application though I 

6 think that NIOSH is on pretty sound ground. 

7 That’s where SC&A comes out. 

8 MS. MUNN: Thank you, John. 

9 MR. GRIFFON: I mean, I’m just listening and 

10 wondering if, because I had some of those 

11 baseline questions, but I don’t want to go 

12 backwards but I’m just here for a guest by 

13 Wanda’s invitation. But if, John, you just 

14 said they have a high percentage or they got 

15 them all, as you said, if they got them all, 

16 why are they using a coworker model at all. 

17 Obviously, they don’t have them all. 

18 DR. MAURO: They don’t. No, they don’t. 

19 MR. GRIFFON: Something’s missing. 

20 DR. MAURO: In a perfect world -- 

21 MR. GRIFFON: But what are the numbers? 

22 What are the -- 

23 DR. MAURO: Yeah, but in a perfect world 

24 every worker that worked, in other words, 

25 every year there were a different ^. And if 
141

1 we had monthly bioassay samples from every 

2 worker every year, then we’d have everything. 

3 We wouldn’t need a coworker model. But we 

4 don’t have that. There’s a time period where 

5 we don’t have data for workers. There are 

6 workers that we don’t have data for. So 

that’s the reason why you go to the 95th 7 

8 percentile. 

9 MR. PHILLIPS: You don’t know that there are 

10 no workers -- 

11 DR. NETON: Here’s the problem. We have the 

12 workers who are actually working on the 

13 uranium drumming operation mostly. I think 

14 John’s right. The problem is that a number of 

15 people walked through these areas. You go to 

16 these town hall meetings, and there are 

17 security guards. There’s porter-type folks. 

18 They say I spent a lot of time in there. I 

19 spent a majority of my time walking through 

20 there because I was attached to that 

21 operation. 

22 There’s no way to demonstrate that’s 

true or not. We used the 95th 23 percentile 

24 bounding and say, well, we don’t know what 

25 your exposure was, but we know that it’s less 
142

1 than x and we’re assigning that value to those 

2 folks. That’s what we’ve traditionally done 

3 at all of the sites. 

4 MR. ELLIOTT: What the law does say on this 

5 is that we are to provide reasonable estimates 

6 of dose understanding full well that the 

7 records may not be full and complete in all 

8 regards. And I think that’s where this goes 

9 to have we provided a reasonable estimate. 

10 DR. MELIUS: No, it goes to whether you can 

11 do a dose reconstruction with sufficient 

12 accuracy, not whether it can be done, whether 

13 it’s a reasonable estimate. And no one’s 

14 arguing that you can’t use estimates. The 

15 question is, are those estimates appropriate 

16 to be able to do individual dose 

17 reconstruction with sufficient accuracy. As 

18 we all know there’s a hole in the regulations. 

19 We have a disconnect between our SEC 

20 evaluation criteria and our sufficient 

21 accuracy criteria. Makes it difficult, and 

22 this is one of those difficult situations. 

23 MR. ELLIOTT: I don’t know that we do. 

24 DR. ROESSLER: I’m reading from the rule 

25 here I think, because I had this question 
143

1 about sufficient accuracy. And it says 

2 radiation doses can be estimated with 

3 sufficient accuracy if NIOSH has established 

4 that it has access to sufficient information 

5 to estimate the maximum radiation dose. 

6 MS. HOWELL: Sufficient accuracy is 

7 established when a plausible upper bound can 

8 be reached. 

9 MR. GRIFFON: But it goes on, it’s 

10 important, too, Gen, maximum dose for all 

11 members of the class, plausible circumstances, 

12 something like that. Maximum plausible. 

13 DR. ROESSLER: For every type of cancer for 

14 which radiation doses are reconstructed that 

15 could have then occurred in plausible 

16 circumstances by any member of the class or if 

17 NIOSH has established that it has access to 

18 sufficient information to establish the 

19 radiation doses, all members of the class more 

20 precisely than estimate of the maximum 

21 radiation dose. That was a long sentence, but 

22 -- 

23 MR. GRIFFON: Part of that definition, too, 

24 sort of competes against the plausible 

25 circumstances to me. It tells us that we 
144

1 can’t just throw a high number at it and then 

2 for all members of the class says you’ve got 

3 to make sure you can bound it for everyone 

4 even the most exposed person. It’s sort of 

5 competing there. 

