STEVEN RAY GREEN AND ASSOCIATES 

NATIONALLY CERTIFIED COURT REPORTERS 

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 

WORKING GROUP 

ADVISORY BOARD ON 

RADIATION AND WORKER HEALTH 

PROCEDURES REVIEW

 

The verbatim transcript of the Working Group 

Meeting of the Advisory Board on Radiation and 

Worker Health held in Cincinnati, Ohio, on 

July 21, 2008. 
2

C O N T E N T S

July 21, 2008 

OPENING REMARKS 6 

MR. TED KATZ, DFO 

INTRODUCTION BY CHAIR 9 

MS. WANDA MUNN 

RESOLUTION OF DISCREPENCIES IN DATABASE ITEMS 10 

FULL REVIEW OF DATABASE CONVERSION TO SQL STATUS 11 

OTIB-0052 34 

APPENDIX BB 81 

OTIB-0070 99 

PROC-0090 113 

OVERVIEW OF OPEN ITEMS FROM SECOND SET 245 

COURT REPORTER’S CERTIFICATE 251 
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 (ACTING)

KATZ, Theodore M., M.P.A. 

Program Analyst 

National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health 

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 

Atlanta, Georgia

 

MEMBERSHIP

GIBSON, Michael H. 

President 

Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical, and Energy Union 

Local 5-4200 

Miamisburg, Ohio 

GRIFFON, Mark A. 

President 

Creative Pollution Solutions, Inc. 

Salem, New Hampshire 

MUNN, Wanda I. 

Senior Nuclear Engineer (Retired) 

Richland, Washington 

ZIEMER, Paul L., Ph.D. 

Professor Emeritus 

School of Health Sciences 

Purdue University 

Lafayette, Indiana 
5

IDENTIFIED PARTICIPANTS 

ADAMS, NANCY, NIOSH 

BRACKETT, LIZ, ORAU 

CHEW, MEL, CHEW AND ASSCS. 

ELLIOTT, LARRY, NIOSH 

FERGUSON, MICHELLE, ORAU 

HINNEFELD, STUART, NIOSH 

HOMOKI-TITUS, LIZ, HHS 

MAKHIJANI, ARJUN, SC&A 

MAO, REBECCA, OCAS 

MARSCHKE, STEVE, SC&A 

MCGOLERICK, ROB, HHS 

MORRIS, ROBERT, ORAU 

NETON, JIM, NIOSH 

SHATTO, DAVID, ORAU 

SIEBERT, SCOTT, ORAU 

SMITH, MATT, ORAU 

THOMAS, ELYSE, ORAU 

 
6

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

2 JULY 21, 2008 

3 (9:30 a.m.) 

4 OPENING REMARKS

5 MR. KATZ: Good morning. This is the 

6 Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, 

7 and this is the Procedures work group of that 

8 board. This is Ted Katz. I am acting as the 

9 designated federal official because Christine 

10 Branche, who ordinarily is in this position, 

11 is presently acting as the Director of NIOSH. 

12 So to start with let’s take attendance. 

13 First, in the room if everybody on the 

14 Advisory Board that’s with this working group 

15 would identify themselves to begin. 

16 MS. MUNN: This is Wanda Munn, chair of the 

17 working group. 

18 DR. ZIEMER: Paul Ziemer, member of the work 

19 group. 

20 MR. KATZ: And that’s it in the room. And 

21 on the telephone are there any Advisory Board 

22 members on the telephone? 

23 MR. GIBSON (by Telephone): Yeah, Ted, this 

24 is Mike. I’m here. 

25 MR. KATZ: Welcome, Mike. 
7

1 Mark Griffon? Does anyone know is 

2 Mark -- 

3 MS. MUNN: He indicated that he would 

4 probably be late because of some medical 

5 problems in his family, but that he expects to 

6 be on hopefully by eleven o’clock. 

7 MR. KATZ: Next let’s just identify ORAU or 

8 NIOSH, OCAS participants in the room first. 

9 MR. ELLIOTT: Larry Elliott, Director of 

10 OCAS. 

11 MR. HINNEFELD: Stu Hinnefeld, Technical 

12 Program Manager, OCAS. 

13 DR. NETON: Jim Neton, OCAS. 

14 MS. THOMAS: Elyse Thomas, O-R-A-U. 

15 MR. SIEBERT: Scott Siebert, O-R-A-U. 

16 MR. KATZ: And then on the telephone, any 

17 ORAU, NIOSH participants? 

18 MS. MAO (by Telephone): This is Rebecca 

19 Mao. I’m on detail at OCAS here. 

20 MR. SMITH (by Telephone): This is Matt 

21 Smith with O-R-A-U team. 

22 MR. KATZ: And now SC&A participants on the 

23 phone. 

24 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Steve 

25 Marschke. 
8

1 MR. KATZ: Arjun, are you attending? 

2 (no response) 

3 MS. MUNN: Steve, to the best of your 

4 knowledge, are you the only one who’s going to 

5 be on for SC&A? 

6 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): I thought 

7 Arjun was going to be on, but maybe he got 

8 caught up in the air traffic trouble. 

9 MS. MUNN: Okay, thank you. 

10 MR. MORRIS: This is Bob Morris with Oak 

11 Ridge team. I just joined. 

12 MR. KATZ: Oh, great. Welcome, Bob. 

13 Now other federal employees 

14 participating in the room. 

15 MS. HOMOKI-TITUS: Liz Homoki-Titus with 

16 Health and Human Services. 

17 MR. KATZ: And on the telephone? 

18 (no response) 

19 MR. KATZ: And then anybody else who would 

20 like to identify themselves who’s 

21 participating by phone. 

22 MS. BRACKETT (by Telephone): This is Liz 

23 Brackett. I’m with the ORAU team. I just 

24 joined. 

25 MR. KATZ: Oh, welcome, Liz. 
9

1 MS. FERGUSON (by Telephone): Michelle 

2 Ferguson. I’m with the ORAU team. 

3 MR. KATZ: Welcome. 

4 Is there anyone else, congressional 

5 staff, that would like to identify themselves? 

6 (no response) 

7 MR. KATZ: Members of the public? 

8 (no response) 

9 MS. MUNN: Thank you, Ted. 

10 MR. KATZ: It’s all yours, Wanda. 

11 INTRODUCTION BY CHAIR

12 MS. MUNN: Thank you very much. 

13 Everyone I hope has a copy of the 

14 agenda. Does everyone on the phone have a 

15 copy of the agenda as well? We’re not going 

16 to go down these in order. It was not my 

17 intent. I just wanted to get those items on 

18 your desk so that you could see what we were 

19 hoping to accomplish today. We have 

20 information that Mel Chew will be with us at 

21 ten o’clock. 

22 Bob, we’re glad you’re already on. 

23 Thank you. 

24 Perhaps before we undertake OTIB-0052 

25 at ten o’clock, we can run through our first 
10

1 item that the list of items, the discrepancy 

2 items, that Steve Marschke had noted for us 

3 from the database. I hope that those will be 

4 fairly easy to go through if we can take them 

5 one at a time. 

6 Stu, could I ask you to start with the 

7 item entitled, “Resolution of discrepancies in 

8 database”? 

9 RESOLUTION OF DISCREPENCIES IN DATABASE ITEMS

10 MR. HINNEFELD: Friday we did finally get 

11 the latest version of the database copied over 

12 to the NIOSH side. If you recall this 

13 database resides on the ORAU system, and when 

14 we want the updated version we simply call it 

15 over and have it transferred so we have the 

16 latest version. And it appears that there was 

17 something about that copying over that wasn’t 

18 working exactly right because we would think 

19 we had it, and then it wouldn’t be updated. 

20 But Friday we did get the updated version and 

21 I checked all of these, and the NIOSH status 

22 is now matched on Friday, I better not say 

23 today, on Friday the NIOSH statuses matched 

24 what the BB on all four of these documents. 

25 MS. MUNN: So TBD-6000 BB item 13 is in 
11

1 progress? 

2 MR. HINNEFELD: There are 13 items in 

3 progress. 

4 MS. MUNN: And they’re all in progress? 

5 MR. HINNEFELD: They’re still in progress on 

6 the NIOSH side. They did on Friday. 

7 MS. MUNN: And OTIB-0002, those seven are 

8 all showing open. 

9 MR. HINNEFELD: They’re open, yeah. 

10 MS. MUNN: And PROC-0080, two items show 

11 closed. And PROC-0095, those three items show 

12 open. 

13 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. 

14 MS. MUNN: Good. 

15 Steve, did you have any comment to 

16 make on that, one way or the other? 

17 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): No, I think 

18 that I agree with the situation as it is now. 

19 MS. MUNN: Good, thank you very much. 

20 FULL REVIEW OF DATABASE CONVERSION TO SQL STATUS

21 As long as we’re talking about that 

22 database, and the first item that we mentioned 

23 on the agenda was reviewing the database 

24 conversion to SQL, do we have, is it going to 

25 take us more than 15 minutes to address that, 
12

1 do you think? 

2 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, probably not because I 

3 don’t know enough about it to talk longer than 

4 that. Because I just started trying. I can 

5 show you a demo of what the SQL procedures 

6 tracking application looks like. Now this is 

7 an application, I think if I can get the TV to 

8 work, if the TV and my computer will both 

9 work. 

10 This is a document tracking 

11 application that we had in place for tracking 

12 documents that are reviewed. And these are 

13 documents that are the contractor prepares it; 

14 they submit to us for review and approval. 

15 This would track our review and approval on 

16 those, including our comments and comment 

17 resolution. And I think evaluation reports 

18 probably are going to be in here eventually. 

19 And this will be sort of a modular 

20 system that will allow very many of these 

21 document review applications to be captured on 

22 a single system. And so all the work that 

23 we’ve accomplished then we can have a record 

24 on this one system, all the work that’s gone 

25 on. It is structured such that various people 
13

1 have various rights to different types of 

2 documents. So they would be able to view, and 

3 in some cases write to, the database for the 

4 documents that they have business looking at. 

5 So the Board review documents would be 

6 a particular category of document here that 

7 the Board members could look at, SC&A members 

8 certainly, maybe designated ones, whoever SC&A 

9 designates to want to be able to see it and 

10 ORAU and NIOSH people would be able to look at 

11 it. And so it’s a comprehensive, it wasn’t 

12 built specifically for procedures tracking, 

13 procedures review tracking, but it’s to adopt 

14 this structure for that. 

15 And this would then allow everybody to 

16 write to the same system, the SQL has the 

17 advantage over ACCESS in that you can write, 

18 we can write on our system, ORAU can write on 

19 their system, everybody can write on their own 

20 system, whatever system you write to, SQL will 

21 keep track of that so everybody will see all 

22 the up-to-date changes. 

23 This is a work in progress. This was 

24 rushed out for me to be able to show today. 

25 So there are things that could be done, things 
14

1 that could be done to modify this if need be, 

2 I think. Since I don’t have to do it, I can 

3 speak with assurance that someone can. And so 

4 I’ll try to get whatever demo I can have. 

5 I do have a little bit of a users’ 

6 guide that I may have to refer back and forth 

7 to and then when I do it will show up on the 

8 TV screen as well. This is the default. This 

9 is what it opens in when you go there. 

10 There’s a location right now, I believe this 

11 is probably on a test server. I don’t believe 

12 it’s on an operational or production server 

13 right now. I believe it’s a test server. 

14 MS. MUNN: So we will have a specific icon. 

15 MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, there’ll be a specific 

16 place where you’ll look at it. So you go to 

17 the O drive. It’ll be there, and it will open 

18 like this. And the default screen is the 

19 documents that are in the system. And in this 

20 case, these documents I believe are all the 

21 documents that are in the procedure review 

22 process, the Board’s procedure review process. 

23 MS. MUNN: Good. We’re not going to make a 

24 mistake in getting these mixed up with any 

25 other database tracking that’s going on. 
15

1 MR. HINNEFELD: No. 

2 MS. MUNN: Good. Thank you; that would 

3 really confuse me. 

4 MR. HINNEFELD: The statuses that are in the 

5 system so far are completed, open and deleted. 

6 The reason for that is that we like in 

7 developing these to essentially limit the 

8 number of statuses because when you start 

9 adding specialty statuses, you end up with a 

10 lot. For instance, we made specialty statuses 

11 for dose reconstructions that we tracked 

12 through NOCTS. 

13 We probably now have 30 statuses for 

14 dose reconstructions that are going through 

15 the system because when you want to keep track 

16 of the history of a document and its status, 

17 of a review in its status, then there are a 

18 lot of things you want to keep track of. And 

19 so you get a lot of different statuses. 

20 The reason we have like 30 different 

21 statuses on dose reconstructions is we have 

22 open, completed, pended, which means that we 

23 need additional information in order to see. 

24 Pulled which means DOL has taken it back 

25 without a dose reconstruction being completed. 
16

1 Then there are statuses to keep track of DOL 

2 returned cases, so you have all those statuses 

3 DOL returned and all those same statuses. 

4 You have cases out of pending, you 

5 know, once a case gets pended, out of pending 

6 indicates that it was pended for awhile so 

7 there’s an out of pending status. There are a 

8 series of reinstated statuses which are cases 

9 that were pulled once but then reinstated. 

10 And so there are like 30 different 

11 statuses on dose reconstructions, and we feel 

12 like we’ve learned something from that and 

13 would rather limit the number of statuses. So 

14 the information we want to keep track of, 

15 which is like transferring to another tracking 

16 vehicle or things like that we would want to 

17 keep track of in another field. I don’t know 

18 if those are built into here yet, but that 

19 would be something we would include as a way 

20 to keep track of what we want to keep track of 

21 without having a whole lot of statuses. 

22 MS. MUNN: Yeah, that was going to be a 

23 concern I’d like to express. For example, at 

24 least I have found it helpful to delineate the 

25 difference between open and in abeyance. 
17

1 We’ve been very clear about the difference in 

2 that in our case. 

3 MR. HINNEFELD: I think we’ll want to retain 

4 that just for ease of finding what you need to 

5 work on, you know, when you work with the 

6 database you want to keep that. But I think 

7 our preference would be to keep it in a field 

8 other than the status field, have the status 

9 field to be open or closed. 

10 MS. MUNN: Yes, Paul? 

11 DR. ZIEMER: I have a question, Stu. Could 

12 you clarify? Is this a separate database for 

13 you to track your procedures or is it a sort 

14 on the procedures database or is it both? 

15 MR. HINNEFELD: I think probably they are, 

16 they could very well be linked, could be 

17 pulling data from the same data tables, but I 

18 don’t know that that’s the case. 

19 DR. ZIEMER: Right now it’s a separate 

20 database in your point of view simply -- 

21 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, we always think of 

22 these things as applications. You know, we 

23 have these data tables where we try to keep 

24 track of pretty much everything. And so when 

25 we have something like this, this is an 
18

1 application that pulls data from whatever data 

2 tables it needs to pull it from in order to 

3 put in the usable form that you want it. So 

4 we have applications that work similarly. 

5 They’re all in SQL. They kind of run on the 

6 same platform. They’re applications that 

7 track dose reconstructions through the 

8 process, map a case as it moves through the 

9 process. They keep track of documents. We 

10 have another, a linked one that keeps track of 

11 SEC activities and what’s happening to SEC 

12 activities. So rather than think of this as 

13 its own database, it may, in fact, require the 

14 addition of some data tables or data fields to 

15 existing data tables. But it pulls from data 

16 tables that we keep. 

17 DR. ZIEMER: Well, I can’t read it too well, 

18 but if you scroll down, well, let’s say the 

19 first item, which looks like the ORAU 

20 procedure. 

21 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, that one is an ORAU. 

22 DR. ZIEMER: And it says it’s open. If you 

23 click on that, does that move it into or can 

24 you from this find the procedure review? Does 

25 it move it into the other database or is 
19

1 everything that we have also on here? Or do 

2 we know at this point? 

3 MR. HINNEFELD: I think probably the review 

4 of this procedure has not been loaded yet, but 

5 it could be linked to be brought up. 

6 DR. ZIEMER: It could be or is that the 

7 intent? I’m just trying to get a feel for 

8 what this is compared to what we’re doing. 

9 MS. MUNN: Yeah, and I certainly hope that 

10 the intent is to link it because -- 

11 MR. HINNEFELD: You mean the document 

12 itself. You mean the entire document that 

13 SC&A wrote, the big, thick document? 

14 DR. ZIEMER: No, no. 

15 MS. ADAMS: Your comments. 

16 MS. MUNN: We mean this. 

17 DR. ZIEMER: If this procedure has been 

18 reviewed, does that show up here and does it, 

19 do the findings show up here? 

20 MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah. I just clicked on it. 

21 I just didn’t click on the top one, and it 

22 takes you to the detail page. And the detail 

23 is to now, the detail displays here. These 

24 are the assigned reviewers. These are the 

25 people who would see this when they open up 
20

1 the application. So the members of these 

2 groups would see this. 

3 DR. ZIEMER: So the SC&A findings show up 

4 here. 

5 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. And this defines 

6 document owners and editors. In other words 

7 that’s changing this document here. I think 

8 if I can get that document -- 

9 DR. ZIEMER: It looks like they’re already 

10 linked. 

11 MS. MUNN: It looks like it, yeah. 

12 MR. HINNEFELD: And so, yeah. So there’s 

13 some fields that are not populated. I mean, 

14 we could populate these. 

15 DR. ZIEMER: But at the front end does this 

16 show up as a separate entry into that from our 

17 -- 

18 MS. MUNN: Yeah, that’s what I was asking 

19 will there be a separate icon for this. 

20 MR. HINNEFELD: This will be, you’ll have an 

21 icon that will take you to the default screen, 

22 which is where I started. 

23 DR. ZIEMER: This starts out with a list of 

24 all procedures. 

25 MR. HINNEFELD: All procedures reviewed. 
21

1 That’s where the application opens. The 

2 application opens by showing you that. And 

3 then what I did just a minute ago, I hope it 

4 does it again for me, I just clicked on that 

5 first one, on PROC-0097, and it took me to the 

6 detail sheet, the detail page for PROC-0097. 

7 And then I have noticed that the arrangement 

8 of these is upside down from what we’ve been 

9 using. Finding number one is at the bottom of 

10 the list. And it works up, and it works up 

11 chronologically. 

12 DR. ZIEMER: The most recent ones at the 

13 top. 

14 MR. HINNEFELD: So you can read in the 

15 description what, this is the SC&A finding. I 

16 think that will take you to the full statement 

17 of it, and actually, we can see what kind of 

18 data. Like I said, I got this Friday, and I 

19 didn’t play with it a lot. It takes you to 

20 the full statement of the finding. 

21 MS. MUNN: It looks to me as though we’re 

22 almost there, but I’m not sure that it’s 

23 workable for those of us outside the agency 

24 and SC&A yet. 

25 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, we’ll get user guides 
22

1 out. I mean, we can send a user guide that 

2 gives some description on how to move around 

3 the fields or move around the screen. 

4 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Stu, this is 

5 Steve Marschke. When will we be able to get 

6 access to the test server so that we could 

7 kind of go in and maybe play around with it a 

8 little bit and -- 

9 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, our hope, our 

10 expectation is to roll this out on the 

11 production server for the NIOSH users toward 

12 the end of this month. Now these dates are a 

13 little soft. And then after that we would 

14 have it available to ORAU, the ORAU side, and 

15 then once it’s on the ORAU side on the O 

16 drive, then SC&A and the work group could have 

17 access to it. I mean, we could grant right 

18 away. 

19 I think that modification to this 

20 won’t be too terribly difficult. I don’t 

21 think if there are things that we want it to 

22 look differently or if we want it to, you know 

23 like I said, certain data fields we want to 

24 add that are not there now, I think we’ll be 

25 able to do that in a relatively 
23

1 straightforward fashion. 

2 MS. MUNN: Well, if those fields with which 

3 I was concerned are imbedded in the detail of 

4 the -- 

5 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, those show up in here, 

6 the detailed statements on the detail sheet. 

7 Now, I put PROC-0097, the thing to remember 

8 about PROC-0097 is we’ve not given you any 

9 responses on PROC-0097 yet. So if you look on 

10 the ACCESS database the only thing it will say 

11 is the statement of the finding. Now, if I 

12 pick a different one, and I don’t know well 

13 enough ^ I’m going to go back to the document 

14 with this one. 

15 MS. ADAMS: Try OCAS-0001. It had 17 

16 findings, eleven are closed. 

17 MR. HINNEFELD: Is that an OTIB or IG or 

18 what is it? 

19 MS. ADAMS: It’s an IG. 

20 MR. HINNEFELD: And part of the delay here 

21 is that I’m on a wireless system going into my 

22 account at work. I think if you’re on the O 

23 drive you can go quicker. Well, actually, we 

24 should see the status on this page and how 

25 many are opened and closed. Now, that was 
24

1 changed late last week so this should be up to 

2 date I would think. So we should get the 

3 status of the number of findings, the number 

4 open on the first page. I forgot to look. 

5 This is IG-001, Rev. 2 had 24 findings and 13 

6 were still active. Does that sound right? 

7 No? 

8 MS. ADAMS: Not according to the chart. 

9 MR. HINNEFELD: Is that Rev. 2 that you’re 

10 looking at? 

11 MS. ADAMS: No, I was looking at Rev. 1. 

12 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, it may not be loaded 

13 yet because they haven’t gotten everything 

14 loaded yet. 

15 MS. MUNN: Rev. 1 shows on Nancy’s list is 

16 17 ^ findings. Rev. 2 -- 

17 MS. ADAMS: Eleven closed and five in 

18 abeyance and one transferred. I picked that 

19 one because it had the various categories. 

20 MR. HINNEFELD: I don’t know. Maybe they’ve 

21 not loaded all the data yet because like I 

22 said, they were struggling to get this up to 

23 date, and I suspect they haven’t loaded the 

24 two datasets yet. 

25 MS. ADAMS: That could be it. And when I 
25

1 talked to Leroy on Friday, what we were trying 

2 to do was just to get the summary tables 

3 together so we could see what had changed 

4 since the last meeting. 

5 MS. MUNN: Yes. 

6 MS. ADAMS: And what we passed out here is 

7 the report of the summary of the status of 

8 things. 

9 MR. HINNEFELD: So I think what you have is 

10 correct because I wouldn’t trust that they’ve 

11 loaded all the data in this database for this 

12 demo. I noticed that on one of the summaries 

13 is OCAS PR-3, where there’s a total of 11 

14 total and 11 closed. Those numbers, in fact, 

15 do match, eleven findings total and none of 

16 them remain ^. So that number does match with 

17 OCAS PR-3. 

18 MS. MUNN: You’ve got four total findings 

19 and four are open? 

20 DR. ZIEMER: That’s five. 

21 MR. HINNEFELD: No, it’s -- yeah, that’s 

22 five. PR-3 has 11. 

23 DR. ZIEMER: There’s 11 and 11. Eleven 

24 findings, 11 closed. 

25 MR. HINNEFELD: PR-5 does, in fact, show 
26

1 four total findings and four all open. 

2 MS. MUNN: Why do we have two PER-3 with 

3 zeros? 

4 MR. HINNEFELD: PER-3 what now? 

5 DR. ZIEMER: Oh, no, that’s IG-002. It’s 

6 just up a line. 

7 MS. MUNN: PER as opposed to PR, okay, got 

8 it. That’s new to me, sorry. Get my alphabet 

9 right. 

10 Well, with any luck at all probably by 

11 our next meeting this conversion will be 

12 further along so that it’ll be a little easier 

13 for us to ask specific questions, right? 

14 MR. HINNEFELD: Right, and I did want to 

15 show that on a procedure where responses have 

16 been made -- I’m going to go with three and 

17 hope that this is, in fact, fully loaded -- 

18 when you look at the detail screen -- 

19 DR. ZIEMER: Which one is this? 

20 MR. HINNEFELD: This is OCAS PR-3. You will 

21 see the SC&A finding and directly on top of 

22 that in order are the discussion that is in 

23 the database, the detailed discussion, so 

24 there are the NIOSH fields, the work group 

25 directives, are in there in the detailed 
27

1 discussion. And I believe if you would click 

2 on these it will open up the full text if the 

3 full text doesn’t display in the box. 

4 Now this is a very short text so it’s 

5 a very short response and so it’s probably 

6 going to show up in the text box, the 

7 description box on the previous page. Now you 

8 should be able to navigate with your 

9 navigation buttons up here. If you hit back, 

10 it should take you back to the last screen. 

11 MS. ADAMS: The hope with where we’re going 

12 on this is that these are all the modules of a 

13 big system and that eventually if you pull up 

14 one of these documents, it will tell you how 

15 many SECs are affected by it, how many claims 

16 are affected by it, how many findings. 

17 I mean, that it’ll be anything that 

18 you want we’ll be able to tie it in and you’ll 

19 be able to see what kind of an effect your 

20 decisions or your work will have as a result 

21 of working on this or on the other side coming 

22 back the other way. 

23 MS. MUNN: Things well outside the purview 

24 of this work group. Everything. 

25 MS. ADAMS: Correct. 
28

1 MS. MUNN: That would be nice. 

2 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, the idea is to have a 

3 system to keep a record of the work that’s 

4 accomplished. And so it would all be there. 

5 It would accommodate transfers from one work 

6 group to another quite readily. It would do 

7 all that because all this data will be in the 

8 data tables and the application, you just pull 

9 the ones you want. 

10 MS. ADAMS: And nothing’s being deleted. 

11 MR. HINNEFELD: Right. 

12 MS. MUNN: Very good. Anything else we need 

13 to say about this right now? 

14 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, so far I have that I 

15 know we should include the data about sort of 

16 the secondary status information, whether 

17 something is open, but it is in progress, but 

18 we have been discussing it. Or if it’s open 

19 and in abeyance, meaning that we have promised 

20 to revise the document but have not done it. 

21 So we would need that additional data field to 

22 keep the information that we have currently in 

23 statuses and so that we can look at that and 

24 select on that. 

25 So if we just want to look at the open 
29

1 findings, the ones we really haven’t discussed 

2 yet, we’ll be able to find those readily. And 

3 then, for instance, I can look at the in 

4 abeyance ones to check and see if we’ve issued 

5 that document yet. So then the feeling being 

6 then the document revision’s okay, and we can 

7 move it to closed. So that’s one thing I know 

8 that we want to do. 

9 MS. MUNN: And that’s good. I’d hate to 

10 lose the specificity that we worked on trying 

11 to establish these various levels of status in 

12 the work we’ve done. 

13 Yes, Paul. 

14 DR. ZIEMER: Just out of curiosity, Stu, 

15 could you look at the one, it’s O-R-A-U OTIB16 0004 where there’ve been six items 

17 transferred? What is that going to look like? 

18 MR. HINNEFELD: I don’t know because I don’t 

19 know that I had a discussion with the TST guys 

20 -- 

21 DR. ZIEMER: What would show up here on your 

22 -- 

23 MR. HINNEFELD: We can make that either. We 

24 can set the business rules for that. 

25 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah. 
30

1 MR. HINNEFELD: And if something is 

2 transferred, we can call it closed. 

3 DR. ZIEMER: What shows up now -- 

4 MR. HINNEFELD: I’m going to check because I 

5 don’t know. You said OTIB-0004? 

6 DR. ZIEMER: It’s OTIB-triple-0-4, Rev. 03. 

7 It’s an O-R-A-U... 

8 MS. MUNN: That will be one of the more 

9 complex trappings I would think. 

10 DR. ZIEMER: The SC&A sheet shows six items 

11 transferred out on that one. 

12 MR. HINNEFELD: How many does it show 

13 closed? 

14 DR. ZIEMER: And two closed. And then 

15 there’s two others. On this SC&A sheet it’s 

16 fourth from the bottom. 

17 MS. MUNN: Someone on the phone is trying to 

18 say something. 

19 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): There’s two 

20 addressed in other findings. 

21 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay, OTIB-0004, here it is. 

22 It shows 21 findings and ten of them still 

23 active, but that is different than... 

24 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Yes, but 

25 that’s basically the sum from Rev. 2 and Rev. 
31

1 3, is 21. 

2 MR. HINNEFELD: Aha. And so if it is, in 

3 fact, showing the sum of those two revisions, 

4 then it shows ten remaining active, so that 

5 counts all the in abeyance and transferred and 

6 addressed in finding, blank, in the, because 

7 those are the ten active according to the 

8 status report. So then those are counted as 

9 active with the two status. 

10 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): So anything 

11 that’s not closed is open. 

12 MR. HINNEFELD: Correct. 

13 DR. ZIEMER: So the two from Rev. 2 carry up 

14 to -- 

15 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I think that might be 

16 a glitch. I think we may need to fix that and 

17 make sure that those are, I would guess you 

18 would want them to appear separately. 

19 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): That’s the way 

20 we’ve been doing it, yeah. 

21 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah. There’s two in abeyance 

22 from Rev. 2 and then Rev. 3 stands on its own 

23 I guess. 

24 MR. HINNEFELD: I would think that we would 

25 want to keep those, rather than see them 
32

1 consolidated in two different reviews, 

2 essentially two different versions of a 

3 document. You’d want to see each of those 

4 reviews separately. 

5 DR. ZIEMER: The six items that transferred 

6 though, do they show up currently on your -- 

7 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I should be able to 

8 find the detail on them, and I don’t know if 

9 they were transferred to another procedure if 

10 they would show up there or not. 

11 MS. MUNN: That’s been one of our concerns 

12 from the outset is to make sure that when we 

13 complete something or transfer it that it 

14 doesn’t fall through a crack somewhere and 

15 disappear. So that cross-checking -- 

16 DR. ZIEMER: There’s a transfer there on the 

17 right, Stu, right there. See that one on the 

18 right column? So that one does show up. 

19 MR. HINNEFELD: This says it was... 

20 DR. ZIEMER: So this is estimate of maximum 

21 particle -- plausible dose for workers. 

22 MS. MUNN: Then if it was transferred to 

23 another procedure somewhere, then we need to 

24 know where that is. 

25 MR. HINNEFELD: I bet this was, since it’s a 
33

1 PROC-0004 thing, I bet it was to universal 

2 scientific issues, or what do we call those? 

3 Overarching issues? 

4 MS. ADAMS: Overarching issues. 

5 MR. HINNEFELD: I bet it was to that since 

6 PROC-0004, but I don’t see it right now so 

7 that’s something else we need to keep track 

8 of. 

9 MS. MUNN: But we need to be able to know 

10 where it went to. And not only do we need to 

11 be able to know where it went to, we need to 

12 be able to have assurance that its resting 

13 place is addressing it properly. And we can’t 

14 just walk away from it. 

