1 

This transcript of the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, Weldon Spring Work Group, 

has been reviewed for concerns under the Privacy Act (5 U.S.C. § 552a) and personally identifiable 

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

certified by the Chair of the Weldon Spring Work Group for accuracy at this time. The reader 

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

NEAL R. GROSS

COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS

1323 RHODE ISLAND AVE., N.W.

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U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES

CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL

NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR OCCUPATIONAL

SAFETY AND HEALTH 

+ + + + +

ADVISORY BOARD ON RADIATION AND

WORKER HEALTH 

+ + + + +

WORK GROUP ON WELDON SPRING PLANT

+ + + + +

TUESDAY

OCTOBER 19, 2010

+ + + + +

 The Work Group convened in the 

Cincinnati Room of the Cincinnati Airport 

Marriott, 2395 Progress Drive, Hebron, 

Kentucky, at 9:00 a.m., Michael H. Gibson, 

Chairman, presiding.

PRESENT:

MICHAEL H. GIBSON, Chairman

RICHARD LEMEN, Member*

ROBERT W. PRESLEY, Member
 2 

This transcript of the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, Weldon Spring Work Group, 

has been reviewed for concerns under the Privacy Act (5 U.S.C. § 552a) and personally identifiable 

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

certified by the Chair of the Weldon Spring Work Group for accuracy at this time. The reader 

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

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ALSO PRESENT:

TED KATZ, Designated Federal Official

NANCY ADAMS, NIOSH Contractor

RON BUCHANAN, SC&A

MEL CHEW, ORAU Team

JOE FITZGERALD, SC&A

DAVE HARRISON, ORAU Team

MONICA HARRISON-MAPLES, ORAU Team

STU HINNEFELD, DCAS

EMILY HOWELL, HHS

KAREN JOHNSON, Weldon Spring Petitioner

MARY JOHNSON

JENNY LIN, HHS*

ARJUN MAKHIJANI, SC&A

JOHN MAURO, SC&A*

ROBERT MORRIS, ORAU Team

MARK ROLFES, DCAS

TINA TRIPLET, Weldon Spring Petitioner

*Participating via telephone
 3 

This transcript of the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, Weldon Spring Work Group, 

has been reviewed for concerns under the Privacy Act (5 U.S.C. § 552a) and personally identifiable 

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

certified by the Chair of the Weldon Spring Work Group for accuracy at this time. The reader 

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

NEAL R. GROSS

COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS

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C-O-N-T-E-N-T-S 

Welcome and Introduction................... 4 

Overview of Weldon Spring Site 

 Evaluation Report and SEC Status......... 9 

Issues Matrix for Weldon Spring

 Site Evaluation Report and

 SEC Petition............................ 12

Draft NIOSH Response to SCA Issues

 Matrix................................. 174

Administrative Detail and Calendar....... 205
 4 

This transcript of the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, Weldon Spring Work Group, 

has been reviewed for concerns under the Privacy Act (5 U.S.C. § 552a) and personally identifiable 

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

2 (9:02 a.m.)

3 MR. KATZ: So good morning, 

4 everyone in the room and on the line.

5 This is Ted Katz with the Advisory 

6 Board on Radiation and Worker Health. This is 

7 the Weldon Spring Work Group. I'm the 

8 Designated Federal Official for the Advisory 

9 Board. And we're going to get started in a 

10 minute.

11 Before we go on record, we're 

12 going to do roll call. And let's begin with 

13 Board Members in the room with the Chair.

14 CHAIRMAN GIBSON: Mike Gibson, 

15 Chair of the Weldon Spring Work Group.

16 MR. KATZ: And please speak to 

17 conflict.

18 CHAIRMAN GIBSON: No conflicts.

19 MEMBER PRESLEY: Robert Presley, 

20 Board Member. No conflict.
 5 

This transcript of the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, Weldon Spring Work Group, 

has been reviewed for concerns under the Privacy Act (5 U.S.C. § 552a) and personally identifiable 

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1 MR. KATZ: And on the line, Board 

2 Members?

3 MEMBER LEMEN: Richard Lemen. No 

4 conflict.

5 MR. KATZ: Welcome, Richard --

6 Dick.

7 Okay. And now NIOSH ORAU Team in 

8 the room?

9 MR. HINNEFELD: Stu Hinnefeld, 

10 Interim Director of DCAS.

11 MR. ROLFES: Mark Rolfes, health 

12 physicist with DCAS. No conflict of interest.

13 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. No conflict 

14 on my part, either.

15 MR. KATZ: Any NIOSH ORAU Team on 

16 the line?

17 DR. CHEW: Mel Chew, ORAU Team. 

18 No conflict.

19 MR. KATZ: Welcome, Mel.

20 MR. MORRIS: Robert Morris.

21 MS. HARRISON-MAPLES: Monica 
 6 

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has been reviewed for concerns under the Privacy Act (5 U.S.C. § 552a) and personally identifiable 

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1 Harrison-Maples, ORAU Team. No conflict.

2 MR. KATZ: Okay. So we have 

3 Robert Morris and Monica --

4 MS. HARRISON-MAPLES: Harrison5 Maples.

6 MR. KATZ: Harrison-Maples. I 

7 always get those switched around. But thank 

8 you.

9 MS. HARRISON-MAPLES: That's okay.

10 MR. KATZ: And both of those, no 

11 conflict?

12 MR. MORRIS: No conflict for 

13 Robert.

14 MR. KATZ: Right. SC&A in the 

15 room?

16 MR. FITZGERALD: Joe Fitzgerald. 

17 No conflict.

18 DR. BUCHANAN: Ron Buchanan. No 

19 conflict with Weldon Spring.

20 DR. MAKHIJANI: Arjun Makhijani. 

21 No conflict.
 7 

This transcript of the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, Weldon Spring Work Group, 

has been reviewed for concerns under the Privacy Act (5 U.S.C. § 552a) and personally identifiable 

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

certified by the Chair of the Weldon Spring Work Group for accuracy at this time. The reader 

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1 MR. KATZ: And SC&A on the line?

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

3 conflict.

4 MR. KATZ: Welcome, John.

5 Very good. And federal officials 

6 or contractors for the feds in HHS and other

7 agencies in the room?

8 MS. HOWELL: Emily Howell, HHS.

9 MR. KATZ: And on the line?

10 MS. LIN: Jenny Lin, HHS.

11 MS. ADAMS: Nancy Adams, NIOSH 

12 contractor.

13 MR. KATZ: Welcome, Jenny and 

14 Nancy.

15 MR. HARRISON: This is Dave 

16 Harrison, ORAU Team with no conflict.

17 MR. KATZ: Oh, thank you, Dave 

18 Harrison.

19 All right. Finally, there are no 

20 members of the public in the room.

21 But on the line, any members of 
 8 

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has been reviewed for concerns under the Privacy Act (5 U.S.C. § 552a) and personally identifiable 

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1 the public who would like to identify 

2 themselves?

3 MS. K. JOHNSON: This is Karen 

4 Johnson, one of the petitioners.

5 MR. KATZ: Welcome, Karen.

6 MS. TRIPLET: Tina Triplet, one of 

7 the petitioners.

8 MR. KATZ: And welcome, Tina.

9 MS. M. JOHNSON: Mary Johnson.

10 MR. KATZ: Mary Johnson. Thank 

11 you.

12 Very good. So let me just ask for 

13 all of you on the line, please mute your 

14 phones except when you're addressing the 

15 group. For those of you that don't have a 

16 mute button on your phone, if you hit *6, 

17 that'll mute your phone. And then if you hit 

18 *6 again, it'll unmute your phone. So *6.

19 And please, do not put the call on 

20 hold at any point, but hang up and dial back 

21 in because the hold will disrupt the call for 
 9 

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has been reviewed for concerns under the Privacy Act (5 U.S.C. § 552a) and personally identifiable 

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1 everyone else.

