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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

 CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL 

+ + + + + 

 NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY 

 AND HEALTH 

+ + + + + 

 ADVISORY BOARD ON RADIATION AND 

 WORKER HEALTH 

+ + + + + 

 60th MEETING 

 + + + + + 

 TUESDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2008 

 The meeting came to order at 9:00 a.m. 

in the Oglethorpe Room of the Augusta Marriot 

Hotel and Suites, 2 Tenth Street, Augusta, 

Georgia, Dr. Paul L. Ziemer, Chair, 

presiding. 

PRESENT: 

PAUL L. ZIEMER, Chair 

JOSIE M. BEACH, Member 

BRADLEY P. CLAWSON, Member 

MICHAEL H. GIBSON, Member 

MARK A. GRIFFON, Member 

JAMES M. MELIUS, Member 

WANDA I. MUNN, Member 

ROBERT W. PRESLEY, Member 

JOHN W. POSTON, Member 

GENEVIEVE S. ROESSLER, Member 

 (via telephone) 

TED KATZ, Acting Designated Federal Official
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REGISTERED AND/OR PUBLIC COMMENT PARTICIPANTS 

ADAMS, NANCY, NIOSH CONTRACTOR 

AL-NABULSI, ISAF, DOE 

ANDERSON, VIRGINIA W. WSRC 

BAILEY, ROBERT 

BARTNETT, LOUISE 

BOATWRIGHT, D.B., SRS 

BOYCE, WAYNE 

BRADFORD, SHANNON, NIOSH 

BREYER, LAURIE, OCAS 

BROEHM, JASON, CDC 

BROCK, DENISE, NIOSH 

BROWN, KAREN, SRNS 

BURNETTE, ROSA, SRS 

BUSH, JIM, SRP 

BUSH, ROX ANN, SRP 

CAMERON, BUCK, ATL 

CANO, GINA, DOE 

CARVER, HARRY, SRNS 

CRASE, KEN, SRNS 

COOKE, SCOTT 

DAILEY, AMBER, SRNS 

DAVIS, PAMELA 

DAVIS, RUTH 

DEGARMO, DENISE, SIUE/DOW 

ELISBURG, DONALD, BCTD 

FARVER, DOUG, SC&A 

FINDLAY, MITCH, SRNS 

FRAME, ALICE 

FREDERICK, JEAN 

FUNK, JOHN, NTS 

GLEATON, DONALD, BSRI 

GREEN, STEVEN, SRG 

HALL, JOHN 

HAND, DONNA, NUCLEAR WORKER P/A 
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HANSON, JOHN, SIUE 

HARMON, YVONNE, SRP 

HARTNETT, LOUISE G. 

HASKELL, JUDY 

HASKELL, SAM 

HINNEFELD, STU, NIOSH 

HOMOKI-TITUS, LIZ, HHS 

HOWELL, EMILY, HHS 

HOOKER, N.D., GA BOW HUNTER 

JELNIGAN, CHARLES 

JOHNS, DALE 

JOHNS, GORDON 

JONES, RICHARD, WSI 

JONES, SIDNEY, ADORNES 

KELLY, DON 

KENNERLY, KATHRYN 

KENNERLY, PAM 

KIMPAN, KATE, ORAU 

KIRBY, ROBERT 

KNOX, WAYNE, SRS 

KOTSCH, JEFF, US DOL 

LAWSON, TALMADGE 

LABONE, TOM, ORAU 

LEGG, ROBERT, SRS 

LEWIS, GREG, DOE 

MAHATHY, MIKE, ORAU 

MAKHIJANI, ARJUN, SC&A 

MARSCHKE, STEVE, SC&A 

MAURO, JOHN, SC&A 

MILLER, RELADA, OCAS 

MCDONALD, FLETCHER, BSRI 

MCDOUGALL, VERNON, ATL 

MCFEE, MATT, ORAU 

MOCK, LAVERNE, SRP 

MORGAN, RUSS, SRNS 

MULLIGAN, JAMES 

NEWTON, LAURA, SRS 

NOIR, GENE 

NOIR, THELMA 

OLEIUYA, CHARLIE, DOE 

OVERCASH, KARL, SRP 
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PENNIEU, J.J. 

PITTMAN, LOURECETTA 

PRESLEY, LOUISE 

PRICE, REGINE, DOE 

QUINN, TRISH, CPLOR 

ROBERTS, KIM, SAIC 

ROTON, JOHN, IBEW 

SAM, BARBARA 

SAM, THOMAS 

SAPP, MARK 

STILL, MIKE 

TAULBEE, TIM, NIOSH 

TICHENOR, DUDLEY, NUCLEAR WORKER 

VAN BRACKLE, DANIEL E, SRS 

VANDERSYDE, JANET, NUCLEAR WORKER 

VAUGHN, DAVID, NUCLEAR WORKER 

VOLSCH, JOE, SIUE 

WADE, BETTY, SRS 

WADE, LEWIS 

WESTBURY, KIM 

WHITLEY, HENRY, SRS 

WHITLOCK, R. VERNON, SRS 

WILLIAMS, MIKE 

WORTHINGTON, PAT, DOE 

YOUNG, ROBERT, WSI 

ZACCHERO, MARY JO, ORAU 

ZEIGLER, JOE, BSRI 

ZIEMER, MARILYN 
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 A-G-E-N-D-A 

Welcome . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 

 Dr. Paul Ziemer, Chair 

NIOSH Program Update . . . . . . . . . 7 

 Mr. Larry Elliott, NIOSH 

Department of Labor Update . . . . . . 44 

 Mr. Jeffrey L. Kotsch, DOL 

Metallurgical Laboratory SEC Petition 

 Mr. Stu Hinnefeld, NIOSH . . . . . 61 

 Ms. Lafern Kuntz, Petitioner . . . 91 

Board Contractor Presentation . . . . . 108 

 Mr. John Mauro, SC&A 

Savannah River SEC Petition 

 Mr. Ted Katz, DFO . . . . . . . . 127 

 Mr. Timothy Taulbee, NIOSH . . . . 143 

 Mr. Henry Gordon Rowe, Petitioners 199 

 Mr. Don Elisburg, Petitioners. . . 215 

 Mr. Bob Warren, Petitioners . . . 232 

 Mr. Steve Marschke, SC&A . . . . . 243 

Public Comment

 Ms. Donna Hand . . . . . . . . . . 273 

 Mr. Harry Carver . . . . . . . . . 276 

 Mr. Mitch Still . . . . . . . . . 280 

 Mr. Jim Bush . . . . . . . . . . . 290 

 Ms. Alice Frame . . . . . . . . . 293 

 Mr. Wayne Knox . . . . . . . . . . 298 

 Mr. John Hall. . . . . . . . . . . 311 

 Mr. Wayne Boyce . . . . . . . . . 314 

 Mr. Sidney Jones . . . . . . . . . 317 

 Mr. Dan Lee Davis . . . . . . . . 323 

 Mr. Robert Young . . . . . . . . . 328 

 Mr. Karl Overcash . . . . . . . . 330 

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

 9:10 a.m. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Good morning, 

everyone. I'd like to officially call the 

meeting to order. This is the Advisory Board 

on Radiation and Worker Health as you know and 

we're pleased to be meeting here in beautiful 

Augusta. It's a pleasant time of year to be 

here, at least for some of us who've come from 

the more northern parts of the country. But 

in any event, welcome to all. I have a couple 

of housekeeping reminders for you. There is a 

registration booklet out in the foyer and we'd 

like everyone to register, board members, 

members of the federal agencies, members of 

the public, register your attendance so that 

we have a record of that. Also, there is a 

sign-up booklet out there that is available 

for those who would like to participate in the 

public comment period today. The public 

comment period is scheduled for 5:00 p.m. and 

if you wish to make public comment you can 
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register in that booklet again in the foyer. 

Also, on the table in the back there are a 

variety of documents, including today's 

agenda, so please avail yourself of those as 

needed. 

 In general, we will follow the 

agenda as given. The times on the agenda are 

in general approximate times. They are not 

time certain, so we may get ahead or behind 

depending on the issue and the nature of the 

discussion. But in any event, unless 

otherwise announced we will follow the order 

of the agenda as designated in that document. 

 I will take a moment to welcome one 

individual who is with us and that is Dr. 

Lewis Wade who was our Designated Federal 

Official. Lew, we're glad to have you here. 

He missed us so much, the deliberations, he 

couldn't stay away, but Lew, welcome. For the 

record, the record will show that Board Member 

Phil Schofield is not here this morning. Phil 

had some difficulty in traveling and will 
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arrive tomorrow. Board Member Dr. James 

Lockey will not be able to be with us today. 

And Board Member Dr. Gen Roessler will be with 

us by phone, and I think we do need to 

determine whether Dr. Roessler's on the line. 

 Gen, are you with us this morning? 

 MEMBER ROESSLER: I am on the line. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Great, that sounds 

like we have a good connection. 

 MEMBER ROESSLER: I can hear well, 

thank you. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Thank you. So other 

than that, the rest of the Board members are 

here assembled. Our Designated Federal 

Official is Ted Katz. Ted, if you have some 

additional remarks please proceed. 

 MR. KATZ: Yes, thank you. I am 

the acting Designated Federal Official and I 

want to welcome you, everyone here in the 

room, and from Savannah River site, and also 

everyone who's attending by telephone. And I 

also want to extend the welcome of Dr. 
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Christine Branch who is the acting director of 

NIOSH, but ordinarily serves as the Designated 

Federal Official currently for this board, and 

Secretary Levitt of the Department of Health 

and Human Services who is advised by this 

board. So welcome everybody. 

 And then just a functional matter 

for the people attending by telephone. Please 

realize - you don't, but your phones are 

hooked into our sound system here so if there 

is talk on your phones, if there's any 

background noise we all hear it. Dogs 

barking, dishes being washed, wherever you 

might be in your office, phones ringing, all 

of that is amplified here and it'll disrupt 

the Board while we hear that noise, so please 

mute your phones and keep them muted except 

when you're addressing the Board, and if you 

don't have a mute button *6 will work on your 

phone to mute the phone. And the other thing 

I just ask is if you want to disconnect please 

don't hit Hold, but disconnect completely and 
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call back in because if you press Hold, you 

don't realize that but there is - we'll either 

get a beep, or we'll get Muzak or something 

and that'll disrupt the Board as well. So 

please disconnect and call back in if you need 

to. Much thanks. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Okay, thank you very 

much. We will proceed then, and for the 

benefit of those of you who may be visitors 

for the first time to this board, we typically 

have an update from the federal agencies that 

are involved in this program, more 

specifically from NIOSH and Department of 

Labor. And so we're going to begin our agenda 

with those two reports this morning. We'll 

begin first with the program update from NIOSH 

and this will be given by the Director of 

OCAS, Office of Compensation Analysis, Larry 

Elliott. 

 MR. ELLIOTT: Good morning. Thank 

you Dr. Ziemer, and I too add my appreciation 

for the Board meeting here in lovely Augusta. 
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 It's much warmer here than it is back in 

Cincinnati where we're experiencing snowstorms 

today. So thanks for meeting here. 

 I've got a couple or three news 

briefs that I'd like to share with the Board 

before I get into the regular set of slides 

that I use. First of all, just to let the 

Board know and members of the audience, we 

have entered into another review by the 

Government Accountability Office. This review 

on the program concerns the implementation of 

this law. The review includes not only NIOSH, 

but also the activities of the Department of 

Labor and the Department of Energy in the 

program. Can't hear? Is that better? Okay, 

now we're up and running. As I was saying, we 

have entered into a review with the Government 

Accountability Office looking at the 

implementation of this program. It addresses 

the activities of the Department of Labor as 

well as NIOSH and the Department of Energy. 

That review has just started and we're not - 
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we don't know at this point in time when it 

will be completed or how soon they will 

deliver their report. They have just started 

their fact-finding phase, and so that's off 

and running. 

 The second news brief I have to 

make sure the Board is aware of is that the 

Department of Labor's Inspector General, 

Office of Inspector General filed a report - 

and you can find this on the DOL website; you 

can use OCAS's website and go to Related Links 

and that will take you to the Department of 

Labor website. You can find this report 

there. Accompanying the report is a 

memorandum of response from the Assistant 

Secretary of Department of Labor providing 

remarks about the report, and I'll have a few 

slides to address some issues that we have 

with the report later on in my presentation. 

 There's also been some - I'd like 

to take the opportunity at this point to also 

mention that in the media there's been some 
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recent information that has been provided that 

perhaps has given misunderstanding or 

misconception to things that are going on 

around the Dr. Ruttenberg data for the Rocky 

Flats site. NIOSH has been working hard with 

Dr. Ruttenberg's wife, Margaret Ruttenberg, to 

get a copy of this data set. We've been doing 

that since April of 2006 when a NIOSH 

scientist met with Dr. Ruttenberg before his 

death to discuss Dr. Ruttenberg's study. And 

based on that meeting we concluded, with the 

information Dr. Ruttenberg had given us that 

the dosimetry data that was used in Dr. 

Ruttenberg's study is the same set of data 

that NIOSH has used in our efforts to 

reconstruct dose in the neutron dose 

reconstruction project, which is the data 

that's used by NIOSH as well as the data used 

by Dr. Ruttenberg. Our efforts to work with 

Ms. Ruttenberg to get a copy of the data has 

been to verify that we have the same set of 

data and that the data is being used to the 
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fullest extent and vantage of the claimants. 

However, there's a few key pieces of 

information, misinformation, that I'd like to 

clarify. NIOSH has not had the opportunity to 

fully examine the data set that the 

Ruttenbergs hold. We've discussed its source 

and its structure and we've seen samples of 

the data, but we've not had the opportunity to 

review the dosimetry data and to confirm our 

belief that it is the same set of neutron dose 

reconstruction project data that we're both 

using. Two, both Dr. Ruttenberg and Ms. 

Ruttenberg have confirmed that the source of 

the study's data was the neutron dose 

reconstruction project data, data which is 

also used in our efforts to reconstruct the 

doses. Three, we think it's an 

oversimplification to say that if Rocky Flats 

worker had proof that they were monitored for 

neutron exposure that they would qualify for 

compensation. Many people had neutron 

exposure outside of the class, period. And so 
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that could be part of what is being contested 

here. Four, we cannot comment on any 

particular claimant's data and so we encourage 

claimants to contact NIOSH if they think that 

we have missed the mark on doing their dose 

reconstruction, or if they think that they've 

had neutron exposure in their work history 

that the Department of Labor may not be able 

to identify. We are continuing to pursue the 

Ruttenberg data and I'm hopeful that later 

this week if not early next week we will be 

able to reach agreement with Ms. Ruttenberg 

for the transfer of the full data set to NIOSH 

for use in the program. 

 Lastly as a news brief, I sent an 

email to you all yesterday, all the Board 

members, with a Federal Register notice about 

the opportunity to comment on the computerassisted telephone interview questionnaires 

that are used. This is a requirement by the 

Office of Management and Budget that we get a 

renewal of this survey instrument every so 
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often. This'll be the second time we've asked 

for that renewal. There's been some concern 

among board members that you will not have the 

opportunity to comment on this set of 

questions or the questionnaires that are used, 

and I just want to confirm for you that you 

have plenty of opportunity, both as individual 

citizens. You can make comments through the 

public comment period and get your comments in 

within 60 days. Go into the docket and we 

will take those into consideration as we 

revise and finalize these survey instruments. 

 I've also spoken with the working group on 

procedures and informed them that if, as they 

come forward to the Board with recommendations 

or comments about these questionnaires that - 

and if the Board does not have enough time to 

meet the 60-day public comment period we will 

still accept the Board's consensus comments 

and they will be considered in the revision of 

these questionnaires. So just wanted to make 

sure that everyone on the Board understood 
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what was happening with these CATI 

questionnaire documents. And with that I'll 

stop with the news briefs and get into the 

slides that you typically see every time I 

make this presentation. 

 As of November 30, 2008, the 

Department of Labor has referred 28,405 cases 

to NIOSH for dose reconstruction. We have 

completed 79 percent of those, or 22,396 cases 

have been returned to DOL. And if we break 

that number down into finer segments, 19,333 

were returned to Department of Labor with a 

dose reconstruction report, 793 were pulled 

from NIOSH's claim population by the 

Department of Labor for various reasons, but 

essentially a claim was not any longer 

eligible so they were removed from our claim 

population. There have been 2,270 claims 

pulled from our claim population so that the 

Department of Labor can determine the SEC 

class eligibility for those. That leaves 20 

percent of the 28,405 claims, or 5,562 claims 
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or cases still at NIOSH for dose 

reconstruction. We've had 447 claims, or 1 

percent, that are in a state of administrative 

closure on dose reconstruction. And I remind 

the Board and the audience that this means 

that we have completed our work and we're 

awaiting, by preparing a dose reconstruction 

report and providing that to the claimant, and 

we're waiting for the claimant to sign the 

OCAS 1 form and return the claim, the dose 

reconstruction to us with the OCAS 1 so that 

we can then transmit that all to the 

Department of Labor for decision. Claimants 

are given 60 days to sign the OCAS 1 

indicating that they have no further 

information to provide and they are given 

another 14 days grace at any point thereafter. 

 If they choose to submit the OCAS 1 or submit 

additional information we would reopen that 

dose reconstruction for the claim. 

 This is your pie chart which shows 

you the current case status in the NIOSH case 
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population. I won't go through all of this, 

but I would highlight your attention to those 

portions of the pie chart that we are still 

working on. Those would be the yellow, the 

active claims, 4,399, and the pended claims, 

1,163. And I'll speak a little more about 

those in a moment. Of the 1,163 pended claims 

that NIOSH holds, we provided here for you the 

top six categories which represent 91 percent 

of those claims. And these categories for 

pending include technical basis documentation, 

changes that are occurring so the claim is 

awaiting those changes. Four hundred and 

seventy-nine claims await those kinds of 

changes. Three hundred and twenty-seven 

claims are pended because of a special 

exposure cohort issue, either there's - it's a 

claim that doesn't fit into the class and 

we're developing the partial dose 

reconstruction approach that will be used for 

that claim, or the claim has been pended 

awaiting the designation of an SEC class. In 
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other words, we know that the class is going 

to go forward and we're not performing any 

work until that class is established so the 

claim can move under that mechanism. There 

are 82 claims that are pended because of 

incorrect employment information and so we're 

awaiting the Department of Labor. Time is 

ticking on them in that regard for us to hear 

from them about the correct employment 

information. Seventy-four claims have an 

incorrect cancer ICD-9 code, and again we're 

waiting for Department of Labor to correct 

that situation to allow us to move forward 

with the dose reconstruction. Fifty-four 

claims are pended because they're awaiting 

additional information from the Department of 

Energy or atomic weapons employer facility, 

and we can't complete a dose reconstruction 

until we have that information. There are 41 

claims that have a situation where a missing 

survivor or claimant is the cause for the 

pending status. Again, these six categories 
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comprise 91 percent of the pended claims. 

Whoa. 

 MEMBER CLAWSON: Way to go. 

 MR. ELLIOTT: Well, I hope you 

liked that. Sorry for that. Of the 19,333 

dose reconstructions that were returned to the 

Department of Labor, we show in this slide 

that 33 percent of those had a Probability of 

Causation greater than 50 percent, leaving 67 

percent with a PoC of less than 50 percent. 

If we look at the distributions of probability 

for causation of all claims dose reconstructed 

and returned to Department of Labor, you'll 

see here in this slide the breakout of those 

distributions in 10 percent tile increments, 

up to the 50 percent and greater. 

 To look at our active caseload, of 

the 5,562 cases that are remaining at NIOSH 

for dose reconstruction, we have 2,417 that 

are in the process dose reconstruction. A 

dose reconstructor has an assignment, they're 

working on a piece of that claim or they're in 
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a review stage. So there are 682 initial 

draft dose reconstruction reports in the hands 

of the claimants, where we're awaiting the 

OCAS 1 form to be returned, and 2,463 cases 

have not yet been assigned to a health 

physicist for dose reconstruction. It's 

important to note, and we monitor this 

closely, that 61 percent of these, or 3,406 

claims are older than one year. We have these 

- since September's meeting we've seen a 

dramatic decrease in this number of old cases, 

older than a year. We've been working hard on 

those, and just to remind you at your 

September board meeting that number was 3,849 

and so we've removed and acted upon 433 of 

those old claims. 

 If we look at the first 5,000 

claims that were sent to us which represent 

our oldest portion of the caseload, there have 

been 3,722 returned to Department of Labor 

with a dose reconstruction. Eighty-five of 

the first 5,000 currently are in an 
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administratively closed situation, 254 

represent cases that had been pulled from our 

caseload by the Department of Labor, 331 cases 

are representative of eligibility for a 

special exposure cohort class, four cases have 

a situation where the dose reconstruction is 

with the claimant and we're awaiting the OCAS 

1. That leaves - the big thing here is 579 

cases which we've completed once and they've 

been returned to us for some rework issues and 

there are 25 cases that have not yet had one 

dose reconstruction, or initial dose 

reconstruction out of the first 5,000 claims. 

 We're working hard on those 25 and you can 

see that those 25 represent 20 distinct sites. 

 Seventeen of these 25 are in a pending status 

for these reasons. There's either a claimant 

survivor information is missing. The 

employment is questionable for two cases. 

There are 13 that are pended for various 

reasons as you see here in this slide, either 

awaiting a dose reconstruction methodology or 
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they're SEC class cases pended before the 

designation of the class, or there's 

modifications to the TBD that - technical 

basis document - that needs to be done. And 

in one case it is a petitioner that is 

awaiting the outcome of their petition. Eight 

of the 25 are in an active status, and these 

are broken down here. Two employees which do 

not meet the 250-day criteria for a special 

exposure cohort class, NUMEC and Y-12, and so 

we are working on partial dose reconstructions 

for those claims. Four NUMEC claims are 

pended for non-SEC cancers and we are awaiting 

a non-SEC dose reconstruction methodology, and 

two claims have been accepted for special 

exposure cohort at NUMEC for SEC cancers, but 

a dose reconstruction is needed for those 

claims for medical benefits for non-SEC 

cancers. So you can see that as we work hard 

to try to work off the oldest claims, they 

still can come back to us for various reasons, 

some due to changes that we have made and some 
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due to changes within the claim, and in some 

instances like that last example where dose 

reconstruction is needed for other purposes 

within the claim adjudication process. 

 The graphic here shows you the 

trend of receipt of cases from the Department 

of Labor shown in the blue line. The dose 

reconstruction reports as draft reports to the 

claimants is shown in the green, lime green or 

yellow line. And then the final reports that 

are provided to the Department of Labor is 

shown in the red line. Since the third 

quarter of 2008 we've been working again above 

the receipt of DOL so we're working off the 

backlog. Before that you see that little area 

there. That's where we were receiving more 

than we were working off so we were building a 

backlog. So this is the chart that we monitor 

weekly to determine where we're at in our 

production effort. If we break down - I'm 

sorry this doesn't come out very well in the 

purple at the top, but looking at our full 
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caseload and we break these down, these 1,000 

increments of cases received, we show in this 

blue that these are the completed, the red is 

the case that has been pulled from us for 

Department of Labor purposes. The active case 

is this mustard color here. The SEC cases are 

in green. You can see how those are 

distributed across claim populations. Cases 

that have been administratively closed are up 

here in yellow and then this case pending in 

the purple status at the very top. 

 A new chart that we've added to 

this presentation which also is of interest to 

the government accountability review that is 

underway is how much time is it taking us to 

process dose reconstructions. And this chart, 

and there are several other ways of reporting 

out on this, but this is one example. In the 

early days we certainly acknowledged the fact 

that we didn't have all of our tools and 

infrastructure together and it was taking 

quite a long time, years in fact to do a dose 
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reconstruction. And you can see how over time 

this has improved with more recent cases 

getting quicker treatment. In fact, that - 

now we are dealing with a case where we have 

all of our dose reconstruction tools at our - 

available to us and at our disposal we're 

turning dose reconstruction claims around in 

30 days or less in some instances. Depends 

upon the claim. Some claims are, as you know, 

very complex because of the amount of work 

history the claimant may have had, the number 

of jobs, the number of sites they worked at 

and a variety of circumstances that they may 

have encountered which require us to do as 

good a job as we can. So at any rate we're 

trying very hard to improve our timeliness and 

this is one example of how we have done in 

that regard. 

 If we look at the number of claims 

that have been returned to us for rework. A 

rework is a situation where something has 

changed with the claim, the employment 
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history, the cancer information, the number of 

survivors may have changed, Department of 

Labor will return the claim to us for a 

rework. Also, if we make a change in our 

technical basis approach to reconstructing 

dose we claim that as a rework. And as you 

know, we provide in those instances a program 

evaluation review which identifies the 

affected claims. And here you see in this 

chart in red the 8,503 cases have been 

returned to us over the course of time since 

fourth quarter of 2003 till the present, and 

we have returned 5,433 of those. The spikes 

that you see here late in 2007 and up until 

the second quarter of 2008 represent Super S 

and a couple of other large program evaluation 

reviews that were issued and are still 

underway. 

 As you know, we turn to the 

Department of Energy for requests for dose 

information in order to complete our dose 

reconstruction effort, and I report out to you 
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every meeting on the DOE response to those 

requests. Right now we have 255 outstanding 

requests. We follow up on those every 30 

days. We monitor their progress. We track 

how long they take and we work with Department 

of Energy to make sure that if the information 

can be found we will get it. If not, then we 

take steps to move the claim into dose 

reconstruction without the information. At 

this point in time there are 158 requests that 

are outstanding longer than 60 days. Some, 

there are five that are longer than 120 days. 

 Those are at the Oak Ridge facility's 

operations office and we are working with DOE 

on what to do with those five. The rest are 

less than 120 days but more than 60 days. 

 In the past few presentations I've 

made to you we have talked about the technical 

basis documents that are used for atomic 

weapons employers, especially those sites that 

work with uranium and thorium metals. And we 

reference that as Technical Basis Document 
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6000. And there are a number of appendices 

that had to be created for special exposure 

circumstances at atomic weapons employer 

facilities. We've now completed all 16 of 

those appendices for those special exposures 

and you won't see this slide in the future in 

this presentation. 

 Where we looked at atomic weapon 

employer sites that refine uranium and thorium 

metal, we call that Technical Basis 6001, and 

there are five appendices that had to be 

created for special exposure circumstances 

relative to those atomic weapon employer 

sites. And those five have all now been 

completed and are in use. This slide will not 

be presented in future program staff 

presentations. 

 I mentioned the program evaluation 

reports. Thirty-two program evaluation 

reports have been issued to date. This 

represents 8,596 individual claims which have 

been reviewed against those program evaluation 
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reports to determine the need for a rework. 

Of those, 3,684 individual claims will be or 

have been reworked due to the PER changes, 

1,810 have already been reworked to date and 

262 claims have had a Probability of Causation 

increase greater than 50 percent. So we're 

very happy to report that for those claimants. 

 If you're interested in the bulk of that, 262 

claims that changed in compensation decision, 

124 were from PER 9 which is the lymphoma 

program evaluation review. The next highest 

is the Super S program evaluation review at 

123 claims, and then it drops considerably 

down to the next highest which is 30 for PER 

20 on blocks chemical. 

 In the government we're required to 

establish what are called PART goals, Program 

Assessment Rating Tool goals, and in this 

fiscal year we - in last fiscal year, Fiscal 

Year 08 our goal as you see it was established 

to complete 80 percent of the new dose 

reconstructions within six months of receipt 
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from Department of Labor. This Fiscal Year 08 

was to set our baseline for performance 

against this goal. And as you see here, we 

did not do very well. We only achieved 31 

percent of our goal in that regard. The other 

goal that we have set in FY 08 was to complete 

50 percent of the legacy dose reconstructions. 

 Legacy is defined as any claim in our hands 

that is over two years old. And so this looks 

at the oldest claims that we have and in 

Fiscal Year 08 we completed 54 percent of 

those claims. So those were our baselines in 

08 and now we are in Fiscal Year 09 and 

working to again try to complete 80 percent of 

the new dose reconstructions within six months 

from receipt of the Department of Labor. As 

it says here, in 08 our performance was 31 

percent. How did we get that? Well, there 

were 2,322 initial dose reconstructions 

referred to NIOSH in that Fiscal Year 08. We 

returned 31 percent of those, or 713 to 

Department of Labor within six months' time. 
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Of those 713, 560, or 79 percent, were final 

dose reconstructions sent to DOL and 153 or 21 

percent are cases that were returned to DOL 

because they fit into a new class. So we 

didn't have to do a dose reconstruction for 

those claims. We take credit for moving those 

on. Our legacy goal is to complete 50 percent 

of the claims that have been in NIOSH for two 

years or longer, and as you saw our 

performance in 08, our baseline performance is 

54 percent. We arrived at that by completing 

822 cases in FY 08. One thousand five hundred 

and thirty-six were initial legacy cases at 

the beginning of FY 08, 714 of those legacy 

cases at the end of FY 08. We will report out 

on our progress against these goals at your 

next meeting and we'll see where we stand at 

that point against the goals. Thirty-five 

classes have been added to the special 

exposure cohort since May of 2005 and 57 

percent or 20 of those classes were processed 

through the 83.13 process and 15, or 43 
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percent were accomplished and designated 

through the 83.14 process. These classes 

represent workers from 29 sites and they also 

represent 2,270 potential claims. 

 I mentioned earlier in the news 

briefs to you that the Department of Labor's 

Office of Inspector General issued a report on 

November 12 that also included a response as 

an attached memo from the Department of 

Labor's Assistant Secretary for Employment 

Standards, and that was sent in on October 30 

or dated October 30, 2008, and it was based 

upon the draft report. The Office of the 

Inspector General did visit NIOSH in 

Cincinnati and interviewed me, and we were 

told that we would be given an opportunity to 

comment on the draft report for clarity and 

accuracy, but that never happened. We have 

several concerns about the report, and I'll 

mention a couple of them in the next few 

slides. One of the recommendations that the 

OIG made was to consolidate all communication 
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with claimants at Department of Labor and the 

response memo from the Assistant Secretary 

disagreed with this recommendation as do we at 

NIOSH. We think that we have a robust 

communication process in dealing with 

claimants and petitioners and we think it's 

most appropriate that NIOSH have those 

communications with the claimants and the 

petitioners. So we don't see the benefit of 

combining the communication effort and placing 

it at the Department of Labor. 

 Also, there was a concern raised 

about the impact of NIOSH's guidance changes. 

These guidance changes refers to our program 

evaluation reports which reflect our 

commitment to use the best available science 

in dose reconstruction. The number 12,955 is 

a mystery to us. As you've already seen in 

some of my earlier slides the total number of 

dose reconstruction reworks for the entire 

program is only 8,503 cases, a number that 

includes reworks for reasons such as 
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employment change or cancer information, and 

out of that 8,503 as of right now only 3,684 

claims have been determined to need rework due 

to the program evaluation reviews that they 

have issued. So we don't know where this 

12,955 number comes from. 

 There is also mentioned in this 

Office of Inspector General report that cases 

which require NIOSH processing took an average 

of 1,200 days for DOL to adjudicate, including 

an average of 870 days for NIOSH dose 

reconstructions. While it is true that dose 

reconstruction is a lengthy process and is 

time-consuming and in many cases is very 

complex, in the early years of the program as 

I mentioned we didn't have the infrastructure 

available. This slide shows you that in 2008 

our average time was 775 days, and it's 

improved over the next two years, 586 days in 

FY 2007 and 373 days in FY 2008. So we're a 

little baffled by the 870 days at NIOSH. 

 I'll move on now to present some 
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site-specific statistics relative to the 

Savannah River site for those in the audience 

who are interested as well as board members 

who are interested. To date, as of November 

30 there have been 3,318 Savannah River site 

cases referred to NIOSH and we have completed 

80 percent of those as a dose reconstruction 

effort, or 2,647. If we look at the decisions 

on those claims, Department of Labor has found 

972 or 37 percent had a PoC of greater than 50 

percent, and 1,675 or 63 percent had a PoC of 

less than 50 percent Probability of Causation. 

 Sixty-seven, or 2 percent have been pulled by 

the Department of Labor for various reasons, 

but essentially they are ineligible for dose 

reconstruction so they've been removed from 

our case file. Six hundred and four or 18 

percent are active Savannah River site claims 

at NIOSH and we're working those. 

 If we look at the Probability of 

Causation distribution for only Savannah River 

site claims it mirrors somewhat what you saw 
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in the earlier slide for the overall program. 

 There are 964 as I mentioned that are greater 

than 50 percent, and the remainder are broken 

out as you see in those other bars on the 

chart. If we want to look at how long it's 

taking to do dose reconstructions for Savannah 

River site claimants, overall it's been 557 

days on average for a Savannah River site 

claim to get through dose reconstruction. 

However, if we look at the year 2006, 216 days 

were required on average to complete a dose 

reconstruction. In 2007 that jumped up to 306 

days, and in 2008 currently we are averaging 

122 days to process a dose reconstruction for 

Savannah River site claims. And that is to - 

this slide is to submit to Department of Labor 

a dose reconstruction report that the claimant 

has provided us an OCAS 1 on. This slide 

shows you just the days it's taken for NIOSH 

to do its work and turn a dose reconstruction 

over to the claimant. So the other slide is 

to DOL, this slide is just to the claimant and 
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you can see that the days here in 2006 are 

173, 2007 are 273 on average, and 2008 the 

average is 107 days. Remind everybody that 

there is again a 60-day period for a person to 

sign the OCAS 1, and I think the difference 

between these two slides that you're seeing is 

the time difference it takes folks to process 

what they have in the dose reconstruction 

report and provide the OCAS 1. And with that 

I'll be happy to take any questions that might 

be out there. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: All right, thank you 

Larry. I wonder if you might comment a little 

more on the Program Assessment Rating Tool. 

You indicated that your objective for Fiscal 

Year 08 was 80 percent of the new dose 

reconstructions within six months of receipt, 

and your performance was I think 31 percent. 

