This transcript of the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, Fernald Work Group, has 

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information has been redacted as necessary. The transcript, however, has not been reviewed and 

certified by the Chair of the Fernald Work Group for accuracy at this time. The reader should be 

cautioned that this transcript is for information only and is subject to change.

1

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U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES

CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL

NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR OCCUPATIONAL

SAFETY AND HEALTH 

+ + + + +

ADVISORY BOARD ON RADIATION AND

WORKER HEALTH 

+ + + + +

WORK GROUP ON FERNALD SITE PROFILE AND SEC

+ + + + +

FRIDAY

JANUARY 29, 2010

+ + + + +

The Work Group meeting convened in 

the Zurich Room of the Cincinnati Airport 

Marriott Hotel, 2395 Progress Drive, Hebron, 

Kentucky, at 9:30 a.m., Bradley P. Clawson, 

Chairman, presiding.

PRESENT:

BRADLEY P. CLAWSON, Chairman

MARK GRIFFON, Member*

ROBERT W. PRESLEY, Member*

PAUL L. ZIEMER, Member
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ALSO PRESENT:

TED KATZ, Designated Federal Official

ISAF AL-NABULSI, DOE*

SANDRA BALDRIDGE, Petitioner

ROBERT BARTON, SC&A*

HANS BEHLING, SC&A*

MEL CHEW, ORAU Team*

HARRY CHMELYNSKI, SC&A*

LOU DOLL, Public

SAM GLOVER, OCAS

STUART HINNEFELD, OCAS

EMILY HOWELL, HHS

JEFFREY KOTSCH, DOL*

RICHARD LEGGETT, SC&A*

JENNY LIN, HHS

JOYCE LIPSZTEIN, SC&A*

ARJUN MAKHIJANI, SC&A

JOHN MAURO, SC&A

ROBERT MORRIS, ORAU Team*

GENE POTTER, ORAU Team*

BRYCE RICH, ORAU Team*

MARK ROLFES, OCAS

JOHN STIVER, SC&A

*Present via telephone
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

Introductions ............................. 4

Uranium Bioassay Coworker Model .......... 10

Validation of the HIS-20 Database ........ 22

Recycled Uranium ........................ 222

Radon Breath Analysis and Associated

Reconstruction of Ra-226 and the

Th-230 Exposures......................... 239

Radon Emissions from K-65 Silos.......... 254

Thorium-232 Dose Reconstruction ......... 295

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

2 (9:30 a.m.)

3 MR. KATZ: Good morning, everyone 

4 in the room and everyone on the line. This is 

5 Ted Katz. I'm the Designated Federal Official 

6 of the Advisory Board on Radiation Worker 

7 Health, and this is the Fernald Working Group.

8 I'm going to begin with roll call 

9 first, beginning with Board Members in the 

10 room.

11 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Brad Clawson --

12 MR. KATZ: Please state if you 

13 have a conflict of interest. All the agency14 related people, please state that.

15 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Brad Clawson, 

16 Fernald Work Group Chair, member of the 

17 Advisory Board. No conflict.

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: Paul Ziemer, Board 

19 Member. No conflict.

20 MR. KATZ: And that's it in the 

21 room for Board Members. How about on the 
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1 line?

2 MEMBER PRESLEY: Robert Presley. 

3 No.

4 MR. KATZ: Bob Presley, I'm glad 

5 you could make it.

6 Any others? Do we have Mark 

7 Griffon yet?

8 (No response.)

9 MR. KATZ: Or Phil Schofield?

10 (No response.)

11 MR. KATZ: Okay. Then NIOSH-ORAU 

12 team in the room.

13 MR. ROLFES: This is Mark Rolfes, 

14 health physicist from NIOSH. I have no 

15 conflict of interest.

16 MR. CHEW: Mel Chew, from ORAU 

17 Team. No conflict.

18 DR. GLOVER: Sam Glover, NIOSH, 

19 health physicist. No conflict.

20 MR. MORRIS: Robert Morris, NIOSH 

21 team. No conflict.
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1 MR. KATZ: Robert Morris, welcome.

2 MR. RICH: Rich, ORAU Team. No 

3 conflict.

4 MR. KATZ: Bryce Rich.

5 MR. POTTER: Gene Potter, ORAU 

6 Team. No conflict.

7 MR. KATZ: Very good. SC&A staff 

8 in the room.

9 DR. MAURO: John Mauro, SC&A. No 

10 conflict.

11 MR. STIVER: John Stiver, SC&A. 

12 No conflict.

13 DR. MAKHIJANI: Arjun Makhijani --

14 have a conflict.

15 MR. KATZ: And then SC&A staff on 

16 the line.

17 DR. BEHLING: Hans Behling. No 

18 conflict.

19 MR. KATZ: Welcome, Hans.

20 DR. LIPSZTEIN: Joyce Lipsztein. 

21 No conflict.
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1 MR. KATZ: Welcome, Joyce.

2 MR. BARTON: Bob Barton, SC&A. No 

3 conflict.

4 MR. KATZ: Welcome, Bob.

5 Is that it for SC&A on the line? 

6 Okay.

7 MR. CHMELYNSKI: Harry Chmelynski, 

8 SC&A.

9 MR. KATZ: Hi, Harry.

10 Okay. And in the room, HHS and 

11 other government agency employees or 

12 contractors.

13 MS. HOWELL: Emily Howell, HHS.

14 MS. LIN: Jenny Lin, HHS.

15 MR. KATZ: And on the line? HHS 

16 or government.

17 MR. KOTSCH: Jeff Kotsch, Labor.

18 MR. KATZ: Welcome, Jeff.

19 MS. AL-NABULSI: Isaf Al-Nabulsi, 

20 DOE.

21 MR. KATZ: Welcome, Isaf.
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1 MS. AL-NABULSI: Thanks.

2 MR. KATZ: Okay, and then members 

3 of the public or staff of congressional 

4 offices or others in the room.

5 MS. BALDRIDGE: Sandra Baldridge, 

6 petitioner.

7 MR. KATZ: And welcome to you, 

8 Sandra.

9 And on the line? That's it in the 

10 room. Any members of the public or staff of 

11 congressional offices who want to identify 

12 themselves?

13 (No response.)

14 MR. KATZ: Very good. Then let me 

15 just ask. Everyone on the phone, the usual 

16 reminder. Please mute your phones. If you 

17 don't have a mute button, use *6 and *6 will 

18 take you off mute again. And please do not 

19 put the call on hold at any point. Just 

20 disconnect and dial back in if you have to 

21 leave the call for some point.
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1 Thank you, and Brad, it's your 

2 meeting.

3 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay.

4 MEMBER GRIFFON: Hi. Ted? Ted, 

5 this is Mark Griffon.

6 MR. KATZ: Oh, Mark, great. I'm 

7 glad you could make it.

8 MEMBER GRIFFON: I'm sorry. I 

9 came on late, and I'm going to have to leave 

10 for a little while, but Brad knows about this, 

11 but I just wanted to say I will be back in a 

12 little while, as soon as I can.

13 MR. KATZ: That's great.

14 MEMBER GRIFFON: I just wanted to 

15 dial in just to say hi, and I'll talk to you 

16 in a little while.

17 MR. KATZ: Thanks. And, Mark, why 

18 don't you just let us know when you're cutting 

19 out and rejoining us.

20 MEMBER GRIFFON: I will. I'm 

21 actually going to have to cut out like pretty 
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1 much right away here.

2 MR. KATZ: Okay.

3 MEMBER GRIFFON: And then I'll 

4 rejoin probably around 11, but maybe a little 

5 before 11.

6 MR. KATZ: Okay. Good.

7 MEMBER GRIFFON: All right.

8 MR. KATZ: Thank you.

9 MEMBER GRIFFON: Thanks.

10 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay. Well, 

11 it's been a while since Fernald Work Group has 

12 met, and on January 14th, we held, not a Work 

13 Group call, but just kind of a to-come up-to14 speed on everything of where we were at on the 

15 issues, and so forth like that.

16 What we're going to be using today 

17 to be able to go over this is the letter that 

18 John Mauro set out clarifying on February 15th 

19 what their understanding was, and the first 

20 issue that we need to address falls into 

21 SC&A's court, and that is the uranium bioassay 
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1 coworker model.

2 We had an OTIB-0078 that I believe 

3 you were supposed to look at and see where we 

4 were at. So I'll turn that over to you, John.

5 DR. MAURO: Thank you.

6 MR. KATZ: One thing. Just for 

7 the folks on the phone, for the benefit of 

8 people who don't have this, which is going to 

9 affect our agenda, let me just quickly --

10 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Yes, sorry.

11 MR. KATZ: -- just so everyone 

12 knows, the first issue the Work Group will 

13 deal with is this uranium bioassay coworker 

14 model.

15 The second issue is validation of 

16 the HIS -- H-I-S -- 20 Database.

17 The third issue will be recycled 

18 uranium.

19 The fourth issue will be radon 

20 breath analysis and associated reconstruction 

21 of radium-226 and thorium-230 exposures.
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1 And the sixth issue will be the 

2 thorium-232 dose reconstruction, just to let 

3 everybody know sort of the layout of the day.

4 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay. Thanks.

5 DR. MAURO: Yes, this is John 

6 Mauro. I'm leading up the SC&A team on 

7 Fernald. 

8 Just as background information, 

9 the six issues that were just identified, 

10 these -- behind them are large White Papers 

11 that have been issued over a two-year period. 

12 All those White Papers have been filed, PA 

13 reviewed, loaded up on the Web. They're 

14 available for anyone by topic.

15 What has happened subsequent to 

16 that, of course, is that we've held 

17 discussions on these, and as Brad pointed out, 

18 because of the time span over which these 

19 discussions have been held we sort of 

20 regrouped, and as a result of regrouping 

21 recently, I issued a memo which basically 
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1 summarized my understanding of the status of 

2 each issue, and the action items, follow-up 

3 action items, in anticipation of this meeting 

4 so that we can move expeditiously.

5 So all of the technical material 

6 that we're going to be talking about is PA 

7 cleared. It's on the Web, and the new 

8 material that we'll talk about; we are going 

9 to be talking about, you know. So I think 

10 that we're in pretty good shape.

11 Issue No. 1 has to do with the 

12 uranium bioassay coworker model. Basically, 

13 that is a set of tables that NIOSH has 

14 assembled from a vast amount of bioassay data 

15 of uranium in urine, and using that data, the 

16 plan is to use that data to reconstruct the 

17 doses, internal doses, to workers.

18 And for workers that don't have 

19 any or have limited bioassay data, they built 

20 a coworker model using that data.

21 We reviewed that very, very 
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1 carefully. In fact, there's a large report on 

2 it, to see if, in fact, all different time 

3 periods, all different buildings, types of 

4 categories of workers are captured so you 

5 could pigeonhole a person and reconstruct his 

6 doses.

7 We found that a very robust 

8 report. The data were complete. We only had 

9 one concern, and that concern was that the 

10 instruction given to the dose reconstructor 

11 was to use either the median or the full 

12 distribution. So, in other words, if you have 

13 a worker that doesn't have any bioassay data 

14 for a given year or time period, you go in and 

15 use the coworker model, and you pick off the 

16 median value in the model because they give a 

17 range of values.

18 We did a lot of work to show that, 

19 you know, there are some categories of workers 

20 and some time periods and some buildings where 

21 the median is not claimant-favorable, where we 
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1 found that you can't just automatically assign 

2 the median. You've got to be a little 

3 careful. You've got to do it on a case-by4 case basis.

5 So our recommendation was that 

6 some modification to the language in their 

7 guidance capture that, and during our 

8 conference call last week, NIOSH pointed out 

9 that, well, they've issued OTIB-0078, which is 

10 the formalization of the coworker model that 

11 they developed, and that in that 

12 formalization, there was language to that 

13 effect.

14 Well, unfortunately, I have to say 

15 that I read through it, the OTIB-0078, and 

16 others within our organization. The language 

17 is not there. So I would beseech, at some 

18 point in the process when the TBD is updated 

19 or the OTIB-0078 is updated, that a little bit 

20 more language is put in because right now the 

21 language that's there is very, very limited. 
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1 A little bit more could be done to give some 

2 guidance and caution, the dose reconstructor, 

3 you know, to take a better look before you 

4 just jump and use the median.

5 But as far as I'm concerned, this 

6 issue has been resolved, and it's really a 

7 matter of making sure that at an appropriate 

8 time and place the guidance explicitly makes 

9 that point clear.

10 MR. ROLFES: Yes, sir, John. I 

11 agree that we can just simply insert a couple 

12 of lines to address consideration of the 95th 

13 percentile intakes for certain workers.

14 DR. MAURO: Yes, and quite 

15 frankly, that's it. So we agree in principle. 

16 It's just a matter of, you know -- in fact, 

17 even on the phone call we said we think this 

18 issue is revolved, but the work, we felt that, 

19 listen, really until the document is fixed, it 

20 really can't be closed. So we sort of put it 

21 on the shelf until that document is fixed.
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1 And with that, we can move on 

2 unless anyone else wants to discuss it 

3 further.

4 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: No, I just want 

5 to make sure that we've got a handle on what 

6 the path forward is on this, John. I 

7 understand that till we see OTIB-0078 and the 

8 changes that are being made to it to address 

9 this. Like you said, it really --

10 DR. MAURO: It doesn't. I did 

11 look at OTIB-0078, and it doesn't fix it.

12 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: All right. So 

13 until that is done, then this item is still 

14 open.

15 DR. GLOVER: John, this is Sam 

16 Glover.

17 Could we clarify that there's SEC 

18 issues and TBD issues, and that we could --

19 DR. MAURO: Yes, and this is not 

20 an SEC issue. This is, in my opinion -- I 

21 hate to -- you know, as your contractor, I 
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1 hate to come to those kind of bottom line 

2 conclusions, but it's self-evident. Here's a 

3 case where, I mean, the technical issues have 

4 been resolved. It's just a matter of 

5 clarification.

6 So I can't see anyone calling this 

7 an SEC issue.

8 DR. GLOVER: Because, you know, it 

9 takes some formal interpretation to fix 

10 documents.

11 DR. MAURO: Yes.

12 DR. GLOVER: It can take a long 

13 time, and I'd hate to hold up six or seven 

14 months where we've fixed documents and you go 

15 through a very elaborate process.

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: I wonder if you 

17 could clarify. This is Ziemer.

18 I wonder if you could clarify what 

19 that fix is going to look like with a couple 

20 of sentences. Are you just going to instruct 

21 the dose reconstructor to do what?
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1 MR. ROLFES: I think that it would 

2 be appropriate for us -- right now we have a 

3 statement saying that we would use the 50th 

4 percentile intakes for a non-monitored worker 

5 to assign a uranium intake to them, and we've 

6 got those intakes listed in the Technical 

7 Information Bulletin.

8 What SC&A has essentially asked us 

9 to do is to incorporate some language to, 

10 basically, state that we would consider the 

11 95th percentage for certain workers in certain 

12 time periods based upon the other facts of 

13 their case, considering, for example, recorded 

14 external doses, work time periods, and other 

15 information provided to us.

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: Okay. So you've 

17 agreed on what the nature of the wording will 

18 be without actually having it.

19 DR. MAURO: In fact, in our White 

20 Paper that stands behind this, we've pointed 

21 out which buildings, which years, and which 
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1 job categories are the ones that are 

2 vulnerable. It might be worthwhile to just 

3 mention that, you know, if you are a guy who 

4 happens to fall into -- you know, I think the 

5 antennas should go up. Those are the three 

6 parameters.

7 And it's listed in our report. I 

8 forget the buildings and the time periods, 

9 but --

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: But there will be 

11 some specificity beyond some general 

12 wordsmith.

13 MR. ROLFES: Yes. However, we 

14 can't just, you know, because an individual 

15 was in this building and he had this job 

16 category, we can't automatically assume that 

17 they were exposed to the 95th percentile. 

18 We'd also have to get consideration for the 

19 amount of time that they spent in the 

20 building, what duties they were performing, 

21 what was operating at that time.
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1 MEMBER ZIEMER: And those would be 

2 alerts.

3 MR. ROLFES: Yes.

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: And, number two, 

5 there could be other cases that haven't been 

6 covered by those alerts.

7 MR. ROLFES: Correct, but we don't 

8 want to --

9 MEMBER ZIEMER: But the dose 

10 reconstructor would have to --

11 DR. MAURO: It's important to 

12 point out that the vast majority, beginning in 

13 1957, over 90 percent of the workers have 

14 data.

15 MEMBER ZIEMER: Anyway.

16 DR. MAURO: Anyway. So this is 

17 going to be, having to resort to the coworker 

18 model, is going to be the exception, not the 

19 rule.

20 Issue No. 2.

21 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, one more 
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1 question though. Are you proposing that we 

2 close this or wait until we see it?

3 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: No. Well, I 

4 wouldn't close it until we see what's been 

5 implemented on it. It's just we've got as far 

6 as, between us, we've got it taken care of, 

7 and it's covered, but I'd just like to be able 

8 to see that once it's implemented that it's 

9 implemented in the manner that was discussed. 

10 That's all I want to be able to see.

11 So does that answer your question, 

12 Paul?

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes.

14 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay. On Issue 

15 No. 2, which is validation of the HIS 

16 database, the action item is actually with 

17 NIOSH and there was actually a White Paper 

18 that had been out by SC&A, and they were going 

19 to review that and get back, determine what 

20 they needed from there.

21 So I believe it's up to you, Mark.
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1 MR. ROLFES: Okay. I prepared a 

2 short, little response here, and in the HIS-20 

3 database we had considered in excess of 

4 400,000 uranium in urine samples and looked 

5 back at SC&A's report briefly, and so it 

6 appears that there could be 8,000 to 28,000 

7 samples that appear to be missing from HIS-20.

8 And the way we were able to 

9 determine that is that we have those results 

10 in hard copy and didn't have them in HIS-20. 

11 But we felt that that was not significant 

12 because, one, we have a tour for uranium 

13 intake model for unmonitored employees.

14 Two, with a single sample from an 

15 individual was not entered into his 20th, 

16 possible that it was an erroneous result. 

17 It's possible that it was a verified 

18 contaminated sample which wasn't reflective of 

19 the worker's intake, or it also could have 

20 been combined with another sample taken on the 

21 same day perhaps.
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1 Furthermore, if the employee was 

2 monitored via urinalysis, given uranium's 

3 biological half-life, longer retention time in 

4 the body, the subsequent bioassay sample would 

5 likely reflect or integrate a previous 

6 exposure to uranium.

7 And, third, those with the highest 

8 exposure potentials at Fernald, as well as the 

9 highest lung burdens at Fernald, had the most 

10 frequent routine chest counts, and the chest 

11 counts are another source of information which 

12 can be used in dose reconstruction. The chest 

13 count results can allow us to validate or put 

14 an upper bound on an individual's previous 

15 uranium exposures to make sure that our end 

16 result is, indeed claimant-favorable.

17 So I guess that's our response, 

18 and essentially we found that in excess of 93 

19 percent of the uranium urinalyses were, in 

20 fact, transcribed validly into HIS-20 and made 

21 it into HIS-20.
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1 Furthermore, those results that 

2 did not make it into HIS-20, we didn't find 

3 that there was any kind of bias with the 

4 actual uranium urinalysis values reported. 

5 Some of the errors were misspellings of names, 

6 wrong plant, part of a Social Security number, 

7 or an extra number typed into the Social 

8 Security number. 

9 We didn't find any kind of bias of 

10 uranium urinalysis results that were reported. 

11 We didn't see that any of the high results 

12 were removed, and we didn't see that any of 

13 the low results were, you know, removed.

14 So we feel that what we have is 

15 pretty good and pretty defensible.

16 DR. MAURO: Let me. I hear what 

17 you're saying, but I think we should back up a 

18 little bit so that everyone understands the 

19 context of this issue. The HIS-20 database is 

20 the electronic database that everything is 

21 done from, it all came from hard copy database 
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1 that someone transcribed.

2 And you know, certainly to the 

3 credit of NIOSH, they said, listen, let's make 

4 sure that transcription was done faithfully.

5 And we're going to go through a 

6 sampling process. We're going to go into this 

7 vast amount of hard copy data and sample, take 

8 numbers out and see if, in fact, that number 

9 was taken out of the hard copy and put into 

10 the electronic database correctly.

11 And they imposed upon themselves 

12 what they call a military spec criteria of 

13 acceptability, which was, I believe, one 

14 percent. So they said, after we go through 

15 this process, if we could show that when 99 

16 percent of the transcriptions were correct, we 

17 pass our test.

18 They went through and they found 

19 out that six percent failed instead of one 

20 percent failed. So you failed your test.

21 Now, in fact, when we looked at 
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1 this, we said, well, you know, strangely 

2 enough, we don't feel that that's a big deal 

3 because I think you've imposed upon yourself 

4 an acceptance criteria that was unnecessarily 

5 restrictive. That is, there is no reason why 

6 you have to have 99 percent faithful 

7 transcription. If it wasn't that good, there 

8 are ways to deal with it, but I think that 

9 that had to be dealt with.

10 Your report, I guess in effect 

11 your report, you know, comes out and says 

12 we've missed it. Now, you are giving now some 

13 reasons why you believe that it's okay to have 

14 six percent, but there's a little bit more to 

15 the story, and that has to do with shutting 

16 down the process of validation on given sets.

17 What I'm getting at is I think 

18 there's some more. I hear what you're saying, 

19 but I think there's some more work, mechanical 

20 work, that needs to be done to complete the 

21 record, and then after the record is completed 
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1 that, yes, you've done the checks that have to 

2 be checked, then a case could be made by the 

3 kinds of transcription errors that you're 

4 observing can be managed.

5 Harry, are you on the line?

6 MR. CHMELYNSKI: Here.

7 DR. MAURO: Could you very nicely 

8 explain during our technical conference call, 

9 I don't know if it was 20 or 25 batches that 

10 they looked at? Some of them they sort of 

11 reined in and did not finish the completion of 

12 the checks, and I have to say when you 

13 explained it, it helps to understand the kinds 

14 of things that NIOSH might do to sort of close 

15 the book on this thing.

16 Could you give us a little rundown 

17 on some of the things that you felt could be 

18 done to help close the door on this one?

19 MR. CHMELYNSKI: Okay. First, I'd 

20 like to say that we're referring to these as 

21 transcription errors. I think that's slightly 
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1 a misconception because what we found was that 

2 almost all the entries that were put into HIS3 20 were correct.

4 The problem was there were some 

5 records that didn't make it into the database. 

6 So I'm not sure I would call that a 

7 transcription error. They're missing data.

8 And as NIOSH just said, there are 

9 reasons why maybe some of these are missing, 

10 and although the reviewer in the document said 

11 that there were also some, there's no reason 

12 why they were missing.

13 At any rate, there were some 

14 missing, and our best estimate was about six 

15 percent. And that may not be important. 

16 That's an open issue.

17 The procedure they used though to 

18 derive these numbers, this accuracy check, has 

19 a long history in the mil spec tradition of 

20 how it can be applied, and one of the 

21 distinguishing features it has is that it 
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1 allows a reduced level of inspection that is 

2 meant for cases where you have an ongoing 

3 procedure, and everything is going pretty well 

4 in a factory sort of environment, and the 

5 shipments are going out, and every time we 

6 check them they're okay.

7 So at that point you're allowed to 

8 have a reduced level of inspection. However, 

9 NIOSH used this reduced level of inspection on 

10 this particular task, which I thought was 

11 inappropriate.

12 First off, it was a one time 

13 study, and second, they weren't doing very 

14 well on the ones they did look at.

15 So switching to reduced level of 

16 inspection for certain of these batches seemed 

17 inappropriate. So I don't think the study was 

18 ever completed in that sense, but those 

19 reduced inspections should have been at least 

20 upgraded to normal inspection or even 100 

21 percent once it was found that the quality 
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1 goal was not being met.

2 That would tie up this report. 

3 I'm not sure there's an issue here that we 

4 ought to throw out HIS-20.

5 DR. MAURO: I'm sorry. I didn't 

6 hear what you said, the last statement.

7 MR. CHMELYNSKI: There's no reason 

8 here, I think, to be suspicious of any of the 

9 numbers that are in HIS-20. Those were found 

10 to be almost 100 percent correct.

11 DR. MAURO: I guess would it be 

12 your recommendation that they complete the 

13 ones that they were doing or you feel that 

14 they're at a point that you feel satisfied 

15 that even though they didn't go through the 

16 complete process, you know, the reasons you 

17 described, that we could walk away and say 

18 that the HIS-20 database has been validated to 

19 our satisfaction?

20 MR. CHMELYNSKI: Well, I guess I 

21 would say that this report has not been 
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1 published yet. It needs a lot of work to be 

2 published, and I think one of the things would 

3 be to complete the ones that had reduced 

4 inspection. There's other things it needs, 

5 too, which is sort of an overview of what the 

6 conclusion is.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: Which report is he 

8 referring to, yours?

9 MR. ROLFES: He's referring to our 

10 analysis of the HIS-20 data.

11 MEMBER ZIEMER: Your analysis.

12 DR. MAURO: One of the things that 

13 we discussed was let's get to the point. 

14 Let's say you complete your analysis the way 

15 Harry suggested in his White Paper. You know, 

16 we have a White Paper which sort of lays all 

17 of this out, things that could be done to 

18 close the door.

19 I'd like to say a position that 

20 SC&A has taken, is that let's assume for a 

21 moment that you find out that six percent of 
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1 the data were not transcribed.

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: As opposed to 

3 transcribed in --

4 DR. MAURO: Errors. Please excuse 

5 me. I was referring to as transcription 

6 errors as it's a hit, basically, and a hit 

7 turns out to be of a form that is, no, they 

8 didn't bring this number over. All right?

9 I think there were others, too. 

10 There were things like the guy's name might 

11 have been spelled wrong. So there was a 

12 variety.

13 But let's -- and this is what we 

14 talked about on the phone, and I think it's 

15 important to get on the record here -- is that 

16 the way we look at it is it's not uncommon for 

17 a record, an electronic record, to be 

18 incomplete. That's why we have the Whole Dose 

19 Reconstruction Center protocols. And as long 

20 as the six percent incomplete is really sort 

21 of like a randomly missed -- that's why you 
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1 have a coworker model.

2 And the only time where if you 

3 miss a significant percent, whether it's 

4 because you left badges behind, whether you 

5 destroyed records, whether they were lost, 

6 it's when that particular set of missing 

7 records happens to be at the high end of your 

8 distribution.

9 Now, when that happens, you've got 

10 a problem. Then you can't build a coworker 

11 model. But there's no reason here to believe 

12 that that's the case. So I guess where I am 

13 on this is that if your formal document, 

14 finalized, addresses the issues or the 

15 recommendations that Harry pointed out and 

16 then at the end, the points that you just made 

17 in your summary become conclusionary, and 

18 maybe back off on the imposition of the one 

19 percent.

20 You know, I think it was admirable 

21 that you set that up, as we're going to assess 
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1 it against that, but I think that was an 

2 unnecessary imposition on yourselves of a 

3 quality level that wasn't required for this 

4 kind of application, and you really can't even 

5 put up front what you really want to know, is 

6 that once you determine, you know, how much 

7 data might be missing, a judgment has to be 

8 made whether or not it's significant in terms 

9 of affecting your ability to do a coworker 

10 model and how to deal with it.

11 And then you will have a complete 

12 story. Right now that complete story isn't 

13 there.

14 MR. ROLFES: All right. I guess 

15 since we've said that the numbers that are 

16 entered into HIS-20 are good and we've got 

17 greater than 400,000 numbers in there, we've 

18 developed our coworker intake models. So for 

19 an individual that wasn't monitored for 

20 uranium, if they were in a radiation area, 

21 they would receive the 50th percentile 
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1 coworker intake automatically.

2 You know, we can go back and look 

3 at some of the records that weren't entered 

4 into HIS-20, take a look at hard copy 

5 records, and I believe we had already done 

6 this. I think we had looked to see how much 

7 the missing results would have impacted the 

8 various intake rates over time, and from what 

9 I recall, they were, you know, a small 

10 percentage, maybe one microgram difference on 

11 a 50 microgram, you know, intake or something, 

12 you know. So it was pretty trivial.

13 DR. MAURO: And that's a good case 

14 at the back end. In other words, the way I 

15 look at it they're linear. You build a 

16 process. You are faithful to the process. 

17 The end result is, okay, we did check all 25 

18 batches that became your sampling base. We 

19 didn't pull short, take advantage of the 

20 shortcut that the mil spec allows you to do 

21 under certain circumstances, but you didn't 
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1 have those circumstances.

2 And so what Harry is saying is we 

3 really shouldn't have pulled back. Finish it 

4 up the way you began, take some work, so that 

5 it's done. At then end then you say, okay, 

6 we're coming out where we come out. Let's say 

7 it is six percent, and then you took a whole 

8 bunch of steps to say why we could live with 

9 that, and there you've got the end, story 

10 ends.

11 And so I'm not disagreeing with 

12 you. I'm almost looking at it as a complete 

13 record that's available to everyone to show 

14 that you have a sound documentation of the 

15 validity of the HIS-20 database. Right now 

16 it's soft because of these reasons.

17 MR. ROLFES: Yes, I guess my side 

18 of things is that these reasons don't appear 

19 to me to be important to dose reconstruction.

20 DR. MAURO: And I'll tell you the 

21 truth. I'll tend to agree with that.
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1 MR. ROLFES: Okay.

2 DR. MAURO: But it would be very 

3 nice to finish the work and say that.

4 MR. ROLFES: Maybe we can add some 

5 text to specifically address what you're 

6 asking us to.

7 DR. MAURO: Yes, right.

8 MR. ROLFES: But if you could 

9 restate briefly what you're asking.

10 DR. MAURO: Harry explained it, 

11 and it is written up in our report, I mean, 

12 and I think what goes to the heart of it is 

13 the mil spec process the way I understand it 

14 is one where you enter into a sampling process 

15 for batches. Batches are coming off the 

16 assembly line, and that's a living process 

17 that goes on forever because you're making a 

18 product.

19 And you design -- I'm going to 

20 take one out of ten, you know, and check it. 

21 And as that process is going on and you're 
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1 saying every time I do it I'm okay, I'm okay, 

2 I'm okay, then apparently you build a record 

3 that you're okay, you're okay. You could 

4 start to soften up. I'm only going to take 

5 one out of 20.

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: One out of 20, 

7 yes.

8 DR. MAURO: Yes. Well, you folks 

9 went through a few batches. You weren't 

10 meeting your one percent.

11 MR. ROLFES: Correct.

12 DR. MAURO: And you backed away. 

13 It seems to me that if you were meeting your 

14 one percent as you march through each batch, 

15 you could have backed away, but you weren't 

16 meeting your one percent. So don't back away. 

17 Finish it.

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, I heard 

19 something different from Harry.

20 DR. MAURO: Okay, good.

21 MEMBER ZIEMER: He can speak for 
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1 himself --

2 DR. MAURO: Oh, yes, yes.

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: But this is a one 

4 time thing. It's not like you're producing 

5 product and your accuracy rate is changing. I 

6 think Harry said, number one, the 

7 transcription part, which is the mil spec was 

8 based on, was not a problem. All right? For 

9 those transcriptions you were within the one 

10 percent.

11 The only real issue is not 

12 everything was transcribed, but you're not 

13 producing an ongoing product. You don't have 

14 a new database coming up that you're sampling 

15 and it's a different rate.

16 So if I understood you, Harry, 

17 you're saying that, in a sense, for backing 

18 away this doesn't meet the way the military 

19 says they back away into a lesser sampling 

20 rate based on ongoing experience.

21 Did I understand that right?
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1 MR. CHMELYNSKI: That's correct. 

2 In this whole project, I don't think it ever 

3 should have been considered. I think in a one 

4 time project, you never have that level of 

5 confidence.

6 By the way, the reduced sampling 

7 here means you look at 20 records, which in 

8 some cases you can get away with, but it's 

9 like I said. In this case there hasn't been a 

10 track record ever established. So 20 wasn't 

11 enough.

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: I don't think I 

13 like the way he described it.

14 MR. ROLFES: So is it a Board --

15 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, I mean, you 

16 wouldn't just use 20 samples anyway to 

17 describe your accuracy rate on this database 

18 or whatever it is. I mean, you already have 

19 what you had, right?

20 MR. ROLFES: I'm not sure I'm 

21 following you. Much more than 20 samples were 
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1 considered.

2 MR. CHMELYNSKI: I mean, in a 

3 particular batch. The reduced rate says that 

4 you can get away with 20 samples.

5 MR. MORRIS: But we did dozens of 

6 batches. This is Robert Morris.

7 MR. CHMELYNSKI: Yes, but there 

8 weren't any that were -- there weren't many 

9 that were within the goal though, and again, I 

10 don't think that the reduced level inspection 

11 is at all applicable in a one time situation 

12 like this.

13 MR. MORRIS: I'm not disagreeing. 

14 I just want to make sure you don't leave the 

15 impression that we only looked at 20 samples.

16 MR. CHMELYNSKI: Oh, no. I'm just 

17 saying that there were some batches where 

18 there were only 20 samples inspected. That's 

19 all I can say. Some of the batches.

20 MR. ROLFES: And I think that 

21 might have just been a result of the PDF size 
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1 perhaps because we had compared some hard copy 

2 records. They were actually scanned into our 

3 electronic database separate from the HIS-20, 

4 and we compared the results in that PDF to the 

5 results in the electronic HIS-20 database.

6 Does that sound accurate, Bob or 

7 Gene?

8 MR. POTTER: This is Gene Potter. 

9 I actually worked on the comparison.

10 And let me first say that SC&A did 

11 a very thorough job, and many of their 

12 criticisms would be accepted. Others we'd 

13 have to argue with. They're both saying that 

14 our AQL was too high, which means we would 

15 have had or done bigger sample sizes then 

16 they're criticizing us for using due sampling.

17 So there's some inconsistencies in 

18 their work as well, in my opinion, but I think 

19 the bottom line is -- is correcting this study 

20 that we've done, is that an end product that 

21 is needed to make a decision when both SC&A 
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1 and NIOSH agree that 93 and a half percent or 

2 so in the worst case of the results are in 

3 HIS-20. Is this study an end in itself, which 

4 is what I think John Mauro is advocating?

5 DR. GLOVER: Is it fit for 

6 purpose?

7 This is Sam Glover.

8 DR. MAURO: In other words, what 

9 I'm hearing is does this thing need to be 

10 fixed before a judgment could be made 

11 regarding the SEC. Is this what I'm hearing? 

12 Is that the question that's being raised?

13 MR. ROLFES: I think that's 

14 essentially what we're asking, yes.

15 DR. MAURO: Is that your 

16 understanding?

17 MR. ROLFES: Yes. I mean, because 

18 to do additional work is going to take 

19 additional time.

20 DR. MAURO: I guess in mine --

21 this is my opinion, and I'm speaking as just 
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1 an individual member of the crew around the 

2 table -- this becomes one of the rocks you're 

3 standing on. In the end, all of your dose 

4 reconstructions, all of your coworker models 

5 depend on the trust you have in the HIS-20 

6 database.

7 And right now, based on what was 

8 done, there appears to be for the sampling 

9 that was done perhaps six percent error. 

10 Okay?

11 Now, but at the same time we know 

12 there were certain batches where the sampling 

13 wasn't complete. So that the actual percent 

14 that might be missing -- correct me if I'm 

15 wrong -- I mean, if you were to go through the 

16 thing the way Harry described, don't have any, 

17 which is 20. Let's go each batch. Go through 

18 the full treatment the way, you know, Harry 

19 suggested, and when you're done, you say, 

20 okay, this is what we have, we have for this 

21 batch this percent, for this batch this 
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1 percent, for this batch this percent.

2 And then there's a process you go 

3 through to convince yourself the way you 

4 described that that does not affect my ability 

5 to come up with a sound coworker model for the 

6 following reasons, and you run the test you 

7 ran.

8 We're going to run some cases and 

9 see what happens. So, in other words, when I 

10 see -- you've got to bring it to closure, and 

11 until you bring it to closure, you're sort of 

12 leaving yourself in a funny plight. You're 

13 saying, we really never completely finished 

14 and documented our HIS-20 database validation, 

15 and it's really hard to move on from there 

16 with that sort of leaning in the wings.

17 I don't know. That's how I look 

18 at it. I know I feel a lot more comfortable 

19 locking that up, knowing that you're standing 

20 on a rock, put to bed, everybody agrees, and 

21 then after that, everything -- for example, 
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1 you know, when we said we're okay with Issue 

2 No. 1 except for the words, but Issue No. 1 

3 really is presuming that the HIS-20 database 

4 is everything's okay.

5 MR. ROLFES: Right. The two are 

6 tied together.

7 DR. MAURO: Do you see what I 

8 mean? So you put yourself in a funny place. 

9 I don't know if you want to be there. If you 

10 could put this one to bed, I don't know how 

11 much of an effort it is, but if you could put 

12 this one to bed, I think it will give the 

13 Board a lot more confidence that we're 

14 standing on a rock.

15 DR. MAKHIJANI: This is Arjun.

16 Can I ask Harry a question?

17 Harry, is there a way to 

18 characterize six percent that are missing 

19 compared to the 94 percent that are there? 

20 Are they kind of random missing or systematic 

21 missing? Do we know?
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1 MR. CHMELYNSKI: No bias was 

2 found. We'll put it that way. Systematic? I 

3 guess you could say in some cases there were 

4 groups of them left out, but generally they 

5 were associated with one person maybe. So 

6 maybe he was left that for a reason, maybe 

7 not.

8 I think it's very speculative 

9 trying to figure out why they weren't put in 

10 the database. There were some reasons offered 

11 earlier, but --

12 MR. ROLFES: Right. There could 

13 be reasons behind those. It could be a 

14 contaminated sample. It could be, you know, 

15 some other explanation. To go back and try to 

16 identify each of those cases is actually 

17 something that we would do during a dose 

18 reconstruction, but to do it as a whole for 

19 the entire database is going to take a lot of 

20 additional time, and it's something in my 

21 opinion that really isn't warranted because we 
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1 know that the data that are in the database 

2 from which the coworker intake models were 

3 derived, the numbers were essentially 100 

4 percent accurate.

