THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES 

PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE 

CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION 

NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH 

convenes the 

EIGHTEENTH MEETING 

ADVISORY BOARD ON RADIATION AND WORKER HEALTH 

 VOLUME II 

 The verbatim transcript of the Meeting of the Advisory 

Board on Radiation and Worker Health held at The Adams 

Mark St. Louis, 315 Chestnut Street, St. Louis, 

Missouri, on October 29, 2003. 
 C O N T E N T S

 

 October 29, 2003 

REGISTRATION AND WELCOME 

 Dr. Paul Ziemer, Chair. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 

 

ADMINISTRATIVE HOUSEKEEPING 

 Ms. Cori Homer, NIOSH; Dr. Paul Ziemer, Chair; Mr. Larry 

 Elliott, Executive Secretary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 

SITE PROFILE UPDATES 

 Dr. Jim Neton, NIOSH. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35 ....... 

WORKING GROUP ON OPTIONS FOR EVALUATING INTERVIEWS 

 Dr. Jim Melius, Workgroup Chair . . . . . . . . . . . 119 

RESEARCH ISSUES 

 Mr. Russ Henshaw, NIOSH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122 

PUBLIC COMMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148 

 

ADJOURN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208 

 

COURT REPORTER'S CERTIFICATION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .209 
 TRANSCRIPT LEGEND

 The following transcript contains quoted material. 

Such material is reproduced as read or spoken. 

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

unintentional or purposeful interruption of a sentence. An 

ellipsis (. . .) indicates halting speech or an unfinished 

sentence in dialogue or omission(s) of word(s) when reading 

written material. 

 In the following transcript (sic) denotes an incorrect 

usage or pronunciation of a word which is transcribed in its 

original form as reported. 

 In the following transcript (phonetically) indicates a 

phonetic spelling of the word if no confirmation of the 

correct spelling is available. 

 In the following transcript "uh-huh" represents an 

affirmative response, and "uh-uh" represents a negative 

response. 

 In the following transcript "*" denotes a spelling 

based on phonetics, without reference available. 

 In the following transcript (inaudible) signifies 

speaker failure, usually failure to use a microphone. 
 P A R T I C I P A N T S

 (By Group, in Alphabetical Order) 

 BOARD MEMBERS

CHAIR

ZIEMER, Paul L., Ph.D. 

Professor Emeritus 

School of Health Sciences 

Purdue University 

Lafayette, Indiana 

EXECUTIVE SECRETARY

ELLIOTT, Larry J.

Director, Office of Compensation Analysis and Support 

National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health 

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Cincinnati, Ohio 

 

 

MEMBERSHIP

ANDRADE, Antonio, Ph.D. 

Group Leader 

Radiation Protection Services Group 

Los Alamos National Laboratory 

Los Alamos, New Mexico 

 

DeHART, Roy Lynch, M.D., M.P.H. 

Director 

The Vanderbilt Center for Occupational and Environmental 

Medicine 

Professor of Medicine 

Nashville, Tennessee 

ESPINOSA, Richard Lee 

Sheet Metal Workers Union Local #49 

Johnson Controls 

Los Alamos National Laboratory 

Espanola, New Mexico 

GIBSON, Michael H. 

President 

Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical, and Energy Union 

Local 5-4200 

Miamisburg, Ohio 

GRIFFON, Mark A. 

President 

Creative Pollution Solutions, Inc. 

Salem, New Hampshire 
MELIUS, James Malcom, M.D., Ph.D. 

Director 

New York State Laborers' Health and Safety Trust Fund 

Albany, New York 

MUNN, Wanda I. 

Senior Nuclear Engineer (Retired) 

Richland, Washington 

OWENS, Charles Leon 

President 

Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical, and Energy Union 

Local 5-550 

Paducah, Kentucky 

PRESLEY, Robert W. 

Special Projects Engineer 

BWXT Y12 National Security Complex 

Clinton, Tennessee 

ROESSLER, Genevieve S., Ph.D. 

Professor Emeritus 

University of Florida 

Elysian, Minnesota 

 AGENDA SPEAKERS

Dr. Jim Neton, NIOSH 

Dr. Jim Melius, Workgroup Chair 

Mr. Russ Henshaw, NIOSH 

 STAFF/VENDORS

CORI HOMER, Committee Management Specialist, NIOSH 

STEVEN RAY GREEN, Certified Merit Court Reporter 
 AUDIENCE PARTICIPANTS

NANCY ADAMS 

WILLIAM M. BECKNER 

DEBORAH BERKEY 

DENISE BROCK 

EVELYN COFFELT 

GERI L. DREILING 

CLARISSA EATON 

DONNA EHLMANN 

CHRIS ELLISON 

WILLIAM C. FRANSON 

DAVID GWEN 

CHRIS HADDOX 

RUSS HENSHAW 

LIZ HOMOKI-TITUS 

THOMAS M. HORGAN 

PATRICK KELLY 

JAMES KNUDSEN 

JEFF KOTSCH 

ROBERT LEIFIED 

CAROL LUEDDECKE 

HAROLD LUEDDECKE 

ROBERT MCGALERRA 

DANIEL W. MCKEEL 

LOUISE MCKEEL 

RICHARD MILLER 

CHERYL MONTGOMERY 

EDWARD MUECKE 

DAVID NAIMON 

STEVE POWELL 

LOUISE S. PRESLEY 

TOM ROLLOW 

D.M. SCHAEFFER 

SARA SHIPLEY 

BARBARA A. SMIDDY 

FLORENCE STROPER 

DELORES STUCKENSCHNEIDER 

DAVE SUNDIN 

STAN/ANN SZTUKOWSKI 

BOB TABOR 

BRIAN THOMAS 

PAMELA TODOROVICH 

RICHARD TOOHEY 

DAVID UTTERBACK 

JIM WERNER 

MARILYN ZIEMER 
 7 

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

2 

3 (8:30 a.m.) 

4 REGISTRATION AND WELCOME

5 DR. ZIEMER: (Inaudible)... housekeeping, the first 

6 item of which will be the minutes that we deferred 

7 action on yesterday. So Board members, if you'd please 

8 open to that section in your packet -- you're not -- 

9 you're not getting any sound? 

10 MR. PRESLEY: There's no sound that's coming out in the 

11 room at all. 

12 MS. MUNN: What happened to the folks? 

13 DR. ZIEMER: Sounds like it's working. 

14 DR. MELIUS: It's not feeding in -- 

15 DR. ZIEMER: It's not feeding, okay. I think it's 

16 simply not feeding to the recorder's -- oh, it is? 

17 MR. ELLIOTT: Now he's got it. 

18 DR. ZIEMER: Testing one, two -- okay, Ray? Okay, 

19 thank you. 

20 ADMINISTRATIVE HOUSEKEEPING

21 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. So I'm calling the meeting back to 
 8 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 order now. We're going to begin with housekeeping and 

2 administrative items. I ask the Board members to go to 

3 that part of your packet that includes the minutes from 

4 our last meeting. 

5 Tony is missing. 

6 MR. ELLIOTT: Tony and Leon. 

7 DR. ZIEMER: I'd like to ask if there are any additions 

8 or corrections to the minutes of the August 18th-19th 

9 meeting. And here I'm looking for substantive changes. 

10 If you have minor, editorial -- spelling or 

11 punctuation corrections, you can give us those 

12 separately, but substantive changes in the minutes. 

13 Are there none? 

14 MS. MUNN: None that I saw. 

15 DR. ZIEMER: There appear to be none. Motion to 

16 approve the minutes as distributed? 

17 MR. PRESLEY: So moved. 

18 DR. ZIEMER: So moved. Seconded? 

19 MR. ESPINOSA: Second. 

20 DR. ZIEMER: All in favor, aye? 

21 (Affirmative responses) 

22 DR. ZIEMER: Any opposed? 
 9 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 (No responses) 

2 DR. ZIEMER: Then we'll consider the minutes approved. 

3 I do want to tell you that we may go ahead and prepare 

4 an abbreviated version of these, but at least content5 wise they are approved. 

6 Larry, you had some information -- or Cori has some 

7 information concerning Board correspondence, I believe 

8 -- are you going to cover that? 

9 MR. ELLIOTT: Well, I'll cover the Board 

10 correspondence. Cori has some other items to discuss. 

11 And while she's coming to the fore, I'll just touch on 

12 this issue. 

13 I believe that some members of the Board are receiving 

14 correspondence -- perhaps from claimants, perhaps not 

15 from claimants, for -- just letters of interest. And I 

16 don't know how you're handling those. I just wanted to 

17 make an offer to you that we would be glad to -- to 

18 help with the response to those upon your behalf, or 

19 help provide -- if -- it depends upon what the 

20 inquiry's all about. If it's about status of a 

21 particular case, we certainly want to respond to those 

22 -- those inquiries and provide status. We do so when 
 10 

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1 the letters come to us or when the inquiries come 

2 directly to us. So we should perhaps talk about how 

3 you want to approach this. Certainly it's at your 

4 discretion, but we'd like to have a sense of what kind 

5 of inquiries you are receiving and if you want us to 

6 assist you in preparing responses or handling the 

7 response for you and providing a copy back to you as an 

8 individual and a copy to the Board, we will do so. But 

9 I think -- we feel a need to get a little bit more on 

10 top of this. 

11 We had a little discussion about this with a couple of 

12 Board members at the August meeting in Cincinnati, and 

13 I felt that we needed to bring it up in front of the 

14 whole Board. And so I would entertain your thoughts 

15 and how you'd like to proceed. 

16 DR. ZIEMER: I know that I've received such letters. I 

17 presume others have. They may be a variety of things, 

18 people simply inquiring about the program or issues 

19 related to the rule making, that sort of thing. As a 

20 starting point, I believe it's important that all such 

21 letters be answered, that we not ignore them. And you 

22 would have to make a judgment, I think, as to whether 
 11 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 it's appropriate for you as the Board member to answer 

2 it, or if it's something pertaining to a particular 

3 case where you would have to refer it to NIOSH 

4 directly. 

5 It seems to me that it would be helpful -- unless 

6 there's some obvious reason not to, but normally it 

7 would be helpful to make NIOSH staff aware of such 

8 inquiries, as well. I know that typically I would copy 

9 Larry my response so that he's aware of such 

10 interchanges. 

11 Roy, you have a comment? 

12 DR. DEHART: I was one of the ones that brought that 

13 discussion up I think in August, and had received a 

14 number of letters. And I'm doing exactly what you're 

15 suggesting, and that is I do respond to the originator 

16 of the letter, but I say in there that the letter is 

17 being forwarded to NIOSH for proper response. 

18 DR. ZIEMER: Gen Roessler? 

19 DR. ROESSLER: (Off microphone) I have received a phone 

20 call one time (Inaudible) -- 

21 UNIDENTIFIED: It's not on. 

22 (Pause) 
 12 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 MR. ELLIOTT: You might want to tap it and see if 

2 it's... 

3 DR. ROESSLER: How's that? Now it's on. I was -- I 

4 was not there when the phone call came in and then I 

5 did receive a FAX from the person. It's a rather long 

6 FAX and I haven't even gone through it yet to evaluate 

7 it. So my question would be, what would you recommend 

8 -- I can see a letter being fairly easy to answer. 

9 With regard to a phone call, how -- how would you 

10 recommend handling that? I think -- my feeling on this 

11 is that -- I don't want to get involved. I want to 

12 refer the person to NIOSH because that's where the 

13 activity's taking place. But on the other hand, I 

14 don't want to be cold and -- and non-responsive because 

15 certainly we all share their concerns. 

16 DR. ZIEMER: Let me start with that one because I had 

17 such a phone call this past week and it was rather 

18 extensive. My -- and sometimes it takes a lot of 

19 talking before you figure out exactly whether the 

20 person is even possibly eligible for this program or 

21 not, and it's not really my determination to make, but 

22 you have to hear the people out. And I did -- I did 
 13 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 several things in this case. One was to refer the 

2 person to the web site and indicate that there's 

3 information there, both about NIOSH and Labor, that 

4 will help them determine eligibility. This individual 

5 had some issues relating to medical diagnosis and, you 

6 know, I had to assure him that I was not a medical 

7 doctor nor could I diagnose things by telephone. But 

8 in any event, providing information about the program, 

9 referring to the web site is helpful, I think. I also 

10 told this individual that he needs to be in contact 

11 with the Labor Department folks and they can determine, 

12 from where he worked and the years and those things, 

13 his eligibility for the program, as well. But I think 

14 we can mainly refer people. 

15 As you say, it's difficult on -- I think on the phone, 

16 partially because these things tend to ramble, and you 

17 get into all kinds of information that may or may not 

18 be pertinent. It's hard to cull it out sometimes. But 

19 I think there's no easy answer to any of that. It's -- 

20 you sort of -- it's a judgment call. But I think -- I 

21 think the most important thing is probably referring 

22 them to the right people where they can get the 
 14 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 information, and that's got to be Labor or NIOSH, 

2 basically, I would say. 

3 MS. MUNN: I suppose I've been very fortunate. I 

4 haven't received any written correspondence, but I 

5 frequently receive verbal inquiries and telephone calls 

6 about the program. And I make it a point to, first and 

7 foremost, point out to them that I am a member of the 

8 policy group which is overseeing the process, that I 

9 don't have anything to do with their claim, because I 

10 think it's important for people to understand that they 

11 are not talking to someone who can exert influence on 

12 their behalf with respect to their claim. 

13 My experience has been like yours, Paul, that most 

14 people want to tell you something about what they think 

15 their situation is. But I -- I always make a point to 

16 emphasize what our function is, and that we're -- it's 

17 our job to see that the process meets the law and is 

18 handled in a legitimate manner, and that it's the 

19 responsibility of the Department of Labor to show them 

20 what must be done, what steps they must go through. 

21 I also assure them that it's a lengthy process and 

22 point out that I'm sure they want it to be done 
 15 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 correctly, and so therefore time is one of the things 

2 that they must expect, and give them the correct 

3 contact information. That, so far, has worked well for 

4 me. 

5 MR. ELLIOTT: I would add to that -- I think that's an 

6 excellent approach, and it goes back to what -- if you 

7 recall the advice you were given from counsel about 

8 acting as an individual member, not on behalf of the 

9 Board, when you interact with people. 

10 I think -- we certainly want to help you. I understand 

11 your interest to respond to these people, to the 

12 claimants, to the people who provide inquiries to you. 

13 And we don't want to stifle that. I would add this, 

14 also, that in some cases, if the claimant -- if it is a 

15 claimant and they want to provide information to you, 

16 or even the letter that they may send to you, may be 

17 appropriate for addition to their administrative 

18 record. And so that's another reason why we would like 

19 to capture these and add them to the administrative 

20 records so that it is complete. 

21 So again, we stand ready to help in any way you would 

22 like for us to assist. We can prepare the response, 
 16 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 give it back to you and you can send it out, or we can 

2 send it out -- prepare a response, send it out and copy 

3 you. So any way an individual member would like us to 

4 work with you, we will. 

5 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Any further comments on this issue? 

6 (No responses) 

7 DR. ZIEMER: It appears not. Larry, final comment? 

8 MR. ELLIOTT: You can -- if you have a phone call that 

9 you would like for us to interact with the caller on, 

10 you can send it to me, call it to my attention, or you 

11 can call it to Chris Ellison's attention or Dave 

12 Sundin's -- any of the three of us at any point in time 

13 should be available to you. And so if I'm not there, 

14 you know, you could tap Dave Sundin or you could tap 

15 Chris Ellison. 

16 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. That's very helpful and I 

17 think -- even if your response is simply to tell the 

18 person that you are forwarding their information and 

19 let them know that they're at least being -- the 

20 issue's being addressed for them. 

21 Cori, you have some additional housekeeping things for 

22 us? 
 17 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 MS. HOMER: It appears as though we have our microphone 

2 problems worked out. Good morning. 

3 Just wanted to let you know that tomorrow I'll need 

4 your e-mails listing your time. Go ahead and send 

5 those to Larry, cc'ing me. I'll want that broken out 

6 by work group time -- whatever work groups that you 

7 spent time on -- separate from your Board time and your 

8 prep time. 

9 Also wanted to remind you on the record that -- not to 

10 make your own flight arrangements, if at all possible. 

11 We can't guarantee that you'll be reimbursed. And 

12 that when on government travel, which you are on 

13 government travel when you're attending a Board 

14 meeting, that we really need to do your travel orders. 

15 And one last thing that I can think of is -- every year 

16 this time of year we file an annual report to GSA. 

17 That covers the activities and the accomplishments of 

18 the Board on an annual basis, and it should be final 

19 and published by sometime mid to late November, maybe 

20 early December. If you're interested in a copy of 

21 that, I can certainly provide that. 

22 Any questions? 
 18 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 DR. ZIEMER: Cori, is that annual report a fairly 

2 extensive or a brief -- you know, a couple of pager or 

3 what does it look like? 

4 MS. HOMER: It's approximately four pages, five pages. 

5 This year there were some additional requirements, so 

6 I can't say for sure what format that's going to take, 

7 but it's -- includes just generally the financial 

8 information and -- and what the activities of the Board 

9 were for the year. 

10 DR. ZIEMER: And you would have it in electronic form, 

11 as well, I presume -- or would you? 

12 MS. HOMER: I'm not entirely certain if I'll be able to 

13 access it on the web and can provide you with that web 

14 site, or if I'll have to send you a hard copy. It 

15 depends on what committee management allows me to have. 

16 DR. ZIEMER: Uh-huh. Maybe I'll just take a moment and 

17 ask the Board members if they are interested in copies. 

18 Is there anyone -- would everyone like a copy? This 

19 might be an easy way to do it, let's just -- probably. 

20 Why don't we just plan to make -- 

21 MS. HOMER: All right, as soon as it's -- 

22 DR. ZIEMER: -- make them available. If they can be 
 19 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 made available electronically, I suppose that's the 

2 quickest and easiest way to do it. 

3 MS. HOMER: Okay. 

4 DR. ZIEMER: Otherwise, hard copy. Okay, thank you. 

5 MS. HOMER: Okay. 

6 DR. ZIEMER: Any other items for the -- 

7 UNIDENTIFIED: Talk about next meeting at this point. 

8 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah. 

9 MS. HOMER: Next meeting? 

10 DR. ZIEMER: Let's go ahead and talk about next 

11 meeting. I think the date and place is set, so we can 

12 -- 

13 MS. HOMER: Okay, we're in Las Vegas -- 

14 DR. ZIEMER: -- let you give us the information. 

15 MS. HOMER: -- tentatively, December 9th and 10th. I 

16 have a tentative contract with the Westin, which is a 

17 brand new property in Las Vegas. They're not even open 

18 yet. We might be their very first meeting. As far as 

19 I know, that's -- that could very well be the case. 

20 We'll be about a quarter-mile off the Strip, so if 

21 you'd care to gamble or see the sights, we won't be far 

22 from -- from the Strip at all and -- and I understand 
 20 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 that Bob is seeing if he can work up a visit for us. 

2 DR. ZIEMER: Bob, you may want to mention what you're 

3 looking at in terms of a visit to the Test Site, which 

4 is really one of the reasons for going to Las Vegas. 

5 MR. PRESLEY: If we can set it up, the tour will be 

6 probably on Thursday. It will be all day long. It's 

7 an hour and a half to the Test Site from Vegas, an hour 

8 and a half back, put you four or five hours out on the 

9 Test Site, so it's an extra day, any way you do it. 

10 What I'm going to do is set it up for staff personnel 

11 and the Board, and if we have any spouses, I will at 

12 this time ask if we can take spouses with us, so we'll 

13 -- we'll put that in and I'll talk to Mr. Flanagan next 

14 week and see what we can do. 

15 MS. HOMER: Okay. 

16 MR. PRESLEY: And then I'll send everybody an e-mail 

17 and we'll let you know. 

18 MS. HOMER: All right. 

19 MR. PRESLEY: How many people are interested in going, 

20 staffers that are here? 

21 DR. ZIEMER: This is NIOSH staff first, right? You're 

22 looking at NIOSH staff -- or Labor staff, too? 
 21 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 MR. ELLIOTT: Yeah. 

2 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, any government staff people. 

3 MR. PRESLEY: And then the Board. Okay? 

4 DR. ZIEMER: How many on the Board? 

5 MR. PRESLEY: Okay, so we're talking 25 to 30 people. 

6 That'll be -- see what they've got -- a bus available. 

7 DR. ZIEMER: And if it's -- if we're able to set it up, 

8 details will be mailed and we'll get -- get a point 

9 where you will confirm your participation, as well as a 

10 spouse, if -- 

11 MR. PRESLEY: Correct. 

12 MS. HOMER: If you'd like, Bob, I can go ahead and 

13 clear those names for you, collect them, put them on a 

14 listing. And that will also help me with the rooming 

15 list. 

16 MR. PRESLEY: Uh-huh, okay. 

17 MS. HOMER: Okay? Anything else? 

18 MR. PRESLEY: What we'll do is we'll need names and 

19 Socials. 

20 MS. HOMER: Okay. 

21 MR. PRESLEY: And I'll get back with you the first of 

22 next week. 
 22 

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1 MS. HOMER: All right. So if your spouse is 

2 interested, if you could provide me with their Social 

3 Security number, that would be helpful. 

4 MR. ELLIOTT: I would also like to know if there are 

5 any agenda items that you want me to address for the 

6 December meeting. Certainly we'll have -- have a face7 to-face with your contractor. There'll be the portion 

8 to negotiate -- or to deal with the task orders in that 

9 piece, but other agenda items that you want me to 

10 explore to add. 

11 DR. ZIEMER: One thing on the face-to-face with the 

12 contractor, unless something has changed since 

13 yesterday, I understand that we can't mandate that the 

14 contractor be there since the contractor doesn't have a 

15 task order yet and money to support travel, so the 

16 face-to-face could conceivably be a phone-to-phone or -

17 - 

18 MR. ELLIOTT: We'll -- we're going to have to look into 

19 this and how we can make this a face-to-face, yeah. 

20 DR. MELIUS: (Off microphone) Just -- one more -- 

21 MR. ELLIOTT: We may have to put -- we may have to put 

22 one task in front of them just to get this -- 
 23 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 DR. ZIEMER: Travel task for -- 

2 MR. ELLIOTT: Travel task, so we'll do that for you. 

3 DR. MELIUS: (Off microphone) For the agenda, we'll 

4 have a follow-up -- I mean I'll talk about a little bit 

5 -- but a follow-up with the interview work group, so 

6 we'll need some time. 

7 DR. ZIEMER: So the meeting with the contractor, the 

8 face-to-- or the follow-up interview work group, two 

9 items right at the start. Mark? 

10 MR. GRIFFON: This is a little bit of a follow-up from 

11 yesterday, but I'm wondering if it would be useful to 

12 the Board to have some sort of presentation on IMBA or 

13 -- or -- you know, at some point I think a training and 

14 -- well, we haven't even received the software. I have 

15 a earlier copy, but I don't think anyone else has -- 

16 has seen it or used it, so I think at some point -- 

17 DR. ZIEMER: Can that be done there? 

18 MR. ELLIOTT: We'll look into that. 

19 DR. ZIEMER: Look into that. And other items, if 

20 there's something that occurs to you between now and -- 

21 I'm not sure when, the next month, actually, we'll 

22 probably be working on this agenda and so it's always 
 24 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 somewhat in a state of flux, almost up to the last 

2 week, as things are added or dropped. But if you have 

3 some particular thing you think should be on the 

4 agenda, let Larry know or let me know, 'cause we'll be 

5 -- 

6 MR. ELLIOTT: We'll probably try to get the Federal 

7 Register notice out by November 15th, and with that 

8 we'll have to have a draft agenda. That agenda tends 

9 to change, of course, but we'd like to have it as firm 

10 as possible. 

11 DR. ZIEMER: But we have several -- several weeks -- 

12 MR. ELLIOTT: You have several weeks. 

13 DR. ZIEMER: -- lead time on that. Okay. Any other 

14 housekeeping items we need to address right now? 

15 MR. ELLIOTT: I have one more. I just want to announce 

16 that we try to bring the best possible people to bear 

17 on the work that you have, and I think it's appropriate 

18 to let you know that the recorder/transcriptionist that 

19 you have today working with you is the second-time 

20 National Champion court recorder. 

21 (Applause) 

22 MR. ELLIOTT: I'm further told that if he wins again 
 25 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 next year, he will be Grand National Champion, and 

2 there are only two others in the -- I guess the world 

3 like that. So -- 

4 DR. ZIEMER: Maybe the universe. 

5 MR. ELLIOTT: So congratulations, Ray. 

6 (Applause) 

7 DR. ZIEMER: Indeed, we congratulate you, Ray. That's 

8 great. Nothing but the best. Right? 

9 MS. MUNN: Absolutely. 

10 DR. ZIEMER: I believe that concludes our 

11 administrative items for this morning. We're ready to 

12 proceed on the agenda. Oh, I'm sorry, Wanda. You have 

13 an item. 

14 MS. MUNN: Are we not going to make any -- are we not 

15 going to have any discussion about meetings following 

16 the Las Vegas one? I -- there's some concern in my 

17 mind -- 

18 DR. ZIEMER: Yes, we can -- we could do that now. 

19 Perhaps -- yes, we'll do it now. 

20 MR. ELLIOTT: You have a calendar that was provided I 

21 think that goes through -- January, 2004 through 

22 December, and I'm sure Cori's going to ask you to 
 26 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 provide that, but if you pull that out now, maybe we 

2 can get those marked up. 

3 MS. HOMER: (Off microphone) Would you like to start 

4 with the location of our next meeting? 

5 MR. ELLIOTT: You want to start with location, Cori's 

6 asking, or do you want to start with dates? 

7 DR. ZIEMER: Let's start with dates, see when -- when 

8 people are available. 

9 If we -- we'll be meeting December 9th and 10th. It's 

10 unlikely we would need to meet before the first of 

11 February. Whether -- and when we meet next may also 

12 depend somewhat on what we decide to do on the issue of 

13 a subcommittee, as well. But let us proceed as if 

14 we're going to meet and get some times blocked out. 

15 That's usually easier to do that now and -- and delete 

16 them later, if we need to, rather than try to add them 

17 after people's schedules fill up. 

18 Does anybody believe that we would need to meet earlier 

19 than February 1st? 

20 MR. GRIFFON: Yeah, I think early -- early February 

21 would probably be good -- early to mid-February would 

22 probably be good, assuming in December we approve the 
 27 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 tasks. I think there's a couple of deliverables in the 

2 task that are fairly fast turn-around on the methods 

3 that they'll use and things like that, so we want to be 

4 able to meet quickly and review that and get them going 

5 on the actual work. 

6 DR. ZIEMER: All right. Gen? 

7 DR. ROESSLER: The week of February 8th is the Health 

8 Physics Society mid-year meeting. I would assume that 

9 -- 

10 DR. ZIEMER: That's in Augusta. 

11 DR. ROESSLER: -- would involve quite a few people. 

12 MR. ELLIOTT: Where's that? 

13 DR. ZIEMER: Augusta, Georgia. 

14 DR. ROESSLER: Augusta. 

15 MR. ELLIOTT: Yeah, but what dates? 

16 DR. ZIEMER: 8th through 11th. 

17 MR. ESPINOSA: Augusta sounds good to me. 

18 DR. ZIEMER: That's true, it is in the vicinity of the 

19 Savannah River Plant, so that if someone -- if we did 

20 that, the meeting would almost have to be on the 12th 

21 and 13th, as far as participation of some of the Board 

22 members who are active in that group, and some of the 
 28 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 staff, as well. 