2 Much thanks. And Mike, it's your 

3 agenda.

4 CHAIRMAN GIBSON: Okay. Hope 

5 everyone's got a copy of the agenda. Sorry I 

6 was late getting it out. But it's pretty 

7 straightforward, I think.

8 We have a few documents to go over 

9 but I thought, to start off, maybe we could 

10 have someone from DCAS just give us a brief 

11 overview of the Weldon Springs ER report and 

12 the original SEC petition, just to get us back 

13 up to date.

14 MR. ROLFES: Sure can. And I just 

15 had it pulled it up, and I need to pull it 

16 back up here. I just accidentally closed it. 

17 If you could just give me a couple of 

18 seconds.

19 Okay. Sorry about that.

20 Okay. This is just a brief update 

21 on SEC-00143. We received the petition in 
 10 

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has been reviewed for concerns under the Privacy Act (5 U.S.C. § 552a) and personally identifiable 

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1 April of 2009. It qualified September 11, 

2 2009 and the price evaluated by NIOSH was all 

3 employees of the Department of Energy, 

4 Department of Energy contractors or 

5 subcontractors who worked in any area of the 

6 Weldon Spring Plant or Weldon Spring area 

7 during the covered operational period from 

8 January 1, 1957 through December 31, 1967.

9 The Evaluation Report was approved 

10 in April of 2010 and the feasibility 

11 determination was that the documentation and 

12 records that we have allow us to do accurate 

13 dose reconstructions -- dose reconstructions 

14 of sufficient accuracy for both internal and 

15 external sources of radiation exposure.

16 Would you like any additional 

17 details?

18 CHAIRMAN GIBSON: Are there any 

19 other questions about the petition or at least 

20 what we're starting from here today?

21 (No response.)
 11 

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has been reviewed for concerns under the Privacy Act (5 U.S.C. § 552a) and personally identifiable 

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1 CHAIRMAN GIBSON: If not, we can 

2 get right into the -- SC&A has prepared an 

3 issues matrix for the Weldon Spring Site 

4 Evaluation Report and the SEC petition. So if 

5 we're able to take off with that, we'll go 

6 there.

7 MR. FITZGERALD: Yes. Let me just 

8 preface -- Ron's going to go through that.

9 We sent that matrix out yesterday 

10 afternoon. And again, it was in DOE for 

11 clearance for a bit. So hopefully everyone 

12 has a copy of that now. We use that as a sort 

13 of set of talking points.

14 MEMBER LEMEN: This is Dr. Lemen. 

15 I didn't get a copy, if you sent it out 

16 yesterday afternoon.

17 MR. FITZGERALD: It's on the CDC 

18 computer. But you don't see it?

19 MEMBER LEMEN: Well, I have 

20 trouble with the CDC computer. I'm not 

21 cleared for it for some reason. I'm trying to 
 12 

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1 get cleared for it. But maybe if you sent it 

2 to my regular email.

3 MR. KATZ: I think we're going to 

4 try to figure out how to forward that to you.

5 MEMBER LEMEN: Okay. Thank you.

6 MR. FITZGERALD: I guess with 

7 that, as we do on these initial work group 

8 meetings, we're going to walk through what we 

9 see are some of the issues that either are, in 

10 our mind, a technical question or areas where 

11 I think we need clarification on the 

12 evaluation. I mean, these are all created 

13 equal. But we want to make sure at least 

14 there's a complete listing at this point in 

15 time.

16 MR. KATZ: Dick, Mike's emailed it 

17 to you, so it should arrive soon.

18 MEMBER LEMEN: Okay. I should get 

19 it in a few minutes if he did because I can 

20 get it from Mike.

21 MR. KATZ: Thanks.
 13 

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1 MR. FITZGERALD: It's ten pages, 

2 Dave.

3 MEMBER LEMEN: Okay. Thank you.

4 MR. FITZGERALD: So we're just 

5 going to go ahead and walk through this. And 

6 Ron's done the yeoman's job so I'm certainly 

7 going to turn to him to go through the issues 

8 we have.

9 You want to just tick through?

10 DR. BUCHANAN: Okay. Before we 

11 get started on the individual issues, just to 

12 bring everybody up to speed, I think we ought

13 to cover a little bit about what the whole 

14 facility was about and why we have an SEC.

15 Okay. Weldon Spring was the 

16 uranium processing plant, and it operated from 

17 1957 to 1966. It took over the job of the 

18 Mallinckrodt downtown uranium plant in 

19 downtown St. Louis. There was a slight 

20 overlap -- a year and a half or so -- that 

21 they both operated. The Mallinckrodt -- a lot 
 14 

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1 of you are familiar with that downtown plant. 

2 I know Arjun is and he worked some on that.

3 And then the Weldon Spring took 

4 over, and it was more of a directed, 

5 engineered plant to process uranium ore 

6 concentrate. It essentially took the uranium 

7 ore concentrate, did chemical processing on 

8 it, put it into a furnace, melted it down into 

9 uranium metal mostly and shipped it out to 

10 other areas -- other labs and stuff to be made 

11 into reactor fuel elements. There were some 

12 other products, but that was the main product.

13 As far as SC&A can find and then 

14 NIOSH has found, it used mainly uranium ore 

15 concentrate. It did not use pitchblende or 

16 the other material that came in with a lot of 

17 the byproducts of the decay in it. And so it 

18 received these in drums in something like a 

19 55-gallon drum. They dumped uranium ore. 

20 After the chemical processing at 

21 the mills, it came in looking something like a 
 15 

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1 yellow cake, so that they called it yellow 

2 cake. They sampled these, weighed them, put 

3 them in a hopper. And then that material went 

4 down through a chemical separation process. 

5 And then I don't know all the details as far 

6 as the chemistry goes, but they created a 

7 green salt and then they put that into a 

8 furnace -- in a bomb, they called it. They 

9 had to use magnesium to heat it up. And out 

10 of the bottom of the container then came the 

11 molten uranium which they called an ingot. 

12 And then that was screwed into rods, and then 

13 rods in the machine and cut into certain 

14 lengths. And those were then shipped out. 

15 That was their end product. That was in `57 

16 through December of `66.

17 They also used some thorium -- did 

18 some thorium processing from `63 to `66 in

19 certain buildings at Weldon Springs.

20 December 31st in 1966 was the 

21 official cut-off date, I guess. They decided 
 16 

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1 that it was no longer economically feasible to 

2 run Weldon Springs. And so they closed it 

3 down. It started a decrease in productivity 

4 and worker count in the 1966 year. And then 

5 the 1st of January of '67, it appears that 

6 there was no real work being done there.

7 Now in '67 and '68, it was an Army 

8 site to begin with. It was turned over to DOE 

9 for the uranium processing. It was turned 

10 back over to the Army for manufacturing Agent 

11 Orange herbicide. It never was done. 

12 However, there was some work done in '67 on 

13 some of the buildings and '68 to renovate it 

14 for the production of a herbicide. And that 

15 will be one of the issues we talk about a 

16 little later.

17 And so I wanted to give you a 

18 background on what it's function was. 

19 According to records and according to NIOSH, 

20 they received mostly uranium from the United 

21 States and Canada, received recycled uranium 
 17 

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1 starting in -- and this is another issue, what 

2 date is not sure -- it's around '61 -- and 

3 Fernald mainly as some of their work. It also 

4 received enriched uranium in a one- to two5 percent range from Fernald also in the later 

6 years.

7 And so, what SC&A did, we did 

8 worker interviews about a couple years ago. 

9 We also evaluated the Technical Basis 

10 Documents 1 through 6 that were issued in 

11 2005. We evaluated those and sent that report 

12 in in February of '09 with 28 issues as far as 

13 TBD issues go. And as Mark says, the ER then 

14 was issued in April of 2010 -- somewhere 

15 around that. And so we were charged with 

16 looking at the ER and evaluating it to see if 

17 it was technically correct.