5 And it's the numbers that are 

6 important for us in a dose reconstruction.

7 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, the point of 

8 my question was that if the answer is that 

9 it's clear that it's random, then you don't 

10 have to worry. But if, as Harry said, it's 

11 not clear, then I think, you know, you have 

12 got something to settle.

13 DR. MAURO: I think it has to be 

14 said. You see, one of the things that I 

15 encountered, and I always have problems. I'll 

16 read a report. It's sort of you're always 

17 left a little fuzzy. In other words, I like 

18 at the end of the report to say, listen. 

19 Okay. We found six percent error, and I would 

20 like to see where it would say, and do you 

21 know something? If this six percent error 
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1 turned out to be a systematic bias that was at 

2 the upper end of the tail, we've got a 

3 problem. So we're going to run a series of 

4 tests to convince ourselves that, no, it was 

5 random and it could not bias the coworker 

6 model, not the guy that's doing your dose. 

7 I'm saying the coworker model because you have 

8 a coworker model that says for this year and 

9 this building, here's the 95th percentile, you 

10 know, and we're going to use that 95th 

11 percentile value for any guy that we're 

12 missing data for. Okay? You say you're going 

13 to do that.

14 Well, we're really hanging our hat 

15 on 95th percentile. We know it's good. Now, 

16 if there's any reason to believe we can't 

17 trust that 95th percentile because of some 

18 kind of bias in the transcription, you've got 

19 a problem.

20 So I look at it very simple. So 

21 if you could make a case that says, no, 
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1 there's no reason why that 95th percentile and 

2 prove whatever process you go through is 

3 completely unaffected by this. It's

4 unaffected. So, therefore, our coworker model 

5 is robust notwithstanding we may have missed 

6 six percent of the data.

7 And it's just plain language. 

8 It's just simple thinking, but it wasn't 

9 there. I mean, it took us a lot of thinking 

10 and figuring and a lot of work, you know, to 

11 bring this baby home, but I think we 

12 understand where you are and we think we 

13 understand how it needed to be fixed.

14 MR. MORRIS: Bob Morris.

15 It seems to me that Harry just 

16 went on the record saying that there is no 

17 inherent bias obvious in the data that we 

18 have.

19 DR. MAURO: Right.

20 MR. MORRIS: And I think that's 

21 the challenge that you just gave us, and Harry 
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1 just gave us the answer.

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, I was going 

3 to ask the same question. Did SC&A run some 

4 tests?

5 In other words, Harry, your 

6 statement is based on what? Was that 

7 intuitive or did you guys run some tests on 

8 the missing data to assure yourselves that 

9 there wasn't any obvious bias?

10 Because in a sense, if you say 

11 there's no bias, that's another way of saying 

12 it's random.

13 DR. MAURO: Right. Oh, yes.

14 Harry, what I heard you say, you 

15 have a sense that you could not really see any 

16 systematic bias.

17 MR. CHMELYNSKI: Well, I'm basing 

18 that on the work that NIOSH did when they did 

19 the report, which was they looked at the data 

20 that found -- was not in HIS-20, and they said 

21 that when you add that data in, it makes very 
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1 little difference in the estimates.

2 MR. ROLFES: That's correct.

3 MR. CHMELYNSKI: That says that 

4 those numbers weren't that much different to 

5 me. 

6 On the other hand, the real issue 

7 isn't the numbers that we know didn't make it 

8 into the database. It's all the other numbers 

9 that we know didn't make it in, but we don't 

10 have them yet. We haven't found them.

11 DR. MAURO: Those are the ones 

12 where they cut short. They weren't the 20 

13 samples.

14 MR. CHMELYNSKI: No, not the 20 

15 samples.

16 DR. MAURO: Okay.

17 MR. CHMELYNSKI: I'm just saying 

18 that is six percent of them are missing, that 

19 means six percent of 400,000 are missing, 

20 which is 24,000 records. We don't know which 

21 24,000 they are. We only know a handful of 
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1 those 24 that we happened to see while we were 

2 doing this study.

3 We don't know all the records that 

4 are missing is all I'm saying. We just know 

5 the ones that we found when we did this study 

6 of a very small number of the records.

7 MR. MORRIS: Isn't it true that 

8 unless we do 100 percent sampling we'll never 

9 know them all?

10 MR. CHMELYNSKI: Yes, that's 

11 right. I'm just saying that we will never 

12 know why they're all missing, but the ones we 

13 did look at don't seem to be a problem is what 

14 I'm saying.

15 MR. ROLFES: Right. The numbers 

16 that we would use for, you know, dosimetry 

17 calculations, internal dosimetry calculations 

18 we found to be for the data that are there, 

19 the 93.5 percent of the data that is in HIS20 20, we found that the numbers are good, and so 

21 that's the important thing. That's what I'm 
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1 trying to make sure that we don't misrepresent 

2 the data if an individual, for example, only 

3 had one urine sample and that was the sample 

4 that didn't make it into HIS-20, we would 

5 apply the coworker intakes, and that really 

6 essentially would solve the problem.

7 DR. MAKHIJANI: So you're using 

8 HIS-20 for a dose reconstruction.

9 MR. ROLFES: The HIS-20 database 

10 is where the uranium urinalyses were extracted 

11 from in order to calculate the uranium in 

12 urine coworker study, intake --

13 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes, I understood 

14 that. The individual dose reconstruction, 

15 you're starting with the HIS-20 data. That's 

16 your primary source for --

17 MR. ROLFES: We actually received 

18 individual exposure information from the 

19 Department of Energy, and it is from the HIS20 20 database, and there is also some hard copy 

21 records that are associated with those as 
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1 well.

2 MS. BALDRIDGE: Can I interrupt?

3 MR. ROLFES: Please.

4 MS. BALDRIDGE: This is Sandra.

5 You know, I don't have a problem 

6 with the HIS-20 database. My problem is you 

7 don't know when those samplings were done, 

8 whether they were done at low exposure times 

9 or high exposure times, and to assume that 

10 they were all done at high exposure times is 

11 ridiculous, especially when you mention only 

12 one sampling.

13 You have one sampling for a year. 

14 What kind of representation is that as 

15 exposure? It's not. I just think that based 

16 on the documents in the petition, there is too 

17 much question about the timing when these 

18 tests were done, what they reflected, what 

19 they chose to ignore, how they chose to 

20 schedule the test, and based on my own 

21 knowledge of things that were missed in 
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1 looking at this data, I mean, it just -- I 

2 still question how valid uranium urinalysis 

3 data is in determining the level of exposure.

4 MR. ROLFES: Do you have any 

5 questions that I might be able to help explain 

6 or anything?

7 MS. BALDRIDGE: No. You know, 

8 going through this process and finding out, 

9 you know, we'll go -- exposures, you know, the 

10 19 people that were exposed in Pilot Plant 

11 back in 1951. Well, and then you see how the 

12 data is looked at by the examiners, the dose 

13 reconstructors, and then you have someone who 

14 comes along with the same conditions that 

15 resulted from these exposures whose records do 

16 not reflect any urinalysis done, do not even 

17 reflect that they were part of the examination 

18 because the exposure wasn't recognized in 

19 their part of the plant and was just 

20 restricted to 19 men, and then it's not even 

21 picked up because that person's records show 
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1 that they worked in a different plant than 

2 where they could have been exposed.

3 But they couldn't have worked 

4 anyplace else because that's the only plant 

5 that was operating at the time they were 

6 working.

7 MR. ROLFES: So if you're 

8 expressing concern about certain workers 

9 working in a plant that weren't monitored for 

10 uranium exposures, in those cases what we have 

11 done is looked at the urine concentrations 

12 from the people that were monitored, and we're 

13 using the monitored workers' uranium 

14 urinalysis values. We're using the median 

15 value. We've calculated, you know, We 

16 plugged in all roughly 400,000 samples and 

17 come up with a distribution.

18 So if an individual was not 

19 monitored for uranium, we would take the 50th 

20 percentile of that distribution and assign an 

21 unmonitored uranium intake to that worker, 
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1 and --

2 MS. BALDRIDGE: But if you didn't 

3 pick up the fact that they were a worker in 

4 that location at that time, that assignment 

5 wouldn't be made.

6 MR. ROLFES: No, it would. If an 

7 individual was believed to have been exposed 

8 to radiation and was never monitored for 

9 uranium via urinalysis, we would assign 

10 uranium intake, bottom line.

11 MEMBER ZIEMER: Just one other 

12 comment on the sampling issue. I think 

13 there's almost no case where you do 100 

14 percent sampling on anything.

15 MR. ROLFES: No.

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: I mean, obviously 

17 you never know. For example, if you want to 

18 know what percent of the people in the U.S. 

19 support some position of the President, 

20 there's no way to sample that 100 percent. 

21 That's unreasonable.
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1 You know, if you sample ten 

2 people, what does that tell you? So 

3 statisticians have ways of doing that where 

4 they can get an unbiased picture.

5 I guess on these missing ones, 

6 isn't the question sort of you have looked at 

7 some of the missing ones --

8 MR. ROLFES: Correct.

9 MEMBER ZIEMER: -- and it seems 

10 that the question being raised is how 

11 representative are those of the rest of the 

12 missing ones.

13 Now, actually for a statistician, 

14 that's not that difficult of a problem. 

15 Unfortunately, I'm not a statistician.

16 (Laughter.)

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: So I don't have 

18 the solution to that, but it's a variation of 

19 pulling the white and the red balls out of a 

20 hat or out of a bag to determine what the 

21 relative numbers of each are, and obviously 
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1 unless you do it 100 percent you don't get the 

2 exact answer, but you can come really close if 

3 you model it right.

4 So I guess I'm trying to 

5 understand. I think as I understand it, the 

6 transcription per se from hard data to the 

7 database is not an issue. It's the missing 

8 stuff, and the missing stuff that you've 

9 looked at appears to be unbiased.

10 And it appears to me the issue 

11 that's been raised is how representative is 

12 that, and is there a way of answering that 

13 question?

14 For some reason did you select 

15 only the -- you know, there's a bunch of 

16 really high ones here, but for some reason, 

17 all you got was this little distribution, 

18 which I guess someone could argue that could 

19 happen. In fact, if stuff like that didn't 

20 happen, no one would ever go to the casinos.

21 (Laughter.)
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1 MEMBER ZIEMER: Because in the 

2 casinos you know that --

3 DR. MAURO: You lose.

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: -- on average, but 

5 there's always a few people that are in the 

6 cluster, and so do we have a weird cluster 

7 here?

8 And the only way you -- you've got 

9 to play enough. If I play enough at the 

10 casino, I'm going to lose, and I don't have to 

11 play forever. It's just long enough to --

12 DR. MAURO: Yes, and I would argue 

13 it's random, and you've got a guy that worked 

14 at the plant ten years in different locations. 

15 The chances that he just happened to be the 

16 guy that we missed his data in the 

17 transcription every time and he happened to 

18 just be at that place at that time --

19 MEMBER ZIEMER: Every time.

20 DR. MAURO: -- that's not going to 

21 happen.
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1 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right.

2 DR. MAURO: And so I agree with 

3 you.

4 MR. ROLFES: In that case, we 

5 would apply coworker intake.

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: So I'm looking for 

7 an argument of what do you do with missing 

8 data then.

9 DR. MAURO: Well, you did 

10 something. What you did I think may be the 

11 solution, but I'm not sure. I put something. 

12 I think --

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: You're going the 

14 same direction.

15 DR. MAURO: Yes, let me tell you 

16 what I'm thinking. I'm saying, okay, I've got 

17 a guy. All right? He worked at the Pilot 

18 Plant in 1950. Okay? And in that plant --

19 this is all made up. You know, we can get the 

20 real numbers -- but let's say you have 1,000 

21 urine samples that were collected that year in 
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1 the Pilot Plant, and along comes this guy. 

2 All right, and you're going to reconstruct his 

3 dose, and you go into his records.

4 Now, here's my first question. 

5 You go into his records and you have the HIS6 20 database and you go pull it. You go pull 

7 his numbers out, but if you see he's missing a 

8 couple of months, do you go to his hard copy 

9 data to get the rest of it, or do you just 

10 work with what his -- in other words, you 

11 don't go back to the hard copy.

12 MR. ROLFES: No, we do actually.

13 DR. MAURO: You do?

14 MR. ROLFES: Yes. For each dose 

15 reconstruction that we work on for Fernald and 

16 other sites, we didn't base our dose 

17 reconstruction method solely on the HIS-20 

18 data.

19 For example, when we complete a 

20 dose reconstruction, we actually receive an 

21 individual DOE response file for each 
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1 individual claimant, and much of that data 

2 does come from HIS-20, but there are also some 

3 hard copy records that come to us.

4 DR. MAURO: That solves half our 

5 problem. No problem, and who cares? You've 

6 got the transcription. For a guy that has a 

7 complete record --

8 MR. ROLFES: You have the record.

9 DR. MAURO: -- you've got the 

10 record. That's the end of the story.

11 Okay. Now, same guy, same guy, 

12 except in this case, you go back to his 

13 records and he has no records. So in other 

14 words, he has missing data, and everybody has 

15 got a hole. You've got him this month or this 

16 quarter and this quarter. We're missing some 

17 numbers, and we go back into his hard copy 

18 data. They're not there, okay, for some 

19 reason.

20 Okay. Now you've got to hang your 

21 hat entirely on your coworker model, and what 
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1 do you do in your coworker models is, well, I 

2 know that for this period the mean -- I'm 

3 making stuff up -- the mean is five Becquerels 

4 per liter and the magnitude is 12. Okay? 

5 You've got that.

6 Now, what are we saying? We're 

7 saying that in the transcription process, some 

8 data was missing. It might have been this 

9 guy's data or, well, no, it can't be because 

10 you went back and you checked it.

11 I'm thinking it out. I'm thinking 

12 it through. So what you're left with is a 

13 situation where if you did have the data, no 

14 problem. It's when you don't have the data 

15 and you're depending on this distribution for 

16 this guy.

17 Now, the fact that six percent of 

18 these 1,000 samples, what we're really saying 

19 now is best we can tell there's -- this 

20 shouldn't be 1,000. This should be 1,060.

21 MR. ROLFES: Right.
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1 DR. MAURO: That's what it should 

2 be.

3 MR. ROLFES: Right.

4 DR. MAURO: But it's not. It's 

5 1,000. Now, in this distribution, whatever, 

6 you know, they're changed, because we're 

7 missing 60 numbers.

8 MR. ROLFES: Right.

9 DR. MAURO: And I'm going to argue 

10 that if those 60 numbers are random --

11 MR. ROLFES: Unbiased.

12 DR. MAURO: -- unbiased, nothing 

13 changes and everything is fine.

14 MR. ROLFES: Right, right.

15 DR. MAURO: Now, what I'm hearing 

16 is is there a way to convince yourself that 

17 those 60 numbers really can't -- unless 

18 someone deliberately left them out, it would 

19 be a concerted effort to deliberately leave 

20 out those 60 numbers that happened to be the 

21 worst ones.
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1 Now, is there anything that you do 

2 to convince yourself that's not what happened?

3 MR. CHMELYNSKI: John.

4 DR. MAURO: Yes.

5 MR. CHMELYNSKI: Yes. We did a 

6 simulation.

7 DR. MAURO: Good. Go ahead.

8 MR. CHMELYNSKI: And what we 

9 looked at was, well, let's say six percent of 

10 the data was missing, but it does come from 

11 the same distribution that the other data 

12 comes from.

13 DR. MAURO: Okay.

14 MR. CHMELYNSKI: That rules out 

15 the systematic bias issue. Okay? I'm just 

16 saying that without the systematic bias of the 

17 missing data, let's assume that they just come 

18 from the same distribution. We just haven't 

19 seen them.

20 And then we ask the question: 

21 well, how much would the 95th percentile 
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1 estimate be affected? We did a simulation 

2 that said that -- let me make sure I get the 

3 right answer here -- if the sample size is 100 

4 or more, then the 95th percentile you see will 

5 be between the 90th and the 98th true 

6 percentile 95 percent of the time.

7 (Laughter.)

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: If you follow 

9 that --

10 DR. MAURO: It means you're okay.

11 MR. CHMELYNSKI: Well, it says you 

12 can be plus or minus three percentiles --

13 DR. MAURO: You're okay.

14 MR. CHMELYNSKI: -- if you have 

15 100 or more.

16 Now, if you're down to where you 

17 only have 25, then it could be somewhere 

18 between the 82nd and the 99th, which means 

19 there's a lot more uncertainty. So really it 

20 boils down to what is the sample size that you 

21 build your coworker model on.
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1 DR. MAKHIJANI: And, Harry, you 

2 know, while the difference would be 95 and 98, 

3 it doesn't look large when you say it as 

4 percentiles. The difference in the actual 

5 values could be very large, right?

6 MR. CHMELYNSKI: It could be, and 

7 with the log-normal and with a small sample 

8 size, you can get some pretty high numbers in 

9 there that you haven't seen.

10 DR. MAKHIJANI: Because you're in 

11 the tail of the distribution. So when you go 

12 from 95th percentile to 98th percentile, 

13 you're going to wind up with significant 

14 errors in your dose assignment. It's not 

15 three percent.

16 DR. MAURO: But remember what 

17 we're talking about is we're filling in 

18 blanks, a month here, a month there, a year 

19 here, a year there, for a guy that may have 

20 worked there for ten years. This is not going 

21 to happen every time. You see, that's my 
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1 problem.

2 If it was a one time deal, in 

3 other words, but for you to miss it, in other 

4 words, you -- do you see where I'm going? I 

5 don't --

6 DR. MAKHIJANI: No, but I don't 

7 agree with your characterization of the 

8 situation. You know, I'm just coming at it 

9 was a neutral party, just kind of looking at 

10 it from a statistical point of view. I 

11 haven't been involved too much in this 

12 discussion.

13 First of all, Harry's numbers 

14 assume that the missing data are random. So 

15 part of the same distribution, right, Harry?

16 MR. CHMELYNSKI: Right.

17 DR. MAKHIJANI: And then you come 

18 up with this result. But you marry that now 

19 with what Harry said earlier, is that 

20 sometimes you've got a person whose data are 

21 -- it's worse if someone's data are missing 
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1 and we don't know why they're missing, but 

2 there are many data points for somebody that 

3 is not there.

4 Now, if you add, you know, even a 

5 modest bias to this missing problem, then, you 

6 know, this question of sample size, the 

7 question of difference in percentiles could 

8 become important.

9 And I think that it may be useful 

10 to determine if the missing data are random or 

11 not random.

12 DR. MAURO: I agree with that 100 

13 percent. How you do that I don't know.

14 MEMBER ZIEMER: Let me ask one 

15 other question on this in terms of simulating. 

16 Suppose you had 1,000 samples. It should 

17 really be 1,060, and make the assumption that 

18 all of those 60 had values equivalent to, say, 

19 the 95th percentile of the original 

20 distribution. They're all high.

21 What does it do to a -- what does 
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1 a modified distribution look like? Is that 

2 the kind of simulation that was done?

3 DR. MAURO: No.

4 MR. CHMELYNSKI: No. The 

5 simulation I did did not look at a biased 

6 sample, which that would be.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: No, I'm saying 

8 what's the worst case that could happen if 

9 everything was -- I don't know if that's what 

10 you want to do. I'm just trying to think 

11 about --

12 DR. MAURO: It would go like 

13 something -- you know, it would lose this 

14 piece, you know. That's what would happen, 

15 and if you're interested in this number here, 

16 right? I mean, you go --

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, I'm not 

18 sure. You have a different number.

19 DR. MAURO: Yes, the magnitude 

20 would change. If only the high -- if six 

21 percent of the numbers were gone and you had 
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1 only the highest numbers --

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: You have a 

3 different number.

4 DR. MAURO: -- you've got a 

5 different 95th percentile.

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, but you also 

7 have a larger number of samples. So that sort 

8 of dilutes it anyway.

9 DR. MAURO: You have a really 

10 large number, and it depends on the number of 

11 samples.

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: I don't think six 

13 percent is going to change it that much, but 

14 that's intuitive. That's intuitive. Someone 

15 would have to try that. I don't know. We're 

16 all kind of speculating here about what the 

17 effect would be, and I'm wondering if somebody 

18 needs to give some thought to is there a way 

19 to convince ourselves that without sampling 

20 100 percent of the universe, what's the nature 

21 of the missing stuff.
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1 DR. MAURO: I've got an idea. I 

2 mean, it's one of my comments. In other 

3 words, let's say you know we didn't transcribe 

4 these out of the I don't know how many 

5 thousands there were. Okay? Let's say there 

6 are thousands of numbers that were not 

7 transcribed. Okay?

8 Now you go in and you say, do you 

9 know what? I'm going to go grab a couple 

10 hundred of those, the ones that weren't 

11 transcribed, and see what their distribution 

12 is.

13 And for the ones that were not 

14 transcribed, if their distribution looks 

15 exactly like the distribution for the ones 

16 that were transcribed, aren't we done?

17 Do you see what I'm getting at?

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, but somebody 

19 is going to make the argument, yes, but you 

20 only did 100, 200 or a few hundred out of 

21 20,000, and statistically, somebody has got to 
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1 ask how do you do that sampling that you just 

2 described.

3 DR. MAURO: That's what Harry does 

4 for us. He tells us those things.

5 Harry, what I just said, is that a 

6 way of getting at this thing? In other words, 

7 go in there and pull the ones that weren't 

8 transcribed, some number -- I don't know how 

9 many -- where at the end you could say I'm 95 

10 percent confident this is an unbiased -- the 

11 things that were left out does not represent a 

12 bias leave-out.

13 MR. CHMELYNSKI: Well --

14 DR. MAURO: They look exactly like 

15 the ones that were transcribed.

16 MR. CHMELYNSKI: I think, again, 

17 it gets back to this issue that NIOSH has 

18 already looked at the ones we know are not 

19 transcribed, which is a fairly small amount of 

20 records really, and they don't seem to make a 

21 big difference if you put them in there or 
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1 not.

2 MR. ROLFES: Yes.

3 MR. CHMELYNSKI: But what we're 

4 dealing with are the ones that we haven't 

5 found yet that haven't been transcribed, and 

6 to find those is not easy. And so I'm not 

7 suggesting we do that.

8 DR. MAURO: Well, why would you 

9 want to do that? I mean --

10 MR. CHMELYNSKI: Well, to do what 

11 you want to do.

12 DR. MAURO: You know, I guess I 

13 thought that they -- my sense was that they 

14 entered into a process where they made it say, 

15 we're going to do this. I'm going to go 

16 through this process, step, step, step, step. 

17 And at the end we will have checked.

18 But you cut the process short. At 

19 a certain point in the process you decided I'm 

20 not going to do the full sampling that I 

21 originally designed. I'm going to pull back 
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1 and go to 20 samples as opposed to whatever 

2 the samples were.

3 And it seems that you pulled back 

4 when you shouldn't have. Now, if you go back 

5 and finish it, okay, the way you originally 

6 planned to do it, now you know what percent is 

7 missing. You followed your own rules. I know 

8 now that, yes, there is -- right now the 

9 indication is six percent. When you finish 

10 the process, you'll say going through the 

11 process, yes, the number is this percent for 

12 that batch, this percent for this batch, this 

13 percent for this batch. I think you broke 

14 them up in batches.

15 MR. CHMELYNSKI: John, one of the 

16 things I might throw in here is that in the 

17 batches we looked at that had reduced 

18 inspection, we actually did better than 

19 anywhere else. They've got a 99 percent score 

20 on those so far. It may turn out it's less 

21 than six percent are missing when you're done.
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1 DR. MAURO: Well, I mean, that's 

2 an important finding. I mean, that would 

3 be --

4 MR. MORRIS: That's why we reduced 

5 the number of samples. That's why the -- we 

6 didn't go in with the intention of taking only 

7 20 samples. We went in and intentionally 

8 following the process.

9 Now, I understand in retrospect we 

10 say, oh, maybe we should never have set up a 

11 reduced sampling rule once we started getting 

12 good matching of our expectations, and we'll 

13 take that criticism.

14 But the reality is those data sets 

15 that did match well are the ones we didn't 

16 sample heavily because they did match well.

17 MR. CHMELYNSKI: But as far as you 

18 went they did match. I have to admit that, 

19 yes.

20 DR. MAURO: So there may be good 

21 rationale to cut short, I mean.
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1 MS. BALDRIDGE: Can I comment 

2 again? It has been about three years ago I 

3 asked if they ever compared the data with the 

4 documents when there was no high exposure at 

5 specific locations. Was that comparison ever 

6 done?

7 MR. ROLFES: As far as --

8 MS. BALDRIDGE: You've got people 

9 working in certain plants. There are 

10 documents in the petition that state the MAC 

11 at this time was this level, was that level, 

12 excessive high, this far above. Were any of 

13 those people's urinalysis data compared to 

14 known exposure levels based on the plant's 

15 documents to see if those recorded levels were 

16 done at those times or even reflected the 

17 level of exposure that was on record?

18 MR. ROLFES: The short answer is, 

19 I guess, yes and no. And what Fernald did 

20 early on in the very beginning of operations, 

21 they had people from the Health and Safety 
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1 Laboratory come down and do assessments of air 

2 concentrations and the work environment, and 

3 that actually applies. Those reports, the 

4 daily weighted exposure reports, that were 

5 assembled from the years of 1952, I believe, 

6 through about 1965, and those reports actually 

7 did analyze the air concentrations at various 

8 operations both at breathing zone basically, a 

9 steelworker's breathing zone area next to his 

10 mouth or nose. The air concentrations were 

11 analyzed there and also in the general area of 

12 the work being performed.

13 They also considered the amount of 

14 time that the worker was exposed at these 

15 various concentrations.

16 MS. BALDRIDGE: Does the uranium 

17 urinalysis data reflect that exposure for 

18 those people known to be in those locations at 

19 that time? I mean, were they even tested 

20 then or was there sampling from another time 

21 when there was a lower level or one that was 
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1 not recorded?

2 MR. ROLFES: They were --

3 MR. MORRIS: Mark, can I 

4 interject?

5 MR. ROLFES: Yes, please.

6 MR. MORRIS: There were published 

7 papers at conferences where that topic was 

8 presented, and if I recall correctly, there 

9 was only a modest correlation between air 

10 sampling, air concentration in the facility 

11 and worker exposures by urinalysis, but the 

12 contemporary scientists studied the question 

13 and presented reports, at least one major 

14 report and maybe two that I'm remembering.

15 I'll try to find the references 

16 for you.

17 MS. BALDRIDGE: If there isn't a 

18 direct correlation, then it makes any of the 

19 data that you do have questionable as far as 

20 whether it really reflects exposures that 

21 people actually had or whether they only 
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1 reflect exposures that people have at the time 

2 that they were tested.

3 MR. ROLFES: Well, the thing about 

4 uranium urinalyses, if an individual is 

5 monitored, any previous exposures to uranium 

6 would actually be integrated in the results of 

7 the urinalysis that was collected. So when 

8 you have a urine sample, for example, that was 

9 collected, say, a year after routinely working 

10 for previous years, if you -- I'll draw a 

11 little diagram here.

12 MS. BALDRIDGE: That was a 

13 cumulative.

14 MR. ROLFES: Yes. Physically you 

15 had exposures that occurred back here, you

16 know, from time zero to time 1,000, we'll say, 

17 say, 1,000 days of chronic exposure. To take 

18 a sample, you know, following those 1,000 days 

19 of exposure out here sometime, if you're 

20 exposed at this level, you could have a 

21 urinalysis sample that can actually be used to 
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1 reconstruct the historical exposure, you know, 

2 several days, several years, several weeks, 

3 several years back.

4 So typically if there was a high 

5 result here, that would have prompted another 

6 urinalysis to be collected. So when you have 

7 an additional sample, when you have an 

8 additional sample, it allows you to basically 

9 develop a more accurate excretion rate and get 

10 a better picture of what happened here.

11 DR. GLOVER: I think from the 

12 beginning they recognized that it's -- that's 

13 why we always use the most favorable 

14 solubility classes. They did air sampling. 

15 It has all of the size. Some of these things 

16 aren't inhalable, process materials. So 

17 directly relating non-size restricted uranium 

18 samples to bioassay results is fraught with 

19 peril, a much larger, much larger number than 

20 what you would have got if you actually --

21 what did the guy get in his body?
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1 DR. MAURO: Well, you're going to 

2 have that on air samples, you know.

3 MR. ROLFES: Those are reflective 

4 of uptake into the body rather than air 

5 concentrations in the plant because the other 

6 things, in comparing something like that, you 

7 would have to look at the amount of time that 

8 the individual was exposed at that air 

9 concentration; also whether he was wearing 

10 respiratory equipment. You'd have to take a 

11 look at particle size distributions because 

12 some of the samples had non-respirable 

13 particles. So those would not be inhaled or 

14 uptake. They wouldn't have gotten into the 

15 lungs and into the blood stream essentially.

16 So really that's why we rely on 

17 the bioassay samples, the uranium urinalyses, 

18 because they're most reflective of the actual 

19 worker exposures.

20 DR. GLOVER: John, I wanted to 

21 mention one thing. So from the beginning of 
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1 the report, the team did evaluate the missing 

2 data that they saw and whether it was within 

3 the scope. So they say if we had 70 missing 

4 values, they said they had this reduced rate, 

5 and the original, I always go back to what was 

6 the purpose, and we say it was verification of 

7 the completeness and accuracy of the data. 

8 We didn't necessarily say it was 

9 for HIS-20 applications or what our specific 

10 thing was. Is it the Board's feeling that we 

11 may need to, for the purposes of HIS-20, 

12 discuss what we did, and if we need to extend 

13 that, is that what you're really trying to 

14 say?

15 Or do we need to put it in the 

16 context of the HIS-20 and then also our dose 

17 reconstruction?

18 We may not have made it clear what 

19 our test protocol was. Is there some 

20 clarification that you're asking for?

21 We had an original purpose.
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1 DR. MAURO: Let me give you my 

2 comments and way of looking at it. You go 

3 through a process to convince yourself you've 

4 got a transcribed database that you can depend 

5 on. You come out of the back end of that 

6 process saying right now it looks like overall 

7 you might have missed six percent of the 

8 numbers.

9 Now, I think you said it's based 

10 on a process where in the middle of the 

11 process you sort of backed off a little bit on 

12 the sampling, perhaps for good reason. The 

13 way I look at it is it would be nice if you 

14 didn't do that, you stuck to your process and 

15 you finished your sampling because instead of 

16 six, you may come out with three or you may 

17 come out with nine.

18 In other words, we don't know if 

19 you did it according to your rules where you 

20 come out. What I just heard, if you actually 

21 went through and inspect the time and money, 
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1 what I just heard is you may actually come out 

2 at a lower number as opposed to a higher 

3 number because your judgment to hold back was 

4 a good one, but it's not self-evident.

5 So I said to myself, all right, if 

6 I want to convince myself, I go through this 

7 process. I finish up, and I find out what the 

8 real number is. Let's say the real number is 

9 six percent. Okay. Six percent.

10 Then I go in and say is that a 

11 problem. I say, all right, let me go see if 

12 it's a problem. Let me go pick one of these 

13 time periods and where it says I've got 1,000, 

14 I go fix the 1,000 and I go find the ones I 

15 had missed. All right? In the HIS-20 

16 database, and now I've got the 1,060. Now 

17 I've got my complete set, you know, if I 

18 didn't forget. Originally I didn't forget to 

19 do that, to transcribe.

20 Now I say, okay, so I've got 60 

21 estimates of Becquerels per liter that are not 
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1 in here, and I say I'm going to put them in 

2 here. In other words, in other words, here we 

3 have, I guess -- in other words, where do they 

4 fall? Those concentrations, those 60 are sort 

5 of one over here, one over here, one over 

6 here, one over here. And I make a plot of the 

7 60.

8 I say, well, we put the 60 in 

9 here, and it looks like this. I don't know. 

10 It looks just like this, only the numbers are 

11 lower, you know. It's exactly the same thing. 

12 It just looks the same.

13 It means that the 60 that I'm 

14 missing are just like the rest of them, but if 

15 all of a sudden I say, holy mackerel, all 60 

16 are over here, you know? Okay. I mean, it 

17 shows you that there was some kind of built-in 

18 bias, that the ones that were being 

19 transcribed were deliberately not transcribed 

20 because they were hot. If I see that, I get 

21 really upset because then it's not random 
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1 anymore. Something strange is going on here.

2 Why in the heck would the 60 that 

3 happened to be missing all be in the upper in 

4 of the tail? I don't think you would find 

5 that.

6 MR. ROLFES: We didn't.

7 (Laughter.)

8 MR. ROLFES: This is exactly 

9 what --

10 DR. MAURO: Well, they were done. 

11 This problem is solved.

12 This is me talking, all right? 

13 Not SC&A but me. As far as I'm concerned, I'm 

14 a biologist. I look at something like that 

15 and it tells me we have nothing more to talk 

16 about. You did that.

17 DR. MAKHIJANI: Actually we should 

18 rely on it.

19 DR. MAURO: I look at this, and 

20 you tell me if that's what you get. It's 

21 done.
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1 MR. ROLFES: That's exactly what 

2 we have, John.

3 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Where is that 

4 information?

5 MR. ROLFES: In our analysis of 

6 the HIS-20 database. We actually had 

7 considered the missing results and looked at 

8 the impact in the distribution essentially.

9 Gene, Gene?

10 MR. POTTER: I'm sorry, Mike. I 

11 was taking myself off mute there.

12 MR. ROLFES: No problem. I guess

13 if you could maybe elaborate a little bit on 

14 what I've been referring to or what we've been 

15 discussing.

16 MR. POTTER: Yes.

17 MR. ROLFES: Could you pull up the 

18 specific portion of our analysis of the HIS-20 

19 data that were missing?

20 We looked back to see what bias 

21 might be, you know, to look to see if any of 
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1 the missing data from HIS-20 had any bias to 

2 it, and what we have found, I pulled up --

3 I've got a statement, but I know we did some 

4 additional work on this.

5 We had looked at this, and we 

6 found that the missing data didn't have any 

7 significant changes to the coworker study for 

8 Fernald if we would include the missing data 

9 from HIS-20. So the bottom line was that the 

10 missing data that were not in HIS-20 didn't 

11 impact the coworker intake.

12 MR. POTTER: Yes, that was the 

13 batches that did not meet -- let me just 

14 briefly summarize -- the batches that did not 

15 meet our preselected AQL, we looked at what 

16 the effect of the missing data versus the 

17 original data that was in there.

18 Now, SC&A criticized this because 

19 they said something to the effect that we 

20 didn't consider the total effect of all of the 

21 missing data. We just did it batch by batch 
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1 essentially and showing there was no 

2 difference that way. Certainly that is an 

3 opinion, but from the limited work we did, it 

4 did not seem to have any effect or any major 

5 effect, I should say, whether the missing data 

6 was included or not included in the rather 

7 small batch-wise thing that we did.

8 MR. ROLFES: Thank you, Gene.

9 DR. MAURO: The way in which you 

10 convince yourself everything is okay, you put 

11 the 60 back there, okay, and then you make the 

12 plot. The 60, you really can't see anything. 

13 In other words, we're putting a small amount 

14 back in. All right? And it almost 

15 disappears. It's diluted.

16 MR. KATZ: John, do you want to 

17 just speak up.

18 DR. MAURO: The 60, if you do what 

19 I understand you did, is let me put this and 

20 see if my distribution changes. I say to 

21 myself, okay, that's a good thing to do, and 
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1 you find out my 95th percentile doesn't move 

2 even though I put the 60 in.

3 But you know, I guess there's one 

4 more thing I would do. I would say because 

5 the 60 is going to be hidden, it's sort of 

6 like diluted in this 1,000, but if I went in 

7 and I pulled the 60 and I said let me see 

8 where the 60 are, you know, because if it 

9 turns out they tend to be over here, you still 

10 may not see them because they are diluted in 

11 the 1,000. You know, like we were talking 

12 about before, it's hard to see. I don't know 

13 how this blind is going to change, and that 

14 may not be important, but I --

15 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, if you still 

16 can't see them, John, even if they're 

17 clumped --

18 DR. MAURO: If they're all -- if 

19 every one of those 60 fall above the 95th 

20 percentile, wouldn't that make you very 

21 nervous?
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1 MEMBER ZIEMER: Not if you still 

2 can't see them in the total distribution it 

3 wouldn't. In fact, that's the question I was 

4 asking.

5 MR. ROLFES: Right. The same 

6 number, for example, 50, 60 results.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: You can simulate 

8 the answer to that, but I guess the only final 

9 thing I would kind of ask is there is no 

10 reason to think that the sampling to that 

11 point -- obviously you've done a small 

12 fraction of the total. You can make the 

13 argument that it still is a random sample of 

14 the distribution, and then the only question 

15 that comes to a statistician -- and this would 

16 be Harry's -- is there any reason to think 

17 that that sampling so far would itself be 

18 biased in some very unusual way?

19 I mean, if your sampling is such 

20 that you were only getting certain kinds of 

21 results from the rest of the distribution, 
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1 then you might make that argument, but it's 

2 hard for me to see that the missing ones, 

3 unless what you describe, John, whether there 

4 was some intentionality on the missing ones 

5 where someone said we're going to 

6 intentionally not record high ones, but if 

7 that were the case, then it should be showing 

8 up even here.

9 MR. ROLFES: Right, right.

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: If there was a 

11 biased intention on ones you leave out, then 

12 that should show up in the sampling.

13 MR. CHMELYNSKI: Yes, and I think 

14 the NIOSH report, original study, did address 

15 this issue, and I think maybe I should read 

16 some of their conclusions here.

17 On one of their files that had 

18 missing data they conclude that there were 36 

19 missing results. Eleven were above the 50th 

20 percentile; four were equal to the 50th 

21 percentile; and 21 were below the 50th 
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1 percentile.