 MR. ELLIOTT: That's correct. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: And you indicated 

your new goal for this new fiscal year again 

is 80 percent. I guess my question is was the 
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80 percent goal - you must consider it still 

to be realistic, so - you're going back for 

the same goal. This is the baseline, so 

you're sort of getting a feel - 

 MR. ELLIOTT: We're tied to the 

same goal because we had to establish a 

baseline for PART. And so the goal has to 

remain the same and you work against not only 

the goal, but you work against your baseline. 

 And yes, we felt that 80 percent was 

achievable and realistic if we were in a 

situation where we, like in 2005 and 2006 

where we had full production capacity from our 

technical support contractor. We haven't had 

that - we have not had that - 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: That was my 

question. How much did that impact - you were 

almost on a month to month basis on technical 

support, is that? 

 MR. ELLIOTT: Yes, that is correct. 

 What you see here, we believe, is the 

artifact of that. That low production rate, 
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that 31 percent is an artifact of not being 

able to see our contractor operate at the 

fullest capacity. We've not had a regular 

appropriations cycle since 2006 so we've been 

operating under continuing resolutions which 

are problematic, but more problematic is the 

lack of a new technical support contract award 

which has pushed us into using contract 

extensions and we are only able to extend the 

contract for short periods of time, four to 

six weeks, eight weeks, and this last contract 

extension which carries us through the end of 

this month I think was the longest in a series 

of 12 now contract extensions that we've had. 

 So we believe, we feel that we have the 

experience documented that we could achieve 80 

percent if our contract support is up to par. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Dr. Melius? 

 MEMBER MELIUS: I have a question, 

but first a comment. I would note that if you 

- the other way of getting that number up, 

that percentage up is to do more SECs. 
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 MR. ELLIOTT: That's true. 

 MEMBER MELIUS: Because it seemed 

to combine the two and it's - I know you have 

to come up with a single statistic and it's 

hard, but it seems like a funny way of mixing 

things also. My question goes back to the 

comments of the Board, or potential comments 

of the Board about the changes in the 

interview, and just actually a technical 

question, but if we - if the Board were to 

submit its comments after February 9, would 

they become part of the docket? 

 MR. ELLIOTT: I believe I can add 

them to the docket post the closing period of 

the docket, but at any rate, we will still 

consider them and you know, address them. 

 MEMBER MELIUS: Would it be 

possible for the attorneys to give us an 

answer to that question? It would be helpful 

to know. I mean, not right now, but if they 

could check because I think it makes some 

difference at least in terms of my thinking. 
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 CHAIR ZIEMER: Thank you. 

 MEMBER MELIUS: One other comment. 

 Your one - I don't know how you can do this 

better, but your claims processing trends 

slide which is - you don't number the slides, 

so it's Number 13 of the group. I just - 

 MR. ELLIOTT: Yes, the new slide I 

introduced here? 

 MEMBER MELIUS: Yes. 

 MR. ELLIOTT: Average time? 

 MEMBER MELIUS: Right. If I 

understand it correctly, that's for newly 

received - from the time that you receive 

them. So the numbering, like 24,000 would 

represent those that were received, you know, 

during some recent time period. But more 

importantly, those, the 28,000 would be the 

most recently received. So obviously if you 

were able to complete them the short - you 

know, the turnaround would be very short. And 

so it doesn't really reflect all of the - 

 MR. ELLIOTT: It's not an overall 
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average. 

 MEMBER MELIUS: Right. 

 MR. ELLIOTT: This slide - let me 

see if I can go back to that. 

 MEMBER MELIUS: I think going back 

in time, I would say it's towards the 20,000 - 

it probably is a reflection of significant 

improvement, but it's a little bit misleading 

at the end. 

 MR. ELLIOTT: Well, if you look at 

the X axis you're talking about those tracking 

numbers in that 1,000 or 2,000 or 3,000, 4,000 

category. 

 MEMBER MELIUS: Right. 

 MR. ELLIOTT: So it's the average 

time within that category of claims. 

 MEMBER MELIUS: Yes. 

 MR. ELLIOTT: So then yes. But the 

early claims, the oldest claims took us the 

longest time. 

 MEMBER MELIUS: Right, right. 

 MR. ELLIOTT: If you're a claimant 
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who has a claim - NIOSH tracking number of 

28,000 you can see that it's taking on average 

much less time today to do your claim than it 

was six years ago. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Yes, and those 

numbers wouldn't get fixed, you see, if they 

didn't do any work on the old claims. That 

number, if you report it the next time, the 

other end of that would go up. 

 MEMBER MELIUS: Yes, it's got to go 

up, yes. I mean, at some point - 

 MR. ELLIOTT: So the information is 

in there. 

 MEMBER MELIUS: Well, but it's just 

a confusing number. That's all. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Josie Beach. 

 MEMBER BEACH: Yes Larry, back on 

Slide Number 7 you said that there was 2,463 

cases not assigned. Can you give me an idea 

of why, and are those new cases or older 

cases? 

 MR. ELLIOTT: Well, there's a mix. 
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 There can be old cases, there can be new 

cases. There's cases just coming in that 

haven't been assigned because the new case - 

because we haven't got the computer-assisted 

telephone interview done, they haven't got the 

POE information or the AWE information on 

dose. That's one reason for that kind of 

claim in that category. 

 MEMBER BEACH: So it's not one 

distinct reason, there's several? 

 MR. ELLIOTT: No. The pending, you 

know, the active but they're pended, they're 

in that group there. There's a variety of 

reasons why a claim may not have been assigned 

to a dose reconstructor yet. 

 MEMBER BEACH: Thank you. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Any further comments 

or questions? Okay, Larry, thank you very 

much again for updating us. Next we'll hear 

from the Department of Labor and Jeff Kotsch 

is with us again today, and he will give us 

the Labor update. Welcome again Jeff. 
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 MR. KOTSCH: Thank you. Good 

morning and thanks for the opportunity to 

provide the Department of Labor's update. 

Often this is primarily the one that we always 

give, other than changing the numbers. We are 

working on the slides. And the data for this 

set is December 4, the capture date for the 

information on these slides. 

 Just a little background for 

basically the people that haven't heard the 

presentation before. The program the 

Department of Labor administers has two parts. 

 There's a Part B which is really the part 

that the Board is more interested in. That's 

the part that has to do with cancer and 

silicosis and things like that we'll talk 

about a little bit later. Part B became 

effective on July 31 of 2001. Since that time 

64,346 cases or 94,650 claims have been filed. 

 I always mention that the number of claims 

will always be higher than the number of cases 

because when you're in a survivor claim 
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situation you may have more than one survivor. 

 Of those cases, 42,531 have been cancer 

cases, 28,316 cases have been referred to 

NIOSH. Now, on the other side of our program 

is Part E which became effective on October 28 

of 2004. This program was formerly 

administered - was the former Part D program 

that the Department of Energy administered, 

and on this side which is primarily the toxic 

chemical exposure side, 54,909 cases or 76,866 

claims have been filed. At the time that we - 

or the time that Part B became effective, we 

received or 25,000 cases were transferred over 

from Department of Energy. 

 This is the primary overview for 

the program. $4.4 billion have been paid in 

total compensation since the initiation of the 

program. $2.8 billion of that was Part B 

claims, $2.5 billion for a non-RECA Part B 

conditions and $300 million for the RECA which 

is the Radiation Exposure Control Act which is 

primarily administered by the Department of 
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Justice. $1.4 billion has been Part E 

payments and $271 million in medical payments 

actually for both parts. So Part B is about 

63 percent of the payments. Just quickly, the 

claim categories under Part B are primarily 

cancer, but also include chronic beryllium 

disease, beryllium sensitivity, chronic 

silicosis and then the RECA Section 5 claims 

that again are basically coming from the 

Department of Justice. 

 And just a quick overview of the 

benefits for Part B. Who's eligible? Current 

and former employees of DOE, its contractors 

and subcontractors, the atomic weapons 

employers (AWEs), beryllium vendors, uranium 

miners, millers and ore transporters who 

worked at facilities covered by Section 5 of 

the RECA and certain family members of 

deceased workers. This is a summary of the 

Part B cancer case status and I'll primarily 

just talk about it in terms of cases. Fortytwo thousand five hundred and thirty-one cases 
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had 65,990 claims. We've had 35,622 with 

final decisions, 1,630 with recommended but no 

final decision, 3,547 referred to NIOSH but no 

recommended decision, and 1,732 cases with no 

DOL initial processing. Those are the 

incoming cases primarily. The way the process 

works is the case comes in, is developed for 

medical and - I'm sorry, developed for medical 

and employment. If it needs a dose 

reconstruction it's transmitted to NIOSH. We 

receive the final dose reconstruction back 

from them, back to the district office. They 

then render a recommended decision. At that 

point the claimant is allowed the opportunity 

to provide comments, objections, or basically 

contest the decision. That goes to our final 

adjudication branch which is the FAB which is 

separate from the district office. They 

review that information. If they deem that it 

merits return to NIOSH it will go back to 

NIOSH. If it merits additional work of 

development it'll be done. After all that's 
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done then render the final decision. So 

that's the distinction between a final and a 

recommended decision. 

 Claims filed for cancer under Part 

B. Potentially any cancer that's claimed 

under Part B of the program, if it is 

determined that the covered employee was a 

member of the SEC and was diagnosed with a 

specified cancer or it is determined from the 

dose reconstruction conducted by NIOSH that 

the employee's cancer was at least as likely 

as not, which is 50 percent or greater, caused 

by radiation exposure. And this is just the 

bar chart of the decisions, 14,948 final 

decisions for approval, 20,674 final decisions 

for denial. Of those, you can see the 

breakdowns. The primary one is the 12,441 for 

Probability of Causation of less than 50 

percent. 

 The special exposure cohort, the 

SEC, the statutory one or the three diffusion 

plants, gaseous diffusion plants, K-25, 
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Paducah and Portsmouth, and certain nuclear 

tests at the Amchitka site and then any other 

new designations where we add or classes are 

added to the SEC. Within that, or another 

requirement of that is you have to have 

specified cancers. Causation is presumed. 

There's no dose reconstruction except for the 

- obviously for the non-specified cancers or 

the ones required for medical benefits for an 

SEC case. And HHS recommends the SEC class 

designations and as the process goes, if 

Congress says - at the point that it goes to 

Congress, if it does not object within 30 days 

the facility becomes an SEC. The new SECrelated cancers, the numbers here are 2,275 

cases have been withdrawn from NIOSH for 

review, 2,042 have final decisions issued, 84 

of those have recommended but no final 

decisions, 66 cases are pending and 83 cases 

have been closed for a variety of reasons. So 

we've got 92 percent of the SEC-related cases 

have final decisions. 
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 This slide shows the status of 

referrals to NIOSH. Twenty-eight thousand 

three hundred and sixteen cases have been 

referred to NIOSH, 21,000 of those - I'm 

sorry, 21,757 have been returned from NIOSH. 

And the breakdown that we show from our 

database is 19,026 are at DOL with a dose 

reconstruction, 30 are being reworked for 

return to NIOSH - "rework" is probably not a 

good word here because it doesn't have the 

same connotation as the other rework, but 

they're within DOL being reviewed - 2,701 are 

withdrawn from NIOSH with no dose 

reconstruction. The other part of that is 

6,559 cases are currently at NIOSH according 

to the information in our database. Of those, 

3,597 are initial or original referrals and 

2,962 are reworks or returns. This is the pie 

chart for the status for dose reconstructions. 

 We're showing 19,026 cases at DOL with a dose 

reconstruction. Of those 16,390 have a final 

decision. That's 86 percent of the total. 
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Twenty-one hundred ninety-three cases have a 

recommended but no final decision. That's 

primarily that they're at the final 

adjudication branch in that portion of the 

process and 443 cases are pending a 

recommended decision by DOL. That is, they're 

at the district office pending a, you know, 

developing the recommended decision. 

 The case-related compensation 

statistics or data are $1.1 billion in 

compensation. This is for NIOSH cases. 

That's 11,356 payees in 7,432 cases. Of that, 

$887 million on dose reconstructed cases with 

payments to 8,430 people in 5,934 cases, and 

$222 million on added SEC cases. Those are 

the new classes. Payments to 2,926 people in 

1,498 cases. And this is the pie chart for 

that, for the breakdown of paid cases under 

the program. This is both Part B and D and 

the total is 34,796 cases. That breaks down 

to 22,556 Part B cases and 12,240 Part E 

cases. And the Part B cases break down to 
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case payees and 1,848 other Part B case payees 

which would be silicosis and some of the other 

ones. So 43 percent of the payments under the 

program are cancer cases. 

 This is just a quick summary of the 

last four months of cases received and sent to 

NIOSH. New Part B cases received by the 

Department of Labor in August was 405, 

September 354, 398 in October and 285 cases in 

November of 2008. And then cases sent to 

NIOSH by Department of Labor, 424 in August, 

377 in September, in October it was 378 and 

November it was 251. And I think these 

numbers - obviously, they must include some 

extent, and I don't know why they haven't 

teased it out. It must include rework 

statistics too there because obviously we're - 

some of those numbers are bigger than the 

receipt ones for each month. But I think 

we'll try to tease that out next time, but I 

think it had been asked in the past basically 
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what was our baseline, or what level did we 

seem to be moving towards as far as incoming 

cases. And it's - I've always said it's 

around 200, 250 kind of thing, and this is in 

the general ballpark I think, or at least 

cases being referred to NIOSH. So I think 

that surplus is probably some - a reflection 

of the rework number. 

 At every meeting we try to give a 

little bit of information on what we perceive 

or at least listed as the classes - or the SEC 

classes that are going to be presented to the 

Board. For Savannah River site this is a 

summary to date as of, again, December 4. The 

number of cases for both Part B and E, and B 

and E are applied - I mean, E applies to DOE 

facilities - 10,483 cases or 13,824 claims for 

the Savannah River site, 2,529 NIOSH dose 

reconstructions. We have final decisions on 

the Part B side of 3,541 cases and on Part B 

we have 1,178 approvals. Part E approvals 

number 1,445 for total compensation for both 
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Part B and D of $264 million. For the 

Metallurgical Lab at the - in Chicago we're 

showing 65 cases or 106 claims, five dose 

reconstructions, 20 final positions under Part 

B, 17 Part B approvals, 10 Part E approvals 

and compensation of $3.6 million. 

 For Mallinckrodt Destrehan Street 

we're showing 1,567 cases or 2,482 claims for 

both Part B and E, 182 NIOSH dose 

reconstructions, 520 Part B final decisions, 

383 Part B approvals. The number of Part E 

approvals were 226 and total compensation for 

both Part B and D was $77.6 million. For 

vitro manufacturing in Mechanicsburg, 

Pennsylvania we show 68 cases or 100 claims. 

This is only Part B sites. We've got 10 NIOSH 

dose reconstructions, 21 final Part B 

decisions, six Part B approvals, the Part E 

doesn't apply to this site and so total 

compensation is $825,000. And any questions? 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Wanda Munn? 

 MEMBER MUNN: Jeff, do you have any 
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information that would shed some light on the 

discrepancy between the OIG's figures for DOL 

and NIOSH? 

 MR. KOTSCH: I actually wasn't 

involved very much or really at all in the 

review of those numbers so I'd have to get 

back to you. I have to admit I don't know the 

origin or the discrepancy for our numbers and 

NIOSH's numbers. 

 MEMBER MUNN: Well, it's large 

enough to be a little disconcerting and any 

information that you might be able to provide 

would certainly be - 

 MR. KOTSCH: Yes, I'll go back and 

check. I don't - I often blame our system 

because I know it looks at numbers, or we 

track things a little bit differently than 

NIOSH, but I admit a difference that large is 

- 

 MEMBER MUNN: Well, we never, at 

least I personally never think too much about 

a few hundred cases. I can see how the system 
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alone would do that, but that - those figures 

are significant in difference. 

 MR. KOTSCH: Yes, I agree. 

 MEMBER MUNN: And I was a little 

concerned. 

 MR. KOTSCH: Let me look into that 

and get something. 

 MEMBER MUNN: If the OIG is getting 

information that's not accurate then in either 

case it would certainly be beneficial for this 

board to know where the problem is with the 

reporting. 

 MR. KOTSCH: Okay. Yes, let me 

report back. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Jeff, during Larry's 

presentation it was mentioned that in the 

Inspector General - was it the Inspector 

General's report? 

 MEMBER MUNN: Yes. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Yes. That 

communication be the sole responsibility of 

the Department of Labor and Larry indicated 
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that NIOSH certainly didn't agree with that. 

I'm wondering if the Department of Labor has 

any official position that you're aware of on 

that same issue. And I think here we're 

talking our - the NIOSH interactions with 

claimants deals specifically with dose 

reconstruction issues normally, but in any 

event, is there a Labor position on that or is 

it premature to ask? 

 MR. KOTSCH: I think - I don't want 

to comment on that because I'm not sure what 

the position is yet. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: I was only asking 

you if there was one. 

 MR. KOTSCH: Yes, I'm not aware of 

it. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Okay, thank you. 

 MR. ELLIOTT: Is this on? If you 

look at the Assistant Secretary for Labor's 

memo in response you'll find there that she 

disagrees with that. And I don't know if 

that's the Department's position or not, but 
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she does make that statement. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: That is on the 

record, yes. Okay, thank you, that's helpful. 

 Mark, did you have a question? Same as 

Wanda's, okay. Other questions? It seems 

that Dr. Melius has a question even not being 

here. He did have to step out for a little 

bit, so. If there are no further questions 

then Jeff, thank you very much again for this 

update. We want to make sure that the 

discussion on the Metallurgical Lab occurs 

very close to 11:00 because there may be 

petitioners on the line, so I think we'll go 

ahead and take our break at this point. We 

can -- our breaks tend to take a little longer 

than we plan on anyway, so let's all take a 

break and then we'll resume shortly before 

11:00. 

 (Whereupon, the above-entitled 

matter went off the record at 10:20 a.m. and 

resumed at 11:02 a.m.) 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: We are ready to 
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reconvene. Let me check and make sure we have 

a phone connection. Dr. Roessler, are you on 

the line? Dr. Roessler, are you still on the 

line? 

 MEMBER ROESSLER: I am. I was 

doing my un-mute. I'm here. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Thank you, thank you 

for being muted and un-muted. Okay, the next 

item on our agenda is the - oh yes. A 

reminder from our Designated Federal Official. 

 I'll let him do the reminder. 

 MR. KATZ: Just a reminder for the 

people that are on the telephone to please 

mute your phones, press *6 if you don't have a 

mute button. Earlier in the day we could hear 

someone breathing along with the discussions, 

and I understand that some people on the line 

had difficulty hearing some of the speakers so 

we hope we fix that. We're going to have a 

lavaliere mic for the speakers. That should 

take care of that. And I hope - let me know 

right now if you can't hear me or the members 
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of the Board well. 

 MR. MCKEEL: It's very weak. 

 MR. KATZ: It's very - I'm sorry, I 

had a hard time hearing you. 

 MR. MCKEEL: This is Dan McKeel. 

Your voice is kind of medium to low. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: We're hearing you 

better now Dan also. Can you hear me well 

now, Dan? 

 MR. MCKEEL: Yes, I'd say it's 

probably 80 percent of what normal should be. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Okay. 

 MS. KUNTZ: I hear Dan very well. 

This is Lafern Kuntz. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Okay. 

 MEMBER ROESSLER: This is Gen. I 

think the volume maybe could be a little 

higher. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Maybe the local 

person here will be able to - he's jacking 

that up. Is that getting better now? 

 MEMBER ROESSLER: You sound good 
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 CHAIR ZIEMER: Okay, good. 

 MR. MCKEEL: Yes, good. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: I think we're there. 

 So then put your phones on mute so we don't 

get that heavy breathing. I know this is an 

exciting session, but no heavy breathing 

allowed. 

 (Laughter.) 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Let's proceed. 

Metallurgy Lab which is an 83.14 petition. 

The evaluation report will be presented by 

LaVon Rutherford from NIOSH and then we will 

have an opportunity perhaps to hear from the 

petitioner by phone. Okay. Or no, Stu 

Hinnefeld is playing the role of LaVon 

Rutherford today. 

 MR. HINNEFELD: Right. Whenever 

I've been an acting boss, I tell people I've 

been acting my whole career so today I'll try 

to act like LaVon. LaVon is sick. He called 

me Saturday to let me know he was getting sick 
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and warned me that he might not be able to 

make the trip. So I said okay, being a good 

guy I said don't worry about it, I'll give the 

presentation, and didn't think another thing 

about it. And then later on I realized I'd 

just fallen for what he was leaving me, this 

line that he was giving me. So I figured that 

after learning that it worked so well I'm 

looking at future agendas so that I can plan 

my malady appropriately. 

 (Laughter.) 

 MR. HINNEFELD: Anyway, LaVon 

actually is sick and couldn't make the trip so 

I'll be presenting today the Metallurgical 

Laboratory. Metallurgical Laboratory was part 

of the University of Chicago and I think as we 

go along you'll - a lot of this work will 

sound familiar to you if you have some 

knowledge of the history of the program. 

Here's the petition overview. We evaluate the 

petition in accordance with Part 83.14, that's 

what we call it, a .14 petition. And this is 
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the circumstance where the petition is 

submitted by a claimant whose dose 

reconstruction we could not complete. We 

determined that it was not feasible for us to 

do this person's dose reconstruction. We 

informed them of that, sent them I think it 

was a Type A petition or a Form A petition and 

suggested that they sign that and send it in 

to make the petition. The petitioner was 

employed at the Metallurgical Laboratory from 

1943 through the end of - or through 1952, and 

I have to amend this slide. This slide's been 

kind of overtaken by events. The current 

covered period on the Metallurgical Lab 

actually ends in 1946 and that has a change 

that's been made very recently. That change 

is reflected on the DOE's facilities database. 

 I looked this morning and the ending date of 

1946 is reflected on that. And we encountered 

that information in our research as we were 

researching this petition. What happened was 

the Metallurgical Laboratory became part of 
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Argonne National Laboratory in 1946 and so the 

work from 1946 on forward then would be 

considered Argonne National Laboratory work. 

 Our determination upon evaluating 

this class is that we're unable to complete 

dose reconstructions for the claimant. And as 

you can see, there are a handful of some 14 

active claims in our hands who have employment 

at the Metallurgical Laboratory. The 

laboratory was located in Chicago, Illinois. 

It's the predecessor to Argonne National 

Laboratory. Its original classification as an 

atomic weapons employer was from 1942 through 

1952. That's what the original dates were 

assigned to that. During our evaluation we 

found this documentation indicating that the 

Metallurgical Laboratory essentially ceased to 

be as an entity in 1946 and became Argonne 

National Laboratory. And the Department of 

Labor has concurred with this, Department of 

Energy has concurred with this and DOE has 

changed their facility database to reflect the 
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1946 ending date. They do not wait for a 

Federal Register -- require a Federal Register 

notice to change the dates. They use Federal 

Register notices to add sites or to de-list 

sites, but they don't require a Federal 

Register notice to change the effective dates. 

 The University of Chicago was 

involved in early uranium metallurgical work 

in the -- way back during World War II, 1942 

to `43. Started actually even before the 

creation of the Manhattan Engineering 

District. The predecessor government agency 

to the Manhattan Engineering District who was 

pursuing nuclear research actually originally 

awarded the contract to the Metallurgical 

Laboratory and that contract then was conveyed 

over to the MED, the Manhattan Engineering 

District when it came into existence in 1942. 

 The first self-sustaining nuclear 

chain reaction occurred at this facility. The 

University of Chicago, that was Enrico Fermi 

and his colleagues, the first demonstration 
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that a nuclear reactor could actually be 

constructed, and the primary goal for the 

people at Chicago was to develop methods for 

the production and purification of plutonium. 

 You probably know that plutonium is created 

by the neutron capture of uranium, uranium238, in order to make -- this had been 

observed in laboratories where neutrons were 

generated in fairly small quantities and very 

small amounts of plutonium could be generated. 

 And in order to generate an appreciable 

amount of plutonium they recognized that we're 

going to need a fairly constant source of 

neutrons and what if we can make one of these 

things just run and make plutonium for us. 

And they were successful in doing that. 

 There are a number of facilities 

that were associated or that performed the 

various kinds of work -- there were a number 

of different kinds of work done -- at the 

Metallurgical Laboratory for the MED. And 

these facilities include the new chemistry 
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laboratory in the Annex and the Ricketts 

Laboratory. These were used for plutoniumuranium research and these were demolished 

after Argonne National Lab was established. 

The West Stands which I believe are maybe the 

west stands of the football field. There's a 

squash court I think according to history is 

actually what was taken over to build the 

pile. CP-1 stands for I believe Chicago Pile 

1, the first one, and that's where it was 

constructed, the first sustained chain 

reaction. It operated into 1943. It began 

operation in 1942. I think it was in December 

of 1942 when it actually achieved criticality. 

 Operated into 1943 when it was disassembled 

and reconstructed with -- in a slightly 

different configuration and some additional 

material was added to it to make it slightly 

bigger. It was moved into the Argonne Forest 

-- this is the one outside of Chicago, not the 

one I guess in France or wherever it is -- and 

it was reconstructed and then called CP-2 or 
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Chicago Pile 2. 

 Ryerson Physical Laboratory was 

also used. They did research with radium 

according to the information that we've 

obtained. This was by -- actually, this was 

not contemporary records that we saw, but 

these were records that were generated 

sometime later by the Argonne National 

Laboratory re-survey group. Eckhardt Hall has 

similarly performed a search with radium based 

on those sources. Kent Chemical Laboratory, 

research with plutonium, radium and uranium 

again using the later source, and the Jones 

Chemical Laboratory which performed research 

with radium-226, again according to the later 

source. 

 Our data capture efforts related to 

this site include of course Argonne National 

Laboratory, the DOE Legacy Management Office 

and Archives, the Illinois Emergency 

Management Agency, the National Nuclear 

Security Administration (NNSA), NRC Agency-
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wide Document Access and Management, what they 

call their ADAMS database, and other records 

at the NRC, Washington State University -- the 

part of Washington State University which is 

the U.S. Transuranium and Uranium Registries, 

Washington University Libraries in St. Louis. 

 The DOE opened that which is an OSTI 

database. Internet searches, DOE's 

epidemiology database, CEDR. I think that's a 

comprehensive epidemiological data repository 

I believe is what CEDR stands for. Hanford 

DDRS which is some document record system, 

declassified maybe? National Academy Press. 

As you can see we tried quite a number of 

avenues to learn what we could, learn 

additional information about this work that 

occurred at the University of Chicago. 

 We conducted interviews of the 

claimants who have filed claims and from that 

we can find information that would help us 

very much in doing dose reconstruction. It 

wasn't sufficient to complete dose 
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reconstructions, the information we received. 

 We have such a small amount of data available 

about personal exposures and radiological 

conditions that we really despaired of 

learning anything from additional interviews 

and pursuing interviews, so we did not try to 

go out and seek additional interviews to 

either change the determination of our 

feasibility determination or to limit the 

class in some fashion. 

 The internal sources of exposure, 

the people who have been exposed to -- it 

would have been the plutonium, uranium, 

fission-activation products and the radium 

from the research. There was plutonium 

research and separations were conducted at the 

site and there were experiments conducted on 

uranium ores and maybe other types of ores as 

well, leach liquors and raffinates from other 

sites. And so they had not only just refined 

uranium, they also had materials that would 

contain the uranium progeny in various -- and 
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then the equilibrium among those things were 

disturbed by various operations that were done 

there. External sources of exposure would be 

photons, neutrons and beta from the operations 

involving the uranium, plutonium, the radium, 

fission-activation products and then some 

exposures from the reactor operations as well. 

 For internal monitoring data, we 

have I think 15 radon breath samples from - 

actually, we have samples from 15 workers in a 

couple periods of time, 15 workers in February 

of 1945 and three workers in May of 1945. 

This is a bioassay technique for radium body 

burden. We didn't really learn much about 

interpretation technique for these results so 

it's not entirely clear that we'll be able to 

use these in any fashion and they certainly 

would, given the small number they would 

probably only be relevant to the actual person 

that the sample was taken from. We've been 

unable to build any kind of a coworker 

estimate from that. There was some error 
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sampling for one of the buildings, the New 

Chemistry Laboratory at one time, but it 

wasn't even comprehensive for that time 

period. Hard to relate. We don't know of any 

way we could relate those to actual breathing 

zones that people were exposed to. And there 

were some contamination surveys for brief 

periods in that building as well. Again, not 

so much we felt like that was characterized to 

the extent that it could be useful for 

determining individual exposures. 

 External Monitoring Data. We saved 

some external dose records. I think we might 

just have one. I think we have one of the 

claimants who has photon exposure data. So 

hardly a comprehensive lasting or a complete 

listing. There are a few isolated radiation 

surveys again from the New Chemistry 

Laboratory. We don't know very much about the 

medical X-rays. We think we can probably 

reconstruct that using standard documents that 

we use, complex-wide documents that we use. 
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claimants. And like I said, in one case there 

was a physicist who had some external gamma 

dosimetry results. No neutron monitoring data 

for anyone, no other external monitoring data 

so we really didn't receive anything else with 

respect to the claimants we have in terms of 

their exposure, their external exposure. 

 Internal Exposures. We have the 18 

radon breath samples, but as I said we don't 

really know much about how the samples were 

analyzed or the interpretation thereof. We 

have no other personal bioassay data, no urine 

results at all or fecal. There are 

insufficient data from which to draw 

conclusions regarding the potential magnitude 

of internal doses from exposures to uranium 

and progeny, plutonium, radium and any fission 

products or activation products. 

External Exposures. We have limited external 

dose records exist. In other words, one 
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claimant, that's pretty limited. No neutron 

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Insufficient data from which to draw 

conclusions regarding potential magnitude of 

external doses and we believe we can 

reconstruct medical doses using favorable 

assumptions and complex-wide documents that 

we've used in a number of cases. Now, if we 

in fact have any personal monitoring data that 

we do have or becomes available for employees 

if in fact we have to do a dose reconstruction 

for anyone, for instance if they were not 

included -- if a class is added they're not 

included in the class by reason of not having 

an SEC cancer. Then if we have data for an 

individual we will use it in that person's 

dose reconstruction to the extent we're able 

to. 

 So, a summary then of our 

feasibility determination. We concluded we 

cannot reconstruct internal or external doses, 

well internal doses at all. Don't have 
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sufficient data to reconstruct external gamma, 

beta or neutron doses except in the one case 

where we have the photon exposure for the one 

person which we will utilize, and we do intend 

to attempt to reconstruct medical X-ray doses. 

 Okay, if our health endangerment 

determination evidence reviewed in this 

evaluation indicates that some workers in the 

class may have accumulated chronic radiation 

exposures through intakes of radionuclides and 

direct exposure to radioactive materials, and 

consequently NIOSH is specifying that health 

may have been endangered for these workers, 

for the workers covered by this evaluation who 

are employed for a number of work days 

aggregating at least 250 work days within the 

parameters established for this class or in 

combination with other classes. 

 Our proposed class is all AWE 

employees who worked at the Metallurgical 

Laboratory in Chicago from August 13, 1942 - 

that was the date of creation of the Manhattan 
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Engineer District -- through June 30, 1946 for 

a number of work days aggregating at least 250 

work days occurring either solely under this 

employment or in combination with work days 

within the parameters established for one or 

more other classes of employees in the SEC. 

So our recommendation to the Board and for 

consideration and our recommendation to the 

director is that for the period of August 13, 

1942, through June 30, 1946 we find that 

radiation dose estimates cannot be 

reconstructed for compensation purposes. And 

our table indicates we do not believe the dose 

reconstruction is feasible and we do believe 

that health was potentially endangered for 

people who worked there. So, I intended to 

take longer at that. I apologize for speaking 

so swiftly. Are there any questions? 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Any questions for 

Stu? Stu, this is a question that's more a 

curiosity question. For the one individual 

for whom you have external dosimetry, what was 
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the nature of the dosimetry? Were they using 

some sort of a film badge? Obviously this is 

before the time of commercial film badges and 

almost before the time of even badges that -- 

in other words, had the Manhattan District 

developed their own device at that time? 

 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I didn't 

foresee that question over the weekend, Paul, 

so I don't know. Now, I don't know if LaVon 

is on by phone or not. If he's on and he 

knows the answer he might want to speak up. 

If he's on and he doesn't know the answer he 

may want to say, you know, be quiet so we 

assume he's not on. Oh, he's on. 

 MR. RUTHERFORD: This is LaVon, I 

am on. And actually from the very beginning 

when they were looking at CP-1 they looked at 

using dentistry film, and they also had 

developed ion chambers, pocket ion chambers. 

So I do not know if it was pocket ion chamber 

results or film results for that individual, 

but they were using them at that early period. 
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 CHAIR ZIEMER: Thank you. And then 

the other thing, and again it's not sort of 

critical to this petition, but more out of 

curiosity. Is this start date, the August `42 

start date which is the official start of the 

Manhattan District, is that before or after 

the actual CP-1 critical experiment? 

 MR. RUTHERFORD: Again, this is 

LaVon Rutherford. CP-1 started - went 

operational on December 2 of 1942. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: So this date 

captures the actual Fermi experiment then, 

which was in December, the critical date, 

right? 

 MR. RUTHERFORD: That's correct. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Okay, thank you very 

much. Wanda Munn. 

 MEMBER MUNN: I have one question 

with respect to the 14 claimants. Are any of 

those 14 claimants in a situation that you're 

aware of where their 250-day employment period 

would become an issue relative to their 
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ability to be included in the claim? 

 MR. HINNEFELD: I don't know. I 

don't know if LaVon knows or not. 

 MR. RUTHERFORD: No, I do not know. 

 I could check that out. 