18 And so we did that. And I created 

19 the matrix with nine issues to be resolved on 

20 it. I do apologize for getting it in late. I 

21 know I hate it when I receive something at the 
 18 

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1 last minute. SC&A did send this in around the 

2 1st of October. It took quite a while to 

3 clear and so it didn't get out to your 

4 computers until yesterday, apparently. And so 

5 we made extra copies for anybody that needs it 

6 here. However, I realize that this doesn't 

7 give you a chance to look it over beforehand.

8 So we'll try to go through each 

9 issue and explain why we bring these issues up 

10 today since some of you hadn't had a chance to 

11 study it.

12 And we have nine issues that we'd 

13 like to bring forth to the Working Group for 

14 them to consider that need resolving and what 

15 can be done to resolve these issues. And 

16 we'll just start off with, are there any 

17 questions at this point on the function of 

18 Weldon Spring or where we are at this point?

19 MR. ROLFES: Ron, just before we 

20 start, I want to make sure that our 

21 contractor's on the phone so they can follow 
 19 

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1 along.

2 MEMBER LEMEN: This is Dick Lemen. 

3 I do have it now.

4 MR. ROLFES: Okay. Mel, Bob and 

5 Monica, do you have copies of the document? 

6 We're going to discuss the site Special 

7 Exposure Cohort evaluation matrix that we 

8 received yesterday. So I just want to make 

9 sure that you have that before we start.

10 DR. CHEW: This is Mel. I do.

11 MR. ROLFES: Okay. I realize we 

12 haven't had time to prepare responses. So 

13 this is sort of going to be on the fly. So 

14 we'll certainly hear what you have to say. 

15 And just keep in mind that we haven't prepared 

16 responses to these and that we're going to 

17 need to do some additional research to 

18 formulate our official responses.

19 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, I think our 

20 conversation today is more for questioning to 

21 make sure we understand the nature of the 
 20 

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1 finding and what would be expected for the 

2 finding to not be a finding -- those kinds of 

3 things -- if we have any questions.

4 MR. KATZ: Ron, maybe as you go 

5 through these, if some of these issues are 

6 overlapping with issues that were raised in 

7 the TBD review, that might be helpful to know, 

8 since the TBD review was done back in

9 February.

10 DR. MAURO: Ron, this is John 

11 Mauro.

12 And Stu, just a quick question. 

13 I'm looking at the matrix and I see that in 

14 the far right-hand column -- the fourth column 

15 -- gives the SC&A summary of the issue. But 

16 the middle one has a NIOSH ER position. Is 

17 this write-up something that NIOSH prepared or 

18 is it something that we prepared based on our 

19 understanding of the NIOSH ER?

20 DR. BUCHANAN: John, this is Ron.

21 Yes. The latter is correct. This 
 21 

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1 is SC&A's reading of NIOSH's position the way 

2 we understand the ER.

3 DR. MAURO: Okay. So we don't 

4 have before us, then, NIOSH's own response to 

5 our concerns?

6 DR. BUCHANAN: No, because they 

7 haven't seen our concerns yet.

8 DR. MAURO: Very good. Thank you.

9 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, we have with 

10 the ER. We have NIOSH's Evaluation Report.

11 DR. BUCHANAN: Right. And in the 

12 third column, this is the way we understand 

13 what they're saying.

14 DR. MAURO: Okay.

15 DR. BUCHANAN: In my 

16 interpretation. So if it's incorrect -- as we 

17 go through this, if there's anything that you 

18 wanted to clarify or correct, please free to 

19 interrupt me.

20 MR. FITZGERALD: This has been 

21 standard practice because clearly when we 
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1 present the matrix for the first time, one 

2 issue is making sure we're reading it right.

3 DR. BUCHANAN: Sure.

4 MR. FITZGERALD: And the second 

5 question is the actual technical issue itself. 

6 So -- yes.

7 DR. BUCHANAN: And some of these 

8 issues are perhaps SC&A's questioning the TBD 

9 and the ER to see if they match each other. 

10 If something has changed between the two, then 

11 we want to know which way will be used in 

12 actual dose reconstruction. And so that's one 

13 reason for us putting down what we understand 

14 NIOSH to be saying and so we can clarify which 

15 method is going to be used.

16 So if there's no other questions, 

17 we can get right into the heart of the matter, 

18 and that's on page two of the matrix -- issue 

19 number one -- is accuracy of records not 

20 sufficiently verified. And A and C are 

21 together -- internal and external. A was 
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1 expounded on a little bit more in the ER than 

2 C. But we had the same questions on both.

3 First of all, can NIOSH tell me --

4 the CER -- how is it used in dose 

5 reconstruction and why was it compared to the 

6 CER? Why was Weldon Spring's hard copy data 

7 compared to CER?

8 MR. ROLFES: Well, I'm going to 

9 defer to Monica on this one because I believe 

10 she was the one who had gone and looked at the 

11 CER records.

12 Monica, did you hear Ron's 

13 question regarding the comparison of the CER 

14 data?

15 DR. CHEW: Mark, this is Mel. 

16 Monica had to step out to take another call 

17 here from another petitioner. I just got an 

18 email from her. Maybe you want to defer it 

19 until she gets back.

20 MR. ROLFES: Okay. We'll 

21 certainly do that if we can if that's okay 
 24 

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1 with you, Ron?

2 MS. HARRISON-MAPLES: Mark?

3 MR. ROLFES: Yes?

4 MS. HARRISON-MAPLES: Yes. I 

5 haven't left yet. I'm getting ready to leave. 

6 I have about six minutes that I can address 

7 this question real quickly.

8 MR. ROLFES: Great.

9 MS. HARRISON-MAPLES: Sorry about 

10 that. I couldn't get off of mute.

11 The CER database is an electronic 

12 record of the data that ORAU collected early 

13 on for epidemiology studies having to do with 

14 Weldon Spring -- the studies having to do with 

15 Weldon Spring. The purpose of comparing the 

16 two sets of data had to do with verifying that 

17 the electronic records and the -- verifying 

18 the pedigree of the records, basically. We 

19 from an SEC perspective were not looking at it 

20 in terms of how the data was going to be used 

21 for dose reconstruction directly because the 
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1 SEC process doesn't really look into 

2 individual dose reconstructions that way. But 

3 we do need to verify that the data that the 

4 project has available to it -- both hard copy 

5 and electronic -- we were comparing them for 

6 consistency to make sure that what we had was 

7 accurate and met our pedigree requirements.

8 As far as for dose reconstruction, 

9 the dose reconstructors, to the best of my 

10 knowledge, have in their procedures that they 

11 will always go back to the hard copy record if 

12 there is hard copy information available. So 

13 the comparison -- you're looking at it from 

14 two different perspectives when you talk about 

15 how is it going to be used for dose 

16 reconstruction. This comparison will not be 

17 used for dose reconstruction.

18 Does that answer the question?

19 DR. BUCHANAN: Well, Monica, this 

20 is Ron.

21 Will the CER database be used for 
 26 

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1 dose reconstruction?

2 MS. HARRISON-MAPLES: The CER 

3 database will only be used for dose 

4 reconstruction in the event of an individual 

5 dose reconstruction where there is not a copy 

6 of a hard copy record. 

7 DR. BUCHANAN: How did the CER get 

8 -- just for clarification -- how does the CER 

9 get data if there wasn't hard copy to put it 

10 in originally?

11 MS. HARRISON-MAPLES: There would 

12 have been a hard copy record originally. ORAU 

13 received the information directly from Weldon 

14 Spring back when they were doing this 

15 epidemiology study, and they digitized the 

16 records. They made the database directly from 

17 the records.

18 Now, if at some point in time that 

19 record was destroyed somehow, CER would still 

20 have that electronic database. That is 

21 probably not going to happen. We don't see 
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1 that very often. What is more likely to 

2 happen is that the CER database would be used 

3 in the event where there is no record for 

4 someone, and they would look at it from a co5 worker kind of perspective.