15 DR. ZIEMER: So right now you do show that 

16 it’s been transferred and then that detail is 

17 not fully there, I guess, at this point. 

18 MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah. 

19 MS. MUNN: It may be too early a day for us 

20 to be trying to get much further with that. 

21 Do we need to say anything else about that 

22 right now? I’m assuming we’ll have chapter 

23 two at our next meeting, whenever that might 

24 be. 

25 MR. HINNEFELD: Sure, it may be even 
34

1 available before. 

2 MS. MUNN: Good, that’s great. 

3 Let’s close that item and go to our 

4 ten o’clock item. Has Mel Chew joined us? 

5 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): Yes, I am, Wanda. 

6 I can hear you. Can you hear me? 

7 MS. MUNN: Yes, we can. You’re coming 

8 through loud and clear. 

9 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): Thank you very 

10 much. Good morning, Wanda. 

11 MS. MUNN: Good morning. We’re glad that 

12 you can join us now. 

13 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Arjun 

14 Makhijani has also joined you. 

15 MS. MUNN: Hi, Arjun, good. We have you 

16 both. Thank you very much. 

17 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): I think Bob Morris 

18 is on the line. 

19 Bob, are you there? 

20 MS. MUNN: Bob was on early on. 

21 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): Good, wonderful. 

22 OTIB-0052

23 MS. MUNN: We have all three of you. That’s 

24 great. We want to begin this by having Steve 

25 address the items in OTIB-0052 that we have 
35

1 outstanding and that are still being discussed 

2 as not yet agreed upon. Who do we want to 

3 take the lead on that? 

4 Stu, do you want Steve to do it or do 

5 you want -- 

6 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I would like either 

7 Jim or whoever Jim designates. 

8 DR. NETON: Well, I would actually prefer if 

9 Steve would kick it off with his findings that 

10 he feels remain open, and we could take the 

11 discussion from there. 

12 MR. ELLIOTT: Could we find out how long Mel 

13 has to be available for us because I know he’s 

14 going to go to the Savannah River site for 

15 document review shortly. 

16 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): Yeah, I’m good. 

17 Is that you, Larry? 

18 MR. ELLIOTT: Yes. 

19 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): I’m here. I’m 

20 actually at the Document Center so they set me 

21 up with a conference room and a telephone, and 

22 so I’m good. And so I’m just waiting for Tim 

23 and Sam and Brent to arrive and so they’ll be 

24 here about one o’clock. So I’m in your time. 

25 MS. MUNN: Wonderful, thank you. 
36

1 DR. NETON: I thought if Steve could kick it 

2 off the findings that, you know, I think 

3 there’s six that remain open. 

4 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Okay. 

5 DR. NETON: Just generally state the issue 

6 and then we can discuss it. We don’t have any 

7 formal handouts for this meeting. They were 

8 late coming and rather than confuse everyone 

9 with putting out things that they could read 

10 at the table, we thought we would just engage 

11 in a dialogue with where we are right now in 

12 our thoughts on these six findings. 

13 So, Steve, it’s yours. 

14 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Okay, I’m just 

15 looking at, just reading, one of the reasons 

16 in the, the finding was plutonium and/or 

17 uranium were used for comparing internal 

18 doses. What about other radionuclides? 

19 And I guess the NIOSH response was the 

20 vast majority of the bioassay at the DOE 

21 complexes is for plutonium and uranium, data 

22 on other radionuclides is limited the results. 

23 Consequently, meaningful comparison between 

24 groups for the less prominent radionuclides 

25 were not judged to be feasible. 
37

1 And what caught my eye on that is 

2 feasible or not, it shouldn’t be the criteria. 

3 It’s whether or not it’s necessary. So I was 

4 just, I agree with the response that saying, 

5 yes, the vast majority of the bioassay data is 

6 for plutonium and uranium, but the fact that 

7 there are smaller amounts of data, if any 

8 data, for the other radionuclides. 

9 I mean, what is the scientific or 

10 technical reason for not using that data or 

11 for using the plutonium and uranium data only 

12 and not using any data for like cesium or if 

13 they have any data on that. I guess that’s 

14 really my, the reason I kept that open was 

15 less prominent, comparison between groups of 

16 less prominent radionuclides it may be 

17 necessary to do less prominent radionuclides 

18 if the plutonium-uranium doesn’t always 

19 dominate. 

20 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): Jim, do you want 

21 me -- 

22 DR. NETON: Mel, why don’t you kick that 

23 off? 

24 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): Steve, thank you 

25 very much. I understand your comment. I 
38

1 think it’s clear. Actually, we looked. 

2 Remember, this is what we tried to do is to 

3 look at what construction workers might have 

4 been exposed to and even unmonitored 

5 construction workers looked at. But as we 

6 went and gathered data from all the sites 

7 here, we certainly saw occasionally bioassay 

8 results for some of the other nuclides like 

9 you have mentioned here. 

10 Then the key, the question, is were 

11 they were for the people who were working at 

12 the site on the processes or were they related 

13 to construction workers who were either 

14 monitored or potentially unmonitored. And I 

15 think our position at the time was that the 

16 few that we saw, and we looked at Nevada Test 

17 Site, INEL, Hanford, Savannah River especially 

18 here, there were very few that we did see was 

19 potentially even the exposures to the process 

20 people or the all monitored worker was most 

21 likely episodic especially. 

22 There was nothing that you saw on a 

23 routine basis that they got exposures on a 

24 regular operation other than episodic other 

25 than the plutonium and uranium and possibly a 
39

1 little bit of tritium here. And so the 

2 question was really that when we’re focusing 

3 this document on making sure that we’re 

4 looking at comparing the non-monitored 

5 construction worker to a construction worker 

6 versus looking at all of the people who were, 

7 the all monitored worker data. 

8 We just didn’t have enough data with 

9 what I would consider to make any kind of 

10 conclusion that would show that any of the 

11 information we would gather would make it 

12 statistically meaningful that unmonitored 

13 construction worker would have gotten even any 

14 exposure at all and that greater than people 

15 who were construction workers who were 

16 monitored as even compared to all of the other 

17 folks at the people who were in the process. 

18 And so the answer to your question, 

19 Steve, I think we went to the information with 

20 the most data, and that’s certainly the 

21 plutonium and the uranium were we able to find 

22 construction workers at those sites that were 

23 routinely monitored so we can have enough data 

24 to make something statistically meaningful 

25 here. So the bottom line is that some of 
40

1 those unusual, some of the more unusual 

2 isotopes we just didn’t find enough data to do 

3 anything with. 

4 Jim, you want to add to that? I think 

5 that’s where I am right now. 

6 DR. NETON: Yeah, I don’t know there’s much 

7 more to add here other than if you look at 

8 what we set out to try to do was there were 

9 some assertions made by a number of folks that 

10 construction workers were more highly exposed 

11 than the all monitored workers or the regular 

12 staff at the site. So Mel went out and found 

13 the data we had, and we focused on areas where 

14 the data, like Mel said, were more abundant. 

15 And correct me if I’m wrong, but I 

16 don’t recall that we really found any real 

17 differences for the internal exposures at any 

18 of the sites save, I think, Hanford. And so 

19 that gave us a fairly good feeling that we 

20 were not seeing any major differences in the 

21 exposure patterns in those two types of 

22 workers. 

23 I don’t know how we could get much 

24 more down in the weeds on this given the data 

25 are not sufficiently robust on these smaller 
41

1 levels of exposure or smaller, not levels of 

2 exposure, but smaller exposure scenarios I 

3 guess. 

4 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): And remember, 

5 we’re talking about internal exposures here 

6 and that’s the real key. And when we actually 

7 looked at the data, and especially in places 

8 where we were able to pull out actual 

9 individual data for construction workers, you 

10 just did not see unusual isotopes here other 

11 than plutonium and uranium. 

12 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): This is 

13 Arjun. A couple of things. First of all, if 

14 there aren’t major differences in internal 

15 exposures between construction and production 

16 workers, that means construction workers were 

17 being comparably exposed. And then in the 

18 ‘50s and ‘60s in many places internal exposure 

19 coverage was really far from complete, and in 

20 some places was very, very spotty and the 

21 relevant radionuclides were not being covered. 

22 Other than Nevada Test Site, let me 

23 just mention the various incidents, and this 

24 would be episodic, but it does go to how much 

25 exposure there might have been. All the 
42

1 spills and incidents in the tank farms and 

2 some on the early site and I’m not as familiar 

3 with this as at Hanford, but one wonders 

4 whether the people who handled that, the 

5 construction workers, the trades people, were 

6 monitored for radionuclides that were fission 

7 products that would be the main thing in the 

8 high-level waste in the tank farms. So these 

9 other -- it’s not a question of degree of 

10 exposure I think. I think the item is what 

11 happened to the other radionuclides, or are we 

12 ready to say that they’re not relevant. 

13 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): Well, I think I 

14 agree with you. I don’t think they are 

15 relevant, and I just think I agree, I think, 

16 Arjun, especially with the construction 

17 workers or even the unmonitored construction 

18 worker. The only records that we have 

19 obviously would be the construction workers 

20 who were monitored. 

21 And so from what we saw, because I was 

22 able to try to pull data that we can use to 

23 say, yes, these people, the monitored 

24 construction workers, were exposed to these 

25 kinds of activity here. And in the results 
43

1 that we saw we just didn’t see a lot of what 

2 you’d consider the other radionuclides other 

3 than plutonium and uranium. 

4 So I think we need to stand by that 

5 very fact that the likelihood of any exposures 

6 to even the unmonitored construction worker is 

7 even more unlikely as compared to even the 

8 ones that we did see for the monitored 

9 construction workers. 

10 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Well, I think 

11 you misunderstood me. I wasn’t saying that 

12 I’m ready to say they were not relevant or we 

13 are ready to say. I was inferring that 

14 perhaps that might be where you’re headed, but 

15 I’m certainly not ready for that. Because the 

16 situation is that we don’t have data on these 

17 radionuclides, and in the absence of data how 

18 do we conclude that -- 

19 DR. NETON: Yeah, Arjun, -- 

20 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): -- exposure 

21 was not relevant when there was fission 

22 product exposure at least in certain specific 

23 situations. 

24 DR. NETON: Arjun, I understand what you’re 

25 saying, and I think we tried to prove or 
44

1 establish the general principle for this 

2 analysis, but I do agree that there’s always 

3 going to be site-specific issues that need to 

4 be evaluated like possibly the ones that you 

5 just pointed out. 

6 In fact, I believe that’s the subject 

7 of an SEC that’s ongoing right now. So we 

8 would handle those separately and not hide or 

9 bury our head in the sand and ignore those 

10 issues. But I think TIB-0052 as it’s written 

11 does make the case for, there’s the general 

12 case for the exposures and that we would need 

13 to address any site-specific things on a case14 by-case basis. 

15 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): You know it 

16 may be helpful if TIB-0052’s revision, you 

17 know, as these issues are resolved, would 

18 mention the kinds of things that are not 

19 covered. Because if you were explicit that 

20 these other radionuclides are not covered, and 

21 these are the kinds of situations in which 

22 they should be covered, that would most help 

23 the specific dose reconstruction as well as 

24 the SEC reviews, both for your team that’s 

25 doing it, and then when and if we are asked to 
45

1 review it for the Board. 

2 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): Yeah, but, Jim, I 

3 think I support what you’re saying is what 

4 Arjun’s saying is that in those particular 

5 cases it would be more site specific and it 

6 would be in the technical basis document 

7 talking about that particular site. And in 

8 order to put a general document out to cover 

9 all of the sites, then that will have a lot 

10 more detail for each of the sites and we don’t 

11 have all the sites covered here. 

12 DR. NETON: Well, I think some caveats put 

13 in the procedure might be in order as Arjun is 

14 suggesting and how we word that. I think we 

15 need to think about it, but I’m not in 

16 disagreement that there couldn’t be some 

17 caveats provided in that procedure or in that 

18 TIB. So I think that’s probably where we need 

19 to go with this at this point. So I don’t 

20 know that there’s much more to say on that 

21 other than we would point out in the TIB that 

22 there are some special cases out there that 

23 need to be considered. 

24 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): And if there 

25 is a scarcity of data that, you know, as you 
46

1 were saying, Jim, if the data are not there, 

2 then that also may be ought to be pointed out 

3 or if they’re not readily available other than 

4 in individual files that that would be useful 

5 to point out. Or if there are certain periods 

6 involved where there should be particular 

7 attention. 

8 DR. NETON: Yeah, we need to regroup and 

9 think about what language we might want to put 

10 in there. But I’m in general agreement with 

11 your thoughts, Arjun. 

12 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Thanks, Jim. 

13 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Okay, we’re in 

14 agreement or at least general agreement? 

15 DR. NETON: It’s not closed. We’re in 

16 agreement that we’re going to maybe craft some 

17 language to revise the TIB to explain what it 

18 really covers and what it might not cover. 

19 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Thank you. 

20 That sounds good. 

21 The next one that was up I guess was 

22 the finding number nine. The finding was 

23 evaluation of the DOE annual -- oh, this is 

24 for INEL, and the evaluation for INEL was 

25 based upon the DOE annual exposure report. 
47

1 And our comment was there needs to be 

2 addressed the MUD dose database for INEL, and 

3 M-U-D stands for I don’t know -- 

4 DR. NETON: Master Update Dump, I think, or 

5 something. 

6 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): -- something 

7 like that. 

8 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): That’s right. 

9 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): The NIOSH 

10 response was that the annual report equivalent 

11 for the overlapping time period. Really, I 

12 guess, maybe my comment wasn’t, I was really, 

13 what I was comparing was Table 3-1. There is 

14 a NIOSH report out there. It’s not prepared 

15 for this project, but it was prepared for -- 

16 DR. NETON: There’s an epidemiologic study 

17 conducted by our health-related energy 

18 research branch at that time. 

19 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): The cancer risk 

20 epidemiology study. 

21 DR. NETON: Right. 

22 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): And they had a 

23 Table 3-1 in there that listed all the doses 

24 for all the years from -- I’m trying to pull 

25 it up here. 
48

1 DR. NETON: Yeah, I’ve got it here. It’s 

2 ’79 through ’98 is what it overlapped. 

3 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Right, and 

4 that’s what I kind of, in the response there, 

5 we kind of show that if you look at the OTIB6 0052 doses, the millirems and the number of 

7 individuals, and you compare them to this 

8 Table 3-1, you get quite different numbers. 

9 And I just found, I just was wondering if 

10 there’s any way we could reconcile those 

11 numbers or should we try and reconcile those 

12 numbers. 

13 DR. NETON: Yeah, we’ve gone back and looked 

14 at that. I pulled out that original epi 

15 report, and one thing that stood out -- and 

16 Mel and his crew noticed this right off the 

17 bat -- was that the units of the dose in that 

18 table are millisieverts, not millirem. So 

19 they’re off by a factor of a hundred. 

20 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Oh, okay. 

21 That makes a difference. 

22 MR. HINNEFELD: They claim they were 

23 millirem. They were millisieverts. 

24 DR. NETON: Right, right. 

25 MR. HINNEFELD: And so you’re off by a 
49

1 factor of 10. 

2 DR. NETON: A factor of 10. When you re-do 

3 the table, the ratios -- 

4 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Go the other 

5 way. 

6 DR. NETON: -- they go very much under one, 

7 so that reconciles that issue. 

8 The other thing though that still 

9 concerned me a little bit though was that the 

10 total number of monitored workers were a 

11 little bit different by year. And in going 

12 back and reviewing that report, they actually 

13 included all workers at the INEL site which 

14 included the workers at the naval reactor 

15 facilities which are not covered under this 

16 program. 

17 So that at least would explain some of 

18 the difference if not all of the difference in 

19 the number of monitored workers that were 

20 included in their study versus what we’ve 

21 looked at. So it’s a slightly different 

22 population of workers I guess is what I’m 

23 saying. So it’s not directly comparable to 

24 what we’ve put together for our analysis. 

25 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): I think you’ve 
50

1 also answered the next one also, Jim. Because 

2 again, the finding 10 was talking about the 

3 similar comparing again to the -- 

4 DR. NETON: Right, and we have this written 

5 up, but obviously we didn’t get it out in time 

6 for you folks to review it, so I guess maybe 

7 we should just write this up. 

8 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Arjun, do you 

9 have anything to say on those two? But those 

10 two sound like they’re really, there was an 

11 explanation and if I got the units right, 

12 there wouldn’t have been too much problem in 

13 the first place, but Jim’s explanation seems 

14 good to me. 

15 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): Steve, that’s very 

16 understandable when we all went to SI units 

17 and rems and sieverts here, we all got 

18 confused, too. It was difficult to keep 

19 straight, but it was pretty obvious when we 

20 looked at the NIOSH 2005, we can understand 

21 that that mistake was easy to make. 

22 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yeah, I’ll go 

23 with your judgment, Steve. 

24 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): The other 

25 one’s number 11 is the fourth one that is open 
51

1 or that we wanted to keep in progress and that 

2 also has to do with this IS 2005 epidemiologic 

3 study. And well known and documented -- 

4 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): Are you going to 

5 read your finding, which one you’re on? 

6 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Claimant 

7 favorability of OTIB-0052 approach for INEL, 

8 early period, internal dose to 1965 cannot be 

9 determined. And then basically NIOSH’s 

10 response is internal exposures is well known 

11 and documented. And then I had basically in 

12 my follow up, OTIB-0052’s section 514 states 

13 data for internal exposures for worker at INEL 

14 is not available. Also, NIOSH 2005 states 

15 until about 1965 construction and service 

16 workers had relatively higher percentages of 

17 internal dose than non-construction, non18 service workers. 

19 Both these statements lead us, SC&A, 

20 to believe that the INEL pre-1965 internal 

21 dose is not well known or documented. So I 

22 guess basically what we were doing is taking 

23 exception to your response saying that it is 

24 well known and documented when in ’52 you say 

25 it’s not available. 
52

1 DR. NETON: Mel, I’ll let you handle that. 

2 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): Yeah, we -- 

3 MR. MORRIS (by Telephone): Can I make a 

4 comment? 

5 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): Yeah, Bob, go 

6 ahead. 

7 MR. MORRIS (by Telephone): It is well 

8 known. The internal exposures are documented. 

9 It’s just not documented electronically so we 

10 couldn’t analyze them as readily available 

11 data. 

12 MS. MUNN: Excuse me, Bob. You’re coming 

13 through very softly. And I don’t know whether 

14 any of you out there are using speaker phones 

15 or not. But if you’re not, please try not to 

16 use your speaker phone when you’re 

17 communicating with us because we’re getting 

18 multiple levels of voice strength here, and we 

19 do want to hear what you say. So please get 

20 on your handset when you actually want to 

21 talk. Thanks. 

22 MR. MORRIS (by Telephone): What I was 

23 saying is that the INEL data are available and 

24 documented but not electronically available. 

25 So that was the beginning position in our, 
53

1 that we weren’t clear about, but we should 

2 have been in the response. 

3 And then beyond that OTIB-0052 made no 

4 attempt to demonstrate claimant favorability 

5 for that period of time. We acknowledged that 

6 we didn’t have the data to present a case for 

7 INEL because of the electronic formatting 

8 problem. Then if you wanted to go through and 

9 look at what NIOSH 2005 did beyond the fact 

10 that it included naval reactor facility people 

11 that were not covered, it also grouped 

12 construction trades workers and service 

13 workers together. 

14 And OTIB-0052 didn’t do that. Service 

15 workers were not necessarily defined as 

16 construction trades workers. If you look in 

17 OTIB or NIOSH 2005, Table 2-7, service workers 

18 included radiological service workers, and 

19 there were 2,423 of those. So we think that 

20 just including that kind of service worker, 

21 radiological service worker, in with 

22 construction trades workers would have biased 

23 the kind of information that you could gather 

24 out of the data as presented in NIOSH 2005. 

25 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): How do we 
54

1 handle the construction workers for INEL in 

2 that period, given the situation? 

3 MR. MORRIS (by Telephone): They’re handled 

4 just as any other sites’ construction workers 

5 would be. They’re taken to be represented by 

6 a population of all monitored workers. 

7 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): But you don’t 

8 have the electronic database so you cannot do 

9 any comparisons or find how you’re going to 

10 deal with the unmonitored construction workers 

11 or what factors you’re going to use in that 

12 period. 

13 DR. NETON: Well, I think, Arjun, this sort 

14 of gets into this conceptual issue of what 

15 TIB-0052 is and isn’t. We, Mel, set out to 

16 look at the general issue, which is are 

17 construction workers different than all 

18 monitored workers. And he went out and pulled 

19 as much data as was possible at all the sites, 

20 well, the sites that we felt were going to be, 

21 data were available and were somewhat 

22 representative of the different types of 

23 operations and activities that occurred within 

24 the complex. 

25 And to the extent that was possible, 
55

1 that was what was included in TIB-0052. INEL 

2 just didn’t happen to have usable internal 

3 data. But given all the data we have at the 

4 other sites though it’s generally indicative 

5 to us that the exposures were not, internal 

6 exposures, were not that different at the 

7 sites that we were able to find data for. So 

8 that’s kind of where we’re at with that. 

9 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): I think what I 

10 would like to see is the statement was saying 

11 that in ’52 where the statement is saying 

12 internal doses for workers at INEL is not 

13 available. I’d like to augment that statement 

14 or replace it by what Bob just said about, you 

15 know, it wasn’t available electronically, but 

16 we have no reason to believe that it was, you 

17 know, you can’t use the same procedure that’s 

18 being developed should you have a claimant who 

19 was a construction worker at INEL during that 

20 period of time. 

21 I think that’s what NIOSH’s intent is, 

22 there’s basically we have these general rules 

23 that are going to apply and the base worker or 

24 the coworker model will give you a dose at 

25 INEL, and then you’re going to increase that 
56

1 by -- well, I guess you’re not going to for 

2 internal doses you don’t increase it. The 

3 multiplication factor is one for internal 

4 doses. So basically what you’re going to end 

5 up doing is using the coworker model to 

6 calculate the internal doses at INEL. 

7 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): Steve, let me just 

8 add one more thing. When developing of OTIB9 0052 it obviously the question that you 

10 brought up it begs the question. Since we 

11 would not be able to have enough bioassay data 

12 in an electronic form that we can use to make 

13 a comparison, we’d really, we went and asked 

14 and looked into some previous documentation 

15 about construction workers and especially 

16 internal doses to them. 

17 This is really a quote from John 

18 Haran* and Braun* that we actually cited in 

19 OTIB-0052, and they made a statement. I 

20 recognize it as to the statement is that the 

21 internal doses especially to construction 

22 workers historically been a very minor 

23 contributor to the effective dose. Now, I 

24 recognize there’s no values pointed out to it, 

25 but it basically gives us a confidence that 
57

1 TIB-0052 in looking at all the sites that the 

2 construction worker there at INEL was most 

3 likely and probably no different than any else 

4 that we looked at. And so I think that’s 

5 where we are. 

6 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): I think 

7 statements along those lines would go, they 

8 seem to be missing from OTIB-0052, and I think 

9 statements along those lines would be, would, 

10 you know, for us people who are trying to 

11 critique OTIB-0052, they would be very helpful 

12 if they were there. I realize that OTIB-0052 

13 is primarily intended for the dose 

14 reconstructors, and they don’t really need all 

15 that philosophy and background information. 

16 But for us who are trying to critique it, it 

17 is very enlightening, you know, these 

18 statements that you’ve given us now. 

19 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): Especially 

20 remember OTIB-0052 is primarily the focus on 

21 are unmonitored workers that should be 

22 evaluated as compared and so that’s the real 

23 focus here, and you’re right. I think we can 

24 do that. 

25 Jim? 
58

1 DR. NETON: Yeah, I think we got the path 

2 forward here what to put in there. 

3 MR. MORRIS (by Telephone): Yeah, in fact 

4 that statement is exactly in OTIB-0052 right 

5 now, Steve. 

6 DR. NETON: That’s in there but I think 

7 there’s some other things that we talked 

8 about, especially what you brought up, Bob, 

9 that would also help substantiate that. 

10 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): This is 

11 Arjun. I still have a concern about how do we 

12 make this kind of statement for 19, for the 

13 period for which we don’t have an electronic 

14 database about the relative situation that 

15 INEL compared to the other sites? Because I 

16 know it was a pretty unique site in the early 

17 period. They built so many, and operated so 

18 many reactors. 

19 And they were not production reactors 

20 like Savannah River Site and Hanford. They 

21 were more like, I don’t know, Santa Susana. 

22 They were experimental reactors, you know, it 

23 was even much different from that. They had 

24 very unique reactors. They had naval reactors 

25 so it seems, I don’t know what the technical -
59

1 - I’m uncomfortable about the technical basis 

2 of that statement. 

3 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): Arjun, I think 

4 you’re familiar with INEL, the way it’s laid 

5 out. It’s a big site, and each of the 

6 locations where the things that you’re talking 

7 about, you know, the EBR-1, EBR-2, the chem 

8 plant, they were basically fenced off and 

9 cordoned off. And if people came in who were 

10 potentially exposed, they were monitored as 

11 they went in. That was a discussion that we 

12 had with the people who worked at the site. 

13 As you all know it’s a big site and 

14 the majority of the construction worker was 

15 working at the site to construct the site 

16 itself, the roads and all those things that 

17 and they were probably the most likely 

18 unmonitored. But the likelihood of the having 

19 unmonitored construction worker entering those 

20 areas that you’re talking about we just didn’t 

21 have any evidence with discussions that showed 

22 that was going to be an issue here. 

23 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): But there 

24 were no construction workers within these 

25 areas when we know they were all monitored -- 
60

1 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): Yes, there were -- 

2 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): -- for 

3 internal dose. The question is about internal 

4 dose. 

5 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): Right. I 

6 understand. 

7 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): And, you 

8 know, even at places like NTS in the period 

9 we’re talking about internal dose coverage 

10 tended to be incomplete. And that’s the 

11 source of my discomfort is that internal dose 

12 coverage was generally or often incomplete, 

13 and then you run a site that’s very different 

14 than the other sites in many respects and then 

15 we’re making a comparative statement. And 

16 that really does make me uncomfortable. 

17 DR. NETON: Well, I think let us take a 

18 crack at beefing up that language and putting 

19 in what we talked about and see if we can get 

20 closer on this. 

21 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Okay. 

22 DR. NETON: Hang on one second, Arjun, 

23 we’re... 

24 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): Jim, I think the 

25 way -- there’s a little dead spot here, but 
61

1 you say that we will look at it and see how we 

2 can add more to the language. 

3 DR. NETON: I just looked at some e-mail 

4 traffic that’s been coming through late 

5 breaking, and it appears that there may 

6 actually be some electronic information 

7 available that we could do some comparisons. 

8 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Okay, that 

9 would be very useful. 

10 DR. NETON: We’ll try to use whatever we 

11 have and beef this language up, and to the 

12 extent possible, look at the electronic 

13 information and see where we end up. And 

14 we’ll prepare a more formal response for you 

15 guys to review. 

16 DR. ZIEMER: The question, Jim or Mel, this 

17 is Ziemer. When you say that you don’t have 

18 electronic data, does that imply that there’s 

19 some data available in a different form that 

20 you’d be able to look at that just is not in 

21 an electronic database or what? 

22 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): Bob, I think the 

23 answer is yes. The other day when there was, 

24 I had a discussion with Liz Brackett from 

25 Internal Dosimetry, she said that there were 
62

1 internal information as regard to INEL, but 

2 it’s not in electronic form. Am I saying this 

3 correctly? 

4 DR. NETON: But it appears, Mel, now that 

5 there may be some electronic information. We 

6 probably should not discuss it much more than 

7 that other than to say we’re going to go back 

8 and re-look at that issue. 

9 One thing that comes to mind though is 

10 I think in some respects, I don’t know how we 

11 capture this. We need to look at this in the 

12 context of how we are reconstructing doses for 

13 sites where the data are sparse. Typically, 

14 as you know, the sparser the data, typically, 

15 the more claimant favorable we get because we 

16 just can’t, you know, we’re trying to bound 

17 things rather than get an accurate number. 

18 And to some extent I think we need to 

19 look at that when we’re doing these 

20 construction worker sites. If we really have 

21 a very claimant favorable upper bound applied 

22 to all site workers then in my mind to a large 

23 extent that would envelope what the 

24 construction workers could also possibly have 

25 received. So we have to look at it in the 
63

1 context on a site-by-site basis almost. 

2 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): I agree, Jim. 

3 I mean, basically, the OTIB-0052 methodology 

4 relies heavily on the coworker, the way you 

5 calculate the coworker dose which is done on a 

6 site-by-site basis. And so if the coworker 

7 dose is really the 95 percentile or whatever, 

8 it’s going to be pretty conservative for the 

9 construction worker, the external more so than 

10 the internal because you’re going to be 

11 multiplying the external by an additional 

12 factor of 1.4. So I agree. You can’t really 

13 take OTIB-0052 in a vacuum. 

14 DR. NETON: Right. Okay, I think we know 

15 what we need to do on this particular finding. 

16 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): The other 

17 finding, finding 13, was basically the 

18 construction worker dose need to be compared 

19 consistently to either the all monitored 

20 workers or the non-construction workers. In 

21 some sites you’ve compared the construction 

22 workers with all monitored workers. On other 

23 sites you’ve compared them only to the non24 construction workers. 

25 Depending on which you select, it 
64

1 could have an effect on your overall ratio, 

2 your 1.4; 1.4 could either go up or down 

3 slightly. I don’t think it’s going to be a 

4 major effect. It’s more I guess of an 

5 analytical nit maybe. 

6 But it’s just from an analyst’s point 

7 of view, I would like to, it’s just a little 

8 bit of inconsistency here, and it is going to 

9 drive the ratio for a given, when you roll all 

10 the sites together and come up with a combined 

11 ratio, it is going to kind of influence that 

12 somewhat. It would be good if it could all be 

13 done on the same basis. And again, finding 

14 number 14 is also a similar type analysis. In 

15 some cases the missing dose is rolled in 

16 before you do the ratio. In other cases, the 

17 missing dose is not rolled in. 

18 And again, that’s going to affect, 

19 when you roll in the missing dose, it’s going 

20 to have the effect of driving down the ratio. 