6 DR. NETON: We went down this path before, 

7 and I don’t know. 

8 MR. GRIFFON: We have discussed it. It’s 

9 the question of, to me it’s the question of 

10 does this issue reach an adequately -- 

11 DR. NETON: Well, this is a generic issue 

12 that is not just relevant to this discussion. 

13 I mean, virtually every SEC petition that’s 

14 pending right now has this issue because they 

15 all have coworker models, and they all assign 

95th 16 percentile under certain circumstances, 

the Rocky Flats, all of them. I mean, the 95th 17 

18 percentile the external data has been used 

19 throughout this program from its inception. 

20 I’ve never heard anyone object to that until 

21 this point. 

22 MR. ELLIOTT: They may object to how we 

23 arrived at it. 

DR. NETON: They may object to what the 95th 24 

25 percentile is, but no one has objected to that 
145

1 approach. I’ve not heard any objection until 

2 this meeting today. 

3 MS. MUNN: Quite to the contrary. It’s been 

4 widely accepted. Well, if you’re going to use 

the 95th 5 percentile, that’s acceptable. If 

6 we’re going to change the way we look at that 

7 now, then in my view it’s a showstopper. And 

8 it’s a showstopper not just for Blockson, but, 

9 and not just for other phosphate plants, but 

10 for the entire program. 

11 DR. MELIUS: The Board has never had a 

12 discussion of the coworker model in general, 

13 and the general applicability and the approach 

14 used to it and something that’s been dealt 

15 with it in, as far as I recall, only within 

16 the Procedures work group, never been brought 

17 to the Board. 

18 MR. ELLIOTT: Well, it’s dealt with in the 

19 review of the dose reconstructions that are 

20 conducted using that approach, and to date 

21 I’ve not seen one instance in any of those -- 

22 DR. MELIUS: And in the -- 

23 MR. ELLIOTT: Let me finish, Dr. Melius. 

24 I’ve not seen any indication that that has 

25 been an issue in any of the dose 
146

1 reconstruction reviews. 

2 DR. MELIUS: Because when I brought it up, 

3 I’ve talked to John. I’ve talked to the other 

4 people and Bob. They say, well, no, we just 

5 make an exception procedure if that’s involved 

6 and utilize the procedure. We don’t, they 

7 don’t review the procedure as far as doing 

8 individual dose reconstructions. That’s what 

9 I was referring to earlier in terms of sort of 

10 the disconnect in our approach to doing ^. We 

11 keep sort of circling around issues. 

12 MR. GRIFFON: In the DR review it is the 

13 application of -- appropriately apply what 

14 they were supposed to do. 

15 DR. NETON: It’s also covered in the 

16 implementation guide which was presented at 

17 the Board, one of the very first meetings. 

18 The concept is -- 

19 MS. HOWELL: And the dose reconstruction 

20 rules. 

21 MR. ELLIOTT: It’s in the dose 

22 reconstruction rules. 

23 DR. BRANCHE: That was my question. Has it 

24 come up in the Subcommittee? 

25 MR. GRIFFON: It’s come up in the, like I 
147

1 said, in the DR, in the subcommittee of DRs it 

2 really has been pushed back to the ^. But in 

3 other cases like Rocky Flats we did discuss 

4 it. 

5 DR. NETON: But I was thinking early on this 

6 came up with Bethlehem Steel where the Board 

7 was tremendously involved with many, many, 

8 many meetings at the Board level, and no one 

ever questioned the 95th 9 percentile air 

10 concentrations. They asked the question what 

11 that value was. I never heard anyone bring up 

the issue that the 95th 12 percentile applied to 

13 all workers, all claimants at Bethlehem Steel 

14 was inappropriate. And that’s exactly what 

15 we’re talking about here. 

16 MS. MUNN: It is. 

17 MR. GRIFFON: I feel we’ve discussed it, but 

18 we haven’t questioned whether you could 

19 actually not use -- 

20 DR. NETON: Well, I know. One would think 

21 that would be the time to bring it up. 