6 DR. BUCHANAN: Now the CER 

7 database is not complete. It doesn't contain 

8 all the records from Weldon Spring? Is that 

9 correct?

10 MS. HARRISON-MAPLES: It contains 

11 all the records that CER was able to get for 

12 Weldon Spring.

13 DR. BUCHANAN: Okay. But the way 

14 I understand the comparison in the ER, some 

15 years it might have contained 30 percent, some 

16 60 percent, sometimes 90 percent when you made 

17 a comparison. So the CER generally cannot be 

18 used for dose reconstruction because it's not 

19 complete. Is that correct?

20 MS. HARRISON-MAPLES: I'm not 

21 really sure I'm understanding your question. 
 28 

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1 You're talking about for an individual dose 

2 reconstruction?

3 DR. BUCHANAN: Yes.

4 MS. HARRISON-MAPLES: If a person's 

5 record -- an individual's record are in the 

6 CER database, then yes, it could be used for 

7 dose reconstruction. If an individual's 

8 records are not in the database, then they 

9 might be able to look at similar workers, 

10 similar job titles and do a co-worker study 

11 based on the CER records.

12 I'm not an expert in the co-worker 

13 studies. I don't know if there might not be a 

14 period where a partial reconstruction might or 

15 might not be able to be done. But that's 

16 generally how the CER database will be used.

17 For the most part, for individual 

18 dose reconstructions, though, they will look 

19 at the records of the individual.

20 DR. BUCHANAN: Okay. Now for 

21 Weldon Springs, when they have a claim and a 
 29 

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1 dose reconstructor request data, where does 

2 that data come from to that --

3 MS. HARRISON-MAPLES: I'm sorry. 

4 I didn't quite understand the question.

5 DR. BUCHANAN: When a claim is 

6 submitted and NIOSH processes that claim and 

7 does a dose reconstruction for Weldon Spring, 

8 where do they get that data that they use to 

9 actually do the dose reconstruction? Do they

10 get hard copies from where? Or electronic 

11 database?

12 What I'm trying to establish is 

13 the data they use today has been verified it 

14 is complete and accurate from the original 

15 data that was recorded for that worker 40 

16 years ago.

17 MS. HARRISON-MAPLES: I'm not sure 

18 that I can answer your question fully. I 

19 don't work on the dose reconstruction side of 

20 it. I believe I understand the procedures, 

21 but I work SEC side.
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1 As I understand it, we have out 

2 for the record for Weldon Spring, we have a 

3 storage of records from Weldon Spring. And 

4 that would be searched to find records for the 

5 individual. That would include copies of the 

6 hard copy record for the individual, if we 

7 have them. They might look through the 

8 database. And this comparison of the database 

9 with the hard copy is basically a verification 

10 that we got these records at one time in the 

11 past, we're comparing them to what we get 

12 again, and we're verifying that they are the 

13 same in order to establish a pedigree of the 

14 information.

15 DR. BUCHANAN: Okay. So for 

16 example on page 49 of the ER, it shows -- 49 

17 or 50 -- it shows that for 1957, for example, 

18 that the SRDB results captured in a CER 

19 database was 61 percent. So this tells me, 

20 number one, that the CER does not contain all 

21 the records, obviously, if it contains only 61 
 31 

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1 percent for that year. So the SRDB database 

2 -- this is an electronic database that was 

3 copied from the hard records? Or how did the 

4 --

5 MS. HARRISON-MAPLES: No, no. 

6 You're confusing the purpose of the SRDB 

7 database.

8 Mel, can you speak to this a bit? 

9 I have to go. I have to pick up this other 

10 call. I apologize and I will be back on this 

11 call as quickly as I can be. But we have a 

12 petitioner from another petition that I set up 

13 a call for and I've got to go.

14 MR. ROLFES: Thank you, Monica.

15 MS. HARRISON-MAPLES: I'm sorry. 

16 Thank you.

17 MR. ROLFES: No problem. Thank 

18 you.

19 Mel, did you want to answer Ron's 

20 question regarding the Site Research Database 

21 or should we wait for Monica?
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1 DR. CHEW: I think we should table 

2 this thing, Mark.

3 MR. ROLFES: Okay.

4 DR. CHEW: I'm not so sure I 

5 understand exactly where Ron is going with 

6 this question, anyway.

7 MR. HINNEFELD: This is Stu.

8 Well, one question that comes to 

9 mind is what is the origin of the exposure 

10 record we receive when we get an exposure 

11 history from a Weldon Spring worker. Weldon 

12 Spring is not there anymore. Does this go to 

13 Legacy Management, and what record do they 

14 pull out? What do they rely on to tell us 

15 what the exposure record is? I mean, that's 

16 one question.

17 DR. BUCHANAN: That's correct. 

18 And what's the chain of custody, so to speak? 

19 When it was recorded in 1962 to when the dose 

20 reconstructor -- I guess this is the summary 

21 of the issue is for external and internal 
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1 records. What is the chain of custody? What 

2 is the verification that the dose 

3 reconstructor receives? If it's an electronic 

4 database, is it a photocopy or whatever, how 

5 do we know that that is complete from when 

6 that record was recorded in 1962 or whenever 

7 the operation's taking place during the SEC? 

8 That is what I would like to be addressed.

9 DR. CHEW: So Mark, let me make it 

10 -- I think we need to get someone who was 

11 doing the dose reconstruction from Weldon 

12 Spring to answer that particular question.

13 MR. ROLFES: That would be a good 

14 idea. I don't know if Dave Harrison might be 

15 familiar with that or not.

16 Dave, did you have anything to add 

17 about the source of the DOE records that we 

18 received for dose reconstructions for Weldon 

19 Spring Plant?

20 MR. HARRISON: I do not have that 

21 information right now.
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1 MR. ROLFES: Okay. Thank you.

2 We'll have to get you an answer 

3 for that. I was trying to look on my computer 

4 here but it's not very responsive at the 

5 moment.

6 MR. FITZGERALD: Yes, the two 

7 facets -- and this is sort of a conventional 

8 question we raise with every SEC as sort of 

9 the source of the database that's being used 

10 for dose reconstruction. And the other thing 

11 that I think that Ron was getting to is how 

12 you validated that the database track was 

13 sufficiently complete. And if there were 

14 gaps, how did you address the gaps? I mean, 

15 that's kind of where we always come from.

16 DR. MAKHIJANI: Just to add 

17 something to that, part of our procedure is to 

18 review these. And the Board's guidelines for 

19 us were to look at adequacy and completeness. 

20 If you're going to do co-worker models, 

21 they'll probably come from this electronic 
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1 database. And then we're supposed to verify 

2 the adequacy of that electronic database. So 

3 if 40 percent of the records are missing in 

4 some cases, then you want to know which 40 

5 percent are missing.

6 MR. FITZGERALD: Right. And how 

7 representative would it be if you did --

8 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes, 

9 representativeness, adequacy and completeness 

10 are part of our kind of SEC review guidelines 

11 that we need to ask those questions.

12 DR. BUCHANAN: A lot of these 

13 records have been transformed to electronic 

14 records through the years. And then that gets 

15 put into another system. And so we have some 

16 sort of verification from the very origination 

17 of those records to the use of dose

18 reconstruction to make sure that they're there 

19 and they've been transferred accurately.

20 So that's issue 1 -- A and C on 

21 the records. And the reason I put those in 
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1 there is because the way I understand it is 

2 that on B, we might as well pop into that now, 

3 it's air data.

4 I understand that according to the 

5 ER and TBD that there is uranium air 

6 monitoring data area and some breathing zone 

7 area for 1958 through 1966. That's on page 40 

8 of the ER. And for thorium, 1963 to 1966 on 

9 page 41 through 45. And am I to understand --

10 recommend using TIB-5000 and 6000 for using 

11 this data which consists of daily weighted 

12 averages -- DWAs -- which I understand they 

13 would put an air sample there for a certain 

14 amount of time, determine how long that exists 

15 and then prorate that for like an eight- to 

16 ten-hour shift or something?