2 Now, that's one file out of five 

3 that had missing data.

4 Another one, the statement is made 

5 that these files had eight missing results in 

6 the two files combined. I'm sorry. Eight 

7 missing results were spread around the 50th 

8 percentile, although one was above the 84th 

9 percentile.

10 So I don't know the actual numbers 

11 that we're missing, but there are these types 

12 of statements made in the report about the 

13 missing data, which imply that they don't seem 

14 to have a bias.

15 DR. GLOVER: Mark, I have one 

16 question. In the extensive sampling reports, 

17 at Hanford we actually would state these are 

18 statistics. Here is the number of high 

19 samples. Here's the number of low samples. 

20 This was the worst case sample during 

21 different periods.
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1 I'm pretty sure that they would 

2 have done something similar at Fernald. We're 

3 not actually sampling an unknown population. 

4 We probably have some statistics that are 

5 probably subscribed in some monthly reports. 

6 Is that the case?

7 MR. ROLFES: The nighest exposures 

8 at Fernald were routinely followed, and people 

9 with the highest exposures, if a urine sample 

10 was collected at above 40 micrograms per 

11 liter, a subsequent sample was collected and 

12 they wanted to track that employee's internal 

13 exposure or uranium burden to ensure that it 

14 came back down to a safer level.

15 So those types of things were 

16 routinely followed. Now, in addition to the 

17 urine sampling program, those individuals with 

18 highest internal exposures at Fernald were 

19 counted in the whole body counter. So it 

20 opens up another data source that could be 

21 used once again to fill in any perceived 
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1 missing data gaps.

2 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Now, we're 

3 using uranium bioassay to completely 

4 reconstruct everybody's dose. We're not using 

5 air sampling data; is that correct? So we're 

6 only using uranium, and everybody at Fernald 

7 got a urine sample?

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: I don't think 

9 everybody, no.

10 MR. ROLFES: Not everybody. Not 

11 everyone was sampled. Approximately 93 

12 percent of the population was sampled, and for 

13 the people that weren't sampled, we have the 

14 coworker intake model.

15 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay. So for 

16 the people that didn't have urine, because --

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: You're going to 

18 assign it.

19 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: You're going to 

20 assign it to them because that was one of the 

21 things that came into this, was people that 
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1 weren't supposed to be getting uranium and all 

2 of a sudden they did a spot sample and they 

3 did have it. And I was just wondering because 

4 really we don't know what they were into or 

5 anything else.

6 The one that comes up is the 

7 people who were issuing the clothing and so 

8 forth like that. They weren't monitored for 

9 numerous years, and then they came up showing 

10 positive, and now we're going to go back. 

11 We're going to go back and do what for them 

12 because we have no idea. They could have been 

13 fairly high.

14 MR. ROLFES: True, true, that is 

15 possible.

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: You can still do a 

17 maximum.

18 MR. ROLFES: Right.

19 MEMBER ZIEMER: If you weren't to 

20 do the whole worker, you can assign. You can 

21 say what's the biggest dose they had to have 
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1 way back there at Fernald.

2 MR. ROLFES: Exactly. In fact, in 

3 that sort of scenario, you know, if there were 

4 a couple of years of unmonitored exposure 

5 perhaps, subsequent urine samples ---

6 DR. MAURO: And that's exactly the 

7 reason we had a problem with Issue No. 1. 

8 They were automatically going to assign the 

9 median to everybody without thinking about, 

10 well, wait a minute. Is that being claimant11 favorable for every one?

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: For everyone.

13 DR. MAURO: Right. Now I'm 

14 hearing that, no, you're going to think about 

15 this and say, well, for this guy it seems to 

16 me maybe we'd better assign the 84th 

17 percentile.

18 So we really bounced back. So, 

19 yes, we know that between '52 and '57, only 

20 about four or five percent, a small percent, 

21 not four; I forget the -- less than 50 percent 
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1 were monitored. After '57, not over 90 

2 percent were monitored. 

3 So there are a bunch of people in 

4 the early years and in the later years they 

5 weren't monitored, and we also know that some 

6 of those people worked at time periods and in 

7 buildings and job categories that we know from 

8 looking at the data put them up at the high 

9 end.

10 So if you happened to do -- now, 

11 it's rare. It's rare, but we found them, and 

12 on that basis -- and that's the only reason we 

13 brought up Issue No. 1 -- on that basis all 

14 we're saying is be careful when you use your 

15 coworker model. So I think that problem is 

16 solved, and they're ready to do that.

17 Where we are now is that can we 

18 depend on those distributions that you have 

19 for every quarter for every building by year, 

20 an incredible amount of data. And I've got to 

21 tell you what I just heard, if you guys put to 
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1 the test every segment the way you just said 

2 you did, we took the 60 and we took a look 

3 where they were. I just heard from -- and I 

4 should have known this -- but I just heard 

5 from Harry when he looked at the ones that 

6 were missing, you know, half of them were 

7 below 50 and half of them had one over here, 

8 one over there.

9 You know, it's almost like I don't 

10 need a sophisticated statistical analysis. It 

11 just screams at you obviously that they 

12 weren't all from the high end. You know, if 

13 Harry came back and said that the 30 that were 

14 missing were all in the upper 95th percentile, 

15 I would say shut the shop down. There's 

16 something went on that people should be in 

17 jail, you know. That's what I would say. 

18 You're going to lock somebody up, you know. 

19 Really. You know, you can't just be missing 

20 -- you have the 60 that are missing. They're 

21 all the high guys? I'm sorry. I just get 
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1 excited.

2 But when I hear what Harry said, 

3 everything is okay.

4 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay. My 

5 concern is we're using this bioassay data. 

6 That is the whole thing that we're using to be 

7 able to do the coworker data with, right?

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: As opposed to?

9 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Well, see, 

10 early on if you remember right, they had all 

11 of this air sampling data and stuff like that, 

12 and that kind of came to be flawed a little 

13 bit and so forth like that. So you know, the 

14 more information that we have out there, the 

15 more checks and balances we have.

16 We have one check which is a HIS 

17 database. Now, the one question that I have 

18 is that NIOSH says that they have checked

19 these other ones that weren't found, and I 

20 think 30 percent were below 50 or whatever 

21 else, like that.
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1 MR. ROLFES: Right. It's basically 

2 what John has drawn up here. Red is that they 

3 followed the same distribution.

4 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Right.

5 MR. ROLFES: Some were higher, 

6 some were lower, and some were right on the 

7 mark. So they didn't significantly impact the 

8 distribution that we did use.

9 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Well, this is 

10 just a simple question. If you guys checked 

11 all that, then why didn't it get put into the 

12 report? Why isn't it in the HIS database if 

13 you guys checked all of this?

14 MR. ROLFES: I don't know. I 

15 really don't know. 

16 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Because it 

17 seems to me it would have stopped a lot of 

18 this back-and-forth if it was put in the 

19 database.

20 MR. ROLFES: Sure, sure. There 

21 could be reasons behind it. It could have 
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1 been, for example, an employee that wasn't 

2 employed by Fernald or something. It could 

3 have been a contaminated sample. It could 

4 have been a lost sample. It could have been, 

5 you know, if you take a 24-hour urine sample, 

6 sometimes they'll collect, you know, multiple 

7 samples on a day, and then it could be that 

8 they just piled them all into one 24-hour 

9 sample.

10 Those are some of the reasons. 

11 I'm just speculating about what they might be, 

12 but it could have been a repeat error. It 

13 could have been, you know, somebody 

14 accidentally typed it in twice.

15 MR. KATZ: I think Brad was asking 

16 -- you're thinking about that they've actually 

17 done this checking. Why not put it in the 

18 HIS?

19 And I think the answer to that 

20 question, Brad, is they've only done a 

21 sampling. So if you were to actually go 
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1 through all of the records and fill in the 

2 gaps in HIS, that would be a phenomenally 

3 large work load for OCAS to do.

4 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Yes, because 

5 what I was hearing was, yes, we checked all of 

6 these and they're all right because they sit 

7 right between here.

8 But what you're saying is that 

9 they have just sampled portions of these, and 

10 they've come to find that we're right in the 

11 50-50 error that you were showing on these 

12 things.

13 MR. ROLFES: Yes, right.

14 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay. Well, 

15 that's --

16 MR. ROLFES: In the amount that we 

17 sampled we didn't find any bias that they were 

18 either like the high results weren't entered 

19 into HIS database and also no indication that 

20 the low results weren't entered into HIS-20. 

21 So we found that the stuff that didn't make it 
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1 into HIS-20 was right in line with the 

2 information that is HIS-20.

3 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: So what we were 

4 trying to prove, that there was no bias in 

5 what they did. Okay.

6 MR. ROLFES: And that's what we 

7 found.

8 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Well, now I've 

9 got the rousing question: what are we doing 

10 with Issue No. 2?

11 Because I started out with an 

12 awful lot of notes, and I finally gave up 

13 because it seemed like you kind of made a lot 

14 of changes on this. Because I'm going to be 

15 quite honest here, the thing that bothers me 

16 is at many sites I know that we end up doing 

17 this, but we have one set here. We're using 

18 this data, and we need to make sure this is 

19 solid. You know, as John puts it, this is the 

20 rock that we're standing on and it is being 

21 put out there because, as we've found at other 
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1 sites, kind of built these models, and as 

2 we've just seen a little while ago, they fell 

3 down, and I want to make sure that this 

4 database is correct, that it's going to cover 

5 the people correctly.

6 I'm still questioning what are we 

7 doing with Issue No. 2, John.

8 DR. MAURO: I'll give you my 

9 recommendation. It would be to finish the 

10 test the way it was originally intended, find 

11 out what the real percentage is, whether it's 

12 three, six or nine, because right now we'd get 

13 a six but it may turn out to be better than 

14 that. That's good news, right? That means 

15 the database is -- when you finish it.

16 And when you're done with that, 

17 you tell that story in a way that everybody 

18 can understand. The ones that were missing, 

19 we went back and tested it, and we did it and 

20 just sort it. I would say not do it in the 

21 aggregate, but break it down the way you broke 
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1 it down, mainly perhaps by building, maybe 

2 particular years, enough of a grab from each 

3 segment, year, building, that you could show 

4 that the ones that were missing from the 

5 sample fall -- some fall over here, some fall 

6 over there, and show the story that, no, they 

7 don't all fall in the high end.

8 And then if you could supplement 

9 your report with that, this story is over and 

10 you've got the rock. And that's what I would 

11 recommend.

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: What does that 

13 entail? Can you spell out?

14 DR. MAURO: That's not going to 

15 work?

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, spell out 

17 for us. I mean, a lot of times you enter into 

18 a sampling program to avoid doing what you 

19 just described. I mean at the front end you 

20 don't know what you're going to -- I'm going 

21 to start drawing balls out of the bag. I 
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1 don't know what's going to be there. But at 

2 some point when I give enough of a picture I 

3 can say it's time to stop.

4 And I'm not -- I don't know, Fred, 

5 that point or not. You know, here's the 

6 original project. Are we here? Are we here? 

7 So I'd like to hear a little bit about what's 

8 entailed and at what point are we confident 

9 that it's ready to stop?

10 DR. MAURO: Let me modify. I have 

11 another alternative strategy. See, basically 

12 I said why don't you finish, do it the way you 

13 did now. If you can make a case that you cut 

14 back at this point in the process and why, 

15 because you're starting to see that --

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: It was just the 

17 same thing over and over.

18 DR. MAURO: And you could set your 

19 rationale. Then you don't have to. I mean, 

20 I'm just trying to find a way you can -- we've 

21 got to get on the record the logic behind the 
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1 process so that when you come to the end of 

2 the process and come to your conclusions, it's 

3 clean.

4 So I guess I would say that really 

5 there are two alternative strategies in my 

6 mind: one, complete the thing or, two, if you 

7 don't think it's necessary to complete the 

8 thing, make a real hard case why it's okay 

9 that you pulled back when you pulled back.

10 MR. ROLFES: And I thought that 

11 our paper had already done this by, you know, 

12 because of our reduced sampling we reduced our 

13 sampling because of the good integrity of the 

14 data. The data was all valid there. The 

15 numbers were good. We found nearly 100 

16 percent in our sample.

17 DR. MAURO: Well, the reason we 

18 thought it wasn't is you were shooting for one 

19 percent and you saw six percent, and that was 

20 a little disturbing to you.

21 MR. ROLFES: Right.
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1 DR. MAURO: And to pull back, 

2 that's incongruous.

3 MR. ROLFES: But the six percent 

4 wasn't necessarily a number that would go into 

5 this intake model. Those are separate errors.

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: It wasn't a 

7 transcription error.

8 MR. ROLFES: It could have been 

9 spelling. It could have been a spelling 

10 error. It could have been a Social Security 

11 number error. It wasn't the urine sample 

12 result value that was erred. Those were all 

13 good. Those were 100 percent accurate and 

14 transcribed.

15 DR. MAURO: Harry.

16 DR. GLOVER: Hey, John. May I say 

17 one thing? One of the things I did want to, 

18 the bioassay, there's a series of multi19 reports, and it says for October 1968 there 

20 were 288 urinalysis samples taken for uranium. 

21 It's not an unknown number, and so we have 
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1 some ability to bound the annual year, how 

2 many should be there so that we can estimate 

3 statistics of, you know, what's missing 

4 percentage-wise. So these aren't just -- I 

5 mean, we went in unknown. We actually tested 

6 it, Mark, blindly. Right? We took the hard 

7 copy sheets, but there are statistics that are 

8 generated that we could test this against.

9 DR. MAKHIJANI: But that hasn't 

10 been done as yet.

11 DR. GLOVER: I'm not privileged.

12 MR. ROLFES: There's no reason to 

13 do it when the numbers aren't bad. One 

14 hundred percent of the numbers are reported 

15 and transcribed faithfully, there's no reason 

16 to go back and look at something that isn't 

17 important to a dose reconstruction. 

18 If an individual's name is 

19 misspelled, that's not an issue for generating 

20 a number. I mean --

21 DR. MAKHIJANI: I didn't think we 
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1 were arguing about the transcription because I 

2 think we're all agreed that the transcription 

3 is fine. What we're arguing about, the 

4 numbers that are not there.

5 MR. ROLFES: Correct.

6 DR. MAKHIJANI: Now, I don't 

7 remember because it has been a while since I 

8 looked at the Fernald data whether the HIS-20 

9 database at Fernald was compiled the same way 

10 as at other sites; that whoever was employed 

11 in the mid-'70s -- still, you know, they may 

12 have got started in the '50s -- was included 

13 in the database, but those people who had 

14 stopped their employment in the earlier time, 

15 you know, were no longer employed by the time 

16 the electronic transcription started were not 

17 in the HIS data.

18 MR. ROLFES: Okay. I've got you.

19 DR. MAKHIJANI: Is that true of 

20 Fernald? I don't remember.

21 MR. ROLFES: Well, it could be. I 
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1 don't know. However, if you take a look at 

2 the coworker intakes that are generated from 

3 the data that we do have in HIS-20, the actual 

4 intakes for the earlier years are a couple of 

5 orders of magnitude higher than the later 

6 years. So that, you know, I mean, if there 

7 are, in fact, less data, the workers' internal 

8 dose would actually be increased in the 

9 earlier years.

10 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, I don't 

11 think that's an automatic conclusion. If you 

12 had --

13 MR. ROLFES: Well, however --

14 okay. Go ahead.

15 DR. MAKHIJANI: I'm not saying 

16 that you're wrong. I'm just saying if there 

17 was somebody who was 35 or 40 years old who 

18 started in the '50s and left in the end of the 

19 '60s, they would have experienced intakes that 

20 were universally admitted that they were at 

21 the high end. Intake in the '50s was very 
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1 high compared to -- and to some extent '60s --

2 compared to the '70s.

3 So if there's a bias in the people 

4 who are not in the HIS-20 database -- and I 

5 don't know if this is true because I don't 

6 remember how the Fernald HIS-20 database was 

7 compiled -- I think that was true of the 

8 Savannah River HPAREH database. That's why we 

9 had to go back to the other one to check.

10 I don't know what the effect of 

11 that would be and whether you've taken that 

12 into account or not, and whether there's some 

13 kind of system to the data that are missing 

14 and whether they're missing from the higher 

15 period of exposure.

16 MR. ROLFES: And we did look at 

17 the data that weren't entered into HIS-20 and 

18 found that there was no bias in the results.

19 DR. MAURO: In the early years.

20 MR. ROLFES: For all years that we 

21 sampled.
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1 DR. MAURO: Well, because the '52 

2 to '57, the percentage of people that had 

3 bioassay sample was relatively low.

4 MR. ROLFES: We took samples from 

5 each decade: '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s I think is 

6 what we have done.

7 DR. MAURO: So you picked up the 

8 '60s.

9 MR. ROLFES: Yes.

10 DR. MAURO: Okay. I'm sorry.

11 DR. MAKHIJANI: For a total of 60 

12 in all?

13 MR. ROLFES: For a total of 60.

14 DR. MAKHIJANI: You examined 60? 

15 I'm confused.

16 MR. ROLFES: I'm not sure what 

17 you're asking.

18 DR. MAKHIJANI: The 60 numbers 

19 that you examined that were missing --

20 MR. ROLFES: That's the number --

21 (Simultaneous speakers.)
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1 MR. ROLFES: So we did sample each 

2 decade, data from each decade, from the '50s, 

3 the '60s, '70s, '80s, and found no indication 

4 that any of the data that was not in HIS-20 

5 had a bias to it. We found that --

6 DR. MAKHIJANI: For those years. 

7 Okay.

8 MR. ROLFES: Correct. We have no 

9 reason to believe that the other missing data 

10 would have any significant impact on the 

11 coworker intakes.

12 DR. MAKHIJANI: Right. Okay.

13 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: That brings me 

14 back to the break time question.

15 MR. ROLFES: No break until we get 

16 this thing down. What are we doing with No. 

17 2?

18 MEMBER GRIFFON: This is Mark 

19 Griffon.

20 I just want to say I just got on, 

21 like, two minutes ago.
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1 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay.

2 MR. KATZ: Mark, thank you.

3 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Part of my 

4 subscription -- I mean, I understand there 

5 were some transcription errors, but there's 

6 100 percent of the data or so forth like that. 

7 What are we looking for on this, John? 

8 Because what happened was, we were 

9 sampling to a certain point and all of a 

10 sudden changed our sampling plan and continued 

11 to sample on. Is that --

12 MR. POTTER: This is Gene Potter.

13 Let me interject that I think it's 

14 a mischaracterization that we changed the 

15 plan. The reduced sampling scheme is a part 

16 of the mil spec. SC&A is arguing that you 

17 can't treat these batches like they're widgets 

18 coming down a production line, which may be a 

19 valid point.

20 But what I did was look at the 

21 history of similar files from a similar era, 
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1 and that caused me to assume that the reduced 

2 sampling protocol was appropriate. An 

3 arguable point.

4 MR. KATZ: Can you explain that a 

5 little more because I think you didn't say 

6 enough for people that sink their teeth into 

7 that, what you mean by the history.

8 MR. POTTER: Okay. Our sampling 

9 has been characterized as somehow flawed 

10 because we went to a reduced sampling plan. 

11 In other words, you pick an AQL of one 

12 percent. You look at your batch size and that 

13 tells you how big your sample size should be. 

14 You just pick these numbers off a table, and 

15 there's different levels of inspection, too.

16 And I'm saying that rather than 

17 not following our own plan, I think that's a 

18 mischaracterization. How I would characterize 

19 it is I looked at these batches of samples 

20 from a similar era of a similar data type and 

21 said, okay, the quality looks good on these. 
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1 I'm going to a reduced sampling for these 

2 batches, and unless they start failing, we're 

3 going to stay with that. If they start 

4 failing, then we'll go back to a normal 

5 sampling number, and it basically just changes 

6 the number of samples you're pulling from a 

7 batch.

8 MR. KATZ: But just the thing I 

9 was asking is when you say the quality looked 

10 good, can you explain that?

11 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Yes, because 

12 I'm having a hard time understanding this six 

13 percent. You guys were shooting for a one 

14 percent error, and we were showing --

15 MR. POTTER: No, I think that is a 

16 bit mischaracterized, too. You pick an AQL 

17 basically out of thin air. This is something 

18 you pick beforehand, and the fact that it 

19 doesn't turn out to be the case is not a 

20 defect in your plan as it is being 

21 characterized here. It merely sets the sample 
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1 size you're going to draw from your batch.

2 And the fact that we picked an AQL 

3 of one percent and this has been characterized 

4 as some kind of a failure, what we saw was 20 

5 out of 25 batches did, in fact, meet that AQL.

6 Now, some didn't, and we did some 

7 other things, such as looking at whether the 

8 missing results were biased and so forth that 

9 we've already discussed for those batches that 

10 failed, and that's all detailed in our draft 

11 report.

12 Obviously SC&A has a difference of 

13 opinion as to whether these batches can be 

14 treated in this way. However, you know, I 

15 don't think it should be characterized that we 

16 didn't follow our own plan.

17 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Let me ask you 

18 this. You said that they were all being good. 

19 So that's telling me that you had a quality 

20 level that you were striving to obtain. What 

21 was that quality level?
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1 MR. POTTER: One percent errors.

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: One percent 

3 transcription error.

4 MR. POTTER: Now, that's a 

5 preselected thing. You can't do statistics by 

6 changing your plan after you've, you know, 

7 started.

8 MR. ROLFES: Right.

9 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Well, I 

10 understand, and that's kind of what was 

11 throwing me off a little bit here because --

12 DR. MAURO: Me, too.

13 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: -- the one 

14 percent and then we were ending up with six 

15 percent. That's telling me that it wasn't 

16 making it to that.

17 I guess that's kind of my 

18 understanding, is what John is requesting. If 

19 you guys saw that everything was fine to --

20 MR. POTTER: What the one percent 

21 did was set our sample size, and we went and 
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1 we found what we found. Now, SC&A, in their 

2 paper, their finding number ten says there may 

3 be as many as 28,000 uranium urine results 

4 missing from the HIS-20 database. Actually 

5 they calculated that number in three different 

6 ways so that there's a range of 8,000 to 

7 28,000. So it's two to six percent depending 

8 on how you want to calculate it. The 28 

9 percent is calculated very conservatively, 

10 which still amounts to 93 and a half percent 

11 of the data being in HIS-20.

12 So I think the question is, John 

13 Mauro has put forth his position that this 

14 study ought to be corrected. It's an end in 

15 itself, and we don't have enough confidence to 

16 make a decision here. That's certainly one 

17 possibility. 

18 We can do that. It kicks the 

19 decision farther down the road. That's the 

20 negative effect.

21 DR. MAURO: But I guess I'm still 
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1 a little bit disoriented for the same reason 

2 that we just heard from Brad. That is, you 

3 pick a number, one percent. Good. So you 

4 need a point of departure, but the one percent 

5 does have a role to play because it helps you 

6 steer the ship, and as you're moving through 

7 the process you start to notice that, batch 

8 number one that you're -- I think you grabbed 

9 them in batches, and you took a look. This 

10 one looks like it's coming in at six percent. 

11 Oh, all right.

12 Batch number two, this one is 

13 coming in at four percent. Oh, but then 

14 somewhere along the line, whatever the number 

15 of samples, percent or whatever they are that 

16 you are pulling for sampling, you decided we 

17 could cut back.

18 Now, something happened that told 

19 you that you could cut back. I thought the 

20 reason you could cut back is because we were 

21 meeting our one percent, but you say, no, 
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1 that's not the reason you cut back. You cut 

2 back for some other reason.

3 MR. POTTER: No, that's true. 

4 Those samples that were -- those batches that 

5 were subject to a reduced sampling protocol 

6 were meeting the criteria and they were the 

7 same era and same type of record.

8 MR. CHMELYNSKI: I guess I have to 

9 interject here that there were only 23 files. 

10 Six of them had reduced inspection, which 

11 leaves 17 files. Out of those 17, a very 

12 large percentage did make one percent.

13 So where is the history that we're 

14 talking about?

15 MR. POTTER: I'm going from 

16 memory. We would have to go into the 

17 spreadsheets to see that type of deal.

18 MR. CHMELYNSKI: Yes. I don't 

19 have the chronological ordering of which files 

20 were done when. So I have to admit that I'm 

21 lacking some information here, but when I see 
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1 that out of the 17 files that were not given 

2 reduced inspection, that three of them where 

3 they gave 100 percent inspection to because 

4 they were that bad that they needed 100 

5 percent inspection, and out of the other 14, 

6 your success rate averaged 98 percent, which 

7 wasn't the one percent goal. It was close, 

8 but didn't make it. 

9 So I still don't see any reason 

10 where there's a history that establishes a 

11 pattern that's good enough to reduce 

12 inspection.

13 MR. POTTER: We would have to look 

14 at the detail on the spreadsheets to answer 

15 that, and I don't think we want to probably 

16 digress to that at this point.

17 DR. MAURO: Well, I go back to my 

18 original recommendation, and what I'm hearing 

19 doesn't change my -- I say you have one of two 

20 paths. One is to make a case why the reduced 

21 inspection is okay, and therefore you don't 
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1 have to go back and do some more, and the 

2 other is, no, you've got to go back. It 

3 appears that the rationale for the reduced 

4 inspection may be a little soft and go back 

5 and finish the inspection the way you started. 

6 This is your call and which way you want to 

7 go, notwithstanding whichever way you go down, 

8 whichever path you go down you come to a place 

9 at the end that says, okay, each patch here's 

10 the percent that's missing. It may turn out -

11 - wherever it comes out it comes out.

12 Then you have to say, okay, you do 

13 the thing that's on the blackboard that you 

14 can't see, which says, well, the ones that are 

15 missing, we went back and took a look at them, 

16 and you get a sense where did they fall within 

17 the distribution. And that may have already 

18 been done, but now you will do it.

19 Now, if it turns out that you can 

20 make a case that you don't have to do anymore, 

21 that you have good rationale for cutting back, 
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1 and you are finished, and you do know the 

2 percent missing in each group, and you have 

3 already put that test that the ones that were 

4 missing do, in fact represent a random number 

5 within each batch, you're done, finished. 

6 Whether you have to document that, whether 

7 it's already in there, you know.

8 But I think the one thing that --

9 or if you feel that, no, we do have to go back 

10 because we're soft in the rationale for 

11 cutting back. You finish it up. You come out 

12 of the back end of that, wherever you come 

13 out. You run this bias assessment of the 

14 nature you just described, again, or 

15 supplement it and say, "Here is where we come 

16 out, and here is why we think it's unbiased."

17 So, I mean, I think that's the 

18 only way to come out of this thing.

19 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Well, and then 

20 it comes back to something that -- we're 

21 putting all of our eggs in one basket on this 
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1 program to be able to do dose reconstruction, 

2 bottom line, and I want to be able to walk out 

3 of here and feel good about it because I 

4 understand everybody's standpoint, but I agree 

5 with John. We've got two paths forward, and I 

6 guess that comes down to NIOSH's decision of 

7 what they would like to be able to do to put 

8 this to bed.

9 Because I understand the point on 

10 both sides. I just want to make sure that 

11 when we walk away from this we walk away that 

12 this database is correct in what it needs.

13 MR. ROLFES: The important thing 

14 are the numbers, and we found the numbers to 

15 be good. That's the bottom line. The numbers 

16 that we used to generate this intake 

17 distribution we found are 100 percent 

18 accurate, and we found that the data that 

19 wasn't transcribed was unbiased. The high 

20 results were not selectively removed, and the 

21 low results were not selectively removed.
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1 DR. MAURO: And one more thing. 

2 You have to be able to show that the pull3 back, when you did pull back, had good basis 

4 for pulling back. In other words, when you 

5 did not do the full sampling, the rationale 

6 for why you did that and why that was a 

7 reasonable decision. Maybe that's the one 

8 piece that at a minimum you've got to give us 

9 that.

10 MR. ROLFES: I think we have 

11 documented that, that we had pulled back 

12 because of the good agreement in data, and it 

13 was greater than 99 percent agreement, I 

14 believe.

15 DR. MAURO: But I heard it was six 

16 percent.

17 MR. POTTER: When we pulled back. 

18 Gene --

19 MEMBER ZIEMER: Where there are 

20 pull-backs in different batches and some were 

21 and some weren't, in other words, for what, 
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1 different decades or whatever it was? It 

2 sounded like a lot met the criteria, and you 

3 could justify pull-back, and some didn't and 

4 so they didn't pull back.

5 DR. MAURO: If that's the case, 

6 then you're okay.

7 MR. ROLFES: Exactly.

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: From what I heard 

9 described, it sound like what we -- and maybe 

10 I had misunderstood this -- but it sounded 

11 like they actually did what the plan called 

12 for.

13 MR. ROLFES: Yes.

14 MEMBER ZIEMER: And perhaps all 

15 that needs to be done is to document, and 

16 maybe it is documented and we've overlooked 

17 that, document, number one, and number two, 

18 confirm what's been described here about that 

19 distribution. Maybe it's already there in 

20 words, and I don't have the document before me 

21 here.
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1 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Sam has got the 

2 document.

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: I think Sandra had 

4 some additional comments.

5 MS. BALDRIDGE: I have a question. 

6 When you talk about this being the rock, am I 

7 misunderstanding that are you planning to base 

8 the whole argument for your ability to go 

9 through, construct, on the fact that you have 

10 uranium urinalysis records?

11 MR. KATZ: That's just one issue.

12 DR. MAKHIJANI: No, this is just 

13 for uranium records.

14 DR. MAURO: No, I agree. This is 

15 more than that because the uranium bioassay 

16 issue tells you whether you could reconstruct 

17 uranium intake. However, the intake of the 

18 missed uranium missed all that because they're 

19 assuming that two percent of what you've 

20 inhaled -- I'm sorry.

21 The uranium that's in there, given 
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1 that it's correct, we're going to use that as 

2 a stepping stone to predict what the intake of 

3 enriched uranium is. We're going to use that 

4 as a stepping stone for what the recycled 

5 uranium intake.

6 So everything, everything from an 

7 internal dosage reconstruction sits on this 

8 rock. Yes, you're right. That's my issue.

9 MR. STIVER: Except thorium.

10 DR. MAURO: Except thorium. 

11 Thorium is a whole different story, and quite 

12 frankly, the thorium when we came into this 

13 meeting is where I thought the action was 

14 going to be.

15 MR. ROLFES: Thorium we need to 

16 clarify a little bit because the thorium-230 

17 intakes will be based upon uranium intakes. 

18 The thorium-232 intakes will be based upon --

19 DR. MAURO: Oh, yes. Yes, I'm 

20 talking thorium-232.

21 MR. ROLFES: -- in vivo data.
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1 DR. MAURO: So, yes, this is the 

2 rock we're standing on for internal dosimetry, 

3 a very large part of the internal dosimetry, 

4 and I think it's very important that we all 

5 walk away from this table believing, okay, 

6 we're sitting -- the rock is solid.

7 MS. BALDRIDGE: You talk about 

8 bias. We still don't know that the data that 

9 was reported wasn't biased.

10 MR. ROLFES: Our sampling of it 

11 did show that there was no bias, but we didn't 

12 look at all the data that was missing.

13 MS. BALDRIDGE: But I'm talking 

14 about the numbers that were reported. I mean 

15 documents show they had no qualms about 

16 misrepresenting themselves to meet government 

17 regulations, to meet government requirements.

18 My question and the point in part 

19 of filing the petition was everything is being 

20 based on data that the reliability is 

21 questionable because of the character of the 
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1 people who were reporting it.

2 MR. ROLFES: That's a strong 

3 allegation.

4 DR. MAURO: You are bringing up a 

5 different point.

6 MS. BALDRIDGE: -- documented in 

7 the petition, their words, not mine.

8 DR. MAURO: I think you brought up 

9 a very fundamental question. Is the hard copy 

10 data any good?

11 You see, what we've really been --

12 MS. BALDRIDGE: Right.

13 DR. MAURO: -- talking about, 

14 given the hard copy data is complete and 

15 reliable and it's not, you know --

16 MS. BALDRIDGE: That's an 

17 assumption.

18 DR. MAURO: -- corrupted, that it 

19 has been transcribed to the HIS-20 database in 

20 a reliable way.

21 MS. BALDRIDGE: Right.
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1 DR. MAURO: I have to be the first 

2 to admit, was that ever an issue that we 

3 engaged? Do you recall? Did we engage the 

4 hard copy data?

5 DR. MAKHIJANI: Hans was the 

6 original one to look at this petition. So he 

7 would have to say. My memory is a little 

8 vague because it has been a while. 

9 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Well, this was 

10 one of the question from early on, and this 

11 was part of the issue with the HIS database. 

12 You know, I've said this numerous times. The 

13 data here is only as good as what was entered 

14 into it. You know, it's like a computer. If 

15 you enter garbage in, you're going to get 

16 garbage out. It may look good and it may 

17 calculate up and stuff like that, but the 

18 bottom line is that the information that went

19 into this bioassay or assay program of -- what 

20 it was.

21 MEMBER ZIEMER: I'm going to 
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1 suggest we take a break, but if I could make 

2 one comment, and I don't think anyone would 

3 deny that it would be possible for someone to 

4 fudge or cook data, but to do that over 

5 decades for individuals who work there a long 

6 time, you would have to have a systematic 

7 scheme amongst many workers --

8 DR. MAURO: Organized crime.

9 MS. BALDRIDGE: Read some of the 

10 documents.

11 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, I'm just 

12 making the statement that it's actually 

13 difficult to do that, I mean, in a way that 

14 would escape detection later because you would 

15 have to be able to --

16 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Paul, you're 

17 absolutely right, and this is one of the 

18 things of data integrity and stuff that we 

19 were trying to put forth. I agree.

20 MS. BALDRIDGE: And when inquiries 

21 were made to the quality of the data, the 
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1 record keeper said, "You can't use this. It's 

2 not -- you know, it can't be used for this. 

3 It can't be used for that."

4 MR. ROLFES: What you're referring 

5 to --

6 MS. BALDRIDGE: They cast the 

7 doubt on their own data. It's not me saying 

8 it or, you know, I'm not questioning or 

9 doubting NIOSH's responsible evaluation of 

10 what they have. I'm just suggesting that 

11 based on documents in the petition, it is 

12 questionable whether the government was 

13 provided with accurate information which they 

14 have, therefore, passed on to you, which is 

15 now being used in this process.

16 MR. POTTER: I think what you had 

17 referred to was the concern about calculating 

18 internal dose from the uranium urinalyses, and 

19 the concern that they were not collected 

20 for --

21 MS. BALDRIDGE: There were three 
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1 different documents --

2 MR. ROLFES: You were concerned 

3 about --

4 MS. BALDRIDGE: -- that question 

5 the validity and the usability, not just --

6 MR. ROLFES: Right.

7 MS. BALDRIDGE: -- not just on 

8 that point, but the accuracy and the usability 

9 of the records that were kept, and this is 

10 from the record keeper.

11 MR. ROLFES: I think one of the 

12 issues that you're referring to would be the 

13 concern about using uranium urinalyses to 

14 calculate internal doses to various body 

15 organs.

16 MS. BALDRIDGE: That's one part of 

17 it.

18 MR. ROLFES: And at that time 

19 period, they had some pretty basic models 

20 which showed what happens to uranium after 

21 it's inhaled in your body, how it's 
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1 distributed into different biological 

2 compartments, and at the time, those early 

3 models, like the ICRP-2 model, was very 

4 primitive.

5 And today we have those historical 

6 samples that were collected. We have much 

7 more advanced biokinetic models that allow us 

8 to very accurately understand exactly where 

9 uranium goes, how it's dissolved into lung 

10 fluid and into the blood stream and 

11 distributed throughout the body. That allows 

12 us to come up with a precise internal dose.

13 The way we interpret those uranium 

14 urinalyses that are collected, we assume the 

15 most claimant favorability, solubility --

16 excuse me. I can't talk. My mouth is a 

17 little dry here -- we assume the most claimant 

18 favorable solubility class for the target 

19 organ in dose reconstruction. So if it's a 

20 lung cancer, we'd assume the most insoluble 

21 material. If --
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1 MS. BALDRIDGE: I see that part of 

2 it, but that wasn't the only issue --

3 MR. ROLFES: Okay. Well --

4 MS. BALDRIDGE: -- that has 

5 arisen.

6 MR. ROLFES: Okay.

7 MS. BALDRIDGE: As a result of 

8 this.

9 MR. ROLFES: I'd be happy to 

10 discuss the other two issues if you could 

11 point me to those.

12 DR. GLOVER: I think she said that 

13 they were fabricated.

14 MS. BALDRIDGE: In part, yes.

15 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Early on there 

16 were people --

17 MS. BALDRIDGE: They admitted it.

18 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: The bioassay 

19 program was in question, the people that were 

20 performing it and so forth. There was 

21 question of the training of it, and then 
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1 themselves made the comment that you can't --

2 this data can't be used for something like 

3 that.

4 MS. BALDRIDGE: They didn't 

5 explain why.

6 MR. ROLFES: That's what I was 

7 wondering, if you could possibly explain why 

8 because --

9 MS. BALDRIDGE: They didn't 

10 explain why in their papers. They just said, 

11 you know, referring to the document that you 

12 referenced, they said it couldn't be used. 

13 They did not explain. They did not provide an 

14 explanation for that statement in the document

15 MR. ROLFES: I understand. I 

16 think another one of the things that we had 

17 discussed is the concern about collecting 

18 those urine samples for chemical toxicity 

19 concerns rather than radiological assessment, 

20 and just because they were collected for one 

21 reason over the other doesn't prohibit their 
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1 use from dose reconstruction.

2 MS. BALDRIDGE: But, you know, 

3 when there are documents that say, you know, 

4 the Department of Waiver or whatever is really 

5 pushing on this, they're asking us whether 

6 we've respond -- tell them what they want to 

7 hear. Just tell them what they want to here.