22 MR. GRIFFON: But it does get to the 

23 individual. I agree. It’s sort of the site 

24 specific stuff we discuss that that mean, but 

25 can you use it ever, I don’t think we’ve 
148

1 questioned that. 

2 DR. NETON: Well, that would have been the 

3 point to bring it up I would think. 

4 MR. GRIFFON: Right. 

5 DR. MAURO: There’s no doubt that this, I 

6 guess we’ve never had this conversation before 

7 in a global sense. That is, whenever we came 

8 to this problem, and we encountered data 

9 adequacy, that’s what we’re talking about, 

10 data inadequacy. 

11 MR. GRIFFON: And representativeness. 

12 DR. MAURO: Adequacy and representativeness, 

13 we always sort of dealt with it when we came 

14 across it at Bethlehem Steel we talked about 

15 it. We talked about it at Rocky. We’re 

16 talking about it right now in spades on Nevada 

17 Test Site. And it all goes to the heart of 

18 the concern that Jim brought up about. But we 

19 really never talked about what was ^. 

20 In some cases we did have a 

21 conversation, roundtable discussion about 

22 what’s the philosophy here. When would you 

use upper 95th 23 percentile as your criteria. 

24 And we’ve had some disagreements on those 

25 conditions. But I think in general when we 
149

1 came across this it’s almost like it was 

2 general agreement on each individual’s cases 

3 that if you don’t have complete datasets, then 

4 you go to, you build a surrogate model that 

5 blocks off some percentile from the dataset. 

6 But you have to feel convinced that 

7 that dataset is representative of in general 

8 the population of workers you’re working with. 

9 And that becomes a tough question. That’s 

10 exactly the question that Jim is asking. To 

11 what degree is the dataset that we have before 

12 us, those 122 urine samples for those 25 

13 workers, did that dataset capture the full 

14 distribution of possible exposures the workers 

15 may have experienced in Building 55 and by 

plucking off the upper 95th 16 percentile of that 

17 dataset that we have a degree of confidence 

18 that we placed an upper bound on all those 

19 workers that were not completely modeled or 

20 weren’t monitored or weren’t. That’s really 

21 the question. And we come down all the time -

22 - 

23 DR. NETON: But I think Dr. Melius’ point, 

if I understand it correctly, is that that 95th 24 

25 percentile cannot be applied to all workers 
150

1 because there are people with lower exposures 

2 who are going to get much higher exposures 

3 than they would have gotten. It’s not 

4 sufficiently accurate. I think that’s what 

5 I’m hearing is it’s a sufficient accuracy 

6 issue meaning you haven’t done an individual 

7 dose reconstruction sufficiently accurate for 

8 that individual. 

9 DR. MELIUS: I think the question is you 

10 have one question is for the unknown person 

11 that has worked in Building 55, unknown 

12 background. The spouse giving you information 

13 has no idea. Somehow you have an inkling that 

14 person may have spent significant time in 

15 building, in that building. Then I think 

16 using the overall distribution may be 

17 appropriate. I think that the question is 

18 when you have somebody that’s the chemical 

19 operator there, what you know, and I think the 

20 SC&A report provides supporting evidence, not 

21 conclusive, but supporting evidence, that has 

22 a different mean and they have a higher 

23 exposure than average. The question is is it 

24 appropriate to use the overall distribution 

25 for all workers in Building 55 to apply to 
151

1 that person that you know is in a category 

2 that would have a higher exposure. Then -- 

3 MR. GRIFFON: Are you, in effect, lowering 

4 that person’s -- I mean, if you look in the 

5 example in here there’s a certain individual 

6 in these urine datasheets who is always number 

7 one ranked on all these sheets that I’m 

8 looking through. Now if his twin is out 

9 there, if you don’t have data for him but his, 

10 the guy that did the same job every day and 

got the same exposure, the 95th 11 could almost be 

12 lower because there’s a lot of -- 

13 DR. NETON: That gets into the issue of -- 

14 MR. GRIFFON: That’s the question. 

15 DR. NETON: -- we’ve bounced about quite a 

16 bit which is if the population you have 

17 represented the highest exposed workers. 