 MEMBER MUNN: The other is a 

comment for those who have great interest in 

nuclear technology and any interest at all in 

history. The people who constituted this 

portion of the Manhattan Project are the men 

and two women who constitute the shoulders on 

which our entire basis is built in the United 

States, and if there is any group anywhere 

that deserves inclusion it is certainly the 

individuals who worked in the Metallurgical 

Laboratory under Enrico Fermi during those 

very crucial years. The information that has 

come out of their efforts has been the basis 

for not only what transpired during World War 

II and the following Cold War years, but also 

for the entire science of health physics and 

nuclear technology overall. So if -- when 
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we've finished with questions I'd certainly 

like to be the person who makes the motion 

with respect to this petition. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Thank you. Dr. 

Melius? 

 MEMBER MELIUS: Yes, I just have a 

question. It may be more for Department of 

Labor, but it's not clearly covered in the 

report. But do you anticipate any problems 

trying to identify who these workers were in 

terms of eligibility? It would seem to me, I 

mean one, you've got this long time period to 

go back to, but secondly, would, you know, how 

do you make a determination that people worked 

in that particular department, and how do you 

deal with other workers who might have also 

been exposed? Security guards for example, 

and in other -- I just have no idea how sort 

of the personnel system was set up going back 

that far to university. 

 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I understand 

your question and can frankly say that is in 
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fact a DOL question. From our standpoint, I 

mean, that determination is made before we're 

even aware of a case, and we have no 

involvement in a case until it is made known 

to us by the Department of Labor. And so a 

qualification of whether this employment was 

at the Metallurgical Laboratory or not, I have 

no particular knowledge of what's available to 

do that, but that decision is made before we 

have any involvement in the case. 

 MEMBER MELIUS: I mean, I don't 

think you can deny responsibility for - 

 MR. HINNEFELD: I'm not trying to 

do that. 

 MEMBER MELIUS: -- for that because 

I mean our definition, class definition may 

impact on that. I just want to make sure that 

we, you know, that we have a sufficient class 

definition. It may be fine. I have not 

looked at the individual interviews and 

there's some discussion in this report that 

there's been discussions with DOL, but I'm 
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just trying to get confirmation on that. 

 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, our 

discussions with the Department of Labor, at 

least the ones conveyed in the report, had to 

do with the end date for the Metallurgical 

Laboratory. And that was based on our 

research. It was fairly clear from our 

research that the Metallurgical Laboratory 

simply ceased to exist, or at least ceased to 

exist as an AWE in 1946 and became Argonne 

National Laboratory. So that was the extent 

of our discussion with DOE. Certainly -- 

 MR. RUTHERFORD: This is LaVon 

Rutherford. I'd like to point out that this 

is the -- under the DOE facility database, the 

Metallurgical Laboratory is its own 

designation by itself and so this covers the 

whole facility, the whole Metallurgical 

Laboratory. If there were individuals or a 

group outside of this under the University of 

Chicago that ultimately we determined were -- 

should be included that would end up having to 
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be a separate designation, or a separate SEC 

class in itself because you cannot have an SEC 

class with more than one facility. 

 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, from the 

designation standpoint we can do one case at a 

time. I think your question then probably 

speaks to University of Chicago employees who 

are exposed to these conditions. 

 MEMBER MELIUS: Right, yes. 

 MR. HINNEFELD: And we can 

certainly talk to the Department of Labor 

about that. You know, I don't know that Jeff 

would be in a position to say anything about 

that. We can certainly talk about that going 

forward. I mean, it's clear to us that, you 

know, these are not dose reconstructions that 

are feasible for us to do, and we would -- I 

don't think we would take any position about 

excluding people because we've not found any 

way to exclude people who work there based on 

control of materials and the radiation 

exposures were only here with only those 
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people. We're not attempting to do any of 

that and be exclusive at all. So to the 

extent that it's within what is typically our 

authority to make a decision on or render a 

recommendation on, we make no distinction or 

separation at all. With respect to the 

question of who really is an employee of the 

Metallurgical Laboratory, we would have to 

approach the Department of Labor about that. 

 MEMBER MELIUS: Jeff, do you have 

comments? I would just add, it also I think 

makes a difference in terms of the outreach 

that's done. If you tell people only if you 

worked for a certain facility, you know, it's 

defined and even though it was sort of, there 

may have been other employees in those same 

buildings or whatever, it is potentially 

confusing. Now, I don't know enough about the 

history there and when Argonne took over what 

happened to employees and ancillary sort of 

employees or other people that may have been 

involved in that work. 
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 MR. KOTSCH: I specifically have 

not looked at any Met Lab cases. I mean, all 

I can say is that each one would be looked at 

for the information that's provided, the 

evidence of employment that's provided for, 

you know, as being a Met Lab employee, or a 

University of Chicago person that was working 

at the Met Lab. And you know, the outreach 

will be in that -- I don't know what form it 

will take. It'll certainly be in that area as 

well as -- I don't know where else they would 

target. But you know, it's always based on 

the evidence that's provided, or the 

affidavits, or whatever, you know, information 

is provided as far as employment goes. 

 MEMBER MELIUS: I just get worried 

that as it gets farther down into the 

bureaucracy, into your outreach centers that 

if they're just focused on, you know, a narrow 

class definition that somehow we lose the 

potential to identify other groups which are, 

again, I have no idea what the potential 
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impact is here could be. And I just remind 

that on the MIT-proposed evaluation that has 

been withdrawn because of some of these 

definitional issues that at one point the 

proposal was to include the entire university, 

and if an employee of the university is in the 

class. Here we have sort of the other -- I 

had concerns that may have been too wide a 

group, and yet we narrow it down it may be too 

narrow a group and we need to think about 

we're going to be fair to the potential 

claimants that we identify. Have some process 

in place to identify and make sure that we 

don't reject people inappropriately. 

 MR. KOTSCH: Understood. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: I'll add a comment 

to that, maybe two comments. One is that 

universities are notoriously open for people 

to roam around or as those connected with 

academia know. On the other hand, this 

project, the Manhattan Project was a highly 

secret project at that time. I believe, I'm 
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not certain of this, but one of the reasons 

for using the stadium was I think they had 

stopped playing football, Chicago -- that may 

not -- it's immaterial right now, but that was 

not - that was one of the locations that was 

thought to be sort of isolated from other 

things. 

 The other point I'd like to ask 

LaVon is the CP-1 was simply an array of 

graphite and uranium rods. Was there any 

shielding on that? LaVon, do you recall? 

 MR. RUTHERFORD: Dr. Ziemer, there 

was some shielding, but not a lot of 

shielding. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: They mostly used 

distance, I believe. 

 MR. RUTHERFORD: Yes, they did. 

There is actually some good pictures of CP-1 

you can see on the site research database as 

well as if you do the internet search there's 

some pictures. There was some concrete 

shielding that went around it, and then they 
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did use distance in their approach. But when 

they went from CP-1 to CP-2 in the 

rearrangement they did add additional 

shielding to the facility based on what they 

learned. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Right. And then 

Wanda, in connection with your question on the 

250 days, I think we do know that a lot of 

those folks at the original CP-1 event went 

elsewhere. For example, the hatchet man, I 

won't give his name although it's commonly 

known, the one who held the hatchet to release 

the boron if something went wrong and he was 

going to cut the rope. That was the early 

what we call a SCRAM system. Later I think 

became the associate director of one of the 

national labs. We know that another person in 

that project became the head health physics at 

another national lab. And so a lot of these 

people went to other locations in the system 

following that success of CP-1. They didn't 

all stay at Argonne. Some did, but they would 
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accumulate their days elsewhere. But the 

reason I asked about the shielding is that to 

some extent this looks like a criticality 

event. I look at Dr. Melius because his group 

is looking at that 250 day issue. And I know 

in the pictures the group was all standing I 

think at a balcony overlooking the pile. I've 

often wondered what kind of doses they 

received up there. Of course, they didn't 

operate it very long, but it was a critical 

event. 

 MR. RUTHERFORD: Dr. Ziemer, I 

would say that if we did determine that, you 

know, the potential was there for doses, you 

know, consistent with a criticality accident, 

that would be a separate class because we 

would identify that as a separate class and 

event that occurred, and so we would 

ultimately end up with two classes for that. 

Instead, you would have the chronic or longterm exposure from 42 to 46 period where you 

would need 250 days, and then you could look 
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at adding a second class that would be 

identified as CP-1 operations conducted, you 

know, sometime during that period. So that 

would be two separate classes. I would also 

point out that the initial wattage I think was 

two watts. So it was very low operations. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: And I would not want 

to characterize it as a criticality accident. 

 It was a controlled chain reaction, not an 

uncontrolled one, so one would not expect the 

kind of doses you might have gotten at, say, 

the SL-1 accident in Idaho. Thank you. Other 

comments or questions? Dr. Poston? 

 MEMBER POSTON: No comment -- no 

question, but a comment. I think LaVon is 

incorrect. There was no shielding at the CP1. What appears to be shielding are large 

pieces of wood which were used to hold up CP-1 

because it was actually built in a spherical 

shape, and there's no shielding. In fact, if 

you look at the pictures you'll see folks 

standing on top of the reactor, you'll see 
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folks standing beside the reactor to move the 

rods. The rods were moved manually, not by 

any mechanism, and there was no shielding 

between the folks on the reactor and the folks 

on the balcony. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Thank you. That's 

helpful. Other comments or questions? Okay, 

thank you Stu. Now, it would be in order to 

have a motion. Or no wait, I'm sorry. I'm 

ahead of myself. We may have a petitioner on 

the line, I'm not certain. Is there a 

petitioner on the line for the Metallurgical 

Laboratory claims? I was told that there 

would be. 

 MS. KUNTZ: Yes, sir. My name is 

Lafern Kuntz. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Okay. And Lafern, 

would you like to make any comments or ask any 

questions? 

 MS. KUNTZ: Well, I was a little 

confused. I'm 86 today, sir, and going 

through the reports and locations of your 
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exposure sites, and perhaps you named the 

ones. I worked on the Bikini Atoll. At 57th

and Ellis used to be a storefront. There was 

a young lady, [Identifying Information], who 

later became a doctor. We all worked under 

[Identifying Information], a physiologist who 

was from the University of Southern Illinois. 

 He wrote a paper -- giving all of us credit, 

the only doctor I know there at that time that 

worked on radiation of dogs. Also, it wasn't 

mentioned about the horse stable at 62nd and 

University which was called Site B under 

metallurgy. And I would be -- I was made 

supervisor in 1945, then transferred to New 

Chem. And you were speaking about radiation. 

 They had something, we used to be able to 

check it once in awhile with our shoes and I 

had to throw away a pair of shoes. I used to 

do the blood work on those that were exposed. 

 You would hear "pthh" and the roof would be 

gone and the men would go into a shower and 

come to me, and I'd draw blood and they'd go 
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right over to the hospital for other work. 

 I notice Ellis Street and Site B 

wasn't mentioned. Perhaps in another forum, I 

don't know. That was under [Identifying 

Information] was the head hematologist and 

hired me. And when I was first hired I was 

working in outpatient laboratory in Billings 

Hospital and I was hired there and worked in 

Billings on rabbits on the third and fourth 

floor. And then I would be sent to West Anne 

where I worked on goats. We, a lot of us, all 

of us should be put in that group for 

exposure. We were pioneers. I was told not 

to go on too much with talking, but I thought 

it would be interesting. There were things 

that I had seen and I'd like to write to you 

about it, where two little puppies -- it took 

me years to get over it -- their hind legs 

were exposed, bones, and I found them in my 

area where the rabbits were supposed to be. 

And I got help for them and I collapsed. 

Their little eyes were all over, their teeth 
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were all over. Evidently the pregnant dog was 

given radioactivity when she had conceived and 

the puppies were distorted. And that was one 

of the horrible things. I can't get that out 

of my mind even today, but it's not too bad. 

 But I thought also in Germany a boy 

came back from the Army when the war was over 

and we saw pictures of men in the mountains 

and they did scalp and removed their hair and 

everything. And one foot would be a skeleton 

and the other foot would be normal. Saw no 

shoes by them. It was in the mountains. The 

Army didn't know what it was. They were all 

in Nazi uniforms and it turned out that's what 

I saw on the two dogs about three or four 

years later at Site B. Somebody did the same 

experiment with the same chemical they gave 

the men in the mountains in Germany. I 

thought maybe you'd be interested. 

 But I do hope you put our group in. 

 Everybody was exposed. We traveled around. 

And being a pioneer, you men have more 
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knowledge today than they were trying to seek 

and find in those days. Thank you. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Okay, thank you 

Lafern. This sounds like some early 

radiobiology experiments that might have been 

carried out in conjunction with the project. 

LaVon Rutherford, is this something that has 

been looked at? 

 MS. KUNTZ: We did plutonium and 

fission mixture, a lot of that. 

 MR. RUTHERFORD: There is 

discussion in the site research database on 

one document of some early biological, you 

know, early experimentation on human beings, 

actually. 

 MS. KUNTZ: Oh, yes. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Was this part of the 

Manhattan Project, LaVon? LaVon Rutherford? 

 MR. RUTHERFORD: You know, Dr. 

Ziemer, it's not clear if it was part of what 

was -- if you looked at the report, the 

Metallurgical Laboratory was doing a lot of 
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research on personnel health and safety and 

including looking at different methods of 

monitoring techniques and so on and biological 

effects. And there was some clinical 

experiments that were done on what were 

considered patients that were going to die due 

to some, you know, illness. And it's not 

clear if it was conducted there -- it's not 

clear it was conducted at the metallurgical 

facility from the document that I read. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Okay. Somebody 

needs to mute their phone. We're hearing 

about the Verizon wireless. Okay, maybe 

they’ve done that. Okay, thank you. So, the 

facility that Ms. Kuntz mentioned, LaVon, 

sounded like a separate animal facility. Is 

it uncertain as to whether that's part of this 

project, or do we know that it is not, or? 

 MR. RUTHERFORD: There was animal 

research that was done at the facility, and it 

wasn't clear from the documentation we had 

which one of the facilities under the Met Lab 
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that that activity was included in. 

 MS. KUNTZ: Excuse me, yes it was 

under the Metallurgy Lab, Fifth Army Corps of 

Engineers. We spoke to and saw General Leslie 

Groves constantly there and we worked there 

for the University Army, Fifth Army period. 

 MR. RUTHERFORD: I wasn't saying it 

wasn't part of the -- I just was saying it's 

not clear where that activity -- from the 

documentation we have it's not clear where 

that activity was conducted. 

 MS. KUNTZ: Oh, at 57th and Ellis 

Street. They tore that building down. And 

Site B was at 62nd, used to be a horse stable. 

 Everybody around the university that's alive 

today. I met some doctors that knew about 57th

and Ellis, and they weren't part of the 

project. They were new medical students. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Well, as I look at 

the definition for the proposed class, since 

it's not defined in terms of buildings, but 

rather defined in terms of employment with 
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be covered. Am I correct on that, LaVon? 

 MR. RUTHERFORD: That is the way we 

intended and that's the way it's been 

practiced in the past. If you include the 

entire facility and all employees then it 

would include everyone. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: So these buildings 

listed in the evaluation report are there as 

part of your evaluation, but there's no intent 

to exclude people that were outside of those 

named buildings? 

 MR. RUTHERFORD: That's correct. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Thank you. Other 

questions? Dr. Melius? 

 MEMBER MELIUS: I just want to go 

back to this class definition because I keep 

hearing it interpreted differently. Are we 

saying that you have to work for the 

Metallurgical Laboratory, be an employee of, 

or work at the -- if you worked at you could 

have come in from other. 
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 CHAIR ZIEMER: It says "worked at" 

right now. 

 MEMBER MELIUS: Yes, I know, I'm 

saying -- 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: It doesn't say 

"employees" it says "worked at." 

 MEMBER MELIUS: Yes. So that's the 

interpretation, but if -- so if you worked for 

the University of Chicago but you were working 

at the Metallurgical Lab are you covered or 

not? 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Yes. I see Stu is 

shaking his head yes. I believe that's the 

understanding. The intent is, I think as we 

understand it here, sitting here, is that if 

they worked at that. That would not be unlike 

cases where people work at the test site and 

were employed by someone other than the main 

contractor, subcontractor, whatever. Now 

actually, the Metallurgical Laboratory and 

even Argonne, Argonne was operated by the 

University of Chicago, so people who worked at 
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Argonne or worked for Argonne were employed by 

the University of Chicago. So I guess the 

Metallurgical Lab was part of the university. 

 So these are all university employees. But 

the worked at, would allow for cases where an 

individual might have been an outsider, 

visiting investigator. You see, I don't know 

if Enrico Fermi worked for the university or 

not, but it's beside the point. It's 

whoever's there I believe is covered under 

this. Is that correct? If they were in the 

project, regardless of whose payroll they were 

on, correct? Yes, thank you. 

 MS. KUNTZ: Sir, may I say 

something? 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Yes, you certainly 

may. 

 MS. KUNTZ: This is Lafern. As you 

gentlemen know, it was a highly kept secret in 

our country, and the reason the University of 

Chicago wrote our checks was they thought we 

were all students there. We were all young. 
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I was 21 when I was hired there. And it was a 

big cover-up for us. It definitely was and 

everybody in the Metallurgical Laboratory, if 

you read their book, Their Day in the Sun, 

that was written by two lady doctors from Oak 

Ridge, Ruth Howes and Caroline Herzenberg, you 

would see all the names of all the women, even 

if they were doctors. We were given equal 

titles that we had served our country, and 

that's all I thought would help you. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Thank you. Other 

comments or questions? Dr. Melius, another 

question? 

 MEMBER MELIUS: No, I'm sorry. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Okay. So we have a 

proposed class before us. We've also heard 

the comments from the petitioner and let me 

ask if there is a proposed action. Wanda 

Munn. 

 MEMBER MUNN: I recommend that all 

AWE employees who worked at the Metallurgical 

Laboratory in Chicago from August 13, 1942, 
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through June 30, 1946 as described in the SEC 

petition be accepted as a segregate SEC for 

all purposes, this board and its 

deliberations. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Okay. You've heard 

the motion. Is there a second? 

 MEMBER CLAWSON: Second. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Brad has seconded 

it. If the motion carries we will have it 

returned to us during our workday on Thursday 

for the official wording that would go forward 

to the Secretary which will be slightly 

different than what was in the general motion 

that Wanda just made. Is there discussion on 

the motion? If the motion is passed then the 

individuals so described would become a class 

of the special exposure cohort. Are you ready 

to vote, then? We will vote by roll call vote 

and we will later obtain the votes of Mr. 

Schofield and Dr. Lockey. So Ted, if you'll 

call the roll call we'll do the voting. 

 MR. KATZ: Yes. Beginning, Ms. 
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Beach. 

 MEMBER BEACH: Yes. 

 MR. KATZ: Mr. Clawson? 

 MEMBER CLAWSON: Yes. 

 MR. KATZ: Mr. Gibson? 

 MEMBER GIBSON: Yes. 

 MR. KATZ: Mr. Griffon? 

 MEMBER GRIFFON: Yes. 

 MR. KATZ: Dr. Melius? 

 MEMBER MELIUS: Yes. 

 MR. KATZ: Ms. Munn? 

 MEMBER MUNN: Aye. 

 MR. KATZ: Dr. Poston? 

 MEMBER POSTON: Yes. 

 MR. KATZ: Mr. Presley? 

 MEMBER PRESLEY: Yes. 

 MR. KATZ: Dr. Roessler on the 

phone? 

 MEMBER ROESSLER: Yes. 

 MR. KATZ: And Dr. Ziemer? 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Yes. The motion 

carries. We will obtain the votes of the 
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others as quickly as possible. I want to tell 

you that it is our intent to, once we have the 

formal motion at the end of this week, to move 

that forward very quickly to Health and Human 

Services, to the Secretary in the hopes that 

he can push that forward before we get into 

more of the transition and perhaps this class 

can be added by the mid-January date when the 

current Secretary will leave office and we 

will have a new group coming aboard. And 

that's -- not that we wouldn't want the new 

group to handle it, but I think just to 

expedite it so it's not behind the curve as 

far as a lot of new people coming aboard. So 

we'll do our best to move this out. The 

official motion normally charges the chair to 

do this within 21 days and I just want to tell 

you that the intent would be to try to do this 

yet this week if we're able to. 

 MEMBER MELIUS: We'll give you 21 

hours. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Twenty-one hours 
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would be a new record, but we will move it 

forward very quickly. Thank you. Any other 

comments? And thank you, Ms. Kuntz, for 

joining us today. We appreciate your input on 

this as well. 

 MS. KUNTZ: I thank you, sir. Only 

in America could something like this be done. 

 God bless all of you. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Thank you very much. 

 We are approaching the lunch hour so we are 

going to recess till 1:00 p.m. and we'll 

resume our deliberations at that time. Thank 

you all. 

 (Whereupon, the above-entitled 

matter went off the record at 11:54 a.m. and 

resumed at 1:22 p.m.) 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: We are now ready to 

reconvene. I've instructed our Designated 

Federal Official to modify tomorrow's agenda 

so that we have a slightly longer lunch hour. 

 I think logistically it's been very difficult 

for people to get their food and get their 
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bills and back, so we'll extend that tomorrow 

a little bit to accommodate. And our 

apologies to those standing by by phone, but 

logistically we're just not able to all get 

back here within the hour timeframe. 

 The next item on our agenda is the 

Department of Energy update. However, Dr. 

Worthington was stranded halfway here due to 

fog. That is, I think the fog was here and 

she couldn't get here from Atlanta. But in 

any event, she's on the plane now and en route 

so we're going to delay the DOE update until 

Dr. Worthington arrives. We're hopeful that 

she will be here in mid-afternoon in which 

case we will delay the official adjournment 

time which is currently scheduled for 4 

o'clock. It says adjourn, it would really be 

a recess technically since the meeting will 

continue after that with the public comment 

period. But in any event, we'll plan 

tentatively to hear the Department of Energy 

update somewhere later in the afternoon after 
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we complete the work on the Savannah River 

petition. 

 Now we do want to keep the Savannah 

River discussion at sort of a time certain 

because there may be individuals by phone or 

others who were planning to be here for that 

that are planning to arrive around the 2 

o'clock hour, so what we will do at the moment 

is to move one item up from tomorrow's agenda, 

and that is a report from the Board's 

contractor, SC&A. It currently is on your 

agenda for 2:15 tomorrow. It's called Review 

Closeout Process. And so I've asked John 

Mauro if he would present his comments at this 

time and he's agreed to do that. So I'm 

pleased to have Dr. Mauro come on behalf of 

SC&A. He's going to talk about the closeout 

process. And let me preface this by reminding 

those who are here that at the present time 

our contractor is perhaps what you would call 

in limbo because we are in the process, that 

is the Board is in the process of recompeting 
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the contract, and the Board's work is done on 

that and the agency, the federal agency that 

assists us with this has done most of their 

work but we're waiting for the final decision 

on the selection of the contractor for the 

next 5-year period. So until we know whether 

or not that will be SC&A or some other entity 

we are not in a position to officially proceed 

with very much new work, but at least we have 

some old work that has to be closed out by the 

present contractor. And John Mauro is going 

to talk to us a bit about the plans on moving 

forward on the closeout process. John? 

 DR. MAURO: Thank you, Paul. Good 

afternoon everyone. As Paul pointed out, John 

Mauro. I'm the project manager for Sanford, 

Cohen & Associates. We're the contractor to 

the Board. We have been for the past five 

years. And I'm going to summarize where we 

are as of today. Our contract actually I 

believe officially ends tomorrow, and what I'm 

going to do is try to give a rundown. This 
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very first slide is an attempt to capture the 

story on one slide. I usually like to start 

with the end of the story, and then we'll back 

away and go into some of the details. The - 

for all intents - you can think about the work 

that we do for the Board as falling into two 

categories. One is we prepare major reports, 

and these are large documents that go and are 

submitted to the Board, and they go up on the 

Board's website and become available 

eventually for everyone to look at. And then 

once that work product is delivered to the 

Board, then the Board usually authorizes a 

work group which is a group of individual 

board members where we meet together in 

working sessions to discuss the issues that we 

have raised as a result of the work we did. 

And that's called a closeout process. 

 Now, the first item on this slide 

here basically says, for all intents and 

purposes, with the exception of one 

deliverable which is still active, we have 
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delivered all our work products to the Board. 

 They're large documents sitting on the shelf 

or electronically. The single deliverable 

that has not been delivered yet is a set of 

dose reconstruction audits. There area 18 

dose reconstructions that we were given to do 

a review of, I guess about a month or so ago, 

and we're pretty close to finishing that up. 

But that particular work product will not be 

delivered to the Board prior to the end of 

this contract unless the contract is extended 

a little further. So what that means is all 

our work is done except for the closeout of 

issues, and that's not a small thing. As we 

have all experienced, as we deliver our 

reports we find that we have many comments on 

the work products prepared by NIOSH, and then 

we meet and we discuss some of the concerns we 

have. And Item Number 3 says well listen, if 

you step back and look at all of the work that 

was done over the past five years, you know, 

where are we on closing out all the issues? 
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And I think it would be fair to say that we're 

about 50 percent complete. There's still a 

lot of issues that have to be closed out. 

It's going to take some time to address those 

issues and close them out. The good news is 

that even though the contract's coming to an 

end and there's still a lot of closeout work 

to do, there are a lot of resources left in 

the contract. We estimate as of today we have 

about $400,000 left in our budget. That 

translates to about 300 work hours. So in 

effect we have some resources available that 

will allow us - that's available to continue 

the closeout process. 

 And what I did then is say, okay, 

given that we have 300 work hours left in the 

budget - I'm sorry, 3,000. Did I say 300? 

Three thousand. What does that mean? That 

means well, let's take a look at the work that 

remains that needs to be done. The work that 

needs to be done, I put them in what I 

consider to be the priority, the things that I 
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think are most important. Certainly the Board 

may see it differently, but I thought it might 

be helpful. I'll just lay them out. The 

first item that I think is the highest 

priority is the completion of the issues 

resolution process on active SEC petition 

evaluation report reviews, such as the 

Savannah River site profile construction 

worker SEC petition which is the discussion - 

we'll be talking about that a little bit 

later. And we estimate that in order to 

complete all the SEC petitions evaluation 

reports that are still before us, whereby 

we've done the work and now we're in the 

closeout process of those, we're going to need 

about 1,650 work hours. And we go down the 

list. The second item I put complete issues 

resolution on procedures. We've reviewed 

about over 100, maybe 130 procedures that are 

used by NIOSH to do their dose 

reconstructions. And we estimate that we've 

completed the review, and we'll get into a 
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little more detail on this, but about half of 

those issues. There are a lot of issues, 

hundreds of issues, but to finish that 

closeout we're going to need about 350 more 

work hours. 

 Moving down the row. There are 

also - I mentioned earlier there's one set of 

dose reconstruction audits that we were asked 

to do as part of our existing contract that 

ends tomorrow to review one set of cases. We 

estimate that we're going to need about 300 

work hours to finish up that work. And then 

the next item down is - that would be to 

actually do the dose reconstruction audits 

themselves and put a report out, a piece of 

paper that goes on a shelf. But then the next 

item underneath that says complete issue 

resolution on dose reconstruction reviews. 

That's the process. Now once we finish doing 

the dose reconstruction audits, we have all 

our findings, then we go through the process 

of resolving the issues. That's about 300 
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work hours. 

 Now, you'll notice that those first 

four items I put in bold. You add those up, 

that's about - we basically have enough 

resources left over from the previous contract 

to do those first four items. Now, the three 

items beneath that, well the two items beneath 

that, sorry, we don't have enough resources to 

complete. And I said complete issue 

resolution on active site profile reviews. 

There are several site profile reviews that 

there are active work groups, we're attending 

to the issues, but we still have work to do. 

And we estimate that to finish that we're 

going to need 550 work hours. 

 And finally, there's the issues 

resolution on what I call the inactive site 

profile reviews. There are a number of large 

site profile review documents that SC&A has 

issued that are sitting on the shelf that we 

really haven't been able to get to. It wasn't 

possible to form the Work Groups, to initiate 
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the Work Group meetings and get the work 

started. We estimate that'll require about 

1,900 work hours to finish that work. So what 

I'm really saying is we've got leftover 3,000 

work hours in the bank so to speak that we can 

draw upon, but we've got 5,050 work hours of 

work to do. So the bottom line is that we're 

basically coming up short in terms of getting 

all our work done, the five years worth of 

work that we did. It would have been great if 

we could have said today, I could have come 

before you all and said we're done. We 

finished all the work, closed out all the 

issues, you can go home. But no, the reality 

is we still have work to do. We have - we're 

going to need - basically to do that work it's 

going to cost, projected shortfall is about 

$250,000, $300,000, on that order. What does 

that mean? That means the next contract is 

going to be burdened with that. So whoever 

your next contract is, we certainly hope it's 

us, we haven't heard yet, but that contract 
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will be burdened with not only doing its own 

work the next fiscal year, but also with 

closing out this work. And we think it's 

going to burden that next year's work at a 

cost of about $250,000. I have to say that 

that ain't bad. I mean when you think about 

it, it was about a $13 million contract. 

We're effectively coming up short about 

$250,000. So that's the roll-up, that's the 

end of the story. But now we're going to back 

up a little bit and say how I got there. 

 We're first going to talk about - 

everyone can see that? - the status of 

closeout. This is the SEC. In other words, 

this is the - if someone says what did you 

folks do with regard to supporting SEC reviews 

and supporting the Board. The first column is 

a listing of all of the SEC petition and 

evaluation reports that SC&A reviewed on 

behalf of the Board over the past five years. 

 The next column over says the status of that 

deliverable, the book that we delivered. We 
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have delivered or are in the act of delivering 

all of them. You'll notice that there are a 

few that have asterisks next to them. The 

last few, couple of asterisks. One of the 

logistics problem that have emerged, and I 

guess we're going to hear more about that when 

DOE is here, is we have three documents, Santa 

Susana, Pantex, Savannah River construction, 

that have been completed and are on various 

stages of review by the Department of Energy. 

 The Department of Energy likes to see all our 

work products before they are released for 

public consumption. So we like to think that 

we've finished our work, but quite frankly it 

still has that one last step to go. So I'd 

like to say that we have delivered all our 

work products or for all intents and purposes 

have delivered all our work products, but then 

the next column over says the status of 

closeout. Now, completed means from our 

perspective I think we've done all our work. 

That is, we have done all the technical work, 
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delivered our work to the Work Groups, to the 

Board, and we believe our work is completed. 

However, there are a number of active SEC 

petition reviews and closeouts, and I've 

indicted you'll see the word active. For 

example, Fernald is active. And we believe, 

based on as best we can tell, we're going to 

require about 300 work hours to support the 

closeout process for Fernald. And you can 

see, that's our breakout of where we - on that 

first slide if you remember I said it would be 

about 1,650 work hours to support the closeout 

of all the SEC petitions. Well, that's where 

the 650 comes from. So that gives you - I 

guess if you step back and say what is it we 

have in front of us, we still have lots of 

work to do on Fernald, we have lots of work to 

do on Mound, NTS, LANL and Hanford. 

 You'll notice I have Blockson. I 

know it's been a subject for a great deal of 

discussion. We had some work right up until 

last week, but I think by and large the work 
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is complete. My experience is that very often 

though we think our work is complete sometimes 

there's always a little bit more to do. But 

you know, for all intents and purposes that's 

probably a fair representation of where SC&A 

stands in terms of supporting the Board on SEC 

petition reviews. 

 One of the other major activities 

that SC&A took on over the past five years was 

the review of procedures. On this slide we 

indicate that there are about 101 procedures 

that we reviewed. It turns out there are a 

few more than that, but this is probably a 

pretty good picture of where we stand. Those 

of you involved in the procedure work group 

meetings are very familiar with these 

different categories of status. For example, 

we have found a way of sorting all - think of 

each procedure, each of the 101 procedures has 

a certain number of findings. They could have 

10 findings, 15 findings, and then we meet 

with the Work Groups and we - the Procedures 
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Work Group under the direction of Ms. Munn and 

we one by one close out the issues as best we 

can. Bottom line is you'll see if you go down 

that list a little bit, the number of closed - 

out of the total number of findings, 485, 215 

have been closed which, means that's it, we're 

done. We've come to an agreement of some 

sorts. Either SC&A has agreed no, we were 

wrong, NIOSH is right, we'll withdraw our 

finding, or NIOSH says no, I think you're 

right, we better fix that. And they fixed it. 

 There's another category called in 

abeyance, and you'll see the number 63. This 

means that SC&A and NIOSH have come to an 

agreement on the solution to the problem, 

except that the actual procedure that 

implements it has not yet been revised. So 

when you add those two up, the 215 to 263, 

that's why I say I think we're - that's 260. 

That's close to 260, 273, 278 out of 485. 

We're more than halfway home. And by the way, 

this does not reflect - Steve Marschke's in 
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the room. Steve runs our procedure review 

program. That doesn't reflect the fact that 

we just recently had a very good procedure 

review meeting where we closed out a whole 

bunch. So we're in even better shape than it 

appears on here. 

 Okay. Really, the - when all is 

said and done, I think one of the main roles 

of SC&A in supporting the Board has been 

reviewing dose reconstructions performed on 

behalf of individuals. You'll see that there 

have been, every so often the Board would give 

a group, a package of dose reconstruction 

audits to us to review. They usually come in 

chunks of 20 cases, sometimes they come in 

larger numbers than that, but if you add them 

all up I think we're at about 240. So over 

the period of five years we've audited about 

240. For every single audit we have a number 

of findings. The next column over, for 

example, Row Number 1, it says Set Number 1, 

there were - we reviewed 20 of these cases. 
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These are real people dose reconstructions. 

Out of those 20 cases we had 79 findings. The 

places where we had some point of concern 

related to that dose reconstruction. And 

you'll see the next column where it says 

percent of findings closed. That's 100 

percent. So for the first set of 20 all 

issues have been resolved. So if you go down 

that row you'll see that each set, a lot of 

them we really closed everything out for all 

intents and purposes right up through the 

sixth set of 20 cases. We're at right now, 

under the direction of Mark, where's Mark? 