2 DR. ROESSLER: Yeah, I'm committed on the 12th, the day 

3 after the meeting. 

4 DR. ZIEMER: You have a conflict. 

5 DR. ROESSLER: On the 12th. 

6 MS. MUNN: I would think 13th and 14th. 

7 DR. ZIEMER: That takes you into a Saturday. 

8 MS. MUNN: I'm looking at the wrong month. 

9 MR. ELLIOTT: We can do that. If you want to meet on 

10 a Saturday, we can do that. My staff is going to kill 

11 me, but we can do that. 

12 DR. ZIEMER: Larry says that it's doable. Wanda, you 

13 have another comment on that? 

14 MS. MUNN: No -- 

15 DR. ZIEMER: You have your flag up. 

16 MS. MUNN: -- the first week is problematical for me, 

17 but -- 

18 DR. ZIEMER: Is the Board interested in meeting in 

19 Augusta on that date? Shall we block that out? 

20 MR. ELLIOTT: The 13th and the 14th? 

21 DR. ZIEMER: Uh-huh. Gen, are you out of the loop all 

22 day on the 12th? 
 29 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 DR. ROESSLER: I think so. 

2 DR. ZIEMER: The concern I have there is that those who 

3 are attending the meeting 8th to 11th, both staff and -

4 - and Board, then are cooling their heels for a day in 

5 between. 

6 DR. ROESSLER: We're having a Health Physics Society 

7 editor's meeting and I really need to be at that. 

8 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah. 

9 MS. MUNN: Perhaps we could set up a tour of the site 

10 that day. 

11 DR. MELIUS: What about the week before? 

12 DR. ROESSLER: That's a good plan. 

13 MS. MUNN: That's good. 

14 MR. ELLIOTT: The 5th and the 6th? 

15 DR. ZIEMER: The 5th and the 6th, and then stay over. 

16 That would be all right. 

17 DR. MELIUS: And people that want to stay over can stay 

18 over. 

19 DR. ZIEMER: Uh-huh, 'cause I think the meeting 

20 actually typically kicks off on a Sunday, doesn't it -- 

21 Sunday afternoon or evening? 

22 DR. ROESSLER: For some people, officers and so on, it 
 30 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 might involve Saturday. I think Dr. Toohey is an 

2 officer, so he might be involved on Saturday. 

3 DR. ZIEMER: Yes, but our -- but our meeting -- I know 

4 it's important for Rich to be here, but since he's not 

5 a Board member, we can't -- we can't use his calendar 

6 as... 

7 MS. MUNN: I'm committed 2nd, 3rd and 4th. I can't 

8 travel till the 5th, but I guess I could travel -- 

9 DR. ZIEMER: The 5th and 6th would work? 

10 MS. MUNN: The 5th and 6th would work, probably. I'll 

11 just leave early. 

12 DR. ZIEMER: Is the 5th and 6th okay? 

13 MR. ELLIOTT: The 5th and 6th would probably work best 

14 for staff and my wife. Since the 14th is Valentine's 

15 Day, I'm going to get beat up two different ways, one 

16 from staff and one from home. 

17 DR. ZIEMER: Good point. 

18 MR. ELLIOTT: But 5th and 6th would be probably the 

19 ideal for us, but we'll do whatever you want. 

20 DR. ZIEMER: Let's set aside the 5th and the 6th. 

21 MS. HOMER: Any other dates? 

22 DR. ZIEMER: Augusta. 
 31 

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1 MS. HOMER: Any other dates besides the 5th and 6th 

2 during the month of February? Any other locations, 

3 possibly? 

4 DR. ZIEMER: For February? You mean as a fall-back? 

5 MS. HOMER: As a fall-back. 

6 MR. ESPINOSA: D.C.? 

7 MS. MUNN: D.C. will always work for me. 

8 MS. HOMER: The week of the 16th, possibly? 

9 MR. ELLIOTT: No. 

10 MS. HOMER: No? 

11 MR. ELLIOTT: Can't do that. 

12 MS. HOMER: Week of the 23rd, no? 

13 MR. ELLIOTT: Pardon me? 

14 MS. HOMER: Week of the 23rd. 

15 MS. MUNN: That'll work for me. 

16 DR. ZIEMER: Who has conflicts the week of the 23rd? 

17 DR. MELIUS: I have them the beginning of the week, but 

18 Thursday and Friday, 26th and 27th, I'm okay on. 

19 MR. PRESLEY: If we start slipping out that far, we're 

20 getting into conflict on our contract -- our 

21 deliverables. 

22 MS. HOMER: Okay. The 5th and 6th in Augusta? 
 32 

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1 MR. PRESLEY: Last week in January would be better, I 

2 think. 

3 DR. ZIEMER: Let's just stick with 5th and 6th and see 

4 -- 

5 MS. HOMER: Okay. 

6 DR. ZIEMER: -- see how we can do. Then we would 

7 probably be looking at April. April -- late April, 

8 early May? Let's -- 

9 MR. ELLIOTT: Not the 15th -- or the -- 

10 DR. ZIEMER: Not the 15th of April? 

11 MR. ELLIOTT: Not the 5th through the 16th -- 5th 

12 through the 16th is out. 

13 MS. MUNN: And then the following week, the 19th, would 

14 be fun here. 

15 DR. ZIEMER: The week of April 19th, how does that 

16 look? Any -- any conflicts? 

17 (No responses) 

18 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Why don't we tentatively block off 

19 20, 21 and 22, to give Cori a little flexibility. 

20 MS. HOMER: Okay. 

21 DR. ZIEMER: And let's talk about location. 

22 MS. MUNN: If you want to come out to Hanford, that's a 
 33 

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1 good time of year to do it. 

2 DR. ROESSLER: Yeah, sounds good. Can you give a tour? 

3 MS. MUNN: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. 

4 DR. ZIEMER: In fact, that would be a good reason to 

5 stay the extra day. Plus you need a couple days to get 

6 there and a couple days to get back. 

7 MS. MUNN: You need a day to get there, you need a day 

8 to get back, uh-huh. 

9 DR. ZIEMER: Well, we're sort of overdue on visiting 

10 the Hanford area and -- and interacting with the folks 

11 there. Shall we try for Hanford in late April? 

12 MS. MUNN: Fine. 

13 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Now it occurs to me -- so -- so 

14 we're sort of -- have the next three meetings lined up 

15 here. We also need to gain the experience with our 

16 contractor and -- and see where we're going on the 

17 subcommittee. I'm wondering if it would be -- whether 

18 there would be any need to go beyond April for the 

19 moment. 

20 MR. PRESLEY: It'd be nice to go ahead and book a week. 

21 DR. MELIUS: I really -- like we talked about 

22 yesterday, I think it would be helpful if we -- the 
 34 

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1 next meeting we talk about the subcommittee issue, 

2 figure that out in terms of a schedule of how we 

3 interact and what's the most efficient -- 

4 DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

5 DR. MELIUS: -- way of doing that. Then I think we 

6 could block out some more meetings and -- 

7 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah. 

8 DR. MELIUS: -- get a better sense of what the schedule 

9 would be. 'Cause it may very well be that quarterly 

10 meetings -- 

11 DR. ZIEMER: Well, basically this takes care of the 

12 next six months, for all practical purposes, as far as 

13 having time slots available 'cause it takes us into 

14 May. 

15 Okay. Agreed? 

16 DR. MELIUS: I just have one other -- Cori, can you 

17 just make sure Henry Anderson -- 

18 MS. HOMER: Absolutely. 

19 DR. MELIUS: -- hears about these dates 'cause -- 

20 MS. HOMER: Yes, I will. 

21 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Thank you very much. Let us 

22 proceed now to the next topic, which is -- 
 35 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 MR. GRIFFON: Paul -- 

2 DR. ZIEMER: -- an update on the site profiles. Yes, 

3 Mark? 

4 MR. GRIFFON: Just one more thing. I'm not sure if 

5 this is housekeeping or what, but our next meeting -- 

6 I'm interested in the tour of the Test Site, even 

7 though I've had some -- I'm just wondering if -- if 

8 that's going to give us enough time to review these 

9 tasks -- the task reviews may be fairly straightforward 

10 and, you know -- but do we have enough time on the 

11 agenda -- 

12 MR. ELLIOTT: Two days. 

13 MR. GRIFFON: -- with that tour -- 

14 DR. ZIEMER: We have two days, and that's going to be -

15 - 

16 MR. GRIFFON: But the tour's a half a day or is it -- 

17 DR. ZIEMER: -- kind of our main focus. We will -- we 

18 will make enough time on the agenda for that. 

19 MR. ELLIOTT: I think Bob's proposing the tour -- you 

20 need a full day for the tour -- 

21 MR. GRIFFON: Oh, okay. 

22 MR. ELLIOTT: -- so that was the -- 
 36 

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1 DR. ZIEMER: We have two days, plus the tour. 

2 MR. GRIFFON: Oh, sorry. 

3 MR. ELLIOTT: So the 11th, I think -- 

4 DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

5 MR. ELLIOTT: We're there the 9th and 10th, and then 

6 the 11th would be the tour day. 

7 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, we're not taking one of the Board 

8 days for the tour. The tour's extra. 

9 MR. GRIFFON: Thank you. 

10 SITE PROFILE UPDATES

11 DR. ZIEMER: Right. Okay, thanks. So let's call on 

12 Jim Neton now for the profile -- site profile update. 

13 DR. NETON: Well, good morning. It's a pleasure for me 

14 to get up here this morning and address an area that 

15 we've invested, along with our ORAU contractor, a 

16 significant amount of resources over the last three or 

17 four months, and that is the site profiles for the 

18 individual sites so that we could proceed with the dose 

19 reconstructions as expeditiously as possible. 

20 I'm going to give a few slides -- a brief overview of 

21 where we are with this, and then I'd like to spend the 

22 bulk of my time going over the Mallinckrodt Chemical 
 37 

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1 Works site profile that was just completed this Friday. 

2 Just as a reminder, I think I showed this slide last 

3 time, but you know, site profiles support dose 

4 reconstruction. These are limited scope documents, 

5 they are specific for a site -- or even a facility at a 

6 site -- and they are used by dose reconstructors as a 

7 road map to figure out, in conjunction with the other 

8 available data for a claimant, such as the claimant 

9 interview information that may have been provided in 

10 the claimant's submission or the Department of Energy 

11 individual dose records that may have been provided, 

12 either by the Department of Energy or obtained through 

13 site data captures -- to put all those pieces together 

14 and to make some sense of what they're looking at when 

15 it comes time to estimate the exposures to the workers 

16 during their career. 

17 They are site-specific. It gets -- they involve 

18 characterization of monitoring programs, chemical 

19 forms, processes, all the things that you might need -- 

20 all the things that might end up affecting the dose 

21 reconstruction. But they're really good in the sense 

22 that they help minimize interpretation. And as you 
 38 

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1 know, we have about 130 health physicists slated to 

2 work on these dose reconstructions, so we really need 

3 to have some consistency among them, and this helps 

4 bring that to the dose reconstruction. 

5 Again, it's basically used as a handbook, and I would 

6 point out these are dynamic documents. They're not 

7 static. As soon as a revision's out there, we try to 

8 put it on our web site as soon as possible. We accept 

9 comments and any comments or information that we 

10 receive after that, we are committing to updating the 

11 Technical Basis Document or site profile and going back 

12 in time and evaluating what effect those changes may 

13 have had on dose reconstructions that were done prior 

14 to the new information being available. 

15 A little general background information that's 

16 transpired since the last time we met. All completed 

17 profiles can be avail-- are viewed at our web site, 

18 cdc.gov\niosh\ocas, and as we discussed yesterday, 

19 comments are encouraged and can be made to the NIOSH 

20 docket office. If you look under the site profile 

21 itself, at the very top of the introduction to the site 

22 profile, there is a docket address that you can mail 
 39 

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1 to, and that information will be considered by us, as 

2 well as posted on our web site to be viewed by anyone 

3 who visits the site. 

4 We also are in the process of arranging briefings with 

5 union members, representatives at each of the sites, as 

6 available, to solicit input. We mentioned yesterday 

7 that we are scheduled to visit Savannah River on 

8 November 11th to provide the -- it's now at Rev 1 of 

9 the Savannah River Technical Basis Document or site 

10 profile, and we are currently in the process of making 

11 arrangements to visit Hanford. Just recently we've 

12 completed all six pieces of the Hanford Technical Basis 

13 Document -- or the six Technical Basis Documents that 

14 make up the site profile, so we're looking forward to 

15 going out there and presenting that in the Richland 

16 area. 

17 The team members who are on the individual site 

18 profiles are now on the ORAU web site, so if one goes 

19 to oraucoc.org -- that's Oak Ridge Associated 

20 Universities, Cincinnati Operations Center.org, there 

21 is a bar now you can click on that says site profiles, 

22 and all the team members that make up each site profile 
 40 

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1 team are listed there, along with their associated 

2 conflict of interest statements. That is an addition 

3 since the last time we met. 

4 Okay. Where are we right now? We have 15 DOE 

5 facilities being worked on in parallel, so I think the 

6 number right now is somewhere around 50 or 60 health 

7 physicists and associated staff actively going out and 

8 pulling data together to write these documents. Each 

9 of these documents alone typically runs around 100 to 

10 150 pages. 

11 We have a target date of the completion for these DOE 

12 facilities by the end of the calendar year. Although, 

13 as I mentioned yesterday, if there are circumstances 

14 beyond our control, they may slip some. But we are 

15 committed to trying to keep as close to that schedule 

16 as possible. 

17 When those 15 documents are completed, we estimate that 

18 they will address about 77 percent of the claims 

19 currently in our possession. So at that point we will 

20 have a road map to at least begin reconstructing the 

21 doses for the vast majority of the claimants that we 

22 have in-house today. 
 41 

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1 There's some new documents coming out that I'll 

2 probably like to discuss at future meetings, but these 

3 are complex-wide documents being developed for DOE and 

4 AWE facilities. These are Technical Basis Documents 

5 that address, on a broad scale, dose reconstructions 

6 for certain classes of workers at DOE facilities, those 

7 who may have never been monitored and whose monitoring 

8 records have no -- no results. We find that we can 

9 group these together and use some characteristic 

10 assumptions, over-estimating in certain areas, to try 

11 to evaluation (sic) as quickly as possible. It's 

12 really an efficiency process measure that we've 

13 adopted. 

14 Likewise for AWE facilities, many of these facilities 

15 were uranium facilities -- almost all of them -- so 

16 they have a lot of characteristics in common. So we 

17 would just take a uranium facility Technical Basis 

18 Document that already exists and -- and update it with 

19 a technical annex or a bulletin to address issues that 

20 are unique just to that facility. 

21 There are a number of TBDs completed thus far. I think 

22 you've -- I think we discussed yesterday that Bethlehem 
 42 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 Steel, Blockson Chemical, Mallinckrodt Chemical Works 

2 and Savannah River are already on our web site. The 

3 total documents are out there. Hanford has just been 

4 completed. We are assembling the six pieces -- the 

5 Technical Basis Documents that make the profile -- that 

6 constitute the profile, and we'll have those on our web 

7 site as soon as we get those in one concatenated 

8 version with an official signed page. We expect to 

9 have that next week sometime. 

10 There are a few other pieces. As we develop the 

11 individual chapters of the site profile, we also 

12 approve them. But until we get the complete document 

13 and assemble it, we're not posting it on our web site 

14 at this time. 

15 Okay. I'd like to spend, as I mentioned, the majority 

16 of my time talking about the site profile for 

17 Mallinckrodt. And I'd like to acknowledge at the 

18 outset that Oak Ridge Associated Universities put this 

19 together, principally Janet Westbrook was the site 

20 expert on this document, with assistance from Jerry 

21 Anderson and I'm sure a cast of others doing data 

22 capture efforts and reviews. I would say that although 
 43 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 ORAU put this together and authored it, this was -- 

2 this document was reviewed in parallel with NIOSH 

3 staff, so we take complete responsibility for the 

4 content of this document. And once the document is 

5 issued, it is approved by NIOSH for use, not until that 

6 time. 

7 As I mentioned, this document was just completed 

8 Friday. We're doing our best to aggressively get these 

9 things out as quickly as possible. And I think that 

10 the document was posted on our web site within several 

11 hours after I signed the final document. So we're 

12 committed to getting things out there in the public for 

13 review as soon as possible. 

14 The document is a 128-page document -- sorry, Dr. -- 

15 DR. ZIEMER: Let me interrupt here. Mike, you have a 

16 question here at this point? Yeah. 

17 MR. GIBSON: The health physicists and those that are 

18 doing the site profiles, how many of them are Q-cleared 

19 and are they going through classified documents? And 

20 if so, how do you take that relevant data and get it 

21 into the Tech Basis -- or the site profile? 

22 DR. NETON: (Off microphone) Good question. We do 
 44 

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1 have a number of Q-cleared health physicists both on 

2 the ORAU staff and the NIOSH staff (Inaudible) -- 

3 DR. ZIEMER: I think your mike may be slipping there, 

4 Jim. Can you hook it up there maybe a little closer to 

5 your neck region? 

6 DR. NETON: Is that better? We have a number of Q7 cleared individuals both on the NIOSH staff and the 

8 ORAU staff. I think right now NIOSH has, out of our 

9 ten health physicists, three -- three folks that have Q 

10 clearances, plus we have ability within NIOSH to draw 

11 from other Q-cleared individuals. And I might have to 

12 defer to ORAU on the number of currently Q-cleared 

13 people. I think it's on the order of 15, 20. It's a 

14 fairly large number. We are actively working on 

15 getting those -- some of those clearances transferred 

16 over to work on our project. As some of you may know, 

17 an active Q clearance for a Department of Energy 

18 facility is just that, it's for a specific function, 

19 and we need to get those cleared, and we work very 

20 closely with Office of Worker Advocacy in DOE to effect 

21 those transfers. 

22 That was the first question. The second part was -- 
 45 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 oh, how do we address Q-cleared data if we run into it. 

2 Thus far, we have not had any data that we looked at 

3 that has -- well, we've had data that has not been 

4 classified, so we've had to have Q-cleared folks go 

5 into these rooms and look through the data and see if 

6 any of that information may be applicable to the site 

7 profiles. We've done that. We've gone in and looked 

8 through storage vaults, and thus far we've not found 

9 information that was of a classified nature that needed 

10 to be included in the dose reconstruction. 

11 There is another issue, though, with UCNI data. UCNI 

12 data is not classified, but it is essentially 

13 considered sensitive and sort of on a need-to-know 

14 basis, almost -- similar to Privacy Act type data, so 

15 you don't put it out there unless it's -- it's there. 

16 At one of the facilities we're actually going through 

17 an UCNI review to make sure that we can put it out 

18 there on our web site. We can have it in the Technical 

19 Basis Document and use it, but there's a question of 

20 whether or not we could post all that information on 

21 our web site, for instance. And right now we're going 

22 through that process. So far we have not held up 
 46 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 anything. 

2 Larry, did -- 

3 MR. ELLIOTT: Could -- you need to specify UCNI for the 

4 general audience. 

5 DR. NETON: Yeah, I was going to, but I can never 

6 remember the darned acronym. It's Un-- 

7 MR. ELLIOTT: Bob Presley can help us, I'm sure. 

8 DR. NETON: Yeah, Bob, UCNI, un-- 

9 MR. PRESLEY: Just a minute -- 

10 DR. NETON: --classified nuclear information, or 

11 something like that? 

12 MR. PRESLEY: -- I'm going to give you the official 

13 thing right here. 

14 DR. NETON: Okay. I didn't want to mis-speak, so I was 

15 trying to skirt the issue. 

16 MR. PRESLEY: Let me get the right one here. 

17 Unclassified Controlled Nuclear Information. 

18 DR. NETON: Right. Thank you, Bob. I always forget 

19 the Controlled. 

20 MR. ELLIOTT: I would also add that as we're going 

21 through the vaults and the secured areas -- at Y-12 

22 we're having a little bit of difficulty getting 
 47 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 information that we think is necessary. We're working 

2 with classification officers. In the research program 

3 we have established a procedure where we work with the 

4 classification officers and come up with data or 

5 information that is couched in a way that we can use it 

6 and it's not classified. We've had success in that 

7 regard and we're using that same approach in this case 

8 where we can. If we come against a wall where we 

9 cannot successfully get the information in a 

10 declassified form, that's going to present a dilemma to 

11 us and we'll have to cross that bridge when we come to 

12 it. But thus far, we've been successful in working 

13 this through this way -- in a way that we can use the 

14 information that doesn't present a security risk. 

15 DR. ZIEMER: Jim Melius? 

16 DR. MELIUS: Just a long -- just to follow up on that, 

17 I think it would -- at the very least, if you do run 

18 into that situation, there ought to be some way of 

19 informing people within the document or -- 

20 DR. NETON: Oh, absolutely. 

21 MR. ELLIOTT: Absolutely. 

22 DR. MELIUS: -- whatever so -- so that that's -- so 
 48 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 that you don't end up with a situation where you're 

2 relying on data that's not available, nobody knows 

3 that, and -- 

4 MR. ELLIOTT: Absolutely, and we will do that. And in 

5 fact, if we come to that point and we have to have the 

6 information for a case -- to finally adjudicate a case 

7 or in an appeal situation, we will work with -- I 

8 believe the Department of Justice has experience in 

9 this, and the Department of Energy, and we'll work with 

10 them in order to make sure that the information is used 

11 in the adjudication of the case. But it'll be done in 

12 a way that it protects the National security interests. 

13 DR. ZIEMER: Mike, has your question been answered? 

14 Yeah. Thank you. 

15 DR. NETON: Thanks, Larry. I'd just add that I think 

16 we have a fairly good working relationship with the 

17 classification and security people at this point and 

18 it's working -- well, it's working fairly well for us. 

19 Okay. The site profile for Mallinckrodt is typical in 

20 length of a site profile. It's 128 pages long. That 

21 includes 40 pages of tables, though. There are 

22 extensive tables in this document that contain results 
 49 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 of air sampling measurements, bioassay measurements, 

2 radon measurements -- all the kinds of nuts and bolts 

3 information you think you would get in a typical site 

4 profile. It has 150 different references. Forty of 

5 these references are from the former Manhattan 

6 Engineering District/Atomic Energy Commission. As 

7 you'd expect, they had a very active involvement in the 

8 Mallinckrodt facility, conducting a lot of health 

9 physics monitoring type programs. As many of you know, 

10 the former Health and Safety Laboratory within the AEC 

11 was very active and involved, was sort of serving as 

12 the corporate health physicists, if you will, of these 

13 facilities that did not have in-house practical 

14 experience handling radioactive materials. 

15 The contents of the document are outlined in -- I have 

16 seven chapters listed here. There's actually eight. 

17 The bottom chapter on residual contamination is 

18 currently marked reserved, and I'll talk about that in 

19 a little while. But as -- you can see them outlined 

20 here, and what I'd like to do from this point forward 

21 is actually briefly discuss what -- as best I can in 

22 the time allotted; I mean we could probably spend most 
 50 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 of the day talking about this -- what's addressed in 

2 each of these individual chapters. 

3 The purpose of course is to assist the reconstruction 

4 of radiation doses to workers at the Mallinckrodt 

5 facility. And I should emphasize that this is the 

6 downtown St. Louis facility only. It does not address 

7 the St. Louis Airport Storage Site, it does not address 

8 the Hematite facility that was operated by United 

9 Nuclear Corporation. So it's really just the 

10 collection of buildings, the 60 or so buildings that 

11 were used at one time in the Destrehan and Broadway 

12 Street complex. 

13 The major plants addressed, although there are other 

14 buildings -- ancillary buildings -- are Plants 1, 2, 4, 

15 6, 6E, 7 and 7E. These were the main production plants 

16 that were in existence to essentially make uranium ore. 

17 The Mallinckrodt facility was a chemical facility that 

18 the DOE -- well, not the DOE, but the Manhattan 

19 Engineering District converted into a uranium refinery 

20 -- is the best way to describe it. The history of the 

21 site runs from April, 1942 through July of 1958. 

22 As I mentioned, there was also residual contamination 
 51 

 NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES 

1 that we are obligated to include in a worker's dose 

2 reconstruction, and that would run from the period of 

3 1959 through 1995 when the buildings were officially 

4 decontaminated and I think they were torn down in 1996 

5 or 7, I forget, but we believe the relevant period to 

6 complete the residual contamination is through 1995. 

7 That section is listed as reserved, if you go on our 

8 web site, which just means that, you know, we're not 

9 quite there yet. We have a draft chapter, but we're 

10 still going through and formally reviewing it and 

11 making sure that it makes sense. It's based on this -- 

12 some of you health physicists may know, the ResRad 

13 model, the residual radioactivity model, and we're 

14 fine-tuning the calculations. And as soon as that's 

15 available, we'll get it out there. 

16 Okay. The introduction chapter is what you think it 

17 does. It goes through and talks about what happened 

18 there. As I mentioned, Mallinckrodt (sic) Engineering 

19 District asked Mallinckrodt in '42 to start making 

20 uranium for the weapons effort. So they took a 

21 chemical factory and started making uranium. And it's 

22 amazing to me that in April of '42 they started to 
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1 research how they could make this, and by July, just 

2 about three months later, almost a ton of uranium -- 

3 uranium dioxide was being produced per day. That's a 

4 pretty massive increase. The facility started off with 

5 about 25 workers working on this production. It 

6 ultimately ballooned to I think about 1,500 or 

7 thereabouts. 

8 I'll get into this a little bit later, but they started 

9 producing uranium trioxide, uranium dioxide, and then 

10 they ended up going to UF4. These are all intermediate 

11 steps along the way to making uranium metal. You start 

12 with uranium ore, and eventually you want to get metal, 

13 and so all these chemical compounds are just 

14 intermediate products on the way to making the desired 

15 product, which is the metal. 

16 In 1953 the first full uranium plant was started, 

17 although uranium metal was made before that, but here -

18 - here we had a plant that was officially constructed 

19 solely for the purpose of making uranium metal. 

20 So through the history of the site it's estimated about 

21 50,000 tons of natural uranium products were produced 

22 at this facility. So it was a pretty large-scale 
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1 operation, very early. This essentially set the stage 

2 for the production of uranium at most facilities in the 

3 country. I mean this was really the place where the 

4 process was developed. 

5 Full scale health physics programs, though, didn't 

6 start at this facility till 1947, so we have a period 

7 of time from '42 to '47 where we have very sketchy 

8 monitoring data. That does present a bit of a problem, 

9 but hopefully I can discuss as we go the methods that 

10 we use to infer doses that are missing. After all, that 

11 is the purpose of dose reconstruction is to try to 

12 reconstruct exposures that were either monitored 

13 inadequately or not at all. 

14 Film badging, radiation exposure badges on the workers, 

15 were begun in late 1945, with a urine sampling program 

16 to measure how much uranium was inhaled by the workers 

17 later on in that decade. Both Mallinckrodt and the 

18 Atomic Energy Commission performed periodic air sample 

19 and surveys at these facilities, which included the air 

20 sampling, radon breath analysis, uranium in urine, 

21 primarily. 