21 And then some cases those sites that don’t 

22 have the missing dose are going to have a 

23 higher ratio than those sites that include the 

24 missing dose. I don’t know how you want to -- 

25 DR. NETON: Yeah. 
65

1 MR. POTTER (by Telephone): This is Gene 

2 Potter from Mel’s team. I’ve got a comment on 

3 that. Part of the reason some of those 

4 inconsistencies exist was because we were 

5 comparing two existing coworker studies. And 

6 therefore, when a coworker study that we were 

7 comparing to included missed dose, we included 

8 missed dose in our comparison to keep things 

9 on an even keel. It doesn’t address the issue 

10 why inconsistency between sites, but we tried 

11 to be consistent with the sites so when we 

12 were comparing construction to non13 construction or all monitored just basically 

14 has a lot to do with what was available to us. 

15 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): And I think 

16 that’s okay, but I think what you need to do 

17 is -- now, again, this is one of the things 

18 which I think again from a reviewer’s point of 

19 view this would be nice if this was pointed 

20 out and maybe, you know, something to the 

21 effect of saying that this has a small impact, 

22 a ten percent impact, a 20 percent impact, 

23 whatever it is, on the overall ratio and it’s 

24 really not going to drive the results one way 

25 or the other. 
66

1 I realize that it probably has the 

2 user of OTIB-0052 probably doesn’t need to 

3 know this information or need to know the 

4 story behind this, but again, the reviewer of 

5 OTIB-0052 it would be nice if we had the story 

6 and also some idea of the magnitude of what 

7 the, if they had been done, what the magnitude 

8 of the impact would be. 

9 MS. MUNN: Well, and even from an archival 

10 point of view it’s helpful to have that kind 

11 of detail as long as it can be incorporated. 

12 DR. NETON: I hear what you’re saying. I 

13 think we can try to incorporate some language 

14 to that effect. 

15 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): I think we all 

16 recognize the difference is probably not as 

17 significant and important as long as they, the 

18 comparison within the site is consistent and 

19 comparable, which was the case here. But I 

20 understand where you’re going. 

21 We did take the available data and 

22 clearly making sure that we sort out that we 

23 did try to identify clearly the construction 

24 workers within those particular sites and 

25 compared to many of the coworker studies that 
67

1 were done for the all monitored one. I think 

2 you’ll see that the probably it’s going to 

3 drive down the factor or anything, but I can 

4 understand that the language that you want to 

5 will clarify that. 

6 Is that where we are, Jim? 

7 DR. NETON: Yep. 

8 I think you’re right, Steve, that 

9 takes care of number 14 as well. 

10 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Yeah. And 

11 those are the six that we, I had basically 

12 still as in progress. And I guess right now 

13 the second and third one of those, nine and 

14 ten, I think we’re ready to basically change 

15 our recommendation to have those closed. And 

16 the first and the last three I guess if I 

17 understood what NIOSH was saying is that those 

18 are really now going to be changed to in 

19 abeyance. We’ve kind of agreed on a path 

20 forward and NIOSH is going to work it. 

21 DR. NETON: I believe so. That’s my 

22 feeling. 

23 MR. MORRIS (by Telephone): This is Bob. 

24 With regard to that finding number 16 where 

25 you recommend transfer to another work group, 
68

1 I think that that’s really not necessary. I 

2 think that we’ve shown that there’s claimant 

3 favorability with OTIB-0052 and we also know 

4 that OTIB-0020 already contains the direction 

5 on the judgment process that you had asked for 

6 additional consideration to be given to. So I 

7 don’t really see there’s merit in moving this 

8 one to another venue to us again when we 

9 pretty much have information to close it right 

10 now. 

11 MS. MUNN: What group did we recommend? I 

12 don’t have the page in front of me. 

13 DR. NETON: OTIB-0020. 

14 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): This is the 

15 question that there are certain construction 

16 trades which kind of tend to have higher doses 

17 than the construction trade as a whole, for 

18 example, pipe fitters comes to mind. And -- 

19 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): I think, Steve, if 

20 you remember we actually had quite a 

21 discussion on that the last time we met in 

22 August of last year, and we were able to break 

23 down especially with Savannah River different 

24 trades here. And I was able to show a graph 

25 of pipe fitters as even compared to the other 
69

1 trades and compared to the construction 

2 worker. And there was about two years that we 

3 identified that the pipe fitters were slightly 

4 higher than, that stood out. 

5 And remember that we discussed it that 

6 we even went back to the detail, a level of 

7 detail, and looked at what happened on those 

8 particular years and what caused that. And we 

9 had a discussion, and I don’t want to go back 

10 and revisit that, but we had looked into the 

11 exposures of these pipe fitters in the canyons 

12 because they were doing certain activities to 

13 refurbish the canyons. 

14 But I think clearly working within 

15 those particular area, those people were 

16 monitored, and the likelihood of an 

17 unmonitored construction worker actually going 

18 into those canyons and working as pipe fitters 

19 was just really highly unlikely because they 

20 were not only monitored, but they were 

21 probably cleared to some level for clearance 

22 wise. 

23 So I can remember we had that 

24 discussion at length. There was probably, 

25 that was a very good ability for the Savannah 
70

1 River data to able to break out quite a few of 

2 the different trades here, electricians, pipe 

3 fitter, millwrights and carpenters and et 

4 cetera. And you’re absolutely correct. There 

5 was a couple years there that the pipe fitters 

6 did sit out, but we had that discussion I 

7 think. 

8 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): I remember our 

9 discussion, but again -- and if Arjun wants to 

10 chime in at any point -- I don’t know whether 

11 your specific examples for Savannah River can 

12 be generalized across the DOE complex for 

13 other sites where pipe fitters, and again, we 

14 have these, and in any kind of distribution 

15 you’re going to have some of the trade workers 

16 which are going to be on the high end of the 

17 distribution and some of them obviously will 

18 be on the low end. 

19 And using the average construction 

20 trade worker for these guys who are on the 

21 high end of the distribution, generally, from 

22 an OTIB-0052 point of view, it would be 

23 claimant favorable. But from an individual 

24 claimant’s point of view it may not be 

25 favorable. So, I mean, I have this, in my 
71

1 mind claimant favorability has got two 

2 distinct prongs on it. 

3 There’s the, you know, what you do for 

4 a general methodology such as OTIB-0052, you 

5 tend to use a percentages, you know, 90 

6 percent, 95 percent, something like that. And 

7 that ensures an overall general claimant 

8 favorability. But then when you come into a 

9 claimant’s case, how do you make sure that 

10 what the analysis you do for him or her is 

11 claimant favorable for that particular 

12 claimant? That’s something that really cannot 

13 be addressed in my mind in a general procedure 

14 such as OTIB-0052. 

15 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): But, Steve, 

16 what we’re talking about here, there’s a third 

17 distinction which -- hello, am I coming 

18 through? 

19 MR. MORRIS (by Telephone): Yes. 

20 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): We can hear 

21 you, Arjun. 

22 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): There’s a 

23 third distinction which is when you take the 

24 95 -- When you’re dealing with all 

25 construction workers together, then certain 
72

1 groups of workers who were highly exposed may 

2 not be adequately covered. And that’s what 

3 showed up with the pipe fitters. And, yes, we 

4 have discussed it, but I don’t know that we’ve 

5 resolved it. 

6 MR. MORRIS (by Telephone): This is Bob. 

7 Let me quote some stuff that Steve presented 

last August 29th 8 . It’s in the transcript that 

9 you guys could see if you wanted to go into 

10 it. But Steve just -- I’m skipping between 

11 paragraphs, but I don’t think I actually 

12 perturbed what the meaning of what you said 

13 when I got my quotes out like this. 

14 You took some sample cases and 

15 validated them so that you applied the OTIB16 0052 methodology to construction workers and 

17 compared those results to the actual 

18 monitoring data. And when you did that, you 

19 found that OTIB-0052 was conservative. And 

20 you then said it wasn’t a random test. 

21 We tried to bias our individuals from 

22 those occupations that received higher doses 

23 like pipe fitters, and even in those cases we 

24 found that OTIB-0052 methodology generally was 

25 conservative, and you concluded by saying, 
73

1 overall, we’re happy with it. 

2 Now you add that to the existing 

3 information that’s in OTIB-0020 that contains 

4 direction on the judgment process that a dose 

5 reconstructor must use when applying process, 

when applying the 50th or 95th 6 percentile 

7 values, and I think we got this one wrapped 

8 up. 

9 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): On the other 

10 hand what if you remember also, I don’t know 

11 if I said it back in August, but I think we 

12 did 60 of those samples, and I think we did 20 

13 -- if my memory serves me correct, we did 20 

14 at each of three sites. And we did have a 

15 handful, and I can’t, I’m not sure if I 

16 mentioned it last August or I don’t know how 

17 many, but we did have a handful of ones that 

18 did fail. 

19 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): And you’re 

20 right, and that is covered in the report. The 

21 reason to cull it out is we made statements, 

22 you know, generally about OTIB-0052, and then 

23 we also made statements about the exceptional 

24 areas. And rather than rely on a transcript, 

25 I think I’d rather rely on our report where 
74

1 these things are detailed quite specifically. 

2 DR. NETON: Let me chime in here. It seems 

3 to me that the recommendation here would not 

4 be that hard for us to implement. I mean, the 

5 way I read this it basically says that we 

6 would put a statement in TIB-0020 alerting 

7 people that there may be certain classes of 

8 workers who could have higher exposures that 

9 we need to consider. And that’s all it really 

10 says here. 

11 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): That’s all 

12 we’re looking for. 

13 DR. NETON: To me it does not seem to be 

14 unreasonable. 

15 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): No, and we’ve 

16 got these couple of examples, and if you could 

17 give the examples, that would be helpful. 

18 DR. NETON: But I want to be clear though. 

19 I’m not saying that we’re going to make a 

20 special class of pipe fitters, but if we are 

21 doing a pipe fitter, we might want to consider 

22 what those exposures may be in relation to the 

23 norm or something like that. And I don’t have 

24 a problem with that. 

25 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): Jim, are you 
75

1 recommending that we put that in -0052 or go 

2 to -0020? 

3 DR. NETON: This would go into -0020. I 

4 don’t have a particular problem with putting 

5 some additional guidance language in there to 

6 make sure that something doesn’t fall through 

7 the cracks is really what this is trying to 

8 accomplish. 

9 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): That’s all. 

10 DR. NETON: Okay, I’m okay with that. 

11 MS. MUNN: Anything else on OTIB-0052? 

12 (no response) 

13 MS. MUNN: Everybody happy for the moment? 

14 DR. NETON: For now. 

15 MR. HINNEFELD: As the, now, SC&A just 

16 recommended that nine and ten they thought 

17 should be closed. So weren’t we going to 

18 close those? 

19 MS. MUNN: Yes, there’s no reason to leave 

20 them open, is there? 

21 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay, so then SC&A keeps up 

22 those datasets can change those statuses to 

23 closed then. 

24 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Could you, the 

25 discussion that, I guess, Jim and Mel gave on 
76

1 nine and ten, could we add that to the 

2 database? 

3 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, yes. 

4 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): And basically, 

5 you know... 

6 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, we can do, I mean, 

7 we’ll put the write up that you guys did into 

8 the database, or ORAU can do that. 

9 DR. ZIEMER: The discussion. 

10 MR. HINNEFELD: Oh, you can’t? Well, we’d 

11 have to have them do it, what we wanted to put 

12 in. 

13 DR. NETON: Well, I think what we might want 

14 to do here is just write up everything we’ve 

15 talked about here, provide it to SC&A, let 

16 them look at it, and close them all out at one 

17 time. 

18 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I would like to get 

19 those two closed. If we can get them closed, 

20 I want to get them closed. 

21 DR. NETON: Okay, that’s fine. 

22 MR. HINNEFELD: I would like to provide 

23 those two write ups. I’m afraid, Steve, I’m 

24 afraid you guys will have to put it in the 

25 database right now. I don’t think we can do 
77

1 that yet. But you guys can put in what we 

2 tell you to put in -- 

3 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): You can tell 

4 me what you, yeah. I was trying to take notes 

5 a little bit, and I guess -- 

6 MR. HINNEFELD: It’s our obligation to give 

7 you that. 

8 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): We’ll do that, 

9 okay. 

10 MR. HINNEFELD: But we want you to write 

11 into, it’ll be one of our response blocks 

12 which should be the next open block in the 

13 database. And then there’s probably a work 

14 group recommendation or direction block if I 

15 recall. 

16 MS. MUNN: I think so. 

17 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): That’s right. 

18 MR. HINNEFELD: Would the work group then 

19 agree that that direction would be that this 

20 finding would be closed? Or just something to 

21 that effect? 

22 DR. ZIEMER: I’m okay with that. 

23 MS. MUNN: Mike? 

24 (no response) 

25 MS. MUNN: Mike, are you there? 
78

1 MR. GIBSON (by Telephone): I’m here. Yeah, 

2 I’d just like to read it over once it’s done. 

3 MR. HINNEFELD: That can all be provided to 

4 the working group members and to SC&A what we 

5 propose the NIOSH response to be, and we could 

6 even put in, it would be like a one-line 

7 statement on what we would think the Board’s 

8 or the working group’s direction was. 

9 MS. MUNN: Correct. 

10 MR. HINNEFELD: So we could put that in and 

11 share it with the working group and SC&A. And 

12 then if the working group agrees that it 

13 reflects what we talked about today, then they 

14 can tell SC&A, okay, you agree and that status 

15 can be changed to closed. 

16 MS. MUNN: Very good. If you would, in 

17 fact, get that to us, then we’ll do that. Get 

18 that one out of the way. 

19 MR. ELLIOTT: Somebody has put us on hold. 

20 MS. MUNN: I guess somebody has put us on 

21 hold. We need to remind people not to do 

22 that. But in any case are we at a point where 

23 we can take a break? 

24 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Ms. Munn, 

25 this is Arjun. Are we going to have any 
79

1 further discussion on Procedure-0090? 

2 MS. MUNN: Yes, we haven’t discussed PROC3 0090 at all. 

4 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): When is that 

5 going to be? I have a, I’d like to rejoin 

6 this discussion at that time. 

7 MS. MUNN: Well, I had expected 90 to be a 

8 fairly extensive discussion so perhaps if we 

9 said we would take that up immediately after 

10 lunch, would that suit you? 

11 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yeah, that’d 

12 be fine. 

13 MS. MUNN: All right, we’ll try to address 

14 that at probably 1:15 this afternoon. 

15 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Thank you 

16 very much. 

17 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): Wanda, this is 

18 Mel. So the OTIB-0052 team can be excused 

19 here? 

20 MS. MUNN: As far as I can tell the OTIB21 0052 team can go do something else? 

22 MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, I think Jim’s leaving, 

23 too. He stepped away from the table for a 

24 minute, but I believe he is pretty much done 

25 as well. 
80

1 MR. CHEW (by Telephone): Good, Stu. 

2 MS. MUNN: Thank you all. We really 

3 appreciate it. We’ll look forward to the work 

4 group receiving e-mails from progresses from 

5 SC&A and NIOSH moving forward on this one. 

6 We’re going to go on mute for 20 

7 minutes. We’ll be back at, by my clock, at 20 

8 minutes after 11. 

9 (Whereupon, a break was taken from 11:00 

10 a.m. until 11:20 a.m.) 

11 MR. KATZ: We’re coming back on. This is 

12 the Procedures work group of the Advisory 

13 Board on Radiation Worker Health. We just had 

14 a break. And I’d just like to remind the 

15 participants on the phone even though I think 

16 we have very few members of the public, if 

17 any, when you, if you need to go on hold, 

18 please, unless it’s very, very brief, please 

19 just break the line and rejoin. 

20 Otherwise, we hear the beeping or 

21 whatever noise it might be. And if there is 

22 anyone else on the line, just listening, 

23 please just put your phone on mute, which if 

24 you don’t actually have a mute button, you can 

25 just use star six. Thank you very much on 
81

1 that. 

2 MS. MUNN: Can we check to see if Mike is 

3 back? Are you back, Mike? 

4 MR. GIBSON (by Telephone): Yeah, I’m here, 

5 Wanda. 

6 MS. MUNN: Very good. 

7 Has Mark joined us yet? 

8 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): Yeah, Wanda, I 

9 did. 

10 MS. MUNN: Well, good. 

11 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): I sat through 

12 the whole break. 

13 MS. MUNN: I’m sorry about that. 

14 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): That’s all 

15 right. I’m just glad to hear voices. 

16 MS. MUNN: For your information we’ve jumped 

17 around a bit on the agenda. We covered the 

18 review of the database, the first item that 

19 was listed. We covered the resolution of 

20 discrepancies, the second item that was 

21 listed. We covered OTIB-0052 at considerable 

22 length. We’ve taken our break. 

23 APPENDIX BB

24 Now it’s our hope to talk about 

25 Appendix BB, the Landauer response and where 
82

1 we’re going to go with this particular item 

2 until the new work group is convened. And 

3 then we’ll talk a little bit about the status. 

4 Hopefully, Steve can give us a, or someone 

5 from SC&A will give us a report on the status 

6 of OTIB-0070 before we break for lunch. We 

7 had agreed that our first item after lunch at 

8 about 1:15 will be PROC-0090. 

9 That fit your schedule all right? 

10 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): Yeah, thank 

11 you, Wanda; thanks for the update. 

12 MS. MUNN: All right, Stu, want to talk 

13 about Landauer and where, generate some 

14 discussion about where we think we’re going 

15 with -- 

16 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, at the last Procedures 

17 work group meeting I was asked to see if I 

18 could find out from Landauer what calibration 

19 source they used for their film badges. They 

20 provided dosimetry service for General Steel, 

21 GSI, for some years, a couple of the covered 

22 years and then additional years extended 

23 beyond that. And we have all the readings 

24 that they have from those from their service 

25 there. They provided those to us upon our 
83

1 request. 

2 And we’re actually, our main task here 

3 is to analyze that dataset to determine if it 

4 confirms or contradicts the models that are 

5 proposed for the external exposure. So that’s 

6 the main thing. And really the big thing that 

7 has to happen next is we need to provide some 

8 additional responses based on our analysis of 

9 that dataset. That’s really the next big 

10 thing that has to happen. 

11 At the last work group meeting though 

12 there was discussion about film badge and 

13 energy dependence of film badge and what were 

14 these calibrated to, what were these badges 

15 calibrated to as I was asked to find out if I 

16 could from Landauer what source they used. 

17 And I found out actually really quickly after 

18 I asked. Craig Yetter* answered my e-mail 

19 pretty quickly and I think I forwarded that e20 mail to the working group members, and I think 

21 to SC&A as well. 

22 Craig responded they used a Cesium-137 

23 source, and they, to his knowledge, they 

24 didn’t have any record of receiving 

25 information from GSI about the expected photon 
84

1 spectrum that would be encountered at GSI, and 

2 so they didn’t make any adjustments to their 

3 cesium calibration. And then they reported 

4 their results, their dosimetry results, and 

5 then Craig added, and I don’t know what 

6 adjustment we would make if they had told us 

7 which I think probably speaks to the kind of 

8 the health physics, I guess the conclusion 

9 that film is sensitive to radiation. 

10 And it’s radiation at photon levels 

11 below maybe what, 100 KeV or 200 KeV, 

12 something in that order. But when you get 

13 above the energy range for occupational 

14 purposes, the film response is relatively 

15 flat. So you don’t normally worry about 

16 energy adjustments or energy adjustments to 

17 your calibration curve at higher energy 

18 photons. So that was the nature of it. So 

19 that was the exchange we had there. 

20 Now, I don’t know that most of us, I 

21 don’t know if there’s exposure potential for 

22 25 MeV photons which I believe there’s 

23 postulated to be a couple of scenarios, you 

24 know, almost direct beam exposure. And to be 

25 completely honest, when you’re talking about 
85

1 occupational physics, you don’t normally think 

2 about 25 MeV photons. I’d have to go do some 

3 research, which I’ve not done yet, to really 

4 see if film remains flat in its response to 

5 energy up through 25 MeV. So that’s pretty 

6 far above what you normally see in an 

7 occupational exposure spectrum, energy wise. 

8 So that’s where we are. 

9 MS. MUNN: Have any comments from SC&A? 

10 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): No. 

11 MR. HINNEFELD: Sorry I didn’t speak longer 

12 about that, Wanda, I just -- 

13 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): We did receive 

14 Stu’s e-mail, and you did not send it to Dr. 

15 Anigstein, so I have to forward it to Doctor, 

16 I don’t know if John forwarded it to Dr. 

17 Anigstein or not. 

18 MR. HINNEFELD: I forgot. I think I sent it 

19 to you and John and the work group members, 

20 but I don’t know that -- whatever I sent to 

21 you that’s what I sent to, so if Bob’s not on 

22 there, I didn’t. 

23 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): I don’t know 

24 if Bob has seen this actually or not. I’m 

25 just now looking at it because I really wasn’t 
86

1 involved in BB, but I’m not sure that Bob has 

2 gotten this. So I’ll forward this to Bob and 

3 see how he wants to use it. 

4 MS. MUNN: Now, that’s good. We’ve always 

5 sort of worked on the premise that anything 

6 that got to John would be distributed to the 

7 appropriate members of the SC&A -- 

8 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): That’s what I 

9 was working on, too, Wanda. 

10 MS. MUNN: So we here just assume that if 

11 John gets it, it goes to the appropriate 

12 people. 

13 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): And that could 

14 very well be true. I mean, I don’t know who 

15 John has sent it to. He very well might have 

16 sent it to Bob. I’ll just forward this to 

17 Bob, and then Bob can have two copies of it. 

18 MS. MUNN: That’s good. But it sounds to me 

19 as though we still will be looking forward to 

20 another report from NIOSH with respect to some 

21 additional research on the 25 MeV. 

22 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, yeah, I think that can 

23 be part and parcel of what our response is, 

24 our evaluation of the dataset. You know, we 

25 would want to speak to would the film badge 
87

1 data be representative, would it record 

2 accurately the photons that the people were 

3 exposed to. 

4 Now, we did find -- Dave Allen, who I 

5 don’t believe is on the phone, I didn’t ask 

6 him to sit in, I didn’t really expect to talk 

7 very much about this -- he did show me fairly 

8 recently some information that may be relevant 

9 to whether to model some of the inverted 

10 Betatron issue. Do you remember the issue 

11 with the Betatron is that at some point the 

12 operators, the Betatron operators, have been 

13 pretty consistent in this point. 

14 At some point they were instructed to 

15 invert the Betatron thereby overcoming its 

16 built-in swing volume so that items could be 

17 irradiated on the railway car. Because as it 

18 was normally configured, the Betatron would 

19 only shoot at the closed in wall of the 

20 labyrinth, so the rail came in sort of on the 

21 side of that. And if they would invert the 

22 Betatron 180 degrees downward and around, they 

23 could overcome those lug switches and could 

24 aim at an item on the rail car and could 

25 irradiate in that fashion. 
88

1 And from the sketch of the building it 

2 appears that that would give you something of 

3 a 90 degree which would be the 90 degree 

4 linkage off the head of the Betatron, a 90 

5 degree shot at some largely unshielded areas 

6 or at least only partially shielded that are 

7 occupiable in the adjacent building. Dave did 

8 find recently that, and also the operators who 

9 talked about inverting the Betatron all said 

10 that when this one particular person was the 

11 supervisor of the Betatron, he never had them 

12 do that. 

13 And I don’t remember that person’s 

14 name. He was in the outreach meetings. They 

15 all said [Identifying Information Redacted] 

16 never told us to do that. It was only when he 

17 left and he was replaced by this other person 

18 who came from somewhere else that he 

19 instructed us to invert it and shoot at the 

20 rail cars. Well, when we looked at the 

21 employment histories for [Identifying 

22 Information Redacted], the one who had never 

23 told them to do that, his last day of 

24 employment was the last day of the contract to 

25 do the irradiations of the AEC work. 
89

1 So it would seem from that that if 

2 once he left was when they inverted it, that 

3 that inverted position would not have been 

4 utilized during the covered period but only 

5 during the residual period when the photon 

6 dose from the Betatron isn’t included. 

7 Because during the residual period you only 

8 reconstruct the residual of the AEC work if 

9 it’s distinguishable. Clearly, the uranium 

10 contamination on the floor, the dose from that 

11 is pretty distinguishable from the dose from 

12 the Betatron. 

13 So now that’s sort of preliminary and 

14 it was just a matching up of dates that they 

15 just happened onto, I mean, just kind of 

16 stumbled onto by accident as he was working on 

17 our additional response. So it may reflect 

18 the scenarios that we have to address outside 

19 of the Betatron operators in terms of 

20 potential exposure to leakage from the 

21 Betatron head. 

22 MR. ELLIOTT: As Dave’s analyzing the 

23 Landauer data, are we not looking at some of 

24 the other comments that have been given by the 

25 Betatron operators such as they worked a lot 
90

1 of overtime and the badges were only worn 

2 during a portion of their work? 

3 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, what they would say is 

4 they wore their badge when they worked as an 

5 operator. I think what they said was when 

6 they worked as an operator, they wore their 

7 badge. But if they did a double shift, and 

8 their second shift may have been in the 

9 adjacent building, and is not in an operator’s 

10 job, they wouldn’t wear their badges. It was 

11 stored in the rack. So that’s part of the 

12 situation. 

13 But they didn’t say they didn’t wear 

14 it on overtime. If they spent ten hours on 

15 the Betatron, but they said they sometimes 

16 would work a double or something like that, 

17 not as a Betatron operator, and in those 

18 instances they didn’t wear a badge. 

19 MS. MUNN: This is a very limited pool of 

20 claimants, the operators, correct? 

21 MR. HINNEFELD: Oh, well, it’s limited. It 

22 depends on what do you mean by very. I think 

23 we may have over ten claimants who are 

24 operators. I don’t really know. 

25 MR. ELLIOTT: If you just talk operators, 
91

1 yes, that’s probably the ballpark. 

2 MR. HINNEFELD: I’m not a hundred percent 

3 sure. It seems like there’ve been about ten 

4 of them that have spoken at the outreach 

5 meetings. I don’t really know how many 

6 operators there were that are claimants that 

7 never spoke up at the outreach meetings. 

8 MS. MUNN: Yes, Paul. 

9 DR. ZIEMER: Couple points, just a reminder 

10 that for a 25 MeV, this is a 25 MeV electron 

11 accelerator, I believe. 

12 MR. HINNEFELD: Right. 

13 DR. ZIEMER: And I think the photons are a 

14 Bremsstrahlung distribution which means that 

15 the average energy is more like 8 MeV, the 

16 number of photons at 25 is close to zero. 

17 MR. HINNEFELD: Correct. 

18 DR. ZIEMER: And it’s sort of a lognormal 

19 distribution, so in looking at the point at 

20 which you look at the energy dependence of the 

21 film badges, your focus should be down around 

22 8-to-10 MeV which is where most of the X-rays 

23 lie. 

24 MR. HINNEFELD: Thanks for that. You told 

25 me that once before. 
92

1 DR. ZIEMER: The other thing -- it was more 

2 for the record, whatever works -- the other 

3 thing is that unless a person was in the 

4 direct beam, and I think that there was an 

5 orientation where they were saying that there 

6 could be direct beam down on the track. But 

7 otherwise they were talking about scattered 

8 radiation is number one is a small percent of 

9 the direct beam. Plus the energies are 

10 degraded considerably in the scattered beam as 

11 well. 

12 MR. HINNEFELD: I think the aspect about the 

13 orientation, the reason why the inverted 

14 orientation is relatively important is in that 

15 orientation it appears that the leakage from 

16 the Betatron, and the Betatron doesn’t appear 

17 to be all that heavily shielded, so there 

18 could be some 90 degree leakage out of the 

19 Betatron head which may, in fact, be the 

20 Bremsstrahlung spectrum from that occurs in 

21 the head, degraded however it is by whatever 

22 shielding you have on the side. 

23 And that may, in fact, have presented 

24 a somewhat unshielded, I mean, this is in the 

25 SC&A report, a somewhat unshielded beam of 
93

1 that whatever leakage came out the side of the 

2 head kind of obliquely around the labyrinth 

3 wall, back down the railroad track a little 

4 bit and off into the actual building. But I 

5 don’t recall how far that shielded labyrinth 

6 extends. I don’t remember that sketch. 

7 MR. MCGOLERICK: This is Rob McGolerick. 

8 Hello? 

9 MR. HINNEFELD: I think that was Rob. I 

10 think somebody just joined us. 

11 MS. MUNN: Hello? Did someone just join us? 

12 (no response) 

13 MS. MUNN: The other item that we wanted to 

14 look at with respect to this particular issue 

15 is -- and maybe no one except myself is 

16 concerned about this, but I was very pleased 

17 that the full Board accepted our 

18 recommendation to deal with 6000 and 6001 

19 through a different work group than this one. 

20 But that work group has not yet been 

21 appointed, and that being the case, there was 

22 some concern in my mind with respect to how we 

23 should continue to track these particular 

24 items until that work group becomes a reality. 

25 Paul, do you have any thoughts on 
94

1 that? 

2 DR. ZIEMER: Well, unless my recollection’s 

3 different than yours, we did that on the last 

4 day of the meeting. Maybe Nancy can help me 

5 remember, but I think we got the volunteers, 

6 and in the absence of a volunteer to serve as 

7 chair, I ended up volunteering to serve as 

8 chair. So I think we’re in place. I think 

9 you volunteered. 

10 MS. ADAMS: Yes. 

11 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. 

12 Maybe -- 

13 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): Yeah, Mark, I 

14 was on that, Paul. 

15 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, I was thinking you 

16 volunteered, so there was at least three of us 

17 from this group. 

18 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): I thought John 

19 Poston also. 

20 DR. ZIEMER: And John Poston and then there 

21 was an alternate, and I’m trying to remember 

22 who it was, but the other work group has -- 

23 MS. ADAMS: Josie. 

24 DR. ZIEMER: Josie, yes. It was Josie. And 

25 so we do have the other work group now ready 
95

1 to go, and it would just be a matter of 

2 establishing the first meeting. But I think 

3 we’re ready to hand off those responsibilities 

4 to the other work group for this particular 

5 item. 

6 MS. MUNN: Good, so it’s just a question of 

7 convening the new work group -- 

8 DR. ZIEMER: That’s right. 

9 MS. MUNN: -- more than anything else. 

10 DR. ZIEMER: There’s three of us here if you 

11 want to stay over. 

12 MS. MUNN: Well, maybe not this time. But 

13 do you have any thoughts about when -- 

14 DR. ZIEMER: Well, I think we need to get 

15 underway fairly soon. I don’t know if we can 

16 meet before our August phone meeting. That 

17 would be probably pushing it, at least for me 

18 with some other responsibilities, but -- 

19 MS. MUNN: I guess my real question is 

20 should we meet before the September meeting. 