There he is. We're still working real hard on 

the seventh, eighth, ninth set, and the tenth 

set as I mentioned before hasn't even been 

delivered yet. It probably won't be delivered 

till February. That's the way things are. 

But you can see that, when you look at the 

grand scheme of things, we're about halfway 

home again on the procedure reviews. But we 

still have work to do. 
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 Okay, now we're moving into the 

site profiles. This is the area where I guess 

we still have lots to do. I'll just put this 

much on. The left-hand column lists every 

site profile that we reviewed. The next 

column over is whether or not we delivered our 

site profile review document to NIOSH and the 

Board. All of - the answer is we've delivered 

them all. I believe they're all sitting on 

the Board's website. Anyone who wants to go 

online could go and see what we have to say. 

They're usually about 200-page reports. The 

next column in terms of status of closeout is 

where we are, as best I can tell, which ones 

are closed out. That is where we've met, 

we've sat together with the Work Group and 

we've resolved all the issues to the 

satisfaction of those concerned. And other 

areas you'll see, the items which say active. 

 That means we currently have an active work 

group that's meeting periodically to put to 

bed the issues that we are dealing with. And 
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are a number of them, that say inactive. What 

this means is these are site profile reviews 

that SC&A has completed, but unfortunately it 

really wasn't possible for a work group to 

form and to meet, to engage the issue. So 

there are a lot of inactives. And then 

there's another category that I call SEC 

active, and this is important because very 

often we'll do a site profile review, and then 

somewhere along the line an SEC petition would 

be issued. A good example would be at the 

Pantex plant. Another good one would be the 

Savannah River. You know, these are places 

where we transitioned from doing a site 

profile review. Out comes an SEC which of 

course is of great interest to many, many 

people. And we transition into the review of 

the SEC petition. But very often we'll 

complete the SEC petition review process, some 

judgment will be made on behalf of the Board 

regarding granting, denying a portion of or 
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all of an SEC petition, but there still very 

often are issues that are residual that we 

call - they're not SEC issues, but they are 

still some technical issues that need to be 

resolved. So even though we may end up 

closing out and resolving the SEC issues, 

there may still be some site profile issues. 

And I put down the number of work hours next 

to each one of the active sites. So you get 

an idea of what I think it's going to take to 

finish up the work. 

 And I think that tells the story. 

I'll go back to the first slide just so that 

you can get that bird's eye view again on 

where we are. Again, the bird's eye view is I 

think we finished all our major deliverables 

except for one, the tenth set of cases. I 

believe that we are 50 percent home in terms 

of closing out all issues that were raised all 

in the last five years. I believe a lot - we 

still have resources left on the order of 

about $400,000 that can go toward resolving 
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the remaining issues, but still we're going to 

need a little bit more resources than that to 

finish all of the open items. And that 

concludes my presentation. I welcome any 

questions anyone might have. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: John, can copies of 

this be made available for our work session on 

Thursday? 

 DR. MAURO: Yes, and I believe that 

- 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Or do we have them 

already? 

 DR. MAURO: I think they might 

actually have been put out on the back. I was 

talking to Zaida. She mentioned that she 

didn't have copies. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Are they on the 

disk? Oh I'm sorry, I didn't even look on the 

disk to see if it was there. Good, thank you. 

 Dr. Melius, question? 

 MEMBER MELIUS: That was actually 

my first question as he started to present was 
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trying to see where we had, because I didn't 

want to write down all those numbers. I'm 

having a little trouble figuring out what to 

make of this because I think I need an update 

on the status of the contract award to sort of 

know where we are. And I think it also 

affects our ability to make assignments and 

sort of how we conduct the rest of this 

meeting. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Ted, give us an 

update on that. 

 MR. KATZ: Yes, so the status of 

the contract is, as I think Dr. Ziemer 

mentioned earlier, all of the technical work 

has been done for the making of an award, and 

it is going through a sort of policy review 

process at CDC before the award can be made, 

and we don't have exact timing on when that 

award will be made. I would also mention that 

because of the situation, I believe it's 

already been done or it's in the process of 

being done is the SC&A contract has been or is 
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being extended to the end of December to cover 

whatever the reality is in terms of the timing 

of that award. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Let me add to that 

though, however. There is nonetheless money 

for a lot of closeout work, and I would 

anticipate that if some sort of announcement 

isn't made, David Staudt I believe is willing 

to continue - perhaps I shouldn't speak for 

him, but he certainly indicated earlier that 

in fact, even if there were a different 

contractor that closeout activities could take 

place under this. 

 MR. STAUDT: Dr. Ziemer? 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: David, are you on 

the line? 

 MR. STAUDT: Yes sir, that's me. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Oh okay. I don't 

want to speak for you, David. 

 MR. STAUDT: Yes, two things. I 

did want to reinforce the fact that Ted is 

correct. We're in the final stages of getting 
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the contract award and any delay, the slight 

delay was based on my part alone, so I 

apologize to the Board. I should have had it 

awarded by now, but I expect it to be done 

very, very shortly. But aside from that I 

would recommend that we extend the current 

SC&A contract probably through at least 

January based on John's comments on the level 

of funding and the number of hours. I did 

want to get his feedback on that, assuming 

that SC&A was or was not successful on how far 

that would take them because I'd be more than 

happy to extend the current contract to take 

care of that function. 

 DR. MAURO: David, this is John. 

Yes. Right now the way I see it is we have 

3,000 work hours or about $400,000 left 

beginning today. We're trying to make our 

best estimate right up as current as we can. 

We've been operating at a pace of about 

$300,000 a month. So that means we'll get 

through this month and we'll probably be able 
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to go through next month. So I would say 

coming toward the end of January we will run 

out of money. 

 MR. STAUDT: Okay, well I'm working 

on your modifications right now, so if you 

think that's your best estimate right now we 

can easily extend it, you know, into February 

if you want, but that's really kind of, you 

know, your call right now and your best 

advice. 

 DR. MAURO: I would say we will 

make it into January. Someplace - 

 MR. STAUDT: Okay, well right now, 

take an exception, I'll extend the base 

contract and the asset task orders through 

January 30. 

 DR. MAURO: That would be fine. It 

would be cutting it close. Sometime toward 

the end of January we will run out of money. 

 MR. STAUDT: Okay, that's what I'll 

do for now if that's okay with everybody. 

 MEMBER MELIUS: Can I just ask 
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another question? 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: There may be others 

running out of money by then too. Go ahead, 

Jim. 

 MEMBER MELIUS: What does this mean 

in terms of assignment of new work? Because 

frankly some of the new work could have a 

higher priority than the old work. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Yes. I think we're 

going to return to that, but let me make a 

comment. It seems to me that, and we can 

deliberate this as we go forward in the next 

couple of days. It seems to me that the Board 

should be doing two things at this meeting. 

One is to see what closeout things have high 

priority from the list that John presented, 

but we should also identify new work and have 

that basically identified and saying as soon 

as a contract is released we want this new 

work to start. I don't believe we're in a 

position to assign much new tasking to - under 

the current contract. 
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 MEMBER MELIUS: I agree, that's why 

I'm trying to figure out - 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: But I don't believe 

that should stop us from identifying the tasks 

that we want done so that as soon - I'm 

optimistic that there will be a contractor 

named before we meet again. 

 MR. STAUDT: Dr. Ziemer, I don't 

see any reason why this will not be awarded by 

the new year. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Okay, but you know 

David, you told us last - 

 MR. STAUDT: I know, I know, there 

was some other thing that came up. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: I understand. 

 MR. STAUDT: But as of right now 

the way it's sitting there's no reason why I 

don't see this awarded by the new year. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Okay, but in any 

event I think we should go ahead and in 

essence define the tasking so that it's ready 

to go. 
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 MEMBER MELIUS: Okay. I just 

wanted to make sure we had - we'll probably 

have to be a little - the scheduling may be 

difficult, but at least we'll have something. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: The scheduling may 

be difficult and the Work Groups may have 

problems because we have a number of work 

groups with ongoing things that involve SC&A, 

and to the extent that work groups need to 

schedule meetings in the next six weeks this 

could be problematical. So we need to do as 

much as we can on the closeout, identify the 

new items, and in a sense we would proceed as 

if everything is normal and we have a 

contractor. And then we will wait for the 

word that will come to us. 

 And John, I don't know if you want 

to do it now, but you also have some ideas on 

new work and you could share those either now 

or - it may be best done during the work 

session of the Board. John Mauro, right. 

 DR. MAURO: Yes, we can wait for 
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the work session. That would be fine. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Because we're 

getting close to the 2 o'clock hour here 

anyway. Okay, Brad, you have a question here? 

 MEMBER CLAWSON: I just want to 

make sure because this is kind of hamstringing 

us as work groups at a point, because we've 

got certain ones that we have to set out far 

in advance because of their special 

uniqueness, and we're hamstringed on this. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Yes, and I think at 

the moment what we're going to need to do is 

go ahead and schedule because announcements 

have to be made and the usual sort of red tape 

has to be taken care of. It'll be easier to 

cancel if we have to, and I'm hopeful that we 

don't, but I think we go ahead and plan as if 

things are going to fall into place. Other 

comments or questions for John right now? 

Okay John, thank you very much. That's very 

helpful for us as we look forward. 

 We have on the agenda a break. I 
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don't know if we really need one this soon 

after lunch. We'll just pause a minute if 

anyone needs a comfort break and we're going 

to begin the deliberations on Savannah River 

here right at 2 o'clock. So just going to 

take about a 5-minute - don't go far. We'll 

take just a 5-minute recess so everybody is 

ready at 2 o'clock. 

 (Whereupon, the above-entitled 

matter went off the record at 1:54 p.m. and 

resumed at 2:00 p.m.) 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: We're ready to 

reconvene the meeting if you'd all have your 

seats. Thank you very much. I'd like to 

check the phone line. Dr. Roessler, is the 

phone line open for your hearing? 

 MEMBER ROESSLER: I'm here. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Very good, thank 

you. We're going to now move to the agenda 

item which is called Savannah River SEC 

Petition. There are a number of individuals 

who will be making presentations. We're going 
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to begin with our Designated Federal Official, 

Ted Katz, who's going to outline for us all 

what the SEC process is all about, give us 

kind of an overview of that. Then we will 

hear from Tim Taulbee representing NIOSH and 

he will present the evaluation report on the 

petition representing NIOSH's evaluation. We 

will then hear from a number of petitioners 

from the Savannah River site, and then we will 

also have an opportunity to hear from our 

board contractor, SC&A, on their review of the 

petition. So a number of items before us 

dealing with Savannah River. So let's begin 

then with Mr. Katz who will give us an 

overview of the process. 

 MR. KATZ: Thank you, Dr. Ziemer. 

Before I do that though let me - since we're 

starting a session where there's quite a bit 

of public presentation and input, I need to 

let you know about a policy of the Board with 

respect to transcripts. I think as you've 

noticed this meeting is being transcribed. 
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There will be a verbatim transcript and that 

transcript gets posted to the NIOSH website 

where it's available for all to see. We have 

a policy with respect to that which is if you 

come up and speak you don't have to give your 

name if you don't want to, but if you do give 

your name generally speaking we will not 

redact your name so that will appear in the 

transcript. You will be identified in the 

transcript. And if you discuss for example 

medical conditions that you have or such those 

would generally appear in the transcript too. 

 If you discuss, however, a third party, 

another person, that information about a third 

party will be removed from the transcript. It 

will be redacted. The other thing to note of 

importance is if you would like to speak with 

the Board, present information to the Board 

but you don't want to do it in public then 

contact me and we'll arrange something if 

you're not willing to do that. Last point 

about this is the policy that we have about 
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redaction which I've just discussed should be 

available where you sign in to speak and it's 

also available on the NIOSH website with the 

agenda for this meeting. So if you want to 

look at that in detail. 

 Now, just to give you then - we 

thought it'd be useful to give an overview of 

the SEC process, not so much for the 

petitioners who I think probably at this point 

have a pretty good idea of how that process 

works, but for other people from Savannah 

River who may not be so familiar and don't 

know where this, today's events come into the 

process and what goes forward. So I'll try to 

be very brief about that. But it's about a 7 

or 8 step process all in all depending on how 

you count, but it begins all with a petition. 

 NIOSH needs a petition before the Secretary 

can consider adding a class to the cohort. 

And a point I just want to make about the 

petitioning process is that there can be more 

than one petition from a site, and a site as 
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big and with as long a history as Savannah 

River may have in the end of the day many 

petitions addressing particular classes. 

Right now we are considering one today, but 

there is I believe another petition that's 

already been received by NIOSH and there could 

be more. I'd just make that point. 

 The second step in the process is 

to qualify the petition and that's just in 

effect to say that it meets certain basic 

requirements to get the full consideration of 

NIOSH and the Board and the Secretary of 

Health and Human Services, the Director of 

NIOSH and so on. The third step is that NIOSH 

evaluates the petition and prepares a report. 

 And in the case of Savannah River site it's 

done that. I think the Board received that 

report a month ago or so. And the fourth step 

then, which is where we are today, is the 

Board takes up the petition for consideration. 

 And to say something about the Board's 

consideration of a petition, it can be brief 
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as you heard this morning in a case that's 

very simple, and it can be very extensive in a 

case like with big sites and covering many 

years that you may have with Savannah River 

site. It begins typically with the 

presentation of a NIOSH evaluation report and 

following that the petitioners are given the 

opportunity to speak to their petition and 

also speak to the NIOSH evaluation report 

their view of what's found in that evaluation 

report. From there then a number of things 

occur. The Board of course has a lot of 

dialogue, but the Board may need to assign a 

work group. In this case there is already a 

work group focusing on Savannah River site 

that may continue the work beyond the Board 

meeting to go into details about this. And 

you just had a presentation from SC&A. They 

may be brought into the picture as well to do 

a detailed technical review of issues. And in 

this case with Savannah River site with a 

construction petition they've already done 
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what they have termed a paper review which is 

sort of the initial step in how they go about 

their work for the Board in investigating 

issues in detail. All of this goes on until 

the Board has come to a point where it has 

sufficient confidence that it understands the 

issues and can make a recommendation, and it 

makes a recommendation to the Secretary of 

Health and Human Services as to whether or not 

to add a class to the special exposure cohort. 

 At that point then the director of NIOSH will 

receive all this information, including - and 

it's very important, it's not just the 

information that the petitioners provide and 

SC&A and so on, but also information that's 

provided by members of the public, members in 

this case of Savannah River site who come to, 

for example, a public comment session and may 

provide information that may be important to 

that petition as well. The director of NIOSH 

considers all this information and makes a 

recommended decision as to whether the class 
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should be added. That's step five. Step six 

is the Secretary of Health and Human Services 

makes a final decision. And then important to 

you again, step seven is if the Secretary of 

Health and Human Services makes a decision 

that's adverse to adding part of the class or 

the whole class, denies adding part of the 

class, then there's the opportunity for the 

petitioners to appeal that decision. But in 

quick, that's the whole process and here we 

are starting with the Board's first 

consideration of this petition. Thank you. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: And Mr. Katz, if I 

might add, if the Secretary does recommend a 

class be added, that recommendation goes to 

Congress and Congress then has, I believe, 30 

days to either revoke that, or if they take no 

action then it stands as a recommendation and 

takes effect. 

 MR. KATZ: Right, and the record to 

date is that Congress has never sought to 

revoke any designation by the Secretary. 
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 CHAIR ZIEMER: Okay, thank you very 

much. Let's proceed then to hear the 

evaluation report from NIOSH on the Savannah 

River petition. And that petition for the 

record is Petition SEC-00103 and the 

presentation will be given by Mr. Taulbee, Tim 

Taulbee, and he will give details on both the 

petitioner and the site and the recommendation 

of NIOSH. 

 MR. TAULBEE: Thank you, Dr. 

Ziemer, and for this opportunity to present 

the Savannah River site special exposure 

cohort. Can everyone hear me okay? Okay. 

And thank you members of the Board for your 

attention during this evaluation. 

 To give a little bit of an overview 

of this petition, we received it November 11, 

2007. The petitioner proposed the class 

definition of construction workers and all 

other workers in all locations at the Savannah 

River site in Aiken, South Carolina, from 

January 1 of 1950 to the present. On March 4 
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of 2008 we qualified the petition for 

evaluation for construction and building 

trades workers only. And when I indicate 

building trades and construction workers 

you'll hear me refer to those interchangeably 

throughout my presentation. Sometimes I'll 

just refer to construction trades. What I'm 

talking about here are the pipefitters, the 

laborers, the carpenters, the electricians, 

the general trades and crafts that are used 

for construction. Also millwrights that would 

work as mechanics within the facilities, et 

cetera. All of these are lumped together in 

what we call construction and building trades 

workers. 

 On March 10 of 2008 a Federal 

Register notice was published identifying that 

we had qualified this petition for evaluation. 

 Because we only qualified the construction 

and building trades workers for evaluation, 

two of the petitioners who were not 

construction building trades workers requested 
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an administrative review on April 24 and April 

25. And this administrative review is 

conducted by an independent group within 

NIOSH, not part of OCAS, the group that I work 

in, where they look at what the petitioners 

provided to us as far as information as to 

whether we restricted the class too narrowly. 

 The administrative review panel presented 

their findings to the director of NIOSH on 

June 25 of 2008 and the administrative review 

panel concluded that the petitioners did not 

provide sufficient information to extend the 

class definition beyond the Savannah River 

site employees classified as construction 

workers. As a result of this finding we 

continued on with our evaluation of all 

construction workers - and again I'm adding 

building trades in there - who worked in any 

area at the Savannah River site during the 

period of January 1, 1950, through December 

31, 2007. The initial petition if you recall 

said through present. Unfortunately present 
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is a moving target within our evaluation time 

periods so we needed a hard date that we could 

look at against. In July of this year, July 

17, we notified the Advisory Boardthat we were 

not going to make the 180-day time period and 

this was due to data access issues, and over 

the period of April and May into the first of 

June we worked through the data access issues 

with the Savannah River site and we were able 

to get onsite and review the records that we 

needed in order to conduct this evaluation. 

The evaluation report was issued on November 

14 of 2008. 

 So I want to talk a little bit 

about the petition basis for this petition, 

and the main basis came as to why we qualified 

this petition was due to external monitoring 

of unmonitored workers - or unmonitored 

workers, their external dose. What the 

petitioners provided to us that qualified this 

petition was a study conducted by the Center 

for the Protection of Worker Rights, or CPWR, 
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in which they compared building trades workers 

2,335 construction workers. And what they 

indicated in this report was that based on the 

Health Protection Annual Radiation Exposure 

History Database, or HPAREH as you'll hear me 

refer to it, of radiation monitoring records 

from the Savannah River site, it appeared that 

the underlying dose data were deficient for 50 

to 90 percent of the construction workers 

employed at the Savannah River site. This was 

the information that we didn't have when we 

had been doing our other information, and so 

by the petitioners providing it to us, this 

qualified the petition for evaluation. In 

addition to this, the Advisory Boardsite 

contractor SC&A in their site profile review 

indicated as one of the issues that Dr. Mauro 

was talking about that no effort had been made 

to evaluate the completeness of the HPAREH 

file used in the development of the external 

coworker model. So these two are closely 

related. It's using the same database. So 
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this is the fundamental basis that qualified 

the petition for evaluation. 

 For unmonitored workers also there 

is an internal dose component. The 

petitioners indicated that in regards to the 

Savannah River site profile, all nuclides that 

workers were potentially exposed to are not 

identified in the site profile. Unfortunately 

they didn't provide any evidence of which 

radionuclides for us to go and evaluate, so in 

and of itself this would not have qualified 

the petition for evaluation. The Advisory 

Boardcontractor had also indicated this, that 

the impact of internal and external exposure 

to radionuclides from special campaigns are 

not analyzed and included in the technical 

basis document. There are a subsequent set of 

technical information bulletins that we use 

that do discuss many of these radionuclides in 

the special campaigns, but what we had not 

done to date was to go through and look at the 

individual campaigns and see if there was 
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monitoring data covering that exact time 

period that those campaigns were being 

conducted. So we added this into the 

evaluation report and you'll see that within 

the report that we issue. 

 Some additional concerns raised by 

the petitioners regarding the site profile are 

that radiation incidents are not included in 

the site profile. This is really the case in 

all of our site profile documents. We 

generally don't include these unless it was a 

major incident at the particular facility. 

However, when we look at a dose reconstruction 

and we get information from the site, 

information about radiological incidents we do 

receive and so when we're doing a dose 

reconstruction we can incorporate information 

from that incident into our dose 

reconstructions. Another concern was that the 

site profile was skewed towards production 

workers. Again, virtually most of the site 

profiles fall along that line, that's why we 
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have a separate technical information 

bulletin, OTIB-52, that addresses and 

specifically concerns construction and 

building trades workers. Also, I mentioned 

the 1990 Tiger Team assessment. I'm not going 

to go in that here today, but it is covered 

there in our evaluation report. 

 Another concern was that work in 

non-radiological areas later found to be 

contaminated. They were unmonitored in these 

particular areas and that there was some 

cover-up of incidents along those lines. When 

you consider the incident data, the important 

critical component for dose reconstruction is 

that whether or not there's bioassay data 

available as one would expect in order to 

allow us to estimate the internal dose. We 

don't necessarily have to have all of the 

details of the incident as long as there's 

some monitoring of the individual after the 

accident or at the time of the incident so 

that we can assess the dose. 
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the Advisory Boardcontractor, SC&A, was 

special tritium compounds. This is being 

handled in a separate OTIB because it affects 

more than just the Savannah River site and so 

we have not addressed it within the evaluation 

report. Another concern that was raised by 

the Advisory Boardhere was the early worker 

monitoring data and I'll go into more detail 

about that shortly. Early worker neutron 

monitoring, specifically this would be NTA 

film, and then neutron to photon ratios, and 

then dosimetry uncertainty. The dosimetry 

uncertainty is covered in the evaluation 

report but in the interest of time please read 

about that. 

 The sources of available 

information. What we started with was the 

site profile or the technical basis document 

for the Savannah River site. We also had for 

our team technical information bulletins and 

procedures on how we do dose reconstruction 
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for the Savannah River site. We conducted 

interviews with current and former employees 

and conducted a worker outreach meeting to try 

and get additional information. The site 

research database in March of 2008 when we 

qualified the petition we had about 600 

technical documents in that database. This 

past summer in working with the Savannah River 

site and going through their archives and 

their indexes we've captured an additional 500 

documents. In reality this is many more than 

500 because other than just documents we 

captured individual records, radiation survey 

sheets, air sampling information, neutron 

surveys, et cetera. So I don't call those 

individual documents so the volume is rather 

large. 

 In addition, we obtained the 

quarterly dosimetry reports from the Savannah 

River site since 1958. This is all of the 

monitored workers are on these quarterly 

reports. These are all in hard copy at this 
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time. We also obtained the bioassay log books 

since the startup of the facilities and the 

site special hazards investigation reports. 

This is a detailed discussion of all of the 

major incidents onsite, the Class 1, Class 2 

incidents, as categorized by the site. We had 

the Health Protection Annual Radiation 

Exposure History Database, or HPAREH. We 

added to that the Health Protection Radiation 

Exposure Database, or HPRED. This is more of 

the contemporary bioassay information covering 

time periods post-1992 up until 2007. We also 

had documentation provided by the petitioners. 

 These were all affidavits that gave us some 

insight as to the monitoring that was going on 

at the site, and we had of course the claims 

case files within the NIOSH OCAS claims 

tracking system, or NOCTS. 

 Within the claims tracking system, 

and this is as of October 1, 2008, some of the 

information that Mr. Elliott provided this 

morning is more update for the Savannah River 
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site, but I wanted to keep this consistent 

with the evaluation report that is available 

there on the back table and that the Board has 

reviewed, or has seen anyway. As of October 1 

we had 3,264 claims submitted to NIOSH. 

Claims that would meet the definition, our 

broad definition of building and construction 

trades workers, almost 1,800 of them or over 

half would fall into that category, of the 

claims that we have received to date. For 

dose reconstructions we've completed over 

1,300 of them and of those, 1,700 that meet 

the class definition, 1,400 of those claims 

contained some internal monitoring data. In 

other words, we have some bioassay information 

or whole body count data on those individual 

workers. From external dosimetry it's 

slightly better, we have a little bit more, 

but in general it's 82 percent of all of the 

claims we have to date that we have received 

from the site we have some monitoring data. 

If you recall, the initial petition was for 
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unmonitored workers and our ability to 

reconstruct their doses by using a coworker 

model. So in reality this method that is 

being - that has caused some concern, causing 

us to do the evaluation is affecting 18 

percent of the claims. 

 I want to briefly go over the 

Savannah River site operations. Some of the 

Board members attended a tour yesterday so 

this is a bit of a repeat, but others there in 

the audience might not be as familiar with the 

site. The primary mission was to produce 

materials for nuclear weapons, specifically 

plutonium and tritium at the site. A 

secondary mission was to manufacture tritium 

reservoirs to be used in nuclear weapons. A 

third mission was isotope production, and 

these were the special campaigns that the 

Board had indicated needed to be reviewed 

more, and these were for the production of 

heat sources, plutonium-238, irradiation 

sources, cobalt-60, transplutonium isotopes 
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such as americium, curium and californium. 

The final mission that I want to talk about 

here briefly is the research and development 

at the Savannah River Laboratory. Within that 

facility this is all the research development 

that would go into the site production 

operations. It has since changed with the 

closure of many of the site facilities to 

where now it's Savannah River National 

Laboratory and they do other research, not 

just in connection with the production 

operations. 

 At the Savannah River site there 

are five main areas at the site. The 100 

area, this would be the reactors of R, P, L, K 

and C. This is the startup sequence of how 

they came online. The 200 area is the F and H 

canyons, and include the tank farms. The 300 

area is the fuel and target fabrication area. 

 The 400 area is the heavy water production 

and the 700 area is the research and 

development, or Savannah River Laboratory. 
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 So I'm going to walk a little bit 

through the startup history at the site. And 

the reason for this is the Board had indicated 

some concern about early monitoring data. And 

when you look at the number of workers 

monitored in 1952 versus the number in 1955 

there's a big difference between them, and it 

corresponds with the startup of the 

facilities. Construction actually began at 

the site in February of 1951 and the first 

normal assay uranium arrived from the Fernald 

site in June of 1952. So the evaluation 

period covers January 1 of 1950, but the first 

radioactive materials arriving onsite would 

have been June of 1952. In September of 1952 

the graphite test pilot achieved criticality. 

 In January of 1953 full-scale operations of 

the 300 area commenced. By December of that 

year the R reactor achieved criticality, and 

in June of 1954 the first irradiated fuel was 

withdrawn from the reactor. November of 1954 

is when the isotope separation begins in the 
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200 area, specifically with F canyon. So what 

you can see here is we started with the 300 

area. Then as you add each of the reactors 

you're going to have more people monitored 

over time until you get to November and that's 

when they start monitoring in the 200 areas. 

So this is the reason for the ramp-up of 

monitoring data that you see in the records. 

 December of 1954 was when the first 

high-level waste tank was placed in service. 

March of 1955, the last reactor achieved 

criticality. July of 1955 radioisotope 

separations begins in the H canyon. Started 

with F. About a year later is when H canyon 

began to be operable. October 1955 is when 

tritium was first recovered from the 200 area. 

 In June 1956, the tritium facility 232 began 

operation. By March 1957, the 200 F 

operations were suspended for an upgrade. 

They upgraded the FB line to the JB line on 

the roof, and so when you look at some of the 

neutron monitoring you'll see some cyclic 
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information as to whether people are being - 

you know, when people are being monitored. 

And the reason is these operations were 

suspended for about a 2-year period. They 

resumed in 1959 and in 1961 neptunium 

reprocessing began. 1961 also F and H canyons 

began an alternating work schedule which also 

affects some of the monitoring data that we 

see. And then 1963, 235 F switched from 

neptunium to curium fabrication, and then 1964 

the first U-233 separation with thorium begins 

there onsite. And I'll talk a lot more about 

that later. 1965 is when simultaneous 

operations of F and H canyon resumed. So 

we've got about a 4-year period where they 

were alternating, and the rest of the time 

period they were running simultaneous. 1965 

is THORAX separations. And many of you heard 

yesterday about PUREX operations in the 

canyons. They also had a THORAX operation 

where they were separating out the uranium-233 

from irradiated thorium. The final THORAX 
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campaign was completed in 1969. 

 So before we begin to get into the 

feasibility of dose reconstruction, one of the 

things that we feel is necessary is to look at 

how good is the data that we're using as the 

fundamental basis for our evaluation. So from 

internal dose data, NIOSH obtained the 

bioassay log books from the Savannah River 

site this summer. There were 146 log books 

from 1954 to 1992. 1992 is when the HPRED 

database picked up with everything being 

electronic. Each of these log books is about 

300 pages in length and there's about 20 

workers on each of the pages. So you can see 

there's a large volume of bioassay monitoring 

that was conducted there at the site and now 

we have this information in hard copy format. 

 Within the NOCTS database we went through and 

coded all of the information the site had sent 

us previously. This got started back in May 

of this year before we had any information 

from the site, and there were over 380,000 
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bioassay samples that we coded from within the 

NOCTS database. Most of these were tritium, 

over 300,000 of them. So, the vast majority 

of it is tritium. However, as I go through my 

presentation you'll see the numbers that we 

have for some of the other radionuclides. 

 The data quality or the pedigree of 

it. We went through several log books and 

extracted 200 original entries and we reviewed 

them. Of the 200 names there within the log 

book, 62 of them were claimants that we had in 

the NOCTS database. Fifty-seven of those we 

had the data that was in the log books, or 

greater than 92 percent. So the information 

that we were receiving from the site on 

individual claims we use that in dose 

reconstruction and have been since the startup 

of the program. Three of the claims had 

bioassay information in the log books that 

were not received from the site in the NOCTS 

database, and two of the claims were new and 

we just hadn't received the submittal back 
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from the site. So we're looking at better 

than 90 percent of the data we receive on a 

routine basis from the site in order to 

conduct dose reconstructions. 

 From the external dose data; this 

is the issue that qualified the petition, was 

the use of the HPAREH database and its 

validity in reconstructing coworker doses. We 

knew there were some limitations in it when we 

first started using it. The limitation is 

that if you were employed onsite in 1979 

you're included in this particular database. 

If you terminated prior to 1979 and didn't 

come back, your data is not in this database. 

 So we knew there was a limitation associated 

with it based upon numbers between Taylor 

which is a site document and the - comparing 

an annual basis of the data. For most workers 

we were looking at greater than 50 percent of 

the data per year. So to change an annual 

dose distribution we felt the coworker model 

was pretty robust when you've got 50 percent 
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of the data. What changed here was that CPWR 

went through and said for construction workers 

you might only be looking at 10 percent of the 

data, and so that's what we wanted to evaluate 

to see if this might change some of our 

distributions with regards to construction and 

building trades workers. 

 We obtained the quarterly dosimetry 

reports from 1958 in hard copy and we compared 

the annual dose distributions between these 

reports to HPAREH for four years, 1960, `65, 

`70 and `75. If you look at the number of 

monitored workers in the yellow that you see 

there, that comes from the Taylor document as 

to how many people were monitored onsite in a 

given year. And that very early time period 

here - let's see if I can get this thing to 

work. This is the ramp-up that I was talking 

about earlier, and then you see that there was 

approximately 5 to 6,000 workers monitored on 

the site in these early time periods. When 

you compare it to the data and number of 
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workers monitored in the HPAREH database, 

that's the red bars here, it follows quite 

nicely until you get prior to 1979 and that's 

where it begins to fall off, that those 

workers are not included in the database used 

to develop the coworker model. It's only for 

the coworker model. All other workers that 

were monitored during this time period that 

are not in HPAREH, we receive that information 

when we do dose reconstruction. So we've been 

getting it all along from the site at early 

doses. It's only in the development of dose 

distributions applied to unmonitored workers. 

 We went through and coded the hard copy 

quarterly reports, and you'll see we got 

slightly more workers in 1960, `65 and `75. 

 So how does this compare for 

construction and building trades workers? 

Within HPAREH in 1960 there were only 202 

workers in the HPAREH data system. In the 

fourth quarter summary reports when we coded 

them there were 747. So the study conducted 
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by CPWR in looking at, they were correct. We 

were only looking at about 25 percent of the 

data based upon this particular analysis. So 

the big question was does this affect the 

annual dose distribution? You don't 

necessarily have to have all of the data in 

order to develop an annual dose distribution, 

you just have to have enough of it such that 

it doesn't change, it's more stable. So that 

was the next step. And one other point here 

I'll make is that as you increase in time and 

get closer to that 1979 time period the fourth 

quarter dosimetry reports begin to approach 50 

percent. So it's more of a problem in the 

very early years than it was as you begin to 

approach the latter years. 

 So how did the annual dose 

distributions compare? And this is all 

workers there at the site. And this is from 

our fourth quarter summary with the green 

bars, and the red is what is HPAREH. And what 

you'll see is they match quite nicely. For 
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those not familiar with the box and whisker 

plots, this is just a way of looking at the 

dose distributions. The lower portion of the 

box is the 25th percentile where 25 percent of 

the data in say the case in 1970 is greater 

than 10 millirem of the data that we have. 

The bar is 50th percentile, or the median, and 

from this case it's about 55 millirem. The 

upper tail is 75 percentile. The upper 

whisker here is 90th percentile and the dot is 

the 95th percentile. And what you'll see is 

that the 95th percentile for both all of the 

coded people and those in HPAREH didn't change 

much based upon our analysis. In fact, it 

slightly decreased. So our conclusion based 

upon the all monitored workers is that even 

though we weren't seeing or we weren't using 

all of them for the development of these 

distributions, it wouldn't change much if we 

included all of the workers from this 

standpoint. Now, this is all workers. 