18 MR. GRIFFON: Exactly, yeah, yeah. 

19 DR. NETON: Now, I would agree that if we 

20 knew for some reason that a person was in the 

21 highest end of the high category, we would 

22 accommodate that fact. But the fact is 

23 oftentimes we don’t know. 

24 MR. GRIFFON: I mean, just glancing at this 

25 for two minutes I would question like this one 
152

1 guy or woman has urine levels that are like 

2 five to six times higher than everyone listed 

3 here on a regular basis. Now is that some 

4 unique, you know, what did this person do or 

5 was that -- 

6 DR. NETON: Right, that gets to the point 

7 though. 

8 MR. GRIFFON: Are we by putting all this 

9 data in are we skewing and lowering the 

10 exposures for that one job? That’s the level 

11 that we’ve explored before in other places. 

12 And we’ve had the... I mean, even with Rocky 

13 Flats we ended up pushing and being convinced 

that if we used the 95th 14 for all workers we 

15 were satisfied that we’d bound. But the 

original proposal wasn’t to use the 95th 16 . It 

17 was proposed to use the full distribution or 

18 the 50th. 

19 DR. NETON: ^. 

20 MR. GRIFFON: So I think we’ve answered this 

21 question before. I mean, I’m coming into this 

22 -- 

23 DR. NETON: Well, that’s a little different 

24 issue than what I think we were talking about 

25 before. 
153

1 MS. MUNN: A slightly different issue. 

2 MR. GRIFFON: That would be my issue at any 

3 rate. 

4 THE PATH FORWARD

5 MS. MUNN: I’d just like to ask. James, 

6 what do you see as a path forward? 

7 DR. MELIUS: I don’t know. I’m going to -- 

8 I’ve listened to Jim Neton. I will go back 

9 and re-look at the site profile again and see. 

10 But I will tell you right now that I don’t 

11 believe that what John Mauro has said, I don’t 

12 believe that SC&A has done an adequate 

13 exploration of that. I question whether all 

14 of the chemical operators actually were 

15 sampled are included in the dataset. We 

16 certainly know based on the little information 

17 we have, and it’s limited, that it appears 

18 that the chemical operators, that there are 

19 categories of people that had job titles that 

20 had higher exposures in that dataset, appear 

21 to be. And again, it’s a few people. 

22 DR. NETON: You would expect that. 

23 DR. MELIUS: Yeah, I know. But it would 

24 match up with their job descriptions. I want 

25 to be careful what I say here. And that there 
154

1 are other people that are certainly included 

2 in the dataset that have more peripheral 

3 association with Building 55, would not 

4 necessarily be expected to be in there. 

5 Certainly, they’re included on that basis. 

6 So I question whether we really have 

7 captured all of the people that worked full 

8 time, and what percentage of those that worked 

9 full time in that building in the sampling. 

10 And to what extent that’s knowable based on 

11 other information I don’t know at this point. 

12 But I’m just going back through all the 

13 detailed individual information that’s 

14 available. 

15 Secondly, I remind you that it’s not 

16 just a question of applying these data to 

17 people working there in the years that there 

18 was sampling done. There are, I believe, 

19 roughly three years of production for which 

20 there’s no sampling data available in that. 

21 So we’re not only taking and applying this 

distribution of 95th 22 percentile this 

23 distribution of people within that time 

24 period, we’re also applying to a group for 

25 which maybe the same individuals, maybe other 
155

1 individuals. 

2 I don’t know what happens with changes 

3 that were in the facility going forward. 

4 There’s certainly some variations in 

5 production over that later time, that later 

6 period but for which there are no data. 

7 DR. NETON: No production data. 

8 DR. MELIUS: I meant no sampling data. You 

9 know, we have production data. 

10 DR. NETON: But you can use that. 

11 DR. MELIUS: Well, is that the factor that, 

12 you’re assuming that that’s the major factor 

13 that affected production. I’m not even rating 

14 the statistical analysis by SC&A, and given 

15 the questions about who was sampled when, the 

16 years and so forth, I would, I’m not convinced 

17 that that is the major factor affecting 

18 exposure. 