21 DR. ZIEMER: I think if the group, if the 

22 others are available, I think we should. One 

23 of the reasons for passing this off is there’s 

24 some level of political pressure to move 

25 forward on this particular item. So I don’t 
96

1 think we should delay it. We need to be able 

2 to focus on it. We have a lot of information 

3 already, and I think we can move forward on 

4 it. 

5 MS. MUNN: Do you agree, Mark? 

6 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): Yeah, yeah, I 

7 think we should meet before California for 

8 sure. 

9 MS. MUNN: All right, we’ll just anticipate 

10 some inquiry about our availability in the 

11 immediately foreseeable future. 

12 MS. ADAMS: And Zaida needs to schedule all 

13 kind of travel well in advance of the end of 

14 the month. In fact, I think it needs to be 

done by the 5th 15 of August for -- 

16 DR. ZIEMER: For August. 

17 MS. ADAMS: For August through the end of 

18 September. 

19 MS. MUNN: I have no feel -- are you 

20 anticipating a face-to-face meeting, Paul? 

21 DR. ZIEMER: Yes. 

22 MS. MUNN: Here? 

23 DR. ZIEMER: Probably here. 

24 MS. MUNN: Do we want to even think about 

25 discussing a potential date at this time or 
97

1 would you rather postpone that? 

2 DR. ZIEMER: Well, I think I’ll have to do 

3 it by e-mail because we have some missing 

4 people who aren’t on this call, namely Poston 

5 -- 

6 And who was the alternate? 

7 MR. KATZ: Josie. 

8 DR. ZIEMER: So there’s two other people we 

9 need to be able to touch base with. 

10 MS. MUNN: All right, we’ll look forward to 

11 hearing from you. 

12 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Wanda, this is 

13 Steve. I just wanted to question about 

14 presently we have the 13 Appendix BB issues in 

15 the database. Now that there’s a separate 

16 work group for Appendix BB and the other TBDs, 

17 do we want to maintain these in the Procedures 

18 database or do we want to remove them or 

19 transfer them or make them go away or keep 

20 them in there and let the other work group use 

21 it to track them or what? 

22 MS. MUNN: My thought would be that we would 

23 have to set up, that we would show them in 

24 our, in this group’s database as transferred, 

25 and that we would have to establish a separate 
98

1 folder, database as it were, for the 6000, 

2 6001 work group. It seems to me that trying 

3 to maintain them in the Procedures work group 

4 would be confusing. A part of my intent in 

5 requesting that a different work group be 

6 formed is to get this particular set of issues 

7 out of our Procedures tracking. 

8 DR. ZIEMER: Let me add a thought. It would 

9 be a database that would look identical to 

10 this one, but it would have a different title 

11 on it, and every other parameter would look 

12 identically the same, Steve. What do you 

13 think about that? 

14 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Well, I think 

15 that’s a good idea, yes, but obviously NIOSH 

16 is now going to be responsible for making that 

17 happen with the SQL. 

18 DR. ZIEMER: Well, rather than be the 

19 Procedures Review Database, it would be the -- 

20 MR. HINNEFELD: Document Review and 

21 Tracking. It’s called the Document Review and 

22 Tracking or Document Comment and Tracking 

23 Application. So it’ll be part of that, and I 

24 think that would be a sort of a sub-grouping 

25 of that application that would come up. 
99

1 DR. ZIEMER: It would work the same it would 

2 seem to me. 

3 MR. HINNEFELD: I believe it would, yes. 

4 MS. MUNN: Is that? 

5 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Yeah, thank 

6 you. 

7 OTIB-0070

8 MS. MUNN: Now, Steve, are you the person 

9 who is going to do the status review on OTIB10 0070 for us? 

11 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Well, OTIB12 0070, the status is very simple, Wanda. 

13 Really it’s been assigned to Dr. Anigstein, 

14 and he really is just starting up on it, but 

15 we anticipate getting a draft report out by 

16 the end of August if that’s okay with the work 

17 group. 

18 MS. MUNN: The end of August. 

19 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Yes, a draft. 

20 MS. MUNN: So that we would have an 

21 opportunity to take a look at it before our 

22 next face-to-face meeting. Very good. I’ll 

23 give it an end of August date, and it will 

24 appear on our next agenda with either you or 

25 the author expected to give us a run down. 
100

1 I’m assuming the end of August gives 

2 us only less than a week before our meeting so 

3 that we may or may not be able to do much with 

4 it at our next face-to-face meeting. But in 

5 any case if we have it in hand and have an 

6 opportunity to look at it, that will be most 

7 helpful. Thank you. 

8 Now comes a dilemma for the chair 

9 because we are just 15 minutes away from lunch 

10 time and everything that I see on our 

11 remaining agenda I anticipate to be fairly 

12 time consuming unless someone sees something 

13 that they know we can cover quickly in a brief 

14 period of time. Any thoughts either here or 

15 out there in telephone land? 

16 MR. HINNEFELD: I was curious about the open 

17 items from the first set of reviews. I 

18 believe that’s only PROC-0090 that are 

19 actually open. Isn’t that true, talking about 

20 status open? 

21 MS. MUNN: Is that correct, Nancy? 

22 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): I agree, 

23 that’s correct. 

24 MR. HINNEFELD: Now, there may be some other 

25 status codes we need to sort through like in 
101

1 abeyance and find out the status of those 

2 things are in progress. There may be some 

3 other status codes, but the things really not 

4 closed yet. But if you’re talking about 

5 strictly open, the items that we marked as 

6 open which would indicate there’s been no 

7 discussion, those, I think all but only ones 

8 in the first group of PROC-0090 findings. 

9 MS. MUNN: Well, we’ll just, if that’s 

10 correct, if someone will verify for us that 

11 is, in fact, correct -- 

12 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Yes, this is 

13 Steve. Yes, I have the same information that 

14 there are 29 open items which are the PROC15 0090 items -- 

16 MS. MUNN: And that’s the only thing we have 

17 from set one. 

18 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): -- and there’s 

19 48 that are in abeyance which indicate that 

20 we’ve come to a meeting of minds. It just 

21 hasn’t been implemented. 

22 MS. MUNN: Well, hopefully we can get some, 

23 at least brief report on those abeyance items 

24 as well. 

25 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I can give it a try. 
102

1 MS. MUNN: Okay, let’s do that after lunch 

2 then, and we’ll just -- 

3 Yes, Paul? 

4 DR. ZIEMER: I have a comment on the first 

5 set that has to do with the report to the 

6 Secretary. Would this be an appropriate time 

7 to make it? 

8 MS. MUNN: This would be an excellent time 

9 to make it. 

10 DR. ZIEMER: Over the weekend I sent to 

11 Christine Branche the official signed document 

12 of our report to the Secretary on the first 

13 set review. Appended to that was Steve’s SC&A 

14 executive summary, I forget, I think it was 

15 just called a summary report. So that has 

16 gone in. I want to point out though that the 

17 copy of the summary -- and Steve is aware of 

18 this -- that I sent in, I made the changes on 

19 the dates on the pages of the SC&A report so 

20 that they corresponded to his cover page. 

21 But, Steve, I’m wondering as far as 

22 your deliverables if SC&A may want to actually 

23 generate the corrected copy. 

24 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): We can do 

25 that. 
103

1 DR. ZIEMER: I’m just thinking in terms of 

2 does a copy of your thing go to David Staudt, 

3 for example? Was that a deliverable? 

4 (no response) 

5 DR. ZIEMER: Because what I -- who knows, 

6 maybe John Mauro would be able to answer. 

7 MS. MUNN: That’s a good question for John. 

8 DR. ZIEMER: John’s not on the phone. 

9 But, Steve, do you know if that’s a 

10 deliverable? 

11 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): I don’t think, 

12 it has not gone. I don’t think it has gone. 

13 Let’s put it that way. I know the way it was 

14 transmitted to you all was via e-mail from me 

15 to Paul and Wanda so it did not go through 

16 official channels. 

17 MR. ELLIOTT: Be that as it may, whether 

18 it’s a deliverable or not, for the record if 

19 there’s any appeal point here, we would need a 

20 document that serves as the final version that 

21 is corrected. 

22 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): No, I have no 

23 problems in sending a -- 

24 DR. ZIEMER: If you send it out with a cover 

25 letter as your final, you know, I made the 
104

1 change in the footnotes so that we had a copy 

2 for the Secretary that at least looked right. 

3 But after I did that I didn’t feel quite 

4 comfortable with me making the change in 

5 SC&A’s report, even though it was a change in 

6 the date. 

7 MS. MUNN: Just changed the date at the 

8 bottom of the page. 

9 DR. ZIEMER: I don’t think we ever got from 

10 SC&A a report where the cover date and the 

11 page date coincided, and I wasn’t sure whether 

12 you had sent one to David Staudt actually, so 

13 that was part of the question. But it seems 

14 to me that has to happen. I would point out 

15 that it still is considered a draft report and 

16 the one that went to the Secretary still has 

17 the disclaimer that says it’s not yet been 

18 approved. 

19 MR. ELLIOTT: That’s why I’m saying we need 

20 a document that shows it to be a final -- 

21 DR. ZIEMER: The reason it’s not final is we 

22 haven’t closed out these items. And the 

23 report that went to the Secretary recognized 

24 that. It says basically we’ve closed out at 

25 the time of the report approximately half of 
105

1 the items, and we gave the nature of the kind 

2 of findings so it was more like a status 

3 report. 

4 So I think it’s okay from that 

5 perspective, but it’s not yet the final 

6 report, but it is a version of the report 

7 where the dates didn’t coincide, and it’s the 

8 version that we sent to the Secretary. So I 

9 think I’d be more comfortable if we had that 

10 as official transmission from the contractor. 

11 MS. MUNN: It might be a good idea to do 

12 that. If you’d asked John to do that, it 

13 would be helpful. 

14 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): We can do 

15 that, yes. 

16 MS. MUNN: Thank you. 

17 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Any problem 

18 that when John sends it through the official 

19 channels it’s going to have a date on it which 

20 is going to be after Paul’s letter to the 

21 Secretary? 

22 DR. ZIEMER: It’s not going to have your 

23 date on it? 

24 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Well, the 

report will have my date on it, the April 8th 25 
106

1 date on it. But the transmittal letter will 

2 be dated sometime probably this week. 

3 MS. MUNN: I can’t see that that’s a 

4 problem. 

5 DR. ZIEMER: I don’t think that it’ll be a 

6 problem because by the time it is transmitted 

7 to the Secretary, well, I don’t know. 

8 MS. MUNN: Well, and there’s also the fact 

9 that the question was asked whether it was a 

10 deliverable. I would personally have to go 

11 back and check our transcripts to recall for 

12 certain the discussion on that. But I don’t 

13 believe that we ever identified it as a 

14 deliverable per se. I think it was offered by 

15 SC&A as a reasonable status report that we had 

16 never given the Secretary and the Secretary 

17 might like to have. But that it was part and 

18 parcel of activities with this -- 

19 DR. ZIEMER: In a sense though it was tasked 

20 by the work group. 

21 MS. MUNN: Yes, it was, and we agreed that 

22 it would be a good thing to do. It would be 

23 wise to check. 

24 MR. KATZ: Wanda, is it labeled an interim 

25 report or a status report? 
107

1 MS. MUNN: Status report. 

2 MR. KATZ: So it’s not really a draft status 

3 report. It’s a status report. 

4 MS. MUNN: It’s a status report. 

5 DR. ZIEMER: Here it is. See, that has 

April 8th 6 on this. 

7 MR. KATZ: That’s working draft written on 

8 the top, but the working draft you wouldn’t 

9 keep, right? 

10 MS. MUNN: All right, I’ll take a look at 

11 the transcript to see if I can identify any 

12 clarifying language of whether or not it was 

13 identified as a deliverable. 

14 Any other comments on the status 

15 report? 

16 (no response) 

17 MS. MUNN: My thanks to Paul for getting 

18 those dates corrected and getting that letter 

19 out to the Secretary at long last. And my 

20 apologies to all concerned for not getting 

21 that done in a more timely manner. We’ll try 

22 to do better the next time we have a status 

23 report. 

24 Any other pressing items we need to 

25 look at before we go to lunch? 
108

1 (no response) 

2 MS. MUNN: If not, we’re going to break 

3 until one o’clock, and we’ll be back on the 

4 phone no later than 1:15. Everyone have a 

5 nice lunch, we’ll see you in a little over an 

6 hour. 

7 (Whereupon, a lunch break was taken from 

8 11:55 a.m. until 1:05 p.m.) 

9 MR. KATZ: This is the Advisory Board on 

10 Radiation Worker Health Procedures work group, 

11 and we’re getting started again after lunch. 

12 And let me just remind everyone on the phone 

13 please keep your phones on mute except when 

14 you’re participating. And if you need to take 

15 a break, please hang up and dial back in 

16 instead of putting the call on hold which is 

17 disruptive for the call. Thank you very much. 

18 MS. MUNN: May we verify who’s on line 

19 outside of this room? 

20 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): Yeah, Wanda, 

21 I’m back on, Mark Griffon. 

22 MS. MUNN: Thank you, Mark. 

23 Mike, are you there? 

24 (no response) 

25 MS. MUNN: No Mike yet. 
109

1 Other individuals on the line? 

2 Steve, are you there? 

3 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): I’m here, 

4 Wanda. 

5 MS. MUNN: Good. Anyone else from SC&A on 

6 line? 

7 (no response) 

8 MS. MUNN: Anyone else from OCAS or ORAU? 

9 MR. SHATTO (by Telephone): Yes, this is 

10 David Shatto. 

11 MS. MUNN: David, thank you. 

12 We intend to take a look briefly later 

13 in the afternoon at all of the open items just 

14 to see where we are with them and to try to 

15 get a feel from you, Steve, or others in SC&A 

16 where we are with the sets beyond one and two. 

17 As I indicated, it’s our expectation that 

18 we’ll start with PROC-0090. Since I told 

19 Arjun that we’d do that at 1:15, I’d like to 

20 wait for just a few minutes before we actually 

21 undertake that because I know he’s interested 

22 in several of those items. 

23 Is everyone who is involved in PROC24 0090 up to speed at where we are with those 

25 outstanding items? I trust everyone either 
110

1 has copies of the information that Steve sent 

2 out or is on line with the data you need. If 

3 you do not have that data, please let us know 

4 so we can try to get it to you before we start 

5 our discussion. 

6 Before we actually start that, are any 

7 of the principals that are with us aware of 

8 pressing items in the outstanding material 

9 that we have which we need to think of again 

10 in terms of priority? We have in the past 

11 taken that approach when we have items that 

12 are for some reason extremely current or 

13 holding up reviews of petitions of one sort or 

14 another. 

15 We’ve had other discussions relative 

16 to the fact that if we don’t address these in 

17 a very programmed manner, we end up with the 

18 situation we have in our first set with the 

19 material having been in our hands for a couple 

20 of years and still having open items which is 

21 not desirable I think from anyone’s point of 

22 view. We don’t want to do that if we can keep 

23 from it. 

24 But by the same token I hope our 

25 exercise this afternoon with respect to PROC-
111

1 0090 gives us a feel for whether or not we 

2 can, in effect, just start one item at a time 

3 and move through these in a manner that will 

4 make it possible or be feasible for us to 

5 close items out in a more timely fashion. 

6 Does everyone who is concerned with 

7 PROC-0090 have the material that they need for 

8 us to discuss it? 

9 (no response) 

10 MS. MUNN: If so, we’re going to wait for, 

11 by my clock, exactly four minutes to see if 

12 Arjun will join us. While we’re doing that we 

13 might be taking a look at our calendar to see, 

14 we had a brief discussion earlier about when 

15 this group would have its next face-to-face 

16 meeting, and there was requests that we not do 

17 that early on Tuesday before we, Tuesday, 

September the 2nd 18 , prior to our other 

19 activities. 

20 But it is possible for us to convene 

21 this group at the end of the agenda for the 

22 full Board meeting which would be the 

afternoon of Thursday, September 4th 23 . Does 

24 that seem to be a reasonable thing to aim for 

25 or is that contrary to the needs of some of 
112

1 the members of the group? Any feedback on 

2 that? 

3 MR. KATZ: What time does the Board meeting 

4 -- 

5 MS. MUNN: We don’t have the final agenda. 

6 Normally, the Board meeting is finished in 

7 early afternoon. So a three-hour meeting of 

8 this group would normally be quite feasible. 

9 I’m assuming that this means most of the 

10 members involved who are on the east coast are 

11 not going to be wanting to leave the southern 

12 California area at three or four o’clock in 

13 the afternoon. 

14 MR. HINNEFELD: You can’t really get out so 

15 you may as well stay over the next morning 

16 anyway. 

17 MS. MUNN: So that being the case, even if 

18 the meeting was until four o’clock there, the 

19 concept of having an abbreviated face-to-face 

20 would not be unreasonable. 

21 MR. HINNEFELD: Not as far as I’m concerned, 

22 I mean, from a NIOSH standpoint. 

23 MS. MUNN: If no one has any real grief with 

24 that, let’s tentatively plan on doing that, 

25 working on the assumption that it won’t be a 
113

1 full day’s work, but we will -- 

2 MS. HOMOKI-TITUS: The drafts I’ve seen 

3 don’t have it going through the afternoon. 

4 The drafts that I’ve seen of the agenda don’t 

5 have it going through the afternoon. 

6 MR. KATZ: Okay, we’ll confirm by e-mail. 

7 MS. MUNN: Yes, we will, and we’ll establish 

8 a time based primarily on what happens with 

9 the full Board schedule. But we’ll plan on an 

10 afternoon meeting there. My guess would be 

11 about three hours. If circumstances permit, 

12 we may stretch that to four, but I don’t think 

13 it’s going to go any longer than that. 

14 Dr. Makhijani, have you joined us yet? 

15 (no response) 

16 PROC-0090

17 MS. MUNN: Since Arjun is not with us yet, 

18 and we’re within three minutes of the time I 

19 specified for him that we would be talking 

20 about taking up PROC-0090, I think we’ll go 

21 ahead and begin it. 

22 Steve, are you going to lead this or, 

23 Stu, are you going to do it? 

24 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I can give a little 

25 discussion about what’s happened since the 
114

1 last Board meeting and refresh everybody’s 

2 memory about our last working group meeting. 

3 MS. MUNN: Is there a possibility that we 

4 could do this one item at a time? Steve’s 

5 been good enough to provide us with individual 

6 pages for each of the outstanding items, and 

7 we had discussed the possibility of doing it 

8 this way. Is it too -- 

9 MR. HINNEFELD: No, that’s kind of what I 

10 expected to do. 

11 MS. MUNN: Okay, it’s all yours. 

12 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, at the last working 

13 group meeting I described that it’s sometimes 

14 difficult from the statement of the finding 

15 that was in originally on the matrix and is 

16 now on the database, it was a little difficult 

17 to decide what part of the original review 

18 report pertained to the statement of finding 

19 as it appears in the database. 

20 And a part of that I think was due to 

21 the fact that the page numbers that are 

22 referenced in the finding description didn’t 

23 necessarily refer to anything very meaningful 

24 in the overall review document. You know, it 

25 would refer, sometimes it didn’t refer to 
115

1 anything except the checklist which usually 

2 just gives fairly cursory information on the 

3 review checklist. And sometimes it referred 

4 to pages that seemed to be speaking about 

5 something other than what that finding was. 

6 So I commented to that at the last 

7 working group meeting, and then in the interim 

8 Arjun and I have exchanged a couple e-mails 

9 to, where I kind of specified a little bit 

10 more the areas of difficulty that we were 

11 having, you know, which ones I had particular 

12 trouble finding out, you know, trying to 

13 really deduce the true meaning of the 

14 procedure. And then Arjun responded by 

15 pointing out in the review itself, the main 

16 review document, what pages really each 

17 finding related to. So we did go through the 

18 process of sorting out, getting a better 

19 understanding of the meaning of the findings. 

20 So having done that then Arjun also 

21 responded with a series of responses after my 

22 questions about the items, and he gave either 

23 a more full description of the finding, a 

24 better reference of where to find it in the 

25 report, or in some cases he even suggested 
116

1 that these could be closed. I think that 

2 relates mainly to the first four where the 

3 finding really spoke to the absence of a 

4 procedure for the close out interview at the 

5 time this review was done. And that procedure 

6 for close out interviews has since been issued 

7 and has been reviewed in fact by SC&A. I 

8 think it had its own report. 

9 MS. MUNN: Yeah, I think it did. 

10 MR. HINNEFELD: There’s a part where it says 

11 it has its own report. So Arjun’s initial -- 

12 I think, now Steve, you can correct me if I 

13 mischaracterize this -- but he originally said 

14 that he felt like the first four findings, 90-

15 dash-one through four, could probably be 

16 closed. Of course, we don’t close them unless 

17 the work group says to close them, could 

18 probably close, or actually, I think what he 

19 actually said was these should be transferred 

20 to the review of Procedure 92, which is the 

21 close out interview procedure because they 

22 speak to items of concern related to the close 

23 out interview. 

24 So I think that would serve to 

25 disposition the first four if the work group 
117

1 would go along with that. And Steve has 

2 provided to us a PDF of the detail sheets from 

3 the Procedures database that describes the 

4 interactions and the discussion. 

5 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): One note 

6 difference, a small difference, Stu, is as I 

7 read what Arjun wrote, the first four he says 

8 should be closed. 

9 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. 

10 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): The next one, 

11 which I guess is issue number six, that’s the 

12 one he’s talking about transferring to PROC13 0092. 

14 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay, thanks, Steve, you’re 

15 right. You’re right. 

16 So if you wanted to read through the 

17 statement of the findings in what Steve sent 

18 out, it describes the, kind of what was felt 

19 to be an information void with respect to what 

20 the claimant could expect when they did this 

21 CATI interview, the initial interview, and had 

22 they had better information or things of that 

23 extent, it would, they felt like this would 

24 have gone away or they felt like, most of 

25 these felt, I guess, addressed the fact that 
118

1 there really should be some more discussion of 

2 the fact that this claimant will have another 

3 opportunity to provide input into the process 

4 once a dose reconstruction has been drafted, 

5 and they’ve seen what we did with the 

6 information we had, they have another 

7 opportunity really then to say, hey, you left 

8 stuff out, things like this. And so they kind 

9 of spoke to that. And so the existence now in 

10 a close out interview procedure in Arjun’s 

11 mind allayed these original four findings. 

12 MS. MUNN: Okay, so the final finding as of 

13 this date will be that items one through four 

14 are agreed to be closed? 

15 MR. HINNEFELD: I’m certainly agreeable with 

16 that. 

17 MS. MUNN: And that item number six is 

18 transferred to PROC-0092. 

19 MR. HINNEFELD: Right, that’s what Arjun 

20 suggested, and I don’t have any trouble with 

21 any of those. 

22 MS. MUNN: Any problem with that, Steve? 

23 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): Well, I just 

24 have a question, Wanda. I mean, just to go 

25 back to what you’ve actually told me on 
119

1 several occasions. 

2 MS. MUNN: You’re very faint, Mark. 

3 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): I was just 

4 going back to a point you’ve made to me on 

5 several occasions that the, you know, I’m 

6 pulling up these findings now, but SC&A agrees 

7 that these are closed, and NIOSH is in 

8 agreement for these first four or whatever. 

9 And I think we as a work group are supposed to 

10 decide whether the items are opened or closed. 

11 Isn’t that sort of the way we should deal with 

12 this? 

13 MS. MUNN: Yes, that’s why I’m asking if 

14 everyone’s on board with this. 

15 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): So I just, 

16 before you dismiss them, I thought maybe I’m 

17 trying to find the right document so maybe I’m 

18 a little behind where you guys are at, but -- 

19 MR. HINNEFELD: It’s a PDF, Mark, with a 

20 title of “PROC-0090 for 7/21 Work Group 

21 Meeting,” WG meeting. 

22 MS. MUNN: And as a matter of fact if you’re 

23 -- 

24 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): Do you know 

25 when it was mailed out? 
120

1 DR. ZIEMER: Just yesterday. 

2 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): I don’t think 

3 I sent it to Mark. 

4 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): I don’t see 

5 anything. 

6 DR. ZIEMER: I just got mine yesterday. 

7 MS. MUNN: Maybe not. 

8 MR. GIBSON (by Telephone): I don’t think 

9 I’ve received it either, Wanda. 

10 MS. MUNN: Okay, hold on just a moment and 

11 let me get my e-mail up here. I had thought I 

12 had forwarded that to the Board, but perhaps I 

13 did not. 

14 DR. ZIEMER: It went out Sunday. It was 

15 addressed to Christine and Stu and Arjun and 

16 John Mauro -- 

17 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): And Arjun has 

18 just joined. Sorry I’m late. 

19 MS. MUNN: Oh, good. 

20 DR. ZIEMER: And I got a copy that 

21 incidentally, Steve, are you on the line? 

22 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Yes, I’m here. 

23 DR. ZIEMER: Change my e-mail, if you would. 

24 I think yesterday was the last day you could 

25 still use the old one and it forwarded it 
121

1 automatically. But I’m now comcast.net. 

2 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Okay. 

3 DR. ZIEMER: But I don’t see Mark’s name on 

4 this list. I have a note from Steve, and I 

5 don’t see Mike’s on it either. 

6 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): I don’t find 

7 anything either, especially from Sunday. I’m 

8 looking at the dates shown. 

9 MS. ADAMS: I have the one that Christine 

10 sent me. Do you want me to just forward it to 

11 Mark and Mike? 

12 DR. ZIEMER: Is that this one? 

13 MS. ADAMS: Yeah. 

14 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, we can shoot it to you 

15 right away, I think. 

16 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): Okay, that’d be 

17 great. 

18 DR. ZIEMER: And Nancy’s going to try to 

19 forward it from here. Maybe Steve can. 

20 MS. ADAMS: I sent it. 

21 DR. ZIEMER: Okay, Nancy just sent it. 

22 MS. MUNN: Nancy’s already sent it. You’re 

23 one step ahead of me. I finally got to it. 

24 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): So just before 

25 we close those off I’d like an opportunity to 
122

1 at least look them over. I know we’ve got 

2 agreement on the behalf of SC&A and NIOSH on 

3 this, but -- 

4 MS. MUNN: Arjun, we just had a brief 

5 discussion on the first item that Steve had 

6 sent to us for our discussion of PROC-0090. 

7 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Right. 

8 MS. MUNN: And we had, it was our 

9 understanding that you had agreed that items 

10 one through four could be closed and that item 

11 six would be transferred to PROC-0092. And 

12 the other members of the Board had agreed that 

13 that was acceptable. Mark’s just looking at 

14 the material right now to verify -- 

15 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Thank you, 

16 Wanda. 

17 Yeah, I did actually suggest that some 

18 items should be closed. 

19 MS. MUNN: Thank you. We’ll give Mark a 

20 minute to pull that first sheet up. 

21 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): I hope you’re 

22 not holding up for me. I mean, you can 

23 continue -- 

24 MS. MUNN: No, we just, we want you to be -- 

25 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): -- okay, 
123

1 because I don’t have anything yet in the e2 mail. I’m just keeping an eye so -- 

3 MS. MUNN: Okay, very good. We can move on 

4 to the next item and then come back to verify 

5 after you’ve had a chance to take a look at it 

6 if that’s okay with you. 

7 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): That’s fine. 

8 MS. MUNN: Good, then let’s go on to the 

9 next item, item number -- that takes care of 

10 the next one that we were showing was item 

11 number two. We’ve agreed that one is closed. 

12 Item number three is closed. Item number four 

13 is closed, and item number six has been 

14 transferred, correct? So we’re on to -- 

15 DR. ZIEMER: We are still looking -- 

16 MR. HINNEFELD: We are still looking. We 

17 haven’t really agreed on that. 

18 MS. MUNN: Yes, yes, I know. 

19 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Which list 

20 are we, we’re not looking at the list that 

21 Steve sent around. Which list are we looking 

22 at for these one, two, three? 

23 MS. MUNN: Yes, yes, that’s the list I’m 

24 looking at. I’m looking -- 

25 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Oh, one 
124

1 through four, okay. 

2 MS. MUNN: Yes, one through four. 

3 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Five. 

4 MS. MUNN: Five I think was not -- 

5 MR. HINNEFELD: There didn’t seem to be a 

6 number five in the database. 

7 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): No, there’s 

8 no number five. 

9 MS. MUNN: It was either closed out or 

10 agreed at the first meeting that it wasn’t an 

11 issue. So number six is being transferred to 

12 -- 

13 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yes, okay, 

14 I’ve caught up with you. Sorry about that. 

15 MS. MUNN: That’s quite all right. 

16 And so what we’re looking at for the 

17 moment is item seven. 

18 MR. HINNEFELD: Item seven speaks to the way 

19 coworker interviews are described and/or 

20 conducted. For instance, the interviewee 

21 claimant is provided a script, you know, of 

22 the questions that are going to be asked in 

23 advance of the actual interview. And one of 

24 the questions in there is are there, can you 

25 name some coworkers who could describe your 
125

1 work history, or more to the point if it’s a 

2 survivor claimant, coworkers who could 

3 describe, who would know about the energy 

4 employees work history. 

5 In case of a survivor claimant, the 

6 energy employees would be deceased. And the 

7 finding speaks to the fact that oftentimes 

8 coworkers are not contacted. There’s no 

9 particular explanation to the claimant as to 

10 why coworkers would be contacted or not. 

11 Some claimants probably went to some 

12 trouble to try to identify the names of some 

13 coworkers and took quite a lot of effort and 

14 then with no contact being made to them it 

15 felt like this put them through a lot that 

16 they needn’t go through especially if we 

17 weren’t going to call. I think these all kind 

18 of factor into it. 

19 So, Arjun, if I misspeak in some 

20 fashion, you be sure to let me know. 

21 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): No, the only 

22 thing I would add, Stu, to that list -- I 

23 don’t know if you were done first of all. 

24 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, go ahead. Would it be 

25 helpful more, it would probably be better if 
126

1 you did it than I. 

2 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): No, no, 

3 that’s fine. I was happy with your list. I 

4 don’t have any disagreement with what you 

5 said. The only thing that I would add to that 

6 that was in the original 2005 report, and a 

7 very important, substantive point is that 

8 survivors are at a kind of disadvantage 

9 naturally relative to employee claimants 

10 because very often due to secrecy 

11 classification and so on people didn’t talk 

12 about their work. 