Looking at just the construction workers, and 
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this is where we had that 202 versus 747. We 

do see more - a larger swing here among some 

of the construction workers here, but HPAREH 

again typically appears to be higher. The 

exception is 1970 where the actual monitored 

workers that are in the hard copy records is 

greater than what is in HPAREH. Now, when you 

think about how we apply this for dose 

reconstruction, we would actually apply the 

all-worker model for 1970 and in this case if 

you were to use the 95th percentile you'd be 

looking at about a 2 rem exposure per year 

that we would be assigning. And for building 

and construction trades workers we would take 

this data and multiply by 1.4 per the OTIB-52 

methodology. So when you take the two from 

this particular all-worker model multiplied by 

the 1.4 you end up with somewhere right around 

3, 2 and a half to 3 type of rem dose. If you 

look at the 95th percentile, when it exceeded 

in 1970, we're still overestimating what the 

dose would be. So even though we're looking 
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at a limited data set, we're still 

overestimating what would be applied to 

building and construction trades workers. 

 Now, one of the concerns that we 

had was we used the fourth quarter results 

within our coding. We went through and 

totaled them all up. We know building and 

construction trades workers are more transient 

and so they might not have been there through 

the whole year, and if they were there working 

in the fourth quarter we would have had their 

data. So we went back for 1960 and looked at 

the first, second and third quarter, and sure 

enough it illustrates that there were about 

1,400 monitored construction workers onsite in 

1960. The dose distributions continue to 

decrease. These are annual dose 

distributions, and these are workers that 

would only have been there for a fraction of 

the time, so you would expect that the dose 

distributions would decrease. So for these 

workers the application of the HPAREH database 
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which is based on an annual dose, applying 

that factor that we, you know, that I talked 

about a minute ago we feel is claimantfavorable and a bounding external dose 

estimate for these workers. 

 So from the dose reconstruction 

standpoint, the feasibility. Again, 82 

percent of the claims that we have received to 

date have monitoring data, both external and 

internal. So this would apply to the 18 

percent that are not monitored that we don't 

have any data on. Some of our tools are the 

site profile that I mentioned. We do have 

OTIB number 1 which is the average high 

exposure for a bounding coworker dose. This 

is where we assign multiple radionuclide 

intakes from accidents and incidents that have 

occurred at the site over time and we'll 

assign them all to an individual worker. So 

instead of just a uranium intake, if they 

worked in the 300 area they'd get a uranium, 

plutonium, americium, a large intake that 
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would be assigned. So this is kind of a 

bounding coworker estimate. For external 

coworker model there's OTIB-32 and then for 

construction and building trades workers we 

have OTIB-52. Now, one of the things that 

we're currently developing is what we call the 

SRS internal coworker model. This would be a 

best estimate case and not a bounding estimate 

type of case. And this is where we're working 

with - or looking at using the data that's in 

the NOCTS database and Dr. Wheaton is going to 

talk more about this during the science 

session tomorrow. And so this is kind of how 

we plan on developing this database. We 

expect it to be available in the spring of 

this year. 

 So when we did our feasibility 

determination - and for those of you who might 

be following along, this would be Section 7 of 

the evaluation report - the first thing we did 

was look at the source term. For internal 

dose it's the radionuclide of concern, for 
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external it's photons and neutrons. What we 

looked at was the exposure location and the 

time period, what personal monitoring method 

was being used by the site for that time 

period, and then the data availability. Okay, 

we've got information about where the work was 

going on and now personal monitoring data, 

what was the method of analysis and is this 

data available. These latter three here is 

what plays into our feasibility determination. 

 With regard to tritium doses, 

exposure location and time period, the 

reactor's separations and both of these are 

from basically startup and the first 

operations with tritium. The 1992 here 

actually extends out because there is some 

additional storage of fuels at one of the 

reactors. So the heavy water facility, you'll 

see it starts up in December of 1957. It was 

actually running before that, but it wasn't 

until December that they started recycling 

some of the moderator coming from the reactors 
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and re-purifying it. So the first tritium 

exposure would occur in December. Savannah 

River Laboratory basically from startup until 

present. The monitoring methods used for 

urinalysis, this was for tritium, prior to 

1958 was an off-gassing technique and then 

post-1958 it was via liquid scintillation. 

The sensitivity of both of these methods is 

about the same. In latter years liquid 

scintillation improved even more and the 

sensitivity decreased. As I mentioned in the 

NOCTS database we have a tremendous number of 

tritium bioassay samples, over 300,000 

samples. In the site profile and OTIB-14 we 

have methods to estimate the doses due to 

tritium based upon detection limit and then 

the modeling when we have the monitoring data. 

 So overall we feel the tritium dose 

reconstruction is feasible at the Savannah 

River site. 

 The uranium dose reconstruction. 

Primary areas were the fuel and target 
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fabrication area, the 300 area. And then 

Savannah River Laboratory, the 700 area from 

1952 forward. Then the reactors from 1953, 

about a month prior to startup of the R 

reactor separations, November 1954. 

Monitoring method was a fluorometric method 

for depleted and natural uranium, and they did 

alpha counting for the enriched uranium. In 

our NOCTS database we have 3,700 results from 

1953 to 1992. Keep in mind post 1992 we have 

electronic database so there's a lot more data 

in that particular one. And then enriched 

uranium, another 3,000 samples. And post 1994 

we have about 800 alpha spectroscopy samples 

which will give us an isotopic breakdown of 

the uranium, the various uraniums. So overall 

based to the availability of this data that we 

have we feel that uranium dose reconstruction 

at the Savannah River site is feasible. 

 For plutonium dose reconstruction 

the primary areas of exposure were the 

separations in the Savannah River Laboratory 
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from November of 1954 to 2007, and the fuel 

and target fabrication area from 1959 to about 

1985. This is where they worked with 

plutonium aluminum targets in order to create 

transplutonium isotopes. 

 And so this work was conducted in 

the fuel and target fabrication. The 

monitoring method, there was a separation 

process on the urinalysis and alpha track 

counting was used prior to `64. `64 - that 

should not be 1981, sorry about that. Solid 

state surface barrier detectors. And then `81 

to 2000, we have alpha spectroscopy which will 

give us the isotopic breakdown. In the NOCTS 

database there is, between 1954 and 2006, 

there's over 10,000 plutonium bioassay sample 

results that we have that we can use to 

develop an internal coworker model. So we 

feel that plutonium dose reconstruction is 

feasible. 

 Neptunium dose reconstruction. 

This is the fuel and target fabrication area, 
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from 1958 to 1986, and then the separations 

area in the Savannah River Laboratory from 

1961 to `86. Again, this was kind of an 

intermittent depending upon campaigns that 

were being conducted. Same as before, alpha 

track counting, solid state surface barrier 

and then alpha spectroscopy. Now, in NOCTS we 

only have 304 neptunium sample results from 

1960 to 2004, so this is an order of magnitude 

lower than what you've been seeing in the 

others. However, keep in mind that we do have 

access now to the Savannah River log books, 

where we have all of the data, and we can 

certainly code all of that data in order to 

create a more robust model for neptunium dose 

reconstructions. Because the log books are 

available, we do feel that neptunium dose 

reconstructions is feasible. 

 Americium, curium and californium. 

 We lump all these together, primarily due to 

the chemical separations methodology. There 

were multiple campaigns conducted. The first 
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in the production of americium, curium, 

californium, you start with the plutonium-239 

target. So in 1959 when these targets were 

put into the reactor, there wasn't any 

americium, curium and californium. It was 

being made by neutron bombardment within the 

reactors. From 1959 to 1963, when the fuel 

elements came out of the reactor they were 

allowed to cool and then they were sent to the 

separations area. However, the only isotope 

that was extracted from those fuel elements 

was the plutonium. The americium, curium and 

californium were still combined with all of 

the fission products and those were shipped 

off-site to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. 

 Starting in 1963 in the 200 area, Savannah 

River began to do the first separations of 

these particular radionuclides, and this was 

to generate higher level transplutonium 

isotopes. So it wasn't until 1963 that there 

was really a major potential for exposure to 

these, although there was some irradiation 
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activities going on prior to that. There's 

also the research and hot cell work in the 

Savannah River Laboratory. It started again 

in 1963. We did have an end date here, but 

what we found out is that the end date is 

before the bioassay sampling that we have, so 

there might be an operation there that we were 

not aware of yet. But they were still doing 

sampling beyond that time period. 

 For personal monitoring, prior to 

`63 as I indicated, there's minimal potential 

for exposure. `63 to `71 it was alpha track 

counting, and then surface barrier detectors. 

 They did some radiochemical separations of 

each of these in the 1990s, and then they 

started doing alpha spectroscopy. The data 

available in NOCTS is there's about a thousand 

total results for these particular 

radionuclides, and again I want to emphasize 

that we have the log books so that we can 

supplement this. This data is just what we 

have already coded in an electronic format. 
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There's many more samples in the log books 

that would have to be coded. Based upon the 

availability of the information we do feel 

that americium, curium and californium dose 

reconstructions are feasible. 

 Thorium dose reconstruction. When 

we started this particular evaluation report, 

we were looking at these special campaigns, 

and campaigns generally are more of a shortterm type of an operation and don't extend 

over many years. What we found though, is 

that thorium work at the Savannah River site 

was of major greater magnitude than what we 

had anticipated as far as with what you all 

had done out there at the site. And so this 

is really expanded from beyond what we had 

initially anticipated. From August 1954 to 

1959 there was thorium metal canning in the 

300 area. This is all part of the uranium-233 

production campaigns, is what this is from. 

When I say most of the canning was conducted 

at Sylvania, to give an example, it will be 
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200 slugs canned within the 300 area, and 

2,000 at Sylvania. So it was about an order 

of magnitude larger, but there was significant 

canning operations going on within the 300 

area during this time period. There was also 

metallography work being conducted in the 700 

area with regards to thorium. All of the 

thorium from 1954 to 1959, after it was 

irradiated, when it came out of the reactors, 

was sent to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 

or Oak Ridge site at that time. Starting in 

1961 to 1969, the U-233 production campaigns 

changed. Instead of sending it offsite for 

separation, the separations were conducted on 

the Savannah River site in the 200 area. This 

is the THORAX process that I mentioned a few 

minutes ago. In 1964, there was canning of 

thorium, which was in a powder form and there 

was compaction going on. So again, here you 

have a potential for airborne contamination. 

 The personal monitoring methods 

prior to 1960, all that was available was 
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urinalysis. For members of the Board who had 

been working with the thorium issues, as you 

know the urinalysis has a very low sensitivity 

for thorium, and doing dose reconstructions is 

quite difficult in using this data. Post 1960 

through 1969 of thorium operations, there was 

whole body counting and chest counting. Whole 

body and chest counting actually extends all 

the way out to modern time periods, but just 

for the thorium within this time period. As 

far as data availability, there's 224 

urinalysis for 168 workers from 1955 to 1956. 

 We also have whole body and chest counting 

data. This data we just captured here on the 

Savannah River site last week. We had a team 

down here trying to address this particular 

issue. And so as a result of the ongoing 

investigations we're doing, we're reserving 

thorium dose reconstruction at this time for 

prior to 1960. This is during the urinalysis 

time. Post 1960 there is whole body count 

data. We have captured the in vivo counts for 
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these 168 workers, and we don't know what 

fraction of them yet we have data on. So 

that's an ongoing analysis. We expect to have 

a decision by March of 2009. However, we do 

feel due to the whole body counting 

methodology and chest counting post 1960 we 

can do dose reconstruction. And the reason 

for this is when you look at the whole body 

counting section of each of the monthly 

reports, they'll indicate that there will be 

30-some odd people counted in the whole body 

counter and about a third of them, 10 or 11, 

were counted specifically for thorium. And 

that is indicated there within those reports. 

 Fission product and induced 

activity dose reconstruction. Again, the 

reactor separation Savannah River Laboratory 

pretty much from startup to present. 

Monitoring method was a direct plating of the 

urinalysis data, and then there was whole body 

counting data. Within NOCTS we have over 

4,700 sample results from 1954 to 2004, so we 
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do feel that fission and activation product 

dose reconstruction is feasible. 

 Kind of in summary here, this is 

probably hard to read for people there in the 

back, but what we have here is the major 

isotope that I just went through, and then the 

bioassay underneath it. And what you see is 

that in general in these areas the bioassay 

methodology covers these specific campaigns. 

It appears as if this americium, curium and 

californium is not covered, but as I indicated 

those irradiated materials were sent offsite. 

 The first separations started in 1963, which 

corresponds with the bioassay conducted 

onsite. The exception here is this thorium 

out here in this early time period, and this 

is what we're continuing to evaluate here 

onsite. 

 Photon dose reconstruction. This 

would be for all of the areas, fuel and target 

fabrication, basically again since startup. 

The personal monitoring method from `51 to 
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1970 was film badges. And from our review of 

the procedures and documentation, all workers 

entering radiologically controlled areas were 

required to wear a film badge dosimeter. 

There are some exceptions to that, and let me 

talk briefly about those. One exception was 

detailed in DPSOX-254, and that was from 

November of 1953 through July of 1955. This 

exception was written in due to the startup of 

the facilities. All of the film badges were 

issued at the gatehouses, and some of the 

gatehouses had not been built yet, and so 

there wasn't a way to issue them to workers 

coming in. The requirement on the monitoring 

was only natural assay uranium could be worked 

with in the area. Otherwise, if they were 

working with anything else, they had to badge 

everybody coming in. This continued on, this 

exception rule, until July of 1955 when all of 

the construction operations were complete. 

There are some other exceptions that were 

pointed to us during the worker outreach 
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meeting. Sometimes workers would go into an 

area and the day before it was posted as a 

radiation area, and the day that they went in 

it was not posted as a radiation area anymore. 

 And what happened, as we found within the 

radiation surveys, is that the Savannah River 

site would set up an exclusion zone around so 

the construction trades workers could come in 

and do their work. Around the perimeter from 

these radiation survey reports, we have 

dosimeter readings where the site would 

position dosimeters all around the work 

environment to monitor, to ensure the 

radiation doses were less than the 100 mrem 

per year requirement at the time. So although 

there are these exceptions that did occur over 

time, based upon our review of information 

this summer, we don't find any scenarios where 

there weren't any monitored data, or there 

wasn't monitoring going on in areas that there 

should have been. 

 Thermal luminescent dosimeters were 
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used from 1970 to the present. For data 

availability, as I indicated, we have all of 

the quarterly dosimetry reports. We've 

compared those to HPAREH. We've shown that 

this HPAREH is claimant-favorable. Therefore, 

the use of HPAREH for OTIB-32 for unmonitored 

workers, we feel is a bounding estimate. For 

construction trades workers we multiply by an 

additional 1.4. Based upon all of this, we 

feel that photon dose reconstruction at 

Savannah River is feasible. 

 Neutron dose reconstruction. The 

exposure location time periods, the fuel and 

target fabrications, the reactors, 

separations, and then the 700 area. Again, 

the fuel and target fabrications is due to the 

plutonium aluminum targets that were being 

made there. Personal monitoring method-- and 

this is something that's a little different 

from some of the other sites that we have 

worked at, in that Savannah River only 

required monitoring in areas where the neutron 
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dose rate exceeded 1 mrem per hour. They did 

this monitoring by issuing NTA badges from `54 

to 1970, and then thermal luminescent neutron 

dosimeters from 1970 to 2007. We know with 

NTA film there's an energy response limitation 

associated with it. However, at the 

changeover from NTA film to the thermal 

luminescent dosimeters, the Savannah River 

site conducted some special studies in which 

they - in the workplace, in the plutonium 

facilities. They positioned the Bonner Sphere 

as well as the thermal luminescent dosimeter 

and the NTA film. So we have the comparison 

of how much the NTA film under-responded, and 

it was by about a factor of 3.9. So with this 

under-response for the NTA film, there needs 

to be a correction factor applied to it-- to 

the NTA data in order to use that for dose 

reconstruction. 

 As far as data availability, we 

have neutron survey data, and these are on the 

Radiation Survey Log Sheets, or the RSLSs. 
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They're at the site. These are both fast and 

slow neutron measurements, and the very first 

one that we have is in January of 1954, about 

two weeks after the R reactor started up. We 

have some of these measurements. NTA 

monitoring from 1954 to 1970. Even though the 

requirement of 1 mrem per hour was there. 

Prior to 1962, there's actually limited NTA 

monitoring or limited neutron monitoring among 

the workforce. Post 1962 to 1970, there's 

much more routine. We see hundreds of samples 

within the H area and F area. 

 So from feasibility and validity of 

the neutron to photon ratio, what is currently 

in the site profile that we use is the data 

based upon the thermal luminescent data post 

1970 and we extrapolate back in time. We felt 

with - at this time we don't have any evidence 

that the current NP ratio is not valid. We 

compared some of these early measurements that 

we see on these radiation surveys. They show 

about 10 percent around the reactor areas. 
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This is the value. I think it's 13 percent in 

the site profile. However, given the 

additional data-- and now we know the 

correction factor for the NTA-- we do feel 

that we can validate and evaluate this earlier 

time period instead of extrapolating as we 

have been doing. What we propose to do is use 

the pre-1962 radiation survey data, because in 

that time period the NTA monitoring was 

limited. And this is the same method that we 

have applied to the single pass reactors at 

Hanford and we issued a report a couple of 

months ago about that. In 1962 to 1970, we 

feel we can use the NTA badges, energycorrected, multiplying by this factor of 3.9 

and compare that with the photon data and then 

do our comparison there on the NP ratio. 

Based upon this information, we do feel that 

neutron dose reconstruction at the Savannah 

River site is feasible. 

 I want to talk briefly now about 

the radiation monitoring program that was 
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being conducted at the site, and this is from 

1956 to 1960. These were some numbers that we 

had readily available. One of the things that 

I hope to illustrate here is that even though 

the data that we have is more of a sampling at 

this point, there is large volumes of data 

that we have identified that we can go to 

pretty much validate any of the values within 

the site profile. Savannah River site was 

monitoring about 6,000 workers per year during 

this time period. There were between 8,000 to 

9,000 workers onsite. This is post the major 

buildup of construction. During that time 

period there was 30,000 to 40,000 people 

onsite prior to 1955, but once the 

construction operations finished or were 

finishing up, the number of actual workers 

onsite decreased significantly. 

 Internal monitoring. Non-tritium 

analysis. These would be uranium, plutonium, 

during this time period. You're looking at 

greater than 8,000 samples per year. This is 
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the information that's in these log books that 

we have obtained. You add in the tritium 

analysis, and you're looking at an additional 

20,000 samples per year. Workplace 

monitoring. These are the radiological 

surveys that I was talking about. There's 

over 140,000 of them per year. These are in 

records boxes in the Federal Records Center. 

Savannah River site retrieved a number of 

these boxes for us. I think we had them pull 

about 50 boxes back this summer. We went 

through them to see what kind of condition, 

whether they are usable and what information 

was on them. In addition, there's the air 

samples that were being conducted throughout 

the site, where you have over 80,000 air 

samples conducted per year. And again, this 

time period is 1956 to 1960. These records 

are available for 1960 all the way up and 

through 2007, if we want to go and get them 

and detail them from that standpoint. But I 

just want to give a feel for-- there is a very 
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large radiological monitoring program being 

conducted at the site during these time 

periods. So we feel our evaluation at the 

Savannah River site was monitoring workers who 

were exposed to radiation is a pretty good 

assumption, or a conclusion based upon this 

large-scale monitoring. 

 Normally during one of these-- 

during an SEC evaluation we will present dose 

reconstructions to the Advisory Boardof how we 

do dose reconstruction. The advisory board-- 

you all have already reviewed a number of the 

Savannah River cases, the first 100 that Dr. 

Mauro was talking about earlier that all of 

the issues have been closed out. Nineteen of 

them were Savannah River cases, 14 were from 

operations personnel, five were from 

construction trades workers, and the findings 

of these first 100 reviews have effectively 

been closed out. Now, dose reconstructions 

for some of the best estimate in a category we 

called "Unmonitored but should have been 
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monitored workers" have yet to be completed, 

because we haven't completed this internal 

coworker model. Once we complete this, then 

we'll certainly present to the Board, if you 

desire, how we do dose reconstruction with 

this new coworker model. 

 In conclusion here, the evaluation 

report has been evaluated. NIOSH has 

evaluated the petition using the guidelines of 

42 CFR 83.13 and we submit to you all the 

summary of our findings in the petition 

evaluation report to the Advisory Boardand to 

the petitioners. We issued this report on 

November 14. The evaluation process is a twopronged test. First, we evaluate whether it 

is feasible to estimate the level of radiation 

dose to individual members of the class with 

sufficient accuracy, and two, is there a 

reasonable likelihood that such radiation 

doses may have endangered the health of 

members of the class. NIOSH has found that 

the available monitoring records, process 
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descriptions and source term data are adequate 

to complete dose reconstructions with 

sufficient accuracy for the evaluated class of 

employees. The exception at this point in 

time is pre-1960 thorium exposures at the 

Savannah River site primarily in the 300 and 

700 areas. This is still reserved, and we 

will be doing further follow-up and report 

back to you all. The health endangerment 

determination is not required, because we feel 

we can do dose reconstruction at this time. 

 In summary - this is the table that 

you're all used to seeing - for tritium, 

uranium, plutonium, americium, curium, 

californium, neptunium we all feel that we can 

do dose reconstruction. The thorium in this 

earlier time period is reserved. We're not 

sure yet whether we can actually bound the 

doses. Thorium post-1960, we feel we can 

bound the doses based upon the whole body 

count and chest count data. And fission 

products, we also feel that dose 
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reconstruction is feasible. For external 

dose, the photon and gamma, beta and neutrons 

and occupational medical X-rays we do feel are 

feasible. And with that I'll be happy to 

answer any questions that people may have. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Okay, thank you. 

Thank you very much, Tim. Board members, do 

you have questions right now for Tim? John 

Poston. 

 MEMBER POSTON: Tim, thanks for 

your detailed presentation. I noticed that in 

your discussion of neutron dose you gave some 

disadvantages or some weaknesses in the NTA 

film, and it appears that you've tied it to 

the TNLD data, but you didn't mention any 

weaknesses in that system, and I wondered how 

you took that into account, because that's not 

a perfect system. 

 MR. TAULBEE: No, it's not, however 

-- 

 MEMBER POSTON: And further, the 

fields at Savannah River are so different, 
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depending on where you go, that it's a 

difficult system to calibrate and to use 

properly. 

 MR. TAULBEE: Yes. One of the 

things that we did compare with the TLND data 

for the report that we are looking at at the 

plutonium facility. They also had Bonner 

Sphere, hand survey measurements as well as 

the TLND. Those two results matched quite 

closely within about 10 to 15 percent of each 

other, whereas the NTA was under-responding by 

almost a factor of four. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Additional questions 

at this time, board members? 

 AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have a 

question. I have been to several meetings - 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Well, if you would 

hold off till the comment period. You'll have 

an opportunity. This right now is just the 

Board members. Okay. Mark? 

 MEMBER GRIFFON: Tim, can you - I'm 

just trying to clarify. I'm listening to the 
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presentation and throughout the thing it 

seemed to me in the evaluation report too the 

entire focus is on operational data and 

operations exposures, and then at the very 

last paragraph you seem to conclude that 

therefore we can bound construction worker 

doses. I didn't hear much mention of what the 

construction workforce did at Savannah River 

specifically, and the other part of my 

question is why was the production clause in 

this excluded in this SEC evaluation report. 

In other words, the original petition called 

for all workers, and I think you separated it 

out just to focus on construction workers. 

 MR. TAULBEE: Okay. Those are two 

questions there, thank you. To address the 

first one, as far as our focus especially on 

the internal of the monitoring data of the 

production workers, our goal was to evaluate 

whether it was feasible to reconstruct doses 

for those workers and then apply OTIB-52, 

which has the transference from production to 
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construction workers here onsite. We can, 

from the log book data that we have, go back 

and identify individual construction workers 

that were monitored within those areas. We 

can identify them. Within the NOCTS data 

system, you know, if you looked at our initial 

component of what we were looking at, over 

half of the claims would meet the construction 

worker definition. So by us looking at the 

NOCTS data we're actually incorporating 

construction worker doses from using that 

bioassay data that would meet that class. 

 On the second issue with regards to 

whether the - I'm sorry, could you repeat 

that? Repeat your question? Oh, why we 

excluded. Okay. And the primary reason was 

that in order to for a petition to qualify, 

petitioners have to provide some evidence that 

a dose - that we cannot do dose 

reconstruction, and so what was presented from 

the petitioners that supported the 

qualification process was the CPWR study. In 
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the other cases there wasn't any evidence that 

was provided to us that would indicate that we 

could not. Does that answer your question? 

 MEMBER GRIFFON: I guess. I mean 

sort of, although it seems like any areas that 

we left for further research, neutrons, 

thorium, it would seem that those I think if 

not self-identify those areas beyond the 

petition we've always in the past, you know - 

NOCTS had the liberty to add that in or 

include that, even if it's not specified in 

the petition. 

 MR. TAULBEE: Right, and we will in 

this particular case. If we determine that 

thorium doses cannot be reconstructed, then we 

would expand the class basically for all 

production and construction trades in the area 

where the thorium was worked on. You're 

absolutely right, we would do that. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Board members, 

additional questions? Then we want to hear 

from the petitioners next, and I have a list 
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of four individuals. Who is going to speak 

first for the petitioners? Okay, gentlemen, 

here. And if you would for our court reporter 

when you give your name also spell it for him. 

 MR. ROWE: Thank you. Good 

afternoon. My name is Henry Gordon Rowe. I'm 

a petitioner on the Savannah River special 

cohort petition. I want to thank you all for 

the opportunity to address this board this 

afternoon. 

 I am an electrician by trade. I 

first worked at SRS in 1952. I worked on and 

off at Savannah River plant for 17 years, 

until I retired in 1995. The evaluation 

report that just was presented to - about the 

SRS petition that was presented to this board 

is very disappointing to me and to all the 

workers, the other workers that worked at SRS. 

 We have had only a short time to study this 

evaluation report, but much of it does not 

make sense to me based on my actual experience 

as a worker at Savannah River. I was also 
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very disappointed with the information I heard 

on the tour of SRS yesterday. Quite frankly, 

there were a lot of lies told about 

construction workers. The tour presented this 

board with a pretty picture of SRS, but I 

worked there. I know, and it was just not that 

way. 

 Mr. Tim Taulbee briefed us on this 

report about a week ago, but he did not like 

to be challenged about it, so we did not get 

good answers from him. He did say, though, 

that NIOSH assumed that if a worker did not 

work in a radiation area, the worker could not 

have had any exposure and therefore did not 

need to be monitored. That's a joke, and it 

is one example of how NIOSH has ignored 

everything that the workers have told them. 

We have helped organize NIOSH meetings for the 

past 10 years. I personally have been 

involved, and there's been lots of stories 

given. I remember one story that was reported 

by a construction worker in the May 2008 focus 
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group for NIOSH. He told about a group of 

construction workers and a group that was not 

dressed out, a group of production workers 

that was fully dressed out. There was a rope 

separating the two groups of individuals. 

There were jokes told and everything, and we 

were told that the rope is where separated the 

contaminated area from the clean area. That 

rope had to be a magic rope to stop the 

radiation. One little thin rope don't stop 

radiation. 

 One of the things that NIOSH has 

been told was about missing records and log 

books being stolen, wearing monitors that have 

someone else's ID on it, a number of them, 

monitors that went off consistently but had 

someone else's number, and they went off 

consistently, and it was explained by "there 

was a power surge," or "you must have bumped 

it," or "they just weren't working properly." 

 If these devices weren't working properly, 

how can SRS and NIOSH know if how much 
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contamination these workers received? In 

1989, after DuPont and the subcontractors left 

the site and Bechtel and Westinghouse took 

over, there were six crews of laborers that 

spent about 10 weeks shredding documents, 

records, time cards, log books, monitoring 

records, everything. I saw this with my own 

two eyes. I know this happened, and SRS can 

say it didn't happen, but I saw it. The law 

says that if records were destroyed or 

missing, the SEC petition should be applied. 

It all came down to numbers. The construction 

workers shared that if the site or project 

would register or read three, they would 

rotate people in and out every few minutes, 

few hours, depending on the situation, to keep 

the monitoring records low so that they would 

not have to report to Wilmington of the 

findings and explain what had happened. It's 

apparent that these supervisors or HP 

technicians, they knew the rules, they knew 

the regulations, but they knew how to adjust 
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things to keep the records clean. Records that 

NIOSH seems eager to accept today because it 

will help them make sense in what they're 

doing. They say this is a science they are 

doing. That's wrong. I know it, and I feel 

that you all know it too. NIOSH believes that 

the records, even though they are incomplete 

and unreadable-- because there is nothing else 

to use. What about what the workers have said 

over the years? At this time-- at the time 

that NIOSH had a workshop in Cincinnati-- I 

attended the workshop because I was on this 

petition-- NIOSH stated that DOE at Savannah 

River site had finally agreed to send records 

to them. But they said that -- NIOSH said 

that the records were not complete. But this 

report says that they had -- that NIOSH had 

all the records that they needed. I find that 

inconsistent. This evaluation report on Page 

29 says that there is no evidence of 

documentation of any incidents that would have 

resulted in very high exposures. Of course 
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there's no evidence. SRS wanted it kept that 

way for their records, for their safety 

procedures so to speak. And NIOSH has not 

been listening to all the incidents that they 

have been told over the years. They have 

chosen not to consider any of these things. 

 On Page 18, the report says that R 

reactor started in 1963 and shut down in 1964 

when demand for plutonium and tritium 

decreased. That is not true. R reactor was 

shut down because of a meltdown. There was 

also a meltdown of one of the fuel rods in K 

reactor also. On Page 26 of this report, 

NIOSH talks about the Navy fuels manufacturing 

facility operating from 1985 through 1989. 

That is wrong also. Navy fuels never 

operated, never made any Navy fuel. It 

malfunctioned on the initial startup. The 

entire building was crapped up and all the 

workers in the building. Since then, many of 

the workers that was working in Navy fuels at 

the time have died of cancer. The report says 
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that closure of this facility is currently 

underway. That is also wrong. The building 

was completely tore down a few years ago, and 

there's nothing left there now. There is a 

parking lot where the building stood, so this 

is wrong. It is not currently under 

demolition. You members on that tour 

yesterday, there was no mention of any of 

these buildings that was tore down. There was 

concrete slabs that we saw on lots of places, 

where all of these hazardous buildings have 

since been decommissioned, decontaminated and 

tore down, but that is not - nothing about 

that is in this report. 

 What about the affidavits that were 

submitted with this petition? If you haven't 

seen them-- if you members of the Board 

haven't seen the affidavits, I would encourage 

you to get them and read them. A security 

worker had access to the entire site and 

spasmodically wore a badge. He worked at SRS 

for nine years. He was a nonsmoker, he had no 
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family history of cancer, but he died at the 

age of 30 to lung cancer. His claim has been 

denied because his dose wasn't 50 percent. 

But I might note that it has recently been 

sent back to NIOSH for rework. There was 

another worker that sent in an affidavit, told 

about working in 221 H Building Room 410 

South. When personnel opened the doors, the 

barn doors as they were called, it resulted in 

plutonium spreading airborne from the glove 

boxes in 410 North where the workers had to 

work in fully respirated, fully closed out, 

fully suited out areas. This contamination 

spread into 410 South where workers did not 

operate in this area. They were not dressed 

out. There was a HP man came running in and 

told them to get the hell out, that the area 

had gotten crapped up. The workers that were 

in there, they were given a nasal smear by the 

HP personnel, but there was no incident ever 

made of this report. The HP personnel, 

[Identifying Information], insisted that he 
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make a report, that he log this, but his 

supervisor was very adamant about not entering 

these events in the log book because it would 

look bad on his shift. Vern's log book was - 

he entered it anyway because his conscience 

dictated that he enter the accident report. 

But later doing his - he was away from the 

plant on military leave, National Guard duty, 

his log book was taken out of his desk and 

became missing. 

 Another worker told about working 

on the H platform. She stated that she worked 

repeatedly in the area without a dosimeter 

badge. That was the case for other workers as 

well. She explained since there were several 

different occasions when the TLD badges had 

placed on a board in front of the area by the 

guard gate, would be gone the following day 

when they came in. They were told that a 

radioactive tanker truck delivering materials 

had leaked materials on the road. The truck 

was carrying radioactive materials and they 
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leaked on the road, so therefore it wiped out 

all the badges and they would get new badges, 

to go on and go to work. Some of them didn't 

get badges until late that afternoon, some of 

them got badges the next day. But from the 

evaluation report that NIOSH has given, these 

missing records or all of this stuff don't 

matter. 

 Another worker told of his work 

from 1961 to 1964 as a operator in C reactor - 

excuse me, he was a C operator in 221 F and 

221 H Buildings. Most of his work was 

decontamination or cleaning. They were told 

that what chemicals were involved at all was 

marked high radiation. While cleaning and 

repairing the huge mess he inhaled chemicals 

while repairing and adjusting them. One 

incident occurred when while removing plastic 

covers from a hot railroad car and a lot of 

spill water on the plastic cupboard completely 

wet his work clothes. He stated that most of 

his jobs were done without health physics 
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personnel around or supervision, and there was 

no records recorded of lots of incidents. The 

workers were used to working on weekend 

Saturday and Sunday without any monitoring 

badges any monitoring equipment because they 

were not available. But he stated that the 

work continued as usual even though they 

weren't monitored. 

 Another worker stated that he 

worked with crossties on the railroad and 

going between the areas on Savannah River 

site. He worked from 1987 to 1995. In 1995 

when crossties in the crosstie pit in F area 

were found to be contaminated, the cross ties 

on the mainline were contaminated all, and 

then after they found the contamination in F 

pit the workers would have to dress out to 

remove the contaminated crossties on the 

railroad. 