8 They hadn't addressed the issues, 

9 and it just shows that there was a deceptive 

10 climate at work during certain periods of the 

11 operation within this petition period of 40 

12 years; that there were people who had no 

13 conscience about what they presented and who 

14 they presented it to.

15 Now, it may have been offhand. It 

16 most likely was some of the early years, but 

17 the issue remains it was in place. It has 

18 demonstrated that that was the mindset of some 

19 of the people who were handling the affairs 

20 for National Lead of Ohio. And that showed 

21 how they were responding and reacting to the 
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1 government's request for accurate information.

2 They disregarded. They had no 

3 conscience that they had any responsibility to 

4 provide accurate information. All they had to 

5 do was give them what they were asking for.

6 MR. ROLFES: That's contradictory 

7 to what I've seen.

8 MS. BALDRIDGE: That's the way 

9 that has made them look.

10 MR. ROLFES: But if you could cite 

11 a specific example I would appreciate that 

12 because that --

13 MS. BALDRIDGE: I will see if I 

14 can locate the document.

15 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Something --

16 and I know that we need to go on break -- but 

17 something that was interesting to me about 

18 Fernald was Fernald was done as a heavy 

19 metals. You know, the early years it was 

20 lead. We were worried about lead. It was a 

21 heavy metals plant. It was run as a heavy 
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1 metals plant, and part of the stuff that comes 

2 up, as Sandra was saying, the people that were 

3 doing the samples, they were not -- there was 

4 a question of how they were being handled and 

5 so forth.

6 And you're right, Mark. The 

7 earlier years they were looking for chemical 

8 analysis for other things, but they could also 

9 be used for uranium content. 

10 But one of the questions that came 

11 up was that if the process was being done 

12 right. Now, in Sandra's comment though, the 

13 people that said that it could not be used for 

14 this, they are not going to openly admit what 

15 they had seen or anything else like that 

16 because then they could be held liable just as 

17 much as anybody else could for not performing 

18 the task as it was supposed to be done.

19 But we've seen in numerous sites 

20 that it was basically to keep us within this 

21 realm. Now, later on in the years a great 
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1 deal of things have changed, and I think we 

2 need to look into this just a little bit 

3 because --

4 MEMBER GRIFFON: Brad.

5 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Yes.

6 MEMBER GRIFFON: Before you take a 

7 break -- I know you're ready to take a break 

8 -- can I ask a question?

9 I just wanted to know. Each sheet 

10 has a reference ID. Are those log books in 

11 one spot on the AB document review drive or do 

12 we have to search them in the overall 

13 database?

14 MR. ROLFES: I can take a look 

15 here and tell you.

16 MEMBER GRIFFON: I couldn't --

17 that's one question.

18 And then the other question I have 

19 was are there other log books. You know, this 

20 was a sampling of log books, I assume, and 

21 were there other log books and are they also 
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1 on the O: drive?

2 MR. POTTER: This is Gene Potter. 

3 Perhaps I can attempt to answer both 

4 questions. The reference ID is our for the 

5 general -- in the generalized RDB. You can 

6 search them that way.

7 MEMBER GRIFFON: Okay.

8 MR. POTTER: And I believe, if 

9 memory serves me, Mark, this is all of the 

10 data that was uncovered by the various data 

11 capture trips. This is all of the hard copy 

12 that was uncovered.

13 MR. ROLFES: Correct.

14 MR. POTTER: I do not believe we 

15 eliminated anything that we had.

16 MEMBER GRIFFON: Okay.

17 MR. POTTER: And perhaps while 

18 I've got the floor, maybe a final word on 

19 reduced sampling. Let me read from our report 

20 just to reinforce my opinion, anyway, that 

21 this was not any sort of sneaky tactic and we 
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1 weren't sticking to our own plan.

2 But it says for most of the files 

3 inspected the normal inspection level and type 

4 was used in this analysis. For some files the 

5 reduced inspection was performed based on the 

6 experience with similar files for similar time 

7 periods. Reduced inspection allows a smaller 

8 sample to be inspected, with a correspondingly 

9 smaller number of nonconforming results for 

10 the file to meet the AQL. 

11 Reduced inspection was 

12 discontinued when one batch failed to meet the 

13 AQL in accordance with the switching rules in 

14 the standard.

15 I know Harry has a problem with 

16 treating these, as I said, like widgets, but 

17 that was the plan, and to the best of my 

18 knowledge, that's what we did.

19 MR. CHMELYNSKI: I would like to 

20 respond with a short quote from the document 

21 itself. It says when normal inspection is in 
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1 effect, reduced inspection shall be instituted 

2 provided all of the following conditions are 

3 satisfied.

4 The first one says the preceding 

5 ten lots had been on normal inspection and all 

6 have been accepted.

7 I just don't see how you could 

8 have ten lots that were accepted.

9 MR. KATZ: And on that point maybe 

10 we could take a break.

11 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Well, yes. 

12 It's almost lunchtime. So I was thinking that 

13 we'd probably break for lunch if that would be 

14 all right.

15 MR. ROLFES: John, were these the 

16 two issues that you would expect to take the 

17 longest?

18 DR. MAURO: I don't know. I 

19 thought we would get through in about ten 

20 minutes. The big ones are coming at the back 

21 end.
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1 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Would that be 

2 all right? Because if get back we're only 

3 going to be here for ten minutes and then go 

4 to lunch.

5 MR. KATZ: So what time do you 

6 want to reconvene for people on the phones?

7 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Ten to one, I'd 

8 say. Let's shoot for one o'clock, and then 

9 that way everybody gets right there.

10 MR. CHMELYNSKI: One o'clock.

11 MR. KATZ: Okay. Thank you, 

12 everyone on the phone.

13 (Whereupon, the above-entitled 

14 matter went off the record at 11:40 a.m. and 

15 resumed at 1:02 p.m.)

16

17
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1 AFTERNOON SESSION

2 (1:02 p.m.)

3 MR. KATZ: Good afternoon. This 

4 is Ted Katz with the Advisory Board on 

5 Radiation Worker Health, Fernald Working 

6 Group, and we are reconvening following lunch.

7 And I'd just like to check on the 

8 phones for Board members. Mark, have you 

9 rejoined us? Mark Griffon.

10 MEMBER GRIFFON: Hi, Ted.

11 MR. KATZ: Hi, Mark.

12 And how about Bob Presley? Are 

13 you with us?

14 MEMBER PRESLEY: I'm here.

15 MR. KATZ: Hi, Bob.

16 And how about Phil Schofield? Any 

17 chance you're with us?

18 (No response.)

19 MR. KATZ: Okay. Brad, do you 

20 want to get the ball rolling?

21 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Yes. I guess 
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1 where I'd like to start is where we ended up 

2 on Issue 2 that we had. We were talking about 

3 the HIS database. Some things have come up 

4 that I think we're going to try to determine 

5 how we're going to have to go forward, but one 

6 of the questions that the petitioners brought 

7 before us, Ms. Baldridge, is the adequacy of

8 the data, and it wasn't just with the air 

9 sampling. It was with the data that was 

10 pulled.

11 And I pulled up the petition as it 

12 was filed, and I think that I somewhat slipped 

13 because I didn't catch this a little bit 

14 sooner, but we should have been looking a 

15 little bit more to the data adequacy as it was 

16 put in.

17 We're basing everything for dose 

18 reconstruction primarily on this HIS database. 

19 We want to make sure of the information that 

20 was put in there. So we may have to at a 

21 later date address this or a path forward for 
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1 it, but at this time I'd like -- Ms. Baldridge 

2 has a comment that she'd like to make real 

3 shortly, and I believe that we're going to 

4 continue on from there.

5 MS. BALDRIDGE: Just a reminder. 

6 This petition was filed in December of 2005, 

7 and we are now in 2010. I'm hoping this can 

8 proceed at a quicker pace in the future than 

9 it has to date. I hope most of the issues 

10 that were of concern to NIOSH have been 

11 addressed so that we can get on with some of 

12 the other issues.

13 MR. ROLFES: Thank you, Ms. 

14 Baldridge.

15 You had mentioned about the 

16 falsification of data earlier on, and I did 

17 want to pull back our Evaluation Report. You 

18 had indicated that air samples appeared to be 

19 manipulated to obtain desired readings and to 

20 give the appearance that radiation exposure 

21 levels were much lower than they actually 
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1 were, and I think that was the third issue of 

2 the three that you had mentioned earlier.

3 We did take a look at this, and 

4 you had supplied an affidavit to us where an 

5 individual had indicated that he was 

6 collecting air samples in Plant 5, and he 

7 would take those samples back to the lab and 

8 have them run and then report them to a 

9 supervisor, and his supervisor would look at 

10 them, and if they were high results, he would 

11 tell him to go back and resample.

12 And I guess that could be 

13 interpreted in two ways. He could have 

14 thought that the individual wanted him to 

15 report a lower value or he wanted him to focus 

16 to see what the problem with the process was. 

17 If it was a high sample, that would typically

18 attract attention to a concern in the work 

19 place. They'd want to address that concern 

20 and make corrections to the process to lower 

21 the air concentrations.
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1 For Plant 5, that was the uranium 

2 plant where they were taking green salt and 

3 reducing it into metal. We wouldn't be 

4 relying upon air monitoring data for that. We 

5 would be relying upon the uranium urinalyses 

6 to reconstruct historical intakes of uranium 

7 in that plant.

8 So, you know, we don't know what 

9 the affiant's meaning behind that statement 

10 was, but that was the only thing that we had 

11 found. We couldn't find additional 

12 information to show that the air monitoring 

13 data was manipulated.

14 Our statement in the initial 

15 evaluation of this information, we said that 

16 the petitioner supplied affidavit states that 

17 their sample results were manipulated. You 

18 had also submitted a document stating that 

19 FMPC knowingly calculated effluent releases 

20 using a method which was flawed and grossly 

21 underestimated the releases.
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1 NIOSH could not find additional 

2 information corroborating that air monitoring 

3 data was manipulated, and FMPC Technical Basis 

4 Documents do not specifically address the 

5 topic.

6 While it's possible that the air 

7 monitoring results were manipulated, this 

8 practice was unlikely to have routinely 

9 occurred, and since NIOSH will not be relying 

10 upon a sole air sample result made of worker's 

11 intake, but rather a distribution or 

12 compilation of multiple air dust measurements 

13 or uranium urinalyses, it's unlikely that this 

14 practice would have a significant effect on 

15 the individual's dose.

16 And for this specific plant, Plant 

17 5, we would not be using the air monitoring 

18 data to reconstruct the uranium intake. It 

19 would be based upon the uranium urinalyses.

20 MS. BALDRIDGE: I think the point 

21 is you said that it was not routinely. It was 
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1 done. Someone made the decision concerning 

2 that. We don't know that it wasn't a routine 

3 situation or that that mindset wasn't 

4 routinely initiated in other manners in the 

5 collection or presentation of data.

6 And you can't really assume that 

7 it was a one-time occurrence.

8 MR. ROLFES: We have gone back and 

9 interviewed a couple of individuals that were 

10 specifically mentioned in the affidavit, and 

11 they indicated that that was never the 

12 practice. They had always focused on concern 

13 for employees' health, and that they had 

14 focused if there was a concern with the high 

15 air sample result, that they would go back and 

16 take a look in greater vigor and do more 

17 sampling.

18 That was what we were told based 

19 on our interviews of subject matter experts.

20 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Well, and I 

21 understand that we could debate this quite a 
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1 bit, but I'd like to read just from the 

2 petition right here.

3 Documents indicate that there was 

4 no monitoring for special types of ionizing 

5 radiation known presence. Monitoring was 

6 limited in frequency and limited of groups. 

7 Monitoring was inaccurate due to sampling 

8 techniques and dose limitations. Some data 

9 could not be interpreted due to deficiencies 

10 in the record keeping procedures and so forth.

11 Workers' assignments often changed 

12 as they were rotated to different locations in 

13 an attempt to limit exposure levels.

14 I think the bottom line and what 

15 Sandra has come up with, I think that we've 

16 got to look a little bit further into this, 

17 and this may fall into a NIOSH or an SC&A 

18 issue, but I think what we should do on Issue 

19 2 for right now is to kind of think about the 

20 discussion we've had, and we're going to 

21 proceed on with it, but we might end up coming 
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1 back and tasking SC&A to look into this a 

2 little bit. 

3 I've got to talk with the other 

4 Board members because I really don't know. 

5 Bottom line is I don't know what to do on this 

6 one. There is a question of data integrity 

7 and so forth. I think that we have met that, 

8 my personal opinion.

9 So for this one right here, I 

10 think that we'll continue on to Item 3, but we 

11 do need to address this and request a path 

12 forward.

13 I have one other question now. 

14 Are construction workers going to be --

15 they're going to be monitored, their dose 

16 reconstruction is the same way. Are they

17 different? Because I've seen it at different 

18 sites.

19 MR. ROLFES: Well, it depends on 

20 whether or not they were monitored, I guess. 

21 If they're not monitored and they were working 
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1 on-site in the radiological area, you know, 

2 decommissioning the site or something perhaps, 

3 we would find the uranium intake based upon 

4 the coworker distributions that we have.

5 If they were monitored, then we 

6 would use their data.

7 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay. So if 

8 there's no data, you're going to use the site?

9 MR. ROLFES: If they didn't have 

10 data in their file, for example, if they 

11 didn't have uranium urinalyses in their file, 

12 what we would do is use the coworker intakes 

13 to apply to them.

14 DR. MAKHIJANI: Is Steve Marschke 

15 on the line?

16 DR. MAURO: No.

17 DR. MAKHIJANI: Does anybody 

18 remember if Fernald was explicitly covered in 

19 TIB-0052, internal?

20 DR. MAURO: I don't recall. I 

21 don't believe it was.
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1 DR. MAKHIJANI: Now, we have sent 

2 our review of TIB-0075 in the context of the 

3 Savannah River Site, and as part of that, we

4 looked at whether construction workers at 

5 Savannah River Site and non-construction 

6 workers were comparable or whether in some 

7 instances construction workers seemed to have 

8 higher exposure potential.

9 And you all already have the 

10 report. It has been finalized and sent to the 

11 Board or the Savannah River Working Group. 

12 So, Brad, you would have that, and I'd be 

13 happy to send it to you, Mark, if you don't.

14 But I think the prior assumption, 

15 which perhaps we were all sharing, that 

16 construction workers can be subsumed under a 

17 general coworker model would need another 

18 look.

19 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Well, and I 

20 need to explain why I brought this up, because 

21 we do have an individual that's in our room 
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1 that was discussed with us, and Lou Doll, who 

2 was a former Fernald worker; he also is a 

3 Building Trades National Medical Screening 

4 Program. And the question was brought up when 

5 we were doing this of how construction workers 

6 were falling into this, and this is why I 

7 brought up this question, because I could not 

8 answer it.

9 So this is maybe another thing 

10 that we need to look at, into this because 

11 especially on the HIS database and also how 

12 the construction workers, you know, work into 

13 it, but to be right honest with you, I think 

14 we're going to have to sit down and figure out 

15 a path forward on this one because I think 

16 I've dropped the ball from the standpoint of 

17 what Sandra pointed out to me, that it wasn't 

18 just the air sampling data. It was all the 

19 data that was put into that. And I'll just 

20 leave it at that for right now.

21 But we're going to proceed on.
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1 MEMBER GRIFFON: Can I just have 

2 one follow-up to Mark?

3 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Sure.

4 MEMBER GRIFFON: You said you 

5 reviewed a couple of experts, and they 

6 indicated that this wasn't a general practice, 

7 and the allegation made in the petition was 

8 not the regular practice.

9 Did you interview any other 

10 workers to either confirm or get a sense of 

11 whether -- because I think that's the crux of 

12 it, is we have to try to identify whether this 

13 is happening on a routine basis, and I'm not 

14 sure that going to the HP manager to ask is, 

15 you know, thorough enough --

16 MR. ROLFES: Right.

17 MEMBER GRIFFON: -- you know, to 

18 satisfy the petitioner or me, quite frankly.

19 MR. ROLFES: To be honest, I 

20 wouldn't think that any of the other workers 

21 would know if such a practice occurred. So to 
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1 interview, for example --

2 MEMBER GRIFFON: No, no, they 

3 could have been involved in it. They could 

4 have seen it. They could have known of it.

5 MR. ROLFES: Yes. I mean, we've 

6 spoken with several other people. I don't 

7 know if we specifically asked them about these 

8 issues, but when you get into looking at all 

9 of the data, for example, if there was a 

10 concern about air monitoring data being 

11 manipulated, our first level of information 

12 that we would use for reconstructing uranium 

13 intakes would be the urinalyses, and those 

14 would be more reflective of worker intake than 

15 the air monitoring data.

16 So if, say, for example, you know, 

17 in some hypothetical scenario the uranium 

18 urinalyses were manipulated, once again, those 

19 with the highest internal exposure potentials 

20 were monitored for uranium exposures or 

21 internal exposures by the mobile in vivo unit. 
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1 So it would be another layer of information 

2 that would, once again, have to be manipulated 

3 to try to cover up this hypothetical 

4 manipulation of urinalyses.

5 So the compilation of the health 

6 physics practices appear to indicate that we 

7 have information that will allow us to bound 

8 unmonitored workers' intakes.

9 MS. BALDRIDGE: Wasn't the -- the 

10 in vivo didn't come in till what, 1970?

11 MR. ROLFES: 1968, that's correct.

12 MS. BALDRIDGE: And you've got 

13 from 1950 to '68 with nothing to compare. I 

14 mean, maybe from 1968 on it wasn't because 

15 there was a check system. So what about that 

16 18 years prior to that? There was no check or 

17 balance. Everything was in-house. They 

18 didn't send things out.

19 MR. ROLFES: Well, they actually 

20 did send some of the urine samples out. Some 

21 of the early 1950 urinalyses that were 
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1 conducted for Fernald employees were analyzed 

2 by an off-site entity, by the health and 

3 safety --

4 MS. BALDRIDGE: For a year or two 

5 years.

6 MR. ROLFES: For about two or 

7 three years; that's correct. And a lot of the 

8 work that was done in the earlier time period 

9 relied also heavily upon air monitoring data. 

10 So we don't have any indication that that air 

11 monitoring data during that time period was 

12 suspect.

13 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, you know, I 

14 don't know about urinalysis data integrity 

15 because I've never looked into it. There is 

16 some discussion in the report that Hans wrote 

17 about this, that Hans was a principal author 

18 on for our review of the SEC petition in which 

19 some of the materials cited by Sandy were 

20 reviewed, and I just got back the e-mail, and 

21 the concerns about the non-usability of 
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1 bioassay data for dose reconstruction were not 

2 limited to the 1950s on the part of the 

3 management. There were statements as late as 

4 1984 that said you shouldn't use bioassay 

5 data.

6 MR. ROLFES: Correct. That's 

7 correct.

8 DR. MAKHIJANI: So it's a concern 

9 that goes throughout the period. So that's 

10 one thing, but I haven't independently 

11 examined that, and maybe it might be worth 

12 looking at.

13 But the thing that I would like to 

14 point out is there were some instances in 

15 which the data of record that were given to 

16 the public and that were recorded in air 

17 monitoring data, not in-plant DWE data, but 

18 stack data and scrubber data were manipulated, 

19 to the best of my understanding, like zeros 

20 were entered; measurements were not made.

21 And of more concern actually were 
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1 the scrubber releases from Plant 8 where an 

2 incorrect efficiencies were used throughout 

3 the period and never corrected. The problem 

4 was not corrected after it was pointed out. 

5 So that even when the matter wound up in 

6 court, the estimates that were not correct, 

7 and internal information indicated that they 

8 were known to be not correct, persisted in the 

9 public record.

10 And you know, some of that is 

11 cited in your petition, and so the reason I 

12 bring it up, it's the reason I would actually 

13 declare it conflicted, because I have some 

14 considerable knowledge of this, having looked 

15 at it and participated in that process.

16 And I think since it has been said 

17 that air monitoring data was maybe 

18 occasionally looked at this way, I just wanted 

19 to put on the record what the best of my 

20 information is.

21 MR. ROLFES: I'll address your two 
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1 points there, Arjun. The concern about having 

2 the ability to reconstruct internal doses from 

3 uranium in 1984, as late as 1984, was still 

4 not a concern about the uranium urinalyses 

5 data themselves, but the biological models 

6 that are used to interpret results which would 

7 basically allow you to determine organ dose 

8 for compliance purposes, and I think that was 

9 related to 10 CFR 835, where they were 

10 reporting organ doses.

11 DR. MAKHIJANI: It doesn't 

12 actually say that. The part that I have 

13 quoted doesn't actually say that. What it 

14 says is that amount of deposit of radionuclide 

15 is potentially in 1984; amount of deposit of 

16 radionuclide determined from lung count is 

17 recorded and can be used to calculate -- oh, 

18 sorry. Lost my page -- and can be used to 

19 calculate lung burden, and two, excretion 

20 urinalysis data are recorded, but this cannot 

21 be used for calculating internal dose. That's 
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1 what it says.

2 MR. ROLFES: Right, and that was 

3 because of the lack of a biological model, 

4 which would specifically allow you to relate. 

5 We used updated biokinetic models, ICRP-66 

6 and 68, to interpret in the most claimant 

7 favorable manner the actual uranium 

8 urinalyses.

9 So we have the data and we can 

10 plug those data into our computer program, 

11 into the integrated modules for bioassay 

12 analysis to determine a best estimate or 

13 claimant favorable estimate or an 

14 underestimate, depending upon the type of dose 

15 reconstruction work we're completing.

16 The models that we have today 

17 didn't exist back then. They were used in a 

18 much more archaic internal dose model.

19 DR. MAKHIJANI: I understand that, 

20 but that's an inference you're putting into 

21 that.
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1 MR. HINNEFELD: This is Stu 

2 Hinnefeld. I'm the Director of OCAS and I 

3 also am conflicted at Fernald.

4 And that is, in fact, the reason 

5 why that statement was changed later than 

6 1984, was, in fact, that models existed at 

7 that time, and those data could be used for 

8 dose reconstruction, and so to make the 

9 statement that they cannot be used for dose 

10 reconstruction I felt was an incorrect 

11 statement.

12 The fact of the matter is they 

13 were not until the rules of the order 

14 required. So internal dose calculations since 

15 about 1989 or somewhere around there, because 

16 they were not reaching it because it was not 

17 required, and the guidance from the DOE at 

18 this time had not yet adopted 1976 ICRP-26 

19 models. It was still based on the ICRP-2 

20 models.

21 So that is why that statement --
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1 that is why that statement was there I am 

2 confident.

3 DR. MAKHIJANI: Okay. I don't

4 have personal knowledge of why that 

5 statement --

6 MR. HINNEFELD: I don't remember 

7 much, but that one, I do have personal 

8 knowledge of.

9 DR. MAKHIJANI: Okay.

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, plus 835 

11 actually didn't kick in until about '92.

12 MR. HINNEFELD: 835 didn't, but 

13 that was, I believe, when you started. There 

14 were other things before 835 that required the 

15 calculation of internal doses.

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: But I want to make 

17 sure I understand what the point on the non18 usability of bioassay data, those statements 

19 you were reading, which I guess also appear in 

20 the petition. Did that have to do -- the 

21 allegation there was not that those numbers 
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1 have been falsified. Am I right on this?

2 MS. BALDRIDGE: It didn't clarify.

3 MR. HINNEFELD: No, the statement 

4 doesn't clarify.

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, I understand 

6 that, but they are not claiming that that was 

7 the reason.

8 MR. HINNEFELD: No. The statement 

9 just says that it cannot be used. That was a 

10 historical statement. It appears well back, 

11 and that's I think a particular annual report, 

12 the report of data, a data report to DOE which 

13 I believe was an annual report, although I'm 

14 speaking from memory here, and my memory is 

15 not completely reliable.

16 But that document, that statement 

17 was carried forward in sort of the form letter 

18 that each year's data, the new data were put 

19 on, but the various boilerplate, the language 

20 remained the same, and when I saw it in 

21 whatever year it changed, I said, you know, 
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1 that's not exactly true, you know, based on 

2 the ICRP-26 models which were available, 

3 although not in the guidance.

4 It's not really true to say these 

5 urine data can't be used to calculate ordinary 

6 internal doses, and so that statement was 

7 changed some time after 1984. I don't 

8 remember exactly when.

9 MR. ROLFES: Arjun, you had 

10 another point about the air scrubbers as well, 

11 and we did also specifically interview some 

12 individuals regarding this statement. We 

13 spoke with the individual who was responsible 

14 for changing out basically the filters in the 

15 scrubbers, and if you take a look at the 

16 reports, and I know you have previously, the 

17 entries for emissions were reported in some 

18 months or in some years as dashes or as zeros.

19 And when we discussed this with 

20 the individual responsible for conducting 

21 these analyses, he would do a visual 
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1 inspection of the filter to determine whether 

2 it needed to be changed. If it did not need 

3 to be changed, it would be left in service and 

4 a dash or zero would be entered for the 

5 emissions for that month. It didn't 

6 necessarily mean that there were no emissions 

7 that month. There could have been. However, 

8 they would have been recorded by that air 

9 monitor in a subsequent month when they 

10 returned to determine whether the filter 

11 needed to be replaced.

12 DR. MAKHIJANI: That's why when I 

13 made my sort of intervention there I referred 

14 to the scrubbers as the more important problem 

15 which is not covered by the filters in that 

16 filters' stack. They had no way to monitor 

17 those emissions other than measuring the 

18 amount of uranium, the scrubber fluid, and 

19 measuring the scrubber efficiency. They 

20 didn't actually have filters because it was 

21 very corrosive exhaust, corrosive exhaust 
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1 would heat up the filters.

2 And that set of data continued to 

3 be fundamentally flawed throughout, despite an 

4 internal memo that pointed out that the method 

5 of calculation was wrong, and that it gave 

6 high results when the emissions were low and 

7 low results when the emissions were high, and 

8 to the best of my understanding, it was never 

9 fixed even when the matter was in court.

10 MR. ROLFES: Now --

11 DR. MAKHIJANI: And the scrubber 

12 release is quite different from the air 

13 monitoring filters.

14 MR. ROLFES: That's what I 

15 wondered if you could clarify what scrubbers 

16 you're referring to or --

17 DR. MAKHIJANI: Plant 8 scrubbers 

18 and Plant 23 scrubbers, and the scrubbers that 

19 were more important and that were later 

20 determined by the RAC team, John Till's team 

21 to be the main source of emissions at Fernald, 
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1 the uranium emission from Fernald largely, it 

2 turned out, came out from Plant 8 because at 

3 some points these scrubbers completely broke 

4 down or nearly completely broke down, and 

5 there's documentary evidence of that, while 

6 they were operating these plants.

7 MR. ROLFES: Okay. I guess the 

8 bottom line is how would that impact our 

9 coworker study or an individual's internal 

10 dose from uranium because of the number of 

11 people, given that 93 percent of the workers 

12 from Fernald had internal dose monitoring for 

13 uranium. Any environmental exposures from 

14 uranium would be integrated in their 

15 urinalysis result.

16 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, there are 

17 two things of interest. One is from the Site 

18 Profile onward, and to my understanding to the 

19 present, you're ascribing environmental dose 

20 through the air releases, and through the 

21 recycled uranium White Paper, you have 
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1 continued to use the Fernald site calculated 

2 air releases even though the Centers for 

3 Disease Control sponsored study done by John 

4 Till was available in which this problem was 

5 addressed.

6 So that's one issue. That does 

7 impact, as I understand your dose 

8 reconstruction model, actually does impact 

9 your dose reconstruction for environmental 

10 dose.

11 There are other problems with 

12 environmental dose that I've pointed out.

13 The second thing is when an 

14 engineer on the site says that our method of 

15 calculation for scrubber releases is, quote, 

16 inherently deceptive, unquote, which was said 

17 in a memo in 1971 at Fernald, and that same 

18 method continues to be used for another 15 

19 years, this is an issue, in my opinion.

20 You cannot simply say that there 

21 was an occasional problem with air monitoring 
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1 and that you interviewed people and this 

2 didn't occur because as Mark Griffon has said, 

3 you interviewed the person who was watching 

4 over this stuff and who could not identify, to 

5 the best of my memory, any documents on which 

6 these scrubber releases were based, which were 

7 later shown on careful, at least in my 

8 opinion, careful re-analysis to be wrong.

9 MR. ROLFES: We didn't interview 

10 just one person. There were three individuals 

11 that we had spoken with about this, and once 

12 again, you know, if we have emissions from the 

13 site and employees were being exposed to those 

14 emissions, it would be integrated in their 

15 uranium urinalyses that they were required to 

16 provide.

17 DR. MAKHIJANI: I understand that. 

18 I'm not disputing that if you have your 

19 analysis record and you're using that none of 

20 this would matter.

21 The two reasons to make a 
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1 statement about this at this point -- didn't 

2 say anything for quite a while -- was when you 

3 stated that there may have been an occasional 

4 problem with air monitoring, but it was not 

5 systematic, and I don't think that's entirely 

6 accurate.

7 And the second thing is you are 

8 still using an old source term in your 

9 recycled uranium report, and you are still 

10 saying that you're going to use that source 

11 term for environmental doses for unmonitored 

12 people.

13 And so there's a reason to put 

14 that on the table.

15 MR. ROLFES: I understand, and it 

16 could, you know, be a perception, but to my 

17 knowledge, when we complete a dose 

18 reconstruction, for example, if we have an 

19 individual that didn't participate in the 

20 urine sampling program at Fernald, we have the 

21 coworker study that we can use. To my 
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1 knowledge, I don't recollect ever reviewing or 

2 completing a dose reconstruction where an 

3 individual was denied compensation based upon 

4 environmental levels.

5 When we have to complete a dose 

6 reconstruction, we want to make sure that 

7 we've given every benefit of the doubt to the 

8 claimant, and for the cases that don't become 

9 compensable, we use even higher intakes, TIB10 0002 methods.

11 And so we have approaches to 

12 assign intakes which greatly would exceed any 

13 environmental emissions. So I think we're 

14 okay. The TBD which was developed back in 

15 2003 has an environmental dose reconstruction 

16 approach. However, to my knowledge, I don't

17 believe an environmental dose assessment has 

18 ever been the only source of exposure 

19 considered in the denial of an individual's 

20 compensation.

21 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Arjun, I think 
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1 that your point is going to come up a little 

2 bit more in the next one, but we've got to 

3 close up Issue 2 here of what are we going to 

4 proceed forward with because this is a 

5 validation of the HIS-20 database, and I'm 

6 kind of at a loss.

7 I think we've got to be able to 

8 check the information that was put into it. 

9 I know that the paper work was put in there, 

10 but I guess I'm --

11 DR. MAURO: I think what happened 

12 was it confounded a number of issues that 

13 could have been kept on separate lists, and 

14 let's unconfound them.

15 First of all, regarding Issue 2, I 

16 think a proposed approach was put on the 

17 table, that is, NIOSH would justify and 

18 perhaps has already justified the reason it 

19 limited its number of samples in the process 

20 of verifying the faithfulness with which the 

21 HIS-20 database was transcribed, so to speak, 
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1 and the missing data.

2 And it's my understanding that 

3 there is an action item here. The action item 

4 is to remind the Work Group that, yes, in 

5 fact, your arguments are well articulated in 

6 your existing report of why you did that and 

7 your rationale for doing it holds up soundly 

8 scientifically.

9 If that rationale is not there, 

10 perhaps you will provide it to us. That would 

11 be one way of not having to do additional 

12 sampling. If it turns out that your sense is 

13 that the rationale for limiting the number of 

14 samples in, say, a group of six out of 25 

15 groupings, cannot be really justified well for 

16 the reasons Harry explained. They have to 

17 have -- I mean, if you go back to the mil 

18 spec, I don't now if you remember. 

19 The criteria the mil spec 

20 guidelines offers is a little bit stricter 

21 than perhaps the criteria that you imposed 
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1 upon yourself for when you could cut back.

2 So my sense is that a compelling 

3 case needs to be made why it was okay to cut 

4 back. If you feel that perhaps that case 

5 cannot be made well from what you -- whether 

6 it has been made already or it needs to be 

7 made and it really can't be made, it seems 

8 that going back to the six sets that you cut 

9 short, you finish up the six sets, come out 

10 with a set of outcomes for all 25 sets, show 

11 where the percents come in, three, two, five, 

12 six, eight, wherever they come in in terms of 

13 the percent of samples that were not 

14 transcribed.

15 If and when that's done and 

16 notwithstanding whether you have to go sample 

17 some more or whether or not you're fine the 

18 way you are -- sort of like Stage 2 -- the 

19 type of argument that was made that we 

20 discussed before. It appears that the samples 

21 that we did, the ones that we looked at out of 
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1 the sampling where you found that they were 

2 not transcribed, when you go back in and you 

3 go pull them and take a look at them, you find 

4 out where they fall within the distribution.

5 And some type of argument needs to 

6 be made whether or not it certainly appears 

7 that the numbers that were left out do not 

8 appear to be biased in any particular way.

9 Now, how you do that 

10 statistically, whether you simply make a graph 

11 or a table and show where they fall, oh, about 

12 half fall on this side, half fall on that 

13 side, obviously there's nothing here where 

14 there was a significant bias in terms of what 

15 was left out.

16 And I think that that's where I 

17 come out on what has to be done. With respect 

18 to Sandra's concern, namely, the original 

19 records that were originally the basis for 

20 everything, it sounds to me that historically 

21 the attention that was given to that subject 
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1 had mostly to do with airborne emissions, and 

2 the degree to which the records regarding 

3 airborne emissions were, in fact, recorded 

4 appropriately.

5 The extent to which the Work Group 

6 decides that the very fact that that practice 

7 might very well have existed at that time for 

8 airborne emission, does that somehow imply 

9 that the same practices may somehow have found 

10 their way into the bioassay program?

11 I can't speak to that, whether or 

12 not that's it or not, but it sounds to me that 

13 -- was that a -- now, I haven't looked at the 

14 issues, but is one of the issues specifically 

15 a concern that hard copy records of bioassay 

16 data somehow may have been problematic the way 

17 the air sampling was?

18 DR. MAKHIJANI: You know, I think 

19 it is all very complicated. Brad, might I 

20 suggest sort of three items for kind of moving 

21 ahead. One is NIOSH has to complete the thing 
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1 about the six percent.

2 DR. MAURO: Past that.

3 DR. MAKHIJANI: And whether the 

4 six percent --

5 DR. MAURO: That's what I just 

6 said.

7 DR. MAKHIJANI: So that's kind of 

8 one item, and then we don't have to discuss --

9 DR. MAURO: Anymore.

10 DR. MAKHIJANI: -- the substance 

11 of that.

12 The second thing is there's a data 

13 integrity issue which Sandy introduced and 

14 which you said that we need to do more work 

15 and you can tell if NIOSH is going to do 

16 something, if you want us to do something, and 

17 it obviously can't be resolved here. It's 

18 very complicated.

19 DR. MAURO: Right.

20 DR. MAKHIJANI: And the third 

21 thing is the gentleman who is the construction 
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1 worker just raised this question and the 

2 question of construction workers and whether 

3 you want to look into it and what you want to 

4 look at.

5 And then we can kind of move on 

6 from a bioassay to a record perhaps. I don't 

7 know what. Ted knows.

8 MR. KATZ: My note has one other 

9 item. I mean, originally I just had two, 

10 before these other data integrity issues came 

11 up. So one was clarifying the basis for 

12 pulling back on the sampling. Either make 

13 your case or do some more to shore that up, 

14 either way.

15 My second bullet was to perhaps 

16 provide additional clarification regarding the 

17 test you did to determine that the data is 

18 unbiased. That was the other piece of it that 

19 you wanted.

20 They may have done it, and it may 

21 be that SC&A and others haven't scrutinized 
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1 that closely enough, but if you look at that 

2 and you think there is more to be said about 

3 that, then now is the time to do that, right?

4 DR. MAURO: And that's Item 2. I 

5 mean, as far as I'm concerned, that closes the 

6 door on that.

7 MR. MORRIS: This is Bob Morris. 

8 Can I interrupt?

9 MR. KATZ: Bob, yes, of course.

10 MR. MORRIS: I wanted to refer you 

11 back to October 24th, 2007, transcript, more 

12 or less page 200 or 201. We discussed the 

13 intent of what we were going to do with mil 

14 spec sampling, including the point of reduced 

15 sampling frequencies when we met the prior one 

16 percent criteria, and that's all in the public 

17 record that's available. I don't think 

18 there's any mysterious thing that has gone on 

19 on this. 

20 So we were up front before we did 

21 it and now we've done what we've done, and now 
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1 we've reported it. I don't know that there's 

2 a lot more to do unless you just want us to 

3 rewrite the report for some reason.

4 MR. KATZ: Bob, so tell me that 

5 date of the transcript again.

6 MR. MORRIS: 10/24/07.

7 MR. KATZ: 10/24/07. Again, I was 

8 just going off of what was discussed here, but 

9 if that transcript answers the questions for 

10 why and that's satisfactory, then clearly that 

11 does the job. No one is saying that there has 

12 to be another report written. It's really 

13 OCAS looking at what's been already provided 

14 and is that fully explanational.

15 And then you might want to guide 

16 just as you did SC&A and the other parties to 

17 look at the material that they need to look at 

18 to be sure that they understand what you put 

19 forth to explain this, justify this. That's 

20 all I was saying.

21 So if it has all been already 
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1 written and said elsewhere, that's great. 

2 That's less trouble for you guys.

3 DR. MAURO: We're in a window 

4 though before we can move on to the third 

5 item, which is recycled uranium. I would like 

6 to hear a little guidance from the Work Group 

7 whether there's anything that anyone needs to 

8 do related to the original hard copy data 

9 integrity question that was brought up by 

10 Sandra, and, two, whether there's anything 

11 that SC&A should be doing regarding the 

12 construction worker data set for some reason 

13 might be of a different ilk than the total 

14 work data worker set.