19 MS. MUNN: The concern is twofold. First 

20 with respect to Blockson, whether we can get 

21 any further down the road in resolving the 

22 differences of opinion. And secondly, the way 

23 the decision here will affect the remainder of 

24 the program. How we proceed here is not clear 

25 to me. 
156

1 DR. MELIUS: Well, I’m not proposing we try 

2 to settle this for the rest of the program, 

3 here today or in our next Board meeting. I 

4 think what I said I would do is I would go 

5 back and listen to Jim’s arguments that he’s 

6 presented, and I’ll go back and re-review it 

7 in that context. 

8 I would also ask SC&A to re-review 

9 what they’ve done in the context of the issues 

10 that have been raised. I don’t think they 

11 disagree with John in what he stated. I don’t 

12 think he’s fully addressing this. And then 

13 we’ll, I guess we’ll talk in St. Louis. 

14 DR. BRANCHE: Ms. Munn, are you okay with 

15 asking SC&A to take another look at these 

16 data? 

17 MS. MUNN: I would ask of SC&A whether they 

18 feel there’s anything further in this data 

19 that can be provided for us. 

20 DR. MAURO: I guess the answer to that is 

21 no. Right now, I mean, it’s a tough, you 

22 know, to say there’s really nothing more. But 

23 we have hit this with everything we had. 

24 Looked at it upside-down and sideways. The 

25 number of reports you’ve seen, reports, Harry 
157

1 Chmelynski is on the line asking questions 

2 such as why was the process, we know that the 

3 bioassay samples were taken over a certain 

4 time period. Were they taken during the time 

5 period when the production was at its highest? 

6 And the answer was yeah. It looks that way. 

7 It looks like that at least was up there. So 

8 even though we don’t have bioassay data for 

9 let’s say later years, look at the production 

10 data, you would expect that the bioassay data 

11 that we do have captured the years where 

12 there’s the highest potential for exposure. 

13 Then we ask ourselves the question, well, did 

14 we get enough data from different job 

15 categories. And the answer is, well, it would 

16 have been great to have more data from certain 

17 job categories. Would have liked to have had 

18 that. And if we had that we’d be in a 

19 stronger position, but is that a fatal flaw? 

20 And I’m talking right now in almost like 

21 commonsense discussion, the analysis was done, 

22 lab analysis was done statistically on the 

23 data. And the way it comes out is that we 

feel that it would be, the 95th 24 percentile 

25 number from the sample, and especially since 
158

1 the sample represents a large number of 

2 workers -- I’ll say it again. It’s not that 

3 we’re talking about a thousand workers and we 

4 only have samples from 25 workers. We have 

5 samples from 25 workers, and I don’t know the 

6 total number of different workers that were 

7 there in any given year was something on the 

8 order of ten to 20 working in that building. 

9 So we do have a lot of data capturing a lot of 

10 the different workers. It would have been 

11 great if the worst worker -- for example, 

12 let’s say right now we’re presuming that the 

13 worker’s category was the guy that ^. And it 

14 would be great if we had a complete dataset 

15 for all the workers every month that did that 

16 job. But I say to myself, but wait a minute, 

17 but I do have 122 urine samples for workers 

18 that were in that building some of whom did 

19 that. And I say -- and remember, that’s one 

20 sample taken. I’m going to take that as the 

21 upper-end value. I’m going to assign that to 

22 everyone as if they were exposed at that level 

23 for six years, five years. I walk away saying 

24 that my guess is, if anything, it’s a 

25 plausible scenario. So in my mind it could 
159

1 have happened but probably not likely. 

2 MR. GRIFFON: That’s not quite the way you 

3 described it 

4 DR. MAURO: Help me out because if I’m going 

5 to get it wrong -- 

6 MR. GRIFFON: You’re saying as if you did 

7 this for five or six years. That’s not true. 

8 You have a urine sample for that individual 

9 that did that occasionally. 

10 DR. MAURO: Yeah, right. 

11 DR. NETON: That anybody did. 

12 MR. GRIFFON: I mean, the urine in many ways 

13 is better than the air sampling because the 

14 air sampling raises all kinds of questions. 