22 The Mallinckrodt numbers are sparser. There are fewer 
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1 numbers than the AEC numbers, and in addition, the 

2 Atomic Energy Commission -- as I mentioned, the Health 

3 and Safety Laboratory numbers tend to be much better 

4 documented. They worked with standard operating 

5 procedures. They tended to be preserved better. In 

6 general, I would also say that the health and safety or 

7 AEC numbers are larger, are higher in value than the 

8 Mallinckrodt workers. Because they were better 

9 documented and they tended to be claimant-favorable, 

10 more reliance is placed in this document on the AEC 

11 numbers. 

12 As I mentioned, external dose records -- external 

13 dosimetry was started in about '46, missing from '42 to 

14 '45. We have pretty good external dose records after 

15 that. I believe we have somewhere in the vicinity of 

16 approaching 20,000 film badge measurements at this 

17 facility. 

18 The internal dose records are mostly available from '48 

19 on, and are missing from '42 to '47. So the large 

20 problem with Mallinckrodt is this very early time 

21 period, and particularly when it was fairly -- I would 

22 characterize it as a somewhat dirty operation. I mean 
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1 their controls were -- were really not there in the 

2 very early days, although we do know what the processes 

3 were. I mean they were not that different than what 

4 happened later on. 

5 So the purpose of the document is to provide a context 

6 for interpretation of these existing records, all these 

7 film badge and urine sample records, which I think we 

8 have 40,000 urine sample records available and about 

9 2,500 to 2,600 individual radon area measurements. So 

10 it provides a context for interpreting the records, 

11 along with how do we determine missed dose for periods 

12 when records just don't exist. 

13 The chapter on history of site use summarizes the 

14 chronology of the use of the site. It characterizes 

15 the approximately 60 buildings that were used at the 

16 site, mostly -- it lists the building and there's some 

17 annotation of what process was done in those buildings 

18 over what time periods, a brief description of the work 

19 performed. Also it does a characterization of the 

20 expansion of the facilities. The original two 

21 buildings, Plant 1 and 2, were existing facilities that 

22 were converted to operations, and as they added 
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1 facilities to expand, that's characterized in this 

2 document. 

3 There is a section on decontamination surveys. 

4 Periodically during the operation, decontamination was 

5 performed, starting as early as 1948 and '50. 

6 Although, as you can imagine, the decontamination was 

7 not done to current modern standards. The levels were 

8 still fairly high, and these buildings at that point 

9 were left for unrestricted use, even though by today's 

10 standards they'd probably be controlled areas in the 

11 modern protection programs. So I mentioned the 

12 facility decontamination started in '48 and '50, but 

13 they were further decontaminated in 1954 and '70 for 

14 unrestricted use. The final decontamination took place 

15 in the 1990s and the buildings were demolished in 1997. 

16 Recycling was performed -- of uranium -- starting 

17 around 1957. And I just want to point out that when I 

18 talk about recycling, I'm really talking about just 

19 taking scrap materials -- they would take billets and 

20 crop them, cut them off. The sawdust, the saw 

21 shavings. Uranium was a very valuable commodity back 

22 then and they didn't just want to throw it in the 
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1 trash, so they would take uranium scrap, redigest it in 

2 nitric acid and run it through to recover it because it 

3 was such a valuable commodity. We can find no evidence 

4 at Mallinckrodt that recycled uranium was run through 

5 this facility. We've looked fairly -- on a fairly 

6 detailed basis, and to our knowledge, the so-called 

7 recycled uranium that was run through a reactor, that 

8 contained transuranic material, does not appear to have 

9 been moved through the Mallinckrodt facility. That is 

10 true of the Weldon Springs facility, which we'll 

11 address in a later Technical Basis Document. But as 

12 far as we can tell, there were no plutonium residues 

13 run through Mallinckrodt. 

14 The waste residues were taken to, as I mentioned 

15 previously, the St. Louis Airport Storage Site, known 

16 as SLAP or SLAPS. These were the filter cakes, that 

17 sort of thing. When they filtered the residues after 

18 the extraction process, they made these cake materials 

19 and they were all shipped out to the St. Louis 

20 facility. It's not really clear who monitored these 

21 workers and actually who they worked for. Manhattan 

22 Engineering District actually operated the SLAPS 
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1 facility, I think through 1953, and then turned it over 

2 to Mallinckrodt. And there are some indications of 

3 urine samples for guards there, as well as drivers. 

4 But since it's not clear, we're sort of reserving that 

5 and we're going to treat the SLAPS facility as an annex 

6 to the Mallinckrodt document as we become more 

7 comfortable with what was really done there and who was 

8 monitoring. 

9 I mentioned this was a uranium refinery. It's a basic 

10 -- on paper, it's a fairly simple chemical process, but 

11 they did this on a very massive scale. The idea was to 

12 take uranium that was mined out of the ground and 

13 convert it to purified uranium metal. And to do so, it 

14 started with a digestion process in the nitric acid. 

15 You take uranium, digest it in nitric acid, add a 

16 little sulfuric acid, and that would precipitate out 

17 some of the radioactive impurities in there such as 

18 radium and lead. So -- and then when you filter out 

19 those precipitates, you end up with some -- some 

20 sludge, some slag. That becomes a problem. This will 

21 become apparent why this is an issue later, because 

22 those impurities really constitute some of the most 
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1 serious radiological hazards at the Mallinckrodt 

2 facility. Now I'm not down-playing the hazard of 

3 uranium, but radium-bearing materials were very, very 

4 hazardous. 

5 So you would precipitate out the radium, then you're 

6 left with the uranium in solution, uranyl nitrate. 

7 Then the whole trick is to just dry that, convert it to 

8 uranium trioxide, which is known in the jargon as 

9 orange oxide. Continue to heat it, it turns into brown 

10 oxide, UO2, and then eventually uranium tetrafluoride, 

11 called green salt, and then uranium metal. I don't 

12 want to make uranium chemists out of you, but it's sort 

13 of important to understand the little steps as we go to 

14 understand the hazards associated with exposures here. 

15 Just briefly, there were three periods of the operation 

16 that I'd like to characterize. The wartime period, '42 

17 to '45, was characterized by the processing of 

18 primarily partially-milled ores. And what I mean 

19 partially-milled, the uranium was mined from the ground 

20 and then cleaned up, to a certain extent. It wasn't 

21 shipped in its raw, bulk form to Mallinckrodt in the 

22 early days. Most of these ores came from Canada at 
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1 that time. And they were, in this period, basically 

2 developing the production -- the process. How do you 

3 make your UO3, the UO2, that sort of thing. 

4 What's significant here is the early postwar period, 

5 around '45, late '44 or '45. The demand for production 

6 increased dramatically, and to do -- to increase 

7 production, they not only increased plant size, but 

8 they also started processing what's known as just 

9 pitchblende ore. It's essentially uranium ore mined 

10 right out of the ground. It was not purified in any 

11 way, shape or form. Because of that, it contained a 

12 lot of these impurities, these radium daughters, radon, 

13 the whole -- the whole -- the K chain of the uranium 

14 series was present there. So during this period is 

15 when the real radiological hazards started to increase. 

16 Through these three periods of course you have 

17 increasing radiologic controls that are documented in 

18 here. There were more -- more ventilation added, 

19 respiratory protection, that sort of thing. But this 

20 is the main period where we've introduced a lot of 

21 hazards. 

22 After 1950 or so, Mallinckrodt no longer processed raw 
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1 pitchblende type ore. I won't say never, but the 

2 reliance on raw ore went down, and most of the ore that 

3 came in there had already been purified so that these 

4 radiological hazards were somewhat diminished, although 

5 not totally. I mean this is a trend thing. It's not -

6 - this is not a cut period. I'm just trying to 

7 indicate what happened during the site. 

8 There were other processes at this site, at 

9 Mallinckrodt. I mentioned the uranium recovery 

10 operation where they were trying to reprocess scraps. 

11 There was also an interesting production operation, 

12 what appears to be a one-shot deal, but thorium 230 is 

13 one of these residues in the ore when you precipitate 

14 it out. For some reason, Mound facility had a need for 

15 thorium 230, which is an alpha emitter. I could 

16 speculate, but I won't, as to why Mound needed that. 

17 But they ended up producing I think about -- they 

18 actually went and recovered a lot of the slag materials 

19 from the St. Louis Airport facility, brought it back 

20 and recovered I think -- it's anywhere from 100 to 500 

21 grams of thorium 230, which is a lot of material. They 

22 had -- went through literally tons, I think, of slag to 
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1 yield that level of thorium 230. That happened in 

2 about the '55 to '57 time frame, so workers in that 

3 time frame were definitely potentially exposed to this 

4 -- in this thorium process. 

5 Ores and other feed forms, I mentioned that previously. 

6 You know, Mallinckrodt processed either pure ore out 

7 of the ground or it was uranium that had already been 

8 through a mill, that had been cleaned up to some 

9 extent. And that, by definition, drove the 

10 radiological hazards at the facility. 

11 Residues and other effluents, I think I basically 

12 covered that -- you know, the slag going to the St. 

13 Louis facility -- the effluents from the site, 

14 principally uranium effluents leaving the site. It was 

15 not a very clean operation. These effluents are not 

16 necessarily a real occupational hazard. They may be 

17 more of an environmental hazard. 

18 Okay. The chapter on radiological conditions, 

19 considerations and available date -- that's a long 

20 title, it's a mouthful, but this, as a health 

21 physicist, is where you really start getting into some 

22 of the dose -- dosimetry aspects of what's going on. 
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1 Back then the units were milliRoentgen. The rem didn't 

2 exist in the early time frame. And in fact, it was 

3 milliRoentgen for gamma exposure and a unit called 

4 millirep for beta exposures. A rep is pretty close to 

5 a rad, it's .93 rad. These were the units that were 

6 used. The exposure limits back then were much higher 

7 than they currently are, though. In the wartime era, 

8 the tolerance level for exposure to gamma radiation was 

9 700 milliRoentgen per week. That would equate, on an 

10 annual basis, to 34 rem, which is seven times the 

11 current occupational exposure limit in this country and 

12 -- actually five rem is the legal limit, but in 

13 Department of Energy facilities, two is the practical 

14 limit. So exposures were much higher for -- this is 

15 for whole-body gamma exposure. For extremity -- the 

16 hands, they were concerned about hand exposures -- the 

17 limit was 3,500 millirep per week, which roughly 

18 equates to 175 rem per year, contrasted to the current 

19 legal limit of 50 rem per year to the extremities. So 

20 some pretty high allowable exposures back then. 

21 As time went on, the document describes how these 

22 limits dropped. Eventually they dropped down to 150 
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1 millirem per week as a tolerance level. 

2 The internal dose considerations are sort of an 

3 interesting story. The tolerance level for internal 

4 dosimetry back in the wartime period was 500 micrograms 

5 per cubic meter for insoluble uranium and 150 

6 micrograms per cubic meter for soluble. That dropped 

7 down to an AEC preferred level of 1949 to 50 micrograms 

8 per cubic meter for soluble, which was about 70 DPM per 

9 cubic meter, as their preferred level. 

10 There's a long history behind this, and it's a somewhat 

11 confusing path that this unit took. And there's a 

12 whole appendix in this document that attempts to 

13 describe the history of the tolerance level for uranium 

14 exposures because it is confusing. You'll see 

15 different units and numbers all over the place. For 

16 the health physicists in the crowd, it's complicated by 

17 the use of what's known as a special Curie, which I 

18 won't go into, but it -- just suffice it to say that 

19 it's an interesting development and I think it's pretty 

20 well tracked in this document. 

21 Internal dose considerations are documented, particle 

22 size, solubility, composition considerations. A number 
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1 of particle size studies were done. If you looked 

2 through the literature in the past, some of you may 

3 recognize Mort Lipman as a father in the field of 

4 respiratory inhalation toxicology, air sampling, that 

5 sort of thing. A number of studies were done there, 

6 primarily to demonstrate that the Mallinckrodt ore, the 

7 uranium ore, is dense material. So even if you have -- 

8 for a given particle size, it is so dense that it 

9 behaves like a much larger particle when you inhale it. 

10 It's just -- it's a mass density-based thing, so -- 

11 but the data are conflicting. There are four or five 

12 studies that were reviewed that have the size all over 

13 the board, although there is a tendency to indicate the 

14 particles are larger than what you would think. We are 

15 defaulting in this document to the ICRP-66 five-micron 

16 particle size, unless we have other information. 

17 Airborne dust levels were measured at the facility, and 

18 they're characterized -- I'll talk a little bit about 

19 those later. 

20 Respiratory use was sort of recommended, but we can't 

21 demonstrate that it was ever even exercised with any 

22 degree of authority. And I can't imagine there'll be a 
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1 dose reconstruction where we're going to be able to 

2 take credit for respiratory use, even if it was. So 

3 there'll be a claimant-favorable assumption made in 

4 most cases that respiratory protection was not worn -- 

5 unless there's some document that pops out of the blue 

6 that says here is the certified program and here is how 

7 we controlled it, but I don't see that happening. 

8 Radon measurements -- we are assuming that radon -- 

9 radon gas itself is not really the hazard from 

10 breathing radon. It is the progeny, the daughters, the 

11 particulate that develop in the air itself that you 

12 breathe. So one has to make an assumption about what 

13 percentage of the progeny are in equilibrium with the 

14 gas. We are using a very claimant-favorable assumption 

15 that there's a 100 percent equilibrium in the internal 

16 dose calculations at every calculation we do. 

17 Okay. We have a lot of information in this document on 

18 surface contamination levels. That alone does not 

19 indicate very much that there was an inhalation hazard, 

20 but it does give you a clue as to which areas were 

21 potentially generated airborne radioactivity and 

22 depositing on surfaces. There are fixed and removable 
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1 contamination levels. We have, as I mentioned, 40,000 

2 urine samples. I'm not exactly sure how many breath 

3 radon samples we have. I know they were taking 500 

4 samples a month at one point. 

5 This is an interesting technique. It was used 

6 originally on the radium dial painters, some of you may 

7 be aware, where it's -- it's not radon exposure 

8 monitoring. It's how much radium you breathed in and 

9 subsequently deposit either in your lungs or skeleton. 

10 Eventually the radium in your body will evolve radon 

11 gas that you breathe out, so that's an indirect 

12 measurement of your radium body burdens. So there were 

13 large numbers of these done by the Health and Safety 

14 Laboratory in New York City. 

15 Not much in the area of whole body counting and lung 

16 counts. There were a few people that were referred to 

17 whole body counters to some local facilities, but not 

18 much there. 

19 External dose considerations, of course it's beta, 

20 gamma and other non-specific beta-gamma exposures. The 

21 gamma exposures arose from not only the uranium -- 

22 which is not a really intense gamma-emitter, but as I 
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1 mentioned, these radium products that were in the 

2 impure ore. Radium, and particularly the progeny of 

3 the radium, emit fairly intense photons, so that one 

4 could receive -- barrels were measured that were as 

5 high as 50 millirem -- milliRoentgen per hour around 

6 this Belgian Congo ore that was very high in these 

7 impurities, up to greater than 100 milliRoentgen per 

8 hour with the extracted slag materials. So we have a 

9 situation here -- again, after post-1944 -- where there 

10 are some very seriously elevated gamma exposures in the 

11 facility. 

12 The beta exposures principally arise from the -- one of 

13 the progeny of uranium. There's a very energetic beta 

14 associated with protactinium 234M, principally an 

15 extremity exposure issue, and a skin. When one 

16 produces uranium billets, the impurities in the uranium 

17 tend to migrate to the surface, and so you have a 

18 cropping, a top slag material that is very intensely 

19 elevated in these beta products so that the hands would 

20 receive very large exposures. And in fact, I think in 

21 '49 or thereabouts this became a recognized problem and 

22 ring dosimeters started to be added to try to estimate 
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1 what the exposures to the extremities were at this 

2 facility, and we have some data to that effect. 

3 Neutron exposure's not really an issue at Mallinckrodt. 

4 It is possible to generate neutrons in uranium 

5 tetrafluoride with an alpha end reaction, but this is 

6 very low enriched uranium and it's not considered in 

7 this document to be a real radiological hazard. 

8 Okay, moving through, I mentioned we have upwards -- 

9 approaching 20,000 film badges. We don't really have 

10 any calibration information on these things, but we do 

11 have the badge design, which is not that different than 

12 some other facilities, so we can make some inferences 

13 as to what the badge actually -- the energy response of 

14 the badge was. 

15 I talked about the extremity dosimeters. There were 

16 rings that were worn. 

17 And occupational X-rays, it appears that annual chest 

18 X-rays were performed on the workers. We are making 

19 the conservative assumption that everyone had an annual 

20 chest X-ray, and we've reconstructed the X-ray 

21 exposures to workers based on what we know about the 

22 technology at that time frame, using an idea of what 
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1 the average type of X-ray equipment was in use at the 

2 time and the milliamp settings and that kind of thing. 

3 Other data of dosimetric interest, we do have a number 

4 of workers -- I mentioned 25 workers at the beginning 

5 to 1,500 within a few years. There are a number of 

6 studies we've located that talk about the average 

7 number of hours worked, and actually per job, what the 

8 -- you know, how long it took for a person to get ready 

9 to go to work, what they did for how long and that sort 

10 of thing. We're taking that into consideration, 

11 although where we don't know, we of course make 

12 claimant-favorable assumptions. 

13 Job type and work areas in many cases were actually 

14 indicated on the film badge result cards, as well as 

15 some of the urine cards. So we do have data, to some 

16 extent, for workers -- where they worked and actually 

17 what areas -- or what they -- what they did in those 

18 areas. 

19 Okay. I'm going to go on to one of my favorite 

20 subjects, the determination of internal exposures. We 

21 don't have data for everyone, so what ORAU has done in 

22 this document is allowed a procedure to estimate 
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1 intakes by using surrogate worker data. There are 

2 essentially what we would call a job exposure matrices 

3 in this document that took the urine sample data, those 

4 40,000 urine samples, and they didn't use all of them. 

5 They were screened for quality and that sort of thing. 

6 And then made a job exposure matrix so one could 

7 determine what the intake would have been for a 

8 particular type of worker for a particular facility for 

9 a particular year. It's like a three dimensional 

10 matrix. That can be used to substitute for when data 

11 are not available. However, we recognize that there's 

12 uncertainties associated with this, so each of these 

13 values has some uncertainty distribution about them. 

14 We're not saying that this was the person's exposure. 

15 We have a central tendency value, along with a certain 

16 geometric standard deviation to account for the 

17 uncertainty in the calculation. And of course the way 

18 IREP works, the Interactive Radio Epi Program, we can 

19 put that uncertainty in there and it will be propagated 

20 through the calculation, along with all the other 

21 uncertainties of the risk models. 

22 If we do not have any bioassay data in an area to judge 
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1 its intakes on, there are time-weighted daily average 

2 exposure information for many of the facilities. Some 

3 of these facilities were pretty high. I think in the 

4 early time frames it was not unusual to see 100 times 

5 that maximum allowable concentration value. And not 

6 frequently, but one can see up to 1,000 times the 

7 maximum allowable concentration in some areas. And 

8 even as late as 1956, I think six percent or more of 

9 the samples were still above the maximum allowable 

10 concentration. So I would characterize this as a 

11 fairly messy operation, even in the '56 time frame. 

12 Internal doses for missing periods are calculated using 

13 these intakes. They're put into the IMBA program that 

14 we talked about. The IMBA program then generates the 

15 actual doses using the current regulatory -- not the 

16 current regu-- the current ICRP models, the ICRP-66 

17 lung models and such. 

18 I should back up. I didn't say too much about the 

19 radon, maybe it's coming up, but the radon levels were 

20 fairly high here. I mean even by uranium mine 

21 standards, when they started to bring in this 

22 pitchblende ore from the Belgian Congo, I have seen 
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1 data, maximum air concentrations of 800 pico-- 80 

2 nanocuries per liter, which equates to -- if it's 100 

3 percent equilibrium, would be 800 working levels -- 800 

4 times the allowable concentration back then. It would 

5 be 2,400 times the current allowable concentration in 

6 the U.S. facilities. So that's a very extreme maximum. 

7 But even in many facilities it's not uncommon to see 

8 one working level, two working levels -- even outdoor 

9 concentrations were elevated, and that's all depicted 

10 in some tables in this document. 

11 Okay. External dose -- let me just check my notes here 

12 and see if I missed anything. Yeah, external dose, we 

13 really are relying mostly on the film badge data 

14 because we believe that to be the most accurate 

15 depiction of what the workers' exposures were. We use 

16 the real data when available, of course. And then 

17 based on our hierarchical approach in 42 CFR-82, the 

18 dose reconstruction rule, we would default then -- if 

19 we had no individual monitoring data, we would go to 

20 co-worker data and then gamma survey data, which we 

21 have all -- data in all three categories for the 

22 Mallinckrodt facility. 
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1 For unmonitored workers, and there were a fair number 

2 of them -- I mean not everyone was monitored. It did 

3 appear that many -- many workers were monitored and 

4 many workers had zero exposures on their badges, so it 

5 appeared that there was a tendency toward monitoring a 

6 large percentage of the work force. When workers were 

7 unmonitored, we are making the assumption that they had 

8 received at least the detection limit of the badge 

9 reading, which was stated in these documents at around 

10 50 millirem -- 50 milliRoentgen back then. Given that 

11 there were weekly exchanges, the missed dose for these 

12 workers could have been as high as two and a half rem 

13 per year in the very early time frame. So again, we're 

14 making some fairly claimant-favorable assumptions here. 

15 We apply the film badge and dose monitoring data to 

16 look at the exposure conditions in the work site. 

17 There are tables in here about what the geometry of the 

18 exposure was. That is, what -- where was the person in 

19 relation to what -- where the badge was located on 

20 their chest. It makes a difference if the person was 

21 facing the source of radiation or their back was to the 

22 source, or they were walking around, you know, doing a 
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1 normal task or survey or something. 

2 There are detailed tables in there to try to account 

3 for what those geometrical exposures were to the work 

4 force, based on job category, and also some inferences 

5 as to what the actual photon energy ranges were. As 

6 you know, the IREP program does account for the 

7 different radiation effectiveness factors for the 

8 different energy of the photons that one might be 

9 exposed to, and so that needed to be considered in this 

10 document. 

11 Wherever these data are lacking, of course, again, the 

12 theme is we make claimant-favorable assumptions. 

13 In the reconstructed dose area we have some situations 

14 where we have a -- we're trying to estimate a dose 

15 where the worker -- an unmonitored worker who has -- 

16 with and without any exposure records at all -- what 

17 I'm speaking about here is that early time frame, '42 

18 to '45. If a person was not monitored in '42 to '45, 

19 but he has monitoring data in '46 onward, we can use 

20 what's known as a nearby approach -- it's published in 

21 the Health Physics Journal; it's a standard technique 

22 for dose reconstruction -- to try to infer, to 
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1 extrapolate backwards, knowing what we know about the 

2 trend of those exposures and the processes that were 

3 going on back then, to substitute for those exposures. 

4 It becomes a little more problematic when a person was 

5 unmonitored in '42 to '45, and was also not monitored 

6 after '45. We have to make some inferences there. 

7 There's some guidance in there. One has to look at the 

8 job category and make a decisions, was this person 

9 really potentially exposed or not. Even if they were 

10 not, I think -- not think, we will assign the average 

11 dose for what we believe to be in that unmonitored 

12 period to the worker. Again, a claimant-favorable 

13 assumption. 

14 X-ray doses I discussed. These are covered using our 

15 estimation of what the conventional X-ray equipment at 

16 the time delivered to a -- to the individual organs in 

17 a standard anterior/posterior chest X-ray -- a PA chest 

18 X-ray, I'm sorry, posterior/anterior. 

19 And I think that gets me to my last slide, just to 

20 finish up, other dose considerations. Extremity 

21 dosimetry, I did mention they wore badges on the hands 

22 so the skin doses could be very large. It is not 
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1 addressed in a large amount of detail in this Technical 

2 Basis Document. The health physicist will have to go 

3 out and research it a little further to figure out what 

4 the actual extremity dose was. There was not enough 

5 information at this point to flesh this out in any 

6 sufficient detail, so it -- it's not reserved. There 

7 are -- there's guides as to how to treat this, but we 

8 need to do a little better job -- right now we're 

9 making a claimant-favorable assumption about what the 

10 conversion factor was for the film badge reading. 

11 There's an open window/closed window reading. We are 

12 inferring what that was and -- and assuming that the 

13 factor is one, which is I think at this point claimant14 favorable. We're still working on this. 

15 Submersion in a cloud is not necessarily an issue in 

16 these exposures, with the exception of skin, testes and 

17 breast cancer. Those are fairly -- organs that are 

18 fairly close to the surface where we may have to worry 

19 about some submersion doses from the beta particles 

20 affecting the dose. 

21 And shallow dose, as I mentioned, was measured on their 

22 badge using an open window/closed window technique that 
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1 is a fairly standard health physics tool. We feel 

2 we've got that characterized pretty well, based on the 

3 badge design. 

4 Okay. I've talked for quite a while. I hope I didn't 

5 put everyone to sleep, but that's a very nutshell 

6 overview of what we've got in this document. 

7 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you, Jim. I think we do want to 

8 take some additional time now for questions from the 

9 Board. Or comments. 

10 Let me -- I'll start out. You mentioned the -- I think 

11 radon concentrations up to 800 working levels. Do we 

12 have any working level month values for any of the 

13 workers or -- 

14 DR. NETON: No, not at all. 

15 DR. ZIEMER: -- or are you estimating those all from 

16 the concentrations? 

17 DR. NETON: The only handle we have is the actual 

18 ambient air concentrations that were measured. And 

19 again, it would be 800 working level months if the 

20 radon were in 100 percent equilibrium. That's probably 

21 not the case, but we have no way of knowing. 

22 DR. ZIEMER: So then you take the estimated times in 
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1 those positions and -- do you go to working level 

2 months from that and then -- 

3 DR. NETON: Yes, that's actually the input value in 

4 IREP. One needs to come up with the working level 

5 months in an individual year, and we've done that. 

6 We've actually moved some Mallinckrodt claims through 

7 doing that. 

8 DR. ZIEMER: Let's see, Mark, you started to ask a 

9 question? 

10 MR. GRIFFON: Yeah. I guess -- I wanted to ask if -- 

11 in the course of constructing the site profile, if 

12 NIOSH has any feeling now whether there are subcohorts 

13 or subpopulations of the Mallinckrodt site that -- for 

14 which you feel it likely won't be -- you won't be able 

15 to make a reasonable estimate of doses, or reconstruct 

16 their doses? 

17 DR. NETON: No, we don't. I mean our plan is to take 

18 this document and move through the 180 Mallinckrodt 

19 claims that we have in-house and see if we can't -- and 

20 then if we can't, we need to make a decision at that 

21 point, but that's the way we would approach this. We 

22 haven't gone through a priori and looked through all 
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1 these and made some decisions. 

2 DR. ZIEMER: Jim. 

3 DR. MELIUS: Yeah. Along those lines, what happens if 

4 a person worked at any of the other facilities and then 

5 worked at Mallinckrodt? How are you -- we've talked 

6 about this before, sort of how to deal with this -- 

7 DR. NETON: Yeah. 

8 DR. MELIUS: -- these issues with overlap, missing 

9 information and so forth, and again, I don't think 

10 you've gone through, but I suspect you have people that 

11 have moved around, and -- 

12 DR. NETON: Oh, yeah. 

13 DR. MELIUS: -- how's that going to -- 

14 DR. NETON: That's a real good question. I think a 

15 large percentage of the people who worked at 

16 Mallinckrodt ended up working at Weldon Springs. I 

17 can't give you an exact number, but a large percentage. 