15 Right now we have not taken any 

16 action on any of that. We had no intention to 

17 take any action on that, and we look to the 

18 Work Group as to what you'd like done.

19 MEMBER ZIEMER: Sandra?

20 MR. ROLFES: Sandra, did you have 

21 any concerns about construction worker 
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1 monitoring in the original petition?

2 MS. BALDRIDGE: I had just 

3 included subcontractors. So you know, I am 

4 assuming that they would fall under that 

5 inclusion. I've spoken with some, you know, 

6 on my own that, you know, expressed the fact 

7 that there was little protection. There was 

8 little information that they were provided 

9 about what they were even working in or the 

10 danger in the environment; felt very 

11 frustrated, kind of like they were out of the 

12 -- they were subjected to the same danger and 

13 peril without any of the protection or 

14 inclusion in information.

15 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: So, Sandra, in 

16 your original SEC petition, when you call out 

17 contractors, that is basically where the 

18 construction worker --

19 MS. BALDRIDGE: Right.

20 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: -- will fall 

21 under?
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1 MS. BALDRIDGE: Or painters or, 

2 you know, electricians or plumbers.

3 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: That came into 

4 the site to work.

5 MS. BALDRIDGE: Brought in to work 

6 on either maintenance issues beyond what the 

7 regular workers did or for specific projects 

8 for converting them from one process to 

9 another. I think they often went into the 

10 dirt and didn't know what they were dealing 

11 with.

12 MR. DOLL: I know you don't have 

13 public, but I'd like to.

14 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: You'd better 

15 introduce yourself.

16 MR. DOLL: Lou Doll, pipefitter at 

17 the plant. Started in 1983 through 2004; 

18 worked with Stuart, although I didn't know him 

19 very well.

20 And our first job down there was 

21 the pilot plant, and we didn't get urinalysis. 
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1 We didn't get any air monitoring.

2 We, like I told these guys before, 

3 we had to steal a frisker one day and damned 

4 near got fired over it just so we could 

5 justify ourselves, was there anything in 

6 there. When they came in and the painters 

7 painted the place, they painted green so that 

8 none of the material that would spill on the 

9 floors or anything was -- you could see. 

10 Okay?

11 So and some of the other practices 

12 that were there, the in-house people, I mean, 

13 they brought us in a lot of times because it 

14 wasn't things that the in-house people wanted 

15 to do. It fell under Davis-Bacon and that.

16 So they brought us in, some 

17 people, on an interim basis. They called them 

18 interim workers, to do this work, and they 

19 really didn't care, you know, because they 

20 were going to be gone in a month or two, and 

21 be that right or wrong, but that sure is the 
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1 feeling that was there. Because these guys 

2 are going to be back out the door versus the 

3 people that worked for the in-house plant.

4 One thing that bothers me that you 

5 guys touched on, I don't want to infer 

6 anything. I think that every bit of material 

7 that you've taken, that you were given in 

8 honest, above board, you've done a good job 

9 with what you were given. Let me say that 

10 first before I make the second statement.

11 The second statement is my 

12 understanding is I know more about the back 

13 end than the front end, but every one of these 

14 companies that went in there, National Lead of 

15 Ohio, Westinghouse, and Fluor, were on a fee 

16 basis. It was tied to safety with the 

17 Department of Energy and a lot of other 

18 things.

19 As late as 2003 or 2004, just one 

20 little incident that came through was my son 

21 was working out on the -- putting in a liner 
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1 and he hurt his knee, and so they put him in, 

2 and he sat in a trailer so they wouldn't get a 

3 lost time accident because it was tied to the 

4 fee base. I mean, that's the way it worked 

5 down there with safety.

6 MR. HINNEFELD: If you say so.

7 MR. DOLL: And there were other 

8 incidents that came through, and I think, you 

9 know, the feeling is that there were things 

10 covered up down there from the beginning with 

11 National Lead of Ohio through Westinghouse, 

12 through Fluor, that you know, if they didn't 

13 get the fee base, then corporate was coming 

14 back in and finding out why and somebody is 

15 going to go.

16 And so I think there's enough 

17 things that were found like these, you know, 

18 these different things. They had one set of 

19 dust collectors that blew apart and nothing 

20 was made of it and all of a sudden it shows up 

21 in the inquire, and now we've got the Tiger 
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1 Team down there, you know, all of these 

2 different things. Well, why wasn't that 

3 reported up front?

4 So I guess what that does is sow 

5 the seeds of doubt into all the data and how 

6 it was put out there. So, you know, was it 

7 widespread? I don't think so. I think it was 

8 more the individuals that were responsible for 

9 the fee to the company that set the 

10 parameters.

11 But there's more stories about the 

12 green salt and the hydrofluoric and all kinds 

13 of stuff down there and, you know, we could 

14 get to, but I just called two guys and they 

15 said the same thing as I did. 1983, '84, '85, 

16 '86, we didn't get urinalysis for the 

17 construction workers that worked in the power 

18 plant, and we put the system in, and the 

19 byproduct was HF, hydrofluoric, with plenty of 

20 leaks.

21 MR. ROLFES: So if you're 
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1 producing hydrofluoric acid, are you just 

2 producing the hydrofluoric acid or are you 

3 producing --

4 MR. DOLL: It was a byproduct from 

5 the enrichment process to make green salt. He 

6 brought in the hex and the catalytic chambers. 

7 I mean, he mixed it in the catalytic chamber. 

8 Okay?

9 MR. ROLFES: So you're working 

10 with UF6.

11 MR. DOLL: He brought in the hex. 

12 He heated it, put it in the catalytic 

13 chamber, introduced anhydrous ammonia. Green 

14 salt comes out the bottom. Off-gas comes out 

15 the top. Refrigerations get off-gas as HF.

16 MR. ROLFES: Got you. I guess 

17 what we can do is take a look back to see. 

18 You had indicated that you didn't have any 

19 urinalyses conducted in the pilot plant during 

20 that time period from '83 through 1986. What 

21 we can do is take a look back to see if the 
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1 individuals that were working in that area 

2 have any urinalysis data, and if we find that, 

3 for example, no individuals ever participated 

4 in the bioassay program during that time 

5 period, that's an important point.

6 However, if we have indication 

7 that, you know, some of the individuals with 

8 the highest potential for exposure were, 

9 indeed, monitored, what we would do for an 

10 individual that did not have a urine sample 

11 collected from them if we had to complete a 

12 dose reconstruction for a claimant that has 

13 cancer under this program, we would use the 

14 data from those who were monitored, who likely 

15 had higher exposures to assign unmonitored 

16 intakes of uranium to those without uranium 

17 urinalyses.

18 MR. DOLL: To go back, there was 

19 two guys at work in there. One of them was 

20 Paul Sammons, and I'm trying to think of the 

21 other guy's name. Both of them died at a 
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1 young age of lung cancer, right in the later 

2 '80s. Okay? So there's one name that you can 

3 go back to. I know Paul Sammons was in there.

4 And they talk about stuff getting 

5 outside. Well, he went up and cleaned the 

6 fans one day in white coveralls and came back 

7 looking like they were green coveralls. You 

8 know, and that was right where it went to the 

9 outside, using the exhaust fans on the 

10 building at the top catalytic chamber.

11 So there was a lot of material 

12 introduced to the outside from that -- through 

13 that building, which was the talc, which was 

14 the green salt. But I still go back to the 

15 same thing again. My biggest concern is that 

16 the material that you were given wasn't 

17 necessarily -- that there's some big holes in 

18 it -- wasn't necessarily the correct numbers 

19 or whatever you want to call it.

20 MR. ROLFES: Right. I guess that 

21 plays into a little bit, you know, whether a 
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1 worker was monitored. That's something that 

2 we would certainly look at. If we had an 

3 individual who had been diagnosed with cancer 

4 and bio-declaimed at NIOSH or at DOL and sent 

5 to NIOSH for a dose reconstruction, we provide 

6 every individual claim the opportunity to 

7 relay this type of information to us in an 

8 interview.

9 And so an occurrence like that 

10 would be identified for the individual claim. 

11 When we complete the dose reconstruction, we 

12 would take a look at the information that's 

13 provided to us as part of the Department of 

14 Labor initial claim file, as well as any 

15 information provided directly to us via 

16 telephone interview or any other 

17 correspondence. Plus we would use information 

18 from our Site Profile.

19 If we found that that individual 

20 had no DOE monitoring records and had a 

21 potential for exposure during the operational 
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1 period, we would certainly assign intakes to 

2 that individual based upon coworker data, and 

3 we want to make sure that if an individual was 

4 potentially exposed that we have assigned a 

5 claimant favorable internal dose to that 

6 person to insure that we give every benefit of 

7 the doubt to that individual in our dose 

8 reconstruction.

9 MR. DOLL: Well, the last thing 

10 I'll say is I understand that, but everything 

11 goes back to the same thing as to how you do 

12 your dose reconstructions based upon the 

13 numbers that you were given that were produced 

14 for you.

15 Now, if that material was flawed, 

16 then your dose reconstruction is flawed.

17 MR. HINNEFELD: In point, Mark, 

18 rather than get into the dose reconstruction 

19 process, I think the point here is, Lou's 

20 point is, I think, that the construction 

21 workers specifically in the pilot plant from 
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1 '83 till whenever that was finished -- when 

2 they were installing the 64 unit in there, 

3 right?

4 MR. DOLL: It's more a systematic 

5 problem across the plant over the years.

6 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, in terms of 

7 your personal experience.

8 MR. DOLL: My personal experience, 

9 well, I mean, we worked right out there with 

10 the rest of the guys on all those plants, too.

11 MR. HINNEFELD: I know, I know. 

12 But your personal experience was you were not 

13 monitored. You and the construction guys 

14 doing that work were not monitored.

15 MR. DOLL: A lot of the time.

16 MR. HINNEFELD: And you are saying 

17 that that is not just the only place where 

18 that happened.

19 MR. DOLL: Right.

20 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. That's the 

21 point here, is that -- which was the point 
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1 that they were trying to summarize earlier, 

2 which was construction workers, were they 

3 adequately represented and is this the 

4 appropriate database to do a coworker data 

5 study for construction.

6 And so that is an issue that we 

7 either -- if we have addressed, we need to 

8 pull it back out or convince them we need to 

9 address it. Isn't that where we are to get 

10 this going?

11 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Yes, I think 

12 so. I'm still trying to figure out was 

13 Sandra's the data that was put into it.

14 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, now, that 

15 has been captured. I think that was captured 

16 in one of the other comments that either Ted 

17 or John mentioned, was that -- and the 

18 allegation here is that you should not 

19 consider these data reliable because we have 

20 enough instances to make us think they were 

21 not careful in producing reliable data. I 
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1 mean that they were willing to put down data 

2 that fit their purpose rather than what was 

3 true. So that's that statement, and that has 

4 been captured by one of the other things that 

5 John mentioned.

6 And you didn't say it exactly that 

7 way, but that was the issue, right, John?

8 DR. MAURO: Yes.

9 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. So we've 

10 kind of captured these.

11 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay.

12 MR. HINNEFELD: I'm trying to move 

13 on.

14 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: And I realize 

15 that, and I'm trying to, too, but I don't want 

16 to -- I don't want to miss that there's a 

17 question with the data that went into the HIS 

18 data base, the HIS-20 database.

19 So if that's been captured --

20 MR. KATZ: The question is what to 

21 do about that moving forward. What OCAS or 
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1 SC&A or both might have to do to move that 

2 issue forward. That's the question on the 

3 table.

4 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Well, that's 

5 the million dollar question. That's what I'm 

6 trying to get to as a path forward for this. 

7 My suggestion would be because NIOSH is 

8 already -- they've put forth the effort. The 

9 data is good and so forth like that. So I 

10 guess basically what I'm looking at is somehow 

11 that SC&A would be able to look into this, 

12 that there's not -- that the information that 

13 was put in was put in correct.

14 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, you know, 

15 what we can do, Brad, is we can get our team 

16 together and send you a work plan on this 

17 specific question because I think it would be 

18 a little bit difficult to tease out.

19 MR. DOLL: Yes, it would.

20 DR. MAURO: To control costs and 

21 be efficient. You're talking about two new 
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1 items.

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, I'm really 

3 bothered by this. There's no allegations that 

4 the bioassay database have been falsified. 

5 Nobody is alleging that. There's insinuations 

6 that because of these other cases where there 

7 were management pressures in a report, a 

8 public report to make it look good.

9 And, by the way, the data are 

10 still there. I mean, you're not using what 

11 came out in the public. The reason we know 

12 that is because what's been found afterwards. 

13 You still have the information that's usable, 

14 if you were going to use it.

15 DR. MAKHIJANI: The thing that I 

16 was saying, the public reports and the 

17 internal report all contain scrubber 

18 information that was wrong, which was 

19 corrected later by the RAC, and that 

20 information is available.

21 MEMBER ZIEMER: You could correct 
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1 it and could identify what was done 

2 incorrectly.

3 DR. MAKHIJANI: Right.

4 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: But the fact 

5 that that was done, I have a hard time even in 

6 spite of that saying, therefore, all of the 

7 bioassay data are suspect. I don't think it 

8 follows logically unless somebody can show in 

9 the same way they did here that something 

10 similar happened, and they still have that 

11 data, and we know how to correct in that first 

12 case. I mean, it was still identifiable.

13 DR. MAKHIJANI: Right. I mean, 

14 there were obviously, you know, a whole method 

15 of doing it with uncertainties, but yes, that 

16 data was collected.

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: And I still say 

18 what I said earlier today. To take a database 

19 this size and even if you had a few instances 

20 that would have virtually no impact on a 

21 coworker model. You'd have to have a giant 
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1 scheme involving virtually every technician, 

2 every manager, every foreman in the place 

3 conspiring to do that. To me it's 

4 implausible. I'll just start with that.

5 And I don't object to SC&A taking 

6 a look at this issue, but I think it's just 

7 chasing straws just to say, well, we can't 

8 trust anything because of these other cases. 

9 I mean, this is a big, big database over 

10 decades. It's just implausible to me, and I 

11 recognize because, I mean, we ran into this, 

12 and I'll just tell you because I was 

13 responsible for the Tiger Team so. So we've 

14 seen stuff go on at every lab. Every DOE lab 

15 had stuff like this. This isn't the first 

16 place where these -- there have been places 

17 where people have manipulated the system, and 

18 I've seen it in my own institution now where 

19 people, you know -- I'm not going to wear my 

20 film badge because it's going to put me over 

21 and I'll get into trouble.
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1 For an individual or a few 

2 individuals that occurs, and it shows up later 

3 one way or the other. You get a guy that's 

4 always right up at the limit and never over, 

5 you say something is going on here. Somebody 

6 is doing something, although management-wise 

7 that's often how you work also. You let them 

8 go to the limit and then you stop work.

9 But I don't want to overburden 

10 this, but you get my point. I think it's 

11 wrong to assume a priori that that whole 

12 database is suspect because of these few cases 

13 where people have done some bad things. I 

14 mean they --

15 MS. BALDRIDGE: But you're not 

16 going to distinguish what portion of it is --

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: I recognize that.

18 MS. BALDRIDGE: -- and what isn't.

19 MEMBER ZIEMER: But nonetheless, 

20 there's always a few people like that, but I 

21 also recognize at Fernald and other places, 
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1 I'll bet you that 99 percent of the workers 

2 were high integrity people, all the way top to 

3 bottom. There's always a few, and you get 

4 them in every institution in all kinds of 

5 circumstances, not just radiological and 

6 health and safety issues. It has often been 

7 this way, and I know, Brad, you see this.

8 People want to look good, and 

9 sometimes they take the actual data and they 

10 present it in a way that makes it look good. 

11 You know, they don't actually change it, but 

12 they make it look good. And sometimes we do 

13 that in the way we write reports. We like to 

14 make ourselves look good.

15 But we do go back to this original 

16 data. I just add that as a word of caution. 

17 If SC&A can come up with some way to test the 

18 system, but you're trying to sort of prove a 

19 negative.

20 DR. MAURO: Well, I'm not 

21 advocating one way or the other, but I would 
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1 like to point out the last time we were 

2 confronted with this issue was at the Nevada 

3 Test Site where the claim was made that lots 

4 and lots of workers left their badges behind. 

5 We mobilized an effort that was enormous. We 

6 interviewed an enormous number of people, and 

7 we found out a lot of data was left behind, 

8 but it did not have any effect.

9 We could not find; we could not 

10 come out of the back end of a very expensive 

11 process with a conclusion, a conclusive proof 

12 that, in fact, the amount of data that was 

13 left behind was such a nature that you could 

14 not build one of those graphs, and it was 

15 after spending a lot of money. You had to do 

16 it because it was the heart; it was the heart 

17 of the NTS petition, but it was no small 

18 effort.

19 Now, whether or not the Work Group 

20 decides this is something worth pursuing, but 

21 I can say this, based on previous experience 
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1 if you go down that road it's not a small 

2 effort.

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: I think we need to 

4 know how you would do it and what is it going 

5 to entail.

6 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: That's part of 

7 my issue, and I agree with what Paul says, but 

8 going on the other side of the fence, when you 

9 see all of these other issues that have been 

10 tweaked to make it took good.

11 The workers, a lot of them, have 

12 no control over their bioassay programs. This 

13 is all done behind someplace else. They have 

14 no way there, but I do know that when things 

15 get accelerated a little bit higher, this is 

16 one of the reasons why a lot of the bioassay 

17 programs, they try to get away from company 

18 having --

19 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right, and do 

20 independent stuff.

21 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: And I know 
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1 this, and this is my difficulty as what path 

2 forward we need to go to. Maybe we need to 

3 table this one for right now and proceed on --

4 maybe give Arjun and even NIOSH a chance of 

5 maybe suggestions because, to tell you the 

6 truth, I don't know which way to be able to 

7 go. I don't want to go to a big expense of 

8 this, but I also want to be able to make sure 

9 the petitioners know that we have adequately 

10 looked at this data, and that we can see no 

11 signs that it was manipulated in any way.

12 MS. BALDRIDGE: Can I add one 

13 thing? You're talking about things that are 

14 plausible. What I find is really hard to 

15 believe, but is a fact, is that my father had 

16 two physicals. One was his last physical and 

17 one was his physical when he retired. The 

18 same physician conducted those physicals, 

19 exactly the same format. The omission was the 

20 condition of his lungs when he left. No 

21 statement on his retirement.
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1 Within five months and X-ray 

2 showed that he had lung cancer. Now, I know 

3 that was evident before he left, and someone 

4 in their unscrupulous way or distorted 

5 thinking felt justified in withhold that 

6 information to the point that it was no longer 

7 treatable.

8 Now, where are ethics there? It's 

9 just another one of a multiple of pieces 

10 throughout that 40-year picture, him being 

11 there 13 years, whatever, that says what if, 

12 you know. The integrity is questionable.

13 Whether you can prove that or not 

14 prove it, I think it's probably an issue that 

15 will never be resolved unless, you know, 

16 documents can be found. Whether there's time 

17 and effort worth that, I can't say that it 

18 would justify the process, but the point is 

19 this is a mindset that was prevalent not just 

20 on one occasion, but periodically through a 

21 limited number of people, but it does 
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1 represent a problem with truthfulness.

2 MEMBER GRIFFON: Brad, can I just 

3 say one thing before? I'm sure you want to 

4 get on to Item 3 pretty soon. This may be a 

5 suggestion for path forward here. I think it 

6 wouldn't be a bad idea, and I don't disagree 

7 with Paul. I think it might be a reasonable 

8 idea though to have SC&A just to keep the ball 

9 moving develop or at least outline an approach 

10 that they would use assuming the Work Group 

11 decided to go down that path to test the 

12 concern about falsifying records, you know, 

13 similar to the Nevada Test Site.

14 I mean, I think I want to get a 

15 sense of how they would do this with bioassay 

16 samples and, you know, sort of the extent of 

17 it if we have to go down that path.

18 And then the other item I had, 

19 listening to Ted, I guess I want to put a 

20 little more emphasis on that last point that 

21 Ted raised, which was the question of the 
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1 discrepancies that NIOSH found. I looked in 

2 the report while some of these discussions 

3 were going on here, and I can't find any, you 

4 know, sort of concluding remarks saying that, 

5 you know, even for non-discrepancies, we see

6 no bias to indicate that. You know, sort of 

7 the notion that they were dropping all of the 

8 high samples intentionally or something out of 

9 the HIS-20 database.

10 I think that at least for me if 

11 that can be clarified, I don't know that you 

12 have to rewrite the whole report, but I mean, 

13 I don't see that in the report. If it's 

14 there, if you can point me to it, that would 

15 be great, but if it's not there, it must may 

16 be an action item that would be to clarify 

17 that before the next meeting.

18 MR. ROLFES: It is in there Mark, 

19 and if you can give me just a second, I will 

20 point you to the specific page in our 

21 analysis.
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1 MEMBER GRIFFON: Okay. I may have 

2 the wrong draft, too. I thought I had the 

3 most current draft, but I --

4 MR. ROLFES: Okay. I've got the 

5 comparison of FMPC hard copy bioassay records 

6 to the HIS-20 database, and the date on it is 

7 March 10th, 2008, and I'm going to skip all 

8 the way down to the conclusion, page seven of 

9 eight. I'll read the conclusion.

10 It says, for this study 33 

11 electronic files scanned from hard copy 

12 bioassay results for FMPC were examined. 

13 There were eight files which were primary 

14 subcontractor or gross alpha-beta results. 

15 These files were eliminated since they would 

16 not affect the coworker study of FMPC 

17 employees. Twenty of the remaining 25 files 

18 met an acceptable quality level of one 

19 percent. Five files did not meet the 

20 acceptable quality level, but were unlikely to 

21 result in any significant changes to the 
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1 coworker study for FMPC if the data missing 

2 from HIS-20 were to be included.

3 In addition to the subcontractor 

4 results and alpha-beta results, it appears 

5 that there were some issues with the early New 

6 York Operations Office data, the first two 

7 quarters of 1957, 1961 through 1963 data that 

8 may have been part of a workplace monitoring 

9 program and some data collected as a result of 

10 incidents in the 1950s. Given that there were 

11 efforts to hand enter the data when it was 

12 discovered, it is unclear as to what NIOSH was 

13 able to find even a few files that were not 

14 completely entered into HIS-20.

15 As mentioned previously, at least 

16 one possibility is that the data was 

17 intentionally not place into HIS-20 based on 

18 additional information not analyzed by NIOSH.

19 MEMBER GRIFFON: Okay. I still 

20 don't see the --

21 MR. ROLFES: Okay.
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1 MEMBER GRIFFON: I mean, the 

2 closest I saw was the end of that first 

3 paragraph.

4 MR. ROLFES: Yes.

5 MEMBER GRIFFON: It's unlike that 

6 it would have had an insignificant to coworker 

7 models.

8 MR. ROLFES: Right. Now, in a 

9 separate analysis --

10 MEMBER GRIFFON: I don't know 

11 whether it is or not. I don't know. 

12 Unlikely, right.

13 MR. ROLFES: I think if I could 

14 have Gene chime in because I believe we had a 

15 subsequent discussion of this where we did 

16 actually look at the specific urine samples 

17 that weren't entered into the HIS-20 database. 

18 We looked at those and found that some of 

19 them were above the intakes or some of them 

20 were above the average concentration. Some 

21 were below and some were the same. So we 
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1 didn't find any bias.

2 MEMBER GRIFFON: I guess that's 

3 what we want to look at.

4 MR. ROLFES: And if I could have 

5 Gene on the phone.

6 MEMBER GRIFFON: Sure. Yes, just 

7 list them out and share it with us. Share it 

8 graphically, I think that would solve it right 

9 there, you know.

10 MR. ROLFES: Okay. Gene.

11 MR. POTTER: Mark, you'll find 

12 that discussion in the discussion for each of 

13 the files that did not meet the AQL.

14 MEMBER GRIFFON: Oh, okay.

15 MR. POTTER: The detail is in the 

16 spreadsheet has accompanied this, which 

17 hopefully you have access to.

18 MEMBER GRIFFON: Okay.

19 MR. POTTER: But the discussion 

20 for each file that did not meet the AQL 

21 includes what the specific analysis was like, 
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1 and you can see the detail on the spreadsheet.

2 MEMBER GRIFFON: Okay. Because 

3 I'm looking at the three that you noted that 

4 had a large number of discrepancies, 

5 referenced ID 4399, 3169, and 40322. Do you 

6 know the years on those offhand? I think one 

7 of them is '52.

8 I'm just wondering if there's any 

9 trend that the earlier years were more 

10 problematic. Instead of looking at this 

11 overall, were there more problems in the early 

12 years? Are these all in the '50s I guess is 

13 my question.

14 MR. ROLFES: Mark, this is Mark, 

15 and let me point you to the Fernald HIS-20 

16 comparison Excel spreadsheet, and it is on the 

17 K drive for --

18 MEMBER GRIFFON: Yes, I was 

19 looking at it a few minutes ago and then I got 

20 logged off of this. Anyway --

21 MR. ROLFES: Okay. The Fernald 
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1 HIS-20 comparison Excel spreadsheet dated 

2 March 12th, 2008 has information that Gene was 

3 reporting, and what we had done when we 

4 sampled the HIS-20 database, we had selected 

5 results from the '50s, '60s, '70s, and '80s.

6 And if you take a look back, I'd 

7 have to take a look through each of these 

8 spreadsheets, and I don't think --

9 MEMBER GRIFFON: Yes, we, too, and 

10 I guess that's one of the questions I would 

11 ask, and I'm going to look at that myself. Do 

12 they all fall in the '50s or you know?

13 MR. POTTER: And you can see in 

14 the summary of the problematic ones what years 

15 they were from.

16 MS. AL-NABULSI: Okay.

17 MR. KATZ: So just going back to 

18 the action item, I mean, it seems like if OCAS 

19 can focus a little bit on that question to 

20 Mark and the clarification about where the 

21 information is that puts this to bed -- you 
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1 can do that as followup and you don't have to 

2 sort through it now, Mark.

3 MEMBER GRIFFON: Yes, that's fine. 

4 Thank you.

5 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: I guess I'm at 

6 the point right now of, I guess, John, if you 

7 could just -- the other part of the database, 

8 but we don't want to -- we want to look at 

9 what it's going to --

10 DR. MAURO: Right. I understand. 

11 Our marching orders are very simple right 

12 now. We're to regroup amongst ourselves and 

13 give some thought about where there's a 

14 plausible way of taking a look to see whether 

15 or not there might be some problems, what it 

16 might involved and whether it can or can't be 

17 done, and we'll just report back.

18 So it will be a very -- it will be 

19 regrouping with our crew and say, listen. Is 

20 there any way to come at something like this?

21 The folks that know the database, 
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1 Bob Barton knows the database, and whether or 

2 not there's a way to get a handle on this and 

3 let you know, and if it turns out pretty 

4 quickly, great. If it turns out it's a big 

5 deal, you know, you make your call.

6 MR. KATZ: But what's what 

7 resources that would require --

8 DR. MAURO: Yes, exactly.

9 MR. KATZ: -- and keep in mind 

10 that you'd want to keep those --

11 DR. MAURO: I listened 100 

12 percent. So that's that. Okay?

13 MR. KATZ: Okay.

14 DR. MAURO: The other half was the 

15 construction worker. Now, I'll tell you right 

16 now that that's an easy problem. All right? 

17 You see this card over here? Let's make 

18 believe these are all the workers. The same 

19 thing, the same story. These are all the 

20 workers. All right?

21 If there's a way to go into the 
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1 database, and maybe someone could tell me very 

2 quickly, we know who the workers are and the 

3 construction workers. We know go in and do a 

4 sort, boom, drop out all of the construction 

5 workers, and plot then on the same thing.

6 That plot looks like this.

7 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: I realize that. 

8 I think actually NIOSH is going to -- I think 

9 this is kind of going to be an item for NIOSH 

10 of how they're going to handle the 

11 construction workers. I think that's where it 

12 comes down to. I think that will fall into 

13 NIOSH and how they're going to handle the 

14 construction workers, subcontractors, 

15 whatever, because that is part of the SEC.

16 So that would be --

17 MR. ROLFES: Not all 

18 subcontractors were construction workers. 

19 So --

20 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Right. Well, I 

21 think --
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1 MR. ROLFES: They used to deliver 

2 ice.

3 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Right, right. 

4 Well, I think that's how that comes in there 

5 because we got in this construction worker 

6 issue before. So I think that one falls into 

7 NIOSH's work there.

8 MR. ROLFES: Yes. There is, you 

9 know, a large food service, you know, 

10 companies coming in and other products that 

11 aren't related to radioactive material.

12 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Right. Well, I 

13 was looking more at the rust. I know they had 

14 several contractors come in and do a lot of 

15 that stuff, and those were all construction 

16 workers and so forth like this.

17 MR. ROLFES: I know that we have a 

18 file specific to Rust Engineering employees.

19 Gene, do you happen to know if we 

20 have looked at any of the data from Rust 

21 Engineering in our analysis of the HIS-20 
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1 data?

2 MR. POTTER: You notice in the 

3 report we talk about specifically excluding 

4 those, and I think we've found initially that 

5 the files that we managed to capture did not 

6 appear to be in HIS-20 for the old subs. I 

7 think this was fairly early data. I'd have to 

8 refresh my memory on that, but I think you 

9 will find that at least some of the stuff we 

10 have captured is probably not in HIS-20 for 

11 subs.

12 MR. ROLFES: Okay. That sounds 

13 right.

14 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay. That 

15 answers quite a bit.

16 Are you guys treating the 

17 construction workers a little bit different 

18 than the normal workers?

19 MR. ROLFES: Let me explain a 

20 little bit once again. You know, we've got 

21 the HIS-20 database that we're using to assign 
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1 intakes to unmonitored workers from Fernald 

2 just because the construction worker data 

3 wasn't entered into HIS-20. If that's the 

4 case, that doesn't mean we don't have it 

5 because when we receive -- we did do a data 

6 capture, and we have those hard copy records 

7 in our database. So because we have those and 

8 because we also receive individual specific 

9 dosimetry information from the Department of 

10 Energy, we would have that data for a claimant 

11 if they were monitored.

12 So we can go back to take a look 

13 to see, you know, I mean.

14 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: I just want to 

15 make sure that we cover how the construction 

16 workers -- if it was going to be done the 

17 exact same way if they have the data and so 

18 forth. This has basically come down to NIOSH 

19 and how they were handed out.

20 MR. ROLFES: Right, right. As 

21 John Mauro had said, you know, if the 
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1 construction worker data all indicate, you 

2 know, higher intakes, then something needs to 

3 be done. If we find that the intakes are 

4 roughly the same or less, then I think we're 

5 okay.

6 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay. That 

7 sounds good.

8 Well, now that we got rid of the 

9 two small issues, we're going to --

10 (Laughter.)

11 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: -- we're going 

12 to proceed on to issue -- unless there's 

13 anymore discussion -- we're going to proceed 

14 on with Issue 3, which is recycled uranium. 

15 This is basically NIOSH will review the issues 

16 raised by SC&A in the White Paper and 

17 determine if followup investigation is needed, 

18 and so forth.

19 So that's to you, Mark.

20 MR. ROLFES: All right. I 

21 apologize. I didn't expect to get the ball 
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1 back this quick.

2 DR. MAURO: Do you want me to set 

3 -- tee it up? I could tee it up for you a 

4 little bit.

5 MR. ROLFES: Well --

6 DR. MAURO: Tee it up?

7 MR. ROLFES: Well, it's a pretty 

8 complicated report, you know. We have 11 

9 different --

10 DR. MAURO: Yes.

11 MR. ROLFES: -- and it's quite 

12 complex, and we discussed this during the 

13 phone calls, and I think what you decided 

14 during the phone call was that NIOSH would 

15 give us a formal response.

16 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Right. Okay. 

17 We'll just sit tight there.

18 MR. ROLFES: All right. Well, the 

19 response that I had previously issued was that 

20 OCAS does not intend to reexamine the DOE 

21 provided recycled uranium data, and I just 
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1 relied upon the previously calculated 

2 bootstrap means for the plutonium 

3 concentrations in recycled uranium.

4 A brief review of the data show 

5 that the log-normal means and the bootstrap 

6 means both support the claimant favorability 

7 of the NIOSH default to 100 parts per billion 

8 on a uranium mass basis. This default is ten 

9 times higher than Fernald's historical 

10 administrative control for recycled uranium 

11 shipments.

12 The exceptions to the claimant 

13 favorable default of 100 plutonium parts per 

14 billion would be Paducah tower ash residue 

15 shipped in several T-hoppers to Fernald for 

16 which additional engineering controls did come 

17 into place. They also included some personal 

18 protective equipment, such as air line 

19 respirators, and also put individuals on 

20 plutonium bioassay programs.

21 Those plutonium bioassay results 
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1 for employees are in the HIS-20 database. We 

2 excluded those specifically from our analysis 

3 of the uranium data because they were 

4 separate, but the data is in the HIS-20 

5 database, and you know, from what I recall, 

6 there were no positive plutonium results 

7 except for maybe a handful of individuals, 

8 maybe ten people, and they had done some 

9 initial studies and evaluations. I believe 

10 they had done some lung counting on those 

11 individuals as well up at Hanford.

12 So we didn't feel that it would be 

13 a good idea to go back because there is quite 

14 a bit of data, once again, that we didn't feel 

15 would put us in any better position.

16 Now, our approach for --

17 DR. MAKHIJANI: Just as a point of 

18 information, Mark. Is what you are reading 

19 from your White Paper?

20 MR. ROLFES: Yes, it's my response 

21 to the issues that had been sent out by John 
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1 Mauro. 

2 DR. GLOVER: Here I recall there 

3 were some points that were raised like the 

4 uranium from the tanks. I think we agreed 

5 that we weren't -- well, we had not had time 

6 to add it.

7 DR. MAURO: Now we're getting to 

8 where we --

9 DR. GLOVER: All right. We had 

10 not had time to adequately move forward. That 

11 was the response. We had not. So we can't 

12 adequately -- you've got, you know, 12 or 13 

13 different things. Some of them require input 

14 from Hanford. We have data on the tanks and 

15 what happened, but we haven't had time to 

16 really trust these as they properly should be, 

17 as we can.

18 DR. MAURO: I think it --

19 DR. MAKHIJANI: That's what I was 

20 thinking.

21 DR. MAURO: Yes, I want everybody 
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1 on the same page because my sense is that 

2 everyone is looking at this from a different 

3 level, and I want to get everybody on the same 

4 level.

5 You're 100 parts per billion and 

6 you're mixed for your reference approach. The 

7 reason we had a problem with it is we believe 

8 it probably useful for the time at which the 

9 PUREX process was being applied to recycled 

10 uranium coming out of Hanford over a certain 

11 time period, which represents a large fraction 

12 of the uranium that was recycled, a lot of it.

13 However, we understand that there 

14 was recycled uranium coming in Fernald that 

15 came in from lots of other different kinds of 

16 processes. This is separate from the tower 

17 ash analysis I understand the tower ash. 

18 Let's put the tower ash over here. I'm not 

19 worried about that right now.

20 MR. ROLFES: All right.

21 DR. MAURO: Now, you know, there 
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1 are processes that were other than PUREX. In 

2 fact, Hans is on the line. He identified a 

3 couple of them. He has some information, and 

4 those processes were such, the material they 

5 started with, whether it was the tanks and the 

6 processes, the chemical processes they used 

7 were substantively different than the PUREX 

8 process, and right now we have no knowledge, 

9 and we were not able to find or have an 

10 appreciation of whether or not the mix that 

11 you folks have selected as your default mix 

12 is, in fact, applicable to the recycled 

13 uranium that came out of these other 

14 processes, other than the PUREX process.

15 And in fact, that's my sensibility 

16 of where the problem is right now, and we need 

17 to hear back from you why you believe the mix 

18 that you selected is also applicable to 

19 uranium that was recycled from these other 

20 processes and perhaps other facilities.

21 DR. MAKHIJANI: John, in addition, 
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1 I just -- you know, the report that we sent 

2 you is quite complicated. For instance, in 

3 your White Paper, you used dust collector data 

4 from 1985 to argue that what you've done is 

5 claimant favorable because the average 

6 plutonium concentrations in dust collector 

7 data were less than 100 parts per billion.

8 However, in making your average, 

9 you omitted the highest concentration of 

10 plutonium in the dust collector data from the 

11 Titan Mill, which was 3,548 parts per billion. 

12 It's in your White Paper.

13 And also in the same dust 

14 collection data from 1985, the strontium-90 

15 ratios for plutonium varied by four orders of 

16 magnitude. So the White Paper that we sent 

17 you is a fairly complex document that we 

18 didn't agree with your reason for excluding 

19 the Titan Mill data. You referred that, you 

20 know, it has something to do with raffinates, 

21 and I didn't agree that it had anything to do 
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1 with raffinates.

2 So you know, I'm with Sam, that I 

3 think there are certain issues that are 

4 covered by saying we looked at the tower ash 

5 and so on, but there are several other issues, 

6 including the U plant thing that John raised 

7 that are in the report that to the best of my 

8 understanding NIOSH has not addressed, and we 

9 just looked at the working group and to NIOSH 

10 to say whether you're standing where you are 

11 or whether you're going to address them, and I 

12 understand from Sam you are going to address 

13 them.

14 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: I guess my 

15 standpoint is that really at this time you 

16 guys aren't really -- you don't have it in a 

17 formal form to be able to reply back to us, do 

18 you?

19 DR. GLOVER: No, not at this time. 

20 We can't. We're not going to be able to make 

21 a response that's --
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1 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay.

2 DR. GLOVER: No, we're not going 

3 to be able to do that.

4 MR. ROLFES: What exactly is the 

5 issue? Do you have indication that the 

6 individuals who were working with Titan Mill 

7 samples or Titan Mill waste, do you have 

8 indication that they never participated in the 

9 plutonium bioassay program that was in place? 

10 Is that the issue?

11 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, you're using 

12 100 parts per billion.

13 MR. ROLFES: Right.

14 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes, I don't know 

15 that they participated or didn't participate. 