 There is a lot of stuff that NIOSH 

says that they got - that NIOSH says that 

means that the workers got a high dose 
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recorded when they experienced that that's 

claimant-favorable. They would say it's just 

another indication that the monitoring record 

lacked integrity and cannot be tested. That's 

what workers testified to. There was a 

contractor Electric Motor Service, a 

subcontractor that came in in 1990. Their job 

was to cut down the bubble towers in 400 area. 

 They were told that all they had to do was 

cut down the bubble towers, load it on 

railroad cars, cut it up, load it up, get in 

and get out. There was no HP monitoring, 

there was no HP on the area, there was no 

protective clothing, nothing. And there was - 

since some of these workers have infected 

cancer. Now, we found out that Electric Motor 

Service paid no income taxes, they paid no 

Social Security for these workers that worked 

on this mission. It was a short period of 

time, probably about a month I would say, 

somewhere around a month they worked on the 

job. And there is no record of Electric Motor 
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Service ever being onsite. This is some of 

the instances and things that went on at 

Savannah River site. 

 There are hundreds of stories that 

has been told like this. There's no point in 

telling them over and over again. NIOSH says 

that their science seems to trump anything 

that the workers told them, anything that we 

the construction workers have said that we 

knew about. We might only be construction 

workers, but we know what we saw, we know what 

we experienced. 

 Another thing. NIOSH says on Page 

35 that they were able to get complete lists 

of all construction workers for 1960. I find 

that hard to believe considering 

subcontractors were in and out of that site on 

an everyday basis. SRS didn't keep records of 

that. So how did SRS come up with all the 

records that NIOSH needed to do the dose 

reconstruction? There was one situation where 

laborers had filled a water can from a barrel 
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used to catch leaking water from a heat 

exchanger on -20 level in one of the 100 

areas. The water was then used to spray the 

drilling area to lessen the dust generated. 

Since the barrel had not been roped up, 

everyone was contaminated when they used the 

water coming from this barrel. In a 

supposedly clean area in 221 H a worker was 

working and he was found to be contaminated. 

His shoes and pants were taken, but it was 

supposed to be a clean area. Another worker 

in an office in F area at the 717 building 

where they had a problem with the dosimeters 

and film badges left in the racks. The 

monitors would be set at zero at the end of 

the shift and the next morning they would have 

a reading of 50 or more due to the night shift 

work alone, work being done in the building 

that involved X-rays. Someone should explain 

that. NIOSH will say that that means the 

workers got a higher dose recorded than they 

really experienced, and that is claimant-
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favorable. I would say it's just another 

indication that the monitoring program lacked 

integrity and cannot be trusted. 

 I appreciate your time today, and 

the time that you put on this board to keep 

NIOSH and dose reconstruction straight, but 

let's cut the bull. Dose reconstruction for 

construction workers regardless of what the 

TIB-52 says is still just a guess, and it's 

not even an educated guess. Our federal 

government has spent too much money on this 

NIOSH boondoggle. NIOSH should be ashamed of 

what they're doing. And one last thing. 

NIOSH and DOE will have more meetings than any 

other one I know. For NIOSH to be spending 

hundreds of thousands of dollars going around 

the country telling workers about the SEC 

process and leading them on to file petitions 

is a sham. For DOL to have meetings and not 

include NIOSH and other workers groups in 

them. I don't understand how the government 

has all the money that is being wasted. 
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 Workers have shared stories and 

they speak clearly to the fact that workers 

safety was not taken seriously on this site, 

at least when it came to the construction 

trades workers. The attitude of the site was 

if you can do it safely, do it, but if you 

can't, do it anyway. That's how it was 

operated. I think that all the construction 

workers in attendance today should speak their 

mind, should tell their stories. There's 

going to be a public comment time starting at 

5 o'clock today that you can all tell what you 

experienced at Savannah River site. I want to 

thank the Board for listening to me. I hope 

you will consider the things that I have said. 

 I would like for you to use them in your 

evaluation. I have an advisor, that if it's 

all right I would like to speak now. Mr. Don 

Elisburg, an advisor of mine would like to say 

something. 

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Mr. Rowe, and we'd certainly be pleased to 
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hear from Mr. Elisburg. Don, welcome. 

 MR. ELISBURG: Good afternoon. My 

name's Don Elisburg. I am a consultant to the 

building and construction trades department of 

the AFL-CIO. I have over 46 years experience 

in administrative procedures in occupational 

safety and health and workers compensation, 

including having served as Assistant Secretary 

of Labor for the Labor Standards 

Administration, Employment Standards 

Administration where the EEOIC is housed back 

in 1977. I've also been involved with issues 

surrounding worker health and safety at the 

DOE since approximately 1986 when I was 

Director of the Occupational Health Foundation 

and we began to see large numbers of workers 

with occupational illnesses due to exposure to 

radiation and toxics at the nuclear weapons 

facilities. As a matter of fact, I feel that 

Chairman Ziemer and I are the last living 

graduates from having been involved in this 

for so many decades now. I was also a 
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consultant to the National Academy of Public 

Administration during its study of the DOE 

safety and health programs 10 years ago. I 

was a consultant to the Environmental 

Management Advisory Board at DOE with respect 

to worker safety and health issues for several 

years during which the EMAB was developing 

what is now the integrated safety management 

systems programs at DOE. And I was a member 

of the Department of Energy's EEOIPCA advisory 

committee appointed under this initial 

statute. I am an attorney by training and 

work experience. I do not represent 

individual claimants under this program. 

 The building trades departments has 

been very reluctant to pursue SEC petitions. 

Despite the department's objections to the 

approach NIOSH proposed to take when it 

established its dose reconstruction program, 

the building trades department stated it would 

give NIOSH the benefit of the doubt. Over 

time this doubt about NIOSH's ability to 
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achieve a fair result has grown steadily. As 

we and my colleagues have testified before 

this board in the past regarding NIOSH's 

unwillingness to change course and its 

administrative resistance to provide effective 

responses to our request. We're now faced 

with the situation where one arm of OCAS as 

Gordon pointed out said it can do dose 

reconstructions wherever and whenever, while 

another arm of NIOSH is going around the 

country urging workers to file SEC petitions. 

 It's particularly galling to claimants that 

NIOSH is devoting resources to its contractors 

and consultants to fly around the country 

encouraging workers to file petitions on the 

one hand, only to have NIOSH make the 

determinations against these petitions on the 

other hand. We've also seen a huge volume of 

claims being returned to NIOSH by DOL for, 

quote, "reworking," unquote, which has further 

undermined what NIOSH's - whatever NIOSH's 

credibility was with the claimants and 
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constituents. 

 The building trades department has 

repeatedly asked NIOSH to develop an approach 

to construction workers dose reconstruction 

that would take into account the unique 

employment pattern and unreliable dose 

monitoring with respect to these workers. 

After five years of nagging NIOSH finally 

agreed that there were problems with 

performing dose reconstruction for unmonitored 

construction trades workers and released this 

OTIB-52 in August of 2006. Both the Center to 

Protect Workers Rights and the Board's 

contractor SC&A expressed concerns about the 

bounding methodology incorporated into that 

document. It does not appear that NIOSH has 

made any changes to it, nor has the Board ever 

reviewed it. On November 28, 2007, NIOSH 

issued the OCAS PER-014 which contained an 

analysis of the number of construction trades 

workers claims for which the estimated dose 

could be materially altered as a result of 
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applying OTIB-52. It concluded that a total 

of 977 claims which had already been awarded 

at PoC of at least 36.8 percent, 29 percent at 

Hanford, and that needed to be evaluated. We 

believe that this may be a significant 

underestimate for two reasons, applying a 

wrong adjustment factor and not identifying 

all the construction trades workers in NIOSH's 

database. 

 OCAS applied an adjusted multiple 

of 1.4 to extrapolate dose from environmental 

adapt on coworkers. We believe that 

multiplier is too low for the following 

reasons that were established in a joint 

Center-NIOSH working meeting in July of 2005. 

 It appears that NIOSH has compensated for the 

higher breathing rate among construction 

workers, but has not demonstrated that it has 

compensated adequately for the greater 

variance and exposures among construction 

workers. 

 We performed an assessment of how 
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complete the search terms identified in PER014 using three comparison files of terms the 

Bureau of Labor Statistics standard of 

occupational classification terms, 

construction and extraction operations. The 

building and construction trades department's 

jurisdictional definition of building 

construction trades and terms gleaned from 

work history interviews with 3,200 former SRS 

construction workers conducted by the Building 

Trades National Medical Screening Program. 

This comparison is in Exhibit A which I will 

furnish to the court reporter, however that 

works. We found extensive omissions of 

important search terms in this PER-014 list, 

which most likely would lead NIOSH to miss 

substantial numbers of construction trades 

workers at SRS and any other DOE site when it 

performs a retrospective search of its claims 

database. For instance, the trade of roofer 

was omitted entirely and large numbers of key 

sub-trade terms were also missing such as 
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floor layer, or hazardous materials, or waste 

removal worker. "Security" is not used by 

NIOSH as a search term even though 10 percent 

of the workers interviewed said a major task 

they performed was security duty. This 

demonstrates our view that both the NIOSH 

staff audit and its contractor are severely 

lacking in knowledge of construction work and 

construction workers. 

 As the building trades have 

continued to lose faith in NIOSH's 

performance. They have relied on this board to 

protect claimants from the administration - 

the arbitrariness of procedures that NIOSH has 

adopted. However, we must say that faith is 

also eroding. The building trades has asked 

for several years for an independent quality 

assurance evaluation of all construction 

worker claimant dose reconstructions. As yet 

this has not been done. The building trades 

has also asked for several years that the 

Board undertake a statistical analysis of dose 
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reconstruction outcomes, comparing 

construction worker claimants to other 

workers. This has also not been done. In 

short, there's no evidence to support this 

board's reliance on the integrity of NIOSH 

dose reconstruction process as it applies to 

construction worker claimants. I'd like to 

underscore that point. 

 Let me address for a couple of 

minutes the handling of the SRS petition. In 

November of 2007 the petition was filed, 

contending that workers at the SRS site were 

inadequately monitored between January 1 of 

1950 and December 31, 2007, and they should be 

accepted as a special exposure cohort under 

the provisions of Section 36.26 of the 

statute. That petition was accepted for 

review in March of this year. The section 

states that the Board shall accept classes of 

workers as a member of the SEC if, one, it is 

not feasible to estimate with sufficient 

accuracy, the radiation dose that the class 
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received, and two, there is a reasonable 

likelihood that such radiation dose may have 

endangered the health of the class. I think 

that's the last slide, next to last slide on 

Tim's presentation. NIOSH then developed 

procedures for designating classes of 

employees as members of the SEC. NIOSH in its 

evaluation report regarding the SRS SEC 

interprets this to mean that both the statute 

and 42 CFR Part 83 required NIOSH to evaluate 

qualified petitions requesting that the 

Department of Health and Human Services add a 

class of employees to the SEC. The evaluation 

is intended to provide a fair, science-based 

determination of whether it is feasible to 

estimate with sufficient accuracy the 

radiation doses of the class of employees 

through NIOSH dose reconstructions. 

 We take exception to this. We do 

not believe the evaluation was either fair or 

science-based. We believe NIOSH's procedures 

continue to be replete with conflict of 
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interest and a lack of standards, lack of 

standards for determining its findings. 

Presumably the science-based approach that 

NIOSH refers to can be found in the standard 

NIOSH applies to determine "with sufficient 

accuracy" which is in 42 CFR Section 313, 

radiation doses can be estimated with 

sufficient accuracy if NIOSH has established 

that it has access to sufficient information 

to estimate the maximum radiation doses for 

every type of cancer for which radiation doses 

are reconstructed that could have been 

incurred in plausible circumstances by any 

member of the class, or if NIOSH has 

established that it has access to sufficient 

information to estimate the radiation doses of 

members of the class more precisely than an 

estimate of the maximum radiation dose. 

Translated, the building trades have objected 

to this provision from the time it was 

established. This standard simply says 

sufficient accuracy is whatever NIOSH decides 
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it should be. There's not a shred of science 

incorporated into this standard. In Table 4.1 

of the evaluation report NIOSH has identified 

1,798 construction trades claims out of a 

total of 3,264 claims for its SRS. It gives 

no methodology for how these claims were 

identified, but it presumably used a text 

search of occupational terms. We assume that 

it used the same methodology as detailed in 

OCAS-PER-014. Nevertheless, there is no 

reference to that document in this evaluation 

report, and given the deficiencies in NIOSH 

delineation of construction trades workers 

occupations as noted above in my prior few 

minutes ago, we believe this evaluation report 

is so highly deficient and incomplete that it 

is seriously flawed. 

 We have reviewed Section 5 of the 

evaluation report in some detail. It lists 

the radiological operations relevant to class 

evaluated by NIOSH, i.e., the construction 

operations from 1950 to 2007. This including 
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the list of Savannah River site events 

chronology in Attachment A of the report is 

not at all an accurate characterization. This 

is a general listing of site events that is 

lacking in construction-specific information. 

 In other words, it is not specific to or 

particularly relevant for the class evaluated. 

 We have reviewed our own site history 

information and have found very serious gaps 

in the history. We have included a list of 

missing construction activities with 

significant potential for radiation exposure 

which you may find useful as you consider this 

report, and we will submit that as Exhibit B. 

 This lack of understanding further 

compromises the NIOSH evaluation report. 

 Section 6 of the evaluation report 

focuses on whether the radiation dose records 

at SRS are adequate to make a retrospective 

dose reconstruction, including when used to 

extrapolate exposure history when such records 

may be missing. NIOSH asserts that it could 
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perform this work using two types of records, 

the so-called HPAREH electronic database of 

annual radiation dose summary data for any 

worker who has a termination date after 

January 1, 1979, or paper dose records for any 

worker terminated before 1979, or visitors to 

the site before or after 1979. There are 

specific examples not cited in the NIOSH 

evaluation report which contradicts this 

assertion. Construction workers have 

witnessed in their affidavits that massive 

amounts of paper records were destroyed when 

DuPont ceased to be the operator of Savannah 

River. That would significantly impact on the 

integrity of records available to document 

exposure for workers who terminated before 

1979. NIOSH has not addressed this concern. 

In 1988 the K reactor was shut down for a 

total of 265 days. During this shutdown the 

reported average radiation dose for 

construction workers was 2.8 times greater 

than for day reactor operators. So for these 
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workers, extrapolation from coworker data 

would not be valid. And even if the 

adjustment factor of 1.4 allowed for in OTIB0052 is applied, the extrapolation would 

understate actual exposure by a factor of 1. 

To reiterate, during a significant period of 

time for a significant number of workers the 

measured exposure for construction workers was 

twice the level for production workers. And 

if your coworker extrapolation model is 

applied to these construction workers for this 

period of time it would understate actual risk 

by 50 percent. 

 In summary, we have documented that 

there are critical flaws with NIOSH's 

understanding of construction occupations and 

critical flaws in its undertaking of 

construction operations at the SRS. NIOSH 

agrees that it has to use coworker 

extrapolation for many if not most 

construction worker claims. This process is 

extremely suspect and should lead any 
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reasonable person to conclude that any attempt 

by NIOSH to use coworker extrapolations to 

bound doses for unmonitored construction 

trades workers should be considered too 

unreliable to be used in any standard of 

administrative review. That concludes my 

statement, Mr. Chairman, but I wonder if you 

would give me an additional minute. 

 Like I said, I've been at this work 

since 1986 and it's undisputed in all of the 

hearings and documentation that all of these 

sites did not have appropriate safety and 

health programs to protect the workers. There 

is no dispute. Every Secretary of Energy 

since Admiral Watkins has conceded that. It's 

not surprising then that there are a number of 

sick workers, and it's also a matter of 

history that the normal workers compensation 

programs that should have assisted these 

workers simply failed because of the nature of 

the secrecy and the occupational exposures 

that those systems simply couldn't handle. 
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This law was designed to pay the workers who 

became sick. The system is not working. It 

was not - the way this process is going is not 

what was intended. I feel that those of us 

who have made the effort and supported the 

movement of this program from the Department 

of Energy to the Department of Labor and 

NIOSH, that we have failed these workers and 

there's got to be a better way than 

demonstrating how many years it's going to 

take to get a claim resolved. And then you 

have a group of workers that meet all the 

requirements of employment and illness, and 

somehow two-thirds of them don't qualify when 

you get the dose reconstruction. It seems to 

me that we need to think about not Larry's 

chronology of how long it takes to process a 

case, but the fact that this statute went into 

effect in 2001 for workers who had been 

suffering for the previous decades. It failed 

in its mission at the Department of Energy and 

Congress amended this in 2004. It is now 2008 
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and many of these people who have been waiting 

on line are still waiting, and that's the 

dilemma that I think we have to understand, 

that the people who are represented in this, 

claimants in this room and all over the 

country have a right to have their problems 

resolved in a reasonable and speedy time, and 

having to wait decades for this kind of 

redress because they're still looking for 

records that don't exist and creating 

extrapolations out of whole cloth is simply 

inappropriate. I apologize for putting this 

burden on the Board, but in the 46 years that 

I have been working with workers and their 

problems, this is by far the most frustrating 

experience that I have ever had, and I'm sure 

those of you who have been working in this 

process feel equally frustrated. And I just 

wanted to make that personal statement for 

your record here. Thank you. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Thank you very much, 

Don, for participating with us here today. I 
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believe that petitioners have one or two 

others. Mr. Rowe, were there others? Yes, 

okay. We have an individual who is 

representing someone who could not be here 

today and he will identify himself. 

 MR. WARREN: My name's Bob Warren. 

 I'm a lawyer from Black Mountain, North 

Carolina. My address is Post Office Box 1367 

and I am appreciative of the stand here 

because my Parkinson's is a little shaky and I 

hope you can bear with me a little bit. I've 

been working since the mid-1970s for Savannah 

River workers at the Savannah River site, and 

since January of 2002 I've been representing 

claimants with EEOICPA claims at Savannah 

River and at weapons plants around the 

country. Tonight - this afternoon, I'm 

representing [Identifying Information] who is 

one of the petitioners in this SEC petition. 

He is with his gravely ill wife at the 

hospital now and wanted me to make sure we 

covered some things in his petition. 
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 When we looked at the SRS needs 

assessment Phase I, that assessment said we 

were unable to make an independent 

determination about which hazards employees 

were most likely to be exposed during their 

employment at SRS because of the uncertainty 

and gaps in the monitoring data. And we also 

pointed out that [Identifying Information] 

worked in 221 F and 221 H where film badges 

were not regularly worn at the time he was 

working there and without health physics being 

present. He particularly cited as an example 

the badges were taken up on Friday and they 

were brought back on Monday. Well he worked 

on the weekends. There was no badge to 

monitor for the whole time he worked on the 

weekend. And these are the workers that NIOSH 

says they're going to use those records to 

calculate the construction trades workers. If 

you don't have good data for one thing, how 

can you use that record to justify others? 

Also, in [Identifying Information] petition we 
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cited many workers that were performing jobs 

that would be considered construction or 

construction support but were employed under a 

classification of operations or production 

that did not have a construction title. And 

we listed numerous jobs, crane operators, 

backhoe operators, power and reactor 

operators, riggers, maintenance workers, 

mechanics, inventory workers, truck drivers 

hauling waste, radioactive and nonradioactive, to construction sites, delivery 

drivers, surveyors, workers who cruised or cut 

timber, workers who escorted construction 

workers - these were called escort services 

workers - where they would extort the 

construction worker into and out of 

radioactive area, and then they would remain 

there with the construction workers until the 

job would be done. Those workers aren't 

included as construction workers. We cited 

laundry workers who cleaned radioactive 

clothing. Cleaning personnel, instrument 
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repair workers, workers who serviced vending 

machines in hot areas where construction 

workers were working. Particularly the things 

we cited were administrative and lab 

personnel. There were about 2,200 females 

that were listed as administrative personnel 

and NIOSH classifies them as saying they were 

expected to get 30 mrem in their entire work. 

 When they went out into construction areas 

and delivered or collected mail, they brought 

checks or test samples from the construction 

workers, and they weren't monitored. They had 

visitor badges when they would go in there and 

then the visitor badge records were not valid. 

 So NIOSH has just conveniently overlooked all 

of these. 

 There were other similar jobs in 

the areas where construction was working for 

operations and production. Then we had 

submitted that review and we were informed 

that the NIOSH director would appoint three 

Department of Health and Human Services 
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personnel to conduct an independent review of 

the proposed findings. We had [Identifying 

Information] and others participating in these 

May meetings, May 2008 meetings. There are 29 

pages of minutes that aren't considered in the 

NIOSH evaluation. They list in there saying, 

one, DOE - it's not accessible by DOE and the 

other they had it accessed by DOE but hadn't 

taken that into account. This is not only the 

May meetings, but we and people in this room 

have been to numerous meetings down here where 

they cite instances where they're not 

monitored, where there are crapped up people 

and workers that have no records on all of 

that, yet NIOSH says give us some evidence and 

then they say we haven't produced the 

evidence. In a letter dated June 27, Dr. John 

Howard informed [Identifying Information] that 

the appointed panel had reviewed the materials 

in the petition, stated that petitioners had 

not provided sufficient information to extend 

the class definition beyond SRS workers 
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classified as construction workers. Dr. 

Howard in his letter did not mention the 

minutes of the May meeting that was 

specifically convened by NIOSH to get the 

information that would support the petition. 

So they ask us for the information, don't look 

at it and then say we haven't provided 

sufficient information. After seeing that Dr. 

Howard's panel did not review the May meeting 

minutes, this petitioner then asked that NIOSH 

rescind Dr. Howard's decision and either 

extend the class definition to all SRS 

workers, or have another panel review the 

findings after having access to all relevant 

information. We also asked for minutes, 

notes, other material given to or made 

available to this panel, including a 

preliminary or final report to Dr. Howard. 

This request was made in July. As of today 

nothing has been provided to [Identifying 

Information]. 

 Sometime in late September 2008 
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NIOSH did put the minutes of the May meeting 

on its website, but didn't send the minutes to 

the meeting copies of everybody who signed the 

meeting roster although at the meeting they 

were told that if you didn't have access to 

the web they would be made available to these 

people that participated. That hasn't been 

done. On or about November 17, [Identifying 

Information] received the evaluation report 

from 94 pages. In the report, NIOSH not only 

recommended disqualifications of construction 

workers, but also did not recommend expanding 

the class to all other workers. Instead of 

utilizing these statements at the May meeting 

or at other meetings, NIOSH discounts the 

worker's evidence on having no monitoring or 

external radiation exposure. Mainly they 

didn't look at it. On Page 72 of the report 

NIOSH found that a forestry worker who was not 

monitored during his employment with the 

Forest Service onsite, but then concludes that 

this Forest Service worker's radiation dose 
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can be calculated by environmental and dose 

conversion factors. This conclusion 

conveniently overlooks what this worker told 

at the May meetings regarding exposure to high 

levels of radiation without any protective 

clothing or equipment. This worker also 

explained his exposure to railroad ties and 

trees that were eventually found to be 

contaminated after years of working in close 

proximity to these ties and trees. Tree sale 

was canceled, trees were burned by an outside 

contractor because they were radioactive, 

while the ties were taken to the burial ground 

onsite. 

 [Identifying Information] came to 

the May meeting, told about working on 

weekends without wearing a film badge, of 

having plutonium and other radioactive 

substances show up in his records after he had 

a whole body count when he terminated his 

employment. Others at the May meeting told of 

having no protection or monitoring devices in 
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radiation zones. Instead of looking into 

whether or not DOE had records on the 

individuals that we presented at the May 

meetings and at others, NIOSH concludes that 

the records for another class of workers 

exists that would provide coworker doses for 

any worker that was not monitored. We give 

the evidence, give the NIOSH tracking number, 

they don't even look at the records in that 

individual's file. The phantom data on 

coworkers apparently suddenly appeared without 

any connection to the reality of construction 

and non-construction workers having the same 

problem, not being monitored when they left 

their badges outside the radiation zone or 

having radiation monitors that did not work. 

The NIOSH method apparently ignores examples 

of workers who were sent home with a raincoat 

and plastic shoes after being required to 

leave all of their clothes at the site, all of 

their money, wallets, and then there are no 

records of those individuals. We give NIOSH 
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the worker's name, we give them all the 

information and they say we're not looking at 

those records, we've got other records. I 

wonder if in this room the people that have 

filed claims that haven't gotten 50 percent, 

if you all would just stand just so we'd see 

where we are in this. If you had a claim that 

didn't get 50 percent. And if any of you had 

insufficient monitoring records, if you would 

stay standing. Thank you. I think the panel 

saw that there was a substantial number. 

 [Identifying Information] asked 

this panel to have an SEC at Savannah River 

site for all workers, or in the alternative to 

have an audit of NIOSH's methods so that we 

could get the correct information to the panel 

so they all can make an informed decision. 

Thank you. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Thank you, Mr. 

Warren. The chair is going to suggest a 10-

minute comfort break. We will continue with 

the presentations from the petitioners, but 
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let's all take a 10-minute break and then 

resume our deliberations. 

 (Whereupon, the above-entitled 

matter went off the record at 4:10 p.m. and 

resumed at 4:22 p.m.) 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: We are continuing 

our discussion of the Savannah River SEC 

petition. I have on my list the name of one 

additional petitioner who indicated she wished 

to speak, and I'm not allowed to say who that 

is unless she identifies herself. Was there 

one additional petitioner here who wished to 

speak to the assembly? Okay. Perhaps if she 

comes in later she can speak at the public 

comment period. 

 Now we are going to hear briefly 

from the Board's contractor SC&A. At its last 

meeting the Board tasked its contractor SC&A 

to do an initial paper review of the 

evaluation report. Now, a paper review really 

means it's sort of a preliminary review, an 

early review, not an in-depth review because 
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of the time factor, the evaluation report 

having been issued very recently, and our 

contractor also being on sort of an - almost a 

day-to-day basis right now because of the 

ending of their contract. So this, I guess 

I'll characterize it as a kind of preliminary 

review, but it will help the Board at least 

get underway in its evaluation of the NIOSH 

report and considering its path forward. So 

on behalf of SC&A we have Steve Marschke and 

Steve is going to give us a brief summary of 

the preliminary findings or comments from our 

contractor. 

 MR. MARSCHKE: Thank you, Dr. 

Ziemer. Can you hear me? Thank you, Dr. 

Ziemer. I don't have a fancy PowerPoint slide 

presentation. I have a Word document here, 

but I think we can work our way through it. 

Maybe. 

 The first thing is just the title 

page from the document. As Dr. Ziemer said, 

we were given this assignment in September, at 
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the September board meeting and at that time 

the evaluation report was not available to us. 

 So what we did was we took a look at the 

petition itself which is something that SC&A 

usually does not do. We usually focus on the 

evaluation report and make our comments on the 

evaluation report. So, and the other thing I 

want to say is, at this point we have a report 

which has been completed. Our review of the 

evaluation is not complete, but this first 

step paper study is completed and it's 

currently being reviewed by the DOE and after 

they get done with their review it should be 

made available to the Board and NIOSH and 

anyone who is interested in it. 

 The second slide that I have here 

is just kind of a ground rules slide of what 

the petitions were and the NIOSH determined 

the proposed class when they did their 

qualification of the petition. And you can 

see basically, as Tim mentioned earlier, NIOSH 

has restricted the petition to construction 
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workers. We did not review the process that 

NIOSH undertook to revise the petitioner's 

proposed class to their class. The other 

thing that hasn't been really talked about is 

that there is in fact two petitions, or it's 

been explained to us that there are two 

petitions. We've talked primarily about SEC00103, but there's also a second petition, 

SEC-00104, which, if you look at the bottom 

here, is totally encompassed by SEC-00103. So 

it was merged for - I think NIOSH merged it 

with SEC-00103 in their evaluation report. 

And again, we didn't undertake any review of 

either the merging of these or the redefinition of the proposed class. 

 This is just a list of some of the 

- attached to each of the petitions are 

documentation. And this is a list of the 

documentation that was attached to SEC-00103. 

 There were 13 affidavits. There were four 

attachments and most of them came from the 

Center to Protect Workers Rights, and the 
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third attachment itself had an attachment 

which was the - this one right here - the best 

estimate for daily ventilation rates. SEC00104 had three attachments to document it. 

One of them was, the first one was a dose 

reconstruction and another one was a 

consultation results and a request for nonradiological information. Our approach was 

to, again, since we didn't have the evaluation 

report, our approach was to look at each one 

of these pieces of documentation and do a 

review on each of those. Again, that's - 

really you can see here, our first question we 

asked ourselves was how well do the affidavits 

and attachments supplied with the petition 

support the petition's claim to the 

availability and quantity of dosimetry data 

for SRS construction workers. That was the 

first question that we asked ourselves. And 

to do that what we did was we looked at each 

of the 13 affidavits, and in the report you'll 

see we have summarized each of the affidavits, 
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and then we give a little - our opinion of its 

applicability. And then after - I have not 

presented that here because that's a little 

bit too much detail for this presentation, but 

what we did then was we stepped back and 

looked and said what are these 13 affidavits 

trying to tell us in total. And we felt that 

the affidavits were trying to say was a 

monitored worker dose under-recorded. And 

these are four kind of examples of where the 

affidavits indicated that such doses may have 

been under-recorded. Mr. Rowe and 

[Identifying Information] I think have touched 

on each of these four areas. Dosimetry is 

going off scale and no apparent action taken, 

working on off-shift hours when dosimetries 

were not available, and so on and so forth. 

We feel that follow-up investigations are 

necessary to determine the extent or the 

impact of these concerns on the SEC. 

 The other item that we have 

indicated here is there's been a lot of 
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discussion today about HPAREH and we feel that 

a follow-up investigation is also necessary to 

ensure that HPAREH faithfully reflects the log 

books. Regarding SEC-00104, as I mentioned in 

the previous slide, there was a dose 

reconstruction attached as one of the 

documentations, as part of the documentation, 

and we weren't quite sure why it was attached, 

but we undertook a review of that dose 

reconstruction and we felt that - in our 

review we looked at it and we felt that there 

was - adequate monitoring was provided for 

that particular dose reconstruction. However, 

we haven't reviewed this individual case to 

see how it relates to the reconstruction of 

all members in the proposed class. And so 

that's work that remains yet to be performed. 

 The second question we asked 

ourselves when we were reviewing the SEC was 

since NIOSH has in place methodologies for 

performing dose reconstruction and has in fact 

performed a number of the dose 
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reconstructions, how well do those 

methodologies address the availability and 

limitations in the quality of the SRS worker 

dosimetry data. And what we did for that was 

we undertook a review of a number of NIOSH 

documents, including the site profile 

document, OTIB-32, OTIB-52 and PER-14 for 

external exposures. The site profile document 

again for internal exposures, OTIB-1 and OTIB52 again for internal exposures, and the site 

profile review for medical and environmental 

exposures. 

 Our preliminary results, and again 

I stress that all these results are 

preliminary results, is that documents - all 

the documents that we listed above have been 

previously reviewed by SC&A, and there are a 

number of outstanding issues associated with 

each one of them. What we did was we 

revisited the previously raised issues and 

determined their applicability for 

construction workers. 
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 When we did that review for 

construction workers, again there are a number 

of technical issues out there, but we look at 

them from the determination of whether or not 

any of them were unique to SRS construction 

workers, and we could not identify any of the 

outstanding issues that would be unique to SRS 

construction workers. That being said, 

assuming that the HPAREH is relatively 

complete and reliable, the coworker model set 

forth in OTIB-52 appears to be generally 

scientifically sound and claimant-favorable. 

We've reviewed OTIB-52 elsewhere and we found 

that there are some exceptions to this rule. 

Sometimes pipefitters would be an example who 

tend to have exposures which are not bounded 

by the OTIB-52, or in some cases are not 

bounded by OTIB-52. Hence we need to - this 

issue needs to be revisited in an SEC context 

which requires the reconstructed dose to be 

bounded. 

 Then the next slide is - this is a 
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slide which kind of - I don't know what this 

is saying here. This is a slide which when we 

say OTIB-52 methodology is bounding generally, 

this is an indication of what we mean here. 

This is a plot of the HPAREH dose records 

versus the OTIB-52 methodology. What we did 

each blue dot is a construction worker and the 

doses are their total - the sum of all their 

HPAREH records. And we compared that to what 

their dose would be if we used the OTIB-52 

methodology to calculate their dose. And if 

you take this individual here you can see that 

in his working history at Savannah River site 

he received a total - he or she received a 

total of about 34 rems. If he were to take 

that same individual and calculate his or her 

dose using the OTIB-52 methodology you would 

see you get about 55 rems. So that's what 

we're saying is - that's why we say that we 

believe the OTIB-52 methodology to be 

generally claimant-favorable. You can see 

that anything that is below this diagonal line 
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here would mean that the OTIB-52 methodology 

would result in a higher dose than what was 

recorded in the HPAREH. You can see that 

there are some individuals over here which 

fall on the non-claimant favorable side of the 

line. 

 On November 14 the evaluation 

report was published by NIOSH. And I should 

point out that we were trying to get our 

report out, our paper study out by December 1, 

so that didn't give us a lot of time to 

evaluate the evaluation report or to review 

the evaluation report. So what we did was an 

initial limited review of the evaluation 

report; and, our main concern was that the 

evaluation report does not address the 

concerns expressed by the petitioners, 

specifically those four items that we 

discussed on the previous slide. We believe 

that the petitioners did raise some valid 

concerns that bear on the completeness and the 

reliability of the database upon which the 
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coworker models are based. What we're saying 

is, again, the workers were potentially 

exposed to radiation which was not recorded in 

their dose records. So therefore it can't be 

reflected in HPAREH even if there was a good 

agreement between HPAREH and the log books 

because it's really not in the log books. So 

a review of the petition and the evaluation 

report requires considerable further work, 

including interviews with the petitioners, a 

data completeness and adequacy review, an 

internal dose method review, adequacy of 

incident coverage and whether HPAREH reflects 

actual work experience. And that's all I have 

prepared. If there are any questions? 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Thank you very much, 

Steve, for at least that initial look at the 

petition and the evaluation report. Board 

members, questions for Steve right now? Now, 

what we will be doing, and much of this will 

occur during our work sessions later in the 

meeting, taking into consideration the 
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petition, the evaluation report, our 

contractor's preliminary report, this board 

will need to decide what the path forward will 

be. It's the sense of the chair that we are 

not close to a position where we would wish to 

make a formal recommendation at this point. 