13 They don’t know about the employees’ 

14 work and so on. And so when a coworker is 

15 named, it seemed particularly important to 

16 talk to them especially in cases that are 

17 being denied. So that was kind of the 

18 substantive framework of this whole item. 

19 MR. HINNEFELD: And our response on this has 

20 been, I think there’s some valid points, 

21 certainly some valid points here to be made is 

22 that we don’t want to put a claimant through a 

23 lot of effort to try to identify coworkers if 

24 there’s not a lot of probability that we would 

25 contact that coworker. We tend not to do too 
127

1 many coworker interviews. 

2 The reason for that is that the 

3 identification of coworker was intended, you 

4 know, the intention was contact a coworker 

5 when we have insufficient information about 

6 the claim we felt like to allow us to proceed. 

7 Now, in practice the way things have turned 

8 out, we feel like in most cases we have, we 

9 find sufficient information about claims 

10 without contacting coworkers in large part 

11 because when there’s uncertainty about where 

12 specifically a person was located. 

13 We try to make sure that our dose 

14 estimate bounds their experience so that a 

15 more specific knowledge about the exact 

16 location or exact case or even exact 

17 description of incidents because we know from 

18 our site research at sites where there are 

19 incidents and loose radioactive material, my 

20 own experience being from Fernald of course, 

21 there was plenty of loose radioactive material 

22 at Fernald. 

23 And so we try to fashion dose 

24 reconstruction approaches that address those 

25 kinds of conditions regardless of whether a 
128

1 specific individual was in this incident or 

2 they were in six blowouts or six mag flashes 

3 in plant five or they were there for a 

4 particular, actually working during the shift 

5 when there was a UF-4 spill. Because as a 

6 general rule, those conditions are found 

7 during research and then applied to dose 

8 reconstructions that are done appropriately if 

9 need be. 

10 So we do tend not to use coworkers a 

11 lot. I think it would be worthwhile for us to 

12 refashion some language in some fashion, 

13 certainly to speak in the dose reconstruction 

14 it would be a relatively straightforward thing 

15 to do. The same in dose reconstruction when 

16 we describe the information used in the dose 

17 reconstruction to just put in a simple 

18 statement that coworkers were not contacted 

19 because sufficient information was available 

20 through other means. Something like that so 

21 there would be that level of understanding. 

22 So certainly there are some things like that 

23 we could make some modification on I think. 

24 MS. MUNN: Paul. 

25 DR. ZIEMER: There’s one comment I hear from 
129

1 time to time on the terminology, coworker. 

2 Frequently, a claimant will be told that their 

3 dose reconstruction was done based on coworker 

4 data, which is often the case in a general 

5 sense. And when they check up and they say, 

6 well, I named three coworkers and none of them 

7 were contacted so how can this be? 

8 And so I think there’s a confusion as 

9 to what is meant by coworker in the general 

10 sense that we talk about coworker models, 

11 which is a whole multitude of people, most of 

12 which the worker doesn’t know or may not know. 

13 And those individuals that they name, which 

14 are sort of their working colleagues, and I 

15 don’t think they always appreciate the 

16 difference in that. 

17 And the terminology I think has led to 

18 some confusion. I don’t know how to 

19 distinguish that or if some wording could 

20 somehow help them understand the difference 

21 between the general coworker model issue and 

22 the specific people they may name who may not 

23 have been contacted or who may not even be 

24 claimants. 

25 MS. MUNN: Well, and we also hear comments 
130

1 from the claimants themselves who say nobody 

2 can know exactly where I was doing exactly 

3 what I was doing at exactly what time. And, 

4 of course, that’s, there’s good basis in fact 

5 for that. But it is, that confusion is 

6 further exacerbated, I think, by the use of 

7 the term coworker. 

8 MR. ELLIOTT: We’re revising entries on our 

9 website, the FAQ’s, Frequently Asked 

10 Questions, and there’s a glossary that will 

11 include a description of coworker dataset, a 

12 distribution of information, as well as we’re 

13 going to have to come up with some other 

14 terminology perhaps on what it means when we 

15 say do you have, in the CATI interview 

16 process, do you have other workers that you 

17 could identify for us that we should talk to. 

18 And we should not call those coworkers in that 

19 -- 

20 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, if there were another 

21 term that might be helpful. 

22 MR. ELLIOTT: -- and I don’t know. Stu is 

23 very, it’s a rare event when we find ourselves 

24 in a best estimate situation where we feel or 

25 ORAU dose reconstructors feel that it is 
131

1 necessary and appropriate to contact those 

2 individuals that have been identified in the 

3 CATI. It’s rare that that is a necessity in 

4 order to provide a best estimate. When we do 

5 an overestimate or an underestimate of dose, 

6 we typically don’t go to that extreme of 

7 contacting additional individuals. 

8 And one of the reasons why I think is 

9 it’s not necessary for those types of dose 

10 reconstructions, but it’s also, when we find 

11 ourselves going to somebody else to talk about 

12 another person’s claim, we start, you’re 

13 automatically across the line on Privacy Act. 

14 I mean, you have to be very careful because 

15 you don’t want to talk about the person’s 

16 condition, their health condition, et cetera. 

17 And if you do make that contact, you 

18 try to limit it to, well, we understand that 

19 you worked close or side-by-side with so-and20 so. What can you tell us about the process? 

21 What can you tell us about the day-to-day 

22 activities? What can you tell us about the 

23 exposure to radioactive material they might 

24 have experienced? That’s the limit that we 

25 try to achieve there. 
132

1 MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, coworker interviews 

2 are pretty complicated because a coworker 

3 oftentimes is almost afraid of messing up 

4 their coworker’s claim. What if I say the 

5 wrong thing? Will it go against him? And 

6 they’re not necessarily easy to contact. If 

7 the coworker’s not a claimant and the claimant 

8 doesn’t provide current contact information, 

9 they’re not always easy to contact. 

10 So there are a lot of complications 

11 with doing coworker interviews, but the real 

12 main reason that we do it so rarely is that we 

13 believe we have confidence in the dose 

14 reconstruction research that we do that we can 

15 bound the dose appropriately without the 

16 additional effort of the interview. 

17 And I know a part of this, and I think 

18 this may have occurred in a number of the 

19 findings, is the statement that survivor 

20 claimants are at a disadvantage in terms of 

21 describing the work area. Don’t dispute that. 

22 And I just don’t know that regardless 

23 of what we did in this area, we could really 

24 overcome that. I don’t know that because of 

25 the assumptions we make in making sure we try 
133

1 to bound the dose, I don’t know that we have 

2 to overcome that. 

3 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Well, a 

4 couple -- sorry. 

5 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): I was just 

6 going to ask two questions to Stu, I guess. 

7 One is you said rarely you interview 

8 coworkers. Do you have any sense of a number? 

9 MR. HINNEFELD: I’d hate to -- 

10 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): Because I was 

11 wondering if you ever interviewed a coworker 

12 for the DR process. 

13 MR. HINNEFELD: There actually have been 

14 some interviews. In fact, I recall back in 

15 the old days when I used to be a reviewer of 

16 dose reconstructions on our site, I insisted 

17 on a coworker interview for a particular event 

18 that was described. And in that case of the 

19 coworkers that were mentioned by the claimant, 

20 one didn’t remember the claimant. And the 

21 other one said, well, I kind of remember him. 

22 I guess maybe he worked there, but I don’t, 

23 this doesn’t sound, what he’s describing 

24 doesn’t sound like something I was at. 

25 So the one instance that I know of, 
134

1 there have been a few others, but I would say 

2 there have not been 50 coworker interviews. 

3 There probably haven’t been 20 coworker 

4 interviews. 

5 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): And the other 

6 question is does it still exist on the 

7 modified form? Do you ask that question? Do 

8 you ask, if you’re never going to use it -- 

9 MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, well, I didn’t want to 

10 comment about the modified form because I 

11 commented at one time that we had modified the 

12 CATI form. In fact, we got suggestions for 

13 modifying the CATI form. We have never 

14 submitted the revisions to OMB so we’re still 

15 using the original CATI. I got corrected 

16 pretty quickly after that meeting. 

17 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): Oh, I thought -

18 - 

19 MR. HINNEFELD: And that gives us the 

20 opportunity to use this discussion, which we 

21 were done anyway. I mean, we had taken this 

22 discussion from this finding, these PROC-0090 

23 findings, in our original suggested edits, 

24 actually ORAU was the one who took these and 

25 the original suggested edits. 
135

1 And so we haven’t ignored these 

2 findings, and it gives us the opportunity to 

3 go back and say, well, are these really the 

4 edits that we can capture this. So we still 

5 have the opportunity. It doesn’t have to be, 

6 our approval to use that form doesn’t expire 

7 until January. 

8 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): Go ahead, 

9 Arjun. I’m sorry. 

10 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): No, just a 

11 couple of things. You might consider calling 

12 them fellow workers or colleagues or -- 

13 DR. ZIEMER: Exactly the term I was thinking 

14 of, Arjun. I’m sorry you said it too soon. 

15 MR. HINNEFELD: Since you said it, we have 

16 to choose something else. 

17 DR. ZIEMER: And another term that 

18 distinguishes it from the others would be 

19 useful, and then you could point out that we 

20 rarely contact fellow workers except in rare 

21 occasions or something like that. 

22 Sorry for the interruption. 

23 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): No, no 

24 problem. I think we’re thinking along the 

25 same lines, and you certainly have the 
136

1 prerogative. But if you are thinking of 

2 modifying the CATI form, and it hasn’t been 

3 submitted yet, it might be made part of the 

4 form so the claimants have it. 

5 You know, you generally have enough 

6 information, you know, when you can finish a 

7 dose reconstruction you generally have enough 

8 information, and you generally don’t contact 

9 coworkers but sometimes it could be helpful. 

10 So that at the end people get this note that 

11 you didn’t contact the coworker doesn’t seem 

12 like it’s disrespectful. They’ve already kind 

13 of known that you’re very unlikely to do it. 

14 Or that if you need a coworker 

15 information that you could go back to them and 

16 ask them for coworkers. Something like that, 

17 I don’t know exactly what would be more 

18 beneficial in the sense of less frustrating 

19 to, because this was a big item of frustration 

20 when we actually talked to them. 

21 You know, this partly came from 

22 Denise, and now she’s part of your outfit. So 

23 maybe in modifying the CATI form you might 

24 consult with Denise as to how it might be 

25 done. 
137

1 MS. MUNN: We’ve had many discussions in 

2 this group about modifying the CATI form, and 

3 I’ve always had the impression that doing so 

4 bordered on an administrative nightmare. 

5 MR. HINNEFELD: And it requires OMB review. 

6 The reason it requires OMB review is it’s an 

7 instrument to gather information from a large 

8 number of citizens. I think if it’s like more 

9 than nine. So if you design an instrument to 

10 gather information from a large number of 

11 citizens, you have to have OMB approval for 

12 that instrument, and that’s what we had. 

13 And because it was OMB approved, we 

14 knew that it would be relatively difficult to 

15 change, meaning we would have to submit a 

16 proposed revision to OMB, and they would have 

17 to say okay in order to make the revision. We 

18 can revise it. It’s not that we can’t revise 

19 it. We just knew it would be difficult. 

20 Now we’re at the point where now the 

21 OMB approval has a sunset date, a certain time 

22 span. It expires in January, so we have to 

23 reapply if we continue to do interviews. So 

24 at this time this is a convenient time to 

25 gather these revisions and submit it and have 
138

1 them approve the use of a new form in this 

2 context. 

3 MS. MUNN: So our wrap up of PROC-0090 would 

4 be particularly timeful (sic) right now. 

5 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. At least these 

6 findings. 

7 MR. ELLIOTT: Yeah, because we can use these 

8 review findings to justify, to argue to OMB 

9 the necessity of making these changes. If we 

10 went forward with our own thoughts and designs 

11 about what a new instrument should look like, 

12 then we have, you’re going to start from whole 

13 cloth arguments with OMB. But here we have 

14 something that’s been evaluated by this body, 

15 and we can take that set of review comments 

16 and, I hope, be successful in getting a new 

17 instrument approved. 

18 MS. MUNN: How involved was the original 

19 approval process with OMB? Of course, we were 

20 all just first out of the chute then. 

21 MR. ELLIOTT: Well, you guys didn’t even 

22 know about it. I mean, it’s not something 

23 you’re involved in. 

24 MS. MUNN: I know. I meant you -- 

25 MR. ELLIOTT: -- very involved. In this 
139

1 instance they don’t -- 

2 MR. KATZ: Actually, I think I did that 

3 work, and it wasn’t particularly interactive 

4 in this case. OMB didn’t come back with a lot 

5 of issues in this case. They did come back 

6 and consult on several issues, but there 

7 wasn’t, and there wasn’t a lot of public 

8 input. 

9 But this is really perfect because one 

10 of the things OMB wants to know, too, is that 

11 experts review the instrument or stakeholders 

12 have had a chance to sort of make certain that 

13 the instrument is appropriate. And in this 

14 case we have really the perfect situation 

15 because we have an expert review of just the 

16 issue that they would want so it’s actually 

17 great. 

18 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): I should point 

19 out, Ted, that this review wasn’t a review of 

20 the questionnaire. We’ve only looked at these 

21 procedures, right? 

22 Arjun, am I correct in, SC&A never 

23 reviewed the questionnaire itself, the content 

24 of the questionnaire. 

25 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): We did review 
140

1 the CATI form and had a number of comments on 

2 it. 

3 MR. HINNEFELD: There’s a section in the 

4 report that -- 

5 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): And they are 

6 in the report in terms of what was, you know, 

7 what might be beneficial to be in there. But 

8 at that time -- now we haven’t revisited it in 

9 all of our experience in the discussions of DR 

10 that we’ve had. But there are a number of 

11 recommendations in there. 

12 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): I do recall 

13 that now, but I’m looking at, these are all 

14 CATI process not -- 

15 MS. MUNN: Correct. And either the Board or 

16 this group, I think the Board as a whole, we 

17 went over the CATI, and this has been a 

18 tremendous amount of attention. 

19 MR. HINNEFELD: There’s at least one of 

20 these findings that says a very good number of 

21 recommendations on the CATI form on how the 

22 CATI form can be improved. And that is 

23 captured as at least one of the findings. 

24 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): Yeah, okay, all 

25 right. And I know as a Board we went over it 
141

1 many times, but we were discouraged from going 

2 anywhere with it. So anyway, okay. 

3 MS. MUNN: Now, where were we? We were on 

4 number seven. 

5 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Just a 

6 second. Just for clarity on that point, is 

7 there a suggestion that some of those things 

8 might be incorporated so they might be 

9 discussed or not relevant at the present time? 

10 I didn’t understand. 

11 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I don’t have a 

12 discussion with me today, but we can provide 

13 that. I mean, when the original comment 

14 suggested revisions were made that ORAU put 

15 together, this was some time ago that we have 

16 not submitted to OMB, they did, in fact, use 

17 this report, and they did look at this report 

18 as -- now they didn’t necessarily adopt all 

19 the recommendations of this report. But they 

20 did look at this report and made suggested 

21 revisions based on the content of the report. 

22 MS. MUNN: So, Arjun, is the question you 

23 were asking whether there is going to be an 

24 actual list of suggested revisions 

25 forthcoming? Is that your question? 
142

1 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yeah. I 

2 mean, obviously there have been revisions, and 

3 I was just wondering whether the working group 

4 is going to look at those revisions in light 

5 of the suggestion that had been made in our 

6 earlier review or we’re going to leave it at 

7 that. I just wanted some clarity. 

8 MS. MUNN: Yeah, actually, I thought -- 

9 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): -- in terms 

10 of our work review. 

11 MS. MUNN: -- I thought that we had 

12 understood that there had been no revisions 

13 made. There are no revisions that have been 

14 made to the CATI. 

15 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yeah, but 

16 they are being made, and I was wondering 

17 before it’s submitted to OMB whether we’re 

18 leaving it as is and saying ORAU/NIOSH have 

19 reviewed the work that was done and it’s okay, 

20 or that the working group is going to consider 

21 it or whether you want us to look at it. I 

22 just wanted some clarity on the revisions that 

23 are being made. 

24 MS. MUNN: Oh, well, it was my assumption 

25 that one of our purposes in going through this 
143

1 PROC-0090 exercise at this time is to identify 

2 any outstanding potential suggestions for 

3 revision, and that following our review, NIOSH 

4 would identify from their records and from 

5 their understanding what those suggested 

6 changes would be, and that we would all have 

7 an opportunity to look at those before they, 

8 their formal contact with OMB. Is that not a 

9 reasonable way to proceed? 

10 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yeah, I 

11 think, but, you know, this particular item has 

12 not been on the table until this moment, at 

13 least I wasn’t aware that it was on the table. 

14 And it would be useful for it to be. I think 

15 it would be very useful, but we have not 

16 talked about this as an outstanding item 

17 before because of the problem of the origin of 

18 the form. 

19 MS. MUNN: Oh, what do you mean we haven’t 

20 talked about this? 

21 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): This being 

22 substantive revisions of the questionnaire 

23 other than, you know, we’ve talked about the 

24 fellow workers question, but we have not 

25 talked about -- I’m struggling to find our 
144

1 January report on my computer here. I don’t 

2 have it. 

3 MS. MUNN: Yeah, well, I think we’ve talked 

4 about it often, but as I said have come to the 

5 conclusion that there was a great deal more 

6 effort involved than would be achieved by the, 

7 the success would be achieved by the changes 

8 at that time. But we’re now talking about a 

9 cumulative set of well-discussed, thoroughly10 reviewed items which have been accumulated and 

11 will, in my view, be brought to us in a 

12 succinct form, much easier for us to review 

13 than these multiple pages from the procedure. 

14 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Okay, yes, I 

15 think that sounds fine to me. 

16 MS. MUNN: Is that reasonable? 

17 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yes, it does 

18 sound fine to me. 

19 MR. ELLIOTT: I don’t know what’s being 

20 asked here. I mean, we certainly have -- 

21 DR. ZIEMER: Is this item seven? 

22 MS. MUNN: No, we’re talking about the 

23 entire issue, of the overall issue, of change 

24 to the CATI form. And we know that NIOSH has 

25 received comments from various sources, and 
145

1 we’re making more as we go through this PROC2 0090 process. I was hopeful that when we 

3 finish PROC-0090, we would have some very 

4 specific items that would be suggested. 

5 But certainly it’s not clear in my 

6 mind how extensive those are, whether or not 

7 they’re generally required or would be 

8 helpful. After we had finished PROC-0090, 

9 this work group can do one of two things. 

10 They can either step out of the entire issue, 

11 or we can continue to follow up and see what 

12 NIOSH’s suggestion of proposed changes might 

13 be. 

14 Larry, am I way off base here? 

15 MR. ELLIOTT: I don’t believe you’re off 

16 base at all. I think that is what I 

17 understand our process to have been on many 

18 other procedures and other items where we have 

19 received, as you have received, a review and 

20 comments about a given procedure or 

21 methodology. And I’m okay with that. I guess 

22 where I was confused I wasn’t sure if you were 

23 asking, or Arjun was asking to be -- or I 

24 think I heard Mark ask this at the Board 

25 meeting -- an opportunity to review the OMB 
146

1 submittal. 

2 That causes me some concern. I don’t 

3 know that we’re interested or able to insert a 

4 Board review of the submittal. I think we’re 

5 confident in understanding what the issues are 

6 that have been raised in the review, and we 

7 have developed or are developing our position 

8 on those and moving that OMB form submittal, 

9 advancing it in a separate track from what is 

10 going on in this Board process. 

11 Let me turn that around. If we 

12 inserted a Board review on the OMB submittal, 

13 I’m not sure that we’ll be enabled to make the 

14 timeframe that we need to make. 

15 DR. ZIEMER: Well, if I could, I think 

16 there’s a separate issue here, too, and that 

17 is, what’s the Board’s role in that kind of a 

18 process. I don’t think we have a role in your 

19 submittal, per se. However, once it’s 

20 submitted, then there’s a document being used 

21 as a procedure which we can turn around and 

22 review and say is this now addressed 

23 adequately the issues that were raised in the 

24 previous round. Because it would be subject 

25 to a review just as this had, and we would 
147

1 have to gain some experience with it, get 

2 feedback and so on. 

3 MS. MUNN: Yes, Ted. 

4 MR. KATZ: Let me just say -- 

5 DR. ZIEMER: Be like a new procedure where 

6 you commit to revising something where we say, 

7 okay, that’s the outcome. We’re fine with 

8 that. Once it’s revised we’ll have a chance 

9 to look at it again under a new light. 

10 MR. KATZ: -- so let me explain -- 

11 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): I’m sorry. Can 

12 I ask one thing just to clarify what I was 

13 saying before? And, Larry, I agree, years 

14 back I had asked for that, requested that we 

15 could review the form that you were 

16 submitting. And I understand the problems 

17 with that. I guess what I was looking for now 

18 is clarification that we, as a work group, 

19 discussed the findings or the findings we’re 

20 discussing right now were all process related 

21 in the CATI process. 

22 They’re not content related, and 

23 Arjun’s report, I believe the original SC&A 

24 report, does have some information on content. 

25 To the extent that would be useful to flesh 
148

1 out and have agreement within our work group 

2 or within the full Board to give to NIOSH 

3 prior to their submittal of a new version. I 

4 think that’s where I thought we could have 

5 input. 

6 These things we’ve discussed so far, 

7 maybe the coworker item is one thing that’s on 

8 the form. But there were definitely some 

9 specific comments that we made about the 

10 content of the form itself, and we’ve, I don’t 

11 think we brought those forward in this final 

12 set of findings. 

13 Is that wrong, Arjun, or -- 

14 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yeah, I 

15 believe that that’s correct, Mark. I have the 

16 report in front of me. I cannot find -- I can 

17 give you examples. For instance, one of the 

18 comments was there’s no question about food. 

19 Workers often ate in contaminated places. 

20 There’s no question about overtime or bringing 

21 home contaminated clothing or vehicles. So 

22 there are a number of specific suggestions 

23 like that or -- 

24 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): We didn’t 

25 really discuss those in the work group so if 
149

1 we may or may not decide that some of them are 

2 relevant to pass on to NIOSH and some we 

3 believe are, whatever. I think we -- 

4 DR. ZIEMER: Are those in a finding that we 

5 have already dealt with or -- 

6 MR. HINNEFELD: They’re in the report. 

7 DR. ZIEMER: In the body but they don’t show 

8 up as a finding. 

9 MR. HINNEFELD: One of the findings that’s 

10 enumerated on the database. So there are 

11 several suggestions made with respect to the 

12 CATI form. And it refers you back to the 

13 discussion in the report. So it essentially 

14 is, you know, the recommendations are 

15 essentially captured in one of the findings. 

16 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Mark, from 

17 the time you chaired the group, I don’t recall 

18 that we, you know, we discussed the report, 

19 and we did discuss many of these things, but I 

20 don’t recall that we went over changing of the 

21 form because it was kind of academic at the 

22 time. 

23 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): At the time, 

24 yeah, yeah. So now it might be more relevant 

25 and we should maybe look at those again and 
150

1 see if we want to pass those on as 

2 recommendations from the work group to NIOSH. 

3 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): They’re on 

page 205 of our January 17th 4 , 2005, report in 

5 case anybody wants to refer to it. 

6 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): Give that 

7 reference again, Arjun? 

8 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): They’re on 

page 205 of the January 17th 9 , 2005, report, 

10 Section 5.5.1, which actually starts on the 

11 prior page, page 204. It’s called “Gaps in 

12 the CATI Forms”. 

13 MR. KATZ: So, Mark, let me just -- this is 

14 Ted -- talk about process issues as I recall 

15 them related to doing these OMB pieces 

16 information requests. We can certainly 

17 incorporate expert opinion up front, but the 

18 issue as Larry pointed out is a timing one. 

19 And if we have to have a renewal in January, I 

20 think Stu might have said? 

21 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. 

22 MR. KATZ: There’s a public comment process 

23 that’s part of it that makes it fairly 

24 lengthy. And in this case it’s either one or 

25 two comment periods, each of which I believe 
151

1 are 60 days. So it may work out that you can 

2 get this work if you have to have more 

3 deliberation done before it’s submitted to 

4 OMB. But if not, then there’s that public 

5 comment period as I think Dr. Ziemer was 

6 indicating. 

7 So one way or the other you can 

8 certainly work it in. But if we haven’t 

9 submitted it yet, and we have a lot of the 

10 information, the recommendations that have 

11 already been developed, certainly we can 

12 address those before we submit it because it 

13 shouldn’t take that long. 

14 MR. ELLIOTT: And we will. 

15 MR. KATZ: Right. 

16 DR. ZIEMER: But, Mark, you’re saying that 

17 although SC&A suggested some things, the work 

18 group hasn’t really reviewed them per se. We 

19 haven’t looked at those for adequacy, 

20 appropriateness and -- 

21 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): Well, and I 

22 think Arjun’s maybe correct. We tabled them 

23 at the time because there was no sense on 

24 discussing something that we couldn’t effect. 

25 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, I understand. In other 
152

1 words we agree there were gaps, but we didn’t 

2 spend any time on trying to delineate them. 

3 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): I’m not even 

4 sure we got to the point of agreeing there 

5 were gaps. To be fair I’m not sure everyone 

6 on the work group was in agreement with all 

7 those items. 

8 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): That’s 

9 correct. We did not have an item by item -- 

10 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): Right, I don’t 

11 think -- 

12 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): -- to my 

13 recollection. 

14 MR. GRIFFON (by Telephone): No, I don’t 

15 think so. So I think it would be useful just 

16 to -- 

17 MS. MUNN: Well, we talked about it an awful 

18 lot. I’m surprised we didn’t have an item-by19 item because we did talk about it a lot. My 

20 question, Ted, with respect to the public 

21 hearings, the comment period, those are 

22 following the submittal to -- 

23 MR. KATZ: Absolutely. 

24 MS. MUNN: -- OMB, correct? 

25 MR. KATZ: It’s published in the Federal 
153

1 Register, and then there’s a 60-day public 

2 comment period. 

3 MS. MUNN: For the OMB document that you 

4 would be submitting. 

5 MR. ELLIOTT: A tentative timeline -- I was 

6 just looking in my e-mail here for one day 

7 someone sent to Stu, and I thought he put a 

8 timeline in but he didn’t. But I believe the 

9 timeline we have discussed is that in 

10 September, no later than mid-September, we 

11 have got to get this OMB package up into being 

12 processed for hopes that it’ll be renewed and 

13 approved by January. If not, then they give 

14 us an extension, but we don’t like to carry 

15 extensions for very long. 

16 MS. MUNN: Well, it sounds to me as though 

17 that certainly is a legitimate sounding 

18 timeline. From this group’s perspective this 

19 means that this becomes a major item on our 

20 September meeting, one that we should be 

21 prepared to bring as close to closure as 

22 possible since we’re going to have to fish or 

23 cut bait on that one. 

24 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Well, Ms. 

25 Munn, it might be more expedient in terms of 
154

1 what Larry and others have been saying in 

2 terms of NIOSH time constraints. If NIOSH 

3 simply considered these items and got back to 

4 the working group about what they found useful 

5 in them, and we went from there, it might cut 

6 short the amount of time that we need to 

7 discuss it. 

8 MS. MUNN: Yeah, I sort of thought that was 

9 what I was suggesting when I first brought 

10 this up. 

11 MR. ELLIOTT: Well, certainly during the 

12 public comment periods if you haven’t had a 

13 chance before then to develop your position, 

14 that will give you another opportunity to 

15 speak about the Board’s position on these 

16 particular issues. 

17 MS. MUNN: Well, let’s get through the case 

18 at hand, which is PROC-0090, and urge the 

19 Board members to please re-review or re-read 

20 the SC&A report so that you have in your 

21 individual minds any revisions that you feel 

22 are crucial. I would urge all of us not to 

23 dwell on minutia and to remember that we want 

24 to eliminate, not to complicate -- 

25 MR. GIBSON (by Telephone): Hey, Wanda, this 
155

1 is Mike. Just for the record this item may 

2 not be exclusively for the Procedures group 

3 because I’m sure this will come to head in the 

4 Worker Outreach work group, too. 

5 DR. ZIEMER: Worker Outreach group might 

6 want to -- 

7 MS. MUNN: Yes. 

8 MR. GIBSON (by Telephone): Okay. 

9 MS. MUNN: Would you like us to assume that 

10 we will copy you? As a member of the Worker 

11 Outreach group we can certainly make sure that 

12 that is on your slate, right? 

13 MR. GIBSON (by Telephone): Yes, you know, 

14 I’m just sure that this item’s going to come 

15 up somewhere in that work group so I just 

16 wanted to get that out there -- 

17 DR. ZIEMER: I think that’s appropriate, 

18 Mike. You may want to have the group actually 

19 review the CATI form and see if you have some 

20 independent comments. 

21 MR. GIBSON (by Telephone): Right, that’s 

22 what I anticipated. 

23 MS. MUNN: All right, very good. We were on 

24 item seven, and I have no clear memory of 

25 where we were on item seven. Can anybody help 
156

1 me out? 

2 DR. ZIEMER: Well, the terminology on 

3 coworker was one of the issues, right? Are we 

4 going to look at that and see whether there’s 

5 some -- I think Larry’s suggesting that in the 

6 -- let’s see, your definition list, you’re 

7 going to have a list of -- 

8 MR. ELLIOTT: A glossary, we have. We have 

9 various ways. 

10 DR. ZIEMER: -- where you might clarify the 

11 usage of the term coworker and -- 

12 MR. ELLIOTT: We need to do something 

13 similar for partial dose reconstructions. 

14 We’re receiving a lot of questions about what 

15 does a partial dose reconstruction really 

16 mean. 

17 MS. MUNN: Why didn’t you do the whole 

18 thing? 

19 MR. ELLIOTT: Yeah, why didn’t you do the 

20 whole thing. So we’re looking at, Chris 

21 Ellison is looking at those kind of things on 

22 our website and trying to figure out how many 

23 different ways that we can say what needs to 

24 be said and place it in different places on 

25 the web page. 
157

1 DR. ZIEMER: And maybe the fellow worker or 

2 some other term. 

3 MR. ELLIOTT: I like fellow worker. I think 

4 that may be something we can utilize here. 

5 MS. MUNN: So our action on this is going to 

6 be what? 