18 Those data will have to be added to the dosimetry that 

19 we do here, the dose reconstructions here, and -- you 

20 know, as an aggregate to determine compensability by 

21 Labor. So clearly we -- we can't do anyone who is non22 compen-- if someone were to be over 50 percent using 
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1 the data here, then we wouldn't hold it up. We would 

2 just move that over to the Department of Labor. If 

3 not, though, we would then have to wait until the 

4 Mallinckrodt -- or the Weldon Springs or the Hematite 

5 or whatever other facility TBDs were done. That's just 

6 unfortunate, but that's the way it is. 

7 MR. ELLIOTT: I'd add to Jim's response that we've 

8 actually finalized one dose reconstruction where an 

9 individual worked at both sites, and we were able to 

10 use the dose from the Destrehan Street site to get that 

11 person compensable without using the Weldon Spring 

12 site, so that's what Jim's referring to. When we can 

13 move people through the system without the other, we 

14 do. When we can't, we have to build that other dose 

15 into the profile. 

16 DR. NETON: Larry knows very well, we're constantly 

17 sweeping through the system looking for claims that can 

18 be moved through, and this is a very routine process 

19 for us. 

20 DR. ZIEMER: Roy and then Gen. 

21 DR. DEHART: As you reviewed the documentation, were 

22 there incidences of adverse events that may have 
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1 occurred, failure of ventilation systems, other kinds 

2 of things that would have altered the exposure? 

3 DR. NETON: There are a few incidents addressed in the 

4 Mallinckrodt Technical Bas-- or site profile, and 

5 you've sort of caught me off-guard. I can't recount 

6 what they exactly are. I mean I've gone through them, 

7 but there aren't that many. Now I'm not saying they 

8 weren't there, but we're primarily relying at this 

9 point on the air sampling data that were out there, 

10 recollections of interviewees, and that sort of thing. 

11 But we've gone through 150 documents looking for that 

12 type of information, and where they were available, 

13 we've characterized them. But -- you know, I don't 

14 know what else we could do in that area. 

15 DR. ROESSLER: I appreciate this overview of a site 

16 profile because I have a much better understanding of 

17 what you've done, and it -- I think it seemed very 

18 thorough. But I do have a couple of questions, because 

19 it seemed like it -- it seems like it must have taken a 

20 whole lot of time. How many man or woman-hours did 

21 this particular thing, would you estimate, took? 

22 DR. NETON: I'd probably have to defer to Dick Toohey 
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1 on that, but I know that there were two people working 

2 fairly -- for quite a while on this. It's been in 

3 process for months -- what would you say, six, eight 

4 months, Dick, has been the time period? And it's not 

5 just those two people, of course. It's the site data 

6 capture efforts -- much of this data we found at the 

7 Environmental Measurements Laboratory in New York City 

8 in a data capture effort. Of course we've taken 

9 advantage of the ORAU database that existed from 

10 previous studies. So it's -- yeah, it's massive. The 

11 tables are impressive, by themselves. So -- 

12 DR. ROESSLER: And I have a second question that's -- 

13 with regard to the occupational chest X-ray. I'm 

14 wondering what the -- what you assumed for the exposure 

15 or dose, and what part of the total dose, let's say to 

16 the lung or whatever this might be? 

17 DR. NETON: Well, I don't have the document with -- I 

18 can't give you an exact number -- 

19 DR. ROESSLER: But it'll be in the tables? 

20 DR. NETON: It's in the -- there's a table. I think 

21 it's Table 30 or something like that. Dick, do you 

22 know? That's okay. 
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1 I would guess 30 millirem, but that's -- that's a 

2 guess. 

3 DR. TOOHEY: Dick Toohey, ORAU -- is this on? 

4 DR. NETON: I think so. Just get close to the mike. 

5 DR. TOOHEY: Okay. The chest X-rays were actually done 

6 at a hospital in St. Louis, so the document assumes 

7 that both an AP and lateral was done. And photofluoro* 

8 units were not used, so we're just giving them a 

9 typical X-ray exposure for that time, which would be 

10 about 30 millirem a shot to the lung. But if you 

11 compare that to the inhalation dose from the alpha 

12 emitters for lung dose, it's not very significant. 

13 DR. NETON: I would say it's not just the lung dose 

14 that's in the table. We need to account for the dose -

15 - the scattered dose to any other organ that developed 

16 a cancer, so one could figure out what the bladder dose 

17 may have been or the testicular dose, that sort of 

18 thing. So we do account for that, and of course the 

19 further removed you are from the primary beam, the 

20 smaller the dose is. 

21 DR. ZIEMER: Larry also has a response on that one. 

22 MR. ELLIOTT: I'd just like to add to Jim and Dick's 
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1 comment back to Gen about how long it took or how many 

2 people that worked on it. I don't know how many 

3 person-hours went into this. It was a good effort. I 

4 can give you this information, though. When we saw the 

5 first draft was in August, August 19th was when the 

6 first draft come to us. I don't know how long they 

7 worked on it prior to that, probably not -- not -- I 

8 don't know when they actually started. We gave them 

9 our comments back on September 2nd and it was -- ORAU 

10 provided the resolution to those comments on October 

11 23rd and we finalized it last Friday. So that's the 

12 time line for the development of this particular 

13 document. 

14 DR. NETON: Dick had one comment. 

15 DR. ZIEMER: Leon? 

16 DR. TOOHEY: Larry -- 

17 DR. ZIEMER: Oh, Dick. 

18 DR. TOOHEY: -- if I may add to that, Janet Westbrook 

19 was the primary author on this, and she actually 

20 started working on this probably around last January, 

21 just reviewing the documents that NIOSH already had in 

22 hand and the ORAU database, and had some assistance 
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1 from Jerry Anderson, who is our lead TBD writer for AWE 

2 sites, but -- maybe I should say uranium sites in 

3 general, since most of them are -- so I would say what 

4 went into this, just on the ORAU side, was about one 

5 FTE. 

6 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Now Leon. 

7 MR. OWENS: Dr. Neton, I would like to -- at least to 

8 your comments in regard to this question. The 

9 significant events, if we go through the claimant 

10 interview process and several claimants remember 

11 significant events that have occurred, and there's not 

12 any documentation relative to those events and it falls 

13 within the time frame 1945 through 1949 in order for 

14 those claimants to be compensable, what mechanism is in 

15 place to quantify those events from the standpoint of 

16 possible exposures? 

17 DR. NETON: Okay. Well, we'd have to look at it in 

18 total. If we had several people corroborate the same 

19 event, we would take a look at it in the context of 

20 does that seem plausible, given what we know about the 

21 conditions in the plant at that time. For example, if 

22 someone was asserting that there was a criticality 
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1 accident somewhere, it would be pretty hard to come up 

2 with a technical scenario that could allow for that. 

3 But say it were plausible and we had sufficient 

4 corroborating evidence through affidavit or whatever on 

5 those conditions, then we would seriously consider and 

6 put that into the dose reconstruction. Claimant 

7 assertions are considered when they are -- seem 

8 credible. 

9 MR. OWENS: Okay. From the standpoint of the 

10 affidavits, are you speaking of affidavits from the 

11 claimants themselves if there's a group of claimants 

12 who may have worked in a specific area and they have 

13 knowledge of this event that has occurred and we do not 

14 have any documentation to support -- support that -- 

15 DR. NETON: Yeah, this would be an affidavit assertion 

16 from the claimant, or the coworker, I suspect. 

17 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Jim and then Mark. 

18 DR. MELIUS: I have some general questions on the 

19 process. I want to talk about the -- this particular 

20 site profile. I don't know, Mark, if you have other 

21 comments on that or -- you can go first and then -- 

22 either -- 
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1 MR. GRIFFON: One thing, Jim, I just wondered if you 

2 could take a few minutes to expand on how the surrogate 

3 worker process is intended to work in this TBD. 

4 Specifically I'm wondering -- in my experience -- 

5 suggests that, you know, job title -- even job title by 

6 time period sometimes -- you know, some of these sites 

7 you have a tremendous number of job titles, first of 

8 all, not always descriptive of what they're actually -- 

9 UNIDENTIFIED: We can't hear. 

10 MR. ELLIOTT: They can't hear you. I'm sorry. 

11 MR. GRIFFON: Is that -- 

12 DR. ZIEMER: Just get -- 

13 MR. GRIFFON: The job titles aren't always descriptive 

14 of what individuals would be doing or where necessarily 

15 they would be working, so I'm wondering how -- how 

16 specif-- if you -- as specific as you can be, how are 

17 you using -- or intending to use this surrogate worker 

18 factor, and how are you sort of validating the use of 

19 that method, I guess. 

20 DR. NETON: Well, we of course would start with the 

21 individual bioassay data if we have it. I mean that's 

22 sort of our standard approach. And then the next fall-
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1 back measure would be to look at the intakes that were 

2 estimated based on urine samples in specific 

3 facilities. And you're right, if you don't know if the 

4 person were in a general facility -- you try to get as 

5 close a match as you can, but if not, you would pick 

6 the most claimant-favorable site or location within the 

7 building if you couldn't match it. I mean that's just 

8 our standard approach. So you know, the less it 

9 matches, of course, the more uncertain the dose -- the 

10 intake level's going to be, but that's just a fact of 

11 the way the calculation works out. If there were no 

12 bioassay data, then one is required to go back to these 

13 time-weighted average air sample data values. And 

14 again, the same situation will apply. Match as close 

15 as possible. But if you can't match, pick the next 

16 highest value that you can find in the table. That's a 

17 very brief sketch. I can't get much more specific than 

18 that. I haven't actually done one of these, but that 

19 would be the approach. 

20 MR. GRIFFON: Just two follow-on, and these will be 

21 quicker. 

22 DR. NETON: It may be informative to do an example or 
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1 two down the line, once we get these, you know, moving 

2 through. We actually haven't used this document yet to 

3 do any claims yet. 

4 MR. GRIFFON: One other is did -- did you -- in the 

5 course of doing this -- you mentioned through 

6 interviews some documents are identified. Did -- how 

7 many I guess, quote/unquote, experts were interviewed 

8 in this process, and did you interview past workers, 

9 past health physicists? Who did you -- who were you 

10 able to find in do-- in putting together this document? 

11 DR. NETON: I'm not sure I said through the course of 

12 the interview documents were identified. If I did, I 

13 didn't mean that, I suppose. 

14 MR. GRIFFON: Oh. 

15 DR. NETON: This was a document, a paper search through 

16 the Environmental Measurements Laboratory files, the 

17 archive of vaults at the Oak Ridge Associated 

18 Universities, those type of records. 

19 MR. GRIFFON: So did -- did you interview any past 

20 experts or were you able to do that in -- so far in 

21 this process? 

22 DR. NETON: I don't think we have interviewed any past 
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1 experts at that facility at this time. 

2 MR. GRIFFON: Okay. And the last question is for -- 

3 the site profile is on the web site. All the support 

4 documents that are referenced, would they be av-- can 

5 they be in any way put on the web site or posted or -- 

6 or what's the -- 

7 DR. NETON: That's an interesting question. I'd have 

8 to look into that, Mark. There's a large volume of 

9 these records. We have all of our records available as 

10 scanned images, but I don't know -- I suspect, to the 

11 extent that the Privacy Act would not be violated, we 

12 could -- we could look into that. I really can't say 

13 what -- what or what we couldn't do at this time. 

14 MR. GRIFFON: I mean I would assume there might be 

15 exceptions like UCNI or Privacy Act documents -- 

16 DR. NETON: Yeah, I -- 

17 MR. GRIFFON: -- but other ones I would think could be. 

18 DR. NETON: I really don't know how large an effort it 

19 would be to post that on our web site. We could look 

20 into that and report back to you what could and 

21 couldn't be done in that area. I'm not against it, I 

22 just need to figure out logistically if that's 
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1 possible. 

2 DR. MELIUS: Just one comment on the process here, I -- 

3 and I understand the time pressures. I don't -- not 

4 saying this was done on purpose, but I think in the 

5 future it would be very helpful for this committee to -

6 - Advisory Board to receive copies of reports that are 

7 available before the meeting, so if we're going to be 

8 discussing a report, it's available. It would be 

9 helpful to have known that it existed and certainly to 

10 be able to have had a chance to review it if we were 

11 going to discuss it 'cause I mean -- can't really claim 

12 we've reviewed the document at this meeting. It's been 

13 a general presentation and so forth. And I'm not 

14 saying it was necessarily possible in this 

15 circumstance, and I think you did mean to get the 

16 documents out, but it certainly would be helpful in the 

17 future if we knew that they existed and would have a 

18 chance to review it before we came into this -- this 

19 meeting. 

20 Secondly, this whole issue of that -- my assessment 

21 would be, from Jim's answer earlier, was that there was 

22 -- this was all sort of a paper exercise in terms of 
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1 reviewing available reports and so forth, that no one 

2 from the facility was consulted and so forth. And you 

3 know, given that this process apparently took six to 

4 eight months -- started last January, so apparently 

5 it's ten months ago -- I really find it disconcerting 

6 to think that there was no attempt to consult anybody 

7 during -- during that process. And now we're being 

8 given a final document that's been posted and all 

9 people can do is just sort of react to it. And I think 

10 that puts the program under incredible pressure in 

11 terms of the credibility of the overall process there. 

12 Any criticism that comes up -- and people are 

13 naturally going to be critical, naturally going to have 

14 a lot of questions since there was no involvement up to 

15 now. You know, NIOSH and ORAU are going to essentially 

16 -- forced to be -- to some extent, and maybe very 

17 appropriately, defensive about some of the decisions 

18 that they make. They may very -- may very well be 

19 entirely appropriate, but it certainly doesn't lend 

20 itself to a credible process nor to any sort of 

21 credible input from interested parties into the 

22 process. And so I guess my question is -- is, you 
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1 know, what is your plans in terms of involvement of 

2 interested parties during the development of a 

3 document, meeting with people once a document's in 

4 whatever draft stage, whatever we're going to call 

5 that, in terms of soliciting comments from people with 

6 some knowledge. And how is that process going to work 

7 and what's going to be the time frame for that process? 

8 If that's going to get extended out into a several9 month process, I think that's going to further 

10 undermine the credibility of this process. So I don't 

11 know if Jim or -- you or Larry, who's making these 

12 decisions? 

13 DR. NETON: I'll defer to Larry on this question. 

14 MR. ELLIOTT: As you know, we have 15 of these going 

15 through this process right now in development. The 

16 schedule and the expectation and the goal that we have 

17 is to try to finish those up by the end of this 

18 calendar year. We've said all along that these are 

19 living documents and we welcome input and comment about 

20 them. We have, in fact, used and contacted, where 

21 appropriate and necessary -- example, Bethlehem Steel -

22 - site-based experts to talk to us and provide 
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1 information or finding aids for information where we 

2 couldn't seem to find information on our own. 

3 In this particular case, with the wealth of data and 

4 information and dose information on Mallinckrodt 

5 employees, I guess -- our opinion on this one was that 

6 we felt we had enough information that we could pull 

7 together this site profile and the necessary Technical 

8 Basis Documents that comprise it. We're certainly open 

9 and welcome any comment or input or reference to 

10 information that would make this document better and 

11 more improved. 

12 It's our intent to engage site-based experts where we 

13 feel we can benefit from that. Our first goal, 

14 however, is to move these things through to completion 

15 so that we can start using them in the processing of 

16 claims. And so that -- that's our plan. 

17 DR. MELIUS: So I guess my question still is are you 

18 planning to hold meetings -- I gue-- 

19 MR. ELLIOTT: I told you yesterday that we will hold 

20 meetings. We are going to hold meetings once the 

21 document is -- is ready to be presented as a -- the 

22 best effort that we could put on the table. 
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1 DR. MELIUS: Number two then, and I'm assuming that you 

2 then are rejecting any involvement of people -- union 

3 representatives, other interested parties prior to the 

4 publication of the document on the web site? 

5 MR. ELLIOTT: No, I'm not saying we reject that. We 

6 will seek that where we feel that it is necessary and 

7 appropriate to place a quality document on the table. 

8 DR. MELIUS: Where is that being done then on the other 

9 12 or 15 documents that you're working on? 

10 MR. ELLIOTT: I can't answer that about specific 

11 documents and the need to tap specific site experts. 

12 I'm not that familiar with each individual document and 

13 where they're at in that particular part of the process 

14 of development. 

15 DR. MELIUS: Well, I'm -- just for the record, I find 

16 that to be a very unsatisfactory answer. There's 

17 nothing scheduled. There's no commitment, and I think 

18 that's going to seriously undermine the credibility of 

19 this program, and I think you're making a major mistake 

20 in the way you've approached this, and I think it's 

21 going to cause a lot of future problems with this 

22 program. And I really urge you to reconsider that and 
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1 develop a process for input. We talked about some of 

2 the ways of doing that yesterday. We talked about it 

3 at the last meeting, and I think it's imperative that 

4 you consider doing that or reconsider the way you're 

5 approaching this. 

6 Secondly -- and just again for clarification -- a 

7 member of the public comment period, Richard Miller, 

8 brought up the issue of conflict of interest, and it's 

9 another area that I think -- again, have a lot of 

10 concern about in terms of this program. Again, it's 

11 something that's going to undermine the credibility of 

12 these documents and Richard brought up some examples. 

13 I'm pleased that you're following up on that, but I 

14 think the development of a policy in that regard is to 

15 -- both for the institution or the organization 

16 involved, as well as for the individual people involved 

17 in these dose reconstructions, again, would be I think 

18 very helpful and it's imperative for this -- the 

19 credibility of these documents. And all the more 

20 imperative if you're not going to provide any public 

21 input into the development of the document. Once it's 

22 out there, it's -- and people -- questions are raised 
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1 about the people involved in developing the documents, 

2 I think it's going to be -- raise a number of serious 

3 concerns. People -- again, undermining the credibility 

4 of this process. 

5 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Further comments relating to that 

6 issue or any other issues on the site profiles? 

7 Anything specific on the Mallinckrodt site profile at 

8 this point? 

9 (No responses) 

10 DR. ZIEMER: Okay, thank you. You've heard the 

11 comments. My -- as I understand, let me insert here, 

12 also, I -- it seems to me important that we recognize 

13 the issue of the documents being dynamic in the sense 

14 that at some point you put something out on the web 

15 site. Is it complete? Perhaps not. I would guess 

16 they are never complete. Have you been able to tap all 

17 resources? Probably not. It seems to me the 

18 underlying issue is when is a profile ready to put out 

19 there, whether you -- regardless of who you have or 

20 haven't talked to and regardless of what material 

21 you've looked at, at some point you're putting it out 

22 there. I think what you've told us here on this one, 
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1 that you had a pretty good wealth of information. It's 

2 out there now. If there are other input sources, this 

3 would be modified, as I understand it. This is not a 

4 final -- we should not regard this as the final site 

5 profile. This is the version 1.0 or something like 

6 that, and as you garner additional information, either 

7 through claimants or other representatives who can come 

8 forward now and say well, that's -- that's good, but I 

9 happen to know this fact or this situation -- then I 

10 assume the process allows for modification. 

11 The other part of that is at what point is a site 

12 profile ready at least to use for helping get some 

13 claims through, what was earlier referred to as the -- 

14 the low-hanging fruit, those that you can move through 

15 based on what you already know. Even though there may 

16 be further refinements later that will be helpful and 

17 useful for additional claimant processing, this, I 

18 gather, information has already been useful in helping 

19 -- 

20 MR. ELLIOTT: Yes. 

21 DR. ZIEMER: -- process a number of claims from this 

22 site. Is that correct? 
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1 MR. ELLIOTT: Yes. Again, these documents -- we call 

2 them living documents. To us, that means they're 

3 documents under development. We present a document on 

4 our web site when we think it has reached a state of 

5 quality that it can be used. 

6 As you see, this document -- this site profile has one 

7 Technical Basis Document, or a chapter, if you will, 

8 incomplete. And Jim has identified some other areas 

9 that we're working on in addition, other chapter areas 

10 that are being reviewed and modified, as appropriate. 

11 This is Rev -- what we call Rev 0. It's the first 

12 version that we are comfortable with putting on the web 

13 site, sharing for public comment and input. Welcome 

14 that, again. 

15 I believe the Savannah River document is now Rev 1. We 

16 made changes in the document and the web site, identify 

17 what changes have been made to that document. 

18 As this Mallinckrodt document goes through further 

19 development, as input is provided, as we review and 

20 evaluate that input and make changes, the document 

21 version will change and those changes will be so 

22 identified in each document. 
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1 We're -- again, our goal is to put a quality document 

2 on the table for use by the health physicists doing 

3 these dose reconstructions as quickly as possible for 

4 the benefit of the majority of claims. We -- again, we 

5 also have points along the way in our process where 

6 individuals can offer comments about their particular 

7 experience at the site and identify those, and we take 

8 those into consideration. Those come from the 

9 interview process, they come from comments about -- 

10 about dose reconstructions completed, comments about 

11 the Technical Basis Documents and the site profiles. 

12 You know, so it's kind of a cart and horse thing, I 

13 guess. If we go into a participatory development 

14 process, we're concerned as to how long that will take, 

15 what the benefit will be. We think this is the most 

16 expedited way to develop Technical Basis Documents and 

17 full site profiles and get them out for public comment 

18 and input. So it is a living document, it is under 

19 development. We're not saying that it is final in its 

20 content at this point in time. We've even identified 

21 the areas that we're continuing to work on. 

22 And one last time, we welcome comment and input. 
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1 DR. ZIEMER: Mark? 

2 MR. GRIFFON: Yeah, just a thought that I had about the 

3 -- you know, you mentioned that no one was interviewed, 

4 but you do have -- from this process, you did have 

5 what, 400 or so claimants from Mallinckrodt. Is that 

6 accurate -- 

7 DR. NETON: Actually it's 180, I think, or -- 

8 MR. GRIFFON: Oh, I'm sorry. 

9 DR. NETON: I've heard 400 being mentioned, but I 

10 assume that includes Subtitle D claims, I don't know. 

11 MR. GRIFFON: 180, did you use those interviews in any 

12 way, did they aggregate comments from each individual 

13 interview into like an interview report? Did anybody 

14 in any way -- 

15 DR. NETON: I will say that in our NIOSH review we go 

16 through and look through selected interviews to make 

17 sure that -- that ORAU has -- there's not something in 

18 there that is inconsistent with what the Technical 

19 Basis Document is saying. I mean that -- that happens. 

20 MR. GRIFFON: Okay. 

21 DR. NETON: Now we have not gone through all 186 or 

22 whatever cases there are, but we do go through them and 
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1 -- to see if there's some pattern here that is way out 

2 of kilter, so that does happen. 

3 MR. ELLIOTT: Just for the record, let me clarify. We 

4 have 148 claims from the Mallinckrodt Destrehan Street 

5 plant. There were, as of October 27th, 144 interviews 

6 had been scheduled; 143 of those had been completed; 

7 140 of those interview reports had been shared with the 

8 claimant and returned. There had been 33 dose 

9 reconstructions started. There had been 22 dose 

10 reconstruction reports sent back to the claimant and 

11 there were a total of three completed and sent back to 

12 DOL. And I can't speak specifically, as Jim can't 

13 right now, about how many of the interview comments 

14 were actually used in these -- these cases. 

15 DR. NETON: I don't have that information. But I think 

16 I was -- maybe 180 is the number of claims, not cases. 

17 I -- there is -- 

18 MR. ELLIOTT: These are cases I'm talking about, 148. 

19 DR. NETON: Okay, those are actual individual dose 

20 reconstructions. I really don't know the number that 

21 we've gone through, but we do -- that is part of our 

22 process, to look at the interview. 
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1 DR. ZIEMER: Jim, further comment? 

2 DR. MELIUS: Yeah, just in response to what you said, 

3 Dr. Ziemer, these -- first of all, I don't think 

4 commenting to a web site is necessarily, you know, full 

5 public and open public process. I understand sort of 

6 the bureaucratic need for that, but I think that we 

7 really need a much better outreach program in order to 

8 solicit comments and let people know that these -- that 

9 documents are open to interpretation and to comment and 

10 so forth. 

11 Remind you that the Savannah River document, when it 

12 first went on the web site, was no mention of the 

13 opportunity for public comment on that, at the time we 

14 saw that. That's since been revised and we appreciate 

15 what Larry and his staff has done, you know, in 

16 response to some of our comments from last time. 

17 But again, these documents are also going to be used to 

18 reject claims. And if we're going to have a process 

19 where these com-- if there are significant flaws in 

20 these documents that will have led to the rejection of 

21 claims and people see that happening or there's 

22 uncertainty about that, I think it's just going to 
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1 undermine the credibility of the program. I think 

2 there's going to be a lot of bureaucratic inertia. And 

3 again, I appreciate Larry's and the staff's intent to 

4 be willing to change and admit that mistakes were made, 

5 but there's going to be a lot of resistance to doing 

6 that. Going to try to -- would like to avoid it, 

7 everyone would. And I think not having a process that 

8 allows input in -- just to make -- ensures that people 

9 trust the way the document was developed, feel that 

10 it's complete, that areas that were left out were 

11 appropriately left out and so forth would really add a 

12 lot to the overall credibility of the process. We 

13 don't want to have to be in a process where we're 

14 constantly revising our dose reconstructions and -- 

15 well, you're out; you're in -- you know, whatever. I 

16 think that would be a serious problem, both in terms of 

17 the efficiency of the process, as well as the 

18 credibility of the program. And that continues to be 

19 my concern and I think we -- we deserve a better 

20 response than that and I think the program would be 

21 much better if it had such a program. 

22 DR. ZIEMER: And I appreciate your concern there, Jim, 
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1 and let me add that I certainly support the idea that 

2 we should be proactive in getting input from workers as 

3 well as some of the HPs and professionals who worked at 

4 the sites. I certainly support that. 

5 You have additional comments, Larry? 

6 MR. ELLIOTT: I just want to make a clarification, Dr. 

7 Melius. The documents won't be used to reject claims. 

8 The documents will be used to provide estimates for 

9 dose and then whatever that dose is, it'll either be 

10 compensable or non-compensable. I appreciate your 

11 concern. We've heard, as I said last -- yesterday, we 

12 heard individual comments and I've reacted to those 

13 individual comments. If there is Board consensus on 

14 this, then you need to -- you know, this is a consensus 

15 body, and we have reacted to individual comments. If 

16 there is a consensus of the Board, I need to hear that. 

17 DR. ZIEMER: Wanda? 

18 MS. MUNN: One would hope that we would remember the 

19 cautionary words of Dr. Till when he spoke to us with 

20 respect to the need for establishing a policy of when 

21 the science that we have is what we're going to use, 

22 and recognize what is the reality in terms of 
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1 imponderables that cannot be defined clearly. My 

2 memory of his warning in that respect was that failure 

3 to do so creates more confusion for the claimants and 

4 for all of the people who are involved. He further 

5 warned that the experience his body had had with other 

6 similar kinds of boards and programs was that the 

7 claimants did not clearly understand what the level of 

8 exposure had to be in order to be compensable, and that 

9 all claimants should be continually reminded that there 

10 is a level that must be shown before compensation can 

11 be considered. 

12 We are, at this juncture, moving into the real meat of 

13 what this program is all about. If we're very clear 

14 about what our policy is regarding when we can move 

15 forward, as we're doing in this particular case, and 

16 when we still have too large an uncertainty to do so, 

17 it may be beneficial to us not only in this case, but 

18 in all of the site profiles that we have to face in the 

19 future. 