16 I mean, and I don't believe that you 

17 presented any information to show that they 

18 did or didn't. There wasn't a lot of 

19 plutonium, and this is just one snapshot. 

20 Dust collectors were emptied, right?

21 MR. ROLFES: Right. Yes, sir.
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1 DR. MAKHIJANI: The same dust 

2 collector wasn't over there.

3 Now, in 1985 you have dust 

4 collector data showing a huge range of 

5 neptunium to plutonium rations, a huge range 

6 of technetium to plutonium ratios, a huge 

7 range of strontium to plutonium ratios that 

8 far exceed the choices that you have made.

9 So there is the question of the 

10 plutonium concentration in itself. There's 

11 the question of whether a variety of different 

12 recycle type of uranium were used, which I 

13 would argue is indicated by just this one 1985 

14 snapshot.

15 Now, the DOE itself has said 

16 caution against back extrapolation of this 

17 data. You've got a fundamental data 

18 validation issue to use in an SEC context in 

19 which the DOE reports were all done as 

20 materials balance exercises. 

21 Materials balance exercises are 
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1 macro exercises for figuring out where all of 

2 plutonium went. That's why the DOE got into 

3 this stuff. Whether that's an adequate 

4 exercise to back extrapolate -- so all I'm 

5 saying is I've reviewed what we sent you and I 

6 also, again -- and I also reviewed in part 

7 what you wrote, and as I understand it then, 

8 from my opinion there are a number of 

9 outstanding issues, and I'm happy to go over 

10 them in detail that haven't been addressed, 

11 but if NIOSH is going to address them, then 

12 simply, you know, we should wait for that 

13 time.

14 MR. ROLFES: Let me set the 

15 context a little bit to explain how we would 

16 assign an intake from the other radionuclides 

17 right now. Basically when we would receive a 

18 case for a dose reconstruction at NIOSH, we 

19 would first go to the DOE response files and 

20 take a look at the uranium urinalyses there.

21 If there were none, we would 
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1 assign the coworker intakes of uranium as the 

2 very first basic step of an internal dose 

3 reconstruction.

4 Now, this sort of goes back to my 

5 first response that I had previously issued, 

6 and my response for number one, the issues 

7 that we discussed today, I said the 

8 application of the 50th percentile uranium 

9 intake to an unmonitored worker will likely 

10 overestimate that unmonitored worker's actual 

11 intake, giving the simplifying assumptions 

12 applied by NIOSH during the dose 

13 reconstruction process.

14 Some of these assumptions specific 

15 to internal dose reconstruction include, but 

16 are not limited to the following:

17 The assumption that the employee 

18 was chronically exposed for an entire year.

19 The assumption that the employee 

20 was exposed to the uranium compound that 

21 resulted in the highest internal dose to the 
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1 target organ of concern during the dose 

2 reconstruction.

3 The assumption that the employee 

4 was exposed to the radioactive materials via 

5 the exposure pathway that resulted in the 

6 highest internal dose to the target organ.

7 The claimant favorable assumptions 

8 that the uranium was enriched above what the 

9 empirical data demonstrate to us.

10 The calculation of internal dose 

11 to the target organ using the single uranium 

12 isotope from a mixture, such as U-234, which 

13 delivers the largest internal dose.

14 These are just some of the basic 

15 assumptions. So we use that information to 

16 reconstruct the uranium intake.

17 Now, on top of that claimant 

18 favorable uranium intake, we go a step further 

19 and we apply intakes of plutonium, neptunium 

20 and technetium, and these are based upon the 

21 100 parts per billion of plutonium on the 
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1 uranium ash basis.

2 Historically, plutonium 

3 concentrations in uranium sent back to the 

4 Fernald site were controlled at levels of ten 

5 parts per billion or less. Now, we feel that 

6 to apply a chronic intake over an individual's 

7 history of employment using coworker intakes 

8 or their actual uranium urinalysis data, 

9 because we're already overestimating those 

10 uranium intakes, we'll likely be 

11 overestimating the plutonium intakes and the 

12 neptunium intakes and the technetium intakes.

13 When it comes down to it, if you 

14 take a look at some of the fission product 

15 contaminants, like technetium and strontium, 

16 the doses imparted by those radionuclides are 

17 typically not included in a dose 

18 reconstruction because they're less than a 

19 millirem.

20 The plutonium and neptunium can be 

21 significant for a certain party of organs, and 
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1 so maybe what we need to do in order to better 

2 address this is show the impact of how one 

3 batch of elevated plutonium contaminated 

4 materials, how that might affect a specific 

5 case, and maybe we can complete a dose 

6 reconstruction or a sample dose reconstruction 

7 to demonstrate. No?

8 DR. MAKHIJANI: We understand. I 

9 think we have a very clear understanding of 

10 what you're doing.

11 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: I hate to get 

12 in the middle of this, but I really don't 

13 think that we can address this adequately 

14 until we have a response back. I'm sorry.

15 DR. GLOVER: I think we just leave 

16 it right now. In trying to come up with a 

17 bunch -- we will have a -- and we may not 

18 respond to every point. We certainly will 

19 review it and see which things seem to be the 

20 priority, but we commit to coming back with 

21 it.
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1 DR. MAURO: It's really simple. 

2 You have a default mix that you're going to 

3 use as part of your coworker model. We have 

4 raised for a variety of reasons why that mix 

5 -- there are questions whether or not that mix 

6 is, in fact, claimant favorable.

7 DR. MAKHIJANI: Whether it's 

8 bounding under 42 CFR --

9 DR. MAURO: Right, because 

10 remember I would be --

11 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, we're in 42 

12 CFR 83.

13 DR. MAURO: Right. I would be the 

14 first to admit that on average if I was 

15 looking at 100,000 workers, and I was going to 

16 say I want to find out the average intake in 

17 the aggregate, the approach you take is going 

18 to be conservative.

19 But we're not trying to do that. 

20 We want to make sure every worker one by one 

21 by one at different times, different places, 
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1 different jobs are, in fact, being -- from 

2 different organs, that their doses are being 

3 reconstructed in a way that a plausible --

4 decide to do it correct and reasonably 

5 bounded, sufficient accuracy.

6 I think that you have an 

7 obligation to put to bed the concerns 

8 regarding the mixes that you've seen in 

9 various data, the concerns that Hans has 

10 looked into. Though you're seeing the six 

11 percent or ten percent out of the PUREX 

12 process, we don't know what the mix is in 

13 terms of percent -- not percent -- parts per 

14 billion. 

15 We don't know what they are, and 

16 these other processes that were going on 

17 concurrently and prior to the PUREX process.

18 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, in fact, you 

19 know, the criterion at Hanford for UNH was 80 

20 parts per billion in 1951. So, you know, I 

21 take Sam at his word. It's quote in here. 
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1 This other complication is in there about 

2 blending and so on. We don't know whether it 

3 was ever done. It just needs to be gotten 

4 into.

5 You know, I reviewed the whole 

6 report in preparing for this, and I defer to 

7 Sam. I think it's just right. I take him at 

8 his word.

9 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay. We're 

10 going to move on to Issue 4. NIOSH will 

11 respond to us in writing. 

12 We're going to proceed on to Issue 

13 4 which is radon breath analysis associated 

14 with reconstruction with Ra-226 and thorium 

15 exposure.

16 Who has got that one? I think 

17 NIOSH has. NIOSH has that responsibility.

18 MR. ROLFES: I don't know if the 

19 best way to address this would be to point you 

20 to the sample dose reconstruction that I had 

21 provided to the Advisory Board back in 
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1 February of 2006 when I presented the initial 

2 evaluation. It clearly demonstrated I believe 

3 it was internal dose reconstruction three. It 

4 was a sample dose reconstruction provided to 

5 the Advisory Board which shows how we would 

6 interpret radon breath samples to estimate a 

7 radium body burden using information from 

8 OTIB-0025.

9 From there we would go back. 

10 Sign-in takes other radionuclides based upon 

11 the isotopic contents of Silos 1 and 2.

12 DR. MAURO: Well, subsequent to 

13 the position we've taken our report made a 

14 couple of points. That is, radon breath 

15 analysis using the protocol that you folks 

16 have identified -- and Joyce is on the phone 

17 and she could certainly weigh in -- the 

18 general sensibility is that, yes, that 

19 protocol will work. That is, if you have a 

20 body burden of radium-226 and you do the radon 

21 breath analysis in accordance with the 
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1 protocol you lay out in the OTIB-0025, you'll 

2 probably come up with a pretty good estimate 

3 of the body burden of radium-226.

4 So notwithstanding, I mean, 

5 certainly let's for a moment assume that 

6 that's fundamentally a sound approach, well 

7 accepted by the scientific community.

8 Now, the concern that we raise 

9 that transcends your example is that we know 

10 that it's going to be difficult; that you have 

11 radon breath data for certain people at 

12 certain times doing certain jobs, but we also 

13 know that there are people out there at 

14 different times, and the question becomes 

15 doing different jobs does the radon breath 

16 data that you have -- basically you're 

17 building a coworker model. You're saying we 

18 have radon breath data for a bunch of worker, 

19 and here they are.

20 Now we're saying that we know 

21 there are other workers working at other jobs 
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1 at other times that you don't have radon 

2 breath data, and we need some level of 

3 assurance that the coworker model that you're 

4 building, using the data that you do have, can 

5 be appropriately applied -- and this is only 

6 radium now. I'm only talking radium now --

7 can be applied to these other workers. There 

8 are holes.

9 Now, we'd like to hear a little 

10 bit more about why the radon breath data that 

11 you do have in your data set for the workers 

12 you have can be applied to these other 

13 workers, and we identified in our report what 

14 the time periods were, what the job categories 

15 were; whether or not there's anything about 

16 those other workers that perhaps their 

17 exposures were substantively different than 

18 the ones you do have radon breath data for, 

19 and we want to hear more about that.

20 MR. ROLFES: All right.

21 DR. MAURO: Now, and the other one 
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1 is very simple. The thorium-230, there are 

2 situations that have occurred in the past 

3 where there was thorium-230 but no radium. So 

4 the use of the ratio of the radium to the 

5 thorium-230 will not always work, and we want 

6 to hear a little bit.

7 Now, I understand from our 

8 conversation last week that you folks are 

9 working that problem and the White Paper is on 

10 its way.

11 MR. ROLFES: We sent it.

12 DR. MAURO: Oh, you sent it out.

13 MR. ROLFES: We submitted it to 

14 you.

15 DR. MAURO: Okay. Great, great. 

16 So now the ball is in our ball park now.

17 MR. ROLFES: Yes.

18 DR. MAURO: Okay.

19 MR. ROLFES: Correct.

20 DR. MAURO: So bottom line is, 

21 okay, they responded to the thorium problem. 
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1 The ball is in our park to review it because 

2 we were given the green light during the 

3 previous meeting to do it. 

4 We will do it.

5 MR. ROLFES: Okay. Let me --

6 DR. MAURO: The first item is 

7 still on the table.

8 MR. ROLFES: Okay. Let me point 

9 out first the thorium-230 White Paper that 

10 we've developed, it was put out onto the K: 

11 drive or, yes, the O: drive per you on January 

12 20th of this year, and let's see. I don't 

13 know if you want to go through any of that 

14 information right now.

15 DR. MAKHIJANI: Can you tell us 

16 where it is?

17 MR. ROLFES: Yes, I sure can. If 

18 you go into your K: drive under all the files 

19 that are there and quick find.

20 DR. MAKHIJANI: This is for the 

21 document review?
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1 MR. ROLFES: Yes, that's correct. 

2 May be documents review under Fernald.

3 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes.

4 MR. ROLFES: And if you go to the 

5 top column that you've got name, size, type, 

6 and date modified.

7 DR. MAKHIJANI: It's under the 

8 main Fernald directory?

9 MR. ROLFES: That's correct. I 

10 guess the easiest way might be to click on the 

11 date modified column there and it should have 

12 something that pops up last week.

13 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes.

14 MR. ROLFES: And it's dated 

15 1/2010.

16 DR. MAURO: Okay. So let's look 

17 at it.

18 MR. ROLFES: I believe I sent it 

19 out in an e-mail as well because it was 

20 Privacy Act cleared. Let me see if I can find 

21 the e-mail, as well.
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1 DR. GLOVER: The e-mail occurred 

2 on the 19th.

3 MR. ROLFES: The e-mail was sent 

4 out on the 19th. Okay. Thank you.

5 Okay. Now, back to the first 

6 issue. You were --

7 DR. MAURO: The radium-226 

8 coworker model using radon breath data.

9 MR. ROLFES: Right. I think Bob 

10 Morris had put together an analysis early on. 

11 We set that analysis aside because we had 

12 OTIB-0025, which allows us to estimate radium 

13 body burden from radon breath analyses.

14 DR. MAURO: We're okay with that.

15 MR. ROLFES: I think maybe his 

16 analysis might have spoken a little bit. It 

17 might not address some of the issues that 

18 you've just indicated you had documents that 

19 in your review, but it might speak to this 

20 somewhat.

21 And I don't know if Bob or Mel is 
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1 -- is there anything that you might be able to 

2 relay about how we would estimate radium 

3 exposures for workers that did not have radon 

4 breath analyses?

5 And I know a lot of it pertains to 

6 the changes in the types of materials that 

7 came to Fernald. Rather than receiving radium 

8 ores that hadn't been milled, the later years 

9 was more involved in producing ore 

10 concentrates, and those ore concentrates 

11 didn't have the radium-226 contamination in 

12 them because it was stripped at the mill.

13 And so the radon exposure or --

14 excuse me -- the radium exposure issue is 

15 slightly different based upon the period 

16 because of the different materials being 

17 processed. It was the early materials back in 

18 1951 through -- really through I think the 

19 drum dumping that occurred at Fernald for all 

20 of the silos or for Silos 1 and 2. All those 

21 drums, there were roughly 13,000 drums of K-65 
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1 wastes that were shipped from Mallinckrodt and 

2 dumped into the Silos 1 and 2. It was those 

3 workers who would have had exposure to the 

4 radium content in the ore, and those are the 

5 ones we have the radon breath samples for.

6 So we went back and interviewed 

7 some individuals to determine when the changes 

8 in the types of materials occur, and the types 

9 of processes that were in place, and I 

10 wondered if I could have Bob or Mel contribute 

11 a little bit about this discussion.

12 MR. RICH: Mark, this is Bryce.

13 MR. ROLFES: Hi, Bryce. Thank 

14 you.

15 MR. RICH: You mentioned 

16 Mallinckrodt, 13,000 drums, and the reason 

17 they were put into Silos 1 and 2 is because 

18 the United States didn't own them. They were 

19 owned by the Belgian Congo people, and so they 

20 were separated.

21 And Fernald also processed Belgian 
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1 Congo -- and all of that material came out in 

2 what was called the hot raffinate system. 

3 They were slurried, the 13,000 drums, over 

4 about a three-year period, and the workers 

5 themselves weren't limited by the external 

6 exposure. The drums themselves were in the 

7 few hundred millirem per hour background 

8 levels, and so that's why it took them as long 

9 as it did to dump the waste slurry and put 

10 them in Silos 1 and 2.

11 We have a database of air sampling 

12 data. Initially we thought we would assign 

13 doses on the basis of air sampling data, and 

14 then we have a significant database that Bob 

15 Morris has analyzed on radon breath analysis, 

16 and that is applied primarily to the people 

17 that worked the slurry transfer of those 

18 raffinates, which contained primarily the 

19 radium-226 and other isotopes.

20 The intent, I think -- and Bob can 

21 address this in more detail -- but was to take 
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1 the radium body burden as determined by radon 

2 breath analysis and apply a ratio of what else 

3 was there in the raffinates. This only went 

4 on for about a three-year period of time, and 

5 then they ran out of pitchblende. So it was a 

6 relatively short period of time and a specific 

7 number of people involved.

8 DR. MAURO: Bryce, this is John. 

9 In our report, we identified a number of time 

10 periods and work jobs that involved exposure 

11 to radium that were not -- and when we look at 

12 those, we see some of them you have radon 

13 breath analysis where it could be used to 

14 reconstruct radium body burden, but in other 

15 cases, other time periods and other jobs you 

16 did not.

17 And I guess, you know, what we 

18 were hoping to see is an argument made why the 

19 ones you do have were the bounding ones so 

20 that if you used that data for reconstructing 

21 radium body burdens or some high end in the 
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1 distribution of that, you'd feel a degree of 

2 confidence that you could apply that to these 

3 other workers because the other workers had a 

4 lesser potential.

5 We didn't see that. We haven't 

6 seen that. If that's the case, we'd sure like 

7 to see that.

8 MR. RICH: Let me just say, and 

9 perhaps this is not in as much detail as need 

10 be, but the operation of transferring those 

11 13,000 drums of hot raffinates from 

12 Mallinckrodt was the highest potential intake, 

13 and so there were some others primarily 

14 associated with tending and feeding the K-65 

15 silo material, but the rest of it was in the 

16 transfer from the modified PUREX process that 

17 processed the pitchblende ore, and the 

18 exposure associated with that was -- the 

19 exposure potential was much less because it 

20 was not a handled raffinate system. 

21 That's very qualitative at this 
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1 point, and we can examine that in more detail, 

2 I'm sure.

3 DR. MAURO: Up to this meeting I 

4 have to say that we had submitted many White 

5 Papers, and where we raised some simple 

6 questions, and there really hasn't been until 

7 this meeting where I think, you know, we're 

8 starting to hear answers of the nature that 

9 we're looking for.

10 What I'm saying is you just 

11 responded to the specific concern we raised, 

12 and I was hoping that we can go down, actually 

13 take a look at our reports, go down and say, 

14 oh, no. No, they're wrong. This particular 

15 worker who worked in this job category at this 

16 time, his exposures were much less than these 

17 other workers, and that's the reason why we 

18 believe the radon breath data from this group 

19 is more than adequate to bound to that group.

20 We haven't seen that, and we need 

21 that, and that goes for just about every issue 
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1 that we raise, whether it's recycled uranium 

2 or it's radon breath analysis.

3 MR. ROLFES: I think the simple 

4 response is that we can take a look back and 

5 see if we can, you know, provide some 

6 justification for it.

7 DR. MAURO: Please.

8 DR. GLOVER: So the ball is in our 

9 court.

10 DR. MAURO: Yes. I mean, that 

11 might be answered. You know, if we need --

12 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay. So we've 

13 got an issue with Number 4 that NIOSH is going 

14 to respond to this and get back.

15 DR. GLOVER: Well, I think there's 

16 two. We provide you a thorium-230 --

17 DR. MAURO: You already did.

18 DR. GLOVER: And something Mark 

19 clearly pointed out. When I first read it, 

20 and I just didn't read through it enough, that 

21 the early stuff, that radium-226, because it 
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1 is mixed with the thorium-230, that's the 

2 early method, and then the thorium-230, after 

3 we start dumping it into Silo 3, then there's 

4 this --

5 DR. MAURO: Right.

6 DR. GLOVER: -- and there's kind of 

7 a closed raffinate system. So that's Part 2, 

8 and that recent paper is that second phase. 

9 And I just want to be sure that's clear.

10 DR. MAURO: We understand that. 

11 We understand that.

12 MR. ROLFES: I don't think SC&A 

13 has really had the opportunity to look at 

14 the --

15 DR. GLOVER: Oh, no. That's Phase 

16 1. We have two. We own half of this and you 

17 guys have the other half.

18 MR. ROLFES: That's correct.

19 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Wow, okay.

20 DR. MAKHIJANI: Now we're moving 

21 along.
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1 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Well --

2 (Laughter.)

3 MR. KATZ: Brad is blown away.

4 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Issue No. 5, 

5 radon emissions from the K-60 --l

6 MR. ROLFES: Before, Brad --

7 excuse me -- could we take a break quickly, 

8 please?

9 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: We're going to 

10 take --

11 MR. KATZ: Take ten and start back 

12 up around three?

13 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Yes, we're 

14 going to take a break for ten minutes.

15 MR. ROLFES: Thank you.

16 (Whereupon, the above-entitled matter went off 

17 the record at 2:48 p.m. and 

18 resumed at 3:03 p.m.)

19 MR. KATZ: Okay. We're just 

20 reconvening. This is the Fernald Work Group, 

21 Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, 
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1 after a ten-minute break.

2 Mark, do we have you back on the 

3 phone?

4 Do we have anyone on the phone?

5 MEMBER PRESLEY: Yes, I'm here.

6 MR. KATZ: Okay, great. Hey, Bob. 

7 You've been very quiet today.

8 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay. That's 

9 Bob Presley.

10 Okay. We've got the last item 

11 which is the K-65 silo and the radon issue.

12 DR. MAURO: There's two more 

13 issues.

14 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Number 5.

15 DR. MAURO: Number 5.

16 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Yes, Number 5, 

17 sorry. Thorium, yes, I forgot about that one.

18 DR. MAURO: I do believe we can go 

19 through the radon issue very quickly. As you 

20 know, we have been in a heated debate on 

21 curies released from the sidewalls. Folks 
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1 have been claiming it's 6,000 curies per year 

2 of radon, and we're saying, nope, it's more 

3 like 6,000 or higher release of radon.

4 And you folks know that method 

5 that was used by RAC, Risk Assessment 

6 Corporation was a good method. We did it our 

7 own way, which we think is a better method, 

8 and we come up with much higher releases.

9 You folks have pointed out that 

10 the National Academy of Sciences have approved 

11 the RAC method, and you sent us as a result of 

12 our conference call the other day. The 

13 material from the National Academy of Sciences 

14 that you sent out as being what the National 

15 Academy of Sciences had to say about the 

16 method.

17 You probably received very 

18 recently a report that I forwarded that Hans 

19 prepared where we quote what the National 

20 Academy of Sciences said, and I have to tell 

21 you it doesn't look like they approved it. In 
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1 fact, it looks like they disapproved it.

2 So I think we're at a point where 

3 you folks have got to take a look at our model 

4 on its own merits.

5 MR. ROLFES: Okay. To get back to 

6 that, I did look back at the National Academy 

7 of Sciences' review, and you're right. It was 

8 very brief on the discussion of radon.

9 Subsequently I was looking back 

10 into other documents that I had, and I had not 

11 yet sent these out to anyone, but there's a 

12 couple that I wanted to just read some 

13 excerpts from.

14 The first is a radon and radon 

15 flux measurement at the Feed Materials 

16 Production Center document, which was 

17 submitted -- it was done by Mound.

18 Just to get down to the end

19 conclusion of their analysis, they had 

20 basically put some charcoal canisters on top 

21 of the K-65 silos, done some analyses of the 
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1 results, gave the results. Basically they had 

2 come up with a couple of statements here.

3 "The annual radon release from the 

4 tanks is probably less than" -- and they're 

5 referring to the K-65 Silos 1 and 2. It says, 

6 "The annual radon release from the tanks is 

7 probably less than from the inactive mil 

8 tailing sites which reported releases of 200 

9 curies to 11,500 curies per year."

10 So this is something that I think 

11 you guys should get your eyes on to take a 

12 look at, and also a separate report which I'll 

13 briefly describe as well. It's a Journal of 

14 Environmental Radioactivity paper titled 

15 Uncertainty Analysis of Exposure to Radon 

16 Release from the former Feed Materials 

17 Production Center by George Killough and Duane 

18 Schmidt. It was published in August of 1999 

19 in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity, 

20 49, and it's dated 2000, pages 127 through 

21 156.
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1 And I just wanted to call 

2 attention. I know you don't have this report 

3 here in front of you, but I wanted to call 

4 attention to the particular table which lists 

5 the effluents from K-65, and they basically 

6 had gone back and looked at five different 

7 time periods on-site, beginning in 1951 all 

8 the way up through 1988, and they had put them 

9 into bins. Basically they looked at the radon 

10 releases from the K-65 silos, and the results 

11 here are reported in terabecquerels.

12 For the first period I don't have 

13 the dates right here on this table. Oh, wait. 

14 I take that back. Period No. 1 is 1952. 

15 There was a mean release of 3.9 

16 terabecquerels, which -- well, I don't want to 

17 give the amount of curies. Anyway, I can 

18 punch that in in a second here.

19 Anyway, Period No. 2 was 1953 

20 through 1958. The mean radon release was 5.19 

21 terabecquerels.
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1 Period 3, which included 1959 

2 through 1979, the average release value was 

3 5.41 terabecquerels.

4 For Period 4, which included 1980 

5 through 1987, the mean release was 3.49 

6 terabecquerels.

7 And for Period 5, we had 1988, and 

8 the mean release of radon from K-65 silos was 

9 2.06 terabecquerels.

10 The ranges, I believe, were in 

11 between 46 curies per year if you convert 

12 terabecquerels into curies. It gives you a 

13 range of 46 Becquerels to --

14 MEMBER ZIEMER: Becquerels or 

15 curies?

16 MR. STIVER: Forty-six curies per 

17 year, wasn't it?

18 MR. ROLFES: Let me pull this up.

19 MR. BARTON: Hey, Mark, this is 

20 Mel. This says from 55 curies to 146 curies 

21 per year.
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1 MR. ROLFES: Thank you.

2 So anyway, we've got another 

3 source of information which indicates lower 

4 releases from the silos.

5 DR. MAURO: Did they say how they 

6 got those?

7 MR. ROLFES: It's detailed in this 

8 report and this other report here, the two 

9 reports that I mentioned.

10 DR. MAURO: What is the name of 

11 the first one?

12 MR. ROLFES: I will repeat the 

13 report titles here. The first one --

14 MEMBER ZIEMER: Could you email us 

15 those after the meeting so we can --

16 MR. ROLFES: I certainly can. I 

17 can email the one right now if you would like, 

18 and the other one I only have a hard copy at 

19 the moment. So I would have provided them 

20 earlier. However, I found them last night.

21 DR. MAURO: Well, we'll look at 
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1 them. You might want to look at our report 

2 though, and the very interesting challenge 

3 will be why are we coming off with numbers 

4 based on the method we used, which seems to be 

5 first principles --

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: Were these 

7 modeling exercises or measurements?

8 MR. ROLFES: Well, the first 

9 document that I had referred to Radon and 

10 Radon Flux Measurements at the Feed Materials 

11 Production Center, Fernald, Ohio, has -- let 

12 me give you a brief description. It has -- it 

13 has radon flux measurements, and it describes 

14 the method using charcoal canisters which were 

15 four inches in diameter by one and a half 

16 inches high. Basically they had put the 

17 canisters on the domes of the silos, put 

18 caulking around it so that it had a sealed 

19 fit, and then subsequently counted the 

20 canisters after a known amount of time, 

21 exposure, with some sodium iodide crystals.
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1 DR. MAURO: So the sample over 

2 some time period, but was it like a week or a 

3 month or --

4 MR. ROLFES: Yes. Actually they 

5 had done some as short as a few hours, I 

6 believe, here.

7 MR. STIVER: So they actually put 

8 in the perforations in the dome, or they were 

9 just kind of sitting there exposed to the 

10 actual air concentrations?

11 MR. ROLFES: I'll take a look 

12 here. Let's see. Placement of canisters. 

13 From recollection, I believe there were some 

14 that were placed directly onto the domes. 

15 They might not have had a perforation. 

16 However, they did selectively go at -- the 

17 cracks.

18 MR. STIVER: Okay. How about near 

19 the goosenecks and that type of thing? Were 

20 there any --

21 MR. ROLFES: Well, the gooseneck 
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1 was removed in 1979. So these measurements 

2 were conducted in roughly 1984. So they 

3 wouldn't have been around the goosenecks.

4 MR. STIVER: There were no 

5 measurements that would have been found from 

6 the earlier period.

7 MR. ROLFES: Okay.

8 MR. STIVER: -- we found were very 

9 similar to what was happening after the 

10 mitigation system was put in.

11 MR. ROLFES: Right.

12 MR. STIVER: Basically you had the 

13 same concentrations before and after.

14 MR. ROLFES: Right. Now, the 

15 other report that I referred to, Paul had 

16 asked if it was modeling, and, yes, it was 

17 modeling.

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, we need to 

19 understand the difference between. Because 

20 yours is a model as well.

21 My other question, do we have that 
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1 Academy statement? Didn't you just read that 

2 to us? The one that you said was pretty sort 

3 of ambiguous.

4 MR. ROLFES: Well, it's in SC&A's 

5 White Paper at the back. Let me pull that 

6 back up. I apologize here.

7 DR. GLOVER: Is this under the 

8 recent memo? 

9 MR. ROLFES: Yes, yes. Sam, if 

10 you have that, if you could.

11 DR. GLOVER: Here's the hard copy.

12 (Simultaneous speakers.)

13 DR. GLOVER: You want the last 

14 paragraph?

15 MR. ROLFES: Yes. Actually I can 

16 probably pull it up. I've got it.

17 I can read the NAS statement here 

18 regarding Fernald, I believe, if I can get 

19 down to it fast enough.

20 MR. STIVER: Actually I have it 

21 right here.
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1 MR. ROLFES: Okay. Looking at the 

2 National Academy of Sciences' review, it's got 

3 a -- I'm reading from the National Academy of 

4 Sciences' review of the RAC dose 

5 reconstruction for Fernald, and on page 17 of 

6 the PDF, it has a radon section, and I can 

7 read that if you'd like.

8 DR. MAURO: Is that what you're 

9 reading now?

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: I'm reading it 

11 right now, yes. It certainly leaves the 

12 question open.

13 MR. ROLFES: I'll go ahead and 

14 read that into the record.

15 "The importance of the radon 

16 source term associated with the K-65 silos is 

17 difficult to establish primarily because the 

18 silos have been modified several times over 

19 the years. If the head space has been 

20 adequately sampled, the silos inventory could 

21 be modeled for release, assuming no 
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1 retardation by the cap which has been sealed 

2 to various degrees over the years as a worst 

3 case endpoint.

4 "It is reasonable to separate the 

5 calculations into daytime and nighttime 

6 dispersion because the dispersion figures 

7 would certainly differ. However, there is no 

8 justification given for the release terms of 

9 140 curies per year continuous or 810 curies 

10 per year during the daytime only. It also 

11 might be a reasonable refinement to have 

12 transition periods in between."

13 So I think that's really the part 

14 that is relevant, and it basically calls into 

15 question what the release is, and so the RAC 

16 report doesn't really get us any further down 

17 the road on, you know, validating the radon 

18 releases. However, I think these two 

19 documents that I've just read into the record 

20 and referred to here would probably be best 

21 suited for the Advisory Board Working Groups. 
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1 I think they'll speak more directly to the 

2 number or curies or terabecquerels, however 

3 you'd like to report it, being released from 

4 the silos.

5 So I'll send these documents to 

6 you.

7 DR. MAURO: Please do one other 

8 thing for us. We certainly will look at those 

9 papers very carefully, and let's say we walk 

10 away from this. You read those papers and it 

11 looks pretty good, and then you take a look at 

12 our papers, at the arguments based on where 

13 the -- you know, there is this deficit of 

14 lead-210, and you say then where did the radon 

15 go.

16 I mean, we've got ourselves quite 

17 a dilemma here because the radon had to go 

18 somewhere because of that deficit. Now, if we

19 could somehow reconcile whatever you have here 

20 and our analysis, I'd be -- it would make me 

21 very happy that we could somehow reconcile how 
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1 one analysis, which is based on the radon 

2 deficit, our work, is coming up with some 

3 number and I will look at the other work that 

4 was done and how they came up with theirs.

5 We should be able to reconcile 

6 somewhere along the line. We maybe made an 

7 assumption that isn't appropriate or numbers 

8 and how they measured it here may not tell the 

9 whole story. So we've got to get -- now, this 

10 is -- the reason I bring it up is that we've 

11 never been so far apart on something, but 

12 interestingly enough, I don't believe it's an 

13 SEC issue because as far as I'm concerned, the 

14 radon deficit approach is an upper bound or 

15 close to it.

16 So the degree to which the Work 

17 Group wants to invest a lot of time on this is 

18 certainly your choice. I know it's something 

19 that I'm going to look at very carefully 

20 because I find it fascinating that we could be 

21 so different, but keep in mind, please, 
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1 everyone on the Work Group, that you know this 

2 really is not an SEC issue because we can 

3 place an upper bound.

4 DR. GLOVER: Mark, the crux of it, 

5 are we assuming the Pinney model?

6 MR. CHEW: May I interject? This 

7 is Chew. I have looked at the SC&A analysis 

8 for the source term for radon, and there are 

9 potentially three issues that I can point out.

10 The generation of radon is based 

11 on the, as you say, the deficit amount of lead 

12 in the K-65 material. However, I don't think 

13 that we know enough of the process that would 

14 have depleted the radon -- the lead before it 

15 gets into the -- before it gets into the K --

16 becomes K-65 material, such as play-out, 

17 whatever process. I don't think that we know 

18 enough to make sure that all of the lead 

19 maintained itself throughout all of the 

20 process and ended up in the K-65 material. 

21 That's one problem.
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1 The other area that I'd like to 

2 point out is that in the analysis all the 

3 radon that are emanated from the K-65 material 

4 is assumed to go into the environment. This 

5 is not the case. It goes into a silo which 

6 has some confinement function, and you have to 

7 take into account -- the analysis did not take 

8 into account the -- radon inside the silo as 

9 well as the decay of radon inside the silo --

10 so based on those two factors, there's some 

11 question about data analysis.

12 DR. BEHLING: I'd like to make 

13 some comments in regard to this. This is Hans 

14 Behling, and I'm the principal investigator 

15 behind the White Paper that is under 

16 discussion here.

17 First of all, the lead-212, the 

18 disequilibrium is clearly one that I designed 

19 as a non-conservative assumption because, 

20 after all, this material was put into place 

21 back in the '50s, and assuming that no radon 
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1 escaped, you would almost at this point assume 

2 a very close to full equilibrium, which is 

3 not. The measurements that define the 

4 disequilibrium for lead-212 is much more 

5 recent.

6 Secondly, the issue of radon as it 

7 is being released from the waste package, as I 

8 clearly pointed out -- and this was the 

9 argument that was posed by NIOSH for all of 

10 the last three years since this discussion 

11 first erupted; the assumption was always that 

12 the radon somehow or other emanated into the 

13 head space where it was held up, and the 

14 majority, the vast majority simply decayed in 

15 the head space.

16 Now as I clearly pointed out in my 

17 report and also included an exhibit which 

18 involved empirical measurements that were 

19 taken before and after the sealing of the 

20 dome, and what you really have to look at 

21 closely is the effect of the radon treatments. 
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1 Before the dome was encapsulated or sealed 

2 off, you had certain contact dose rate 

3 measurements on top of the dome which on 

4 average for the years preceding 1978 were 

5 somewhere around 70 millirem per hour. Those 

6 measurements raised up to 400, in some cases, 

7 400 millirem per hour after the dome was 

8 sealed, and that motivated the introduction or 

9 revision in the design of the silos to include 

10 what was called a radon treatment system.

11 That system would allow the 

12 evacuation of radon so that workers could 

13 actually go on top and not be overexposed, and 

14 that system had the capability of moving 1,000 

15 cubic feet per minute and was operated for 

16 three hours before workers were allowed to go 

17 back up.

18 At that point, it was assumed that 

19 the residual amount of radon and its short20 lived radioactive decay daughters would be 

21 evacuated to the point where 97 percent was 
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1 removed, and if you look at the -- and I 

2 showed those in Exhibit No. 1 in my report --

3 the dose rate was reduced down to about 75 or 

4 so millirem, which is the equivalent of what 

5 the dose rate was before the dome was sealed.

6 To me that is one indication that 

7 says the radon that was contributing to the 

8 high dose rate after the dome was sealed was, 

9 in fact, essentially evacuated with nearly the 

10 same efficiency as a radon treatment system 

11 which removed 97 percent of the air including 

12 the radon in the head space.

13 And as far as I'm concerned, those 

14 data speak for themselves. I don't know how 

15 you can argue that issue.

16 DR. GLOVER: I do believe there's 

17 a number of things that we have completed 

18 though, Mark. I mean, aren't you in the 

19 process of uploading the Pinney study?

20 MR. ROLFES: Yes, yes, that's what 

21 I wanted to get back to, and let me -- well, 
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1 you can go ahead.

2 DR. GLOVER: No, I just wanted --

3 there's a number of parts of the Pinney study. 

4 We have a Q-11 edition. They do a number of 

5 things in here. Mark is obviously the person 

6 who can speak.

7 I think we probably don't have a 

8 response yet. There has obviously been 

9 interactions back and forth. We've brought 

10 some new evidence to the table, some backup 

11 data. I think as a measurement guy, I like 

12 measurements better than models if we can 

13 support them, if the data supports it. So if 

14 we can get it based back on measurements, we 

15 would be better off, but we carefully want to 

16 make sure that we don't underestimate things 

17 and make sure -- maybe represent where are we 

18 getting our data from.

19 And maybe, Mark, you can speak to 

20 what we're doing.

21 MR. ROLFES: Yes. In addition to 
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1 these two reports, if you recall from the SEC 

2 Evaluation Report, in our Petition Evaluation 

3 we had indicated that we would use the Pinney 

4 study data, and what we have essentially here 

5 in the Pinney study that was conducted --

6 she's a professor from the University of 

7 Cincinnati. She had a contract with a 

8 different portion of NIOSH to basically do an 

9 epidemiological study to assess historical 

10 radon exposures and also cigarette smoking for 

11 Fernald workers, and it was an epi study 

12 essentially to look for an end result of lung 

13 cancer.

14 And so what they did, basically 

15 completed individual dose reconstructions for 

16 each individual on-site at Fernald, and it 

17 relies upon the K-65 modeled effluents and 

18 also incorporates another source of exposure 

19 which turns out to be larger exposure source. 

20 It was the Q-11 silos outside of Plant 23.

21 NIOSH has indicated and adopted 
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1 this approach. So what we have now is 

2 individual specific radon dose estimates in 

3 working level months by year, and I don't 

4 recall. I'd like to point you to the Pinney 

5 report, and her report was also published. I 

6 believe it was in the Journal of Environmental 

7 Radioactivity, as well.

8 DR. GLOVER: It's SRDB No. 41619.

9 MR. ROLFES: Thank you.

10 I know that we have -- let me see 

11 if I can pull this up.