17 However, I'd like Arjun to address 

18 that since he's addressed this at 

19 Mallinckrodt, perhaps, Fernald. So he has 

20 some insight and experience in this area.

21 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes. I've only 
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1 been marginally involved with Weldon Spring 

2 just kind of answering Ron's questions off and 

3 on.

4 And one of the questions was what 

5 have we said and what methods have we 

6 recommended in using daily weighted average 

7 data. And there was a whole analysis in our 

8 report to the Board in April 2005 when we 

9 showed that the use of daily weighted averages 

10 could give you or indicate at least by an 

11 analysis that could give you average typical 

12 doses for a group of workers. But it 

13 certainly couldn't establish bounding values. 

14 Very often you have two or three measurements 

15 at a job location.

16 PARTICIPANT: Your broadcast is 

17 breaking up here. Could you get closer to the 

18 microphone, please?

19 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes. Well, in 

20 April 2005, we had -- I'll speak a little 

21 louder too. In April 2005, we had done an 
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1 analysis of the daily weighted average 

2 question in the context of the Mallinckrodt 

3 SEC review and pointed out that you can't use 

4 daily weighted averages to come up with 

5 bounding doses for anything -- maybe typical 

6 doses for a group of workers. And there were 

7 a number of reasons for that. And we also 

8 recommended an approach that you might 

9 consider for use of daily weighted averages to 

10 develop such bounding doses. But I don't 

11 believe it's ever been done.

12 And we ran it by our 

13 statisticians. And the basic issue -- just to 

14 remind you -- and I'd be happy to send that 

15 report to all of you who may not currently 

16 have it; I don't think it's on the NIOSH 

17 website -- is that you have two or three 

18 measurements taken over a few minutes for each 

19 task that was performed over the course of a 

20 day. Very often these two or three 

21 measurements for a certain task would be 
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1 highly variable. In some cases, many 

2 measurements were taken but only the minimum, 

3 maximum and averages reported so there's a 

4 significant loss of data so you can't actually 

5 construct the distribution, or at least what 

6 is presented in the database doesn't contain 

7 all the information that was originally taken.

8 And when you try to calculate the 

9 variances based on two, three, four 

10 measurements, they are of course very large. 

11 And then there are different variances for 

12 each task. So there are a number of tasks 

13 that go into a daily weighted average, and 

14 you're confronted with a problem of coming up 

15 with a composite distribution that would 

16 representing a bounding dose.

17 It's a non-trivial problem. And 

18 it's unclear, with a few measurements over a 

19 few minutes which was typical. I haven't 

20 looked at Weldon Spring data -- which was the 

21 case at the Destrehan Street site -- that you 
 40 

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1 could do this. I mean, we didn't offer an 

2 opinion so far as I remember. We suggested 

3 that if it were going to be used to develop 

4 bounding doses that there was a possible 

5 approach that could be developed. But we 

6 never saw any response from NIOSH, presumably 

7 because an SEC was granted at Mallinckrodt and 

8 NIOSH didn't have to go there.

9 But subsequently, I've noted that 

10 NIOSH has proposed the use of daily weighted 

11 average in the same way and sometimes in 

12 moderate variance but never addressed our 

13 original criticisms of use of daily weighted 

14 averages in the SEC context.

15 MR. HINNEFELD: What was your 

16 report that you -- or what was it related to 

17 at --

18 DR. MAKHIJANI: It was the 

19 Destrehan Street site from April 2005.

20 My government computer has kind of 

21 locked up. It's not working right. And I 
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1 have to call -- my whole email has crashed. 

2 But I think I can send things out.

3 MR. HINNEFELD: I can find what 

4 you described. I'll be able to find that.

5 MR. MORRIS: Yes, in 2005, that 

6 would not have had a DOE classification 

7 review. So you're probably not authorized to 

8 handle it over the Internet yet.

9 MEMBER LEMEN: Hello. This is Dr. 

10 Lemen. Can you hear me?

11 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, we can hear 

12 you, Dick.

13 MEMBER LEMEN: Arjun, would it be 

14 possible for you to send me that report if you 

15 can find it?

16 DR. MAKHIJANI: Sure. I can send 

17 it. I have it in my government computer 

18 because I have all my files.

19 MR. MORRIS: But are you aware 

20 that DOE has probably not reviewed a 2005 

21 document?
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1 DR. MAKHIJANI: This raises a 

2 point. We are not allowed to send any files 

3 prior to 2008 to anybody?

4 MR. FITZGERALD: It's probably 

5 appropriate to send it through DOE for a check 

6 before doing it yourself. I mean, just 

7 retroactively because we had that issue going 

8 back before 2006.

9 DR. MAKHIJANI: But presumably 

10 internal SC&A, we can still see it. Because 

11 it's on my --

12 MR. FITZGERALD: Yes, just for 

13 dissemination. I think there's an 

14 acknowledgment that there's some documents 

15 that go far back that --

16 DR. MAKHIJANI: Right. Sure.

17 MR. FITZGERALD: -- there's a 

18 limbo status. But we still want to go ahead -

19 - 

20 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, I'm happy to 

21 go along with whatever direction CDC has to 
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1 provide. Ted?

2 MR. KATZ: Yes, that makes sense 

3 to me.

4 DR. MAKHIJANI: So reports that go 

5 to the Board and to NIOSH should be run by DOE 

6 before sending --

7 MR. FITZGERALD: If they haven't 

8 been screened. That's the protocol. Yes.

9 DR. MAKHIJANI: Okay.

10 DR. MAURO: This is John. Try 

11 speaking as if you just did very briefly on 

12 breathing zone data and daily weighted 

13 averages. This has been a subject that's come 

14 up as Arjun pointed out on a number of 

15 occasions. It also will be an important issue 

16 on our upcoming Fernald meeting.

17 And I just wanted to say 

18 something, I guess, more global. The health 

19 and safety laboratory which made wide use of 

20 this technique and is widely accepted in the 

21 industrial hygiene world as an excellent way 
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1 to get a good sense of the kinds of exposures 

2 different jobs, different workers and job 

3 categories experience.

4 The way it's implemented, when you 

5 actually go through the calculations, you look 

6 at the data, it's instructive to actually do 

7 one. I've done a couple myself just to make 

8 sure I understood how they're done. What you 

9 really come up with is a best estimate of the 

10 exposure of a worker in a given day for his 

11 given job category. And I think that's an 

12 excellent metric to characterize the kinds of 

13 exposures -- inhalation exposures -- that 

14 different classes of workers might have 

15 achieved.

16 But now, it's widely accepted 

17 within NIOSH that this is a reasonable 

18 approach to take and it's been embraced. 

19 We're really questioning whether or not the 

20 intent of the DWE approach that has been 

21 embraced really meets the intent of EEOICPA, 
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1 which is different than what HASL was trying 

2 to do when it invented or applied, or the 

3 industrial hygiene community, in general. We 

4 think that the number you end up with by way 

5 of intake represents a reasonable best 

6 estimate for a given category of work or a job 

7 category. But there can be many workers that 

8 fall within that category that could 

9 experience exposures that are substantively 

10 higher and perhaps substantively lower since 

11 it's a parameter that tries to capture central 

12 tendency.

13 So as applied to this program, the 

14 classic approach to doing daily weighted 

15 exposures may not really meet the intent --

16 and the reason I'm bringing this up is this 

17 becomes a global issue in terms of, does NIOSH 

18 agree that yes, SEC, I think you're right. I 

19 think that it gives a good best estimate. But 

20 is that really what we're looking for? Aren't 

21 we looking for something that provides a 
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1 reasonable bounding estimate so that no 

2 worker's exposure is underestimated?