20 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Mike? 

21 MR. GIBSON: You know, I'm going to respond a little 

22 bit to what Wanda said. I don't think we're 
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1 questioning the science of health physics at all. I 

2 think what we're questioning here is -- we've had a 

3 department of the government, DOE, readily admit that 

4 they improperly monitored workers. They paid 

5 contractors to get work done and didn't monitor these 

6 workers correctly. These same contractors who got that 

7 pay, they generated these records of the exposures and 

8 the levels of exposures. So in essence, management has 

9 already had input into this process. What at least I'm 

10 trying to say, from a worker's perspective, is that I 

11 think we need that same input along the way, as opposed 

12 to just taking managements end of what they say the 

13 exposures or the events were. I'm not -- I'm not 

14 questioning the science at all, and the level of 

15 exposure it takes to get various cancers or various 

16 illnesses. But it's the adequacy of the records that a 

17 Federal agency has went on the record and said they 

18 improperly monitored people for. 

19 DR. ZIEMER: Jim, did you have another comment? 

20 DR. MELIUS: Yeah, I'd like to offer a motion. I move 

21 that the Advisory Board recommend to NIOSH that they 

22 develop a process for public and site expert 
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1 participation and involvement in the development of the 

2 site profiles, that this participation include both 

3 prior to the publication of the site profile on the web 

4 site and for comment and participation after the 

5 initial publication of the document. 

6 DR. ZIEMER: You've heard a motion. Does someone wish 

7 to second the motion? 

8 MR. GRIFFON: Second. 

9 DR. ZIEMER: Mark wishes to second the motion. It's 

10 open for discussion. You wish to speak to the motion, 

11 in support of or if you wish to speak against the 

12 motion, or if you wish clarification of the motion -- 

13 or do you just wish to ponder the motion? 

14 Leon Owens, okay. 

15 MR. OWENS: Dr. Ziemer, I'd like to speak in favor of 

16 the motion. I think that the site where I work is a 

17 Special Exposure Cohort site, so there have been 

18 workers who have received compensation based on that. 

19 And yes, it was a political issue, as we all know. But 

20 I think as we enter into the Subpart -- Subtitle D 

21 claims, there has to be some consistency in these 

22 profiles, and I think that -- I agree with Mike Gibson. 
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1 We're not questioning the science, but there are a 

2 lot of folks that are in this audience that heard Dr. 

3 Neton's presentation and to them, whether it's a rem or 

4 millirem or any number of other issues that are raised 

5 relative to exposures, that doesn't mean anything. The 

6 question is, they were lied to by the government. 

7 That's been an admission of that. There were family 

8 members that were put in harm's way. And so I think we 

9 need to be as transparent in this process developing 

10 these profiles as possible. 

11 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Tony? 

12 DR. ANDRADE: Is this mike on? 

13 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah. 

14 DR. ANDRADE: Yes, indeed, the process should be 

15 transparent. However, whether it's a millirem or a rem 

16 has everything to do with this process. And one has to 

17 start somewhere, and the way to -- I believe that NIOSH 

18 and its contractor proceeding -- ORAU -- is going back 

19 to the records that were developed and that have been 

20 kept, and I'd say it's an unfair assumption to make 

21 that the records are all false, that they are all 

22 untrue, that folks like myself who ran a radiation 
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1 protection organization would falsify these things. 

2 Perhaps some have been destroyed, perhaps some were not 

3 treated specially or were scattered about. And there 

4 have been instances and DOE has owned up to it. But to 

5 make an a priori assumption that all records are bad, 

6 false, lies, et cetera is just unconscionable insofar 

7 as I'm concerned as a professional, because that really 

8 attacks me personally. 

9 So what I am saying here is that you have to start 

10 somewhere, and that somewhere has to be dispassionate, 

11 and that dispassionate piece has everything to do with 

12 the records. And if we're going to determine what 

13 doses are -- okay? -- compensable or not, you need to 

14 know whether it were several rem, 50 rem, hundreds of 

15 rem or a few millirem. And the starting point is what 

16 is on paper. 

17 Then -- then -- I believe that the process that's in 

18 place right now -- and I agree with Dr. Melius, we 

19 should have perhaps a larger outreach effort to let the 

20 public know that they can comment, that they can call 

21 in and talk about maybe special events or -- or 

22 extraordinary events that occurred during -- while they 
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1 were working and have those either confirmed or put 

2 into the record or analyzed or gone back and 

3 researched. But you do have to start somewhere. And 

4 so I vehemently state that the process that is in place 

5 right now is appropriate, yet we do need those outreach 

6 efforts that Jim has talked about. 

7 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. 

8 DR. ANDRADE: Thank you. 

9 DR. ZIEMER: Gen and then Leon. Jim, are you up again, 

10 too? 

11 DR. MELIUS: Yeah. 

12 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Gen. 

13 DR. ROESSLER: Tony sort of said one of the things I 

14 was going to say, and that was about the outreach 

15 effort. I think that if anything is -- needs some 

16 improvement, that that is one of the aspects. 

17 But specifically with regard to the motion on the floor 

18 and how we're going to vote, I'm trying to think back 

19 through this particular site profile and get an answer 

20 from you, Jim, as to what you would have done 

21 differently and how you would have gone about it. I 

22 think this is what we really need to evaluate. 
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1 In addition to the looking at the interviews with the 

2 claimants, can you say how you would have approached it 

3 differently and then at what point in time the 

4 information would be made public for comment? 

5 DR. MELIUS: Well, the motion that I was offering was 

6 that NIOSH develop a process, so I think that process 

7 should be flexible, and it's going to be different for 

8 different -- different sites. I guess I'm more 

9 familiar with Savannah River. Savannah River, where 

10 there was no notification or outreach to any of the 

11 unions telling them that this process was underway. 

12 Secondly, the medical screening program that's based at 

13 the medical college and other groups down there was 

14 never contacted to seek out what documents and other 

15 information they might have. So I would see the -- the 

16 public involvement, whatever we want to call it, prior 

17 to the development -- or during the development of the 

18 document, meaning to seek out what resources and 

19 sources of information would be available. So I think 

20 that's relatively straightforward, be set up through 

21 meetings, you know, with various interested parties at 

22 the sites and let them know what's going on, seek what 
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1 information might be available, what's been found so 

2 far and what additional sources might be available. 

3 Then once the document's more developed, then a process 

4 where it would be shar-- you know, the information 

5 shared, presented. And again, just as a final check on 

6 what other sources of information might be sought -- 

7 what might be missing from the document or what records 

8 might be missing entirely that might have been 

9 overlooked. I think our concern about these documents 

10 is more -- not what's in there, 'cause I think what's 

11 in there is getting a good technical review and so 

12 forth. It's what's not available and understanding 

13 what might be missing. And so I think -- you know, I -

14 - trying to defer as much to NIOSH and NIOSH contractor 

15 staff to let them develop a program that they feel 

16 doesn't hamper their progress, but at the same time 

17 informs people as they go along, gives them a chance 

18 for some input and then a more formal review -- 

19 DR. ZIEMER: I'd like -- 

20 DR. MELIUS: -- this document gets completed. 

21 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. I'd -- before Leon speaks, I'd 

22 just like to insert here, use the Chair's prerogative. 
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1 I think ultimately we're all after the same thing. By 

2 "all", I'm talking about NIOSH and its staff, the 

3 Board, the various sort of facets represented on the 

4 Board, whether it's medical, science, labor, whatever. 

5 And that is we want a good quality product. 

6 We also need to recognize that some -- not all, but 

7 some of what appears to us now to have been sort of 

8 "lied-to" issues reflects ignorance. In fact, the 

9 changing dose limits which were described by Jim, which 

10 were originally in the 35 rem per year range and which 

11 are now five rem per year -- and maybe I should express 

12 it in sieverts to really be up to date, but in any 

13 event, the changing dose limits themselves reflect 

14 changes in knowledge of the biological effects of 

15 radiation. And there was a lot of ignorance going on -

16 - not that ignorance justifies what was done, but a lot 

17 of what we look back at now and say well, you know, 

18 they were giving us all kinds of high doses. When I 

19 started my career, the dose rates were much -- dose 

20 limits were much higher. 

21 There was also -- I know, because I've seen it myself -

22 - in the urgency to get something done, and in the 
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1 weapons program particularly that urgency existed, 

2 there were -- there was a different mindset. We -- in 

3 fact, one might even argue that people in those days 

4 themselves accepted more risks in the war effort. I 

5 don't know that that's necessarily true, and there 

6 certainly were these cases where you get things done at 

7 all costs and, you know, regardless of what the impact 

8 on the workers -- and we've seen this in all kind of 

9 industries, anyway. 

10 But be that as it may, there were some mistakes made, 

11 even by some of our best professionals in the past -- 

12 what we'd now call mistakes simply which were a result 

13 of ignorance or lack of information. 

14 I think the issue of falsifying -- there may have been 

15 cases of that, but I would argue that probably they are 

16 few and far between. And if we knew of specifics, we 

17 certainly would want to take that into consideration. 

18 But again, the issue of getting input from the worker 

19 side, I think we need to respect that and make sure 

20 that there's some way to get that done. If it takes 

21 formal action -- I know that NIOSH wants to accomplish 

22 that. If they need to formalize that in some way, 
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1 perhaps that's useful. 

2 Leon, you had a -- 

3 MR. OWENS: (Off microphone) (Inaudible) the rest of my 

4 comments. I'm fine. 

5 DR. ZIEMER: Roy? 

6 DR. DEHART: I support the motion, but in saying that I 

7 want to make it clear that I have no doubt at all that 

8 NIOSH has done a good faith effort to come up with the 

9 best that they could with the data that they have. The 

10 reason I support the motion is that it's a divisive 

11 issue. We have heard time and time again of the need 

12 for the experts in the field and the workers to 

13 participate as much as possible. This is an 

14 opportunity to continue that participation. However, I 

15 think it's a mistake if you assume that this will 

16 resolve or remove any issues. It will not. 

17 What it will do, though, will give one more step of 

18 protection to NIOSH as it moves forward to try to 

19 accomplish these evaluations. 

20 DR. ZIEMER: Mike, you have another comment, then Gen. 

21 MR. GIBSON: Just for the record, I don't want to say 

22 that I'm questioning the credibility of any particular 
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1 rad professional, but I know for a fact there are some 

2 in the complex that have put production over safety and 

3 put employees in harm's way, and there's even 

4 documentation been sent to management making them aware 

5 of the situation, and it was avoided. I know that for 

6 a fact, so it's -- I'm not questioning the credibility 

7 of most of the rad professionals. But you know, just 

8 like there's -- there's union employees that we have to 

9 represent that's got caught sleeping on the job, there 

10 are some out there. 

11 DR. ZIEMER: Yes. Thank you, Mike. Gen. 

12 DR. ROESSLER: I, too, support the motion. I would 

13 like to say, though, that from my evaluation of what 

14 was done in this particular site profile, I think it 

15 was very well done. I do think that Jim's caution for 

16 the future we should keep in mind, and I think it gives 

17 the Board direction as to what we prioritize when our 

18 audit contractor begins their work. 

19 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Jim or Ray, would you read the 

20 motion for us again? 

21 DR. MELIUS: I'll do it. The -- I -- Advisory Board 

22 recommends that NIOSH develop a program for public and 
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1 site expert participation in the development of the 

2 site profiles, that this involvement should include 

3 involvement prior -- during the initial development of 

4 the site profile, as well as when -- at the time when 

5 the -- what they call -- the final draft document is 

6 about -- is ready for publication on the web site. 

7 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Wanda, you have an additional 

8 comment on the motion? 

9 MS. MUNN: Yes, I do. I want to make it very clear 

10 that although I'm going to vote against the motion, the 

11 reason I'm voting against it is because I think it is 

12 incorrect procedurally. There is no question in my 

13 mind that all sources of valuable information need to 

14 be incorporated into the final document. My 

15 observation of what transpires with public hearings and 

16 with wide open input prior to having a document in 

17 front of you to work from is cumbersome, at best, and 

18 is extremely time-consuming for all involved. My -- 

19 again, in personal experience, what has transpired most 

20 effectively is to have a valuable document based on the 

21 best evidence that can be supported by record, and then 

22 have input to that if there are shortcomings or errors 
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1 to it. 

2 DR. ZIEMER: Let me also clarify. I believe the motion 

3 doesn't mandate how this process is to be carried out 

4 other than to ask that there be that input. It could 

5 in fact be a process that looks exactly like what has 

6 occurred. Yes. 

7 DR. MELIUS: It -- well, I -- 

8 DR. ZIEMER: The motion. 

9 DR. MELIUS: Yeah. 

10 DR. ZIEMER: I'm saying that the motion does not 

11 mandate the process. 

12 Let me add this, also. Recognize that this Board is 

13 not a management board for NIOSH. We do not manage 

14 their process. The -- if the motion passes, it tells 

15 Larry what the sense of the Board is, and that's his 

16 prerogative to use that as he sees fit, or as he 

17 doesn't see fit. Understood. You know, our 

18 prerogative is to recommend things to the Secretary. 

19 This is not an issue that we go to the Secretary and 

20 say make Larry do this. This is -- Larry has actually 

21 asked for the sense of the Board here on this issue. 

22 Now I understand -- yeah, Jim. 
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1 DR. MELIUS: Yeah, but can I just clarify -- 

2 DR. ZIEMER: Clarify your motion. 

3 DR. MELIUS: Yeah, the -- it's to develop a program 

4 now. 

5 DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

6 DR. MELIUS: Trying to give enough flexibility -- 

7 DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

8 DR. MELIUS: -- in terms of what there should be. 

9 DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

10 DR. MELIUS: That's... 

11 DR. ZIEMER: Does everyone understand the motion now 

12 and are you ready to vote? 

13 Okay. All those who support the motion will say aye. 

14 (Affirmative responses) 

15 DR. ZIEMER: Those opposing the motion, no. 

16 (Negative responses) 

17 DR. ZIEMER: And any abstentions? 

18 (No responses) 

19 DR. ZIEMER: Then the ayes have it and -- and the 

20 record shows Rich is not here, and Henry is not here, 

21 so there is -- nine Board members present and voting. 

22 Okay. We need to take a break -- 15 minutes. We're a 
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1 little behind schedule, so be promptly back in 15 

2 minutes. 

3 (Whereupon, a recess was taken.) 

4 WORKING GROUP ON OPTIONS FOR EVALUATING INTERVIEWS

5 DR. ZIEMER: I'm pushing us here because we're a little 

6 bit behind schedule and I'm hoping our next two items 

7 we can move through efficiently. 

8 First of all, working group on options for evaluating 

9 interviews, and this is our working group that Jim 

10 Melius was heading up. Jim, are you ready to report to 

11 us on your work group's activities? 

12 DR. MELIUS: Yes, and I think we can -- we can make 

13 this as brief or as long as you want, so that's -- 

14 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Now our next item... 

15 DR. MELIUS: Let me just update you on where we are. 

16 The working group, which includes Tony, Wanda, myself, 

17 Mike Gibson and Rich Espinosa, had a telephone 

18 conference call, I think about three or four weeks ago 

19 for a couple of hours with NIOSH staff. And we met 

20 again briefly yesterday and we have further plans, 

21 which I'll get into in a second. So we have no 

22 recommendations to report to the full Advisory Board 
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1 yet. We should have that by the -- at least something 

2 by the next meeting. 

3 As you recall, the working group was formed to try to 

4 address the issue of to what -- where -- which the 

5 Board is -- there's disagreements among the Board on 

6 whether -- how extensive and how to evaluate the 

7 interviews that are done as part of the dose 

8 reconstruction. And particularly whether there is a 

9 need for a secondary interview or a follow-up 

10 interview, whatever we want to call it, to evaluate the 

11 quality of the first interview or whether that can be 

12 done in -- in some other manner. 

13 Rather than address that question directly, we decided 

14 to sort of work at it from the other end, which is by 

15 reviewing the entire process that NIOSH and ORAU uses 

16 now in conducting the interviews, how those are done, 

17 how people are trained, what type of quality 

18 assurance/quality control there is. How does that 

19 process -- the -- how does further information get 

20 added to the record 'cause that would tell us something 

21 about the quality of the initial interview, so forth. 

22 We discussed that with NIOSH staff and gave them -- 
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1 during our conference call sort of gave them a list of 

2 what kinds of information we were looking for. They 

3 provided that to us. Included, for example, the OMB 

4 package that was -- at least the main OMB document that 

5 went up that -- when the interview was first approved. 

6 When we met yesterday we asked them for additional 

7 information, particularly as it relates to how ORAU is 

8 now implementing the interviews. And there's been a 

9 transition from NIOSH to ORAU and so there's -- I think 

10 a number of procedures that are under development or 

11 have been developed and to some extent it's a moving 

12 target, but we've asked them for some additional 

13 information to clarify. And what we're really looking 

14 for is, one, is the process; how is this reviewed. And 

15 secondly, how is that review recorded, so is there a 

16 record of sort that could be -- be tabulated, reviewed 

17 in some way. And I think we -- we've got a lot of 

18 useful information. 

19 We're not ready to -- don't have it all and we're not 

20 really ready to make a recommendation. I think by the 

21 next meeting in December we should be ready I think for 

22 -- hopefully for a good discussion of this issue with -
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1 - and be able to present some options that the Board 

2 can consider or ask the working group to go back and 

3 further develop some particular options. 

4 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you, Jim. Very good. Let me ask if 

5 any of the Board members have questions to ask for Jim 

6 -- of Jim about the work of that working group. 

7 (No responses) 

8 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. We'll look forward then to hearing 

9 from you next time. 

10 RESEARCH ISSUES

11 DR. ZIEMER: Let's go ahead and ask Russ Henshaw to 

12 make his presentation on research issues. And I 

13 believe there is a packet in your booklet from Russ, as 

14 well. Russ. 

15 MR. HENSHAW: (Off microphone) Can everyone hear me? 

16 DR. ZIEMER: Move it up just a little bit, Russ. 

17 MR. HENSHAW: How about now? 

18 DR. ZIEMER: That's good. 

19 MR. ELLIOTT: Russ, if you put it on your right side in 

20 case you're looking at the screen, you won't be talking 

21 away from the mike. Thank you. 

22 MR. HENSHAW: Is that okay? 
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1 DR. ZIEMER: Uh-huh. 

2 MR. HENSHAW: Thanks. Well, I'm Russ Henshaw, an 

3 epidemiologist with NIOSH's Office of Compensation 

4 Analysis and Support office. I might start by saying 

5 that as I was preparing my presentation I had an 

6 inclination that there might be -- I don't know -- 

7 maybe a smidgen or two of controversy involved with my 

8 little corner of the EEOICPA world, that would be 

9 research issues, particularly as they relate to cancer 

10 risk models in IREP. I would say that this morning's 

11 discussion served as a humbling reminder that 

12 everything is indeed relative. So there may be a 

13 little controversy involved with this, but it should be 

14 fairly smooth going. 

15 I just want to share some of the things with the Board 

16 that we've been thinking about at NIOSH relative to 

17 research. I'd be very happy to entertain questions at 

18 any point during the presentation, or afterwards, so I 

19 don't -- I don't mind being interrupted. 

20 What I'm going to discuss this morning is really three 

21 broad areas. One -- the first is consideration -- 

22 considerations for adopting and implementing 
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1 modifications to cancer risk models. I'll talk a 

2 little bit about some types -- some types of risk model 

3 adjustments, give two examples. One example is the 

4 recent change we made to the thyroid and leukemia 

5 latency models just earlier -- earlier this year. 

6 I'll go into another example, a possible change for the 

7 future. I'd also like to discuss some criteria to keep 

8 in mind as we consider the results from research 

9 studies and whether or not to implement them; and if 

10 so, how to apply them to IREP. Talk a little bit about 

11 the issue of timeliness, specifically what are 

12 realistic time frames for conducting and completing 

13 research. And also a little bit about what I think are 

14 some special problems associated with implementing 

15 research findings, particularly those that may include 

16 a lower -- may include an effect that lowers 

17 probability of causation. 

18 The second broad area is an update on research topics, 

19 those issues that have been discussed at the Board. In 

20 prior meetings you recall there was a priority list 

21 that was decided upon. We've been discussing that at 

22 length in NIOSH. I'll talk a little bit about where we 
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1 are with some of those issues. 

2 And then finally, I think this would be a good time to 

3 try to summarize the current differences between NIOSH4 IREP and between the NCI version of IREP, which is 

5 really officially known as NIH-IREP. It's -- may be 

6 particularly appropriate since the final report of the 

7 working group to revise the radioepidemiology tables 

8 has been completed and -- I'm not sure exactly where 

9 that is right now, whether it's actually available, but 

10 it's at least -- at least has gone to the printer, so 

11 far as I understand it. 

12 Okay, adjusting NIOSH-IREP risk models. Part of 

13 NIOSH's mission under EEOICPA is to periodically 

14 improve the fit of the cancer risk model, as science 

15 warrants. As new research and new data prompt 

16 adjustments to these models, the models that in fact 

17 determine probability of causation, the effects are 

18 likely to range from very slight to very substantial. 

19 And the interpretation of research findings is complex, 

20 particularly trying to take findings and adapt them to 

21 NIOSH-IREP. 

22 For example, take the recent adjustments we made to the 
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1 leukemia and thyroid cancer latency models. And by the 

2 way, I'm using the word "latency" to refer to the time 

3 between exposure and diagnosis, not a clinical 

4 definition of latency. 

5 Just to recap briefly, you might recall that we -- that 

6 NIOSH observed a problem with those models last year. 

7 Specifically thyroid cancer and leukemia were the only 

8 two cancer models in IREP that conferred zero risk at 

9 short latency periods. It was within two years of 

10 exposure for leukemia and within three years for 

11 thyroid cancer. The other 30 cancer models all 

12 conferred at least some non-zero risk at short latency. 

13 Well, we felt that, frankly, the science did not 

14 support those two exceptions. We then asked SENES-Oak 

15 Ridge, Incorporated, the firm that developed NIOSH16 IREP, to create new models conferring some risk at 

17 short latency. Because of the unusual -- maybe not 

18 unique, but at least unusual -- nature of this 

19 modification, namely that we predetermined that no -- 

20 that PC should not be lowered for any potential 

21 claimant, we specified that to SENES in creating the 

22 risk models. And we learned some lessons from that 
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1 experience. 

2 Number one is that it's very difficult -- and I'll talk 

3 more about this later. It's very difficult to specify, 

4 for any model change, that there be no decrease in 

5 probability of causation. IREP is so complex -- 32 

6 cancer models, not even counting the special model for 

7 lung cancer caused by radon -- that there are literally 

8 thousands of different possible variations in any -- 

9 for any one claimant. 

10 In that case -- in the case of thyroid and leukemia 

11 adjustments, it took a considerable amount of testing 

12 and retesting, and a number of adjustments, to ensure 

13 that no claimant would be adversely affected. Still I 

14 would categorize that modification, in the overall 

15 scheme of things, as a relatively minor adjustment to 

16 IREP. Actually few claims were affected, and in our 

17 view, it really fell more into the category of an 

18 oversight than a -- some major change in risk modeling. 

19 Probably, if we were able to go back in time, those 

20 two cancers would not have been accepted from the -- 

21 allowing some risk at short latency periods. 

22 In this particular instance, NCI eventually agreed with 
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1 our interpretation and modified NIH-IREP so that it -- 

2 those two models are exactly the same as ours, and the 

3 Board endorsed that change. Still, for a relatively 

4 minor adjustment, it took nearly a year to implement. 

5 We actually observed the problem I think in July, 2002 

6 and finally made it effective in IREP in May, 2003. 

7 Going on to another example, this is a possible example 

8 for the future, namely the lung cancer and smoking 

9 model. This has been, as everyone knows, a 

10 particularly controversial part of IREP because we 

11 adjust for smoking. It's the only -- the only cancer 

12 risk model that makes any adjustment for behavior. 

13 NIOSH agrees that our current lung model should be 

14 reviewed, especially in light of the recent paper by 

15 Pierce published earlier this year in Radiation 

16 Research, and a paper that's already -- even though 

17 it's one study -- proved to be influential. NCI, for 

18 example, has completely modified their lung cancer 

19 model according to the Pierce findings. That included, 

20 by the way, some additional work by Pierce. NCI 

21 actually commissioned a -- an additional data analysis 

22 by Pierce, a customized analysis, specifically for 
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1 application to the IREP lung model. 

2 The Pierce study was entitled "Joint Effects of 

3 Radiation and Smoking on Lung Cancer Risk Among Atomic 

4 Bomb Survivors". You might recall also that Dr. Owen 

5 Hoffman of SENES talked a little bit about those 

6 findings at a Board meeting earlier this year in Oak 

7 Ridge. 

8 What Pierce did was examine the smoking history and 

9 lung cancer incidence in what amounted to a subset of 

10 the Japanese atomic bomb survivor cohort. It was a net 

11 cohort of about 45,000 persons, with follow-up through 

12 1994. 

13 Well, NIOSH now has several options, and I want to 

14 emphasize that these are not mutually exclusive. One 

15 option obviously is to adopt the risk model utilized, 

16 created and implemented by NCI. And please don't read 

17 between the lines. There is no hidden agenda in here. 

18 We have no decision at NIOSH to do that. We're just 

19 at the beginning of considering this whole matter. 

20 We might also independently review the data or 

21 commission an independent review of the data from the 

22 Pierce findings. At a minimum, we certainly need to 
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1 evaluate the new NCI model much more carefully in order 

2 to thoroughly understand the assumptions made in 

3 creating the model. No one in NIOSH -- at least at 

4 OCAS -- has had a chance to do that in any -- with any 

5 degree of thoroughness at this point. 

6 Another option would be to take a more cautious 

7 approach, kind of wait until the dust settles on the 

8 Pierce findings. After all, it's only one paper. We 

9 might also solicit expert judgment. That list, again, 

10 is not -- those options are not mutually exclusive nor 

11 exhaustive, just some options we might consider. 

12 It kind of segues into the issue of what are 

13 appropriate rationales for modifying the cancer risk 

14 models. Obviously the scientific value and the 

15 applicability of findings range from fairly weak to 

16 very substantial. In general, we think that prudence 

17 should always be exercised in considering any findings, 

18 especially if the findings from studies are in 

19 conflict, that there's been no replication, if the 

20 results are suggestive but not considered statistically 

21 significant, problems with study design, disagreement 

22 among experts, implausible dose response associations, 
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1 possible bias, et cetera. There's nothing new here. 

2 These are factors to consider in evaluating any study. 

3 What are stronger scientific rationales? Well, they 

4 include studies that are well-designed and have been 

5 peer-reviewed, replicated, and I might also include in 

6 that list ongoing, systematic studies with updated data 

7 analysis. That would be one value of the Pierce study. 

8 One detriment would be, again, it's only one study. 

9 Also expert panel recommendations such as the BEIR VII 

10 report, which we're all anxiously awaiting. Other 

11 expert consensus -- I might also mention that since the 

12 EEOICPA program compensates for cancer incidence -- 

13 getting cancer, not for cancer mortality, that 

14 incidence studies are naturally more compelling than 

15 mortality studies. 

16 And what about evidentiary concerns? Sort of borrow 

17 from the legal world, weight or preponderance of the 

18 evidence is one standard typically used in civil cases. 