7 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, the change in 

8 terminology between coworker and fellow 

9 worker. And also, I think, a little more 

10 clarity to the claimant about the fact that we 

11 aren’t necessarily going to hunt down fellow 

12 workers, that they would be contacted on 

13 occasion or rare occasions. We rarely contact 

14 fellow workers because as a general rule we 

15 can obtain sufficient information for the dose 

16 reconstruction without. Some words along the 

17 line that sort of resets the expectation in 

18 the mind of the claimant about what this 

19 process is, what this fellow worker process 

20 is. 

21 MS. MUNN: So for this particular finding, 

22 is our next entry going to be that NIOSH will 

23 suggest additional wording or a revision of 

24 wording as a potential change for the CATI? 

25 We can’t say change for it at this point, as a 
158

1 potential change? 

2 MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, it may be the CATI or 

3 it may be other part of the acknowledgement 

4 packet that’s, you know, it may be in a 

5 variety of places, ways to communicate -- 

6 MS. MUNN: Interaction with claimants, yeah. 

7 Finding eight. 

8 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Number seven 

9 now is changed to in abeyance? 

10 MS. MUNN: Yes. 

11 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Thank you. 

12 MS. MUNN: That’s my understanding. 

13 Anyone else? 

14 (no response) 

15 MS. MUNN: In abeyance. Number eight. 

16 MR. HINNEFELD: Number eight, I’ll start 

17 unless Arjun wants to talk about it. 

18 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): No, no, 

19 please go ahead. 

20 MR. HINNEFELD: The finding statement is 

21 procedure lacks sufficient information to 

22 assist the recipient in interpreting the 

23 questions, especially family member claimants. 

24 And this speaks to actually the preparation of 

25 the interviewer if I’m not mistaken. 
159

1 This kind of started us off on the 

2 wrong path. And our response originally, 

3 well, we don’t try to prepare the claimants 

4 for this interview. We give them the script 

5 and things like that, but we don’t try to pony 

6 them up for the interview. But I think the 

7 intent of the finding was really the 

8 preparation of the interviewers. 

9 Is that right, Arjun? 

10 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yeah. 

11 MR. HINNEFELD: And this more specific 

12 statement, I guess this may be the original 

13 statement of finding. Interviewers are not 

14 required to have an incident list or a job 

15 category list or familiarity with the specific 

16 facility that the survivor worked at in 

17 particular. 

18 In other words they don’t have to read 

19 the site description section of the site 

20 profile, and so they don’t have this body of 

21 information in front of them that would make 

22 it easier for them to understand what the 

23 claimant is telling them. This to me is a 

24 difficult area to get into because at what 

25 point have you instructed them enough, an 
160

1 interviewer enough. 

2 You know, the interviewers have to do, 

3 even today, 200 new claims a month are coming 

4 from the Department of Labor. And, of course, 

5 we have worked through a large backlog of 

6 claims, so there are a lot of interviews to 

7 do. And I think there might be a sort of a, 

8 you know, maybe the ORAU people can kick me 

9 under the table or just tell me I’m wrong. 

10 I think there’s probably an attempt 

11 for someone who’s, if they’re familiar with a 

12 particular site, to try to do those interviews 

13 with that site rather than try to make them 

14 knowledgeable about everything. But because 

15 of work balance concerns you just can’t rely 

16 on saying, okay, Joe’s going to do all the 

17 Hanford interviews or Joe and Tom are going to 

18 do all the Hanford interviews. 

19 So you’re in the position then of 

20 trying to make your interviewers knowledgeable 

21 about some level of detail of some 200 sites 

22 that we have claims from. So first of all, 

23 you’re starting out with something you can’t 

24 really accomplish in particular detail. When 

25 you get into things like lists of incidents, 
161

1 that to me is always, what is an incident is 

2 always sort of an ill-defined task. 

3 If you make a list of incidents that 

4 occurred at such-and-such facility and without 

5 specifying a threshold and what kind of 

6 incident you’re talking about, you’re kind of 

7 on a hopeless journey here because an incident 

8 to a worker is something that affected him out 

9 of the ordinary in his particular work day 

10 whether there was a particular consequence to 

11 it from dosimetry, or there may have been 

12 something that happened that was of 

13 consequence to dosimetry that he wasn’t in a 

14 position to observe that he was just affected 

15 by. 

16 So to us it’s a little difficult to 

17 come up with an incident list. And we don’t 

18 even, actually, we don’t even try to develop 

19 comprehensive list of incidents in our site 

20 profile. So when you get into this kind of 

21 situation is, of trying to prepare the 

22 interviewers more thoroughly, make them more 

23 knowledgeable so that they can better 

24 understand the, what the claimant says, you 

25 really run into a, you can’t make them 
162

1 completely knowledgeable that they will 

2 absolutely understand what the claimant says 

3 no matter what. 

4 And so you get a kind of a balancing 

5 of costs, diminishing returns in trying to 

6 balance how much effort can you spend on 

7 training your interviewers versus how much 

8 benefit do you get out by making them that 

9 much smarter about the specific sites. So to 

10 me it’s really hard to address this. It’s 

11 really hard to say we can make the 

12 interviewers good enough that they’ll 

13 understand what these guys are talking about, 

14 and they’ll never misunderstand a term. 

15 And the example that keeps popping 

16 into my head, and this goes way back to my 

17 early days in the program when, I think it was 

18 at a public comment session, a claimant 

19 complained about the interviewers not really 

20 knowing very much because he had used the word 

21 cold trap, and it had been transcribed as coal 

22 trap, C-O-A-L trap. Now, if we were to 

23 describe the activities at a gaseous diffusion 

24 plant or ^ 64 facility -- and that’s my 

25 familiarity -- 
163

1 MS. MUNN: Or an FFTF. 

2 MR. HINNEFELD: -- and you’ve talked about 

3 what they did, what does this facility do, 

4 you’re getting pretty, fairly detailed by the 

5 time you start talking about the cold traps 

6 and all that. So it’s not likely that had 

7 this person been particularly familiar with 

8 even the facility, if they had studied the 

9 facility and known what they did, the term 

10 cold trap may not have been part of that. I 

11 mean, that’s going pretty far. 

12 Now, that’s probably an extreme 

13 example, and I’m sure Arjun will point out 

14 that that’s an extreme example. But this is 

15 one where, look, we’re interested in helping 

16 the claimants as we can. And the interviewers 

17 are interested in helping the claimants as 

18 they can. We try to provide them the 

19 information that will assist them in doing 

20 that, but we can’t take on a task that’s 

21 essentially undoable just to try to do an 

22 undoable task a little better. 

23 And so we aren’t really proposing to 

24 change too much other than what we would do as 

25 just process improvements because we want to 
164

1 do a good interview and we want the interview 

2 to be a good circumstance for the claimant. 

3 MR. ELLIOTT: Given all of that, ORAU still 

4 trains the interviewers -- 

5 MR. HINNEFELD: There is training material 

6 for the interviewers. 

7 MR. ELLIOTT: -- on various sites, and when 

8 a new site profile or technical basis document 

9 or technical information bulletin comes on 

10 line and is implemented, that’s one of the 

11 training -- 

12 MR. HINNEFELD: I don’t know. 

13 MR. ELLIOTT: Is it? I thought that’s what 

14 I understood. 

15 MR. SIEBERT: David, are you still on the 

16 line? 

17 (no response) 

18 MR. HINNEFELD: David Shatto? 

19 MR. SIEBERT: That would be the person who 

20 would, I think might be able to answer that 

21 because I don’t know. 

22 MS. MUNN: Certainly, Stu, what you have to 

23 say is well received with respect to the 

24 minefield that we get into with semantics. 

25 And I can think of really no better one than 
165

1 the incident incidence because it’s certainly 

2 not just the workers themselves, the general 

3 public misunderstands what’s meant by an 

4 incident report, what an incident is. I have 

5 a good long story that I’ll tell anyone who’s 

6 happy to listen after we’re off transcript 

7 here about how shocked PBS film crew was. 

8 MR. SHATTO (by Telephone): I’m sorry, Stu, 

9 I was trying to hit mute and I disconnected 

10 myself. 

11 MR. HINNEFELD: Did you hear Larry’s 

12 question about the training for the 

13 interviewers when new documents come out? 

14 MR. SHATTO (by Telephone): Yes, I did, 

15 about is there specific training on a facility 

16 as it comes on line. Is that the question? 

17 MR. HINNEFELD: That was the question, 

18 right. 

19 MR. SHATTO (by Telephone): No, there’s not 

20 specific training for the interviewers as that 

21 comes on line. 

22 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, when a technical 

23 document comes out, the training usually is to 

24 the dose reconstructors about how to implement 

25 that, that technical document. So, but now 
166

1 there is a training package for the 

2 interviews, right? 

3 MR. SHATTO (by Telephone): Yes, there is. 

4 It’s a basic training on the facilities in 

5 general and where to go get information as 

6 it’s needed. 

7 MR. ELLIOTT: And then the other thing I 

8 would point out is that after the interview is 

9 conducted and a report is drafted, the people 

10 who were interviewed get an opportunity to 

11 comment on that and edit it. And maybe they 

12 don’t raise questions like perhaps everyone 

13 thinks they should about, well, you don’t have 

14 anything in here on the incidents or you don’t 

15 have anything here about the accident that I 

16 had. But there is that one more time for an 

17 interviewee to provide input. 

18 MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, and maybe David can 

19 provide at little, maybe he has a sort of 

20 anecdotal impression about how frequently we 

21 get proposed revisions from claimants when 

22 they see the first CATI report that we put 

23 out. 

24 MR. SHATTO (by Telephone): For like 

25 updates? 
167

1 MR. HINNEFELD: Right. When we do a CATI, 

2 we write down what we think we heard, and we 

3 send it to the claimant, do we get, do you 

4 have any kind of feeling for -- 

5 MR. ELLIOTT: Are there a lot of changes? 

6 MR. HINNEFELD: -- do they hesitate to speak 

7 up or do they speak up freely? 

8 MR. SHATTO (by Telephone): They do make 

9 several changes. I mean, some interviews may 

10 go through two or three different revisions. 

11 It depends on the interviewee, the claimant, 

12 if they have a lot of specific knowledge that 

13 they’re wanting a lot of detail, then, yes, 

14 they will have several revisions depending on 

15 what they’re trying to get across. And it 

16 does change. Sometimes they’ll change their 

17 mind on where they wanted their focus. 

18 MS. MUNN: Can you hear all right? It’s 

19 very faint here. 

20 MR. HINNEFELD: Based on the process that we 

21 have, and like I said how far do we go to try, 

22 how far do we go down this task if we can’t do 

23 completely. You know, we haven’t really 

24 proposed any particular changes in this avenue 

25 other than the fact that we do, as just normal 
168

1 process improvement, track that kind of 

2 activities in all our work. If we can find 

3 ways to improve what we’re doing, we implement 

4 those. 

5 MS. MUNN: So? 

6 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): If I might 

7 just comment on what Stu said. I don’t think 

8 the intent of the comment -- now, it was a 

9 long time ago, so I don’t remember exactly 

10 what I was thinking then or what Kathy and I 

11 were thinking then, but knowing what I know 

12 now and the experience we’ve had, the intent 

13 of the comment isn’t that an interviewer 

14 should be a health physicist in the CATI 

15 interviewer or an expert on a particular site. 

16 But knowledgeable and familiar with 

17 the site profile is sort of a different thing. 

18 Or to have the claimant’s claim in front of 

19 them so it would be at least cursorily 

20 familiar with the claim, none of which is 

21 required now. You’ve got so many sites, and I 

22 understand that many sites don’t even have a 

23 site profile. 

24 So I would agree that there are 

25 interviewers to whom particular sites like 
169

1 you’ve got a lot of claims from Hanford and 

2 there are two or three interviewers who 

3 basically handle those interviews. It might 

4 be worth the time for them to actually go 

5 through the site profile, and also I don’t 

6 know how you want to decide whether they 

7 should have the claim in front of them or not. 

8 So it might smooth the process down 

9 the way if the interviewer had that. You 

10 know, you all are doing the work, and it’s 

11 hard to second guess details down into the 

12 weeds like that. 

13 MS. MUNN: Well, and it’s hard for me, 

14 individually, to try to identify why exactly 

15 the interviewer should be in a position of 

16 needing to provide more information to the 

17 claimant than the claimant has access to 

18 already. That’s difficult to decide. You 

19 certainly don’t want to lead claimants one way 

20 or the other. Either they have information or 

21 they do not have information. 

22 So where do you come down on, what 

23 would you suggest sufficient information would 

24 be in interpreting the questions? The 

25 questions have more to do with the work that 
170

1 an individual did. I guess I’m asking 

2 something from SC&A which was inferred in the 

3 original finding that doesn’t seem to have an 

4 answer. 

5 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Well, I don’t 

6 know that it doesn’t have an answer, Ms. Munn. 

7 We made at least an inferential recommendation 

8 that the interviewer should be more familiar 

9 with the site profile and should have the 

10 claim in front of them. Now, if that’s not 

11 practical beyond what is being done, I mean, 

12 that’s a call that the working group has to 

13 make in terms of what you tell NIOSH and, of 

14 course, that NIOSH makes in terms of how they 

15 actually go about things. 

16 MR. HINNEFELD: Now, Arjun, when you say 

17 talk about having the claim in front of them, 

18 are you talking about the claimants’ exposure 

19 history? 

20 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yeah, you 

21 know, say, even if it’s an employee, you leave 

22 aside the problems with survivor claimants, I 

23 think often people don’t remember things, and 

24 or may say something that’s wrong, in which 

25 case you might have a CATI record that’s 
171

1 contradictory to the paper record. 

2 Now, I don’t know whether this kind of 

3 thing would cause the interviewer to depart 

4 from the script. I mean, there are a number 

5 of things that are implicit in the way, in the 

6 recommendation in the way the interview is 

7 conducted. So from a practical point of view 

8 it’s hard to tell. But the survivors often 

9 say don’t know, don’t know, don’t know. 

10 You have raised the objection that you 

11 don’t want interviewers to be prompting 

12 interviewees, and I would agree with that. 

13 You don’t want interviewers to be prompting 

14 interviewees. So there’s a kind of a fine 

15 line, and I don’t have a very good judgment 

16 about where that fine line is. 

17 So in a way I think there’s a concept 

18 that’s before you and how you implement that 

19 concept or what the working group thinks about 

20 it is kind of what I would defer to how you 

21 think the interviewee might best be helped to 

22 produce or remember the best quality 

23 information that would help the dose 

24 reconstructor. 

25 MS. MUNN: We can probably go further than 
172

1 saying there’s a fine line. I think there’s a 

2 bright line if you really and truly get down 

3 and think about it. And that bright line has 

4 to be that the interviewer does not contribute 

5 anything to this process in terms of 

6 information. 

7 If the interviewer is there for the 

8 purpose of providing information, then this, 

9 by definition, causes a bias in the response 

10 of the individual being interviewed. I think 

11 most any individual who’s done interviewing, I 

12 think most psychologists in that field would 

13 take that position. But your questioner must 

14 be neutral, otherwise you are biasing the 

15 information one way or the other. 

16 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): But neutral 

17 is a little different than not knowledgeable. 

18 Interviewers, well, you know, this is kind of 

19 a discussion on an abstract level, but the 

20 point at issue was not whether the interviewer 

21 should be neutral or not, and that’s, of 

22 course, I would agree. The point at issue is 

23 whether the interviewer should be 

24 knowledgeable. 

25 MS. MUNN: One would maintain that the dose 
173

1 reconstructor needs to be knowledgeable. The 

2 interviewer, however, is accepting 

3 information, being open to all information, 

4 presenting a question hopefully in a neutral 

5 way. So what we’re pushing for here is 

6 closure on this particular finding. 

7 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): And as I’ve 

8 said, I think that the spirit of the finding, 

9 and I personally am willing to say that I 

10 think NIOSH has looked at this finding and can 

11 see how best it might implement it. And 

12 mostly as I hear Stu’s responses that you’re 

13 doing what can be done to make the interview 

14 outcome as complete and accurate as possible 

15 and that nothing more needs to be done. 

16 Is that sort of a summary of what you 

17 said, Stu? 

18 MR. HINNEFELD: That’s a very good 

19 characterization of what I said. 

20 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): So at that 

21 stage I guess it’s just for the working group 

22 to decide whether this issue is closed or 

23 whether we need to debate it more. 

24 MS. MUNN: Is the sense of the discussion 

25 which has just ensued can be captured in our 
174

1 closing comment on the status sheet, is there 

2 any objection to calling this closed? 

3 (no response) 

4 MS. MUNN: We can always leave it in 

5 abeyance until we see the words. What is your 

6 choice? 

7 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Well, is 

8 NIOSH going to revise some of the words in the 

9 procedures for interviewers or how is -- 

10 MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, see, there’s a 

11 revision of PROC-0090 that will be done. 

12 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): So I would 

13 suggest that we can just leave it in abeyance 

14 until that time, but I don’t see that there’s 

15 further discussion from my point of view. I 

16 listened to Stu, and I think they’ve 

17 considered this. 

18 DR. ZIEMER: It’s not clear to me how the -- 

19 are you talking about the new CATI form? 

20 MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, I think there’ll be 

21 some changes in procedures as well, PROC-0090 

22 procedures. 

23 DR. ZIEMER: But even in the procedures it’s 

24 hard for me to see how you specifically 

25 address this. In other words you’ll have 
175

1 interviewers who are trained in a way so that 

2 they know technical terms and that sort of 

3 thing. 

4 MR. HINNEFELD: To the extent we can, yeah. 

5 DR. ZIEMER: To the extent you can, so if 

6 somebody’s talking about a Roentgen they sort 

7 of know that terminology. I tend to agree, I 

8 think, with what Wanda’s saying that even if 

9 they give misinformation like if someone from 

10 Idaho said I was in the SL-2 accident, I don’t 

11 want the interviewer to say, no, you mean the 

12 SL-1 accident. I would like him to put down 

13 what the claimant thinks that they were 

14 involved in. 

15 And the claimant may have it wrong, 

16 but it doesn’t seem to me that we want the 

17 interviewer interposing themselves because 

18 maybe the claimant is right because they were 

19 at the site. Or we don’t want the interviewer 

20 saying, no, well, that didn’t happen at your 

21 site so that’s not good information. Whatever 

22 they have, so not to interpose themselves. So 

23 I’m just concerned that we don’t push this to 

24 the point where the interviewers are 

25 controlling the input from the clients. 
176

1 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): This is Steve 

2 Marschke. Stu said something earlier in the 

3 discussion about that an attempt is made to 

4 use an interviewer who’s more familiar with 

5 the site. And I think if words to that effect 

6 were in PROC-0090, not necessarily saying he 

7 must be familiar with the site, but we do 

8 acknowledge that we do at least make an 

9 attempt to use knowledgeable, you know, people 

10 who are knowledgeable of the site and use, 

11 again like you mentioned for Hanford, use the 

12 same interviewers for all the Hanford 

13 claimants or the same group of interviewers 

14 for all the Hanford claimants and so on and so 

15 forth, that might help. I don’t know. 

16 DR. ZIEMER: So that if they said I worked 

17 in the canyons at Savannah River, the 

18 interviewer sort of knows what they’re talking 

19 about. 

20 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Exactly. 

21 DR. ZIEMER: I don’t have any trouble with 

22 that idea. 

23 MR. HINNEFELD: I hate to speak 

24 knowledgeably here because this affects the 

25 work of ORAU, not the work of me, and I want 
177

1 to see before we commit to that -- we may well 

2 do that, but we want to -- 

3 DR. ZIEMER: To the extent possible. 

4 MR. HINNEFELD: -- given the work planning 

5 constraints and getting what has to be done, 

6 done. And to the extent that it is merely a 

7 suggestion that we will attempt to do this, 

8 and so as need be they can do work planning 

9 and have the people do what has to be done. I 

10 don’t see any particular problem in that. But 

11 I really hate to speak very definitively about 

12 this. 

13 And I know Dave is not really a task 

14 team leader for this task. He’s sitting in 

15 for his boss, and he may be a little concerned 

16 about speaking up as well. But I think that 

17 kind of thing if we can say it truthfully, and 

18 it’s sort of a guidance or suggestions rather 

19 than a hard and fast rule that would interfere 

20 with our work plan, then I personally don’t 

21 see a particular problem with that. 

22 MR. SHATTO (by Telephone): This is David. 

23 I was going to jump in just a second. I think 

24 that would affect, it could affect some of the 

25 work planning given our, I mean, some of these 
178

1 sites, I mean, there’s 200 -- like you said 

2 earlier -- there’s 200- and-some facilities 

3 out there. Some of these I think Wanda 

4 actually stated earlier, we don’t want to 

5 discredit anything that the claimant’s saying. 

6 I would hate for the interviewers to think 

7 that they are to say something didn’t happen 

8 at a site. That’s my input. 

9 MR. ELLIOTT: This is Larry Elliott. I 

10 think it would be different if we were having 

11 this conversation at the front end of this 

12 program where we have a large number, had a 

13 large number of claims per certain sites, and 

14 you could tailor your interview staff to be 

15 knowledgeable about a given site. But we’re 

16 not there now. 

17 We’re at a juncture now where the 200 

18 claims that we’re seeing come from DOL in a 

19 given month, maybe 20 of them are Hanford, if 

20 that, maybe another 20 are Savannah River, and 

21 then the rest are all over the place. And so 

22 I think we’re not searching now for 

23 interviewers that have established knowledge 

24 about a given site as much as knowledge about 

25 how to do the interview and do it effectively. 
179

1 So I don’t know. We’ll take it under 

2 advisement, and we’ll consider it, but as I 

3 know Stu has jotted this down, he’ll go back 

4 to ORAU, and we’ll talk about it. 

5 MS. MUNN: Good. I’m just searching for a 

6 set of words that are comprehensive enough to 

7 make everybody happy that we can close this 

8 out. So we’ll await the words. Okay? 

9 (no response) 

10 MS. MUNN: Anything else on item eight? I 

11 hope not. 

12 (no response) 

13 MS. MUNN: Can we move on to item nine? 

14 MR. HINNEFELD: The statement of item nine’s 

15 finding is the interviewer is not required to 

16 have knowledge of the facility although some 

17 may have it. Now, to me this sounds like the 

18 one we just talked about. It sounds like 

19 number nine. I mean, the preparation of the 

20 interviewer not to be knowledgeable, so I 

21 think it’s the same one. 

22 MS. MUNN: It appears to be an extension of 

23 the same thing, just further delineation of -- 

24 MR. HINNEFELD: My suggestion would be this 

25 could be addressed in finding number nine. It 
180

1 could be changed to that unless there’s some 

2 aspect of this that I didn’t pick up on. 

3 MS. MUNN: Or eight. 

4 MR. HINNEFELD: This is nine? 

5 MS. MUNN: This is nine we’re looking at 

6 now. 

7 MS. ADAMS: You jumped to ten, Stu. 

8 MR. HINNEFELD: I jumped to ten? 

9 MS. ADAMS: Yeah. 

10 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I think it sounds a 

11 lot like nine. 

12 MS. MUNN: Yes, it actually appears that 

13 eight and nine are a parsing of the same 

14 issue. So let us agree to close one or the 

15 other and cover it -- 

16 DR. ZIEMER: The same way. 

17 MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, I guess you’re right. 

18 I consider eight, nine and ten to be largely 

19 the same. It has to do with how well prepared 

20 is the interviewer, how knowledgeable is the 

21 interviewer of the site in order to do the 

22 interview and it seems like to be the same, I 

23 think maybe eight contains the additional 

24 context of how familiar is the interviewer 

25 with the claim -- 
181

1 MS. MUNN: Yes. 

2 MR. HINNEFELD: -- in addition to the site. 

3 So there’s that additional element with eight. 

4 Eight, nine and ten are very much the same. 

5 MS. MUNN: May we close nine and ten by 

6 saying that they will be covered by item 

7 eight? Any objection to that? 

8 MR. ELLIOTT: Well, at the risk of 

9 belaboring the discussion here, I need to 

10 understand a little more as to what is 

11 intended by the comment that the interviewer 

12 needs to understand the claim better. What 

13 part of the claim or what aspect of the claim 

14 needs to be better understood by the 

15 interviewer in order to conduct an effective 

16 interview? 

17 MR. HINNEFELD: I don’t know the specifics; 

18 we said number eight, but they said in one of 

19 the findings later on it has to do with having 

20 the exposure history available to the claimant 

21 -- or to the interviewer during the interview. 

22 Right now, the interview doesn’t necessarily 

23 wait on the response from the DOE on the 

24 exposure. 

25 DR. ZIEMER: I don’t think it’s mentioned in 
182

1 eight, nine or ten. 

2 MR. HINNEFELD: No, it’s not mentioned in 

3 eight, nine or ten, but it comes up later. 

4 And then Arjun talked about having the claim 

5 open in front of him. That would be 

6 something, somewhere we might want to go 

7 because maybe that’s worth talking about some 

8 more. At the time of the CATI interview, the 

9 claim file essentially consists of the package 

10 that the Department of Labor sent over to us. 

11 DR. ZIEMER: So you don’t have the DOE 

12 records. 

13 MR. HINNEFELD: Not now. Sometimes yes, 

14 sometimes no, might or may not. It’s not a 

15 required to proceed with the interview but it 

16 might be there. So the file that the DOL 

17 sends over is the claimant form and one, two, 

18 three or something like that, the form that 

19 the claimant fills out in order to file a 

20 claim with the Department of Labor. 

21 On that there’s some information the 

22 claimant fills in about where they worked and 

23 their job title and things like that. And 

24 then there is the, behind that there’s 

25 usually, there will be the medical information 
183

1 that they provided to the Department of Labor. 

2 And then there will be whatever the Department 

3 of Labor has done to develop and support the 

4 information in the application, usually an 

5 employment verification, and there may be some 

6 interpretation of the medical record, maybe 

7 not. 

8 There may not be anything, any kind of 

9 interpretive statement, but sometimes the 

10 medical information is pretty lengthy. So 

11 from the status, now, the interviewer has 

12 available to them on the screen without ever 

13 opening the claim file most of the demographic 

14 information that’s associated with the claim. 

15 It will show them what the covered 

16 employment is, what the diseases are, what the 

17 covered conditions are so that that’s 

18 available to them on a view screen. And, in 

19 fact, I believe it’s probably on the CATI 

20 report. One of the things they do is ask the 

21 claimant to verify these are the covered 

22 conditions that the Department of Labor has 

23 told us about. Are these the cancers that you 

24 have. 

25 MR. ELLIOTT: And the employment history. 
184

1 MR. HINNEFELD: And the employment history. 

2 So opening the file, the claim file, or having 

3 the claim file or making the interviewer open 

4 the claim file, to me, doesn’t provide them a 

5 whole lot more information than what’s on the 

6 view screen that’s used actually to populate 

7 the CATI form. 

8 So other than the exposure record, the 

9 DOE exposure record, which would be perhaps 

10 relevant information, to verify, then you’d 

11 have to gin up the question the Department of 

12 Labor indicates that you were monitored from 

13 this year to that year or from these years to 

14 those years via film badge and that you had 

15 bioassay samples. 

16 Rather than go through that which 

17 requires an interpretation of that record by 

18 the way, and not necessarily an easy one 

19 especially in the case of Hanford, there’s not 

20 a lot in the claim file that’s really beyond 

21 what’s just automatically produced on the CATI 

22 form. 

23 DR. ZIEMER: Well, is this being asked for 

24 in a different item that we’re not -- 

25 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, that exposure history 
185

1 comes later. It’s in one of the later 

2 findings. But this one Arjun did on one of 

3 the findings, number eight, talked about the 

4 interviewer being more knowledgeable of the 

5 claim, and Arjun mentioned that they’re not 

6 required to have the claim file open when they 

7 do the interview or have the claim file when 

8 they do the interview. 

9 And I guess my point is that the bulk 

10 of the claim file at that point doesn’t, you 

11 know, can be many, many pages, but the 

12 information that really is relevant to our 

13 task is the demographic information and the 

14 information about covered conditions of 

15 covered employment which is automatically 

16 reproduced from database onto the CATI form. 

17 So I don’t know that access to the 

18 claim gives the claimant or the interviewer a 

19 lot more information than they have from the 

20 database information that’s summarized for 

21 them. 

22 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): That may be 

23 right, Stu. That may be right. Yeah, it’s 

24 possible that it doesn’t add a whole lot in 

25 the interview if you get into all the details 
186

1 of how the claim files ^ look and how 

2 difficult a lot of paperwork is. This may not 

3 be, this is not necessarily a useful 

4 suggestion. 

5 MR. HINNEFELD: And one thing you all need 

6 to keep in mind, this report was originally 

7 written in 2005. 

8 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): No, it was 

9 written in 2004, sent out in January of 2005. 

10 MR. HINNEFELD: And Arjun’s seen a lot more 

11 of the program since then. And so he may not 

12 have written this today. 

13 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yeah, I think 

14 knowing how difficult a lot of the material in 

15 the individual claim files is, I think it’s 

16 not a very useful suggestion. 

17 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Just for a 

18 little clarification, at the end of issue 

19 eight in parentheses it refers back to finding 

20 eight of the original report which talks about 

21 family member claimants. And in issue nine in 

22 the parentheses it refers back to finding one 

23 of the original report which refers to worker 

24 claimants. 

25 So I guess really the fine points 
187

1 between, the difference between issue eight 

2 and nine is that, does any additional 

3 knowledge or information need to be provided 

4 to an interviewer who is interviewing family 

5 member claimants as opposed to a worker 

6 claimant. 

7 DR. ZIEMER: Well, I’m certainly willing to 

8 answer that. I think the answer is no, and 

9 here’s the reason. Number one I think there’s 

10 often a misconception, particularly among 

11 family members, that there’s a burden on them 

12 to provide the information to process the 

13 claim, when, in fact, we’re simply trying to 

14 supplement the information. Do they have 

15 other information that we don’t already have. 

16 But I don’t think it serves us well to say, to 

17 try to coach them on what the claimant did as 

18 part of gathering information. It’s sort of -

19 - in fact, we need to make it clear to them 

20 that processing the claim is not dependent on 

21 their knowing details of the claimants’ work, 

22 and I think we do that, at least we try to, 

23 right? 

24 MR. ELLIOTT: I hope we do. I think we do. 

25 DR. ZIEMER: Although we still hear these 
188

1 comments from family members who say they 

2 asked me to provide all of this information, 

3 and I don’t know anything about it. We 

4 certainly need to make it clear if they know 

5 additional things, fine. If not, the claim 

6 will be able to be processed very well, thank 

7 you. 