3 And I think once that distinction 

4 is recognized and acknowledged and is 

5 explored, NIOSH may decide no, no, SEC, we 

6 disagree, this is fine. Or no, you're right. 

7 And I think this is something that is so 

8 fundamental to the dose reconstructions we've 

9 been doing where we rely on breathing zone.

10 As Arjun pointed out, if it's 

11 decided by NIOSH that maybe perhaps we should 

12 revisit this concept, we do offer up -- and 

13 that's why it's very important that Arjun's 

14 write-up on Mallinckrodt is distributed 

15 because he actually lays out a statistical 

16 approach using the data that will tend to 

17 generate an approach of what I would say is 

18 more claimant-favorable than the classic 

19 breathing zone.

20 So I wanted to make this point 

21 because it might actually be something that 
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1 goes toward one of these global issues because 

2 it cuts across many sites.

3 MR. MORRIS: This is Bob Morris. 

4 In response to that, John, I'd ask you a 

5 question. Have you guys seen the 9 February 

6 2008 peer-reviewed Health Physics Journal 

7 report by Adams and Strom regarding DWE 

8 uncertainty and how DWE data may be 

9 specifically used in dose reconstructions 

10 under this program?

11 DR. MAURO: I haven't read it. 

12 I've seen it but I have not read it.

13 So I guess you're saying that the 

14 issue may be very well aired in that article.

15 MR. MORRIS: It is a very well 

16 done article.

17 DR. MAURO: I think it's important 

18 that we all take a look at that as part of 

19 this process.

20 DR. MAKHIJANI: But you haven't 

21 proposed --
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1 MR. MORRIS: The 2008 Health 

2 Physics Journal.

3 MR. HINNEFELD: Bob, this is Stu. 

4 Which journal is that in?

5 MR. MORRIS: February 2008 Health 

6 Physics Journal --

7 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay.

8 MR. MORRIS: -- by Adams and 

9 Strom.

10 DR. MAKHIJANI: But you haven't 

11 proposed to use that here.

12 MR. MORRIS: We've used it as 

13 underlying a lot of our approach to DWE data. 

14 It's inherent in our approach. If you read 

15 how we're actually using it in our revised 

16 Technical Basis Document drafts and such, 

17 you'll see that that's one of our underpinning 

18 documents that's referenced.

19 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes. Okay. Fine.

20 DR. MAURO: That's very helpful. 

21 I'm going to look at that right away.
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1 DR. MAKHIJANI: But the only thing 

2 I'd like to add from what John said is we 

3 didn't actually develop this method because 

4 it's NIOSH's to do.

5 MR. MORRIS: Could you move 

6 closer, please?

7 DR. MAKHIJANI: That's NIOSH's job 

8 to develop the method. We critiqued the 

9 application of DWE directly and suggested that 

10 there could be an approach to develop a 

11 method. But we didn't actually ever say that 

12 here's the method; this will work. Here's the 

13 kind of data that go into it. In my opinion, 

14 probably it might depend on a case-by-case 

15 basis. If you've got too many tasks with two 

16 data points, you might have problems. If you 

17 have more data points for each task in a 

18 reliable task profile, that might work.

19 MR. MORRIS: What Strom and Adams 

20 suggest in that context is that as those 

21 uncertainties go up that the geometric 
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1 standard deviation applied to the data set 

2 goes up.

3 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes.

4 MR. MORRIS: So I think there's a 

5 logical approach that they've prepared 

6 considering exactly those concerns.

7 DR. MAKHIJANI: I'm aware of the 

8 geometric standard deviation issue, and we 

9 pointed out the same thing in 2005. But all I 

10 wanted to say in this context, just to 

11 clarify, is that we indicated a path that was 

12 a possible path but never signed off because 

13 NIOSH didn't develop it because it was an SEC 

14 --

15 MR. FITZGERALD: Right. And we 

16 can certainly review it. I'd be happy to do 

17 that.

18 DR. MAURO: Yes, Arjun, thank you 

19 for clarifying that. I know I didn't mean to 

20 say that we're offering it up. But there are 

21 strategies that could be used.
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1 Bob, one real quick question for 

2 you because you really got my attention. This 

3 might be the magic bullet.

4 When I've reviewed and done some 

5 of these, there would be a person that had a 

6 particular job category at a facility. And on 

7 a given day, he would spend let's say one hour 

8 shoveling dirt. I'm making this up. And 

9 where I know this -- okay -- this would be the 

10 smallest element that makes up this DWE 

11 calculation.

12 So here you have this guy. In a 

13 given day we know he spends about an hour or 

14 two doing a particular task -- very specific 

15 task. And what I would always notice is that 

16 they were usually reported for him a breathing 

17 zone sample -- three of them. They were to 

18 report three of them. Not that they had only 

19 three, but they would report three. They 

20 would say here's the lowest one we saw, here's 

21 the middle one, and here's the highest in 
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1 terms of the becquerels per cubic meter that 

2 he was exposed to during the time that the air 

3 sample was collected -- the low, medium, high.

4 What would happen is they would 

5 take the average of those three numbers, and 

6 that would represent his exposure for that 

7 one-hour time period when he does that job --

8 that's my understanding for better or worse of 

9 the essence of the DWE exposure. And then 

10 they process the numbers over and over.

11 But if you take the average, what 

12 you've just done was take what you would 

13 consider to be a good central tendency 

14 estimate for that particular one-hour job that 

15 this guy was doing. And therein lies the 

16 essence of our concern because if you have a 

17 number of people doing that job, some of them 

18 are not going to be in the center. Some of 

19 them are going to be toward the high end. And 

20 those are the ones that you would not be 

21 giving the benefit of the doubt. So it was 
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1 our understanding that that's the way in which 

2 it's done.

3 Are you saying that the Strom 

4 article somehow comes to grips with that in a 

5 way that --

6 MR. MORRIS: Excuse me. I'm 

7 sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt you, John.

8 DR. MAURO: Yes.

9 MR. MORRIS: It's been a half a 

10 year or more since I've read it. So be 

11 indulgent on my memory here.

12 But I'm recalling that he included 

13 a method or way to assume log-normality in 

14 that data set representative of only like 

15 three low, medium and high where it might be 

16 more data that were actually collected and not 

17 reported in the summary level.

18 DR. MAURO: Absolutely. We're on 

19 the same page now because that's how we were 

20 looking at it also. Keep going.

21 MR. MORRIS: And so I think that
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1 the method incorporates some function like 

2 that and in fact addresses it. So that's 

3 really all I'm prepared to say because I 

4 didn't anticipate this conversation today.

5 DR. MAURO: This is great. It's 

6 important. I'm going to take a look at it. I 

7 think the other members of our crew -- because 

8 when I do do it by hand -- and I've done these 

9 by hand to match your numbers -- it was always 

10 the average. But if somehow -- maybe I looked 

11 at an example. There was a recent one. I 

12 forget which one it was. I said, this is the 

13 essence of our concern.

14 But if in other venues, you're 

15 using let's say the Strom approach which does 

16 somehow factor in that there is a distribution 

17 and tries to grab something closer to the 

18 higher end as a way of propagating the number, 

19 well, I think that would go a long way to 

20 resolving our concerns. But we have to look 

21 at this.
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1 MR. MORRIS: Okay. Now the one 

2 last thing I'd say is that they actually 

3 developed their method and tested it with AWE4 type data, and it represents four or five 

5 different sites and shows that it's possible 

6 to come up with bounding estimates with this 

7 method.

8 So I don't want to over-represent 

9 it, but it's an extensive article that's 

10 directly pertinent to the kind of data that we 

11 see.

12 DR. MAURO: Very good. Thank you. 

13 MR. MORRIS: Sure.

14 MR. FITZGERALD: And just to close 

15 out that discussion, you said that's wired 

16 into NIOSH's procedures by virtue of the OTIB? 

17 Or was that just sort of part of the standard 

18 practice now? I just wanted to understand how 

19 that's being implemented.