19 Is that sufficient for modifying an IREP risk model? 

20 Maybe in some cases, maybe not in others. I think in 

21 general, it depends on the potential impact on 

22 probability of causation. I would say the greater the 
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1 impact, the more stringent the standard should be for 

2 implementing any findings. Maybe the evidence should 

3 be clear and convincing, or even -- even greater. 

4 Those are all things we need to consider. 

5 There are also of course instances in which policy 

6 affects IREP modifications. That's no secret. In 

7 general, though, NIOSH is required and committed to use 

8 the -- use science to its fullest -- fullest advantage 

9 and, where science fails, to err on the side of the 

10 claimant. Of course the Board is always welcome and 

11 encouraged to weigh in with comments, as are the 

12 public. 

13 I think another issue is, to put it bluntly, the 

14 usefulness of research. And in that category would be 

15 the time frame for conducting and completing studies. 

16 I don't know that there's a hard and fast rule, but I 

17 would say, for example, that it would probably not be 

18 in the best interests of the claimants or this program 

19 to commission say a prospective cohort study that's 

20 intended to last say ten years or more. Short of that, 

21 I don't know -- one year, two years, five years -- 

22 those are -- that's a factor we need to consider very 
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1 carefully in engaging in, funding, participating or 

2 initiating any research. I would say in general, 

3 though, the longer a study takes, the less useful it is 

4 likely to be for compensation purposes. 

5 Another issue to consider, and it's sort of in the same 

6 category, is targeted research versus research that 

7 kind of just increases the general body of scientific 

8 knowledge. Hopefully, research for -- or under the 

9 auspices of EEOICPA would also have some greater use. 

10 I think one question, though, is do we want to get into 

11 research that has questionable, maybe very limited 

12 application to EEOICPA. There's no doubt that that 

13 research needs to be done. Whether or not this is the 

14 place for it, under this funding, is an issue to 

15 consider. 

16 Potential effects of risk model modifications, well, as 

17 you know, a great deal of uncertainty -- uncertainty is 

18 factored into the IREP cancer risk models. In fact, in 

19 many claims, quite frankly, uncertainty is the major 

20 contributor to compensability. In those scenarios, 

21 although the best estimate of causation is the central 

22 estimate, which can -- actually some may be surprised 
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1 to hear this, but that can actually be one percent or 

2 less. At the 99th percentile credibility limit, the 

3 claim can be compensable. 

4 Well, here's the rub. As we begin to incorporate study 

5 results such as results from occupational studies, that 

6 would have an effect on the uncertainty built into our 

7 risk models. The uncertainty is likely to be reduced. 

8 There's a domino effect there. As uncertainty is 

9 reduced, compensation is also likely to be reduced. 

10 Again, I just want to note that it's often very 

11 difficult to ascertain the precise effects on 

12 probability of causation for every conceivable type of 

13 claim. It may be impossible, in some instances. There 

14 are just too many variables. 

15 At this point, by the way, I just noticed I'm on slide 

16 11, so I have some good news and bad news. The good 

17 news is I'm halfway done with the presentation. You're 

18 probably ahead of me here, the bad news is we've still 

19 got half to go. 

20 I'm going to do some practical considerations for 

21 research. Let's just say that we have some 

22 hypothetical IREP change that appears it will be 
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1 claimant-favorable in some cases, claimant-unfavorable 

2 in some other cases. And by claimant-favorable, I'm 

3 finding that simply is increasing or decreasing 

4 probability of causation. 

5 Well, the first issue to consider -- let's say we've 

6 got a completed study. We've evaluated the findings. 

7 Everybody's just gung ho, let's make this change. The 

8 first issue to consider is what is the precise 

9 effective date for the change. That's an arbitrary 

10 designation. 

11 The second decision, exactly what claims will be 

12 subject to these changes? Is it all claims -- one 

13 option would be all claims filed after that 

14 arbitrarily-designated effective date. Does it apply 

15 to claims in the queue, so to speak, already filed, not 

16 yet subject to dose reconstruction? These are all 

17 issues to consider. 

18 Now for the leukemia and thyroid change, there was no 

19 real issue there because there was no adverse effect on 

20 claimants. We simply applied it immediately to all 

21 claims, past and future. But as I said, that may turn 

22 out to have been an unusual circumstance. So we've got 
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1 -- we've got a very major decision to make about 

2 exactly how to implement changes as they come about. 

3 Let's say, for the sake of discussion -- and again, 

4 please don't read between the lines. We have not even 

5 come close to fully discussing or making a decision on 

6 these issues. Let's just say that we have some 

7 hypothetical change to some IREP cancer risk model. We 

8 designate a date. We determine that it's -- all claims 

9 filed after that date are subject to the change. Say 

10 this happens, over the course of this program, four, 

11 five, six, ten times. Well, the result of that will be 

12 multiple versions of IREP, each one frozen in time and 

13 each one subject to some specific subset of claims. 

14 That's one way to handle this. Maybe not the best way, 

15 it's certainly not the only way. But it's certainly 

16 doable from a technical point of view. It will require 

17 very careful attention to claims tracking procedures, 

18 but it's doable. 

19 Let me give you a bit of an update on research topics. 

20 Take chronic lymphocytic leukemia, CLL, for one. Now 

21 this is a subject that we're very interested in. I 

22 have a personal interest in it, I might add. NIOSH's 
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1 Health-related Energy Research Branch -- the acronym 

2 many -- probably everyone here knows is HERB -- is 

3 currently conducting a multi-site leukemia case4 controlled study. I don't recall off the top of my 

5 head what the expected completion date for that is, but 

6 they do intend to look at the CLL cases in that study. 

7 That's one avenue of research that's on the drawing 

8 board. And there will be others, as well. 

9 The lung cancer smoking model I've already talked about 

10 a little bit. NCI has already adopted the change. 

11 Their model is now different from ours. We will look 

12 very carefully at that model. 

13 But we're also interested in other issues related to 

14 the whole smoking/lung cancer issue, as well, such as 

15 when it's -- I've been asked about, a number of times, 

16 why do we say that -- that former -- why do we define a 

17 former smoker as quit five or more years ago, why -- 

18 you know, and why is -- does it have this or that 

19 effect on the risk model. There are a number of issues 

20 with the smoking and lung cancer model we intend to 

21 look at, and it's a high priority. 

22 Age at exposure is another controversial topic. I know 
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1 one or more members of the Board, for example, were 

2 particularly concerned about that as we were developing 

3 the IREP program, before the Board was even 

4 constructed. 

5 Well, I'm very pleased to note this morning that 

6 NIOSH's Health-related Energy Research Branch, HERB, 

7 will be conducting age at exposure workshops. That's 

8 on the drawing board. I believe their plan is to start 

9 that project before the end of this current fiscal 

10 year. In addition to that, HERB is also completing 

11 some of their existing studies, including exposure12 based cohort studies. 

13 And for those of you who may not know -- I'm sure 

14 everyone on the Board does, but there's a general 

15 assumption in the IREP risk models that the risk of 

16 inducing cancer decreases as age increases. That's one 

17 of the assumptions that the age at exposure workshops 

18 will look at, and the purpose includes re-evaluating 

19 that assumption, as well as the general procedures for 

20 establishing age at exposure and how they affect the 

21 risk models. 

22 Going on to another probably -- I think it'd be fair to 
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1 categorize it as a very controversial topic, at least 

2 within the research world, are the DDREF distributions 

3 used in IREP. DDREF, as the Board knows, is an acronym 

4 for Dose and Dose Rate Effectiveness Factor. And to 

5 put it simply, that -- the DDREF takes into account the 

6 assumption that risk of inducing cancer is different at 

7 low doses and low dose rates compared to high doses and 

8 high dose rates. You may recall that most of our 

9 cancer models employ a dose -- an uncertainty -- excuse 

10 me, a probability distribution for DDREF that tends to 

11 fall mostly between one and two. Some have argued that 

12 it should be one. One has no effect, actually, on 

13 risk. Two reduces effect. Lower than one increases 

14 risk and so forth. 

15 Well, that is a high priority topic for us. We will be 

16 extensively re-evaluating the DDREF distributions used 

17 in IREP. SENES-Oak Ridge, Incorporated will play a 

18 major role in that. We've just started talking with 

19 them about that. I can't really say any more at this 

20 point, but it is a high priority topic. 

21 And also we have our own EEOICPA claims data. We're in 

22 the process of developing a separate epidemiological 
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1 database incorporating variables from the dose 

2 reconstruction process. We intend to utilize that, to 

3 the extent possible. I would say, though, that there 

4 are some limitations with that data related to the 

5 efficiency process. It's somewhat difficult to equate 

6 dose with risk based solely on the dose reconstruction 

7 data. But nonetheless, we certainly intend to utilize 

8 it to whatever extent we can. 

9 We're anxious to begin work on other research topics, 

10 on collaborating and coordinating with HERB, working 

11 with SENES. And I might also mention, speaking of 

12 SENES, that Dave -- Dr. David Kocher's work on REFs has 

13 been submitted for publication to Radiation Research. 

14 SENES will be doing some more -- some additional 

15 research on REFs, particularly after publication and 

16 responding to comments and peer review. 

17 I want to spend a little time now on discussing the 

18 current differences between NIOSH-IREP and NIH-IREP, 

19 which again is NCI's version of IREP. 

20 The new NCI lung model is favorable in terms of 

21 increasing PC to some claimant profiles, unfavorable to 

22 other profiles. And I might add that lung model does 
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1 not apply to radon exposures. That has not been 

2 changed. The new NCI model takes into account age -- 

3 that's really the major change to the model, age at 

4 diagnosis and age at exposure. NIOSH-IREP does not. 

5 NCI, as you might guess, believes that the change 

6 they've made represents the best science available at 

7 the current time. Again, we intend to evaluate their 

8 model, and beyond that, I really have no other comment 

9 to make on -- additional comment to make on what NIOSH 

10 might do with the lung model at this point. 

11 I do want to say, by the way, that this part of the 

12 presentation, the differences between the two IREP 

13 versions, come mostly from a list that Dr. Iulian 

14 Apostoaei -- is that right? -- that Dr. Iulian 

15 Apostoaei prepared for us. Iulian is with SENES. 

16 In general, the new NCI lung model is much more 

17 complex. We do know that it apparent-- well, let me 

18 rephrase that. The new model appears to produce higher 

19 PC for smokers, higher probability of causation, and 

20 for people who were exposed in their twenties and 

21 diagnosed with cancer -- actually the slide shows that. 

22 It's really -- maybe Brian -- Brian Thomas of SENES is 
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1 here, as well. Maybe Brian can correct me if I'm 

2 wrong, but I think it's really 15 to 20 years after 

3 exposure. 

4 It generally appears to produce lower PC for non5 smokers and for females exposed later in life, as 

6 compared to NIOSH-IREP. 

7 Another difference is, in the bone cancer model NCI has 

8 incorporated a new latency function for bone cancer. 

9 Their model now uses the latency function that is used 

10 for thyroid cancer. The thyroid cancer model is 

11 identical in both versions of IREP. NIOSH-IREP has not 

12 made that change. NCI, as I understand it, based that 

13 change on a reconsideration of some studies that were 

14 actually reported in BEIR V that suggested that bone 

15 cancer could be induced within two to four years of 

16 exposure. 

17 Obviously that's another issue we intend to look at in 

18 NIOSH. I would say the NCI model in general appears 

19 that it will somewhat increase PC results for claims in 

20 which the diagnosis occurred within that shorter 

21 latency period. 

22 The age limitation, there's nothing mysterious there. 
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1 NIOSH-IREP accepts minimum age of 15, reflecting the 

2 fact that our cohort is adult workers. NIH-IREP 

3 accepts all ages. 

4 Skin cancer, NCI has no malignant melanoma model. 

5 NIOSH-IREP does. I frankly am not quite sure why they 

6 don't, and I'm not sure how malignant melanoma would be 

7 handled in NIH-IREP. 

8 NIOSH-IREP adjusts -- well, both versions of IREP 

9 adjust for race and ethnicity for skin cancer. 

10 However, in our program claimants are required to 

11 identify one or more races, and those are in turn 

12 plugged into IREP. If they identify more than one 

13 race, we run the model under each race and take the 

14 highest PC. In NIH-IREP they have a category they call 

15 "all races". That's reportedly -- represents the 

16 entire U.S. population, so the effect of that, if race 

17 was unknown and say the individual was black, the PC 

18 result from running all races would be lower than 

19 running under the correct race -- than running the 

20 claim under the correct race. For whites it would be 

21 slightly -- slightly higher, though probably 

22 insignificantly higher. 
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1 Eye cancer, NIOSH-IREP has no specific model for eye 

2 cancer -- I'm sorry, NIOSH-IREP has an eye cancer 

3 model. NIH does not. Presumably if you're trying to 

4 run a case of eye cancer in NIH-IREP you'd use "Other 

5 and Ill-defined Sites" or possibly the nervous system 

6 model. 

7 Cancers of other endocrine glands, well, both versions 

8 of IREP, IREP has a specific model for thyroid cancer 

9 and a specific model, for example, for pancreatic 

10 cancer. However, NIOSH-IREP has an "other endocrine 

11 glands" model. Endocrine glands are ductless, hormone12 secreting glands that affect the metabolic process. In 

13 NIH-IREP there's no model for those other glands such 

14 as, for example, adrenal cancer. And at NIH-IREP, I 

15 think they would run that in the -- they would use the 

16 "Other and Ill-defined Sites" category, I believe. 

17 Male breast cancer, NIOSH-IREP covers that. NIH-IREP 

18 does not. If you're going to run a male breast cancer 

19 case in NIH-IREP, I believe, again, you would have to 

20 use "Other and Ill-defined Sites". 

21 Other digestive cancers, NIOSH-IREP has an "all 

22 digestive" model. NIH-IREP has an "other digestive" 
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1 model. But according to what -- Iulian sent me both 

2 models, produced the same exact PC, so there's 

3 effectively no -- no difference. 

4 And finally, final difference would be dealing with 

5 multiple primary cancers. There's no procedure for 

6 that in NIH-IREP. As you know, under our probability 

7 of causation guidelines, EEOICPA provides for that; 

8 namely a mathematical equation that we actually used to 

9 do by hand, but I know some -- at some point in the 

10 program SENES created an online form for that that does 

11 it automatically. 

12 And rounding third and heading for home here, we get to 

13 the summary. Some modifications seem to be relatively 

14 non-controversial, such as the thyroid and leukemia 

15 latency adjustments made earlier this year. Of course 

16 that was, again, an instance where we predetermined 

17 that there would be no decrease in PC. Other potential 

18 changes, such as lung cancer or the DDREF distribution, 

19 age at exposure, I would say substantially more 

20 significant. And we recognize that policy does play a 

21 role. In fact, one might argue that defining as likely 

22 as not is -- using PC at the 99th credibility limit is 
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1 as much, if not more, policy than science. But 

2 nonetheless, we certainly intend to use science to its 

3 fullest extent within the confines of whatever the 

4 policy happens to be at the time. 

5 And we need to pay attention to practical issues, such 

6 as research time frames, whether or not research is 

7 applicable to the compensation program, how and when to 

8 apply changes and so forth. 

9 Generally speaking, the more good quality data we 

10 accumulate, the less the uncertainty, and quite 

11 possibly the lower the PC. That's the domino effect. 

12 It seems very likely -- to me, at least -- that many 

13 scientific findings are likely to cut both ways in 

14 terms of effect on PC. And in some cases, again due to 

15 the sheer number of variables in the models, it may be 

16 difficult if not impossible to exactly predict that 

17 effect for every potential claimant profile. 

18 And finally, we're actively discussing research within 

19 NIOSH -- not just within OCAS, but with HERB, and we're 

20 planning research projects that hopefully will prove 

21 very relevant to EEOICPA. 

22 And one final note, again, we all look forward to the 
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1 release of the BEIR VII report and we certainly intend 

2 to evaluate those findings when they're released for 

3 possible application to IREP. 

4 And that concludes my presentation. Any questions? 

5 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you very much, Russ. I think we'll 

6 defer questions at this time. If we -- we need to get 

7 to the public comment period -- very brief? 

8 DR. MELIUS: Very brief. 

9 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. 

10 DR. MELIUS: It has nothing to do with public 

11 participation in this process. 

12 The question I have is on the age at exposure workshops 

13 that are underway. Since that's a top-- I don't quite 

14 understand how the other branch is -- the other group 

15 is handling this and so forth, but certainly that ought 

16 -- ought to be something, since you're getting experts 

17 together, let's not have to do it twice and that we 

18 ought to consider some participation and so forth and 

19 so if you could just take that into account. 

20 Second thing, I think that doing that kind of a 

21 workshop for the smoking issue might be a good way of 

22 handling that, too. Get some of the experts together, 
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1 be able to look at that as a way of sort of informing 

2 what are some of your policy choices that -- and what's 

3 the best way to proceed. 

4 MR. HENSHAW: Thank you. 

5 PUBLIC COMMENT 

6 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. I'd like to move us to the 

7 public comment period. We have folks who have been 

8 waiting and we have quite a few that wish to speak. We 

9 can come back to this if we need to, but I -- we're 

10 into the lunch hour. We need to honor those who've 

11 come here to address the Board. 

12 Let me -- again, I want to remind those from the 

13 public, and particularly if you were not here 

14 yesterday, that this is an opportunity to publicly 

15 comment for the record on the program, the policies, 

16 concerns you might have. This is not a -- really a 

17 time to ask questions about any individual claim. If 

18 you have questions on individual claims, those should 

19 be directed privately to the NIOSH staff members. 

20 Also, our format here is not really one of a question 

21 and answer period. It's a statement period. If there 

22 are questions of broad interest to the Board and the 
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1 group, we may choose to respond to those, but right now 

2 we're simply looking for comments. 

3 With those remarks in mind, and I'll take these in 

4 order except for cases where individuals have already 

5 commented to the Board, in which case I'm going to push 

6 you later in the schedule, Dolores Struckhausnider -- 

7 Struckhausnider? I may not be very good at pronouncing 

8 that one. Close enough, huh? Close enough for 

9 government work or some -- a former Mallinckrodt 

10 employee. 

11 MS. STUCKENSCHNEIDER: (Off microphone) My name is 

12 Dolores Stuckenschneider. 

13 UNIDENTIFIED: Pull that down -- 

14 MS. STUCKENSCHNEIDER: Okay. I worked at Destrehan 

15 Street and Weldon Springs for nine years. My file went 

16 to NIOSH in January of 2002 and I have kept in contact 

17 with them on an every-other-month basis. On September 

18 2nd I was told that -- well, on July I was told my dose 

19 reconstruction was going to be completed by September. 

20 September I was told that there were unforeseen issues 

21 that had delayed it, and my dose reconstruction could 

22 take from 90 to 180 days. 
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1 Myself, I cannot understand why Mallinckrodt has been 

2 put on the back burner for two-plus years while other 

3 states are being compensated, and some have been given 

4 Special Exposure Cohort. Although we've had some 

5 attention from our legislatures, we've seen no real 

6 evidence of any action yet expediting or processing our 

7 claims. 

8 When I attended the first meeting in St. Louis at the 

9 Millennium Hotel in July 26th, 2001, the 

10 representatives from Department of Labor and Department 

11 of Energy made the 14 people that attended feel very 

12 optimistic. This certainly has not played out that 

13 way. 

14 Last night I was just able to read bits and pieces of 

15 the Mallinckrodt site profile. It said that the 

16 production office secretary/clerk -- which is me -- is 

17 presumed to have spent time in the office and assumed 

18 to have spent some time in the plant. This, and the 

19 fact that Weldon Springs is now a seven-story high tomb 

20 of radioactive waste called a tourist attraction on 45 

21 acres and 1.5 million cubic yards of radioactive 

22 materials and chemicals are buried under clay, sand and 
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1 rock, is reasons for Mallinckrodt to qualify for the 

2 Special Exposure Cohort. 

3 I don't believe that there is anyone that wasn't there 

4 can tell what the employees were exposed to and in what 

5 way. The fact that the buildings and the contents were 

6 buried should convince anyone that the whole place was 

7 contaminated. 

8 Going back to my position as a clerk, our office was in 

9 the same building as the plant and was separated by two 

10 inside doors. The plant people came in, the office 

11 people went out. No one changed their clothing they 

12 were wearing. All the papers, badges, dictaphones that 

13 the people in the office worked with came directly from 

14 the plant. Desks had to be dusted every morning, and 

15 I'm told that the cafeteria floor in the main building 

16 used by plant and office workers had yellow dust on the 

17 floor and was wiped up several times during the day. 

18 This kind of makes you wonder what we ate. 

19 The plant was approximately a city block from the main 

20 building, and I was one of two that relieved the 

21 switchboard operator in the main building for two 

22 breaks and lunch every other day. This walk back and 
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1 forth sometimes was unbearable. The odor out of the 

2 stacks was overwhelming. I felt sorry for the security 

3 guards that had to be outside all day, mainly because 

4 one of them was my husband's first cousin, now 

5 deceased. Whatever was coming out of the stacks seemed 

6 to be attacking nylon stockings, which after a time 

7 Mallinckrodt started reimbursing us for them. 

8 People that hear all of this wonder why we didn't know 

9 the dangers. I worked nine years for a company and I 

10 had no idea what was being done. I knew it had to do 

11 with uranium, but had no clue as to the dangers of this 

12 uranium or the presence of other chemicals and what it 

13 could do and did do to our bodies. We were not allowed 

14 to talk shop at work or at home. I had no reason not 

15 to trust Mallinckrodt and the Atomic Energy Commission. 

16 When I first read about the compensation and why it was 

17 being given, I felt anger and disappointment that our 

18 government had put us in harm's way without our 

19 knowledge or consent. My sister worked at Destrehan 

20 and Weldon and died at the age of 40. My dad worked at 

21 the main plant for over 48 years, died of lung cancer. 

22 Most of this I would like to e-mail or send to you. 
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1 Oh, I didn't say what I had. In 1985 I had breast 

2 cancer. In 1986 I had a metastasis to both my lungs 

3 and I was given less than a 40 percent chance of 

4 survival. That was 18 years ago. I still have to 

5 worry, though, because I have nodules on my lungs. The 

6 doctors say, you know, it's 95 percent sure that it's 

7 not cancer, and I've had the beryllium test, which came 

8 out negative. But he's -- I still think it's from the 

9 radiation 'cause the thoracic surgeon cannot tell me -- 

10 he's never seen it before. 

11 The only other thing, I think it would be a terrible 

12 injustice if any more of these former workers passed 

13 away before they receive this compensation. Thanks. 

14 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you very much, Dolores, and I 

15 believe you certainly can have that entered into your 

16 record. You work with the NIOSH people on that, as 

17 well. 

18 MS. STUCKENSCHNEIDER: (Off microphone) (Inaudible). 

19 DR. ZIEMER: Bob Leach, Mallinckrodt former employee? 

20 MR. LEACH: My name is Bob Leach and I worked for the 

21 uranium division at Mallinckrodt -- well, I was with 

22 Mallinckrodt for 15 years and 13 of that was in the 
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1 uranium division. And when I was transferred over to 

2 plant four I was appalled at the conditions. That 

3 plant four was part of the Destrehan Street plant and 

4 it's where we made the bombs, so-called, or -- for the 

5 ingots. And when I went in there, the furnaces and 

6 stuff, there would be green salt, there would be liner 

7 material, it'd be all over the floor, just dusty as the 

8 dickens, and all we had was a dust mask. 

9 Then many a times when we would put the bombs, after we 

10 had put everything in them and put them in the furnace, 

11 they would blow out. And then we would have to go in 

12 and clean up everything in there. And then when they 

13 got the electric furnaces in, why then we went to a 

14 bigger one. The smaller ones were around 200 to 300-

15 pound -- we called them biscuits or ever what. And 

16 then when they went to the electric furnaces, we set 

17 off up to 3,000-pound ingots. And there again, many a 

18 times they would blow out. And we have had them not 

19 only blow out through the shell, but also come out 

20 through the bottom of the furnace and out into the 

21 area. And then of course we had to clean all that up 

22 again. And then mechanics had to go in and get the 
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1 furnace going again. 

2 And we had one engineer there that sort of looked out 

3 for us. The lab would send down these experiments that 

4 they wanted to do in that furnace and he'd go over 

5 them, and he would send them back up. And he said if 

6 we did what you want to do, we would blow this place 

7 up, and he -- he looked out, which we were very 

8 thankful for. 

9 But then later on I was transferred out to Weldon 

10 Springs and there again I was in what they called 

11 peanut heaven where we -- we brought the drums of 

12 uranium ore in, took the lids off and run them through 

13 the system, and then it went from there to the 

14 refineries to be made into green salt. But many a 

15 times the -- the dust collectors bags would break 

16 inside of them and then the mechanics would have to go 

17 in -- they would have to replace the bags. Then the 

18 operators would have to go in and clean them. And many 

19 a times the mechanics and the operators would be 

20 covered with this uranium dust that had been vacuumed 

21 up. 

22 And -- well, there's just so many things that was not 
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1 taken care of, and many of us foremen -- well, not only 

2 the foremen, but the operators, we would work as many 

3 as 70-some hours a week during the summer when they 

4 were operating seven days a week, and through the week 

5 they would operate 12 hours a day, and we had to -- 

6 especially if any of them was on vacation, foreman or 

7 operator, that area had to be covered. And you might 

8 say well, you can't work 70-some hours a week, but 

9 believe me, we did, Saturdays and Sundays and all. 

10 And to me, this is one reason why, with all these 

11 different variables, that there is no way in God's 

12 world that they are going to set up an accurate 

13 exposure record for any of these systems, because they 

14 were not there. We were not monitored like we should -

15 - we did have film badges, but this went on and on, all 

16 the time. And when we would make these 3,000-pound 

17 ingots, they would be laying out in the open. They 

18 would tell us that -- oh, you can sit on that; said any 

19 radiation you would get would be gone out of your body 

20 within a week. Well, now they know that is not so. So 

21 we -- we all had our jobs, and we had families to 

22 support, and that's basically why most of us stayed 
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1 there. 

2 And there was just many, many times like this. In all 

3 due respect to all of you that's working on this, there 

4 is no way you're going to get an accurate account of 

5 the radiation and exposure that the operators, the 

6 foremen and all had during these here 12 or 13 years. 

7 And if any of you -- anybody thinks that we were 

8 getting rich, I was foreman for several years and when 

9 I was terminated I was making $4.13 an hour, $752 a 

10 month. And just coincidentally -- and it's strictly a 

11 coincidence -- but Mallinckrodt let me go two months 

12 before I was eligible for a pension. Thank you. 

13 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you, Bob, for your remarks. Next we 

14 go to Kay Dray (sic). 

15 MS. DREY: Drey. 

16 DR. ZIEMER: Drey? D-r-e-y, yes, Nuclear Information 

17 and Resource Service. 

18 MS. DREY: I always tell myself to be organized, but I 

19 never can. My name is Kay Drey. First I would like to 

20 thank you for holding your meeting here in St. Louis. 

21 For many years I have sort of boasted that we have the 

22 oldest radioactive waste of the atomic age. 
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1 As you may know, the Mallinckrodt Chemical Works 

2 purified all the uranium that went into the world's 

3 first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in the 

4 Ferme reactor below the football field at the 

5 University of Chicago in December, 1942. And some of 

6 the radioactive waste from that historic experiment, 

7 the birth of the atomic age, is still just a few miles 

8 north of here. 

9 Mallinckrodt processed uranium and thorium for nuclear 

10 weapons purposes for about 25 years in metropolitan St. 