15 DR. MAURO: I really like the urine samples. 

16 I like that you’ve got 122 urine samples for 

17 25 workers and the total number of workers 

18 that worked in Building 55 is limited to about 

19 that number. 

20 MR. GRIFFON: You understand it’s not quite 

21 as conservative as -- 

22 DR. MAURO: It could be more conservative. 

23 MR. GRIFFON: -- you might have -- 

24 DR. MAURO: Right. 

25 MR. GRIFFON: -- that might be the worst 
160

1 job. 

2 DR. MAURO: I would be the first to admit if 

3 there was a guy that was doing this eight 

4 hours a day, seven days a week. 

5 MR. GRIFFON: They didn’t do it though. 

6 DR. MAURO: But it wasn’t like that. 

7 DR. NETON: But that’s the point. Who did 

8 the worst job that was there for whatever 

9 length or duration it was, we think we have a 

10 sample for. 

11 DR. MAURO: See, within that 122 samples 

12 that upper-end value, and then assuming that 

13 he’s at that point for five years, we walk 

14 away saying I don’t know what more you can do. 

15 This is almost like -- the way I look at it is 

16 this is a place where the coworker approach 

17 works, in our opinion, much better than what 

18 we’ve seen in other locations. There’s always 

19 going to be this challenge on a coworker model 

20 whether or not it’s of adequate 

21 representativeness, but this is one of the 

22 places where it’s at its strongest. 

23 MR. GRIFFON: Just a couple background 

24 because I think we’re going to, some of you 

25 want to look at this more, but the 25 workers 
161

1 that are mentioned out of how many? I don’t 

2 know the context. 

3 DR. MAURO: We had all the -- 

4 MR. GRIFFON: Is it in the site profile? 

5 DR. MAURO: Yes, we were able to estimate 

6 that. 

7 Do you remember actually the total 

8 number of workers that worked in Building 55 

9 in a given year? 

10 MR. PHILLIPS: Well, it depends. 

11 Tom, you can help me with this. 

12 Up front when they started talking 

13 about forward looking, they were estimating 

14 like 20 workers. 

15 MR. TOMES: Well, not actually working in 

16 Building 55 but on the project. 

17 MR. PHILLIPS: In the worker interviews what 

18 I gleaned from that it was more like 12 or 13. 

19 MR. TOMES: There was two operators on the 

20 back shifts, and there was two operators on 

21 the day shifts with two extra day men to 

22 handle because they dumped material in the day 

23 shift. 

24 MR. GRIFFON: And then we’re talking 

25 Building 55 but nobody’s mentioned Building 40 
162

1 if you’re pretty sure that 55 -- 

2 DR. NETON: No, we have a different model 

3 for Building 40. 

4 MR. PHILLIPS: And if you look on the report 

5 in there, it plots the number of bioassay 

6 samples for a month, and it comes out to be 

7 about 12 or 13. So there’s a good, some 

8 probability that everybody in that building 

9 was sampled except for the people who 

10 occasionally -- 

11 MR. GRIFFON: And some years have been 

12 logged, but there’s no sense of why this -- 

13 and AEC did this all, right? Blockson didn’t 

14 do it themselves. 

15 MR. PHILLIPS: HASL. 

16 DR. MELIUS: You’re missing the last three 

17 here. 

18 DR. MAURO: But see, we were concerned about 

19 that, and we plotted the throughput. And I’m 

20 sorry, you can’t see this. In one of our 

21 handouts, but one of the things we looked at 

22 was, is it possible that the time period 

23 during the latter years, starting let’s say 

24 around ’58, all this was in a throughput of 

25 uranium, increase substantially. But it 
163

1 didn’t. It was, in fact if anything, it was a 

2 little lower in the aggregate in the later 

3 years than it was in the earlier years. And 

4 it’s in the earlier years when we got the 

5 bioassay data. So there’s no guarantee. 

6 MR. GRIFFON: That’s better than the 

7 reverse. 

8 DR. MAURO: It’s better than the reverse, 

9 yes. 