12 The methods that were used to 

13 reconstruct radon exposure historically to 

14 Fernald workers, I believe incorporate the 

15 information from the earlier report I 

16 mentioned, the Journal of Environmental 

17 Radioactivity, the uncertainty analysis, and 

18 the radon. 

19 So the Killough paper that I had 

20 referred to that I said that I would email to 

21 everyone, I believe the Pinney study 
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1 incorporated that data but also added an 

2 additional source term of the Q-11 four silos. 

3 So what we have now, what we're currently 

4 doing, we've got all of that information in 

5 our site research database, an individualized 

6 radon exposure estimate over time based upon 

7 input from the employee.

8 Several former workers from 

9 Fernald were interviewed, and they put that 

10 individual employee in their appropriate 

11 building where they were working on certain 

12 shifts, you know, day or night because the 

13 radon concentration varied based on day or 

14 night.

15 Looked at meteorological data and 

16 essentially came up with a working level 

17 estimate of radon for each individual 

18 employee, and it's tied to Social Security 

19 numbers. So what we are doing right now is 

20 putting that all -- and we're going to use 

21 that information for their dose reconstruction 
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1 if we need to do that.

2 MR. MORRIS: This is Bob Morris. 

3 Could I interject, please?

4 MR. ROLFES: Go ahead, Bob.

5 MR. MORRIS: Okay. I'd like to 

6 also point you to a memo that Dr. Pinney wrote 

7 to Ms. Baldridge on September 13th, 2006, 

8 while Ms. Baldridge was preparing information 

9 for the SEC petition apparently, and she 

10 writes to her about using the data from the 

11 RAC report which was an off-site dosimetry 

12 model and extending it, extrapolating it back 

13 toward the source term to reconstruct the 

14 doses on the site. She got assurance from the 

15 model developer, Dr. Killough or Mr. Killough, 

16 that it could be extrapolated back on-site, 

17 and then took the initial action that she 

18 describes of validating that model based on 

19 some on-site information that was available.

20 She took a separate set of data 

21 that had never been used before for this 
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1 purpose that John Cardarelli developed during 

2 his Master's thesis in September, March to 

3 September of '91 and compared that to the 

4 predicted results that came out of this 

5 extrapolated on-site model and reported that 

6 there was good agreement and then also took 

7 the additional action of comparing or taking 

8 window glass panes, if you recall this part of 

9 the study, to study the lead, I think it's 

10 lead-210 that is a residual and embedded in 

11 the window glass as a confirmatory measurement 

12 of radon on-site.

13 That's what led her to the 

14 conclusion that the Q-11 silo data was worthy 

15 of including in an on-site model. But you get 

16 the impression that there are, besides the 

17 modeling that we've done in the RAC study, Dr. 

18 Pinney's work has also got a foundation under 

19 it of on-site dose measurement or on-site 

20 measurements of various kinds.

21 So I want to make sure that you 
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1 pay attention to that as you look at this, 

2 saying, well, the only measurement data that 

3 we have is that from the top of the silo 

4 during the radon evacuation work.

5 There are other on-site long-term 

6 evaluation data sets that can confirm the off7 site as well.

8 MR. ROLFES: Right. That seems 

9 that the Pinney model has the validation of 

10 the RAC model essentially in it, and what we 

11 had previously said had been reviewed by the 

12 National Academy of Sciences, when the RAC 

13 model was reviewed by the NAS, we thought that 

14 it had spoken to the radon effluent, but it 

15 didn't very much, and now what we have here 

16 when we look back at the documentation we 

17 have, we found that the Pinney model actually 

18 relies upon the RAC model, which has been 

19 validated by Susan Pinney's model as well.

20 DR. BEHLING: Well, I think that's 

21 kind of circular reasoning, and I cannot 
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1 accept that, and even if the window pane data 

2 has some level of support, and I've said it 

3 before, here you have the equivalent of let's 

4 assume you have a reactor facility that has 

5 released through a controlled ventilation 

6 system certain numbers of curies and you have 

7 an actual stack monitor that gives you the 

8 actual data at the point of release. To me 

9 that would obviously have a high priority in 

10 terms of credibility as opposed to in the case 

11 of the Pinney model swiping some window panes 

12 and figuring out how much lead were deposited 

13 onto the window pane. That would be the 

14 equivalent of taking an air measurement ten 

15 miles downwind and then somehow or other 

16 applying the concentration in a cubic feet of 

17 air and multiply that by chi over the Q value 

18 to come back to defining the source term.

19 To me you're orders of magnitude 

20 removed from accuracy that relates that 

21 measurement to a source term measurement where 
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1 you have a stack monitor giving you the actual 

2 value. So I can't take that very seriously, 

3 quite honestly.

4 MR. MORRIS: With all due respect, 

5 please, don't characterize the window pane 

6 data as a contamination survey. Before you 

7 discount, you need to understand it, please. 

8 You need to go read that report.

9 DR. GLOVER: What I do want to say 

10 is that we kind of caught you guys by 

11 surprise. This is some new data. We've got 

12 some new things that you haven't -- there are 

13 some serious things in here because the Q-11 

14 in her study is the dominant thing in the 

15 beginning years. That dominates that radon 

16 concentration on-site. It is not trivial. It 

17 is a significant dose impacter.

18 I think we owe Mark at least 

19 putting the data up to make it available. 

20 We're linking this stuff. We haven't given 

21 you guys a written response to what we're 
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1 really doing. Okay? And we can take a look 

2 at what your stuff says and why our stuff 

3 really is -- why we feel it's the strongest 

4 weight approach, and that way we can proceed.

5 Does that seem reasonable? I know 

6 this is kind of --

7 DR. MAURO: Absolutely. I'm 

8 looking forward to looking at this. I'm 

9 especially interested in this, I guess, 

10 charcoal filter that was placed right on the

11 cap, and it's going to sample what's coming 

12 out and come up with a -- I guess you measure 

13 the inventory of bismuth-214 when it's at 

14 equilibrium. I'm picturing how to do it.

15 That's going to give you an even 

16 more direct measurement of the effluent.

17 DR. BEHLING: John, I hate to 

18 disagree with that. The release from the silo 

19 dome was at very discrete locations, at 

20 fissures, the gooseneck, et cetera, and 

21 depending on where those canisters were placed 
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1 with regard to those particular discrete 

2 release points, I have to, again, raise 

3 questions about the validity.

4 DR. MAURO: We're going to look at 

5 that. They could miss it.

6 MR. ROLFES: Let me point you back 

7 to the document, the Radon and Radon Flux 

8 Measurements at Feed Materials Production 

9 Center from 1985. It does, in fact, indicate 

10 that they had placed some of the charcoal 

11 canisters on the fissures of the silo dome. 

12 So to measure the flux, the flux data is going 

13 to be much more important for getting an 

14 understanding of how much radon is leaving the 

15 silo versus an external dose rate measurement, 

16 which can be highly variable as well based 

17 upon the measurement that's taken, you know, 

18 how the meter is placed, if it's measured in 

19 the same conditions and same geometries each 

20 time.

21 DR. MAURO: The one thing we 
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1 talked about, I mean, we're talking about 

2 we're going to look at each other's report, 

3 but I think it was Bryce had mentioned he has 

4 an argument that says, you know, there may not 

5 be this lead-210 deficit. In other words, the 

6 lead-210 may be there, but they missed it when 

7 they were sampling. I mean, that's what I 

8 heard.

9 Somehow -- in other words, we came 

10 up with our model. It's very simple. There's 

11 a whole bunch of samples that were collected 

12 of the radium concentration in the silo, and 

13 they went up and down and sideways, and they 

14 pulled samples, and they analyzed the radium15 226. They analyzed it for lead-210 and the 

16 polonium-210 I think they looked at, and we 

17 saw a deficit.

18 Now if Bryce can make a case that 

19 hold it, that deficit isn't real. The lead20 210, because of its chemistry or whatever 

21 happened to it, it went someplace. It was 
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1 produced. The radon stayed in the silo. It 

2 decayed, and it turned into lead-210, and the 

3 lead-210 then went someplace and was not part 

4 of the sample. There is some process at work 

5 in the silo that's removing the lead-210 from 

6 the sample that they took. If that's 

7 happening and that's the reason for the 

8 deficit, I buy that.

9 DR. BEHLING: John, how do you 

10 account for the radon treatment system when 

11 it's in operation that reduces the dose rate 

12 on top of the dome?

13 DR. MAURO: Yes.

14 DR. BEHLING: Obviously, you're 

15 not removing the other radionuclides that are 

16 steadfast held in the matrix of the waste 

17 package, and if this whole issue occurred in 

18 the head space and played it out, you wouldn't 

19 get this reduction.

20 DR. MAURO: You're right, right, 

21 right.
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1 DR. BEHLING: As I said, I don't 

2 see it.

3 DR. MAURO: You're right. That's 

4 the other half of the problem. You're 

5 absolutely right. We've got to look at this.

6 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Well, you know, 

7 the bottom line comes down to SC&A has not 

8 been able to see this, and we've got to go 

9 back a little ways because this was held up to 

10 us as the holy grail for the radon and that 

11 everything was good with it, and now we've 

12 changed our whole course to that. So we're 

13 going to have to have SC&A review what NIOSH 

14 has put out there, the Pinney report, and so 

15 forth because, you know, we're changing whole 

16 directions.

17 MR. ROLFES: That's a slightly 

18 different -- we've always said since our 

19 Evaluation Report that we were relying upon 

20 the Pinney data. So I did want to point that 

21 out.
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1 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Well, and I 

2 want to point out to you what was told to me 

3 last time was that I would question the 

4 National Academy of Sciences of what they came 

5 to. I will be right honest with you. I read 

6 this, and I wondered where the heck it ever 

7 came up with it because they flat said that, 

8 as you read a lot of this stuff, they didn't 

9 have source terms. They didn't have anything. 

10 It didn't quantify anything.

11 But besides that, we've got this 

12 process. We've got this information we need 

13 to look at. We need to task SC&A to be able 

14 to review this and go forward with this, but I 

15 also would like NIOSH to really look at what 

16 SC&A has put out, too, because there is some 

17 good -- it makes a lot of sense to me, but I'm 

18 just me, but I think that's what we'll have to 

19 do with this issue.

20 MR. HINNEFELD: We'll do that.

21 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Good.
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1 MS. BALDRIDGE: I have a question. 

2 I listened to the discussion about Dr. 

3 Pinney's report, and where does the radon come 

4 in from the thorium? The test that she did 

5 could have distinguished between that which 

6 came from thorium and that which came from 

7 radon -- from uranium, but she chose not to 

8 include any of the radon that was the 

9 byproduct of thorium, only that which came 

10 from uranium in her results.

11 So the results that she provided 

12 you do not include any of the, what is it, 

13 thoron. It doesn't include any of the thoron.

14 MR. ROLFES: That might be true, 

15 but if you take a look at the --

16 MS. BALDRIDGE: It's not it might 

17 be. That's what she said.

18 MR. ROLFES: If you take a look at 

19 the contents of Silos 1 and 2, a large part of 

20 that when you have thorium -- when you have 

21 thoron, thoron has a very, very quick decay 
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1 time, and so it's very difficult to get that 

2 out of the matrix and evolve --

3 MS. BALDRIDGE: But evidently this 

4 glass etch test could distinguish between that 

5 which came from uranium and that which came 

6 from thorium, and she chose not to include the 

7 thorium byproduct, only the uranium byproduct.

8 MR. ROLFES: That is true, you'd 

9 have to take a look at the depth of 

10 penetration of the alpha particle in the CR-39 

11 track detectors. It's something that's of 

12 slightly different concern really because the 

13 amount of thorium in those silos, the radium14 226 effluent or -- excuse me -- the radium-226 

15 content in Silos 1 and 2 is much greater than 

16 the amount of thorium by orders of magnitude, 

17 and so it's going to be a much smaller 

18 contributor.

19 Also because of the fact that the 

20 thoron will decay within the matrix pretty 

21 quickly and not -- it has a decay half-time of 
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1 roughly 55 seconds or 53 seconds. So it's not 

2 going to have much opportunity to migrate very 

3 fast through a watery matrix. So that really 

4 wouldn't have been a significant source.

5 DR. MAKHIJANI: Could I make one 

6 suggestion in addition to what you've said, 

7 Brad? Just a suggestion for Sam in terms of 

8 what he said earlier, is when you send these 

9 materials, I'm somewhat familiar with Pinney's 

10 work from my review of the Site Profile, and 

11 this is a while back now, and because her work 

12 relates to the Q-11 silos, what Hans is 

13 talking about is really the source term from 

14 the K-65 silos, not the Q-11 silos.

15 And in transmitting these 

16 materials, if you could indicate to us how 

17 you're differentiating between these two 

18 source terms it would be very helpful because 

19 in these glass etch tracks, which are 

20 primarily oriented to a different set of 

21 silos, if I'm remembering right from many 
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1 years ago, we want -- if you're going to sort 

2 out what Hans has put on the table, when you 

3 send us that material it would be helpful, I 

4 think, to us, to our team, in knowing how you 

5 sorted these two things out.

6 MS. BALDRIDGE: From my 

7 understanding, she took the window pane. She 

8 didn't interject glass. She took what was in 

9 the air and had come in contact with the 

10 glass. That's what she measured.

11 MR. ROLFES: She'd do a little 

12 glass etch with some acid and then put like a 

13 CR-39 cup detector onto the glass and laid it 

14 there for a predesignated amount of time and 

15 then subsequently look at the tracks from the 

16 alpha particles --

17 MS. BALDRIDGE: I mean, it's not 

18 like it was set off some place, that the 

19 thoron had to go through water before it got 

20 to the glass when you're talking about water 

21 matrix --
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1 MR. ROLFES: We're talking about 

2 two separate issues, and the Pinney study does 

3 actually have the internal exposure in working 

4 level months by year for each employee from 

5 the K-65 silos and also from the Q-11. It 

6 breaks them out, separates them and shows what 

7 each contribution to internal exposure is.

8 And so I think it would be best 

9 for SC&A to take a look back at this data to 

10 determine, you know, if that might help to 

11 respond to their issue or concern.

12 MS. BALDRIDGE: My point is 

13 anything that would have gotten onto the 

14 glass. It would have been airborne. It would 

15 have been in the proximity --

16 MR. ROLFES: Right.

17 MS. BALDRIDGE: -- where it could 

18 have been inhales.

19 MR. ROLFES: Right. We're not 

20 disagreeing with that at all.

21 DR. GLOVER: We will commit to 
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1 putting this on paper, what are we doing, and, 

2 you know, comparing some of the stuff that 

3 comes from the SC&A reports. This does 

4 describe the distinction of how the Q-11 

5 versus K-65, but we need to walk through that 

6 -- need an opportunity to review the stuff.

7 DR. MAKHIJANI: That's right.

8 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: So I need to 

9 make sure that I'm clear on the path forward. 

10 Actually you guys just got these documents. 

11 So you need to prepare a paper for SC&A to 

12 review, correct?

13 DR. GLOVER: If we could just 

14 summarize, I think we don't need 

15 necessarily --

16 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Right.

17 DR. GLOVER: -- a tremendous 

18 document.

19 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: No, it's just 

20 so they can know what your process was, how 

21 you're going through, because a lot of times 
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1 we've gotten down there and that isn't what I 

2 thought.

3 (Simultaneous speakers.)

4 DR. MAKHIJANI: Let me make clear 

5 for you, Brad, why I said what I said. What 

6 we've been talking about is a source term from 

7 the K-65 silos which are in one part of the 

8 plant, and Hans put a model on the table that 

9 said the RAC source term was off by a factor 

10 of ten, and all the time we've been discussing 

11 this one thing.

12 Now there was another source of 

13 radon.

14 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Q-11.

15 DR. MAKHIJANI: These Q-11 silos 

16 and these window panes, and Dr. Pinney did 

17 this study about that, and I just want to make 

18 sure that what we're looking at is the same 

19 thing, you know, that we're talking about the 

20 same source terms. Otherwise we'll kind of --

21 if you're sending us a source term from the Q-
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1 11 silos or a source term that's a convolution 

2 of the two things, then we won't be able to 

3 disentangle this problem, and that's -- should 

4 be clear about which source terms we're 

5 talking.

6 MR. ROLFES: Right. The study 

7 does break those out and makes it pretty 

8 clear.

9 DR. MAKHIJANI: Okay, and that 

10 must be the new element of it.

11 MR. ROLFES: Yes, the Q-11 was not 

12 previously considered. However, the Pinney 

13 study incorporates that in addition to the K14 65 source term.

15 DR. MAKHIJANI: Obviously I 

16 haven't seen it.

17 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay. Well, 

18 we're clear on the path forward with this one.

19 Okay. One more. Thorium.

20 DR. MAURO: Thorium. There are 

21 two parts to it. Okay. I'll tee it up. 
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1 Actually we have one action item, and I think 

2 you folks have one action item. There is the 

3 thorium-232 exposures can be broken up into 

4 pre-'68/post-'68 time periods, the way in 

5 which NIOSH plans to reconstruct the doses of 

6 people who inhaled thorium-232.

7 For the pre-1968 time period, and 

8 this goes back a ways now, you folks have 

9 compiled an immense amount of DWEs, daily 

10 weighted exposure information in a big 

11 database, and that data in theory could be 

12 sorted by time or by building, by thorium 

13 campaign, and to an extent the position is to 

14 the extent that you could build a coworker 

15 model that covers all of the different 

16 increments, different time periods, different 

17 buildings, different campaigns, and with those 

18 coworker models you have breathing zone data 

19 and air sampling data and bioassay data now, 

20 and we love breathing zone data.

21 And from that you could construct 
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1 intake rates by time and location. Now we 

2 recognize that the data, gross alpha, but 

3 you're prepared. You say, well, listen. In 

4 this building at this time we can assume that 

5 all of the gross alpha we're looking at is 

6 thorium-232, even though it may contain some 

7 U-238. So that's a conservative assumption.

8 John Stiver has looked very, very 

9 closely at your work and all of the data 

10 you've provided us with, and you know, you've 

11 been sending us packages of material, and John 

12 is going to have a little presentation that 

13 describes the places where you're soft. Okay?

14 Now before we do that, though, 

15 just to let you know that there is the back 

16 end of the process, which is post 1968. Post 

17 1968 it turns out, you have chest count data, 

18 okay, and you have provided -- last week I 

19 believe it came in -- a report, a White Paper. 

20 Following our conference call you have 

21 pointed out, oh, we have now a White Paper on 
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1 the subject, and we've reviewed it, and we 

2 have Rich Leggett and Hans and Joyce have 

3 reviewed the data that you have provided to us 

4 on the chest counts. 

5 It's basically a chest count where 

6 you are looking either for actinium-228, one 

7 of the progeny of thorium, or lead-212, which 

8 is one of the progeny of the thorium series, 

9 and from there your position is you could 

10 reconstruct the body burdens and intakes of 

11 thorium -- so for the first item, which John 

12 is going to cover, deals with the breathing 

13 zone data, pre-`68. Subsequent to that 

14 hopefully we'll get to our position regarding 

15 your recent transmittal, which we did have a 

16 chance to thoroughly review.

17 MR. ROLFES: Let me clarify a 

18 little bit, John. What we sent out last week 

19 was the thorium-230 White Paper. The thorium20 232 White Paper that we're referring to, which 

21 describes the coworker intakes based on in 
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1 vivo data, was sent out to the Advisory Board 

2 in March of 2008. So it was sent out 

3 approximately two years ago.

4 MR. STIVER: And that is the one 

5 that we've reviewed.

6 DR. MAURO: Well, I got that 

7 wrong.

8 (Simultaneous speakers.)

9 DR. MAURO: Okay. Then I'm lost. 

10 Okay. So I thought that was --

11 MR. ROLFES: The thorium-230 is 

12 the new one that we sent --

13 DR. MAURO: The thorium-230, that 

14 was part of Issue 4, and that was recently.

15 MR. ROLFES: Right. And that --

16 parts of Issue 4 you said you were going to 

17 review that, and we were going to look back at 

18 radium --

19 DR. MAURO: Right. Okay. Now, 

20 then what I misrepresented, I thought the 

21 chest count information where you estimated 
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1 thorium-232 body burden, chest count post '68, 

2 I thought that was relatively new. You're 

3 saying it's not.

4 MR. ROLFES: It was from March of 

5 2008.

6 DR. MAKHIJANI: We were just not 

7 aware of it.

8 DR. MAURO: Now, we did have --

9 now, we became aware of it relatively 

10 recently. That's a better way to say it.

11 MR. ROLFES: Yes.

12 DR. MAURO: And we did have a 

13 chance to look at it. I'm not saying, you 

14 know, that we did this in-depth analysis, but 

15 you know, we put some time in on that one, and

16 we have some observations, questions, and 

17 comments, and we'll get to that, too.

18 But I'd like to allow John first 

19 to tee up the issues that he has regarding the 

20 breathing zone data.

21 MR. STIVER: Okay. I'm not sure 
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1 the extent to which everybody is going to be 

2 able to see this. What I have today is a 

3 PowerPoint presentation of -- kind of gets 

4 into our investigations into the utility of 

5 the thorium-232 air sampling data and the 

6 White Paper that NIOSH has proposed to use as 

7 the coworker model to assess these intakes, 

8 chronic intakes of thorium-232 from possibly 

9 1953 to 1968.

10 Again, in the process of doing 

11 this, we've prepared a fairly comprehensive 

12 review, and came up with 20 findings. So I've 

13 also prepared a findings resolution matrix 

14 that goes through these findings, groups them 

15 according to similar topics. They're not in 

16 numerical order, but I'd like to go through 

17 the presentation and then take a look at this 

18 resolution matrix.

19 And my only concern here is that 

20 it may be too detailed to show up very well on 

21 the screen, in which case I can hand out some. 
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1 Let me pull it up and then you tell me if in 

2 the back of the room if you can --

3 DR. MAURO: This is the PA 

4 cleared.

5 MR. STIVER: Yes, this is the PA 

6 cleared.

7 DR. MAURO: Okay, everything's PA 

8 cleared.

9 MR. STIVER: Is everybody able to 

10 read that or do you need -- I have hard 

11 copies. I can give everybody hard copies. It 

12 would be easier to do that.

13 DR. MAKHIJANI: You'll put it on 

14 the O: drive, too, right?

15 MR. STIVER: It is on the O: drive

16 as well.

17 MR. ROLFES: In the same email as 

18 Hans's radon memo. Nancy Johnson had sent out 

19 an email with three attachments.

20 MR. STIVER: Okay. So in any 

21 event, I can get going on this, and actually 
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1 let me back up a minute. The last time we 

2 talked, it was a technical conversation that 

3 you guys had indicated that you were preparing 

4 some formal responses, but it won't be ready 

5 at this time. So what I want to do is instead 

6 of trying to go through chapter and verse on 

7 every response, is present our findings so 

8 that the Board is aware of where we stand on 

9 this, and then when you guys come back with 

10 your responses, then we can hash out all the 

11 details on that.

12 Anyway, let me pull up the 

13 PowerPoint here, and basically I'd like to 

14 start. Really there were two central issues 

15 in this whole discussion here. One is really 

16 an SEC issue and the other is more of a Site 

17 Profile issue. The SEC issue is whether this 

18 DWE data, this air sampling data, is accurate 

19 and complete enough to construct internal 

20 doses -- in accordance with the requirements 

21 of 42 CFR Part 83 for accuracy and timeliness.
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1 And basically what we have here is 

2 your typical coworker data quality 

3 requirements. I like to think of it as kind 

4 of a three dimensional array. We have enough 

5 data in terms of the time period, the various 

6 facilities, and the particular occupations of 

7 the workers.

8 And the second aspect of this is 

9 given that adequate data are available, are 

10 NIOSH's proposed methods sufficiently to 

11 reconstruct the doses in accordance with the

12 requirements of Part 83?

13 If we can move on, since it has 

14 been a while, it's been almost a year since we 

15 wrote you this subject. We have just a really 

16 brief recap of where we stood. 

17 Two years ago, NIOSH was given 

18 three action items. We were given one action 

19 item. NIOSH's action item was to take these 

20 air dust reports, the inhalable air dust 

21 reports, that I shall refer to as the DWE 
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1 reports, of which there are approximately 160, 

2 post those onto the O: drive along with a set 

3 of spreadsheets that were a sampling from 

4 these reports that were supposed to be 

5 representative of the thorium process in the 

6 plants during the entire history from '53 to 

7 1968, with the presumption that if this data 

8 were adequate, other time periods are probably 

9 likely adequate as well.

10 The White Paper then provided the 

11 methodology for reconstructing the chronic 

12 intakes, and these action items were completed 

13 about a year ago before the last meeting. Our 

14 action item was to review these, prepare a 

15 draft report, and now here's the topic of this 

16 discussion, the report being on the O: drive 

17 for those of you who are interested in looking 

18 at it. It's entitled The Use of FMPC DWE 

19 Reports for Estimation of Chronic Daily Intake 

20 Rate for thorium-232 Internal Dose 

21 Reconstruction.
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1 Now, I really want everybody to 

2 get a good understand of what the daily rate 

3 of exposure, what it really is, what the 

4 concept was, what its limitations are, and 

5 what its advantages were.

6 The concept was introduced to FMPC 

7 by the AEC Health and Safety Laboratory, and 

8 surveys were conducted by HASL personnel as 

9 well. It was not conducted in-house by 

10 Fernald management, and what they really 

11 sought to do was to provide an estimate of the 

12 average worker exposures by job titles which 

13 management could then use to pinpoint where 

14 the high exposures were and what types of 

15 tasks were involved for giving rise to these 

16 high dust concentrations and thereby control 

17 and improve the working conditions in the 

18 plant.

19 They weren't intended really to 

20 use in constructing doses in any sense of the 

21 word. However, it did provide a standardized 
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1 methodology throughout the FMPC history. This 

2 method did not change during the entire period 

3 that we're interested in.

4 It was based on gross alpha air 

5 concentration, and so it was applicable to all 

6 work place alpha emitters, whether it be 

7 uranium, recycled uranium, thorium, or 

8 progeny, and so this gives rise immediately to 

9 the problem of, well, how do you identify 

10 these thorium workers, and it was not 

11 necessarily straightforward business to do 

12 this because thorium production took place in 

13 short campaigns. It was a small fraction of 

14 the uranium production, and so we really have 

15 to go back to process knowledge and the 

16 subject matter expertise for personnel who 

17 were involved in that back in the time.

18 And based on this then an estimate 

19 can be made of the plants where product was 

20 produced, the yearly production, and rates and 

21 amounts produced.
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1 And finally if the processes by 

2 which uranium and thorium were produced -- I 

3 should say the processes that gave rise to the 

4 airborne dust -- are sufficiently similar, 

5 then you may presume that thorium exposure 

6 that took place based on the fact that ICRP 

7 DCFs are found in thorium for all organs 

8 concerned.

9 If you'll excuse me a second, I'll 

10 jump ahead.

11 So exactly what is a DWE? It's a 

12 time-weighted alpha air concentration. It's 

13 specific to a job in a particular facility. 

14 There are several tasks that are involved per 

15 job ranging anywhere from three to more than 

16 20. I think one I saw 22 separate tasks 

17 associated with it.

18 The high, the low, and the average 

19 value of air concentration per task was 

20 reported in units of dpm, disintegrations per 

21 minute, per cubic meter for each task 
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1 associated with the job.

2 However, the data that underlie 

3 that -- building that average are not 

4 reported. The time to complete each task is 

5 reported. This is based on management's 

6 assessments doing time-motion studies, 

7 whatnot, of approximately how long each of 

8 these various tasks would occur.

9 The two types of samples reported,

10 breathing zone samples, which are more 

11 indicative of job-specific exposures, and then 

12 general air samples, which are the ambient 

13 contributions from the cafeteria, the wash 

14 room, things of that sort, which are really 

15 minor contributors to dose.

16 This slide number 6 is an example 

17 of a job exposure evaluation card. It was 

18 taken from an actual air dust report. This is 

19 for Plant 9 in 1955. This is the period of 

20 maximum thorium metal production at FMPC, and 

21 you can see here over on the far left column, 
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1 if I can get my mouse here, this is the type 

2 of sample. There are three breathing zones 

3 and, I believe, seven general air samples.

4 Each shift was approximately eight 

5 and a half hours long, 510 minutes, and you 

6 have the time per shift for each of these 

7 operations. For example, the very first one, 

8 dumping the thorium nitrate tetrafluoride into 

9 the dissolving tank. It took about 60 minutes 

10 to perform that. The high value is 1088, low 

11 293, and an average of 774.

12 The far right column is the 

13 multiple of the time per shift by the average 

14 concentration, and so these T by C values for 

15 each particular task, or type of exposure --

16 these are not really tasks. I guess they're 

17 just apportioned times in these various 

18 locations -- these are all summed up and 

19 divided by the total amount of time per shift 

20 to give you this worker-specific or job21 specific weighted exposure, which was either 
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1 reported in the dpm per cubic meter, as I said 

2 before, or else in maximum allowable 

3 concentration, MAC, which was about 70 dpm per 

4 cubic meter at the time of --

5 DR. MAURO: John, just a quick 

6 question for clarification. So this is a guy 

7 who had a job that's called wet area helper.

8 MR. STIVER: Yes, this is for one 

9 category of worker, the wet area helper.

10 DR. MAURO: And this is what kinds 

11 of exposures he would experience in eight 

12 hours.

13 MR. STIVER: Exactly. This is the 

14 type of exposure that worker would be expected 

15 to accrue on the day that these samples were 

16 taken for the workers who were actually there. 

17 We'll get into that aspect of uncertainty.

18 DR. MAKHIJANI: Can you go back 

19 just a second?

20 MR. STIVER: Sure.

21 DR. MAKHIJANI: There's one thing 
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1 I want to find out. If you look at any 

2 particular task within these eight and a half 

3 hours, you'll see that typically exposure 

4 levels are highly variable. So, you know, --

5 MR. STIVER: -- later.

6 DR. MAKHIJANI: Oh, you're going 

7 to get into that.

8 MR. STIVER: Some are even more, 

9 even more extreme than this.

10 Let's see. Why don't we just back 

11 up for a second and pull up -- let's see here. 

12 Here we go. We'll go all the way back up 

13 here.

14 And this is an example. It's 

15 Table 1. It's from the same report, and this 

16 shows for all the different workers within the 

17 facility, there were a total of 119 employees 

18 during the time period in 32 different jobs, 

19 292 separate tasks.

20 There were 640 separate air 

21 samples that were collected in this year, this 
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1 particular group. A portion of about 92 

2 different tasks. The reason that you have the 

3 difference of 273 versus 92 is a lot of 

4 general air fatalities were assigned to 

5 multiple job types. So there's quite a few 

6 replicates in the data set regarding the 

7 general air stuff.

8 The DWEs range from the lowest at 

9 1.36 up to 685, a little bit more than that. 

10 So this really stresses the importance of job 

11 category. The actual air dust reports are 

12 posted on the O: drive if anybody is 

13 interested, the ones that are related to this 

14 particular study.

15 So in summary, all we can say 

16 about this job-specific DWE, it's really a 

17 task-related air concentration for a given 

18 alpha emitter. For the specific days on which 

19 sampling took place, the answer is workers 

20 were actually monitored.

21 The time-weighting element here is 
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1 critical because this is really the linchpin 

2 that ties potential worker exposure to an air

3 concentration in this big plant with all of 

4 these processes going on, a certain area for 

5 certain profits for a certain period of time. 

6 Without that, the link between the worker and 

7 the concentration is lost.

8 So really in actuality what we 

9 have, as Arjun alluded to here, we have a 

10 distribution of DWEs. We don't just have this 

11 average value in this report. When you look 

12 at all of the workers and look at the job, 

13 there's really a distribution on these and 

14 it's variable both in space and time. There's 

15 a lot of variation even within a given task, 

16 but certainly among all the different tasks 

17 for inside workers, and that's going to become 

18 a critical element of this discussion here.

19 In summary, the DWE data set is 

20 very large. It's a very impressive data set, 

21 one of the best I've seen. It covers most 
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1 facilities in years and a lot of jobs, a very 

2 large array of jobs, and as I say, it 

3 establishes the typical exposures under the 

4 working conditions on days they are performed.

5 Now, I'm going to briefly list 

6 some of the highlights of the NIOSH White 

7 Paper which we referred to as Morris 2009, Bob 

8 Morris' paper. As we've discussed, it seeks 

9 to use the DWE data to estimate the chronic 

10 daily intake rates for thorium-232 of thorium 

11 workers in the period prior to 1968 before the 

12 in vivo counting system was put on line.

13 It involves a thorium time line 

14 which was developed based on the process 

15 knowledge and subject matter expert 

16 interviews; introduce what are the best 

17 estimates of the production facilities and 

18 processes, the quantities in production, and 

19 for workers who actually have specific data in 

20 their CATI report, in my records that identify 

21 the specific jobs, I'm not going to propose 
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1 that we use the DWE for a specific job. 

2 However, that's typically not the case. 

3 Usually you might have some information. The 

4 guy was a welder, but there are several 

5 different categories of welders. He could be 

6 the helper. He could be the primary one. You 

7 don't know. There's a big range of exposures 

8 for that type job.

9 So what they seek to do is to then 

10 take job DWEs, all of them, for an entire 

11 facility, sit them to a log-normal 

12 distribution, and then pick off different 

13 quantiles, the high, medium and low quantile, 

14 and then pull these different groups of jobs 

15 that in the field have similar exposures, 

16 whether it be at the low end for 

17 administrative and clerical versus the high 

18 end of, you know, the welders, the furnace 

19 operators, the people that are exposed on a 

20 regular basis to high air concentrations of 

21 this material.
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1 And then for those who can't 

2 really fit into either category, and they're 

3 putting the same maintenance workers and 

4 construction workers, which we have run into a 

5 different wrinkle with that today, but that's 

6 another story. These guys would go into the 

7 medium category. It would be the full 

8 distribution, essentially a geometric mean 

9 plus or minus the standard GSD on either side 

10 of it.

11 Now, this is where I'd like to 

12 jump off to the findings resolution matrix, 

13 and our report identified 20 separate 

14 findings. Several of them really address 

15 different aspects of a given topic, and I've 

16 listed the four big ones here. One is this 

17 issue of bounding intakes under the 

18 requirements of Part 83.

19 Another really gets to the 

20 uncertainty and the representativeness of this 

21 data, the different types of exposures in 
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1 thorium processes, as well as the 

2 applicability to thorium versus uranium. A 

3 lot of the data reflected uranium processes. 

4 So there's this uncertainty as to whether this 

5 can be adapted to thorium for the reasons I 

6 cited before relating to process with the same 

7 types of dust collectors.

8 And then another set, about four, 

9 related to the statistical integrity. We have 

10 the NIOSH facility distributions 

11 reinterpreted. I'm going to get into building 

12 a job-based DWE distribution.

13 And so I will now jump off to 

14 that, and the first two findings relate -- let 

15 me see if I can make this a little bit bigger 

16 here. It's not going to work. I don't know 

17 if you can read this or not, but I'll go 

18 through the highlights of it, and if you'd 

19 like, I do have copies of it we can distribute 

20 if anybody wants to really read these.

21 DR. MAKHIJANI: We want a copy.
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1 MR. STIVER: Anybody want a copy? 

2 I've got them right here.

3 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: I'd like one. 

4 You can hand them out as you're talking.

5 MR. STIVER: It's fairly detailed 

6 because it was intended for NIOSH to use this 

7 as a basis for responding.

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: It's not marked 

9 whether it's PA-cleared or not.

10 DR. MAURO: Has that been through 

11 PA clearance?

12 MR. STIVER: Yes, all of these 

13 have.

14 DR. MAURO: Is it marked on the 

15 bottom that it has been PA-cleared?

16 MR. STIVER: Yes.

17 DR. MAURO: Okay.

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: It doesn't show up 

19 on this one.

20 MR. STIVER: Emily cleared them 

21 for me. You can blame her if it's not.
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1 MEMBER ZIEMER: My copy doesn't 

2 show either a date or a PA code. I mean, what 

3 was distributed in --

4 MR. STIVER: Yours would probably 

5 have been the non-PA code. Those are the ones 

6 that were sent to the Advisory Board.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes. Okay.

8 MR. STIVER: Here's one. 

9 DR. MAURO: Do you want to keep 

10 the non-PA cleared? Because they have 

11 unredacted information.

12 MR. STIVER: Okay. So these first 

13 findings, first and the second, related to the 

14 variability within DWE, a given job in DWE. 

15 Finding 1 states the DWEs for a specific job 

16 descriptions listed in Table 1, which you just 

17 looked at, are realistic estimates for a given 

18 job category that may not cover some workers 

19 that worked in those jobs, and this is really 

20 the fact that you have a particular worker. 

21 You know, he's, like I say, a welder's helper, 
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1 primary welder's helper, and then you go ahead 

2 and assign him that DWE for that particular 

3 job. It's going to give him the average 

4 value. It's not going to be a bounding 

5 average.

6 And like I said, I have this 

7 category here, the secondary helper within a 

8 particular job category. The highest one is 

9 at 185, and that's really where the -- you 

10 know, you give them that value. It seems this 

11 is the highest exposure with this whole 

12 facility, but if the average worker happens to 

13 be in that category, you're not giving him a 

14 bounding dose.

15 And in addition to that, as I 

16 mentioned, there's this larger variation 

17 within a job type. Say in this particular 

18 situation, you've got a principal worker who 

19 gets a 9 MAC. His helper, on the other hand, 

20 gets 685 MAC. If you have to assume these 

21 guys are pretty much joined at the hip 
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1 throughout the day, there's a huge amount of 

2 variation here and you don't know whether 

3 that's related to the tasks or the variation 

4 within that data as we collected it.