11 Louis. Approximately three million cubic yards of 

12 radioactive waste was generated, and no safe, permanent 

13 technology or location has yet been found to isolate 

14 the first cupful of that waste. 

15 I made my first public speech in November, 1974 against 

16 the proposal to build Missouri's first public -- first 

17 nuclear power plant. That was 29 years ago. At that 

18 time I first began learning about the hazards of 

19 uranium mill tailings, and was relieved to think that 

20 those wastes were not a part of our local problem. It 

21 was a great shock to learn then in 1978 that we had 

22 uranium tailings here in St. Louis from some of the 
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1 richest, most radioactive ore in the world. 

2 During World War II the Atomic Energy Commission was 

3 willing to purchase any ore that contained even just 

4 one tenth of one percent uranium. The Belgian Congo 

5 pitchblende that we processed here was 60 to 65 percent 

6 pure. 

7 Over the years since then I have met many fine people 

8 who have told me about working at the Mallinckrodt 

9 Chemical Works, and about the work place hazards they 

10 faced. It is only because of the sensitivity, hard 

11 work -- and as I often say to people, the brilliance of 

12 Denise Brock, and because of the enactment by Congress 

13 of the long-overdue commitment to compensate former 

14 nuclear weapons workers or their survivors, and because 

15 of the efforts of your Board, of NIOSH and other 

16 agencies, that perhaps justice and fairness will 

17 finally prevail. 

18 The ultimate irony, of course, is that except for 

19 America's dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs 

20 on Japan in 1945, no nation, fortunately, has exploded 

21 any nuclear weapons as an act of war. By having 

22 produced and tested nuclear weapons in our nation, 
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1 however, we have been poisoning our own rivers, our 

2 air, our land and our living creatures. Or to quote 

3 the title of an extraordinary book from 1982, we have 

4 been killing our own. 

5 I literally have accumulated a houseful of books and 

6 have carefully filed documents and correspondence about 

7 the hazards of radiation, nuclear power and nuclear 

8 weapons. These documents make it undeniably clear that 

9 many scientists, physicians and engineers and political 

10 leaders have long known that radiation is harmful. 

11 But no one told the nuclear weapons workers. In fact, 

12 no one was even allowed to use the words "uranium" or 

13 "radiation". 

14 I have brought a book with me this morning published as 

15 a report in 1945, a month after World War II ended, in 

16 which the author, Princeton professor Henry Smyth says, 

17 quote -- this is from 1945 -- "It had been known for a 

18 long time that radioactive materials were dangerous. 

19 They give off very penetrating radiations, gamma rays, 

20 which are much like X-rays in the physiological 

21 effects. They also give off beta and alpha rays, 

22 which, although less penetrating, can still be 
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1 dangerous. Quite apart from its radioactive 

2 properties, uranium is poisonous chemically." His book 

3 is entitled Atomic Energy for Military Purposes. 

4 Our decision-makers have known about the hazards of 

5 radiation and of natural and enriched and so-called 

6 depleted uranium. But they were not telling us back 

7 then, and they are only reluctantly beginning to level 

8 with us today. But no matter to what extent the 

9 experts may or may not have known of and concealed the 

10 hazards of radiation, they did not know -- they did not 

11 know -- how to accurately monitor the radioactivity in 

12 the air, water or soil, nor the contamination in the 

13 work place on floors, ceilings, walls and machinery in 

14 the 1940's, '50's or even in some cases currently. And 

15 many of the personnel dosimeters, whole body counters 

16 and other gauges were inadequate then and are today, 

17 particularly for alpha emitters. That is, for most of 

18 the predominant uranium and thorium materials processed 

19 at the Mallinckrodt facilities at downtown, Weldon 

20 Spring and Hematite, and their daughter products, 

21 including some for which no monitoring was performed, 

22 such as protactinium, polonium and radioactive lead. 
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1 The extremely hazardous beta-emitting daughter of 

2 uranium 235 -- that is actinium 227 -- was also present 

3 at the downtown Mallinckrodt plant because of the 

4 Belgian Congo pitchblende, and radon 219, which is not 

5 normally even detectable where American ore is 

6 processed. 

7 A laborer who is far too ill to attend your meeting 

8 here today told me that after spending days -- I can't 

9 remember, it could have been weeks -- digging in a 

10 trench at the downtown Mallinckrodt plant just two 

11 years ago as a part of the cleanup of the site, someone 

12 told him that the gamma readings were not ten to 20 

13 counts per minute, as in nature, but were 1,500,000 

14 counts per minute. 

15 I have submitted to you three pamphlets today that I 

16 helped write for the Nuclear Information and Resource 

17 Service, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit 

18 organization for which I serve on the board, and also a 

19 copy of comments I presented nine years ago, in part 

20 about our historic Mallinckrodt wastes. My request to 

21 you today is that you will consider including in your 

22 findings the observation that our world has amassed 
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1 more than 60 years of radioactive waste from the atomic 

2 age, for which no safe, permanent location or 

3 technology has been found. And that for every watt of 

4 nuclear power generated, and for every nuclear bomb 

5 fabricated, human lives and the environment may be 

6 tragically compromised, today and far into the future. 

7 Thank you. 

8 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you very much. Next, James 

9 Mitulski, United Nuclear Weapons Worker. 

10 MR. MITULSKI: (Off microphone) (Inaudible) yesterday, 

11 you want me to go ahead (Inaudible)? 

12 DR. ZIEMER: That's right. Go ahead, that's fine. 

13 MR. MITULSKI: I'd just like to speak to the report 

14 given earlier by -- I -- Dr. Jim -- 

15 UNIDENTIFIED: Neton. 

16 MR. MITULSKI: Okay. Sorry. As regards to using the 

17 company's data, I would agree with you, there's no 

18 reason to assume that the company -- company 

19 supervisors did not -- were not people of integrity. 

20 But there's also no reason to assume that they were 

21 people of truth. You know, not everybody is good or 

22 bad, and not everybody has pure or impure motives. 
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1 People sometimes say things to keep their job. So even 

2 though I think that it might be one place to find data, 

3 I think you also need to go to the people that were in 

4 the plants. I'd just like to give you a couple of 

5 examples. 

6 I told you yesterday my dad basically worked with 

7 uranium -- well, with radioactive materials at Weldon 

8 Springs. When he first got out there, they had no 

9 instrument for testing thorium. And they must have 

10 gotten something in from Oak Ridge, and they would test 

11 him and they's say he was too high and they'd make him 

12 go take a shower. And then he'd come back and they'd 

13 say you're still too high, go take another shower. 

14 Then he'd come back and they'd say you're still too 

15 high, go take another shower, until they got him to a 

16 point where his readings were acceptable. And then 

17 they would write it down. So obviously he was exposed 

18 to more than he should have been, but they did maintain 

19 a good record that his readings were acceptable. 

20 Another situation that occurred with Dad was he was in 

21 a explosion in a plant that processed -- or that melted 

22 down uranium, basically -- scraps and the like. And 
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1 after this explosion -- first of all, he concentrated 

2 on saving another man's life that was in the explosion. 

3 He concentrated on evacuating the plant, and then 

4 after he was sure everybody was safe, he went to get 

5 tested at the hospital himself -- which was about two 

6 hours later, after he'd sent everybody else to the 

7 hospital. While he was gone, they burnt all of his 

8 clothes. I don't think they did that because they 

9 thought it would be a good joke to play on him. I 

10 think they thought it was dangerous; his clothes were 

11 radioactive. 

12 He got to the hospital. The hospital didn't want to 

13 admit him because they were afraid he was radioactive, 

14 and they did some testing on him, like for shock and 

15 sound like and the like, and then they released him. 

16 He went back to the company, Weldon Springs. They sat 

17 him down in front of a whole group of people. They had 

18 all these microphones on and they said well, why did 

19 that -- that furnace explode? One of the gentleman 

20 that was in the room -- or in the factory with Dad when 

21 the furnace exploded said well, now why are you 

22 worried? Jim's been telling you for months if -- 
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1 unless you did something, the furnace was going to 

2 explode. They turned off the machines and the 

3 interview was over. 

4 Now I don't know what went onto a report. I do know 

5 that when I looked it up in the -- on -- in the Globe -

6 - well, Post and Globe, 1960, July 15th, basically it 

7 said there was a minor gas explosion, and that's all 

8 they said. So I don't know what went in the company 

9 records. 

10 I do know, too, that I -- I think there's more than one 

11 guy here who could probably tell you that they told 

12 everybody just drink beer on your way home, it'll rinse 

13 everything out. Did you hear that? 

14 UNIDENTIFIED: Right. 

15 MR. MITULSKI: You know, they told them a lot of 

16 misinformation. Now some of -- some things they may 

17 have thought were true, but I don't really believe that 

18 the people in charge thought that drinking beer would 

19 wash out radioactivity. So not everybody was honest. 

20 And Dad talks about hauling pallets, I don't know how 

21 many pounds of uranium. You could only -- you know, 

22 just exposed, and you couldn't get within so many feet 
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1 of another pallet because it would cause a criticality. 

2 You -- everybody had to go through the factory the 

3 same way. Obviously these people were exposed to a lot 

4 of dangerous stuff. 

5 And I do think that in order to get a valid assessment 

6 of what's going on, you have to talk to these men, too. 

7 Because, like I said, you know, there -- there -- 

8 people -- their jobs were at stake. I can't imagine a 

9 supervisor writing down I did it all wrong and putting 

10 it in a file, unless he had a supervisor who did it for 

11 him. So not all these reports were probably valid, and 

12 I think the only way to check out the validity of what 

13 the company says is to bounce it off what the laborers 

14 are saying, and then try to arrive at the truth. 

15 Thanks. 

16 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you, James. Next, Mark -- is that 

17 Buening? 

18 MR. BRUENING: (Off microphone) Bruening. 

19 DR. ZIEMER: Bruening. Okay. Thank you. Mark 

20 Bruening, United Nuclear Weapons Worker, Mallinckrodt. 

21 MR. BRUENING: Yes, my name is Bruening, B-r-u-e-n-i-n22 g, good German. 
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1 Anyway, Father Mitulski just stated that there was 

2 statements made for these people to drink beer, it 

3 would flush out your system. Well, I had 17 years with 

4 Mallinckrodt at both places. And like I said, I'm 

5 German. I love my beer, and it did not flush it out 

6 because I -- it'll be two years this December, I had 

7 colon cancer, so that knocks that theory in the head. 

8 And another thing, we had a -- Mallinckrodt did not 

9 think much of their employees. We moved -- I got 

10 transferred out to Weldon Springs in '57, in February. 

11 I moved my family from Illinois to O'Fallon, Missouri 

12 in the end of May. I'm going to say maybe it was a 

13 month, maybe two months, I got sick. But I went to 

14 work. And then one morning I had to go to the 

15 dispensary. I couldn't stand the pain. 

16 Well, the nurse down there diagnosed I had kidney 

17 stones. And I don't know if any of you has ever had 

18 kidney stones, buddy, I don't wish them on nobody. So 

19 anyway, the nurse called up my boss and said he has to 

20 go to the hospital. So I go back up to the department. 

21 Who drives me home? One of my coworkers from another 

22 department. We get home -- my wife didn't drive -- and 
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1 this friend said Mark, I'm going to take you to the 

2 hospital. I went to the hospital at St. Charles. I 

3 never heard a word from anybody at Mallinckrodt from 

4 the higher-ups. I didn't even get a damned get well 

5 card from them, 'cause I think they -- well, I'm not 

6 going to say it. 

7 But anyway, getting back -- also we had a meeting with 

8 Mr. Aikens. Now I've told you, I've had my cancer. We 

9 had a meeting with -- who's he -- is he a senator? 

10 UNIDENTIFIED: (Inaudible) 

11 MR. BRUENING: Oh, a representative, at Troy about -- 

12 oh, four or five months ago. And my question to him 

13 was Mr. Aikens, I'd like to know how come we have to 

14 wait anywhere from months to years to get compensated 

15 for the cancer that we got from working for the United 

16 States government. The illegal immigrants come across 

17 that border and right away, where do they get their 

18 money to live? Where do they live? The only answer I 

19 got from him was -- well, he said, first thing they do, 

20 they run to the hospital to the emergency room. He 

21 said once they're there, they can't get rid of them. 

22 And I don't think it's right. 
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1 And then, when was it, early this summer, Senator Bond, 

2 he appropriated I don't know how many millions of 

3 dollars for lead poisoning. And I would like to know -

4 - and I can't find out. Anybody that has a lead 

5 poisoning, do they have to wait like we do to get 

6 compensated? I don't know. I wish somebody could tell 

7 me. Nobody knows. 

8 And it wasn't too long after that, Mr. Bond 

9 appropriated $1.5 million for one of the cities to 

10 build a street through their town. But we have to wait 

11 for months and years to get compensated, and we can't 

12 get nothing out of him -- can we, Denise? Huh? I 

13 don't care who's sitting there. Is he there? Is he 

14 there? Well, how -- why? Why do we have to wait? 

15 UNIDENTIFIED: (Off microphone) Well, that's why we're 

16 here because, first of all, the Act was passed in 2000 

17 -- 

18 MR. BRUENING: That's right. 

19 UNIDENTIFIED: -- and the implementation for that, 

20 we're having some problems and -- 

21 MR. BRUENING: Why, it sure -- 

22 UNIDENTIFIED: -- (Inaudible) but those people waited 
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1 for (Inaudible) had to wait some time. They probably 

2 don't have to wait as long as (Inaudible). 

3 MR. BRUENING: That's what I figured. Well, anyway, 

4 that's my argument. Thank you. 

5 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. I'm having a lot of difficulty 

6 on the next one here, could that be a -- is it a Don? 

7 MR. ELLIOTT: Dan? 

8 DR. ZIEMER: Dan or Don -- 

9 UNIDENTIFIED: Is it Don Camstrader? 

10 DR. ZIEMER: Yes, okay. 

11 MR. CAMSTRADER: My name is Don Camstrader and I worked 

12 at Weldon Springs from 1957 till 1966. I worked the 

13 first two years as an operator and the last seven years 

14 as a pipe fitter. And in the early years, it was -- it 

15 was pretty primitive. Everything was new and nothing 

16 worked right. And so we would -- we'd cook off the 

17 uranium and when the uranium would be finished, we had 

18 big vacuum hoses that were stainless steel, of course, 

19 to carry the product. Usually about the time we'd 

20 stick them in there, the system would go down, you 

21 know. So you'd pull them back out and you'd -- you'd 

22 bring in a 55-gallon drum, put a little hood over and 
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1 stick a house vacuum on it and scoop this thing out 

2 with feed scoops. And it was hot work, and the only 

3 thing we had to wear was asbestos gloves and little 

4 aluminum face masks that only had a little cotton 

5 filter in them. 

6 When you'd get finished with sucking a pot out, why 

7 you'd -- you'd take your mask off and you'd see on 

8 anybody there was uranium oxide around your face here 

9 and close to your nose, and you didn't think anything 

10 of it. You went in and -- and washed your face off and 

11 went back to work. 

12 But those kind of things in those days, like I say, 

13 everything broke down more than it ran. When they 

14 finally did get things going pretty good, well, I had 

15 enough time in that I could get out of that job, so I 

16 got into one of the better jobs. And they all had 

17 their problems, but the -- the building itself, for the 

18 most part, we kept pretty clean because everything 

19 could be hosed down and every place where it was hosed 

20 was into a retaining area so that everything that did 

21 wash down was recovered. 

22 But then when I went into the fitters and there wasn't 
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1 a building or office or anything else, I don't believe, 

2 at the plant that I didn't go into at least once, you 

3 know, and I worked in all of them. Some of them were 

4 really rough. Some of them were really easy. But in 

5 one of the plants in particular, the green salt plant, 

6 we had a real bad breakdown one time. We had to go in 

7 and fix something -- I can't remember just exactly what 

8 it was -- we had to put on a complete rubber suit with 

9 rubber boots, rubber gloves and a hood, and then you 

10 had to put an air line mask on. Well, somebody had to 

11 sit by the -- to watch this thing to make sure you 

12 maintained the right air pressure so -- and I know it 

13 wasn't 20 minutes or so and -- it was tough trying to 

14 do a job with them bulky rubber gloves, this big suit 

15 on. But you got in there and -- and when I got out and 

16 got to a clear area where I could undress again, I 

17 could pour water out of my boots, I'd sweat that much 

18 while I was inside that suit. So that just kind of 

19 shows you what -- what kind of job that was. 

20 Another job, two of us worked on and it was about a 

21 week-long job and about the third day I -- when we got 

22 ready to go to work, I grabbed him, I said come on, 
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1 let's get over and get that job done. And he said I 

2 can't go with you. And I said why can't you? He said 

3 I came up high -- hot yesterday. So I said what are 

4 you talking about? He said yeah. He said they told me 

5 I was too hot, I couldn't work on that job. I said 

6 well, hell, we was working together. You know, both of 

7 us were on the same job. So I went and checked and 

8 they said well, no, you're not hot, so I went back on 

9 the job, got another guy and we went in -- and this 

10 kind of shows you how the badges themselves were -- 

11 like I say, there was no way that he could have came up 

12 any hotter than I was because we were both doing the 

13 same job and doing it together. 

14 And as far as Father Jim talking a while ago about how 

15 different people were out there, we had a lot of really 

16 good people. I mean we enjoyed each other. It was 

17 like a big family. And one of the first foremen I had 

18 was Jim Mitulski. And Jim, to this day, I feel, is the 

19 greatest man I ever met. He's a -- if Jim told you 

20 something and you got in trouble for it, and you told 

21 them Jim told me, you didn't have to worry about him 

22 not saying that, you know -- if he said it, you could 
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1 take it to the bank. That's the kind of guy he is. 

2 And I thank you. 

3 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you very much. This may be either 

4 Norbert or Herbert, and again I'm having a little 

5 trouble -- 

6 MR. HIER: Hier? 

7 DR. ZIEMER: Yes. 

8 MR. HIER: I -- 

9 DR. ZIEMER: What is the correct name? I -- 

10 MR. HIER: Norbert -- 

11 DR. ZIEMER: Norbert. 

12 MR. HIER: -- Hier. I also worked with Don here, or I 

13 started in the dreaded pot room, which is -- I think 

14 everybody got a taste of that thing when we were 

15 scooping uranium out with scoops and had a little bitty 

16 respirator, which I found out later that -- in my 

17 different jobs, that it's not even approved for cutting 

18 grass, hardly, much less scooping uranium. And the 

19 equipment we had in those days, when I first started 

20 there, was nothing. That's -- in fact, that's the only 

21 thing we had. 

22 And then I went into the pipe fitters, which -- the 
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1 jobs, too, which the people don't even recognize what 

2 all the things that we went through with tanks running 

3 over and breathing this toxic fumes, and all they would 

4 tell you is don't put any -- we didn't put any special 

5 equipment on or anything, just go in and get it shut 

6 off, you know, clean it up. 

7 And the big thing is, simply -- just like the smokers, 

8 you know. Smokers are warned on the cigarette package 

9 that it's bad for their health and all this stuff. We 

10 weren't told nothing. All we were told in safety 

11 meetings is be careful, you know. 

12 And all the exposure we had to different things -- not 

13 just the radiation. We were exposed to asbestos, which 

14 has been known to be a deadly thing, and we used that 

15 stuff like it was going out of style, and the 

16 government doesn't even recognize that. And I went to 

17 schooling on -- had to take some schooling on the next 

18 job I was on, as a maintenance worker, and this program 

19 is -- like I say, the government doesn't even recognize 

20 this -- and I don't think any part of maintenance, what 

21 you work on, the furnaces, pipes -- and we did -- the 

22 pipe fitters did our own insulating, and we used the 
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1 friable asbestos like it was going out of style, you 

2 know, so I -- 

3 I don't understand why, with our compensation, that -- 

4 now I have cancer of the bladder and also of the colon, 

5 and I've had 11 major surgeries so far. So I -- you 

6 know, I can't blame the people that -- maybe that I 

7 worked for if they didn't know any better, but somebody 

8 surely knew that it was not a very good thing. So like 

9 I say, if we were warned, maybe it would have been a 

10 different situation. Thank you. 

11 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Then -- is it Tom -- is it 

12 Hogan? 

13 MR. HORGAN: Horgan. 

14 DR. ZIEMER: Horgan -- Tom -- oh, Horgan, right, and 

15 Tom's from Washington, D.C. 

16 MR. HORGAN: Thank -- is this on? Thank you. I just 

17 want to -- I'm Tom Horgan. I'm with Senator Bond's 

18 office, the Health Education Labor Pension subcommittee 

19 on aging. Once again, I want to thank all of you for 

20 coming. I have found this very helpful. As a staff 

21 member of the committee that has legislative oversight 

22 for DOL and NIOSH, I want to convey to you that I 
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1 believe that the scientific guidance and advice that 

2 the committee provides is very important, especially as 

3 we try to figure out -- work out some of the kinks in 

4 the legislation and the implementation. 

5 The legislation set this Board up for a reason, and 

6 that was to get input. Now while I know that many of 

7 you had not had much time to go through the 

8 Mallinckrodt site profile, I would like to get, if at 

9 all possible, individual feedback from every Board 

10 member regarding the particular site profile. I don't 

11 know if that's possible, but it would be very helpful. 

12 I am particularly interested in getting feedback from 

13 the Board members who have scientific and medical 

14 knowledge. After sitting through two days, again, I 

15 have found it very helpful, but I'd like to note a few 

16 things. 

17 Now while I do not have the expertise to comment on the 

18 science that went into the site profile, and -- I am 

19 somewhat concerned about the lack of records for 

20 workers who worked at the site prior to 1948. Also I 

21 would encourage NIOSH and the Board to get as much 

22 scientific expert advice from people who have worked in 
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1 this area over the years, as this living document or 

2 site profile develops. I think that worker feedback 

3 should also be explored. I believe that the perceived 

4 and actual credibility of the site profile will depend 

5 on this. 

6 I would also encourage NIOSH to do whatever they can to 

7 finalize the SEC rule in the not-too-distant future. 

8 As you can see, we have a lot of frustrated people down 

9 here. 

10 But that being said, I want to thank Larry and NIOSH 

11 for holding this meeting here in town and giving people 

12 a chance to say what's on their minds. And that being 

13 also said, I want to say on behalf of Senator Bond, 

14 once again, I thank all of you for coming into town 

15 here to hold your meeting and provide a public forum, 

16 and I hope that you have enjoyed your stay in St. 

17 Louis. Thank you. 

18 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you, Tom, for those words. Let's go 

19 now to Donna -- it looks like Edmond? 

20 MS. ERLMANN: (Inaudible) 

21 DR. ZIEMER: Elmond, okay. Thank you, Donna. 

22 MS. ERLMANN: I'm speaking on behalf of my father. He 
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1 was too ill to be here today, but he did work at both 

2 the Destrehan plant and also at Weldon Spring for a 

3 number of years, and this is his statement, not mine. 

4 He was a strong -- 

5 (Reading) I was a strong, healthy man when I went to 

6 work for Mallinckrodt, but the years after I left my 

7 troubles began. First I had a heart attack, then gall 

8 bladder disease. I've had clots in my legs, neuropathy 

9 in my feet. They hurt so bad that I could hardly do my 

10 new job. I've had quadruple bypass. I've been 

11 operated on for cancer of the colon and they've taken 

12 several feet of my colon. I've spent the last 30 years 

13 of my life paying hospital bills, doctor bills and 

14 medicine bills. And I'm convinced that some, if not 

15 all, of my problems were caused by my employment at 

16 Mallinckrodt. 

17 I never told anyone about these things because 

18 everything was supposed to be kept secret. But when I 

19 heard some of the stories that the other workers were 

20 telling, I thought it was time to speak up. 

21 I worked in the breakdown area picking up shells with a 

22 hoist. We would take the cap off with the shell laying 
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1 in a cradle and cut the limestone walls of the shell 

2 out with a jackhammer as far down to the derby as we 

3 could. Then we would up-end the shell with a hoist and 

4 hammer on the sides and the bottom of the -- and break 

5 the bottom of the shell until the derby or ingot of 

6 uranium fell out. 

7 The next operation was to break the lime off with 

8 hammers until you had a fairly clean derby, about seven 

9 or eight inches in diameter, five inches high, weighing 

10 about 95 pounds. Some derbies had a black oxide formed 

11 on the bottom, and when we would slide them on a metal 

12 roller conveyor, they would catch fire. If you didn't 

13 clean it off, it would burn all day. 

14 I turned in a suggestion for an easier way to clean the 

15 shells, because they were never cleaned good enough. 

16 The most they paid was $25. My suggestion must have 

17 been a pretty good one because I got $75. 

18 I don't recall how long I was on that job, but 

19 following that I was put over in the refinery operating 

20 the metal dissolver. It was a dangerous job, working 

21 with scrap uranium from the blowouts. That's a fine 

22 material which is very dangerous because it dissolves 
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1 very fast. The larger chunks are solid and dissolve 

2 slower. Fork truck drivers would bring predetermined 

3 loads to me on skids and I would load them into a 

4 stainless steel basket in a tank of about 10,000 

5 gallons. I would close the lid and start the acid 

6 spraying over it. 

7 Too much fine material would cause a reaction. The lid 

8 would raise up and the fire would puff out. If that 

9 ever happened, I was supposed to open the flood valve 

10 with water and it would sound an alarm to evacuate the 

11 refinery. 

12 One Saturday morning they set the material up for me, 

13 and I told my lead man it was too much fine stuff at 

14 one time. He said run it. When the lid raised up four 

15 inches and started belching out fire, I was scared to 

16 death. I turned off the acid, went down the ladder and 

17 flooded it. My lead man came running out and said what 

18 the hell are you doing? I said I'm just doing what I'm 

19 supposed to do. It turned out my boss was off and the 

20 wrong material had been set out. No one communicated 

21 this to me, so I didn't feel I was at fault. I had 

22 been trying to get into the machine shop, so I didn't 
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1 stay on that job much longer. 

2 Finally after several years experience running various 

3 lathes and grinders and milling machines, I learned to 

4 read a micrometer and got into the machine shop. I 

5 worked the 4:00 to 12:00 shift most of the time, so I 

6 got a lot of experience in the field working with some 

7 good buddies -- Roger Aubachon*, Hank Pedulski*, Joe 

8 Menteer*, Frank Bogner*, Les White and Charlie 

9 Sheeley*. We worked together tearing down blown 

10 furnaces, which were very hot. Sometimes we'd only 

11 stay in there for 15 minutes, sometimes a half-hour. 

12 Other times we would work on dust collectors, cleaning 

13 the bags and putting in new ones. I cannot say that 

14 anyone ever checked them out before we worked on them, 

15 but I believe they were very hot. We would often spend 

16 a couple of hours in the dust collectors. 

17 I remember when they drilled holes throughout the plant 

18 and told everyone it was for termites. I believe now, 

19 as I did then, that it was to check radiation levels 

20 because it was no longer safe. I believe that's why 

21 they built the Weldon Spring plant. 

22 I did not volunteer to go there because of the 75-mile 
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1 round trip every day. The time came when I was forced 

2 to go, and I lost my seniority, so I had to go back 

3 into the manufacturing division because there were 

4 enough people in the machine shop. 

5 This time I went to work in the green salt plant. I 

6 had to operate the fluid beds on the very top floor. 

7 There were two vessels where they forced hydrogen to 

8 react with orange oxide to turn it into brown oxide. 