20 MR. MORRIS: We don't have a 

21 procedure that's titled daily weighted average 
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1 or daily weighted exposure. But when we 

2 develop the Technical Basis Document to come 

3 up with intake rates, you'll see that that is 

4 a referenced document in the technical basis.

5 MR. FITZGERALD: Okay. So it's 

6 referenced in --

7 MR. MORRIS: Yes. And it 

8 certainly underpins what we've done. And you 

9 can see that it really is one of our central 

10 references on this topic.

11 DR. MAKHIJANI: I don't think it's

12 referenced in the Weldon Spring Evaluation 

13 Report.

14 MR. ROLFES: Well, right now what 

15 we have in the Weldon Spring Site Profile is 

16 thorium intakes using surrogate data from 

17 Fernald. And as a result of the SEC petition 

18 evaluation, we indicated that we would use 

19 site-specific data for the Weldon Spring 

20 Plant. And so as part of the revision right 

21 now that's ongoing with the Weldon Spring Site 
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1 Profile, we are looking at the individual air 

2 monitoring results and data that we have for 

3 Weldon Spring Plant operations and using that 

4 in our revision for Weldon Spring.

5 So we are certainly looking at 

6 this issue, and it's something that we're 

7 aware of. We're going to take what you've 

8 written down into consideration as a part of 

9 that revision as well.

10 One other thing to remember about 

11 daily weighted averages is typically those 

12 operations didn't last the entire year. And 

13 many of the higher air concentrations had 

14 documentation indicating that the workers were 

15 required to wear respiratory protection.

16 When we would take that air 

17 monitoring data, we had to use it for dose 

18 reconstruction. We would not reduce the 

19 intake values due to respiratory protection.

20 Also, we would apply a full year 

21 of intake based on that air concentration -- a 
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1 full 2,000 hours per year -- certainly 

2 acknowledging that that operation may not have 

3 occurred that entire year or may have just 

4 been a short production run or a couple of 

5 months.

6 So anyway, those are things that 

7 we will certainly update in the Site Profile 

8 revision.

9 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, Mark, as 

10 you're doing that, you might consider the 

11 literature that indicates it's pretty hard to 

12 establish a relationship that's definitive 

13 between air concentration data and bioassay 

14 data, when both are available.

15 I think there may even be some 

16 literature from Weldon Spring along those 

17 lines, but I'm not sure. I'll have to check 

18 on that.

19 Ron, did I send you something 

20 along those lines? We can talk off line. I 

21 can't recall right now.
 59 

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1 MEMBER LEMEN: This is Dr. Lemen 

2 again.

3 Is this the Adam Davis and Strom 

4 article?

5 MR. MORRIS: That's right. It is 

6 in 2008, if I recall.

7 MEMBER LEMEN: You said they used 

8 for Board compensation but in the article 

9 itself it says that there were overestimates 

10 as well as underestimates by factors -- of the 

11 underestimates by three to ten. So do you 

12 really think that --

13 MR. MORRIS: I think he should 

14 spend some more time with the article before 

15 we have that conversation.

16 MEMBER LEMEN: All right. Because 

17 it doesn't appear to say what you just said it 

18 said. 

19 MR. MORRIS: Well, as I said, it's 

20 been half a year or more since I read it. But 

21 in my view the bottom line of the report goes 
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1 to a recommendation about how to use the data, 

2 demonstrates that it can be used and suggests 

3 some bounding approaches that are based on 

4 using large geometric standard deviations.

5 MEMBER PRESLEY: This is Bob 

6 Presley.

7 How much thorium contamination are 

8 we really talking about?

9 MR. ROLFES: Well, the amount of 

10 thorium that was processed at the Weldon 

11 Spring Plant was less than one percent of the 

12 uranium that was there. So -- and it was only 

13 during the later part of the operational 

14 period from '63 through '66. So I don't 

15 recall the exact number of months, but we 

16 have, I believe in our Evaluation Report, we 

17 had identified the buildings that had 

18 processed thorium and the time periods as 

19 well.

20 MEMBER PRESLEY: So it's less than 

21 one percent?
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1 MR. ROLFES: Correct. The 

2 material that was produced -- the thorium-232 

3 material that was produced from 1963 through 

4 1966 was less than one percent of the total 

5 uranium or special nuclear material throughput 

6 at the site.

7 MEMBER PRESLEY: Well, we're not 

8 talking about much contamination.

9 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, the percents 

10 don't matter as much as the total quantity. 

11 At least in your site -- I haven't researched 

12 the source term independently, but in your 

13 Site Profile, if I recall correctly, it says 

14 about one ton per day of thorium. And that's 

15 a non-trivial amount.

16 You might recall at Y-12, we had 

17 discussion in the SEC -- and you'll recall 

18 this, Mr. Presley -- that initially it was 

19 thought that there were a few kilograms here 

20 and there. But when Mel Chew and his group 

21 discovered that there were hundreds of 
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1 kilograms or tons in total, the tons in total 

2 was considered a significant amount. Here 

3 we're talking a ton per day. So that's a non4 trivial amount of thorium.

5 And it's also important to note 

6 that one percent thorium -- if you're looking 

7 at organ doses and dose conversion factors --

8 one percent of thorium in terms of mass would 

9 be approximately equivalent in terms of bone 

10 surface dose to -- one unit of thorium would 

11 be approximately equivalent in bone surface 

12 dose to 100 units of uranium. So you're 

13 talking -- for some organs -- for other organs 

14 it's comparable to uranium. But for bone 

15 surface, the dose conversion factors for 

16 thorium are a couple orders of magnitude 

17 bigger.

18 So small quantities of thorium can 

19 convert into considerably larger doses than 

20 uranium. That's just how the numbers work.

21 MR. ROLFES: Right. We certainly 
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1 acknowledge that and account for it in dose 

2 reconstruction.

3 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes, right. I'm 

4 not saying you don't.

5 I'm just saying that you can't say 

6 it's one percent and therefore it doesn't 

7 matter. There are two ways in which it 

8 matters, and I've just tried to point that 

9 out.

10 DR. BUCHANAN: And another way it 

11 matters is that if these were campaigns, and 

12 so a worker, he wasn't exposed to 99 percent 

13 uranium and one percent thorium during that 

14 period, he was exposed to 100 percent thorium 

15 if he was on that campaign.

16 DR. MAKHIJANI: Right.

17 DR. BUCHANAN: And so it wasn't 

18 diluted with 99 parts of uranium. And so he 

19 was exposed to the thorium during those 

20 months, days or years or whatever it was. He 

21 was working on it in those buildings. So it 
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1 wasn't a mixture that was flowing through the 

2 whole system.

3 MR. ROLFES: Yes, that certainly 

4 would be the bounding situation for an 

5 individual being exposed purely to thorium. 

6 So what we would do for an individual, say he 

7 worked in 1963 with thorium -- and I think we 

8 provided a sample dose reconstruction to the 

9 Advisory Board on how we would reconstruct a 

10 thorium intake. But I'd have to go back and 

11 check and make sure.

12 We would apply an air 

13 concentration to that individual, apply an 

14 intake for 2,000 hours per year, and assign 

15 that thorium-232 exposure. However, if that 

16 individual also had a uranium bioassay during 

17 that same year, we would apply a uranium 

18 intake as well. And typically, when we 

19 complete a dose reconstruction, if the 

20 individual worked there from 1957 through 1966 

21 and had monitoring for each of those years, we 
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1 would apply a chronic intake for the entire 

2 time period for all years of the employment to 

3 ensure that we are over-estimating the actual 

4 exposure or intake that the individual 

5 potentially received.

6 So basically, our first and 

7 foremost piece of information for a dose 

8 reconstruction would be the bioassay data that 

9 we've had to generate an intake. And then 

10 secondly, for an individual perhaps that was 

11 exposed to thorium during a short-term 

12 operation in the later years, we would take 

13 that air concentration data and apply that on 

14 top of the uranium intake.