8 MR. ELLIOTT: But I would hope we’re doing 

9 that. I think we’re doing that, but it’s 

10 something that we always feel we need to 

11 revisit with whoever does interviews. 

12 DR. ZIEMER: In fact, the family members may 

13 not even be able to verify all the things that 

14 the claimant did that Stu was talking about. 

15 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): It may be 

16 useful in this context to insert, to let the 

17 individual know that if NIOSH feels they 

18 cannot do dose reconstruction, that they do 

19 initiate 83-14 special exposure cohorts. It 

20 may not be. I mean, it’s a suggestion that 

21 might put the claim -- and now that you have 

22 done, initiated many, quite a few 83-14 SECs, 

23 you have a track record that you can point to 

24 with claimants that always believe that you 

25 have enough information in that you’ve 
189

1 initiated a number of them which could put 

2 them a little more at ease that, you know, if 

3 you don’t have enough information that you’ll 

4 do that. 

5 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, but in a way that’s still 

6 the same end result that we can proceed, that 

7 it’s not dependent on the family members to 

8 come up with details on the work or the 

9 incidents or the type of materials worked with 

10 or locations or anything else. So I think in 

11 answer to the original question do you give, 

12 do we need different training for the 

13 interviewers for family members or different -

14 - what is it -- different information that’s 

15 given to them. I don’t think so. 

16 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): One could 

17 take a fairly radical position here and say 

18 the interview’s almost never useful, and why 

19 do the interview. Why not just do it in those 

20 cases where the dose reconstructor feels they 

21 need information from the claimant? 

22 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, that could work. Need 

23 a rule change. 

24 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yeah, I mean, 

25 these comments -- 
190

1 DR. ZIEMER: Well, these aren’t claimants. 

2 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): -- a part of 

3 the problem has been resolved by the changing 

4 of the original letter that was sent that said 

5 this is critical, you know, your dose 

6 reconstruction may not work if, you know, it 

7 may not be able to be done accurately if you 

8 don’t provide this information. And that has 

9 been changed. That letter has been improved, 

10 and so the imperative language has been taken 

11 out of it. 

12 But if the materials in the interview 

13 are rarely useful, then -- and I think in 

14 reviewing dose reconstructions -- Hans and 

15 Kathy are not on the line I imagine -- but 

16 generally we found that the dose 

17 reconstruction is done without much reference 

18 to the CATI. And in that case there’s a sort 

19 of a bigger question that arises, and maybe 

20 we’re doing them just because they’re part of 

21 the regulation. 

22 DR. ZIEMER: But on the other hand there are 

23 still a number of claimants, that is family 

24 member claimants, who have had a wealth of 

25 information about their family member for whom 
191

1 the claim is being initiated. So some know 

2 nothing, but we’ve seen some that know a lot. 

3 But I don’t think you can eliminate that 

4 interview. They are claimants if the 

5 individual has died and they are, they have 

6 the same status legally, don’t they? 

7 MR. ELLIOTT: They do have the same status. 

8 DR. ZIEMER: Entitled to an interview and -- 

9 MR. ELLIOTT: But there’s no requirements 

10 that an interview be conducted out of the law. 

11 We put that in there in our regulation -- 

12 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, but it’s there. 

13 MR. ELLIOTT: -- thinking that we wanted to 

14 hear the individual worker’s side of the 

15 story, and if a survivor claimant had anything 

16 to offer to supplement the information for the 

17 claim to better our ability to reconstruct 

18 dose, we wanted that. We want to give them 

19 the opportunity to provide that. It’s really 

20 a test of just how much value we have gained 

21 from the interviews. If we do away with it, 

22 we’d have to do an assessment of that. 

23 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): We could make 

24 the interviews optional by the claimant. 

25 MR. ELLIOTT: Well, they are. They are 
192

1 right now. They’re voluntary. They don’t 

2 have to go through an interview. In fact, 

3 we’ve had some that have declined interviews. 

4 MS. MUNN: But the issue with number 11 is 

5 whether or not the follow up action that’s 

6 listed from NIOSH is adequate for us to close 

7 it. It says this finding refers only to the 

8 page in the checklist. The statement of the 

9 finding is pretty complete. It appears on the 

10 checklist. Also seems to allude to additional 

11 discussion on this topic. There’s no 

12 reference to where that discussion appears. 

13 If there’s additional discussion, its page 

14 number would help. Is there additional 

15 discussion or can this be closed? 

16 MR. HINNEFELD: Are we on to 11 now? 

17 MS. MUNN: Well, I thought we were. 

18 MR. HINNEFELD: I thought we went up to ten. 

19 MS. MUNN: I thought we had beaten ten to 

20 death. 

21 MR. HINNEFELD: I didn’t say we hadn’t 

22 beaten it to death. 

23 DR. ZIEMER: No, he had pointed out that the 

24 difference between eight and ten is one refers 

25 to family member interviews and the other 
193

1 referred to the energy employee. 

2 MS. MUNN: But we had discussed that and had 

3 concluded that the wording that we were going 

4 to use to close eight would cover -- 

5 DR. ZIEMER: Nine and ten. 

6 MS. MUNN: -- nine and ten. 

7 DR. ZIEMER: I think so. 

8 MS. MUNN: So let’s look at 11 before we 

9 take a comfort break. 

10 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay, number 11 that 7/3/08, 

11 the last, the lowest listed one on the page, 

12 was that was my comment to Arjun to try to 

13 clarify. And then he responded on 7/15. So 

14 it appears above our comment. And he points 

15 out that this finding relates to findings 

16 number four and eight on page 208 of their 

17 report. 

18 So while the statement of the finding 

19 as it existed in the database just referred to 

20 the page number for the checklist, Arjun says 

21 that’s supposed to relate to these two other 

22 findings in the summary finding section. And 

23 so that’s that discussion. That was the 

24 discussion we had, our e-mail exchange between 

25 the last work group meeting and this one. 
194

1 With respect to number 11, if I can 

2 summarize -- and if I miss this, Arjun, please 

3 help me out. 

4 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Sure. 

5 MR. HINNEFELD: My reading of finding number 

6 four is that, finding number four speaks again 

7 to the disadvantage of survivor claimants and 

8 recommends that a coworker interview be 

9 required in the instance of a survivor claim 

10 with the attempt to try to find someone akin 

11 to an EE claimant, you know, an EE claimant 

12 who was actually on the work site actually 

13 doing what he did, try to find somebody akin 

14 to them and make a requirement to do a 

15 coworker interview for a survivor claimant. 

16 That’s number four. 

17 And number eight I believe also speaks 

18 to the level of preparation about the -- and 

19 specific knowledge on the part of the 

20 interviewers. Did I summarize those okay? 

21 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yeah, eight 

22 is actually a summary of all the things we 

23 said in regard to the difficulty being greater 

24 for family member claimants. 

25 MR. HINNEFELD: Right, and so this would 
195

1 then be additional preparation for survivor 

2 interviews on the part of the interviewer. 

3 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yeah, there 

4 are other things in number eight. It’s just a 

5 summary list of bullet points, stuff about 

6 closing interviews and the health physicist 

7 should be present, in finding eight in the 

8 original report on page 211. Yeah, I think 

9 finding four is as you said. 

10 MR. HINNEFELD: And I guess from our 

11 discussion so far we felt all along that 

12 coworker or fellow employee, fellow worker 

13 interviews we want to do those when we don’t 

14 have enough information otherwise, and in most 

15 cases we feel like we do. Consequently, we 

16 don’t feel like we should necessarily go do 

17 coworker interviews whenever we have a 

18 survivor claimant. 

19 We think that we have in almost all 

20 cases enough information anyway and why add 

21 that because that’s a significant increase in 

22 the amount of work necessary to complete 

23 coworker interviews for every survivor 

24 claimant because about half our claims are 

25 survivor claimants. 
196

1 DR. ZIEMER: Unless you have the issues that 

2 Larry raised about privacy of the claimant 

3 itself vis-a-vis the coworkers. 

4 MS. MUNN: Arjun? 

5 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yes. I think 

6 we’ve discussed the issue of coworkers and 

7 some language has been suggested and NIOSH is 

8 going to revise that language so we can review 

9 it at that time. 

10 MS. MUNN: So item 11 -- 

11 DR. ZIEMER: It’s basically the same issue. 

12 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, it’s largely the same 

13 issue as the earlier discussion about coworker 

14 interviews and letting people know whether 

15 we’re going to do them or not, what kind of 

16 expectation do they have. 

17 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yeah, and 

18 when I reviewed it in writing these responses 

19 to you, Stu, I did find that some, because of 

20 the way the checklist was organized, and then 

21 we did findings on top of the checklist, there 

22 was a fair amount of repetition as you had 

23 noted so some of these things keep popping up 

24 because there was repetition in the original 

25 finding. 
197

1 MS. MUNN: So may we close this with the 

2 understanding that it is being addressed? 

3 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Well, I 

4 thought we were going to put it in abeyance 

5 because NIOSH was revising the language. Now 

6 if we don’t want to revisit the language, you 

7 can close it. 

8 MS. MUNN: All right, my concern is, is it 

9 in abeyance and going to require additional 

10 language on this item, or is it in abeyance 

11 awaiting language on other preceding items? 

12 That’s my concern. 

13 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): It’s a 

14 duplication of the preceding items. We 

15 already discussed that, and I understood Stu 

16 to say they’re going to revise the language. 

17 And this is essentially the same thing. 

18 Am I misunderstanding that, Stu? 

19 MR. HINNEFELD: No, I think you’re right. I 

20 think it’s number seven. I’m trying to sort 

21 out which one it was. I think it’s finding 

22 number seven. 

23 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): I agree with 

24 you, Stu. I think it’s number seven as well. 

25 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. 
198

1 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yes, 

2 unfortunately, this is a little bit of a 

3 duplication. I’m sorry about that, but there 

4 was some duplication in the original. 

5 MR. HINNEFELD: So that one will be 

6 addressed in finding seven. 

7 MS. MUNN: Good, in abeyance for now. 

8 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): I think one of 

9 the reasons there’s duplication, Arjun, is 

10 because we took three procedures, and comments 

11 from three procedures and put them together 

12 into one procedure. 

13 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yeah, we also 

14 used the checklist. Now, we did the same 

15 thing, you know, we didn’t have to go to the 

16 OMB, but we had to go to the Board to revise 

17 our checklist. And we thought instead of 

18 dragging things out we’d use the DR checklist 

19 for a procedure review, and it didn’t really 

20 work too well. 

21 MS. MUNN: No, it seldom does. 

22 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): And some of 

23 the problems arose from that. 

24 MR. HINNEFELD: And so in order not to miss 

25 any findings, the way the report was written 
199

1 when the list of findings was compiled, they 

2 would pick a finding off a checklist and then 

3 they would pick the findings as they were 

4 expressed later on, and so as a general rule 

5 the checklist, the later on information just 

6 supplemented what was on the checklist. 

7 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): And we said 

8 the same thing in different ways and so we got 

9 some confusion unfortunately introduced in the 

10 process. 

11 MS. MUNN: Well, that’s one of the things I 

12 hope that we can achieve by going through 

13 these one by one, is diminishing this 

14 staggering number of items that we have down 

15 to a handful that address with more 

16 specificity the concerns that we have. 

17 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): I believe, 

18 Ms. Munn, there are a handful right now. 

19 MS. MUNN: Before we address item 12, let’s 

20 take a no longer than 15 minute break. Be 

21 back at 3:15. 

22 (Whereupon, a break was taken from 3:00 p.m. 

23 until 3:15 p.m.) 

24 MR. KATZ: This is the Advisory Board on 

25 Radiation Worker Health, and it’s the 
200

1 Procedures work group. And we’re just 

2 starting back up after a break. 

3 MS. MUNN: We’re starting with PROC-0012, 

4 correct? 

5 MR. HINNEFELD: PROC-0090, finding 12. 

6 MS. MUNN: Oh, I’m sorry, PROC-0090, finding 

7 12. 

8 MR. HINNEFELD: And this has to do with the 

9 knowledge of the interviewers, the facility 

10 knowledge of the interviewers. 

11 MR. ELLIOTT: Somebody doesn’t have their 

12 phone on mute, or is it feedback in here? 

13 MS. MUNN: Hold on just a moment. We had an 

14 interference problem. 

15 Go ahead, Stu. 

16 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay, I believe this is 

17 essentially the same as the other earlier 

18 findings about the facility-specific knowledge 

19 of the interviewer. 

20 MS. MUNN: It appears to me to be. 

21 Arjun, are you back? 

22 (no response) 

23 MS. MUNN: Arjun isn’t back so we can’t get 

24 his buy-in, I guess. 

25 Steve, are you there? 
201

1 (no response) 

2 MR. HINNEFELD: Could be they gave up. 

3 DR. ZIEMER: We’re not on mute, are we? 

4 MR. KATZ: We’re not on mute. 

5 DR. ZIEMER: Mark or Mike still there? 

6 MR. KATZ: Is anyone on the line? 

7 MR. GIBSON (by Telephone): Yeah, this is 

8 Mike. I’m here. 

9 MR. KATZ: I think maybe we’re a little 

10 early. 

11 MS. MUNN: Two minutes. Two minutes early. 

12 Let’s see if anything other than item 

13 12, item 13. 

14 DR. ZIEMER: Is 12, did we decide that’s the 

15 same as eight through ten? 

16 MS. MUNN: Well, since our folks are not 

17 back here yet so that we can ask them that. 

18 I’m just asking us to take a look. It appears 

19 that 12 and 13 -- 

20 MR. HINNEFELD: Twelve takes a little 

21 different approach here when you read the bulk 

22 of it in the report. It advocates outreach to 

23 communities of claimants in advance of the 

24 CATIs, the need to make the CATI less 

25 threatening and more complete site knowledge 
202

1 on the part of the interviewer. So there’s 

2 kind of something, the second and third parts 

3 of that I think have been addressed. 

4 The first part advocates outreach to 

5 communities of claimants. So this I think was 

6 in the context of, I know Denise was one of 

7 the people who was interviewed for this 

8 review, and at the time there were a lot of 

9 people, Mallinckrodt employees, who were 

10 awaiting, were being scheduled for CATIs and 

11 Denise was getting a lot of calls, can you 

12 help me with this. 

13 And the comment was in these 

14 situations where you have these pockets of 

15 claimants, where you’re going to be doing a 

16 large number of interviews, perhaps it would 

17 be worthwhile to go do an outreach to just 

18 kind of familiarize it with the CATI process. 

19 We’ve never really done that, you know, done 

20 outreach for the purpose of CATI process. And 

21 it’s sort of moot at this point anyway because 

22 like Larry mentioned earlier, the days with 

23 large pools of claims ready to be interviewed 

24 from specific sites are pretty much done. 

25 We interview them, the interviews are 
203

1 fairly current, the CATI interviews are fairly 

2 current. There’s not a really long wait 

3 between the time a case is referred to us and 

4 the time the interview’s done. And so they’re 

5 done just as they come in. So you don’t 

6 really have this opportunity for outreach out 

7 there any more to go to these pools of 

8 uninterviewed (sic) claimants. 

9 So to me since that really doesn’t 

10 seem to be in the cards any more at this point 

11 in the program, and the other two parts of it 

12 I think have been addressed to make the CATI 

13 less threatening was, I think, addressed by 

14 our change in the letter to the claimant and 

15 more complete site knowledge by the 

16 interviewer is subject of several other 

17 findings that we’ve already talked about. 

18 MS. MUNN: Hopefully, when Arjun and Steve 

19 get back -- 

20 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yeah, I’m 

21 back. 

22 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): We’re both 

23 back. 

24 MS. MUNN: Oh, good you’re back. Did you 

25 hear the bulk of the comment? 
204

1 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Unfortunately, 

2 I did not. I didn’t realize I was late. 

3 MS. MUNN: I started two minutes early. You 

4 can blame me. 

5 MR. HINNEFELD: Arjun, what I said about 

6 number 12 was, number 12, while the summary 

7 statement on the database talks about the 

8 interviewers are trained to be sensitive but 

9 do not require facility knowledge, and this 

10 apprehension that the procedure’s not 

11 addressed, as I read the finding in the 

12 report, not the summary statement here, it 

13 seemed to me that there was an advocacy in 

14 this write up for conducting outreach-type 

15 meetings to communities where there are a 

16 large number of claimants to be interviewed. 

17 I think this came up in the context of 

18 a discussion with Denise Brock at the time. 

19 And she had received a lot of calls or a lot 

20 of Mallinckrodt claimants who were being 

21 scheduled for interviews. She was getting a 

22 lot of calls when people were concerned about 

23 doing a good job in the interview. And so I 

24 believe the comment stated that it would be a 

25 good idea to go to these communities where you 
205

1 have, you know, do some outreach so you could, 

2 people could be familiar with the interview 

3 process before they got into it. 

4 Well, we didn’t do that. At this 

5 point those populations of claimants, of 

6 uninterviewed (sic) claimants don’t really 

7 exist any more. The current interviews are 

8 pretty current, you know, they’re done pretty 

9 quickly after the case is referred to us. So 

10 the opportunity for doing something like that 

11 seems to be gone. Then it also, emphasize the 

12 need to make the CATI less threatening. We 

13 believe we’ve done that in large part by the 

14 change in the letter we send to claimants. 

15 And then it also advocates more 

16 complete knowledge, site knowledge, on the 

17 part of the interviewers which we’ve addressed 

18 quite a bit here already. 

19 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): I agree with 

20 all that. 

21 MS. MUNN: May we close item 12? 

22 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yeah, I think 

23 so. 

24 MR. HINNEFELD: And then 13. 

25 I’m sorry, are we ready for 13? 
206

1 MS. MUNN: Yes. 

2 MR. HINNEFELD: The procedure does not 

3 require an interviewer ^ to elicit site4 specific data. Again, I think this is another 

5 statement of the finding earlier about the 

6 preparation of the interviewer for the 

7 interview in order to be as helpful as 

8 possible. And I think we’ve kind of talked 

9 that one quite a bit as well. 

10 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yep, I agree. 

11 MR. HINNEFELD: I don’t know if that’s 

12 closed or addressed in another finding. 

13 MS. MUNN: Yes, it’s closed, captured 

14 elsewhere. 

15 Item 14. 

16 MR. HINNEFELD: Interview contains numerous 

17 gaps. This is what we talked about at some 

18 length earlier on. This finding refers to the 

19 page or so of specific recommendations about 

20 what to do on the CATI form, which I think 

21 would appropriately be in abeyance as we are 

22 going about revising that form for the reason 

23 of a re-approval. 

24 And so I forget where we ended up with 

25 that. I think if I recall, the work group was 
207

1 going to look through the recommendations in 

2 the report and maybe provide ones to us they 

3 thought should be particularly important to 

4 address. 

5 Was that where we were with that? 

6 MS. MUNN: Well -- 

7 DR. ZIEMER: Discuss it at the next meeting. 

8 MS. MUNN: -- it was, I hope, that NIOSH 

9 would also be putting together a list of 

10 recommendations that they had had up to this 

11 point that they were willing to consider in 

12 terms of potential revisions to the CATI. 

13 And I had asked the members of this 

14 work group to go through the report and this 

15 procedure again and to list individually 

16 concerns that they had with respect to what 

17 might be added to. And that that would be our 

18 primary, our first topic at our meeting in 

19 September at the end of the Board meeting 

20 since that fits your schedule for, if we can 

21 come to some conclusion at that work group 

22 meeting with respect to recommendations from 

23 NIOSH. 

24 MR. HINNEFELD: So you would like us then to 

25 provide essentially our take on these 
208

1 recommendations in advance of -- 

2 MS. MUNN: Yes. 

3 MR. HINNEFELD: -- (indiscernible). 

4 MR. KATZ: Our plans for changes. 

5 MS. MUNN: The ones that you already have. 

6 MR. HINNEFELD: -- and receive the proposed 

7 revisions. 

8 MS. MUNN: Yes. 

9 DR. ZIEMER: Isn’t this part of the issue as 

10 to seeing the work product in advance of your 

11 submission to OMB? 

12 MR. KATZ: First, there’s nothing to, if you 

13 want to see our plans for how we’re going, our 

14 basic plans for how we’re going to change the 

15 CATI interview -- 

16 DR. ZIEMER: We don’t have to approve it, 

17 but we need to see it. 

18 MR. KATZ: -- don’t have to approve it, but 

19 if that will help you then in making any 

20 further recommendations as to what you might 

21 have -- 

22 MR. HINNEFELD: I can tell you some of the 

23 recommendations -- 

24 MR. KATZ: -- add to the -- 

25 MR. HINNEFELD: -- have just been adopted in 
209

1 our recommendation. There’s no question about 

2 overtime work that’s in there now, in the 

3 proposed revision. There’s this statement 

4 here there’s no separate form for coworkers, 

5 when, in fact, there is one. There’s no 

6 question about in vivo monitoring, and that’s 

7 been added. So there’s some that we just 

8 said, we just took at face value and put in 

9 there. 

10 MS. MUNN: And using that as a skeleton for 

11 this work group to base any additional 

12 information on that would be the topic of our 

13 conversation when we met in September. 

14 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Ms. Munn, if 

15 we know the items that NIOSH is already 

16 incorporating, it might be the subject of a 

17 brief working group call or technical call 

18 between NIOSH and us that we can make notes 

19 and communicate to the working group if NIOSH 

20 wants closure on this before. I’m a little 

21 concerned that we should not slow down NIOSH 

22 in any way or kind of have comments after 

23 NIOSH’s deadline. 

24 It might be better if we got all the 

25 comments in before, well before NIOSH’s 
210

1 deadline for submittal. At least that’s the 

2 way it seemed to me, but maybe Larry, it 

3 doesn’t matter to NIOSH. 

4 DR. ZIEMER: We can do the public comment 

5 period if -- 

6 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Okay, that’s 

7 fine. 

8 DR. ZIEMER: -- the other thing on this is 

9 probably we need to make sure that Mike 

10 Gibson’s Worker Outreach group also gets the 

11 same material. 

12 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Okay, fine. 

13 MS. MUNN: Mike will have it. 

14 DR. ZIEMER: Mike will have it. Mike, you -

15 - anyway, right, from us. So it’s part of the 

16 same thing that was raised earlier. 

17 MS. MUNN: Are we in agreement on item 14 

18 then, in abeyance? Will be addressed by the 

19 revisions. 

20 (no response) 

21 MS. MUNN: Item 15. 

22 MR. HINNEFELD: The procedures do not 

23 provide for explanation if information is not 

24 used. I think this is a good point. I think 

25 it’s, you can’t really put that in the 
211

1 procedure for CATIs though because at the time 

2 the CATI is done, you don’t know if the 

3 information in the interview is going to be 

4 used or not. 

5 What we have done, independent of any 

6 changes in the CATI procedures, we do now 

7 address this in the dose reconstruction. And 

8 that specifically any incident information 

9 that the claimant provides is addressed in 

10 their dose reconstruction report whether it’s 

11 relevant to dose reconstruction or not even to 

12 the point of when they speak about non13 radiological exposures. 

14 We say, we address that in the dose 

15 reconstruction. It was just a comment that 

16 this doesn’t affect the radiation exposure. 

17 So I believe that’s been done. I don’t know 

18 if I can show you a procedure that requires 

19 them to do it, but I can tell you it’s done 

20 because it’s one of the things we check for. 

21 MS. MUNN: SC&A, can we close this? 

22 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yeah, I 

23 believe so, yeah. 

24 MS. MUNN: Work group members, closed? 

25 DR. ZIEMER: Yes. 
212

1 MS. MUNN: Item 16. 

2 MR. HINNEFELD: This is the one I talked 

3 about earlier, the DOE file, the exposure 

4 history file is not required to be with the 

5 interviewer during the interview. And, in 

6 fact, we do not wait for that response 

7 necessarily to schedule the interview. 

8 Sometimes it will be there. Sometimes it 

9 won’t. But we don’t necessarily ask the 

10 interviewer to make that a part of the 

11 (indiscernible). 

12 There is a fundamental difficulty 

13 here, and that is interpreting the exposure 

14 history. That’s the fundamental difficulty 

15 because exposure histories that you get from 

16 the various sites are not always clear. Until 

17 you’ve looked at a number from that site, it’s 

18 not always clear what you’ve got. At Hanford 

19 you get the same thing in two or three 

20 different formats. 

21 So it’s a little difficult to 

22 interpret what you’re looking at. Usually, it 

23 takes a health physicist some instruction and 

24 a few times looking at a particular site’s 

25 reports to really know what he or she is 
213

1 looking at. So if we have the exposure 

2 history open in front of the interviewer, I 

3 don’t know that that by itself sufficiently 

4 helps anything. 

5 So then the question would become 

6 would it be helpful during the interview for 

7 the interviewee to know what kind of exposure 

8 record we received from them about them so 

9 that they could at that time say, well, that 

10 doesn’t sound right. I know I wore a badge 

11 the whole time I worked there, or something to 

12 that effect. I believe that might be the 

13 intent. 

14 Is that the intent, Arjun? 

15 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): It is the 

16 intent. 

17 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay, so now that is a more 

18 complicated thing than just having the 

19 response available to the interviewer. 

20 MS. MUNN: Are we not then doing two things? 

21 First, we’re implying that you won’t do a CATI 

22 until you have this information. 

23 MR. HINNEFELD: That would be one aspect. 

24 MS. MUNN: I don’t think we want to -- 

25 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I don’t know what kind 
214

1 of work redesign that means. 

2 MS. MUNN: And the second thing would be, is 

3 this not in the arena of dose reconstruction, 

4 not CATI. 

5 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, the opportunity, 

6 during the interview with the worker, it would 

7 give you the opportunity at that time before 

8 you do the dose reconstruction for the worker 

9 to say they didn’t give you all my exposure 

10 history because I know I wore a badge that 

11 whole time, and we could make additional 

12 inquiry. 

13 Because right now we would go ahead 

14 and do the dose reconstruction, we would send 

15 the person a dose reconstruction report, and 

16 they would say, wait a minute. You say I was 

17 monitored for these years here, but I was 

18 monitored for my entire employment. And so at 

19 that point, at close-out interview time, is 

20 then when we go back to the Department of 

21 Energy and see if there’s some reason, you 

22 know, have them look again if there’s some 

23 other way to look to try to resolve that 

24 issue. 

25 MS. MUNN: Arjun and Steve -- 
215

1 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yeah, I think 

2 if I got the gist of Stu’s comment right that 

3 this is better dealt with at the close out 

4 interview. 

5 MR. HINNEFELD: That’s when we deal with it 

6 now. At that point then a health physicist in 

7 the normal course of things has looked at the 

8 file, has interpreted the exposure history 

9 report and has, writes in the dose 

10 reconstruction report, I believe, that 

11 monitored from these dates to these dates. 

12 And so during the close out interview that’s 

13 discussed with the claimant. 

14 If the claimant says that’s not right, 

15 I was monitored more than that or that’s not 

16 right, I was never monitored, then there’s an 

17 issue that has to be resolved during the close 

18 out interview process before the dose 

19 reconstruction can move forward. 

20 DR. ZIEMER: And that interview is done by -

21 - 

22 MR. HINNEFELD: That’s done by the same 

23 interviewers, but in this instance I believe 

24 it would be flagged by either a reviewer or 

25 even to an HP about what do we do about this 
216

1 CATI. 

2 DR. ZIEMER: So it’s just a little later in 

3 the process when they actually had a chance to 

4 gather the dose information and do the first 

5 cut on the DR? 

6 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. It’s after a draft 

7 dose reconstruction is prepared. 

8 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Now, I can’t 

9 remember what the status of our resolution is 

10 regarding all the stuff around the presence of 

11 a health physicist and the reviewed by a 

12 health physicist of the material offered 

13 during the closing interviews and how all that 

14 is handled. I agree that PROC-0090 is not the 

15 right place to review all that, but I think 

16 it’s all still open under the closing 

17 interview. 

18 MR. HINNEFELD: I mean, this could be 

19 transferred to -0092 if you wanted to do that 

20 and with the idea that -- 

21 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yeah, I think 

22 that that would be useful. It would be useful 

23 to transfer it to -0092. 

24 MR. HINNEFELD: And I do know that ORAU now 

25 spends additional effort with dose 
217

1 reconstructors dealing with interviewers and 

2 interview reviewers to make sure that there’s 

3 more a steadier flow of information among 

4 those people. And I think the interviewers 

5 are probably asking the health physicists more 

6 for interpretation at close out interview time 

7 than they were at the time when you reviewed 

8 close out interviews. 

9 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Okay. 

10 MR. HINNEFELD: As a result of that as a 

11 matter of fact. So there’s been some movement 

12 there, but since we’re not on that, and I 

13 don’t think we’ll get to it today, I don’t 

14 think I’ll last that long, I suspect that 

15 maybe just saying that this would be one 

16 that’s better suited for the close out 

17 interview aspect of things might be the best 

18 way to go. 

19 MS. MUNN: So our final comment would be, if 

20 the work group agrees, that this will be dealt 

21 with at the close out and the disposition is 

22 transferred to PROC-0092. Is that acceptable 

23 to all? 

24 DR. ZIEMER: Yes. 

25 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Agreed. 
218

1 MS. MUNN: Work group members? 

2 DR. ZIEMER: Yes. 

3 MR. GIBSON (by Telephone): Yes, sounds 

4 fine. 

5 MS. MUNN: Item 17. 

6 MR. HINNEFELD: This again is the, well, 

7 it’s similar to the earlier one. When you 

8 read the whole write up in the report, it 

9 advocates better preparation of the 

10 interviewer. It recommends requiring coworker 

11 interviews for survivor claimants and/or a 

12 better explanation as to why coworkers weren’t 

13 interviewed. 

14 I think that part we can address in 

15 the dose reconstruction by saying this is the 

16 information used in your dose reconstruction 

17 and coworkers were not interviewed because 

18 sufficient information was available. Now, 

19 something like that can be done in the dose 

20 reconstruction. And then the other things 

21 that we talked about. 

22 DR. ZIEMER: Eight through ten would cover 

23 the rest of that, wouldn’t it? 

24 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. 

25 MS. MUNN: Nothing new in here that we 
219

1 haven’t already discussed, is there? 

2 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yeah, no, 

3 you’re right, Ms. Munn. That’s right. 

4 MS. MUNN: So this is covered by the 

5 language that’s going to be inserted in item 

6 eight. 

7 Is this in abeyance or closed? 

8 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): I think it’s 

9 simply transferred. It’s a duplication of, 

10 you may say it’s a duplication of other items 

11 now covered, something like that. 