9 The heat was terrible, 145 degrees. The brown oxide 

10 was mixed with hydrofluoric acid into three different 

11 screws, each one about 25 to 30-foot long. If the acid 

12 was added too fast, it would bridge the screw. There 

13 were times -- sometimes it was so bad the hydraulic 

14 pressure could not turn the screw. Then there were 

15 other times when the ribbons in the screw would break 

16 and the whole bank of furnaces would be shut down and 

17 the screw would have to be pulled out. It was a lot of 

18 work, very costly. 

19 A couple of good panel board operators could control 

20 the green salt by speeding up or slowing down the 

21 screws, but there were always hazardous jobs. You 

22 always wore gloves, hard hats and goggles. That's 
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1 ludicrous. 

2 When I went back to the machine shop I was exposed to 

3 many other types of contaminations working on the -- I 

4 guess they're bullard lathes. They would cut a curl 

5 off of a 4,000-pound ingot of uranium. The chips would 

6 fall off into a basin around the chuck, which was 

7 continually being flushed with water-soluble oil. But 

8 it would still ignite and turn cherry red. 

9 I changed dies in the extrusion presses. They would be 

10 burned black with a hard crust on them. I would 

11 straighten the mandrels and they would be black. It 

12 seems to me that anything in contact with uranium a 

13 certain length of time would turn black, and I think 

14 that the black oxide that forms is very hot. 

15 We were always packing pumps, changing and repairing 

16 machinery in areas where we had to have rubber boots, 

17 gloves and goggles on. I remember going to take out 

18 the packing on a few pumps, which was only referred to 

19 as "the place across the street". I believe this was 

20 down at Destrehan. When we went through we had to 

21 neutralize our tools that we had used and throw them in 

22 a barrel. After that, they were put on a raffinate 
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1 truck and hauled out to the airport dump. It must have 

2 been really potent stuff. 

3 I know some of these observations and opinions may not 

4 be completely accurate, but I believe they should be 

5 told. I believe it's possible that the airplanes 

6 flying over the raffinate dump at the airport may have 

7 been picking up radiation, and that that is why they 

8 wanted to move the operations to Illinois. That's 

9 probably a little exaggerated, but I've had -- I've 

10 thought about this for years. 

11 One thing I do want to bring up is my concern for years 

12 they've hauled that waste through St. Louis with no 

13 thought for public safety. They tore down -- then they 

14 tore down the Destrehan plant, hauled it out Highway 70 

15 to Highway 94 and dumped it into the quarry. Then they 

16 cleaned up the Brown Road site and hauled it out. The 

17 next site was the Pitter* Lake that had some good 

18 material on the bottom. Someone wanted to reclaim it 

19 and they wanted to pump the water into the Missouri 

20 River. Somehow the people in St. Charles County got 

21 wise and would not allow it for fear of contamination. 

22 I think the DOE knew they were in trouble for dumping 
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1 in the quarry. Finally they made a place on the Weldon 

2 Spring site for storing the waste. They built a new 

3 road from the quarry to the storage site, eliminating 

4 the well-traveled Highway 94 route. I don't know what 

5 all is completed, but I think they finally monitored 

6 the water and pumped it into the Missouri River. 

7 I believe the workers and the public have had the wool 

8 pulled over their eyes for years. Now, after 50 years, 

9 they want the workers -- who are 50 to 60 percent 

10 deceased -- to go by their rules and regulations for 

11 compensation. 

12 I worked hard as an employee of Mallinckrodt Chemical 

13 Company, as did many other people. All my illnesses 

14 began a few years after I was laid off. Four years ago 

15 I was placed on a ventilator to breathe for me. It's 

16 been a long road to recovery and I'm still quite 

17 debilitated. I cannot prove that this was all caused 

18 by radiation exposure, but I have my guess. Without 

19 excellent care, I would not be alive to tell you about 

20 it. 

21 The Department of Energy has spent $900 million 

22 covering up their mistakes at the Weldon Spring site, 
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1 and I think it's time that they take care of their 

2 workers. 

3 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you, Donna, for your comments on 

4 behalf of your father. Next we have Denise Brock. 

5 Denise. 

6 MS. BROCK: Can I raise this? How do you raise this? 

7 (Pause) 

8 I'm loud, loud and proud. First I would again like to 

9 thank NIOSH, ORAU and the Board for coming to St. 

10 Louis. I would also like to state for the record that 

11 I am ecstatic that some claims have been able to be 

12 dose reconstructed prior to the TBD or the site 

13 profile. I'm happy to see this tremendous progress. 

14 I would also like to state that since the TBD was just 

15 finished, and this is not a forum that will allow for 

16 time and space element to accommodate the full amount 

17 of claimants that we have, or interested parties for Q 

18 and A to -- or comment, that I would like to 

19 respectfully request NIOSH, ORAU or someone to come 

20 back to St. Louis as a special meeting that would allow 

21 for such communication. 

22 I do have several other questions to raise, as well as 
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1 some comments. My first comment actually would be in 

2 reference to outreach, and I'm sure most of you know 

3 that -- and this goes to the Board, as well as 

4 representatives from DOE and DOL -- we do have a United 

5 Nuclear Weapons Workers here. It is an established 

6 worker advocacy group, and it would seem efficient to 

7 utilize this group in your efforts. We would be more 

8 than happy to share any information we have, or as I've 

9 stated in the past, I do have access to the UAW and 

10 some retirees and several workers. 

11 And to the site profile, either under the contents of 

12 documents with Dr. Neton's presentation or even on the 

13 TBD, on page 50, if I read it correctly, I understand 

14 that there's statements to the effect that prior to 

15 1948 documents and/or records are spotty. I thought I 

16 saw that even statements were stating that there were -

17 - or are such great variabilities between workers and 

18 jobs that dose reconstruction is not feasible. And I'm 

19 wondering why you would use surrogate coworker data. I 

20 mean it sounds to me that that would be a Special 

21 Exposure Cohort if it's stating that it's not feasible. 

22 Which brings me to my next comment. I don't understand 
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1 how you could state that Mallinckrodt wouldn't even be 

2 considered for a Special Exposure Cohort status, even 

3 during that specific time frame where the records are 

4 spotty, when the proposed rule has not even yet been 

5 finalized. I mean I'm not understanding that, but I'm 

6 assuming the criteria is something that we don't even 

7 know what we have to meet as of yet. And so that sort 

8 of seems to me like you're putting the cart before the 

9 horse. I feel to attempt to dose reconstruct with a 

10 lack of records and impute numbers, and then decide if 

11 it doesn't work to SEC, it seems to me a duplication of 

12 efforts and a waste of time that these workers and 

13 survivors do not have. 

14 And for the record, Mallinckrodt claimants deserve the 

15 same consideration and benefit of the doubt that the 

16 other four Special Exposure Cohorts received. 

17 And still continuing on the contents of documents, as 

18 far as references -- and I don't know if you can answer 

19 this for me or not, I'm just curious. As far as 

20 references, was the Hanson Blatz-Eisenbud memo ever 

21 obtained and -- and used with that? I didn't see it as 

22 a reference. 
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1 And also I noticed that when I was looking through 

2 that, there was no -- unless I'm incorrect, there was 

3 no actinium or Ac-227 listed as part of the -- and I 

4 know that was also part of the residue I believe found 

5 at the airport site. And I seen something about 

6 history on that off-site on page -- I believe it was 

7 page four. 

8 One page three on presentation, on introduction, '59 to 

9 '95 residual activity, I'm curious and I'm just 

10 questioning, what about now? The Destrehan Street site 

11 I understand still has huge piles of uranium out there 

12 that they are dumping soil and gravel on top of. And 

13 I've also talked with elevator constructors who are now 

14 -- the way I understand it, in plant six, doing 

15 something with elevators or elevator constructors, so 

16 I'm curious. They're not wearing protective gear, and 

17 I'm not a scientist or a health physicist, but my 

18 concern would be that my construction or my elevator 

19 workers are in there with no sort of protective gear 

20 whatsoever. Does this not have residual activity? I 

21 mean is that gone? Does that not have a half-life? 

22 I even have a laborer, a roofer, that called me and 
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1 he's pulling a roof off of something, and I don't know 

2 if that's something for -- for anyone here to answer or 

3 if I need to go somewhere else on that, but that was a 

4 concern. 

5 And the other thing I wanted to ask was I understand 

6 that plant six refinery was constructed to process 

7 pitchblende, which contained significant amounts of 

8 radium. And because this radium gives off gamma rays, 

9 which I understand to be very penetrating, is that also 

10 being considered with the plant six workers? I mean is 

11 it possible to -- to consider that or expedite that as 

12 -- without the TBD? I guess when that's done, it 

13 doesn't make a difference. I don't know. 

14 DR. ZIEMER: You have a number of questions there, 

15 Denise, that perhaps the staff can follow up on. I 

16 don't know if we can answer all those now. For 

17 example, the Hanson Blatz-Eisenbud memo, perhaps Jim 

18 can check on that. Some of the other questions, I -- 

19 MS. BROCK: Okay, e-mail's fine, whatever. 

20 DR. ZIEMER: -- have been heard and you can -- 

21 MS. BROCK: Okay, and thank you again. 

22 DR. ZIEMER: -- be in contact. Right. Thank you very 
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1 much for those comments and your continued interest in 

2 the program. 

3 And then last, but probably not least -- oh, I've got -

4 - did I miss one? I have Richard Miller down, but Jim, 

5 are you wanting to comment? Okay, Jim Werner. 

6 MR. WERNER: Thank you, Chairman -- 

7 DR. ZIEMER: And identify for the record, Jim. 

8 MR. WERNER: Sure. My name is Jim Werner, W-e-r-n-e-r, 

9 with Missouri Department of Natural Resources, and I 

10 also want to thank the committee for coming to our fair 

11 city and Dr. Ziemer -- Paul, my old friend, come back -

12 - and all of you for your service, 'cause I know how 

13 these advisory committees take a lot of work. But I 

14 assure you, it's very important work you're doing and 

15 very important you've come here for our sites. 

16 The main message I wanted to give to the committee is 

17 to offer the technical resources available from the 

18 Department of Natural Resources. We have had staff out 

19 at various sites for decades reviewing technical 

20 documents and have a lot of expertise built up over the 

21 years. And so I wanted to make that offer to you. 

22 I have reviewed the Technical Basis Document, not read 
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1 it in detail yet. And first of all, to the ORAU folks 

2 who did it, it's a -- obviously reflects an enormous 

3 effort. In fact, I think many of you on the panel know 

4 me from working on the issue for 20 years outside of my 

5 DNR job now. I think you can see that it may mean 

6 something that, from my perspective, it's probably the 

7 most comprehensive document I've ever seen on the site. 

8 So I congratulate you for that. 

9 But not speaking on behalf of DNR, though, I would say 

10 that it still reflects, as many of you have seen, a lot 

11 of uncertainty, a lot of assumptions had to be filled 

12 in for the dose reconstruction. And you know, there's 

13 a time element here that's important. I would urge you 

14 to consider quickly making use of the technical 

15 resources of the Department of Natural Resources, but 

16 also any good manager knows sometimes you can't just 

17 work harder and work faster, you need to work smarter. 

18 And obviously within the statute there is a basis for 

19 establishing the special cohorts, and I appreciate that 

20 the rule is not out yet, but that due consideration be 

21 given to establishing a special cohort here, given the 

22 uncertainties in the data here. 
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1 One basic observation in reviewing the site basis 

2 document is the lack of recognition to the integrated 

3 way that the site operated. I think you've heard 

4 abundant evidence from workers here, and the ORAU folks 

5 are likely aware of it, but it just really wasn't 

6 reflected in the document that the three sites really -

7 - Destrehan Street, Weldon Spring, as well as, to some 

8 extent, Hematite -- worked as an integrated whole with 

9 workers shuttling back and forth between them. And the 

10 other source of documentation that I would urge you to 

11 consider is the Sutelind* Archive material where 

12 there's significant files on what they regard as MCW 

13 activities, and the MCW -- the Mallinckrodt Chemical 

14 Works -- really looks at the whole operating entity as 

15 an integrated whole, working, you know, together with 

16 workers shuttling back and forth. And I chatted, Paul, 

17 before with you about that the work of the committee 

18 and the exposure assessment involves following 

19 individual workers, and I appreciate that's an 

20 appropriate way to work and it's logical managerial, 

21 but some recognition to the integrated way the place is 

22 operated would be appropriate for -- for other health 
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1 effects. 

2 The other technical resource that would be available is 

3 secondary documentation. I noted that you cited my 

4 document linking legacies that we spent almost ten 

5 years researching it. There's a lot of background 

6 documentation on linking legacies that might be helpful 

7 to you in putting together that. 

8 And lastly, in addition to the operating facilities, 

9 the Westlake facility has turned out to be a knottier 

10 problem than we first found because of the protactinium 

11 problem, which obviously a different radiological 

12 imprint than others. 

13 Then just in conclusion, I urge you to not just work 

14 smarter and harder, but you know, consider all the 

15 technical resources available to you, and we offer our 

16 -- our technical ability on -- and it -- again, that 

17 has to be dealt with quickly. Actually our technical 

18 staff may be disbanded to some extent. We've lost all 

19 funding from the Department of Energy to maintain any 

20 oversight role, so all the decades of technical 

21 expertise may be lost very soon. Though I'm now in 

22 Jefferson City, my family is from St. Louis and St. 
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1 Charles areas, so this is a particular concern of mine 

2 to make the community right. Thank you. 

3 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you very much, Jim, and I'm sure the 

4 NIOSH staff, as well as ORAU, will appreciate any input 

5 you have once you've completed your review of the 

6 document. And if you have additional recommendations, 

7 suggestions or documentation that would be of help to 

8 them, they'd appreciate it. 

9 Now Richard Miller is the last one I have on the list. 

10 Richard. 

11 MR. MILLER: Thank you, Dr. Ziemer. And I realize it's 

12 lunchtime and past, so I'll try to make this crisp and 

13 to the point. 

14 First I would like to thank Russ for his presentation 

15 on the scientific research question, and I know a 

16 number of us are looking forward, once the energy and 

17 water probations bill process is completed -- Senator 

18 Bingaman* was -- wanted -- put $2 million aside for 

19 additional research on chronic lymphocytic leukemia in 

20 the energy and water bill in the Senate, and it's in 

21 conference. I think the conference is tonight. So 

22 pretty soon we'll find out whether that money will be 
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1 available, and we certainly hope that NIOSH, working 

2 with HERB, can come up with some answers on CLL, if the 

3 resources are there. 

4 Secondly, I read that the Blockson Chemical site 

5 profile was on the web, and I was really quite 

6 surprised to see it posted so soon, and maybe someone 

7 can explain why it was posted until what is really a 

8 very significant unresolved question is addressed about 

9 Blockson? I don't know if anybody on the Board's had a 

10 chance to read it, but it excludes any discussion 

11 whatsoever of the radon exposures at the Blockson 

12 Chemical site which processed -- made phosphoric acid 

13 as a feed, which was then used for uranium extraction 

14 in a subsequent process. And although Blockson's not 

15 the only company that did this, certainly it's going to 

16 set the benchmark for whether or not these radon 

17 exposures and the effects on lung cancer will be 

18 considered or not. So once a site profile's been 

19 posted and you haven't even addressed what is a major, 

20 major, major source, I guess my basic question is is 

21 this site profile now going to be used for dose 

22 reconstruction without even addressing the radon 
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1 question? Is that right? 

2 MR. ELLIOTT: It's available for use. 

3 MR. MILLER: If it's available for use, it's going to 

4 be an invitation for a very significant set of 

5 unresolved questions that really need to be addressed. 

6 I can't imagine that something as significant as 

7 excluding a major source term would -- I can't imagine 

8 how NIOSH can go forward and leave this hole in the 

9 donut, so to speak. 

10 DR. NETON: I'd just like to comment on that. The 

11 Blockson -- the Blockson Chemical site profile is out 

12 there. We didn't exclude the radon exposure. We've 

13 reserved it. We have not addressed that issue yet, and 

14 that is really tied up in the definition of the 

15 facility issue. And we do believe we have a technical 

16 basis that's solid for all exposures there, excluding 

17 radon. And to the extent we can move claims forward 

18 that may not be related to radon exposure, we will do 

19 that. 

20 MR. MILLER: I just would offer that the Board should 

21 just be well aware that incomplete documents are now 

22 being posted as site profiles. I've sent an e-mail to 
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1 Larry, specifically on the definition of an atomic 

2 weapons employer, on this very issue related to 

3 Blockson. I've not heard back from NIOSH on it. I 

4 have tried to interact constructively at the staff 

5 level on this to try to work through if there is a 

6 legal definition issue or a policy issue to be 

7 clarified. And I'm going to -- you know, I'm a little 

8 disappointed. I've gotten no answer back and I've 

9 tried to open the discussion and now the site profile's 

10 posted and we still don't have an answer. So I think 

11 that's a disservice at this point and I wish you all 

12 had briefed it and advertised the incompleteness of 

13 that site profile to the Board so it's out in the light 

14 of day. 

15 I realize you all are working hard on this, Jim, and -- 

16 but -- but, you know, message -- message delivered. 

17 The second question has to do with really the site 

18 profile on the TBD here at Mallinckrodt. I went 

19 through it and I had a chance, mostly on the airplane 

20 out here and since I've been here, to read it. 

21 Particularly I appreciate the enormous number of 

22 documents that were reviewed and put into this. And I 
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1 was particularly interested to read the footnotes, and 

2 one of the footnotes that would be very helpful if it 

3 were made as a public document is a November, 1950 AEC 

4 memo, which forms the basis -- it appears from reading 

5 this document -- for the extrapolation of how you are 

6 going to estimate the dose for those for which there 

7 was not either internal or external dosimetry. This 

8 was I think done by Eisenbud. Eisenbud drafted a memo 

9 dated January 31st, 1951 in which he opens by saying 

10 (Reading) About a year ago you asked if it would be 

11 possible for us -- presuming that's Hanson -- to 

12 estimate our, quote, potential liability among the 

13 long-term Mallinckrodt employees. As I explained at 

14 that time, you presented a rather knotty problem, one 

15 which, in the state of our present knowledge, would 

16 probably not be answered, even to a first 

17 approximation. Stimulated by the question, they have 

18 since prepared the attached report, an estimate of 

19 cumulative multiple exposures to radioactive materials. 

20 This report gives, by extrapolation of the best 

21 available laboratory and human data, estimates of the 

22 doses to critical organs of all Mallinckrodt employees 
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1 during the period from '42 to '49. The report shows 

2 that there are 17 employees whose lungs have had more 

3 than 1,000 rem of exposure. I have purposely withheld 

4 distribution of this report for some two months in 

5 order to give us a little more time to consider the 

6 validity of our estimates. 

7 And on he goes. I guess I would just suggest it would 

8 be very helpful if that document could be made 

9 available. I can't imagine that it's -- if it 

10 publishes -- UNCI (sic) or -- or -- or Privacy Act 

11 issues. But if it forms the very foundation for you 

12 assuming that no special cohort is warranted, the 

13 dissemination of that document is foundational, 

14 particularly when it was prepared by a liability 

15 adverse agency. And as we know, the insurance division 

16 of the AEC in many cases affected the quality of the 

17 science that was produced, and most notably at Paducah. 

18 Secondly, you know, I think there was an earlier 

19 discussion today -- let me get to the extrapolation 

20 question. In a '75 Eisenbud report that was prepared, 

21 he -- he mentioned, amongst other things, that in the 

22 time periods where they didn't have good data, they 
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1 were nonetheless estimating in the early process that 

2 they had up to 200 times MAC, or maximum allowable 

3 concentration. I don't know what the -- I don't know 

4 what the methodology is that's going to be used for 

5 extrapolating, again, backwards. Is it going to be 

6 sort of the worst case -- sort of -- kind of a -- to 

7 use Jim Neton's words, capping the dose? Or are we 

8 going to just simply come up with some average and 

9 back-calculate, not knowing what the data is? And so 

10 the very foundation of that extrapolation, or if it -- 

11 I would even go so far as to say speculation or 

12 hypothesis of what the exposures could have been is 

13 very, very important because if claimants are denied 

14 because you don't have the data, and you wrap it in the 

15 flag of oh, we made claimant-friendly assumptions, but 

16 the basis of that is so speculative, it casts a 

17 question for those of us evaluating at least to know 

18 whether a special cohort petition is warranted. And it 

19 clearly states in the site profile -- in fact, it 

20 raises I think in here that -- almost a prejudgment of 

21 that question. It says on page 25 -- it says (Reading) 

22 Little individual monitoring data is available prior to 
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1 '46, and in truth, prior to '48 for the internals. 

2 Some extrapolation of existing data to cover the 

3 unmonitored periods is necessary, as AEC itself tried 

4 to do. 

5 Well, if we're relying on AEC's work, as this memo 

6 reveals, with a liability averse perspective, we 

7 question the weight of the conclusions that were drawn 

8 there. 

9 Finally, in terms of the question that came up about 

10 the credibility of data, Mont Mason was a very 

11 significant individual who worked as the head of the 

12 safety division for Mallinckrodt for many years, and 

13 then after he retired he did some consulting work. And 

14 in the course of his consulting work, he wrote a -- 

15 some very interesting documents that kind of reflected 

16 on his -- his work and the quality of the data he was 

17 involved with. And he had a lot of communications, 

18 which you've footnoted in the Technical Basis Document, 

19 with both Dr. Eisenbud, Blatz and others in the AEC. 

20 But what was remarkable was Mallinckrodt's view of 

21 their obligation. They had removed somewhere around 39 

22 employees from work due to overexposure. They had 
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1 calculated their own index for what is a maximum 

2 lifetime tolerance for uranium exposure. But they 

3 didn't really want to say what the basis for that was. 

4 And in fact, it -- on -- on -- on -- as part of 

5 caution and advice of attorney, a formal report was 

6 never prepared to document -- that no document was 

7 prepared so that it could not be subpoenaed. And so 

8 what you have is a concern that only listed names with 

9 numbers and work sheets were prepared on the uptakes of 

10 these individuals. There was no lengthy description of 

11 the basis for calculations to be pulled apart by the 

12 scientific community with the possibility that such 

13 controversy would undermine employee confidence in the 

14 company safety measures. Our position was simply that 

15 Mallinckrodt had internal safety standards against 

16 which to measure exposure and had control points for 

17 preventive action. 

18 Now I don't know what precisely AEC relied upon as 

19 their raw data, and I don't know precisely whether 

20 AEC's data was foundational upon the dust collection 

21 and urine samples that were done by Mallinckrodt, but I 

22 have to think that, although both were working 
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1 together, it casts some doubt on whether or not 

2 (Inaudible) get the basis for the scientific 

3 calculations upon which at least Mallinckrodt based 

4 their own analyses because of concern about liability 

5 again, whether we can in fairness rely on the 

6 conclusion that we heard from Jim Neton earlier today 

7 in response to a question from the Board that we can 

8 reconstruct that dose. 

9 Now we may -- that may be possible. And maybe by 

10 capping the dose, maybe by using some of the other 

11 methods that NIOSH has talked about in its regulations, 

12 that's possible to do. But I think there's a cloud 

13 hanging over, based on the review of some of these 

14 historic documents by individuals with credibility who 

15 are close to the process. And I would really like to 

16 open up at some point, in another forum, a much more 

17 extensive discussion about the basis for this, quote, 

18 extrapolation. And if that basis isn't a good basis, 

19 then I don't know why it is that the conclusion has 

20 been drawn that it's feasible to estimate dose with 

21 sufficient accuracy. And I -- and I think a lot of 

22 people are going to start to ask that question. We 
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1 appreciate the candor of -- of NIOSH and the Technical 

2 Basis Document for saying where they don't have data. 

3 But the basis for the extrapolation, or as I would 

4 consider it, based on what I've read, speculation, 

5 really needs to be spelled out more clearly before 

6 anyone can draw some firm conclusions. And I would 

7 like you all to arrange to -- to provide some 

8 transparency in that area. 

9 Finally, just a footnote, and I noticed that you 

10 footnoted the Mound dose reconstruction document, and I 

11 was pleased to see you did so because there they 

12 received many of the materials for refining that came 

13 from the Mallinckrodt site. They had an actinium 

14 refinery. They refined protactinium. They refined, of 

15 course, ionium, thorium 230. What we found is is that 

16 the risks from exposure don't seem well-characterized 

17 from the raffinate, outside of radium, that is, and 

18 radon. They don't seem well-characterized. And I 

19 don't know why the report doesn't delineate -- was it 

20 because they were in a liquid form and therefore there 

21 wasn't a chance of inhalation? Or was this due to 

22 something else? Was this due because it wasn't just 
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1 fully considered that this was a dry filter cake that 

2 generated -- you know, or that the process of making a 

3 filter case, you generated aerosols? But I think that 

4 there's probably some room for further inquiry there. 

5 And then lastly, there's no accident incident reports 

6 cited in the -- that I could find -- cited in the 

7 literature, but we know that there were uranium fires 

8 from the milling of the dingots (sic) and the derbies, 

9 as we had at all the uranium milling plants. And I 

10 would hope that those kinds of accident incident 

11 reports would find their way in as you move this 

12 document forward. 

13 So thank you for your time. 

14 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you very much, Richard, for your 

15 comments and your insights. 

16 We need to have a lunch break. After lunch, we have a 

17 closed session of the Board for the purpose of 

18 developing, reviewing and discussing the independent 

19 government cost estimate for contracts for the Board. 

20 I need to announce that that is the only business that 

21 the Board will conduct this afternoon. There will be 

22 minutes kept of that session. Is there anything else 
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1 that I need to announce to the public on that session? 

2 A comment from Larry. 

3 MR. ELLIOTT: I would just like to thank all of the 

4 workers who were here today. I appreciate your 

5 attendance and we really do appreciate your comments on 

6 the record. So thank you for coming. I know that 

7 perhaps it's an inconvenience, but we do appreciate 

8 your being here. 

9 UNIDENTIFIED: (Inaudible) 

10 MR. ELLIOTT: Thank you. 

11 DR. ZIEMER: And let me reiterate that thanks on behalf 

12 of the Board to all who did participate, yesterday and 

13 today, in this particular session. We have your 

14 comments. We value them. And we're hopeful that that 

15 will help us do our job better, as well. 

16 We're now recessed till -- give us -- let's take an 

17 hour, Board. See if you can get back here in an hour. 

18 MR. PRESLEY: Can we leave our stuff in here? 

19 DR. ZIEMER: Can we leave things here, Cori? 

20 MS. HOMER: Yes. 

21 DR. ZIEMER: Yes. 

22 (Whereupon, the public meeting was adjourned and a 
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1 luncheon recess was taken by the Board, 12:45 p.m.) 
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1 

2 C E R T I F I C 

3 A T E

STATE OF GEORGIA ) 

 ) 

COUNTY OF FULTON ) 

 I, STEVEN RAY GREEN, being a Certified Merit Court 

Reporter in and for the State of Georgia, do hereby certify 

that the foregoing transcript was reduced to typewriting by 

me personally or under my direct supervision, and is a true, 

complete, and correct transcript of the aforesaid 

proceedings reported by me. 

 I further certify that I am not related to, employed 

by, counsel to, or attorney for any parties, attorneys, or 

counsel involved herein; nor am I financially interested in 

this matter. 

 WITNESS MY HAND AND OFFICIAL SEAL this _____ day of 

November, 2003. 

 ___________________________ 

 STEVEN RAY GREEN, CVR-CM 

 GA CCR No. A-2102 
 215