There's a lot more work that clearly needs to 

be done, but the path forward we'll have 

opportunity to define, and we'll of course 

very shortly have the opportunity to hear from 

many more of the folks onsite. Mr. Griffon? 

 MEMBER GRIFFON: I think we are in 

a little different position with this one 

because we've assigned SC&A to review the 

evaluation report as well and bring it back to 

the Work Group. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Right. 

 MEMBER GRIFFON: So we're already 

kind of - 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Right, so - 

 MEMBER GRIFFON: - our path 

forward, yes. 
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 CHAIR ZIEMER: Part of the path 

forward is defined. We do have a work group 

which Mark is chairing, and they will be 

meeting and looking at all of these issues, 

but if there's any additional tasking that's 

needed we will have the opportunity to do that 

as well. 

 MEMBER GRIFFON: Can I just say one 

more thing? 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Yes, you bet. 

 MEMBER GRIFFON: As the chair of 

the Work Group on Savannah River, we haven't 

convened this work group in awhile and part of 

the reason we started out reviewing the site 

profile, and we still have a number of 

outstanding issues on the site profile which I 

think will overlap with some of the issues 

identified in the petition and in the 

evaluation process. So we have to continue on 

those. We sort of put it on hold because we 

knew this petition was coming down the line 

and it didn't make sense to use our efforts to 
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go forward without waiting for the petition 

and looking at that. Having said that, I also 

am concerned. Several of the items that NIOSH 

brought up in their presentation look like 

we're still pending some data. Data exists 

and while I understand that NIOSH's hurdle 

sort of is to show that data exists to be able 

to sufficiently calculate doses, our board 

procedures, I'll remind all of us that we have 

a little bit of a higher hurdle that we've put 

in place which is to look at the data validity 

as well as the proof of principle, and several 

of the items that Tim, Dr. Taulbee outlined in 

his presentation mentioned that they have data 

or they're in the process of entering this 

data. It hasn't all been QC'd yet. I think I 

heard one of the TIBs is going to be available 

in the spring. So I just am a little 

concerned that all these tools and things are 

in place fairly soon and we can have 

everything we need to evaluate on this work 

group. But given that, I think we're going to 
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- I did talk to NIOSH earlier and we plan 

certainly on getting this work group back 

onboard in full force in early next year now 

that we have the evaluation report in place 

and everything. So. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Thank you, Mark. 

Wanda Munn? You have on this topic? 

 MEMBER MUNN: One brief correction 

for the record. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Oh, okay. 

 MEMBER MUNN: It was stated earlier 

that this board had not even looked at OTIB52. I wanted to point out that OTIB-52 has 

been very thoroughly debated in our procedures 

group, that since 2007 we've had a total of 16 

items that we have addressed specifically with 

respect to this procedure which is entitled 

Parameters for Processing Claims for 

Construction Workers. So it is actively being 

pursued. There are still - 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Still some open 

issues yet. 
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 MEMBER MUNN: There are still some 

open issues but it has been reviewed in great 

length. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Right, and is still 

in process. Thank you. And Jim? 

 MEMBER MELIUS: Perhaps the 

procedures work group could update the whole 

board on that at some point? 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Well, they will be 

reporting. 

 MEMBER MELIUS: The members of the 

Board have not heard this. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Right. 

 MEMBER MELIUS: Second, my question 

to Mark was in your discussions do we have a 

timeframe for SC&A to review the evaluation 

report and present something? 

 MEMBER GRIFFON: I didn't know if 

we were going to talk about that here or in 

our path forward discussion. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Well, we'll talk 

about it in the tasking. I think we may have 
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already tasked them to do this and I'm trying 

to recall from the last meeting. 

 MEMBER MELIUS: That's why I asked. 

 My understanding - 

 MEMBER GRIFFON: But John Mauro is 

shaking his head no, so I think - 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Okay. There was 

only the paper review perhaps that was tasked, 

but. 

 DR. MAURO: Let me help out a 

little bit. When you were tasked during the 

Redondo Beach meeting it was recognizing that 

in the near future the evaluation report would 

come out. And so at that time we were tasked 

to look at the petition itself. However, we 

were also in communication with Mark 

regarding, listen, you know, we know the 

evaluation report is going to come out. I 

also spoke to Ted about it. I said listen, 

once the evaluation report comes out what do 

you think we should do here? I mean, we're 

sort of in a gray area. Normally our initial 
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process is to read the evaluation report in 

conjunction with the petition. So I guess, in 

consultation with Ted he said listen, please 

review the evaluation report to the best of 

your ability in anticipation of this meeting 

so that you could have at least some initial 

findings. But I guess formally at the meeting 

itself in Redondo Beach we really weren't 

formally tasked with that. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Okay. So we need to 

do formal tasking at this meeting. And as I 

indicated before, I think we're going to have 

to be in the position of tasking our 

contractor, whoever it may be. And we could, 

we could ask that priority be given to getting 

something underway. I think we have at least 

till mid-January, but in one sense we would 

have to think about the funding. I believe 

all of the funding that's available right now 

is earmarked for closeout. Since this would 

be a new task and I think we could talk about 

whether or not new tasking could be done. We 
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could talk with David Staudt about that. But 

it's certainly the chair's sense that we're 

going to task somebody to do the review. 

Whether it's SC&A or another entity we will 

have a contractor that's going to have to do 

that. So. 

 I don't know if David will allow us 

to assign new tasks, but Ted, we should ask 

him about that, David Staudt. We have to 

follow whatever the federal rules are on some 

of these things, but we've been given fair 

flexibility in moving the money between tasks. 

 MR. KATZ: I'm sure there's no 

limitation between spending it on closeout 

versus on new task. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: So we may have some 

flexibility that would allow us to get a good 

start on the in-depth review of the report. 

So we'll talk about that further. Thank you. 

 We have a little time before the public 

comment session, and Ms. Munn has asked for 

the floor and I will recognize her. 
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 MEMBER MUNN: Thank you, Dr. 

Ziemer. If we could beg the indulgence of the 

claimants who are here from the local site, 

we'd like to take care of a small item of 

administrative importance to the members of 

the Board here. We have Mr. Green with us 

this evening who has not been with us in the 

last few months, and if it pleases the Board I 

would like at this time present a resolution 

to you. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: That would be in 

order. The chair will recognize you for such 

a motion, a motion directed toward our prior 

court reporter Ray Green as I understand it. 

 MEMBER MUNN: Correct. The 

resolution reads, "To all before whom these 

present letters may come, know that we the 

Advisory Boardon Radiation and Worker Health 

individually and in group assembled do resolve 

and say, whereas this body has existed since 

the year 2001 AD, and whereas our charter has 

required an extensive and accurate record of 
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our deliberations, and whereas such record 

necessitated verbatim transcriptions of each 

meeting of the Board, together with all public 

comments made therein as well as of all 

subcommittee and work groups meeting either 

face to face or by teleconference, and whereas 

the topics and participants in these 

activities have been numerous and complex, and 

whereas these proceedings have been recorded 

and reported verbatim with great precision and 

accuracy by our award-winning court reporter, 

be it therefore resolved that for his 

outstanding service, professionalism, 

friendship and devotion to the work of this 

board we extend our sincerest appreciation to 

Steven Ray Green. By this document we do 

hereby express our recognition of his valuable 

contribution to the work of this body and as 

he leaves our service convey upon him our 

warmest wishes for continued success and 

distinction in every aspect of his life. 

Signed at Augusta, Georgia, December 16, 
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2008." 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Thank you for that 

motion. The chair is aware that all the Board 

members have actually signed it so the motion 

passes, but for the record all in favor say 

"Aye." 

 (Chorus of ayes.) 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: And Ray Green, if 

you would come forward. 

 (Applause.) 

 MEMBER MUNN: This is one thing you 

won't have to transcribe personally. 

 (Laughter.) 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Ray, if you would 

just pose there with Ms. Munn who was 

responsible for generating this and we'll get 

a picture. And Ray, if you would come up 

here? 

 MEMBER CLAWSON: Ray, could you put 

something over your mouth? 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Yes Ray, we don't 

recognize you with your full face. And Ray, 
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you're not restricted like board members to 

receiving gifts, so on behalf of the Board let 

me also present you with this, a token of our 

appreciation, and maybe I should read for you 

what is on it as well, or you can read it. 

Let me read the inscription for you. This is 

heavy. It looks like it's filled with marbles 

but we want to make sure you do have all your 

marbles. 

 "In appreciation to Steven Ray 

Green for seven years of outstanding service 

to the Advisory Board on Radiation Worker 

Health , August 2008," and below that is a 

symbol of an atom, a very accurate symbol for 

you here to study as you leave us. 

Congratulations. 

 (Applause.) 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: And board members 

one thing further. For Ray we know he wants 

to remember all your mugs very well, so if 

you're agreeable after the public comment 

session we'll get together as a group with Ray 
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and give him a lasting remembrance of this 

board with mug shots. Ray, thank you so much. 

 MR. GREEN: Do I get to say 

something? 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Well, the 10-minute 

limit is on you. 

 MR. GREEN: I've been waiting seven 

years to talk. I did just want to say that I 

can sincerely say the seven years with NIOSH 

was the best working experience of my career 

ever, and that may sound like it's convenient 

because I'm standing in front of you all, but 

it's the truth, it truly is. And not only 

have I loved the Board members, but the people 

at SC&A, the people at OCAS have been 

absolutely fantastic. Everyone at NIOSH from 

Dr. Howard to Cory, LaShawn and Zaida and 

everyone in between has just been wonderful to 

work with, and I tell all my colleagues it's 

so wonderful working with the CDC. I actually 

do have some other entities within the CDC and 

they're very nice too, but I've got to say the 
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best was NIOSH. And then there's the 

peripheral people that I've met through 

working here like [Identifying Information] 

and [Identifying Information], and all the 

wonderful spouses, and it's just been 

absolutely fantastic. And I won't say goodbye 

because we all have emails and we can keep in 

touch, and some of you have been and I really 

appreciate that. So I'm still listening to 

you all every day working on this backlog to 

get your transcripts caught up so it's not 

like I've missed you very long yet. 

 (Laughter.) 

 MR. GREEN: But I did love it and 

I'm not going to say goodbye. I think there 

still may be a future for us, so if you're 

ever in Atlanta give me a call and we'll hook 

up for a cup of coffee or something. Thanks a 

lot. 

 (Applause.) 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Now we're going to 

have about five minutes before we start the 
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public comment period, so if any of you need a 

quick break, a comfort break, why this is the 

time. And we'll reconvene right at 5 o'clock. 

 (Whereupon, the above-entitled 

matter went off the record 4:54 p.m. and 

resumed at 5:05 p.m.) 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Okay folks, if you'd 

please take your seats we're going to 

reconvene for our public comment session. 

Just a few housekeeping items before we 

actually begin the comments. We have - the 

Board has a 10-minute limit on comments, the 

reason for that being to give everybody an 

opportunity because - and I always add that 

that 10 minutes is not necessarily a goal to 

be achieved. That's an upper limit. If you 

can keep your remarks briefer that will be 

fine because if everybody who has signed up 

takes 10 minutes we have about two hours ahead 

of us. So I'll just give you that as 

guidance. And that's fine, we will be here as 

long as needed to hear the comments, but to be 
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fair to those who are at the end, those early 

on the list need to be cognizant of the time. 

 Also, in general the public comment period is 

not one where the Board is here to answer 

questions per se. We're mainly here to hear 

what you have to say. If there's some 

particular item like you need to know who to 

contact about some issue we'll try to help 

with that, but mainly we just want to hear 

what you have to say. 

 Now, Mr. Katz is going to repeat 

the redaction policy. We're required to make 

sure you're aware of this. This has to do 

with what will or will not appear in the 

public record in terms of personal information 

because often in the public comment periods 

individuals share details about perhaps their 

own claim and sometimes about the claims of 

other individuals, and there are some Privacy 

Act issues that come into play when this is 

done. So Mr. Katz will fill us in on the 

ground rules for that as far as the public 
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record is concerned. 

 MR. KATZ: Thank you, Dr. Ziemer. 

So the policy is we have a verbatim transcript 

so that your comments will be taken down 

exactly as you say them. You do not have to 

give your name if you do not wish to, you can 

simply give your comments. But if you do give 

your name, your name with your comments will 

remain in the record, and if you give personal 

information, for example, medical information 

and so on, that may remain in the record too. 

 Ordinarily it will. But as Paul implied, if 

you give information about a third party, 

someone else, that information will be 

redacted, their name and their identifying 

information which might be quite a lot of the 

information that you provide about them. That 

would be removed from the record. The other 

points I would just make is if you - let's 

see, what else. Well, the only other point I 

need to make is if you wish to address the 

Board but you don't wish to address the Board 
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in public we can try to make arrangements for 

that. And the full policy for redactions is 

available where you signed in and it's also 

available on the website where the agenda of 

this meeting can be found. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Now, as we proceed I 

actually have to call you by name in order to 

have you come and give your comment. So if 

you have signed the roster and do not wish to 

have your name identified in the record I need 

to know that right away and you can just come 

up here before I get started and indicate 

which one you are, or let me ask it in a 

different way. Are there any of you who 

signed for public comment that do not wish to 

have me call you by name? 

 (No verbal response.) 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Okay. So I will be 

calling you to come to the mic by name, so 

understand that. So your name therefore goes 

into the public record. You're free to use 

the mic here. Makes it easier for the Board 
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to see you, but if you prefer to use the 

podium or have some materials that you need, 

you know, some support for you can use the 

podium if you wish. Whatever you're most 

comfortable in doing. My plan is to go down 

through the list in the order that you signed 

up. After we complete the list that I have 

here for those who are locally present I will 

also give opportunity for folks who are on the 

phone lines that may wish to make public 

comment to do that as well. So those of you 

who are on the phone, we will get to you after 

we hear from the local folks here, most of 

whom are affiliated in some way or another 

with the Savannah River site, although that's 

not 100 percent true. But in any event, we'll 

go down through the list here. First is Donna 

Hand. 

 MS. HAND: My name is Donna Hand. 

I'm with the Pinellas Plant Workers. Mine's 

going to be very brief because it's going to 

be followed by a letter to the Board itself. 
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I want a clarification of the law when it 

pertains to cancer and the wounds, and how to 

treat with the wounds. The problem is that 

you, HHS, has exclusive control of the cancers 

and decides which are cancers. The only nonradiogenic cancer so far in the law is CLL. 

However, neoplasms, carcinomas are not used, 

even though the law says they will be treated 

as if they're malignant cancers. DOL refuses 

to send these cancers to NIOSH. NIOSH refuses 

to do a dose reconstruction unless a cancer is 

sent to them by DOL. Whenever you send a, for 

example, squamous cell skin cancer, and it 

says there is squamous on it, well they say 

no, that's actinic keratosis so therefore 

we're not sending it. It says on the 

pathology report it is squamous. I send it to 

NIOSH. NIOSH said we can't accept it because 

DOL did not send it to us. So we have 

evidence that there was a cancer but DOL 

refuses to do that. Now this is exclusive 

control of Health and Human Services to decide 
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what is a cancer and if that cancer, you know, 

do the dose reconstruction and then let the 

Probability of Causation decide if it's a 

radiogenic cancer or not. 

 Specifically, you're talking about 

prostate cancer and adding on other cancers to 

the list. Mr. Glover in one of your advisory 

board meetings stated he thought that that 

list came from the National Cancer Institute. 

 No. That list came from the Radiation 

Exposure Compensation Act 42.2210 note. In 

2004 that was amended to add on renal cancers. 

 Before then the Veterans Radiation 

Compensation Act had prostate cancer. You 

know, so you have other compensation programs 

that has radiation that acknowledges prostate. 

 You have switched a bulletin to do dose 

reconstruction on prostate to bladder. You no 

longer use testes, but yet your Probability of 

Causation still uses male genitalia. So why 

can't the Probability of Causation do a 

bladder like you do the dose reconstruction? 
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You issued a technical bulletin for that, and 

I guess it was pre-approved and reviewed 

because you're using it. So why isn't the 

Probability of Causation model then the 

bladder, since you found out, excuse me, that 

the target organ is the bladder to use for 

dose reconstruction. 

 The other issue is wounds. I have 

a gentleman that I'm the authorized 

representative of, he was cut three times with 

classified waste. They said because he was 

not monitored which he should have been 

monitored we're not going to use it in dose 

reconstruction. We do not use it in his 

internal and we don't use it as a separate 

incident. The law says the internal is 

injection, injection or cuts and wounds. You 

have a specific bulletin out for wounds. It 

addresses plutonium, but at the very end it 

says this is for all radionuclides. They're 

not using it. I'll give my other time to 

Savannah River since they're here. Thank you. 
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 CHAIR ZIEMER: Okay, thank you very 

much. And you are planning to send this 

information to us as I understand it? Thank 

you. Next we'll hear from William Hooker. Is 

William here? I know that sometimes people 

inadvertently register their attendance in the 

wrong book and so he may have thought he was 

registering and actually signed the public 

comment list. William Hooker. Okay, then how 

about Harry Carver. Thank you, Harry. 

 MR. CARVER: My name is Harry 

Carver and I work at Savannah River site as an 

iron worker. And I had cancer in 2000 and I 

went through this program and it took them six 

years to finally give me a negative answer. I 

think that was way too long to have to sit 

around and wait, but this dose reconstruction 

stuff that they're going through. They talk 

about a log book. I guess those log books was 

hand-entered by somebody from that site, from 

RadCon personnel or whatever. I know for a 

fact in either 2003 or 2004 after I returned 
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to work after having cancer there was a RadCon 

supervisor that was terminated for having his 

technicians falsely write dosimetry reports on 

those reports. And he was terminated for 

that, and the people that did it were also 

disciplined. The one fellow that refused to 

falsify, to write the right number down, he 

was not disciplined. The other ones were, and 

that is wrote down in the log books out there. 

 And if one does it, how do you come up with a 

dose reconstruction with people falsifying 

records? 

 And there was three of us that 

worked together in the early `90s out there, 

three iron workers. We all worked the same 

crew. We all worked the same area, F-B line, 

and all three of us in our early to midforties has had cancer. One of them is dead 

now, real good friend. Another one is here 

and he'll speak also. It's just highly 

unlikely that three of us in our early 

forties, you know, worked the same areas, the 
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same group, and all of us end up with the same 

- not the same type of cancer, but we all end 

up with cancers. And my other question is 

when I found out about all this and the dose 

reconstruction, I asked my oncologist how much 

radiation does it take to give you cancer? 

How much does it - what are you all's limits 

saying here under this dose reconstruction? 

How - what is the minimum amount of radiation 

exposure it takes to activate cancer? Well, I 

would like to know that. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: You won't get a 

specific answer because it's going to be 

different for every individual in terms of the 

various cancers all have various - 

 MR. CARVER: I have testicular 

cancer. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: But I will point out 

- 

 MR. CARVER: - I mean, he couldn't 

tell me. He said there's no, you know, you 

could get an X-ray, you can get cancer from an 
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X-ray, a single X-ray could activate it. 

Everybody has the potential to have a cancer, 

you know. So how do you all - I don't 

understand how you determine what small amount 

activates any individual's cancer. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: I'll give you a very 

general answer, not a detailed one, but this 

program uses the data from the National Cancer 

Institute which is the so-called risk data 

which they have developed which talks about 

the - it leads to the probability of cancer in 

various organs from various doses. It's based 

largely on the Japanese data, but we can talk, 

you know, we can talk in detail about that. 

But the group does try to use what we would 

describe as the best scientific data, and 

you'll understand that there's uncertainty in 

that as well. Yes, right. Thank you for your 

comment. Mitch Still. Mitch? 

 MR. STILL: Thank you for your 

time, I'll try not to take up too much. I may 

sound like I'm bragging a little bit, but I'm 
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not. I'm just going to state facts. I worked 

at the plant for 11 years and I believe in 

nuclear energy, I believe in nuclear power and 

all that. When I started working I was 

basically a high school graduate, got lucky 

and got a job. Worked my way up. When I left 

I started my own business. I'd worked there 

11 years. I'd got as high as I could go 

without a college education and I basically 

got bored at that time. Westinghouse had 

taken over. DuPont had left when PriceAnderson came in. And up to that time we 

worked - as a matter of fact in `83 and `84 I 

think the most plutonium ever run through any 

reactor in the DOE complex we run it through F 

area canyons. And there were a handful of 

guys and women who made that happen. One year 

I think I worked 87 shifts of overtime. Of 87 

shifts of overtime, they didn't offer overtime 

to sit around in a control room. It was highradiation work and I think anybody with any 

reasonable sense could figure out you can't 
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work an additional 696 hours a year and not 

have more radiation than the worker next to 

you. 

 And where I'm going, the culture we 

had back then, HP and production were two 

different things. Production was what it 

said, production. We got the job done. If 

there were three cars of uranium waiting to 

come in the canyon, they were going to get in 

and they were going to get in that evaporator, 

get melted down and get sent to B line. HP, 

their initiatives weren't the same as ours so 

most of the time we spent our time dodging HP. 

 Most of the high-radiation work was done on 

shifts, done on the weekends. I tried to 

access a log book from the plant because I 

told them if you take, from any given time 

period take a one-month log book from the 

canyon, take the canyon HP supervisor log 

book, take the lab book where the samples were 

delivered, also take the DOE morning report, 

look at the four of them and they won't work 
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out because in production we did things to get 

the job done, okay? The guy earlier was 

talking about the trees that had contamination 

in them. I can tell you how they got there. 

I can tell you all kind of stories and 

incidents that don't need to be reported. We 

did what we did to get the job done. The only 

incidents that NIOSH or anybody will retrieve 

through records are incidents that were too 

big to cover up when we were working. When I 

say "cover up" I mean clean up. If we made a 

mess, we cleaned it up. I deconned myself. 

We went to the hot sample aisle to pull 

samples, you milked samples. Nobody ever 

wanted to bring up what milking a sample was. 

 Milking a sample is you take a sample from 

the hottest radiation material on the plant 

out of these tanks that are 20 feet below you, 

you pull a vacuum on them and pull them out. 

29.9 inches of mercury is a perfect vacuum. 

It still won't pull this kind of material up 

when levels get above 1.5. So there were 
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tricks operators would do to get these to 

pull. It involved not using the door cast, 

120- and 140-pound door cast for shielding. 

You actually had to hold what is called a 

peanut in your hand, work it, watch the vacuum 

needles and get the material flowing through 

it to get a sample, okay? A lot of upper 

management knew these machines didn't work the 

way they should, but yet they knew that on all 

shifts certain guys would get these jobs done, 

okay? When I was hired in we was told that 

radiation wouldn't hurt you any more than 

wearing a tritium dial watch. I don't - I'm 

not putting down people. We were just doing a 

job that we were paid to do. And it goes on 

and on. I mean, waste tank samples, we held 

them in our hands, did the same things. When 

you went to get a sample that couldn't be 

pulled legally, you went on the off shift and 

when you went to the sample box you took a 

swab and swiped the area. We hadn't been 

trained in self-monitoring. You swiped the 
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area, you check it with the - I believe it was 

R-02, I can't remember the exact name. One 

has the shield to shield out beta and gamma, 

the other one checks for alpha beta 

contamination. We didn't even care about the 

radiation beta gamma. All we cared about was 

decontamination. Swipe the floor and whatever 

it was, hopefully it was lower than background 

in the building. If it was lower than 

background in the building, pull your sample. 

 As soon as you get through with it, check it. 

 As long as it was lower than background go 

back to work. Nobody would know you'd pulled 

a sample illegally, okay? But if log books 

are reviewed, and I tried through the plant to 

get them. They won't give them to me. And 

they're in records retention because all those 

log books, we had to save them. They're all 

clearly dated. There's no reason they can't 

be retrieved, okay? Now I know that DOE has 

an order up before Congress where they wanted 

to destroy all records and I think Congress 
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needs to make sure that doesn't happen. Do I 

have more time? 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: You've got two 

minutes. 

 MR. STILL: Missed dose. Missed 

dose, I understand that's a good thing, but 

when you're working 87 shifts of overtime a 

year and you work in the sample aisle changing 

out hooks, crane hooks and all, badges weren't 

worn. If HP was on the job, for some reason 

they were covering a job, a high-profile that 

some upper management wanted to see, you wear 

other people's badges. If you was in a high 

beta radiation zone you knew if you switched 

your badge around in the TLD an open window 

would be closed, you wouldn't get the beta. 

Some of these beta fields would be like a 40-1 

ratio. Dosimeters, they talk about them going 

off scale. You come out of a hot job and if 

the radiation was extremely hot you tell the 

HP inspector I dropped it in there so you 

didn't get that high reading. You were 
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refused overtime if you had high radiation and 

you would not get promoted if you had high 

radiation. It was almost a condition of 

employment. 

 Chemical, trichloroethylene, 

asbestos. We swept mercury out of the sumps 

in the H area. F area didn't have as much in 

their process. We swept it up with brooms, 

okay, and put it in bottles and sent it to the 

lab where they recycled it. So the toxic 

exposure never gets brought up, but we was 

exposed to a lot of that. We even deconned 

ourselves with trichloroethylene. We always 

didn't get decon with HP either, only when 

used on a job that HP was covering. 

 Now, one other thing that really 

concerns me is DOE, the Department of Labor 

and the contractors. I noticed that you have 

an SEC going for construction workers and 

that's fine. They've got somebody to take up 

for them. There shouldn't be a first-line 

foreman having to come in here and take up for 
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operators at the plant, including myself, 

because there's no company to take care of us 

because DOE is just bidding out to lowest 

bidders. And the people at the plant now 

don't even know it's going to affect them in 

the future. DuPont left, good riddance. 

There's nobody to represent employees. That's 

the reason all these lawyers and litigation 

has to get involved. The people need to be 

represented correctly and we picked up 

radiation, we called it the trenches. We did 

the work. We picked up radiation. I've held 

every product on the plant in my hand. And 

when you go home at night a lot of times 

you're wondering, I hope I got everything off. 

 I don't want to get it in my house. And I'm 

not complaining. I got cancer at 47 years 

old, colon cancer. My first foreman that I 

worked for, he died at 60 with colon cancer, 

and my second foreman that I worked for, he 

died last year of colon cancer. You know, Dr. 

Sanjay Gupta this morning on CNN said that 1 
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out of 100,000 get colon cancer and that's a 

big coincidence. He said the average age is 

73 and there's three of us got it before 60. 

So, and I'm not complaining. I'm lucky. I 

caught mine early, I can deal with what I've 

got, but I just wish the workers - every 

worker's work history should be looked at. 

 The biggest jobs done on the plant, 

changing out the 2F evaporator involved about 

a hundred people on an outside radioactive 

job. It wasn't in a canyon. I was the 

foreman over that. I understand radiation and 

I know how the plant works with radiation, and 

I'd be curious if you're even milking samples 

today. If the radiation boxes aren't changed, 

they will. And when operators milk the sample 

or pull any sample they know ALARA, "as low as 

reasonably achievable" is what we were taught. 

 What that meant, and the older gentlemen 

would teach you this, keeps your radiation 

down. How do you do it? When you go into a 

box that's got a high radiation, if you're 
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right-handed, keep your badge on the left side 

of the chest. If it shines it's going to get 

your right side, it's not going to get the 

left. So dose reconstruction on a lot of 

production workers, you would have to figure 

their missed dose for every day because it was 

nothing to get your limit the first day when a 

TLD come out. And if you knew you was getting 

high, was going to get a write-up for it, you 

pick up a TLD badge at the guard shack that 

wasn't yours. It wasn't named, don't even 

sign it out. Just pick it up, nobody would 

ever notice you were wearing it during the 

day. Okay? I'm not complaining, I'm just 

stating facts. All these technical documents 

are full, and I wish the Board had a worker on 

the Board, and I wish in the future you all 

would get one. Get one from Hanford, 

wherever. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: We have several 

workers on the Board. 

 MR. STILL: I mean, workers who did 
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the things that I've done. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: I think we have 

several now. Yes, we do have workers onboard, 

but thank you for that input. 

 MR. STILL: Thank you. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Yes, appreciate 

that. Okay. Looks like maybe two people 

here. Jim and Roxanne Bush? 

 MR. BUSH: Good evening. I'm Jim 

Bush. I didn't work at SRP, but I'm on behalf 

of my [Identifying Information]. He worked 

out there over 20-some years. Back when he 

started, back during `51, on up until he 

retired, but now he come down - he didn't come 

down with cancer. He come down with this 

[Identifying Information], a rare form of a 

[Identifying Information] in the head. And 

[Identifying Information] did not have that 

when he started out there, but during his 

period of time of working, eventually he 

contracted that [Identifying Information] in 

his head. And I've seen it where it was so 
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bad where he couldn't stand for the wind, or 

the four seasons. Winter gave him problems, 

summer, spring, fall. He had to cover his 

face up with an old skull cap to go out into 

the weather. And later on in the years past, 

he had an operation which was a 50/50, either 

live or die. So he had come to the conclusion 

that the pain was so severe, that the doctor 

told us that the pain was so severe of a man 

or anyone having that [Identifying 

Information] was more than a woman having a 

baby. He said he wouldn't wish that on his 

worst enemy. So [Identifying Information] 

gave up and said, "well, just go ahead and 

give me the operation." Well, the operation 

did come out successful, but then they had to 

take and operate on him without an anesthesia 

because he could not stand for the doctor to 

inject him with the needle. So he had to go 

up into his head, over into his skull, into 

that nerve and clip it. And so that was the 

only thing that helped him. 
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 But now [Identifying Information] 

did come a lot of days that he was 

contaminated, but when I went and got all my 

paperwork and everything, it was sent off to 

Washington and Jacksonville and everywhere 

else that it, you know, should go. But each 

time it comes to a deadlock that they want to 

say [Identifying Information] was not caused 

in any way through working at SRP. And so I 

did all I could do, you know, and I got all 

paperwork, whatever was on his behalf, of 

records-- but now to me I feel like it did, 

SRP created and caused his problem, because he 

wasn't having that problem until he started 

working out there. And he was, and I feel 

like if you being contaminated at certain 

points in your life, then there you are going 

to have problems from contamination. And 

that's the way I feel about it, but now the 

only thing I could do is do whatever I can, 

and I felt like I've done my share, you know, 

of getting all records, and I've turned them 
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in. And I've been to most all of the meetings 

that would occur, you know, of having 

something to do with the litigation problem at 

the SRP. And so that's why I come out 

tonight, to state my opinion as well. And I 

thank you all. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Thank you very much. 

 And Alice Frame. Alice. 

 MS. FRAME: I'm from Charleston, 

West Virginia. I've driven about every time 

down here to the meetings. I thank you. My 

[Identifying Information] was an electrician. 

He worked out there in `86 and `87. He was 

diagnosed with [Identifying Information] 1992. 

We had taken radiation and chemotherapy. 

NIOSH tried to say that the [Identifying 

Information] came from 25 radiation 

treatments. Well, I've fought against you 

long enough that you've came back and said it 

was not medical induced. So November 4 of 

1999 we started to Washington, D.C. Cancer 

Center. [Identifying Information] was our 
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oncologist, and he's a specialist in sarcoma. 

And he's the tenth rated doctor in the nation. 

 He's written 56 books, and it's transcribed 

in seven languages. So we started chemo 

November 17. His leg broke and he was put in 

a full body cast. To make a long story short, 

January 28 they [Identifying Information] up 

to his waist. 

 You know, there's not nuclear waste 

in West Virginia. And I've wrote to my 

congressmen and my senators. If I was a coal 

miner, I would have gotten multitudes of 

money. Our hospital bill in D.C. from 

November till April was $333,000. I went to 

Department of Labor in D.C. April 7 for my 

hearing. Everybody is kind of bashing NIOSH, 

but I have found out when my papers come from 

Department of Energy to NIOSH, doesn't it, my 

records? Isn't that right, Department of 

Labor, that's how you get them? Okay, I got 

my papers from Savannah River site. It said 

"work history, inaccurate." Now, if there's a 
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record inaccurate, then how did you get it? 

See what I'm saying? Then I got into when I 

went to my hearing the little girl was very, 

very uneducated. I asked her my first name, 

"Do you have a dosimetry badge?" "Oh, it'll 

take a few minutes." I said, "I have all 

day." "It'll take a few minutes." "I have 

all day." I said, "You don't have it and I 

know you don't have it." I asked for a badge 

number and a badge. I have not yet to get it. 

 So then I have got into dealing 

with Jacksonville, and I got it from one of 

their papers. It come back, "We do not know 

how to make this decision on PoC." I'm going 

to give it the shotgun effect for my decision. 

 It'll only change the cause so much 

percentage. This is my [Identifying 

Information] life that they're going to 

shotgun effect with? So it's not all just 

NIOSH. These people need to know. Then the 

woman that made my decision, I called 

Jacksonville and I said, "I know what an MD 
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is, what's an MPH?" They hung up on me. I 

called back and I said, "Just tell me, you 

know, what is it?" Well, they hung up and I 

called back. "It's occupational medicine." I 

said, "Well, I'm from West Virginia, but I 

don't think it starts with an M and an O." So 

what I have found out, the doctor took her 

decision from medical history, not medical 

record. Why didn't she have the medical 

record and not medical history? Then I came 

back and asked. They paid her $830 for 2.5 

units to do this twice? Is this why I don't 

have money to be compensated for? See, it's 

not all about NIOSH. You do your job, let the 

rest of them come up and do their job. So 

when I went to my hearing in D.C. I asked 

them, "I want somebody with the same 

credentials that his doctor had in D.C. to 

make my decision. And I don't feel like I'm 

asking a lot." 