10 MR. PHILLIPS: And just logically if indeed 

11 the highest exposed worker was the one loading 

12 the end product, then the throughput should be 

13 proportional to the exposures for that 

14 individual. So definitely in proportion to -- 

15 MS. MUNN: So the answer to the question 

16 that we studied, we’re debating here is that 

17 probably there is no more to be said between 

18 SC&A and Dr. Melius. If there’s no issue, 

19 cannot add anything that we have not already 

20 seen, and therefore, the possibility of 

21 discussing this further either offline or here 

22 is not likely to come to any change of 

23 position. 

24 DR. MAURO: I mean, I answered the question. 

25 I thought ^ might add value. 
164

1 Harry, are you still on the line? 

2 (no response) 

3 DR. MAURO: Harry Chmelynski? 

4 DR. CHMELYNSKI (by Telephone): Yes, I’m 

5 still here. 

6 DR. MAURO: Is there anything, after looking 

7 at all these data in the analysis that we’ve 

8 done to date, is there any other things that 

9 you think might add value by doing some more 

10 digging or do you have in mind now for example 

11 as you worked through the problem were there 

12 other things that you would have liked to have 

13 done that you didn’t do? 

14 DR. CHMELYNSKI (by Telephone): To be honest 

15 I spent a lot more time on the radon data than 

16 I did on the urine samples. My impression of 

17 the urine sample data compared to the other 

18 sites I’ve looked at on this project, this one 

19 seemed relatively complete in terms of the 

20 coverage of sampling. I’m not sure we got 

21 everybody but -- and we probably didn’t -- but 

22 seems like they had a goal of doing pretty 

23 much complete testing and that made me feel 

pretty comfortable with the 95th 24 percentile. 

25 Now in terms of what else I would look 
165

1 at I think the question of are these, should 

2 there be some matching done in terms of job 

3 category. Yes, that’s always one that should 

4 be done. 

5 MR. GRIFFON: Can that be done? We tried 

6 for a few right, with the worker interview, 

7 CATIs. 

8 DR. MAURO: In other words in the original 

9 records we have, in fact, we have the -- 

10 MR. PHILLIPS: We only have a few. 

11 DR. MAURO: Right. 

12 MR. PHILLIPS: That’s the only thing that 

13 could add clarification if you have other 

14 people who came forward who you identified who 

15 you could associate their job categories with. 

16 That’s the only thing that I know that could 

17 expand our knowledge on this. 

18 MS. MUNN: That’s not practical. 

19 DR. MAURO: There’s a little bit more to 

20 this though. My understanding was that the, 

21 for example, the guy that filled up the cans, 

22 that that wasn’t a full-time job. So what 

23 happens is that though he may have a title for 

24 a job because of the nature of the work, I 

25 think that people, these folks wore a lot of 
166

1 hats. 

2 Let’s say we found out I always called 

3 it this; I always called it that, we’re still 

4 going to be confronted with the dilemma. You 

5 know, even though you were given that title, 

6 one could say, well, because of that title 

7 your potential for exposure is lower. But at 

8 the same time we also know that when we looked 

9 at this it sounds like that there were people 

10 doing multiple different jobs because it 

11 wasn’t a full-time operation where they were 

12 continually filling up this. 

13 So I like the idea that you pick an 

14 upper end, especially since you don’t know 

15 exactly what the job categories were. What 

16 you effectively have done here is to assume 

17 the worst. That is, since we don’t know what 

18 the job categories were for everybody, you 

19 can’t be that definitive, you have to be 

claimant favorable and assign the 95th 20 

21 percentile to everyone for all time. That’s 

22 the big one, for all time. So I go back to 

23 say, I guess if we got some more information 

24 on job category that can’t hurt. 

25 MR. GRIFFON: Has anyone asked -- I’m sure 
167

1 you’ve done this interview, group interviews 

2 at the sites, you’ve asked about urinalysis. 

3 DR. MAURO: Yes. 

4 MR. GRIFFON: And everyone, did they all 

5 undergo urinalysis or was it kind of -- 

6 DR. BRANCHE: Do what, Mark? Would you 

7 repeat, did they do all what? 

8 MR. GRIFFON: Did they all undergo 

9 urinalysis? 