5 Now, for this particular case, the 

6 helpers, you typically give them the dirty 

7 tasks. I cite an example here of leaning 

8 these furnace pots. This is a 75-minute 

9 operation, 3.2 times ten to the fifth dpm per 

10 cubic meter for the measurements that were 

11 taken. However, we don't know where the 

12 principal workers were. At least sometimes it 

13 goes to these levels as well. So there's an 

14 element of uncertainty. There's an element of 

15 variation as well in the data set.

16 Now, Morris' report, 2009, in 

17 Section 4.1, it describes a method that from 

18 that estimating a log-normal distribution for 

19 the task of air concentrations, from the 

20 average and the range, and they are then able 

21 to use that using fairly standard, statistical 
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1 techniques to generate the geometric standard 

2 deviation from the geometric mean and then 

3 generate the log-normal distribution to go 

4 with each of those tasks.

5 So in theory, you can build the 

6 distribution for each task. What they don't 

7 do is explain how to combine those 

8 distributions into a job DWE. Now, they do, 

9 on the other hand, cite this paper Davis and 

10 Strom, said it looked into these types of 

11 weighted exposures in different facilities and 

12 reported a range of GSDs.

13 So they list these GSDs, a range 

14 of about 1.25 to eight, and there's no 

15 guidance provided as to how they should be 

16 used to the dose reconstructor and what 

17 conditions would you apply three versus five 

18 versus eight.

19 And so there's a basis for a good 

20 job DWE, a distribution model here that just 

21 has not been treated.
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1 DR. MAURO: John, let me ask you a 

2 question --

3 MR. STIVER: Yes.

4 DR. MAURO: -- so I understand. 

5 In the example you have this 685 MAC for a 

6 secondary helper.

7 MR. STIVER: Yes.

8 DR. MAURO: So it is a guy and 

9 it's a given year and we know his job 

10 description is the secondary helper. The 

11 assumption is we will assume he's exposed to 

12 685 MAC eight hours a day or 2,000 hours per 

13 year, and the intent would be to assign that 

14 dose to that guy, I guess, in that year.

15 I just want to make sure I've got 

16 the mechanics.

17 MR. STIVER: We're looking at the 

18 situation when we actually know the guy's job 

19 description. Okay? So if we assign them just 

20 the -- I'm trying to illustrate here -- if we 

21 assign him just the DWE -- this is good. When 
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1 you don't know what the job title was, that's 

2 when you go to this facility distribution. 

3 That's another -- it's kind of a different 

4 topic than the other one.

5 DR. MAURO: But sorry. I guess 

6 the answer is yes or no to my question. If 

7 it's a given year that this DWE measurement 

8 was made and a given building --

9 MR. STIVER: That would be his 

10 average.

11 DR. MAURO: Yes.

12 MR. STIVER: That would be his 

13 dose.

14 DR. MAURO: And you knew that this 

15 guy was designated as a secondary helper, 

16 according to the coworker model that they've 

17 developed, they would assign to that guy 685 

18 MAC exposure continuously for the entire year.

19 MR. STIVER: Right.

20 DR. MAURO: That's how they would 

21 do to that. Okay, and one of the points 
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1 you're making, though, is that the reality is 

2 that particular MAC is based on one worker, 

3 one day. You're saying there could be some 

4 variability.

5 MR. STIVER: It's a weighted 

6 average. You don't know how many workers that 

7 represented above or the number of samples.

8 DR. MAURO: Well, in other words, 

9 it may be -- let's say it turns out there are 

10 20 secondary helpers that work in that 

11 building in that year, all 20 will be getting 

12 the same --

13 MR. STIVER: We know they'll be 

14 getting that same value.

15 DR. MAURO: Okay.

16 MR. STIVER: Now what I'm saying 

17 is they do address the issue among certain --

18 DR. MAURO: Okay, got it.

19 MR. STIVER: -- okay? But it's 

20 just not a completely fleshed-out model.

21 Now, moving on to Finding 5, this 
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1 really kind of developed this idea of 

2 variability within the DWE, and this is kind 

3 of another angle of the same issue. In those 

4 cases where you do have a good DWE, if a 

5 person gets average exposure for a job 

6 description, you haven't addressed the 

7 variability among the workers in that 

8 particular category.

9 In some situations there's a huge 

10 amount of variation. In one task, presumably 

11 a lot of samples were taken in an appropriate 

12 manner, and this was the top of Column 4 here. 

13 This was in Plant 1 in 1955 and a certain 

14 category of operators here, and there was one 

15 particular task of blending and canning, and 

16 there's 36 samples taken, read these samples, 

17 and ranging from eight to 65,000 ppm per cubic 

18 meter.

19 Now, you can see the log-normal 

20 for those two extremes, but there's a 

21 tremendous amount of uncertainty from that 
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1 distribution, and we feel that if the source 

2 data were available to reconstruct that 

3 distribution, then by all means it should be 

4 done.

5 And the Morris 2009 is really kind 

6 of silent on this issue of underlying data 

7 availability. We have established at least 

8 some of the source data that are available. 

9 When I first started on this project, Bob 

10 Barton pulled down some spreadsheets, and I 

11 was able to match up some of the values in the 

12 spreadsheets to the high and low values on 

13 those DWEs. So I know they were used.

14 What we don't know is how 

15 extensive that data set is and how retrievable 

16 it may be or whether some of this data is 

17 irretrievably lost.

18 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, a little bit 

19 more on that. You've got 36 samples and what 

20 you will have, the data we have is the low, 

21 the high and the average. So we've lost 33 
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1 pieces of information.

2 DR. MAURO: What is the eight to 

3 65,000?

4 DR. MAKHIJANI: That's the low 

5 measurement and the high measurement.

6 DR. MAURO: Oh, I see.

7 DR. MAKHIJANI: And then you have 

8 an average.

9 DR. MAURO: And then we get the 

10 average, but we don't get the underlying 

11 samples of --

12 DR. MAKHIJANI: If you have two 

13 samples or three samples, you can construct 

14 the whole data set for that because you have 

15 low, high and average, but if you have more 

16 than three samples, you have lost those extra 

17 pieces of information, more than three.

18 DR. MAURO: But do you have four 

19 separate estimates of the DWE for that work 

20 category?

21 MR. STIVER: We do not.
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1 DR. MAURO: But it says four 

2 workers.

3 MR. STIVER: Oh, this is four 

4 workers that were involved in that 

5 particular --

6 DR. MAURO: Oh, this is the 

7 workers.

8 MR. STIVER: It's not four worker 

9 samples. It's four workers in that category. 

10 There's a lot of -- we get further along with 

11 some other findings that kind of get that and 

12 most of the developments of this idea. So 

13 anyway, we feel that some kind of systematic 

14 search should be conducted to try to identify 

15 availability.

16 MR. ROLFES: We do have some of 

17 that data. I just don't know how much it is.

18 MR. STIVER: So, yes, the source 

19 data would really improve that and reduce a 

20 lot of uncertainty on the whole thing. 

21 Lacking the source data, I think their 
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1 approach to generating the log-normal 

2 distribution to be credible to the extent that 

3 it's complete, it's not going to be up to full 

4 capacity.

5 Now, the next five findings relate 

6 to different aspects of uncertainty and 

7 applicability, representativeness of this 

8 data, certain types of exposures and 

9 conditions. This first one relates to off10 normal occurrences such as fires and reduction 

11 bond explosions.

12 I've got an example here of our 

13 Petition Evaluation Reports, page 70. This 

14 describes 1960 that background levels are at 

15 this one particular fire back on Level 1 at 

16 2.1 MAC on 458, just in this one particular 

17 instance. So the question is, you know have 

18 limited sampling, limited number of workers. 

19 How well is this DWE data capturing these off20 normal occurrences within the task context?

21 And we believe that some efforts 
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1 will be made to uncover these types of 

2 accounts to the extent that they exist and 

3 perhaps account for the uncertainty of the 

4 model that's related to that particular 

5 aspect.

6 During our technical conference, 

7 Mark had indicated that you guys had found an 

8 example of these plant items of reduction bomb 

9 explosions. So there are accounts of this 

10 type of thing out there, to the extent that 

11 they can be catalogued, it's kind of uncertain 

12 at this point.

13 The next findings, I was just 

14 going to say that's one of the things, too, 

15 that you know we have said that we typically 

16 consider the historical dose reconstruction. 

17 You know that it accounts for an acute intake 

18 separate from a chronic intake. This has 

19 really been almost in all cases, it's not 

20 something that makes a difference in the 

21 assigned internal ones. Some of these off-
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1 normal occurrences result in fairly high 

2 intakes.

3 MR. ROLFES: Well, the Plant 9 

4 incident that you had referred to, the 

5 explosion actually was lethal to the 

6 individuals involved, and so there really 

7 wouldn't be a dose --

8 MR. STIVER: Well, not in those 

9 cases, but in the situations where you have 

10 really high concentrations, it may not be 

11 captured in the data.

12 MR. ROLFES: Yes.

13 MR. STIVER: And there may not be 

14 accounts of them. So there's an element of 

15 uncertainty that needs to be introduced in 

16 addition to the variability in the data set.

17 Now, Finding 3 relates to how well 

18 the data captured -- and often that isn't 

19 known -- the thorium process. In this case, 

20 back in 1966 during a redrumming operation, 

21 and the DWE data is just very inconsistent.
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1 And I've cited two references 

2 here, DeFazio and Audia and Starkey and 

3 Chapman, 65 and 68, respectively. But they 

4 indicate that the redrumming operations were 

5 the most important contributor to dust loading 

6 and resulted in unacceptable levels of loading 

7 in that facility on many different occasions, 

8 and yet when you look at the DWE data, you get 

9 the very highest category, which is somebody 

10 we know is handling drums, and it was only 103 

11 dpm per cubic meter. Now, most of our way 

12 down low are much lower than that. So there's 

13 some question as to whether that data is 

14 actually capturing the intended process that 

15 it was collected for or that it's proposed to 

16 be used for.

17 Another aspect of uncertainty here 

18 is the situations. We know that all the 

19 workers weren't monitored during these 

20 surveys. Sometimes one was monitored, more 

21 than one. Sometimes none of them were 
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1 monitored. So there was an element of 

2 uncertainty in how well this data represents 

3 all workers.

4 And an example of this is Plant 4, 

5 the green salt plant in 1955, where there were 

6 21 workers in five different categories that 

7 were given the exact same general air sample 

8 mitt, but there was no difference between any 

9 of them. So there was this appearance of more 

10 granularity than really exists in the data in 

11 certain places.

12 And so how well does this DWE data 

13 actually represent what these guys were doing 

14 and what they were exposed to at any point in 

15 time. So there's another element of 

16 uncertainty in this group.

17 Finding 6, this relates to how 

18 well the uranium data can be translated into 

19 thorium exposure potential, and in addition to 

20 that, how well some known thorium exposure DWE 

21 data actually relate to thorium processing in 
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1 a given plant in a given year.

2 In the first case, when you're 

3 looking at uranium data and trying to apply 

4 the thorium operations, it's Plant 6 in 1960, 

5 one of the biggest sets of data we've got in 

6 the entire batch. They're data from the 

7 rolling mill, from the machines area, from the 

8 inspection area, and the dust room for it is 

9 nice. This is one of the few ones that 

10 actually has a blueprint of the layout of the 

11 entire plant. So you can see where all of 

12 those different things were going on there.

13 And the thorium operation was 

14 going on there in 1960. There was this 

15 oxidation of thorium residues. There's all of 

16 these pyrophoric residues that get analyzed to 

17 fires all over the facility. So what have we 

18 got to do? We've got to oxidize this stuff. 

19 We've got to burn it, get it into stable form. 

20 I believe it was like 80 metric tons that 

21 were oxidized in terms of processing in Plant 
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1 6, and so what they did is they used one of 

2 the furnaces in Plant 6 to do this oxidation.

3 But we have data for Plant 6 from 

4 the rolling room, which we know that is where 

5 the furnace is. There's two furnaces in the 

6 rolling area. They treated the units, heated 

7 them up from the rolling machines, and there's 

8 also a slug furnace, and so you say that, 

9 well, the best data are probably going to be 

10 for the furnace loaders and heaters.

11 Now, the guys are working the 

12 furnace, but then the question is the residues 

13 generate the same kind of dust and plume loads 

14 as treating, you know, ingots of metal. Now, 

15 you're probably going to generate a lot of big 

16 flakes of metal coming off these ingots and 

17 larger particles, whereas, in the oxidation 

18 process you probably have respirable small 

19 particles. So, you know, how well is that 

20 data really representative of what's going on?

21 The example I've got from the 
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1 limited thorium production would be Plant 9 in 

2 1954. Now, there were two days where samples 

3 were collected in May. There was only 19 

4 workers that were involved at that time as 

5 opposed to 119 the next year. We know that 

6 the whole process got ramped up in 1954 to 

7 where, by the end of the year, they were at 

8 full force. Whereas, in the beginning they 

9 were just getting things underway.

10 And so the air dust report says 

11 there were now blending and reduction 

12 operations going on during the time these data 

13 were collected, but only the remelting and 

14 working the thorium, and that's the only data 

15 that was available for that year.

16 So is this really representative 

17 of what was going on during the month of 

18 highest exposure potential at that time? Or 

19 do you have to take next year's data and back20 extrapolate, do some sort of surrogate data 

21 application to assess the exposures?
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1 Finally, the last finding related 

2 to uncertainty would be this idea of exposure 

3 outside of the task context, basically 

4 fugitive emissions. 

5 Now, you might say that, well, 

6 fugitive emissions, to the extent that they 

7 exist, are going to be captured by the general 

8 air samples because you're spreading the stuff 

9 all over the place. There's a higher amount 

10 being produced, and in general, our samples, 

11 it's not going to be an issue.

12 There are a couple of examples 

13 here. This is from 1970, which is really 

14 outside our range of interest, but it kind of 

15 illustrates the point. One was this bad boron 

16 mill. It was just a really bad source of 

17 dust. It was leaking all over the place. 

18 They put buckets under to try to catch the 

19 dust. It sprayed dust throughout the annex.

20 Another is these trays of calcined 

21 thorium tetrafluoride and calcium fluoride. 
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1 What they do is they took the trays and they 

2 stack them by the door of the facility to cool

3 them off. Well, the wind comes along and 

4 blows the stuff back in all over the place, 

5 and people don't know that it doesn't also 

6 blow it off? It was a severe source of 

7 environmental exposure, too.

8 But the problem I have with, you 

9 know, assuming that the general air samples 

10 will catch this is, you know, how about the 

11 re-suspension? This stuff comes in and 

12 settles down in there, and so a general air 

13 sample is, you know, a meter above the ground 

14 or wherever it is may not be capturing the 

15 potential there. In other words, when the 

16 wind blows in or whatever, a forklift comes by 

17 and kicks the stuff in the air, you know, you 

18 have a higher exposure potential that may not 

19 be captured, and so that's another source of 

20 uncertainty.

21 DR. MAURO: But the general air
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1 samples are going on continuously.

2 MR. STIVER: Right.

3 DR. MAURO: So it's an integrated. 

4 In other words --

5 MR. STIVER: Yes.

6 DR. MAURO: -- the general air 

7 sample, wherever it happens to be located is 

8 just going on continuously and you pull 

9 another one.

10 MR. STIVER: This is where our 

11 samples are located. They're really capturing 

12 what --

13 DR. MAURO: Except your concern is 

14 that if they're not in the right place.

15 MR. STIVER: Yes, if they're not 

16 in the right place you may not capture them.

17 DR. MAKHIJANI: And besides that, 

18 John, the problem here is that these are like 

19 episodic light exposures.

20 MR. STIVER: Exactly.

21 DR. MAKHIJANI: They have dust 
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1 loading all the time, but you will have dust 

2 loading leaking. Actually in that memo, I 

3 think it actually says outside air. So you 

4 have fugitive emissions that are creating 

5 environmental concentrations that are pretty 

6 high, according to their own description as 

7 late as 1970.

8 MR. STIVER: Yes. That really 

9 gets to --

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: I wasn't going to 

11 ask about this, but just a general question 

12 because I have to hit the road. I do have an 

13 appointment in Indianapolis at 6:30. So I've 

14 got to make that.

15 MR. STIVER: I'll try to get 

16 through this.

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, I'm going to 

18 leave.

19 MR. STIVER: Oh.

20 (Laughter.)

21 MEMBER ZIEMER: I'm going to leave 
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1 in three minutes, and I can read the rest of 

2 these, but I assume that we're going to get a 

3 NIOSH response.

4 MR. ROLFES: Yes, we've got all of 

5 this information.

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: And we've just all 

7 got to read it as well.

8 MR. STIVER: Yes, we left it in 

9 the room for you guys to --

10 MR. ROLFES: Yes, right now we had 

11 hoped to have our responses prepared in time 

12 for this meeting and haven't had the 

13 opportunity to complete them yet. I know 

14 we've received all of this information and 

15 we're considering it right now first off. I 

16 don't know if we need to go through all of it 

17 here on the record, but I don't think we have 

18 time. I think it will be appropriate to do it 

19 next time around.

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: I think it would 

21 be better to have your response in writing 
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1 before. It is more helpful.

2 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: So we know 

3 where we're at.

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: And I assume 

5 that's the path forward on this, and I just 

6 wanted to get that on the record, but I am 

7 going to have to leave.

8 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Yes, that's 

9 fine. Thank you. I appreciate your coming.

10 Okay. Go ahead and continue.

11 MR. STIVER: Moving along here, 

12 Finding 8 relates to there are certain years 

13 in plants for which the time line has no 

14 report, and so there are not too many gaps for 

15 most of the plants and years in the thorium 

16 time line. There are reports available. 

17 Probably the one example here, at least as of 

18 March in 2009 is last year.

19 The pilot plant, there are four 

20 years of missing data. Now, Mark also 

21 indicated that you guys have transcribed a lot 
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1 more of this DWE data. It just hasn't been 

2 posted yet.

3 MR. ROLFES: Correct.

4 MR. STIVER: So it may very well 

5 include the pilot plant. If it does not, 

6 there is limited data for the pilot plant on 

7 either side of that gap. There is also some 

8 of this underlying air sampling. So it might 

9 be a good test case for this, you know, 

10 applying a process whereby you can apply 

11 surrogate data, you know, within a plant or 

12 from another plant with similar processes 

13 going on. You know, if that is the case, that 

14 might provide a good pilot study as a good 

15 testing source.

16 I might also indicate that our 

17 report was in error in a couple of spots. We 

18 listed Plant 6 in 59 and Plant 8 in 56 as 

19 being pertinent but not having data, and it 

20 turns out that that was a carryover from a 

21 previous version that did not get scrubbed at 
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1 the final draft. So my apologies for 

2 including that.

3 And the finding that emulates to 

4 the thorium time line itself, now, it's a vast 

5 improvement over what was in the Site Profile. 

6 However, the document itself indicates that 

7 it's based on fairly limited resources and 

8 subject matter experts' recollections. So 

9 there's some uncertainty remaining as to 

10 whether it's accurate and complete or whether 

11 it could ever be made so.

12 So this is a source that may or 

13 may not be a subject that could be resolved. 

14 I don't know the extent to which it is 

15 complete. It seems to be fairly complete from 

16 what I've read in the underlying references. 

17 It's probably as good as it's going to get, 

18 but we don't know that for certain.

19 DR. MAKHIJANI: To my memory, 

20 John, we did identify one or two gaps in that.

21 MR. STIVER: Actually that turned 
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1 out to --

2 DR. MAKHIJANI: That was not a 

3 gap.

4 MR. STIVER: It was not a gap.

5 DR. MAKHIJANI: It has been fixed 

6 since I looked at it.

7 MR. STIVER: Our Findings 10 

8 through 13 relate to the NIOSH's proposed 

9 facility distribution model, and these 

10 findings gave us some problems. Let's take a 

11 look at this first one.

12 This is kind of a generalized 

13 finding. The NIOSH approach to building a 

14 single distribution of air concentration; it 

15 doesn't appear to be statistically valid using 

16 the DWE data to the extent that it is 

17 transparent.

18 If you go over to column 4, there 

19 is some italicized information that was taken 

20 directly out of March 2009. This is really 

21 equation 1 here, the fundamental statistical 
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1 unit for the distribution. The job average is 

2 going to be the value upon which this whole 

3 distribution is built, and this Y bar I 

4 represents the job averages, our 

5 interpretation of this, where I is equal to 1 

6 to the N jobs in the facility and Yi1 and Yi2 

7 up to Yi10 are presumably the task averages --

8 in this case, there would have been ten of 

9 them -- divided by the number eight, where 

10 eight is the assumed number of operations that 

11 contribute significantly as a job exposure.

12 Now, this development breaks 

13 across the page. Let's take a look at the 

14 next page, equation 2 and 3, and then based on 

15 this group of job averages, they then create a 

16 facility distribution, which is Y double bar, 

17 which is just the sum of all of these job 

18 averages divided by the other number. So you 

19 have now a mean value, a mean of a group of 

20 pseudo-averages, I suppose is the only way to 

21 put it, which is weighted by the number of 
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1 jobs, and then they introduce an estimator of 

2 the standard of variance, which can then 

3 theoretically be used to get the non-log4 normal parameters and build the facility 

5 distribution.

6 We have some problems with this on 

7 a number of levels, and we'll get into those 

8 here in the next finding, Finding 11. There's 

9 apparently two pieces of critical information 

10 that were available in the DWE reports that 

11 were not used, and that being the time 

12 weighting and the number of tasks per job.

13 And remember before I said time 

14 weighting is really that linchpin that ties 

15 the exposure potential to the air 

16 concentration in the facility at a given time 

17 and place, and without that you really are 

18 kind of drifting around. You've lost that 

19 connection between exposure potential and the 

20 air concentration.

21 And the number of tasks is really 
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1 also a variable associated with any given job 

2 on DWE. It's variable and it has to be 

3 included as such in the development of a 

4 model. 

5 So actually when you look at 

6 Finding 5, you've lost three pieces of 

7 information, two of which were available and 

8 weren't used and one which has yet to be 

9 determined, which is the uncertainty or not 

10 the uncertainty -- well, I guess there is no 

11 other -- the variability within the data set.

12 So you've lost three things. 

13 You've lost the time weighting. You've lost 

14 the number of tasks and you don't have a true 

15 estimate of variability within each job.

16 And then you have this number 

17 eight, eight tasks. We were kind of left 

18 scratching our heads over the number eight 

19 because Morris 2009 states that typically the 

20 fire operations contributed significantly to 

21 the exposure. So we're wondering why they 
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1 chose eight.

2 I understand why you guys did this 

3 is to kind of normalize things where we didn't 

4 have to build all of these different 

5 distributions and you could just kind of give 

6 some normalized value that's fairly 

7 representative and then build the distribution 

8 from that, and it would be a little more 

9 straightforward a method.

10 However, we feel that the 

11 resulting value isn't really interpretable in 

12 statistical terms. It's not an average of all 

13 the data that went into creating the task 

14 averages or the values for that job. It's not 

15 a weighted average. It's just a sum of 

16 average values divided by the number eight.

17 And so we're kind of left at the 

18 point of not being able to apply the rigorous 

19 discussion of the statistics that arise from 

20 this other than if you look at it in an 

21 empirical way, and if you go on to Finding 13, 
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1 it is probably the last thing related to that 

2 particular -- well, it's not. This relates to 

3 the focus on the distribution of job 

4 categories and not the actual number of 

5 workers in the job. It's kind of this 

6 underlying assumption here that personnel are 

7 kind of equally apportioned among different 

8 job categories for the facility.

9 And we demonstrated mathematical 

10 notation, but on page 31 of the report what 

11 they should be looking at is the number of 

12 workers in the category, not the categories 

13 themselves.

14 Let me go back to an example in 

15 our Attachment 1 from 1955. Let me go ahead 

16 and pull that back up here.

17 MR. ROLFES: John, if I could ask 

18 just a quick question, since we have people 

19 from ORAU on the team, I know that we've 

20 received this report from you. We're 

21 currently preparing responses to that. I 
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1 think in the interest of time, I think we 

2 don't want to go through all of these because 

3 we're not going to have the opportunity to 

4 respond today.

5 MR. STIVER: Okay.

6 MR. ROLFES: I don't know if it 

7 would be best to wait until next time so that 

8 we can get the discussion it needs.

9 MR. STIVER: Okay. I can do it 

10 pretty quickly. I don't have too much more 

11 left on it.

12 MR. ROLFES: Well, before you 

13 start that, I'd like to ask Bob Morris if he 

14 has anything that he would like to provide an 

15 update in case we don't have time at the end 

16 of your presentation.

17 Bob, could you possibly give us an 

18 update as to the status of our responses and 

19 maybe when we might be able to have those to 

20 the Advisory Board?

21 MR. MORRIS: Yes. Can you hear 
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1 me?

2 MR. ROLFES: Yes, Bob.

3 MR. MORRIS: We're working on it 

4 right now, and internal review is going to 

5 take some time after it's done. So it's 

6 probably a month out.

7 MR. ROLFES: A month? Okay.

8 MR. STIVER: Well, let me just do 

9 some quick finishing statements here.

10 This shows the distribution of 

11 Plant 1, `55. You've got these workers. 

12 There's 16 up on the high end and basically if 

13 you look up here, it's Table 1-1. NIOSH had 

14 two categories that were in the high exposure 

15 potential, and if you come down here, you see 

16 that if you use two out of 12, you see 17 

17 percent were in the high exposure category.

18 Well, it turns out there's 

19 actually 16 workers. So you're looking at 

20 about 57 percent actually in those high 

21 categories.
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1 So using job weighting as opposed 

2 to worker weighting can distort the low end in 

3 trying to assess the intake.

4 Let's see. Related to that was 

5 the idea of the questionable use of the log6 normal distribution, and we see this is 

7 clearly not log-normal. This is bimodal, and 

8 if you look at the score plot here, it shows 

9 the same thing.

10 And so we were kind of questioning 

11 the idea of using a log-normal distribution 

12 when we've shown that it wasn't applicable in 

13 50 percent of the data sets which comprised 82 

14 percent of the workers involved and didn't 

15 really confer any advantage in claimant 

16 favorability over the empirical distribution.

17 And so that is the end. 

18 Finding 7, this finding really 

19 relates to this whole concept of using 

20 distribution of weighted averages. Even if 

21 you could develop a statistically defensible 
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1 facility distribution of averages, assigning 

2 various categories based on exposure potential 

3 is not going to capture the highest exposure, 

4 exposed individuals within that.

5 And this is what we saw in the 

6 very first finding, even within one category. 

7 If you assign somebody to that category, 

8 you're not going to give them the highest 

9 potential.

10 And we went and constructed 

11 empirical distributions for each of these 

12 plants, and in every case the 95th percentile 

13 in empirical distribution missed the average, 

14 not the highest within that average, but the 

15 highest average. So assigning somebody to the 

16 95th percentile if you don't know anything 

17 about the job and they happen to be in the 

18 high category, it's not even the average. 

19 It's way below the average.

20 So this is a real problem when it 

21 comes to reconstructing bounding doses under 
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1 Part 83.

2 I won't go into all of the details 

3 here. It's just a listing of different things 

4 that were problematic.

5 Finding 19 is essentially the same 

6 as Finding 7. The subjects are pretty much 

7 the same as seven.

8 Fourteen to 16 related to how you 

9 go about building the defensible job-based 

10 distribution, and coming back up here, Finding 

11 7, we feel that some approach that's based on 

12 the actual job distribution appears to be 

13 essential, and this is even in cases where the 

14 data workers filed are not providing new 

15 information in this regard.

16 And so these other findings 

17 related to building statistically defensible 

18 distribution, we still feel that NIOSH has the 

19 basic approach in place. I mean, there's not 

20 a method by which you can generate the 

21 distributions for the tasks. What they don't 
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1 have is a way to combine those, and we 

2 demonstrated also in this example how you can 

3 go about using the method that NIOSH proposes 

4 for generating the task distributions. So we 

5 have used their method, took the number of 

6 samples, sampled that particular distribution 

7 for the task, 96 of them, and then plotted the 

8 average that we got from that and compared it 

9 to task coverage to what was reported in the 

10 DWE reports, and you see there's very good 

11 consistency there.

12 So I mean, in this case we believe 

13 the log-normal is probably applicable for the 

14 task distributions.

15 We then, using a crystal ball, we 

16 had generated the DWEs for each based on each 

17 -- we combined them and we followed technique, 

18 and these are the reported means. You can 

19 compare that. Up here you see that they're 

20 fairly consistent. I could split the screen, 

21 but I don't think we really need to at this 
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1 point.

2 But for each of those we have 

3 summary statistics based on the Monte Carlo, 

4 and so you can see that the highest exposure 

5 category, the mean and the upper bounds is 

6 about -- the 95th percentile is about 4,700 as 

7 opposed to an average of close to 1,500.

8 And I can go back here. I don't 

9 want to take up all the time.

10 So we have demonstrated this is a 

11 tractable problem to be solved in a number of 

12 different ways. We also reported an 

13 analytical approach in our review of the 

14 Mallinckrodt Chemical Works petition in 2005. 

15 Supposedly these are just methodologies 

16 whereby a job exposure distribution can be 

17 developed.

18 Finding 15 relates to trying to 

19 locate the source data, and we feel that any 

20 distribution that's based on actual source 

21 data by virtue of a reduction in the 
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1 uncertainty would be preferable and more 

2 defensible, and we have already discussed 

3 that.

4 Finding 16 is another aspect. 

5 Fifteen and 16 kind of relate to each other. 

6 If you don't have the data, then, you know, 

7 this log-normal approach is probably adequate.

8 Seventeen and 20 are really Site 

9 Profile issues that aren't really pertinent to 

10 this discussion. One is related to the 

11 ingestion model. This is TIB-0009 -- and 

12 we've discussed that many times in the past.

13 Finding 20 is related to 

14 construction trade workers. TIB-0052 is 

15 invoked where it's actually for bioassay data. 

16 It's not really applicable to that situation.

17 Let me go back to the presentation 

18 here.

19 In looking forward, we feel that 

20 the data could be improved by some of the 

21 things here. Obviously the newly transcribed 
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1 DWE data should be posted. A search should be 

2 conducted to locate the source data, 

3 documentation to allow for off-normal 

4 exposures, and documentation of fugitive 

5 emissions to really identify where surrogate 

6 data may be required. All of this is you know 

7 what you have and then you can make a better 

8 determination of how surrogate data can be 

9 used.

10 It also did benefit from focusing 

11 on jobs, specific DWEs in the facility 

12 distributions for the reasons discussed, while 

13 establishing variability in the task, 

14 concentrations, combining those distributions 

15 into a defensible job distribution, providing 

16 a method of assigning bounding job category 

17 for those claims about a defined job.

18 I know it would probably be 

19 something analogous to what we already 

20 attempted to do with the three categories, 

21 groupings of like exposures, the highest 
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1 distribution or the assignment of the 95th 

2 percentile in that distribution, we feel that 

3 would be the best approach.

4 And then find a way of ensuring 

5 the alpha air data that could be used in the 

6 DWE relative to all cases. This relates to 

7 the uncertainty for all the different aspects 

8 that we went through before. 

9 And finally, a process should be 

10 provided in the White Paper and a methodology 

11 for the use of surrogate data, and we feel 

12 that should be consistent with the Advisory 

13 Board draft criteria that have been 

14 articulated.

15 And that is it for me. Hopefully 

16 I haven't gone too far beyond your time frame, 

17 and so I look forward to your responses and 

18 working that out.

19 MR. ROLFES: All right. We'll 

20 work it out.

21 (Laughter.)
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1 MR. ROLFES: I don't know if Bob 

2 wants to say anything final about this --

3 MR. HINNEFELD: Mark, if he does, 

4 I'll shoot him.

5 (Laughter.)

6 MR. ROLFES: All right. We'll 

7 call the meeting closed.

8 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Hey, hey, hey.

9 MR. HINNEFELD: We're not closing 

10 the meeting. We're just finishing our 

11 participation in that part.

12 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay. And so 

13 the task on this we already discussed earlier. 

14 NIOSH is going to provide us with a response 

15 to this. That's correct, and we're looking at 

16 probably about a month out.

17 MR. HINNEFELD: That's our 

18 estimate today. I think it's a little 

19 difficult to say with any --

20 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Right.

21 MR. HINNEFELD: -- clarity today 
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1 what it will be.

2 MR. STIVER: Certainly by the time 

3 we have another meeting.

4 MS. BALDRIDGE: And whatever we 

5 can do to fast track.

6 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Yes.

7 MR. KATZ: So if anybody has any 

8 questions about the tasking today, raise them 

9 now because the next thing would be for SC&A 

10 and OCAS to send an e-mail confirming what 

11 their tasking is. So if you have any 

12 questions about your notes right now that you 

13 want to ask while we're still together.

14 MR. ROLFES: I was just going to 

15 ask a logistical thing. Maybe is it possible 

16 that we could expedite the transcript, that 

17 portion of the transcripts where there are 

18 some tasks listed or --

19 MR. KATZ: Well, I mean, sometimes 

20 they get those transcripts to us in less than 

21 30 days, and certainly if I get them sooner, I 
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1 can send them to all of you sooner. It's sort 

2 of very variable as to how quickly we get 

3 these, but 30 days is the outside limit.

4 MR. ROLFES: Okay.

5 DR. MAURO: I hate to do this, but 

6 does everyone here have a copy? This is a 

7 question to the folks at SC&A on the phone. 

8 Joyce and Rich both looked at the chest count, 

9 had a number of concerns. I know you sent 

10 that material to me. I read it. I have it 

11 with me. Has that material been sent to 

12 NIOSH?

13 DR. MAKHIJANI: It couldn't be.

14 DR. MAURO: It couldn't be?

15 DR. MAKHIJANI: It hasn't even 

16 gone through DOE yet.

17 DR. MAURO: Okay. Well, so we 

18 have a number of concerns with the post '68 

19 aspect of this problem, namely where chest 

20 counting is used as opposed to breathing zone.

21 And it sounds like that we have an 
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1 action item here to make sure we package that 

2 and deliver it to you because we really 

3 haven't had a chance. 

4 I see we're coming to the end. I 

5 just want to make sure everybody understands 

6 that we owe you that write-up so that you can 

7 respond to it also.

8 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: And, John, is 

9 this part of this?

10 DR. MAURO: No, it's separate.

11 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: It is separate.

12 DR. MAURO: Yes. I can see that, 

13 you know, the gas tank is empty, and I know 

14 that Joyce and Rich Leggett have been on the 

15 line. If they're still on the line I'm not 

16 sure.

17 MR. LEGGETT: We're here.

18 DR. LIPSZTEIN: Yes, we're here.

19 DR. MAURO: Okay. We're not going 

20 to go over that material today, but please 

21 fold together your material into a single 
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1 integrated story that we could move through 

2 the system and get into the hands of the Board 

3 and to NIOSH as soon as possible.

4 DR. MAKHIJANI: Actually it's 

5 nearly there. I read it this morning, and 

6 maybe we need a little bit of an internal 

7 review and then go off.

8 Just to remind you, Brad, these 

9 are the in vivo data and they are '68 to '78 

10 and '79 and '89 measured in different methods. 

11 That's what Joyce should be.

12 MR. KATZ: It's another White 

13 Paper.

14 MR. ROLFES: The method was the 

15 same, but the reporting was different.

16 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay. What I 

17 want to make sure is that we capture that as 

18 an item.

19 MR. KATZ: Yes.

20 DR. MAKHIJANI: They've got it as 

21 an action item.
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1 DR. GLOVER: John, we certainly 

2 can maybe pass e-mails back and forth, and 

3 then we could send one out after we go through 

4 and read it and capture all of that.

5 DR. MAURO: And see what it looks 

6 like, yes.

7 DR. GLOVER: Yes.

8 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: With that is 

9 there anything else that needs to come before 

10 the Work Group or what's left of us?

11 MR. KATZ: So I'm assuming we 

12 should wait a little bit before we try to 

13 schedule our next Work Group meeting.

14 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Yes.

15 MR. KATZ: And see how things turn 

16 out in terms of the timing of some of these.

17 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Yes. John, I 

18 ask for your help to make sure that -- because 

19 I'm sorry. This started going way over my 

20 head early on -- a copy of your action items.

21 DR. MAURO: Yes, I have a -- I 
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cautioned that this transcript is for information only and is subject to change.

383

NEAL R. GROSS

COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS

1323 RHODE ISLAND AVE., N.W.

(202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20005-3701 www.nealrgross.com

1 have -- what I did here during the course of 

2 this meeting is write down all of SC&A's 

3 action items. I didn't summarize the meeting, 

4 nor did I write down NIOSH's action items.

5 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Right.

6 DR. MAURO: So the next thing I am 

7 going to do is simply put a memo out that says 

8 here's my understanding of SC&A's action 

9 items. I will send that off to Mark to make 

10 sure, and you may want to add. Maybe you have 

11 a single -- you'd rather have a single package 

12 with all of the action items or should we just 

13 put ours out?

14 MR. KATZ: You put us in it.

15 DR. MAURO: We'll put it out.

16 MR. KATZ: OCAS will put out its 

17 own.

18 DR. MAURO: Okay, fine.

19 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: All right. I 

20 kind of was losing track of what to write down 

21 because the first part of the meeting went a 
This transcript of the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, Fernald Work Group, has 

been reviewed for concerns under the Privacy Act (5 U.S.C. § 552a) and personally identifiable 

information has been redacted as necessary. The transcript, however, has not been reviewed and 

certified by the Chair of the Fernald Work Group for accuracy at this time. The reader should be 

cautioned that this transcript is for information only and is subject to change.

384

NEAL R. GROSS

COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS

1323 RHODE ISLAND AVE., N.W.

(202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20005-3701 www.nealrgross.com

1 lot of different ways, but I would like to see 

2 that so that we make sure that we keep track 

3 of these and we proceed forward with them and 

4 so forth like that.

5 If that's it, I'll call this 

6 meeting adjourned.

7 (Whereupon, the above-entitled 

8 matter went off the record at 4:50 p.m.)

9

10

11