 But a lot of these people don't 

know, I went to my Congress and I now have an 
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attorney. The Congress passed a law October 

of 2000. It states-- do you know what it 

states? It says if you get an attorney before 

you're denied, your attorney is fined $5,000. 

 And this attorney can only take from what, 2 

to 10 percent? There's not a lawyer in the 

world that's going to take. But I have a 

couple of good people that has agreed to take 

mine. Then my paper came back, and I can't 

understand. It says-- the NIOSH dose 

reconstruction says he got the majority of it 

working here, but he didn't get enough of it. 

 What is enough of it to [Identifying 

Information] at 49 years old? Like I said, he 

didn't work anywhere else. And when he worked 

at Savannah River site, he was an electrician. 

 He got a letter from DuPont where he run 

cable tray, and he had done that good a job. 

I tried to find it, but I couldn't find it at 

the time. My understanding is they use a 

drill, you know, screwdrivers. They were 

contaminated. They put them in plastic bags. 
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 They put them in the bin that day and they 

were disposed. If that tool is disposed, what 

causes that body can't be disposed? And I 

have a paper I'd like to pass out to you. 

Could I, please? Thank you. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Alice, do you have 

additional comments? Do you have additional 

comments? 

 MS. FRAME: No, I'm through. I 

thank you. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Okay, thank you for 

sharing that with us. Robert Young? Robert 

Young? Wayne Knox? Mr. Knox. 

 MR. KNOX: My name is Wayne Knox. 

I've been around this industry for many, many 

years. I started in the Air Force as a 

captain there as a radiation physicist, and I 

also worked up the street here in Nuclear 

Medicine Science at Eisenhower Hospital. I 

also spent some time supporting the Nuclear 

Regulatory Commission. I have a contract with 

them for over 15 years, where I provided 
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support to them in regulatory development and 

compliance, and as a result of that I've 

audited over 75 percent of U.S. reactors. 

I've had contracts with the Department of 

Energy, and I have worked on the DOE Tiger 

Team. Not only have I done more of the highlevel work, but I have actually worked as an 

operational health physicist, and I'd like to 

make a distinction here. There is a big 

difference between an operational health 

physicist than an academic or a researcher. 

We're the guys that get the job done in spite 

of all of the elegant models, all of the 

nicely worded procedure. We have to get it 

done, and a number of other people have 

reported that our job was to get it done at 

all costs. It was not whether we were going 

to wait and get the job done when we could 

conveniently do it. It was it had to be done 

and we got it done, minimizing exposure as 

best we could. 

 In 1997 a colleague of mine, a PhD 
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type, made the claim that you could 

accurately, accurately calculate and 

reconstruct this dose. And I said, "Well hold 

it man, what are you talking about? Do you 

understand" - and he came from my same school 

too, a little school on Tenth Avenue. He said 

that he could do it, and I said, "Do you 

understand what `accuracy' means? Accuracy is 

how close you come to the true or actual 

value. And hey man, you don't know the true 

or actual value, so we can't calculate 

accuracy." In the real world you also can't 

even calculate precision, because we don't-- 

this is no research project. We do not make 

repeated measurements. Any measurement of 

precision requires repeated repetitive 

measurements. Any measurement of competence 

level requires repeated measurements. We 

didn't do that, and one of the fundamental 

reasons we didn't make all of these 

measurements-- the more measurements you take, 

the more exposures you've got. And we were 
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trying to minimize exposure. So we didn't 

make all of those measurements you guys think 

we did. So the bottom line is, if we look at 

the definition, any system of measurement, any 

system of measurement that does not have 

accuracy, does not have precision, is defined 

as invalid. So everything we did was invalid. 

 I will make that statement. I walked away 

from that meeting after giving CDC a lot of 

examples of why we couldn't do this thing that 

they said. But yet and still, they proceeded 

to do it. 

 It disturbs me quite a bit when I 

see that people have gone on and attempted to 

spend all of this time and money constructing 

IREP and all of these elegant models in order 

to determine something which we did routinely. 

 We calculated risk. All of the risk data is 

there, internationally accepted. I have 

manually gone through and made several 

calculations using several different methods, 

standard methods, things that we use every 
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day. And based upon my independent 

calculation with a pencil, I come up with 

probabilities of causation greater than what 

was specified by IREP. And it turns out, and 

I've been talking to people about IREP. I 

pinged it. I put in data to see, how does it 

respond when you give it a certain set of 

data? And I haven't figured it out. I called 

and said, "How does this thing work? Have you 

guys ever conducted a validation and 

verification of this thing?" And the answer 

is no. This is standard. I find it very 

difficult to believe that in this day and age 

no one has conducted an independent validation 

and verification of that thing called IREP. 

What further disturbs me is that we have a 

regulation that defines the Probability of 

Causation. It's done in terms of base risk 

and rad risk. I can get the cancer 

statistics, which I did, to pull up my base 

risk. I can drill all the way down to the 

county level and determine a person's base 
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risk. I can determine a person's rad risk 

based upon already accepted methods of doing 

it and risk of dose conversion coefficients. 

But we have this method which I was told, and 

I said, "Wait, wait, are you really telling me 

that?" They said, "Well, we used assigned 

share, and assigned share is the same as - is 

the same as the Probability of Causation." 

And I said, "Well, if you already have a term 

defined, why do you define another term and 

say it's the same?" It is not the same. And 

it bothers me when I look at a report. This 

is a report on the Probability of Causation of 

an individual by name. It has the name, a 

human name. But then I look into IREP. IREP 

does not. It does not calculate the 

individual's assigned share. It does not 

calculate the Probability of Causation, and 

that is what the regulation requires. And in 

fact, this is what you say in here. In the 

report, you do not say "This is the assigned 

share." You say it is the Probability of 
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Causation, and it's not. Is that true? 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: The way it's defined 

in the regulation it is the Probability of 

Causation. 

 MR. KNOX: Sir, are you saying the 

Probability of Causation is the same as the 

assigned share? 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: I believe, if I 

recall-- and this is in the NIOSH document, we 

could look at it. NIOSH pointed out the 

technical difference in the terms, but we'd 

probably have to have Jim Neton answer that 

directly. But we can talk, we can discuss 

that with you. I don't think we should have a 

discussion here, but I understand what you're 

saying. 

 MR. KNOX: And all due respect, 

sir, we're playing with words. We're saying 

that - if they're saying that they are 

technical differences, come on. It's not the 

same. The regulation requires the calculation 

of the Probability of Causation. You report 
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Probability of Causation. You report, this is 

the individual's Probability of Causation by 

name, and it's clearly not. 

 A number of people - we're getting 

on another subject - a number of people talked 

about what really goes on in the real world. 

And trust me, I have been there, I have lived 

it, I understand what they were talking about 

with the badges and falsification of 

documentation. I have been since 1998 

attempting to process the situation. I will 

try to be very brief with you. I was doing a 

job at Savannah River. I've worked at 

Savannah River, I've worked at Hanford, so I 

understand what goes on in the dirty-hands 

world. If you looked at the data, you have 

tritium in the liquid phase of a large 

underground storage tank, but no tritium in 

the sludge phase. And I said, "Whoa. I'm a 

technician now. Us technicians, we sense 

things. We may not know how to calculate it, 

but we can say that doesn't look right, that 
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doesn't smell right." I challenged them on 

it. Look, why isn't there tritium in the 

sludge, and by the way, the sludge is what we 

had to mix up and come in contact with it. 

They said, "It's not there. You prove it's 

there, because we have an 800-page report from 

SAIC that said no tritium in the sludge, a 

validation and verification report." And I 

said, "Okay. Well, what about these plutonium 

numbers? It looks like we have more plutonium 

in the liquid phase than in the solid phase." 

 Again, a technician looks at this and he 

says, "Well, you know, most of the time you 

have more plutonium in the dirt than in the-- 

it's just normal. That's the way it is." But 

it turns out if you were to switch the 

numbers, then you could burn the sludge up at 

Oak Ridge. We burned them in the incinerator 

up at Oak Ridge. I went on and performed the 

job under protest. None of our people had any 

protection from tritium. No monitoring of 

tritium. They would not provide it, even 
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though a health physicist said we needed to 

use it. I clearly said it, I documented it, 

we needed to do it. They refused because I 

had no proof of it. After I finished the job, 

I said, "That's okay." I took my samples and I 

split it, one going to Westinghouse and one 

going to a laboratory. When I did that, they 

said, "Your job is through." They would not 

allow me to have access to the sludge. They 

would not allow me to have access to the final 

report. I had to go through the Freedom of 

Information Act in order to get this 

information. After I got the information it 

did turn out that that was tritium in the 

sludge. I think everybody knew that. I'm 

sure most of you know that rule. That was 

tritium in the sludge. I got the data, and I 

found out that the split sample I gave to 

Westinghouse was a couple of orders of 

magnitude below that which was performed in 

the laboratory. And I dug around and found 

out why. And guess what happened? A 
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gentleman talked about liquid scintillation 

counting. It's sounds nice and elegant, but 

most people use simply the analysis results 

and the errors associated with the analysis. 

They do not consider the errors associated 

with the preparation of the sample or the 

sampling. I have seen people that will 

perform criticality analysis without, without 

considering the sampling error. And the 

sampling error is the largest possible error 

you're going to find. And most of the time 

it's just one or two samples. So you can't 

determine precision, and you can't develop 

these nice little confidence intervals. 

 Anyway, getting back to the 

tritium, what Westinghouse does here-- and I 

have the data. It took me a year and even 

going through - having to appeal it under the 

Freedom of Information Act, but I have the 

data, and I will share it with this committee 

and anyone else where it is a tritium - 

preparation method that Westinghouse used here 
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to boil off the tritium. So, yes, you could 

use the liquid scintillation, but you boil it 

off first. So afterward, it ain't there. And 

it happened in - I did a little more research. 

 I did a little more research. 1996 they sent 

a shipment up to Oak Ridge. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Please go back to 

the mic. You need to wind it up, also. 

 MR. KNOX: Okay. Anyway, the 

bottom line is that there are methods that are 

used that underestimate the amount of 

radioactive and hazardous waste at Savannah 

River. I have the data. I can show you. 

It's not only that, but it's also hazardous 

waste. If you look at how they do PCB, you 

have five species of PCBs roughly, and what 

they will do is sample for one of them. And I 

had to tell them, "You have to sample each one 

of these guys and then you add them up. 

That's your total PCBs. It's not, `I'll 

choose the one that's the lowest level.'" 

Again, there are a lot of other problems at 
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Savannah River. I have all of the 

documentation. I have reported this to the 

Department of Energy IG and guess what? They 

take your data and they gave it to 

Westinghouse and said, "Well, why don't you 

conduct a self-investigation of this and write 

the report in the name of the Department of 

Energy IG?" And that's what they did. They 

wrote a confidential non-releasable report in 

the name of the Department of Energy IG, and 

in violation of Part 1013 which requires - 

which requires a GS-15 or above to conduct the 

investigation. So in summary, the things you 

heard that many people talked about are true. 

 I will certify that. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Thank you. 

 MR. KNOX: And one other parting 

shot. There are no experts on dose 

reconstruction. There are only varying 

degrees of ignorance. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Thank you. 

 (Applause.) 
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 CHAIR ZIEMER: Next, John Hall. Is 

John here? Thank you. 

 MR. HALL: How are you doing? I'm 

John Hall. I'm an iron worker. I'm one of 

the ones Harry Carver told you about. Three 

months ago I had a full head of hair, healthy 

as a horse. Never thought I'd have cancer. 

Never had cancer in my family. I worked at 

SRS for 14 years. Even worked a year at the 

Nevada test site. A lot of things that you 

hear these people telling you are true. I've 

worked in areas, were exposed to things, and 

never were told what it was. I was exposed to 

a release from H area. I was working in S 

area. I got real sick afterward. They never 

did tell me what was wrong, what I was exposed 

to. Again in F area, at lab when the stack 

spewed, worked right there around the clock. 

They never did tell us what we were exposed 

to. Worked in the burial ground. There was 

nothing but a chain link fence between me and 

high-level radiation storage. Worked there 
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for two months. Questioned the people at the 

burial ground about a TLD. "You don't need 

it. You don't need it." Finally a DOE man 

came over. I asked him. It was about a week 

later, me and my crew all had TLD badges. 

Explain to me why they determined we didn't 

need it, but then when DOE got involved in it, 

we needed them. 

 There's a lot of stuff that went on 

out there that you could find out more 

information about it by talking to the workers 

out there than you can talking to the 

supervisors, because they're going to tell you 

what you want to hear, or what they want you 

to know, not what actually happens. If you 

went out there and interviewed the workers 

you'd find out more information than you will 

by talking to them. And hiring another 

contractor, that's just another waste of money 

for them to go out there and talk to the same 

people that you have already talked to. 

 Now, myself-- you just don't know 
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how it is to get cancer. I never thought that 

I would have cancer and you don't know how 

devastating it is. And I hope it doesn't 

happen to nobody else. But it just - there's 

a lot of things that you people need to listen 

to than to just the higher-ups out there that 

try to cover up. Okay? 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Thank you. 

 MR. HALL: Thank you. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Wayne -- is it 

Boyce? Wayne Boyce? 

 MR. KNOX: Let me ask another quick 

question. Who could I get to to show the real 

data? This is live data. On the tritium, the 

plutonium, the PCBs. I have the data. I 

would like to know who I can show it to. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Well, Larry, maybe 

you can direct him. Larry Elliott will give 

you someone. Is it Wayne Boyce? B-O-Y-C-E? 

Thank you, Wayne. 

 MR. BOYCE: My name's Wayne Boyce. 

 I'm an electrician. I have just two things 
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to make comments on. In the late `70s I was 

working in 221 H, was caught in an air 

reversal while operations was packaging 

plutonium. They evacuated the building, 

brought construction workers back in later for 

nasal smears and I had plutonium in one of my 

nostrils. There were two HP inspectors 

involved and an HP supervisor. They did the 

nasal smears, put them in the count rate meter 

and say well you got it in one nostril. They 

smeared some more, well we got it out, and 

that was the end of it. You know, naive, you 

don't think much about it at all. The HP 

inspector that was his area where the incident 

happened, he starts entering it into his log 

book, daily log book that they kept. 

Supervisor got real irate and started raising 

pure - just showing out. He didn't want that 

looking bad on his shift, looking bad on him. 

 They had a pretty heated argument. Anyway, 

it got entered into the log book. Several 

months later the HP inspector that logged it 
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in, he had been to summer camp. He was in the 

Guard or the Reserve or whatever. He came to 

our shack first - before starting to work on 

Monday morning and told me he needed to see 

me. Took me up to his desk. You could see 

where a crow bar, they'd broke in and stolen 

the log book. That was under old DuPont 

culture. 

 Years later when the health 

screening started I went through the screening 

and came back a beryllium sensitized which in 

part of the Cleveland Clinic obstructed lung 

due to welding fumes. And they had a doctor 

in Augusta I was sent to. He was following 

it. It progressed far enough for the 

establishment of the percentage of disability 

or impairment. Can't get a doctor to touch 

it. So now I've expired. I went past my 

limit. Now I got a letter just a few weeks 

ago I think, in two years you can apply again, 

but I'm starting to hear now, I don't - there 

are very few people out there anymore that's 
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been involved in this, but I've heard twice 

tonight in the lobby that this is the standard 

pattern, that when it comes time to establish 

your degree of impairment. In fact, the 

doctor, the office manager of the one I was 

dealing with were rude and obnoxious to me. 

They told me they weren't going to be involved 

in that. So I think that's something that 

might need to be looked into. I can't keep up 

- I keep all the letters, and the best I can 

make out that last letter it'll be two years 

before you can reapply. And that's about all, 

that's all I've got. Thank you. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Thank you very much. 

 Sidney Jones? 

 MR. JONES: Thank you for giving me 

the time. My name is Sidney Jones. I'm a 

local attorney. I'm licensed in South 

Carolina and Georgia. And I got involved in 

this situation sort of when a family member 

developed cancer, and they understood the 

compensation under Program B, and later E that 
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used to be D, and it sort of got convoluted at 

times. So I got involved with it because the 

first one - I've got numerous clients now that 

are trying to get their compensation under 

this program, and it seemed like it's a 

standard operating procedure to deny 

everybody. The ones I've gotten, I'm going to 

share three cases with you which I'll try to 

be brief and real paraphrase it, but the 

information I'm gathering is, like you alluded 

Mr. Ziemer to the radiation exposure from the 

Japanese, you know, being 60 or 70 years ago, 

we're still under the same conclusion that we 

don't know how much radiation it takes to 

cause cancer. People can say there's a 

probability or propensity or anything we want 

to, but the scientists will admit we don't 

know. It could be a very small dose for one 

person, a large dose for another. We have 

Japanese that were close to ground zero that 

never developed cancer. We had some miles 

away that did. So they don't know. But the 
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clients I've got are very unique in that I 

look at some of them and the first one I'll 

share with you, a lady has had eight 

operations for skin cancer, very deep lesions 

and all of them were below her knees. Nowhere 

else on her body. Developing her scope of 

work, the only radiation exposure she had was 

below her feet. She was on 

assembly/disassembly. All the radiation, the 

corona of radiation source much like a space 

heater. The closer you get to it, the more 

you get. So as Mr. Spock said on Star Trek, 

it's just not logical that we've got a lady 

with eight surgeries below her knees, the 

radiation source was below her feet, but NIOSH 

says that a 7 percent probability that it 

caused. 

 I've got another lady with colon 

cancer. The propensity for a statistical 

inference drawn on that per capita is less 

than 1 percent for her age to have colon 

cancer. In her group of 60, there are 12 
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people with cancer. The numbers are off the 

chart when it relates to the per capita people 

that should get cancer. I've got another one 

with thyroid cancer. The ORA Medical Board 

said the probabilities are that radiation 

caused your cancer. They gave her a 42 

percent probability so she didn't get 

compensation. We are appealing it and they 

say we've got all the data, but I presented 

them two of her dosimeters that I've got in my 

office that they never had to analyze to 

review, so there's no way. 

 So I started doing my research 

again and found out that when NIOSH first 

started this reconstruction there were over 

9,000 boxes of old exposure data that was to 

be reviewed and entered in to draw these 

conclusions as to what the statistics would 

be. They had a computer-generated program 

that selected less than 200 of these 9,000 

boxes that they used to construct the data. 

If you're doing an analogy on apples from 
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Washington and you take a sample, you can sort 

of determine what the average size is, but to 

draw a statistical inference there's go to be 

some sort of relationship to what goes on. 

Well, radiation exposure, there is none. 

Every one of them is unique. I've sent in 

numerous affidavits from people where the 

self-reading dosimeters that these people 

carried with them - they called them "pencils" 

- that the HP people would show them how to 

reset them to zero so that they would not have 

to record the data. I've had affidavits where 

they say if you drop one of them it'll 

automatically set to zero. The NIOSH way of 

doing things based on the dose reconstruction 

is just, it's just so full of fallacies it 

can't be anything of substance that can deny 

these people the compensation they need. 

Here's my rule. If they can show that they 

were exposed to radiation they deserve 

compensation. They've got cancer, they were 

exposed because no one knows how much it takes 
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and no one knows what cancer is like except 

those people that got it. I don't have it. 

I'm representing people that do. We haven't 

got into court yet. I'm hoping that we never 

have to. Pay them. You can pay Wall Street 

$700 billion but you can't pay these people 

that's got cancer the benefits that they 

deserve? Something's wrong with the system 

and it's up to you to decide to change it. 

And anything I can do to help, let me know. 

Thank you. 

 (Applause.) 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: I don't think we're 

going to take on Wall Street, but we'll leave 

that up to the attorneys here I think. Thank 

you Sidney for that. Now I'm going to go to 

the phone lines. Is there anyone on the phone 

line that wishes to address - representing, 

from the local site here at Savannah River 

that wishes to speak? Hello? 

 MR. FUNK: Dr. Ziemer? 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Yes. 
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 MR. FUNK: This is John Funk. Is 

any time left? 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Yes. I want to see, 

John, if we first have any comments from 

others representing the local site here. Hang 

on just a moment, would you please? 

 MR. FUNK: Okay. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Anyone on the line 

that wishes to speak for Savannah River - from 

Savannah River? Okay. And I have another 

individual in the room here that has a comment 

perhaps. Yes, we have one more person here I 

think. Please come to the mic and you can 

identify yourself or not as you wish. 

 MR. DAVIS: Good evening. My name 

is Dan Lee Davis. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Haynes? 

 MR. DAVIS: My name is Dan Lee 

Davis. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Dan Lee Davis. 

 MR. DAVIS: Right. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Thank you. 
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 MR. DAVIS: I worked at Savannah 

River site 43 and a half years and I went 

there in `51 when they first started breaking 

soil. I was there and I stayed there 43 and a 

half years. And you can name it, the place, 

I've been there. So I can tell you all I've 

been to the mountain. I was a worker, was a 

common laborer. I did all the dirty stuff, 

name it. I went in some places, I put on two 

pair of coveralls and a lead suit. Have you 

ever known what a lead suit is? Had a lead 

suit on and there's no fresh air passed 

through over that. I mean, I was doing my 

job, see what I mean? And back in those days 

and times we weren't allowed to ask no 

questions. If there's a question you get writ 

up or out the game. You do it how you're told 

to do it and they have a sign on the wall 

there say keep your mouth zipped up. You 

leaving, you leave it here. Well, most of 

them I went with they're gone, they're dead. 

The Lord just let me live a little bit more 
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longer, probably he got something else for 

this old boy to do, so I'm trying to do it. 

I'm letting you all know where we came from. 

We went through the mill out there, everybody. 

 Everybody had to keep their mouth closed. We 

couldn't first call home sometime. I couldn't 

tell my wife or, you know. I tell her I work 

at the site and that's all. So I don't know 

if any of you brothers in here are with me or 

what. Those of you all were not there, so I 

from my stance. Yes, I had cancer too, 

prostate cancer, and right now I'm on four 

doctors trying to stay alive, trying to do the 

best I can. And like I said now, about the 

tritium and stuff, anything that you can't 

smell it, taste it, feel it, you don't know 

what you get. I have plenty of time. I went 

to Savannah twice. They even let me strip, 

put on a little suit, you know, like a doctor. 

 I got up under these big lights. I went up 

there twice in less than two months time. In 

the end they told me nothing. Said well, 
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that's something you got way back. Why they 

send me up there twice, up under them big old 

lights, turn me all over and what? Back in 

those days I wasn't allowed to tell anything. 

 We weren't allowed to tell nothing. So right 

now some of you all that's - the table done 

set for you all. You all can sit and pick and 

eat what they want to eat. When I was coming 

up the table wasn't set. We had to set it 

down there at SRS. And as I said, thank God 

just to let me live a few more days where I 

can tell you all, probably some of you all 

never went down there, just heard about it. 

It was a big place, big place in America 

because I was born and raised down there. 

That was my home and I still have nightmares. 

 I don't know. Like the cancer, I don't know 

where it goes, but right now the way I feel, I 

feel like I'm walking on the clock. I feel 

like, hey, that's where I've been. 

 So brother and sister, I'm sorry to 

tell you all we is blessed in some ways now 
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because back in the old days and time we were 

fighting war and what his name, Khrushchev, he 

came over here. You all remember when he put 

his Sputnik in the air and scared the heck out 

of America. I don't know whether you all know 

it or not. The first Sputnik was in the air 

was done by Russia. It flew overhead and it 

scared us. And hey, like I said, we were for 

the first time checking out the country. We 

didn't had no war here. Rest of the place 

didn't have a war, war in this country. 

Bobby, we took a lot of stuff on ourselves, 

went down to SRS. Like the man said, dropped 

the pencil and all that stuff. That's true. 

Because I was there. It wasn't a place I went 

in down there. Expecting to get hot. See, I 

was construction and anytime we wanted to 

repair something, construction had to go in 

there and repair it. Because they'd say you 

want to repair this building here. We'd do 

it. That's how we had to do. We had to go in 

there and clean it up, wash it up and put on 
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just what they said to put on. We didn't know 

what we were in. And asbestos. I used to 

play with asbestos like I played with a 

marble. We didn't know what was going on back 

in those days and time. What I found out was 

wrong when the cancer - Big Horse - you know, 

when Big Horse died with cancer, with 

asbestos, that's when SRS opened my eyes up. 

All the rest of them days, we didn't pay no 

attention to no asbestos. That's just like 

I'm putting on a jacket. Like lead. I used 

to just play with it. Never thought it would 

hurt us. So I'm just giving you all some of 

the - where I come from. I come from, I'm 

blessed to be living because all my coworkers, 

they're gone. Thank you. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Thank you very much. 

 Anyone else here in the assembly that has a 

comment? Yes, sir. John Funk on the line. 

We may need to pick you up tomorrow. I think 

you're going to be back with us, right? We 

have a couple more here locally that wish to 
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speak. Go ahead, sir. 

 MR. YOUNG: How are you? My name 

is Robert Young and I worked for Wackenhut 

Security at SRS. I worked out there for 24 

years. I can validate a lot of these stories. 

 I've had a lot of them myself. When I first 

started out there we played in our reactor 

hide and go seek many a nights while we were 

out there. I've been in all the areas because 

I had to have knowledge of all the areas, all 

the time, and I filed - I had lung cancer. I 

have only one lung and I no longer can keep up 

my standards to carry a weapon so I had to 

retire this year. But, I've been out there 

long enough and the TLD badges and all that, 

there's no way that they can reconstruct where 

all I've been and say no. Because my TLD came 

back every month no matter where I was or what 

I was doing, 0.001. And I could talk to 30 

other Wackenhutters, same thing, 0.001, for 24 

years. 

 So I've filed already and I've had 
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an interview and I'm only up to 13 percent 

saying that it was probable cause that it was 

out there. But nobody else in my family has 

ever had cancer. I'm the first one and it was 

small cell cancer, squamous cell. I don't 

know if that's one of them out there or not. 

But that's my two cents. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Okay, thank you sir. 

 MR. YOUNG: Thank you. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: And there was one 

other person? Yes, sir. Please, approach the 

mic. 

 MR. OVERCASH: I hadn't planned to 

say anything tonight. I was just going to 

listen. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Give us your name 

and then we'll - 

 MR. OVERCASH: Oh, Karl Overcash. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: O-V-E-R? 

 MR. OVERCASH: C-A-S-H. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Overcash, thank you. 

 MR. OVERCASH: That was before I 
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developed cancer. Now it's Undercash. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Yes, Undercash. 

Karl with a C or a K? 

 MR. OVERCASH: With a K. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: With a K. 

 MR. OVERCASH: Okay. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: For our court 

reporter. 

 MR. OVERCASH: Okay. I spent 40 

years with DuPont, four and a half years with 

the Westinghouse, then I spent another two 

years with Ebasco engineers consultant working 

at the Savannah River plant. Ninety percent 

of my time was spent in SRL. I worked in the 

tritium facility for a year. I worked when I 

first went there for a year till I could get 

my clearance because after 23 years - 23 

months in the military and being discharged, 

they could not get me clearance because I was 

dead. So it took a little while to clear that 

up, but once I got it then I was transferred 

to Savannah River to the laboratory and I 
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worked in research for the next 15 years. 

 In this period I not only did I do 

process development work, but I actually did a 

lot of cutting edge development work. I had a 

wing, a whole wing that I was over, and I had 

27 men that worked for me. We performed every 

kind of hazardous job that you can think of. 

This was not a facility that was built for 

this type of work, but it was protected 

individually in cells and glove boxes. Now, 

one of the things like the lady with the feet 

with problems, there's nothing to tell you how 

much you're getting to your feet when you're 

working at a glove box. How much shine is 

there back to you? It's not a direct thing. 

I also worked with the development of the 

californium for cancer research. My facility 

provided over 60 percent of the radiation for 

the whole SRL and they did not like me. 

 So they finally decided they were 

going to get rid of it and they went it to Oak 

Ridge because they didn't want to have the 
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stigma of the radiation. There's no way you 

can protect yourself 100 percent because 

there's a little here, a little there, a 

little here, a little there. 

 You can't go in and clean it up. 

It's just too hard. You have to wait on a two 

and a half year half life. And everyone no 

matter who they are, they come in, the 

radiation isn't that great from the neutrons, 

but if you're there over a period of time 

you're going to pick up the radiation. Now, 

we had very little problem with maintaining 

our radiation, but we had to swap people 

around constantly and to be perfectly honest I 

was the 28th member of the Work Group. It had 

to be because of the number of people required 

to do these jobs. So I was just, I was just 

like the people that worked for me, really. I 

was a technician just like they were because I 

did all the things that they did. Not quite 

as much as they did, but these are the things 

that you do to get the job done. We weren't 
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asked could we. It's just like Smith 

Kettering. They would call me and say I need 

new californium sources. When do you want 

them? They would tell me. I had to produce 

those to get them to them on time. 

 Now, sometimes I caught my boys 

doing little things that were not kosher. I 

did not appreciate it and I didn't like it. I 

told them, I said look, we can always spread 

it out. It would take twice as much 

radiation. I understood that, but still they 

should not have done these things and picked 

up an unusual amount, like you say, moving 

their badge. Now, this is one of the things 

you had to watch for and we watched for it and 

we tried our best. We had good health 

coverage. Our construction people, I had a 

wonderful relationship with those people. 

They came up and did jobs for me and they were 

always included. They were given the same 

training. They had to have the same training 

that we would have. We had to make sure that 
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they fully understood and actually I usurped 

their supervision quite often, and I had to 

explain this beforehand. Your supervision 

does not understand the problems that we have. 

 I will supervise your employees. He can sit 

out front. There's no problem there. I did 

what I could. And I'm not just the only one 

in SRL that did this. A lot of the other 

supervision there did the very same thing, to 

try to get the job done but get it as safely 

as possible. 

 I processed a unit there. The 

first thing I did was I made slugs for the 

reactor area that went to Hanford - I mean to, 

I think it went to Hanford. I can't remember. 

My mind went when I lost my hair. 

 Anyway, to another facility and 

they worked on them, and then they sent them 

back. Then I processed them again, then I 

gave them to the reactor area. They put them 

in. When they finished, they sent them to Oak 

Ridge. 
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 They processed them and sent me the 

californium-252 to make into an oxide to begin 

with. Then we developed a wire which was much 

simpler because manufacturing had problems 

with having wet cells. Very expensive. So we 

came up with a method of making wires. This 

meant they could have a dry cell. They didn't 

have to fool with liquid which just tickled 

them to death. Now, we made these 

wires. They were a little eighth of an inch, 

maybe 40 mil diameter, 30 mil, whatever they 

asked for. We gave them exactly what they 

want with the length and the concentration. I 

also did the old snap program, the first 

plutonium-238. I did that in a globe box 

upstairs and shipped out the first four snaps. 

 And Snap 1 was rated for 10 years and the 

latest gentleman is still going. 

 All of these things that we do we 

did because we were asked to do it. We did it 

to the best of our ability and I'm sure that 

we made mistakes. I feel so sorry for the 
NEAL R. GROSS

COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 

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young people that have cancer and problems. I 

have been fortunate. I had to wait until I 

started my second puberty. I was 81 when I 

received cancer. I went through the early 

stages when I first started talking about it. 

I went over to the doctor that they sent me to 

and he examined me. I walked out and when I 

went over to this specialist four or five 

months ago and walked in and handed my 

Medicare card, it took about three minutes. 

You're good, bye bye. The fellow that 

examined me to evaluate me the first time 

years before did it faster. He looked at my 

eyes, he looked in my mouth and he felt my 

throat, and that was all there was to it. I 

did not get the type of evaluation I thought I 

should have gotten. I've never applied for 

anything. I have always felt that if I needed 

it I could go get it, but I don't believe 

today these people are getting their fair 

share. And I think this is something that we 

should look into and you people have an 
NEAL R. GROSS

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opportunity to eradicate the road blocks that 

are put before them. And I thank you. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Thank you. 

 (Applause.) 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: I did promise one 

individual on the phone line that we would 

give her an opportunity to speak today. It's 

Terri Barrie. And Terri, are you on the line 

still? 

 (No verbal response.) 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Terri Barrie, are 

you on the line? 

 (No verbal response.) 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: John Funk? 

 MR. FUNK: Yes, I'm here Dr. 

Ziemer. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: John, are you going 

to be able to be with us during the public 

comment session tomorrow? 

 MR. FUNK: Yes, I can. I know you 

guys had a hard day today. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Well, we're past our 
NEAL R. GROSS

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time here. If you're agreeable we'll put you 

on tomorrow's schedule. 

 MR. FUNK: That's fine. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Okay. Thank you, 

John. 

 MR. FUNK: Thank you, sir. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Let me again check 

with Terri Barrie to see if she's on the line. 

Okay. Hopefully we'll check for Terri again 

tomorrow. Was there one other person? Okay. 

And Denise, we'll put you on tomorrow then if 

that's agreeable? 

 MS. DEGARMO: That's perfectly 

fine. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Are you good with 

that? 

 MS. DEGARMO: Yes. 

 CHAIR ZIEMER: Okay. And let me 

remind all of you there is another public 

comment session tomorrow so if any of you felt 

like you wanted to speak but maybe weren't 

quite ready or didn't quite have the courage 
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today, you have an opportunity tomorrow. We 

will be meeting all day tomorrow. You're 

welcome to be at any of our sessions as 

exciting as they are, or as interesting as 

they are, but the public comment session 

tomorrow is at 7:30. It's in the evening to 

accommodate folks who aren't able to come 

during the day, but you're all welcome to be 

back here and we'll be pleased to have you 

with us at that time. So we're recessed till 

tomorrow morning. 

 (Whereupon, the above-entitled 

matter went off the record at 6:32 p.m.)