10 MS. MUNN: No, not everybody who worked at 

11 Blockson in one of the buildings underwent 

12 urinalysis. But most, there’s a large enough 

13 percentage that it’s pretty high. 

14 DR. NETON: It’s confusing among the 

15 workers. We have a worker who insists he 

16 never left a sample. We have a complete 

17 monitoring record for him. I mean, so it’s 50 

18 years old. You’re not going to get very clear 

19 information from workers. 

20 MS. MUNN: But in response to the question, 

21 Jim, it doesn’t seem that there’s any future 

22 in your discussing this further with SC&A. 

23 MR. GRIFFON: But I think if we have 

24 specific questions -- 

25 DR. MELIUS: I mean, I may come back with 
168

1 specific questions. 

2 MR. GRIFFON: You can e-mail it to Wanda and 

3 C-C NIOSH and SC&A and go forward that way. 

4 MS. MUNN: I have to ask the same question 

5 of NIOSH. Do you see any additional 

6 information other than with respect to this 

7 particular item that is likely to be developed 

8 or that we could develop as a result of 

9 further conversations with Jim? 

10 DR. NETON: None based on what I’ve heard so 

11 far today, but we’re open to additional 

12 inquiries if people have questions to be 

13 answered. 

14 MR. GRIFFON: Can I ask one last thing? 

15 The packet you gave me, Jim, is that 

16 all the 120 -- I didn’t count -- but is that 

17 all the -- 

18 DR. NETON: I don’t know. I just gave you 

19 what was e-mailed by John. 

20 Did you mail all 120 urine samples? 

21 DR. MAURO: I mailed all the files that Tom 

22 -- 

23 MR. TOMES: It may be ^ that’s how we 

24 received them. 

25 DR. NETON: But if you look under the A-B ^ 
169

1 (Whereupon, multiple speakers spoke 

2 simultaneously.) 

3 DR. BRANCHE: And for the record, as John 

4 and I talked in a long conversation yesterday, 

5 such information will be mailed because it’s 

6 got -- we’re not going to use electronic means 

7 to convey such information in the future. 

8 MS. MUNN: That’s true. We need to keep 

9 very close tabs on that. 

10 I attempted to say is there anything 

11 else we need to bring to the table, but I 

12 asked that question when we began, and there 

13 was nothing else at that time. As I see it 

14 right now we have action items to pursue with 

15 respect to the radon question, but we will not 

16 have, unless Dr. Melius presents additional 

17 questions to either SC&A or NIOSH or both -- 

18 DR. BRANCHE: Or you. 

19 MS. MUNN: -- or me, we do not have, we’re 

20 at a stalemate there and have no answers that 

21 we can give one way or the other. We’ll try 

22 to resolve that radon issues before our 

23 meeting in St. Louis. 

24 Does anyone else see any further 

25 action that we can take with respect to the 
170

1 disagreement relative to data? 

2 (no response) 

3 MS. MUNN: If not, I declare this meeting 

4 adjourned. We will be in contact with you by 

5 e-mail and telephone regarding our next 

6 communications. 

7 DR. BRANCHE: Thank you. Ms. Munn has 

8 called the meeting to a close and so if the 

9 person closest to the phone can turn it off. 

10 We’re not leaving it on. We’re turning it off 

11 altogether. Thank you. 

12 (Whereupon, the working group adjourned at 

13 1:00 p.m.) 
171

1 CERTIFICATE OF COURT REPORTER 

STATE OF GEORGIA 

COUNTY OF FULTON 

 I, Steven Ray Green, Certified Merit Court 

Reporter, do hereby certify that I reported the 

above and foregoing on the day of June 5, 2008; 

and it is a true and accurate transcript of the 

testimony captioned herein. 

 I further certify that I am neither kin 

nor counsel to any of the parties herein, nor 

have any interest in the cause named herein. 

 WITNESS my hand and official seal this the 

15th day of November, 2008. 

___________________________________ 

STEVEN RAY GREEN, CCR, CVR-CM, PNSC 

CERTIFIED MERIT COURT REPORTER 

CERTIFICATE NUMBER: A-2102