12 MS. MUNN: Well, but we’re not transferring 

13 it to another procedure. 

14 MR. HINNEFELD: This is addressed in a 

15 different finding. 

16 MS. MUNN: We’re addressed in a different 

17 finding. So that would close it. 

18 Item 18, insufficient (indiscernible). 

19 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): This is the 

20 same as 14. 

21 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah. 

22 MS. MUNN: Is the final statement covered by 

23 item 14? 

24 DR. ZIEMER: Fourteen, the CATI gaps are -- 

25 MR. HINNEFELD: The CATI gaps are 14. The 
220

1 interviewer training is eight through ten, I 

2 believe. 

3 MS. MUNN: Covered by items which we are 

4 going to all put under item eight and 14 and 

5 closed, correct? 

6 (no response) 

7 MS. MUNN: Item 19. 

8 MR. HINNEFELD: This is the one about 

9 requiring coworker interviews for survivor 

10 claimants and for also, I guess, maybe about 

11 being more clear and what if coworkers weren’t 

12 interviewed. I think it’s a repeat of another 

13 one. 

14 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): I agree. 

15 MS. MUNN: Covered by eight, closed. 

16 Item number 20. 

17 MR. HINNEFELD: I think this speaks to the 

18 CATI itself. Yeah, that’s the way it looked 

19 to me was this seemed to be addressed in 

20 finding 14 and finding eight, so I think it 

21 has to do with the gaps in the CATI, and, I 

22 think, the training of the interviewers. 

23 MS. MUNN: And the SC&A follow up says -- 

24 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Section 5.5, 

25 which is the gaps in the CATI, addressed in 
221

1 14. 

2 MS. MUNN: It was covered by item 14, right? 

3 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Yes. 

4 MS. MUNN: Closed. 

5 Item 21, definitions. 

6 MR. HINNEFELD: This has to do with 

7 definitions in -- let’s see, this would have 

8 been the review procedure and what does it 

9 mean when someone reviews the interview for 

10 completeness and technical content. And it 

11 kind of originates in the fact that the 

12 reviewer, the interview reviewers, are not 

13 necessarily health physicists. 

14 And that’s kind of behind the nature 

15 of some of these findings in the review. When 

16 they say it’s not technically, you know, when 

17 it’s technically content and complete, 

18 shouldn’t that be a health physicist making 

19 that judgment that, okay, this is a complete 

20 interview. 

21 Well, the current work process is that 

22 the health physicist, when he gets the 

23 assignment to do the dose reconstruction, at 

24 that point then looks at the CATI and makes 

25 whatever judgment is necessary about the 
222

1 completeness of the CATI and is there 

2 something here that needs to be resolved 

3 before you go ahead. I believe that’s the 

4 work process. 

5 So I think there was -- and I think 

6 actually these reviewers, interviewer 

7 reviewers, were actually called HP reviewers 

8 in the procedure. That certainly gave rise to 

9 this confusion because they’re not HPs. I 

10 think that was the origin of the comment. 

11 You have these people you call HP 

12 reviewers who are really not HPs. And when 

13 you say they’re going to review this for 

14 completeness and technical content, since they 

15 don’t really do dose reconstructions, how do 

16 they know it’s complete and the technical 

17 content’s okay. 

18 So I think there’s probably a wording 

19 change here that has to be made. I think it’s 

20 actually in the upcoming revision to PROC-0090 

21 that more clearly defines the role of these 

22 people and the purpose of this review and more 

23 thoroughly describes the use of, you know, 

24 that the dose reconstructor who actually then 

25 gets assigned to do the dose reconstruction is 
223

1 the one who actually does the evaluation of 

2 the CATI to determine if sufficient 

3 information is available or whether more has 

4 to be sought. So I think that will be changed 

5 in their change procedure which would put this 

6 one in abeyance because it depends on a 

7 revision to the procedure. 

8 MS. MUNN: So procedure revision will expand 

9 wording, right? 

10 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. 

11 MS. MUNN: In abeyance. Any objection? 

12 DR. ZIEMER: Looks good. 

13 MS. MUNN: Item 22, this is the site profile 

14 about closing (indiscernible). 

15 MR. HINNEFELD: This addresses a couple 

16 things. There’s no reference to the site 

17 profile. I think -- and this is during the 

18 review of the interview, so I think that maybe 

19 has to do with does this review consider 

20 consistency of the CATI with the site profile. 

21 I’m not exactly sure about that. 

22 But it also, additional findings, the 

23 purpose of the finding are that there’s no 

24 reference to the close out interview and to 

25 the claimant. In other words the claimant’s 
224

1 not told that you’ll have another opportunity 

2 after we draft the dose reconstruction. After 

3 what you’ve told us today, you’ll have another 

4 opportunity to provide us input at the time we 

5 do the close out interview. So that was 

6 something that could probably be addressed in 

7 a procedure. 

8 And then the final part of it is that 

9 the exposure history isn’t addressed with the, 

10 you know, as part of the review. You know, 

11 the exposure history isn’t balanced against 

12 what the person said to see if the 

13 recollection of their monitoring is the same 

14 as the history we got. And, again, as our 

15 current work process goes that’s ^ that’s done 

16 by the dose reconstructor, not by the HP 

17 reviewer. 

18 It could be the origin of this comment 

19 at this point partly stems from the fact that 

20 these people called HP reviewers, and if you 

21 have an HP reviewer looking at it at that 

22 time, shouldn’t they be making these 

23 judgments. In fact, they’re not really HPs 

24 and so they’re being asked to do other things 

25 rather than that, and the dose reconstructor 
225

1 is the one who’s called on to do those 

2 judgments when he’s assigned to do the dose 

3 reconstruction. 

4 So I don’t’ know. Arjun, is there 

5 more you wanted to talk about on this one? 

6 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): No, no, I 

7 think this is also being dealt with under 

8 0092. 

9 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Is this, the 

10 initial NIOSH response refers them to, 

11 actually refers to what is now PROC-0090-dash12 6 issue. And we basically, I think we’re 

13 going to agree to transfer that to -0092. 

14 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yes. 

15 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): That would be 

16 consistent. 

17 MS. MUNN: Is that what we agreed on six? 

18 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, that’s what we agreed 

19 on six. 

20 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): That’s what 

21 SC&A and NIOSH agreed. I don’t know that 

22 we’ve gotten the working group to agree yet. 

23 MS. MUNN: Well, yes, I thought we had. 

24 MR. HINNEFELD: I think you did. 

25 MS. MUNN: Yeah, we did. 
226

1 MR. HINNEFELD: Because that was the first 

2 one after the four closed ones. 

3 MS. MUNN: So this would be covered by, 

4 yeah, it’s covered by item six which transfers 

5 it to PROC-0092 which would make this one 

6 closed. Any disagreement? 

7 (no response) 

8 MS. MUNN: Very good. Item number 23, no 

9 explicit connection -- 

10 MR. HINNEFELD: No explicit connection to 

11 review information in closing interview 

12 provided. I believe this is a suggestion that 

13 at the time that this is done, at the time the 

14 CATI is done, you should not yet tell the 

15 claimant specifically so it would be in the 

16 procedure or in the script or somewhere that 

17 they will receive, after they receive the 

18 draft dose reconstruction based on the 

19 information they have, we will talk to them 

20 about it before it goes any further in the 

21 close out interview, and they’ll have the 

22 opportunity then to see did we get their 

23 information appropriately captured in the dose 

24 reconstruction -- 

25 MS. MUNN: This is the same -- 
227

1 MR. HINNEFELD: -- and tell them 

2 specifically that. I think we’ve talked about 

3 this before. 

4 MS. MUNN: The same item we talked about 

5 earlier today. 

6 MR. HINNEFELD: I think we have. I’m a 

7 little hard pressed right now to figure out 

8 which one it is. 

9 MS. MUNN: Yeah, I am, too, but we agreed 

10 that this was one of the language changes that 

11 we were considering for the new potential CATI 

12 changes. 

13 MR. HINNEFELD: Either in the CATI or in the 

14 procedures. 

15 MS. MUNN: That will be addressed elsewhere 

16 which makes it in abeyance, right? 

17 MR. HINNEFELD: I believe so. 

18 MS. MUNN: Any disagreement? 

19 (no response) 

20 MS. MUNN: Item 24. 

21 DR. ZIEMER: This is the same one as 21, 

22 completeness and technical content? 

23 MR. HINNEFELD: I believe so. 

24 Does that sound right to you, Arjun, 

25 that this is -- 
228

1 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Right. 

2 MR. HINNEFELD: -- the same as 21? 

3 MS. MUNN: So we said procedure revision 

4 will expand wording. So I’m going to say it’s 

5 covered by item 21, closed. 

6 Any objections? 

7 (no response) 

8 MS. MUNN: Item 25, reviewer qualifications. 

9 MR. HINNEFELD: I believe in this instance 

10 we agree that these reviewer qualifications 

11 since they were called HP reviewers, I think 

12 we’re changing that name actually in the 

13 revision of the procedure. So that needs to 

14 be spelled out a little better in terms of 

15 what these personnel do and what they’re 

16 expected to accomplish when their 

17 qualifications ^. 

18 MS. MUNN: And so where will that be done? 

19 MR. HINNEFELD: That’ll be in PROC-0090. 

20 MS. MUNN: PROC-0090 revision. In abeyance. 

21 Agreed? 

22 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Agreed. 

23 MR. HINNEFELD: I think everybody’s numb, 

24 Wanda. 

25 MS. MUNN: We may have to disband before 
229

1 we’re finished. 

2 Item 26, process is implicitly biased 

3 against family member claimants. 

4 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Could I 

5 explain that a little bit? We’ve had a lot of 

6 -- especially the use of the word biased -- we 

7 had a lot of findings and observations 

8 regarding the difficulties that were 

9 confronted by survivor claimants especially 

10 and elaborated on that quite a bit. And I 

11 remember John and I actually -- I don’t know 

12 if John Mauro’s on the line, but John and I 

13 had discussed at great length the use of this 

14 particular term. 

15 The reason it is in there is that it 

16 was in the checklist originally for the dose 

17 reconstruction. This is one of those things 

18 that there was a Board-approved form that 

19 required us to say whether there was bias in 

20 the process or not and so it was very explicit 

21 in the approved form. 

22 And so just to provide some context, 

23 that’s how this word got to be used. But 

24 generally the thrust of it was that there were 

25 a number of situations where survivor 
230

1 claimants were at a disadvantage, and it 

2 related to the coworker interviews and 

3 insufficient preparation of the interviewers 

4 and so on. 

5 MR. HINNEFELD: So if it’s the preparation 

6 of the interviewer, we have addressed that. 

7 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yeah, we 

8 addressed coworker interviews as well, so I 

9 think the details as it concerns the use of 

10 the term biased have been addressed in other 

11 places. 

12 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. 

13 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Well, 17, 

14 again, if you look at the initial response, 

15 17-1 refers us back to PROC-0020 -- issue 20, 

16 PROC-0090, issue 21, which we said is going to 

17 be in abeyance. We’re going to make wording 

18 changes there. And PROC-0003-dash-5 is now 

19 PROC-0090-dash-8, which we also said was in 

20 abeyance. And PROC-0005-dash-12 is PROC-0090-

21 dash-17, which we said was addressed in eight. 

22 MS. MUNN: We’re expecting that item eight 

23 to address a wide range of other items here 

24 which were duplicative, anticipating language 

25 change that would cover all of those. 
231

1 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, when you say all of 

2 those, I mean, many times it’s a restatement 

3 of the same thing. 

4 MS. MUNN: Yes, it is. The question is 

5 whether that language is anticipated to be 

6 inclusive of the issues raised here in 26. 

7 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, Arjun described that 

8 the word biased comes in from the checklist, 

9 and what they were really commenting on was 

10 the preparation of the interviewer which is 

11 being addressed. 

12 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): And also 

13 regarding the coworker interviews, the 

14 differential of information and so on. 

15 MR. HINNEFELD: The requirement for a 

16 coworker interview when it’s a survivor 

17 claimant which is being addressed in number 

18 14. 

19 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yeah, the 

20 elaboration of this -- just so people have the 

21 context -- this was the reason that we had 

22 that list of bullet points. I don’t remember 

23 now what the finding number was. I think it 

24 was finding eight. Let me try to find it 

25 here. It was finding eight. We had a list of 
232

1 bullet points, the ^ procedures are 

2 considerably greater for family member 

3 claimants than for employee claimants and we 

4 covered this earlier. 

5 It was a summary of items that we 

6 already talked about, and this was the detail 

7 that was provided to justify or elaborate on 

8 the use of the term biased in the checklist. 

9 And then the checklist term got transferred to 

10 the matrix as well. 

11 MS. MUNN: And does this change the 

12 checklist wording? 

13 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): No, I don’t 

14 think, well, the checklist wording is in the 

15 original 2005 report so I don’t imagine it 

16 changes the checklist wording. It’s just I 

17 think we’ve dealt with this in my opinion in 

18 the other specific items that we covered. 

19 MS. MUNN: So we can say addressed in item 

20 eight and other PROC-0090. 

21 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): I believe so. 

22 MS. MUNN: And closed? 

23 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, it’s addressed 

24 elsewhere. 

25 MS. MUNN: Closed. 
233

1 Agreed? 

2 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yes. 

3 DR. ZIEMER: Yes. 

4 MS. MUNN: Item 27. 

5 MR. HINNEFELD: I believe this really 

6 reflects the fact that an HP reviewer rather 

7 than a review by a dose reconstructor, HP 

8 reviewer is ^ a dose reconstructor. Like I 

9 said in our work process currently this review 

10 is done by the dose reconstructor when he or 

11 she gets the dose to reconstruct, they’re 

12 assigned the case to reconstruct, they then 

13 make this judgment about the adequacy of the 

14 CATI and whether it would be beneficial to go 

15 back and try and get clarifying information. 

16 And so it’s done at that point rather than 

17 earlier which you would probably expect would 

18 be done if it was, in fact, the dose 

19 reconstructor doing that HP review that the 

20 procedure talks about. We expect to address 

21 this by revising the PROC-0090 procedure and 

22 to be a little more clear about what the HP 

23 review, what was called the HP reviewer, but 

24 that isn’t what’s done there. So that’s, we 

25 intend to revise the procedure to address 
234

1 that. So I believe that puts it in abeyance. 

2 But it’s also the same as other findings that 

3 we’ve already talked about these findings. 

4 MS. MUNN: Right, and Arjun’s follow-up 

5 action finding down there indicates that it 

6 really is finding nine issue. 

7 MR. HINNEFELD: That’s finding nine in the 

8 SC&A report. 

9 MS. MUNN: In the SC&A report, yeah. 

10 MR. HINNEFELD: It’s not finding nine on any 

11 of the number -- 

12 MS. MUNN: I understand. 

13 MR. HINNEFELD: -- in the database. 

14 MS. MUNN: And that it’s grammar. It’s not 

15 a part of the CATI follow-up procedure. So 

16 our closing comment here would be concerns are 

17 now addressed in revisions to PROC-0090. 

18 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, and we think it’s 

19 addressed in finding 21. 

20 MS. MUNN: All right, finding 21 and closed. 

21 Item 28. It’s hard to see any 

22 difference in that and what we -- 

23 MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, we’ve already talked 

24 about that. It’s addressed in a couple of the 

25 other findings we’ve talked about. At least 
235

1 eight and maybe, I’m not sure it’s claimant 

2 dose records, but that’s a little later. 

3 MS. MUNN: So closed, correct? Agreed? 

4 (no response) 

5 MS. MUNN: Finding 29, completeness and 

6 technical content, and the last word from SC&A 

7 is they agree? 

8 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yes, it’s a 

9 duplication. 

10 MS. MUNN: It’s a duplication. 

11 MR. HINNEFELD: It was number, what, 24? 

12 MS. MUNN: And they said referred to 24. 

13 DR. ZIEMER: Twenty-four is the same as 21. 

14 MS. MUNN: We said 24 was being covered by 

15 item 21. So we can say item 21, okay? 

16 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Yeah. 

17 MS. MUNN: And closed. 

18 Can you believe we’re at item 30, the 

19 last one of PROC-0090? Reviewer’s not 

20 required to review the claimant DOE file. Can 

21 we say that’s correct? They’re not required 

22 to? 

23 MR. HINNEFELD: It was under 16. 

24 DR. ZIEMER: Well, the same as 16. 

25 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Sixteen was 
236

1 transferred to -0092. Or do we just want to -

2 - 

3 MS. MUNN: I think it was transferred to -

4 0092, but we also covered it under 16, right? 

5 DR. ZIEMER: Right, which was transferred to 

6 -0092. 

7 MS. MUNN: So if we say it’s covered by 16, 

8 then we can close it because 16 says it’s 

9 dealt with, close out and transferred to PROC10 0092. 

11 DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

12 MS. MUNN: Correct? 

13 DR. ZIEMER: Correct. 

14 MS. MUNN: So we can close this one. 

15 We will look forward to see a new 

16 updated listing on PROC-0090 when we get to 

17 the beach. 

18 As I understand we have covered all 

19 the outstanding material in set one with this 

20 exercise. If that is not the case, please 

21 speak now. 

22 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, we covered the open 

23 ones. 

24 MS. MUNN: Yes, the open ones. 

25 DR. ZIEMER: Forty-eight others in abeyance? 
237

1 MS. MUNN: Yes, we will have a few more in 

2 abeyance here to finish this. But when this 

3 is updated, we can get a better feel for where 

4 we are. 

5 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): The ones that 

6 are in abeyance, I guess I ask the question 

7 have any of the procedures that they refer to 

8 been updated so that, I mean, SC&A could go 

9 back and look to see whether or not the 

10 procedure has, the revised words, so that we 

11 could maybe close out some of those 48 that 

12 are in abeyance? 

13 MR. HINNEFELD: I know OTIB-0008 and OTIB14 0010 have been revised. So I’m trying to pull 

15 up the database now to show, so I can get 

16 these on my screen. As I recall, OTIB-0008 

17 and, ORAU OTIB-0008 and OTIB-0010 are in the 

18 first group and showing in abeyance, those 

19 have both been revised. 

20 PROC-0006, there’s one finding in 

21 abeyance. That has been revised to Appendix 

22 B, and Appendix B has been removed from PROC23 0006. I need to get the list up to see if I 

24 can speak off the top of my head of any of the 

25 others. So I’m working on it. 
238

1 MS. MUNN: Steve, the Microsoft Excel list 

2 that you sent us showing our total findings -- 

3 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Would you say 

4 that again? I’m on my cell phone now 

5 unfortunately, and I’m having a little 

6 trouble. 

7 MS. MUNN: Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I was 

8 just asking Steve about his Excel files that 

9 he sent us which I believe was intended to 

10 show all of the material we have in our 

11 basket. 

12 Is that not correct, Steve? 

13 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Yes, that was, 

14 that does show all the ones that were in the 

15 basket, yes. It doesn’t necessarily identify 

16 which ones are with the first set. 

17 MS. MUNN: Correct. I understand. I just 

18 wanted to check with -- 

19 Nancy, have you taken a look at that 

20 Excel sheet that Steve sent to us? 

21 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): I’m sorry to 

22 interrupt. I got cut off because my phone 

23 battery ran out on me, and I had to reconnect. 

24 Could I sign off? I presume we’re completely 

25 done with -0090 now. 
239

1 MS. MUNN: We are completely done with PROC2 0090. We’re not going to talk about it again 

3 today I hope. 

4 DR. MAKHIJANI (by Telephone): Thank you. 

5 MS. MUNN: Thank you, Arjun, we appreciate 

6 your help. 

7 MS. ADAMS: In answer to your question, I 

8 think I believe it matches the list. 

9 MS. MUNN: Good. It’s always comforting to 

10 know that the two sets of data are tracking. 

11 It is discomforting to know that we have 224 

12 open items and 64 in abeyance. 

13 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay, I think I can give 

14 some responses on these procedures in abeyance 

15 now. Nancy was kind enough to give me a 

16 printed out list of the ones that are in 

17 abeyance. There’s a finding from OTIB-0001 

18 that has not been revised. 

19 IG-0001 has been revised, but I 

20 believe that the findings are shown in 

21 abeyance either came from the second look at 

22 IG-0001 or we determined in that second list 

23 not to have been addressed by the revision of 

24 IG-0001. IG-0001’s been looked at twice. And 

25 so I believe the ones in abeyance for IG-0001, 
240

1 there’s been no change to address those. 

2 MS. MUNN: That was five, right? 

3 MR. HINNEFELD: How many? These aren’t 

4 sorted so I don’t know. 

5 MS. MUNN: Oh, okay. 

6 MR. HINNEFELD: I don’t know how many there 

7 are. There are findings from OTIB-0004, 

8 revision two, at least one. There is a 

9 revision after that. There is OTIB-0004, 

10 revision three, but I don’t know, you know, 

11 this may be a situation like IG-0001, like the 

12 later version was reviewed and determined that 

13 the in abeyance finding from the earlier 

14 version wasn’t fixed in that revision. 

15 Steve, do you know off the top of your 

16 head on OTIB-0004? 

17 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): I’m just 

18 looking up. Hang on just a second. OTIB19 0004, revision three, yes, we did look at that 

20 one. And I think that’s in the same category. 

21 We must have -- 

22 MR. HINNEFELD: Must have left some open 

23 that are in abeyance. 

24 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Left some 

25 open, yeah. Only basically partially 
241

1 resolved. I think that’s the wording we used. 

2 MS. MUNN: And those six that are 

3 transferred, were they transferred to PROC4 0090? 

5 MR. HINNEFELD: No, they’re not, these are, 

6 I think anything transferred out of OTIB-0004 

7 would probably have been transferred to global 

8 issues. 

9 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): The only one 

10 that I got being transferred in the first set 

11 was from IG-0001. 

12 MS. MUNN: Okay. There was one, correct? 

13 (no response) 

14 MR. HINNEFELD: I keep looking through the 

15 OTIBs before I go to the procedures because of 

16 the way the documents are sorted here. I want 

17 to get through all the OTIBs first. 

18 There’s one finding in abeyance for 

19 OTIB-0007. OTIB-0007, I believe, must have 

20 been cancelled. 

21 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): I don’t show 

22 OTIB-0007 being in the, at least not in the 

23 first set. 

24 MR. HINNEFELD: Not the first set. 

25 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): I don’t see 
242

1 that being as one in the first set that was 

2 done in the first set. 

3 MS. MUNN: Well, OTIB-0007 has everything 

4 closed on it and found out that Nancy gave us 

5 her status. There were four findings and four 

6 closures, only one of the original revision, 

7 rev. 00. 

8 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): I can run 

9 through and tell you which ones I have in 

10 abeyance if that would help, Stu. 

11 MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, if you can just maybe 

12 give the procedure number. Let’s go through 

13 OTIBs first. 

14 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): I have OTIB15 0001. 

16 MR. HINNEFELD: That has not been revised. 

17 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): OTIB-0002, 

18 rev. 1. 

19 MR. HINNEFELD: That has been revised. 

20 There’s now a rev. 2, but I don’t know if you 

21 guys have looked at that or not. 

22 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): I can find 

23 out. What did I say, OTIB -- 

24 MR. HINNEFELD: OTIB-0002. You said OTIB25 0002. 
243

1 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Yeah, we’re 

2 supposed to have looked at that. 

3 MR. HINNEFELD: You looked at rev. 2 so 

4 that’s probably in the situation then where 

5 it’s, the finding from rev. 1 wasn’t 

6 completely closed. 

7 So the next document then? 

8 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): The next 

9 document was OTIB-0004, which we’ve already 

10 talked about. OTIB-0008, which you said 

11 there’s a new revision on. 

12 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, OTIB-0008 has been 

13 revised. 

14 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): OTIB-0010. 

15 MR. HINNEFELD: That has been revised. 

16 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): And PROC-0006, 

17 and you said that one was revised as well. 

18 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, PROC-0006 was revised. 

19 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): And then the 

20 only other ones we had were OCAS, IG-0001, IG21 0002. 

22 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, two has not been 

23 revised. One has been revised but re-looked 

24 at. And those were determined to remain in 

25 abeyance. 
244

1 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): And then the 

2 TIB-0002. 

3 MR. HINNEFELD: OCAS TIB-0002? 

4 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Yes. There 

5 were two low priority comments, issues. 

6 MR. HINNEFELD: Rev. zero, that’s not been 

7 revised. 

8 Eight and ten were revised. I think 

9 those should resolve those findings if I’m not 

10 mistaken. 

11 MR. MARSCHKE: Okay, we’ll take a look at 

12 eight and ten. 

13 MR. HINNEFELD: And I think the PROC-0006 

14 revision should, because the finding relates 

15 to Appendix B, and Appendix B was removed. 

16 That’s the DCFs, and it relates to the issue 

17 on the IG-0001 DCFs. And since those DCFs 

18 exist in IG-0001, we did figure there was no 

19 need to have them in PROC-0006 as well so we 

20 just took them out. 

21 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Right, that 

22 would make sense. So we’ll take a look at 

23 those three for definite and maybe we’ll be 

24 able to remove some of these or change some of 

25 these in abeyance ones to closed. 
245

1 MS. MUNN: That would be wonderful and much 

2 appreciated. 

3 OVERVIEW OF OPEN ITEMS FROM SECOND SET

4 I’m going to ask the work group 

5 whether we have the strength and energy to 

6 even begin to address the second set of items 

7 and ask for a report on where we are with the 

8 third set. I’m not certain how and when we 

9 can address the third set. We have a lot of 

10 open items in the second set. I don’t have 

11 them broken out on my screen as to set right 

12 now. 

13 MS. ADAMS: There should be 37 open ones. 

14 MS. MUNN: Do we want to begin trying to do 

15 something with those or are we all brain dead 

16 to the point where we really and truly need to 

17 postpone with fresh eyes to undertake the 

18 second set? I’ll leave it to the discretion 

19 of the group. I personally -- 

20 DR. ZIEMER: Do we have the matrix on the 

21 second set? 

22 MS. MUNN: We have the matrix populated. I 

23 don’t believe we have the matrix populated on 

24 the third set. Am I correct? 

25 (no response) 
246

1 MS. MUNN: Steve, can you give us an update 

2 on where we are with the second set and third 

3 set? 

4 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): The second 

5 set, I’m just looking at it now. Basically, 

6 we have, the ones that all are open it appears 

7 like they were, we have findings and NIOSH 

8 initial responses, but they were never 

9 discussed in the working group, and that’s why 

10 they remain -- oops, there are some of them 

11 that were discussed in the -- 

12 MS. MUNN: Yeah, we picked, they were sort 

13 of selected, some of them were selected by 

14 reason of pressing requests for action on them 

15 in order to move forward in other things, but 

16 we’ve not addressed them as a group. 

17 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Right. So I 

18 mean, the 37 that are open in the second set 

19 are, I guess they’re ready to be discussed 

20 whenever, because we have the finding. We 

21 have the NIOSH response and so I guess 

22 whenever we want to sit down and discuss them, 

23 we can work our way through them. 

24 MS. MUNN: We do have a fully populated 

25 database. 
247

1 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Yes. 

2 MS. MUNN: And, but I have not even 

3 attempted to begin the third set. Is that 

4 populated fully? 

5 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Hang on just a 

6 second. I do not believe -- well, let me 

7 check before I -- 

8 MR. HINNEFELD: I don’t believe we’ve 

9 entered our initial responses. 

10 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): That’s what I 

11 was going to say, but I didn’t want to be 

12 wrong again. I’m tired of being wrong. 

13 MS. MUNN: I didn’t think we had started to 

14 address them. 

15 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): Yes, all 145 

16 of those are shown as being open. Well, wait 

17 a minute. Yeah, we really don’t have the 

18 NIOSH responses to those. 

19 MS. MUNN: We did have some NIOSH responses 

20 ready. Weren’t they made but just not 

21 populated yet? 

22 MR. HINNEFELD: I don’t recall we provided 

23 them on the third set. 

24 MS. MUNN: Okay. 

25 MR. HINNEFELD: On the second set we have. 
248

1 MS. MUNN: Yeah, I knew that the second set 

2 was done, but I had thought that there had 

3 been some work done on the third set. All we 

4 have is just the third set empty? 

5 MR. MARSCHKE (by Telephone): That’s what 

6 I’m showing, Wanda. 

7 MS. MUNN: Okay, is there any probability 

8 that any of those are going to be populated 

9 prior to our September meeting? 

10 MR. HINNEFELD: I don’t know. 

11 MS. MUNN: We’ll have more than we can 

12 handle to begin to address the second set 

13 anyway. 

14 MR. HINNEFELD: We may be able to populate 

15 some but not all. I’m a little hard pressed 

16 here to sort out where we are in terms of 

17 other things that are going on -- 

18 MS. MUNN: I understand that. 

19 MR. HINNEFELD: -- we’re asking our 

20 contractor to do. 

21 MS. MUNN: Right. Could we request that you 

22 do take a look at where we are on that? And 

23 it would not be the expectation from here 

24 certainly that we populate that third set for 

25 the September meeting, but if we at the 
249

1 September meeting had some idea where and when 

2 we were going to begin to look at that, it 

3 would be helpful. The current hope is that 

4 after we have addressed what we’ve already 

5 spoken about at the September meeting, that we 

6 will also begin to address the second set. We 

7 have the database populated. The question 

8 before us really is shall we do with the 

9 second set what we’ve just done with PROC-0090 

10 which is start through those procedures as 

11 they appear on our screen and just plow 

12 through them one at a time rather than making 

13 any attempt to prioritize them since, so far 

14 as I know right now, we have no outstanding 

15 concerns from any quarter with respect to one 

16 given procedure that’s holding something up. 

17 If someone’s aware of such a thing, let me 

18 know, otherwise we’ll work on the premise that 

19 we’ll do what we can in September and at a 

20 minimum hope to begin to address the second 

21 set when we finish up our prior work. Any 

22 problems with that? 

23 DR. ZIEMER: Sounds good. 

24 MS. MUNN: Any thoughts or instructions for 

25 the good of the order? 
250

1 (no response) 

2 MS. MUNN: If not, I think we all need to 

3 take a deep breath and declare ourself 

4 adjourned. 

5 (Whereupon, the meeting was adjourned at 

6 4:20 p.m.) 

7 

8 
251

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 July 21, 

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 

10th day of March, 2009. 

___________________________________ 

STEVEN RAY GREEN, CCR, CVR-CM, PNSC 

CERTIFIED MERIT COURT REPORTER 

CERTIFICATE NUMBER: A-2102