15 DR. MAKHIJANI: Mark, are these 

16 sample dose reconstructions in the Advisory 

17 Board document? I don't see that.

18 MR. ROLFES: Let me check. I may 

19 not have put them out there. And I can 

20 certainly do that if it hasn't been done.

21 MR. HINNEFELD: It seems to me 
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1 that we're spending some length agreeing with 

2 each other here. We've got to move on to the 

3 next issue.

4 DR. BUCHANAN: Yes, I think that 

5 what we want to summarize is that SC&A will 

6 need to look at the Health Physics 2008 

7 article, and then come back to the table and 

8 see how we evaluate that. Is that in 

9 agreement?

10 Okay. Item D on Issue number 1 

11 was coworker data. Okay.

12 The comment I have on that number 

13 one is, of course, coworker data isn't usable 

14 unless the data's been verified. And we 

15 talked about that in Issue items A and C. And 

16 we have agreed upon the direction forward on 

17 that. So coworker data, we have to verify 

18 that before it's useful.

19 Additionally, I guess going from 

20 the TBD to the ER, my issue on coworker data 

21 is that in the ER, I gathered that NIOSH 
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1 recommends using the operator's data to bound 

2 everybody's data so that the environmental 

3 data wasn't necessary. Is that a correct 

4 assumption?

5 MR. ROLFES: Well, certainly if 

6 you're using the individuals who are directly 

7 working with uranium and are monitored. Those 

8 are likely the people that are going to have 

9 the highest exposures. Those exposures would 

10 certainly bound the environmental releases and 

11 any intakes from re-suspension of contaminated 

12 soil, et cetera.

13 DR. BUCHANAN: So are we going to 

14 use if a person wasn't badged at Weldon Spring 

15 -- and that's about 50 -- not monitored --

16 well, some of them weren't badged; some of 

17 them weren't monitored. There were more 

18 people badged than there were bioassayed.

19 So the person wasn't bioassayed, 

20 and say he wasn't bioassayed and he was 

21 badged, though, would he be given an 
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1 environmental dose or an operator's dose?

2 MR. ROLFES: If they were issued 

3 an external dosimeter but had no internal 

4 monitoring data I guess is the question.

5 DR. BUCHANAN: Right.

6 MR. ROLFES: You'd have to take a 

7 look to see what their job function was, look 

8 to see what areas they worked at the plant.

9 One of the things that we do with 

10 everything that we receive is the telephone 

11 interview. So we would also have to take a 

12 look at the details that we received in a 

13 telephone interview if one is available to us.

14 If we do not know and there's a 

15 potential that the individual could have been 

16 exposed to elevated levels of uranium in the 

17 air, we would certainly apply a uranium 

18 intake. We would give the benefit of the 

19 doubt to the claimant. So we would apply the 

20 higher intake --

21 MR. MORRIS: Can I jump in on 
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1 this, Mark?

2 MR. ROLFES: Yes, please, Bob.

3 MR. MORRIS: In the October 12th 

4 document that SC&A -- I may be speaking here 

5 -- the response to the SC&A comments on the 

6 Weldon Spring Site Profile that was issued 

7 earlier this year has got a response I think 

8 dated October 12th from the NIOSH team.

9 MR. ROLFES: Correct.

10 MR. MORRIS: And in item 1 of 

11 that, Ron, you'll see the approach to 

12 occupational -- environmental dose methods 

13 that are actually being put into a TBD 

14 revision that is in review right now.

15 So let me refer you to that. And 

16 if that doesn't answer the question because 

17 I'm not sure I got exactly the question you 

18 asked, if that doesn't answer it, let's try it 

19 again though. But if you could look at that 

20 written response, that would be good.

21 DR. BUCHANAN: Yes. I looked at 
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1 that response. And this is what I'd like to 

2 clarify is that in the original TBD, the 

3 people that -- the way I understand it -- it's 

4 an original TBD, that if the person didn't 

5 have bioassay, then the environmental dose 

6 would be applied. And this environmental dose 

7 would be taken from a hopper-cleaning and a 

8 combination of that and perimeter data 

9 monitoring.

10 MR. MORRIS: We developed quite a 

11 bit more perimeter monitoring data after the 

12 SEC evaluation was completed and we started 

13 Technical Basis Document revision. So the 

14 perimeter data is more robust than it was 

15 before.

16 DR. BUCHANAN: But it's still 

17 perimeter data. It isn't site data. Is that 

18 correct?

19 MR. MORRIS: You're correct on 

20 that. But what we did was we looked at the 

21 local wetting patterns, got the atmospheric 
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1 dispersion parameters and extrapolated that to 

2 the inner ring of the plant building and then 

3 established what an air concentration and 

4 consequent intake rate would have been in the 

5 bounding atmospheric conditions.

6 DR. BUCHANAN: And this is in a 

7 revision -- the TBD 4?

8 MR. MORRIS: That's right. And 

9 it's in review inside the DCAS system right 

10 now. It's described here for you in the 

11 response to item number 1.

12 DR. BUCHANAN: Now how did the 

13 results compare to the hopper clean-out? 

14 Because I noticed in reviewing the TBDs, the 

15 hopper clean-out was combined with a perimeter 

16 then -- a perimeter data then. The perimeter 

17 data only contributed less than one percent to 

18 the parameter data.

19 MR. MORRIS: I'm not ready to 

20 answer that. If you want to defer that, I'll 

21 look for that and compare it and then answer 
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1 it later today.

2 DR. BUCHANAN: I think that would 

3 be a benchmark because the hopper data was 

4 like 100 times greater than the perimeter data 

5 originally. And it'd be interesting to see 

6 how the perimeter data -- new perimeter data 

7 -- extrapolated to the center of the site 

8 through the hopper data.

9 MR. MORRIS: Yes. Well, of course 

10 hopper clean-out is a one-time event and we're 

11 trying to get annualizing averages for these 

12 kinds of numbers. So I would not at all be 

13 surprised if the hopper clean-out numbers are 

14 still higher.

15 MR. HINNEFELD: This is Stu 

16 Hinnefeld and I wondered if I might make a 

17 process suggestion here. And it's just a 

18 suggestion; you can do what you want.

19 But we seem to be spending a lot 

20 of time providing verbal technical responses 

21 to the written report that we have here. And 
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1 we're ultimately going to have to provide 

2 written technical responses to this report 

3 anyway. We're not going to resolve any of 

4 these findings verbally today.

5 But we go through these extended 

6 technical conversations with these things, and 

7 it would seem to me that if we can just have 

8 enough conversation to understand the issue 

9 and to maybe suggest like, well, we believe we 

10 have some information we've put together on 

11 our TBD evaluation response that will be 

12 appropriate here and we can do some brief 

13 stuff there. Because none of this verbal 

14 technical discussion is going to resolve 

15 anything today.

16 And so, I think we're better 

17 served with our time today -- again, in my 

18 suggestion -- to make sure we have an 

19 understanding of the finding so that we can 

20 provide a written technical response to the 

21 written technical finding. This is a 
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1 suggestion.

2 CHAIRMAN GIBSON: That's fine with 

3 me. Everyone okay with that?

4 DR. MAKHIJANI: Could I supplement 

5 that just slightly?

6 MR. HINNEFELD: Sure. Absolutely.

7 DR. MAKHIJANI: I agree with you. 

8 It might be useful as I did with the issue of 

9 air concentration just to point out as NIOSH 

10 is preparing its response, some of the things 

11 that we're going to be looking at -- I mean, 

12 this is an initial --

13 MR. HINNEFELD: Absolutely. 

14 Absolutely -- as much as we can learn, yes.

15 DR. MAKHIJANI: So I'd like to do 

16 that in this case.

17 A couple of points that would be 

18 useful for you to consider in your response 

19 looking at your October 12 document here is 

20 one we've said before in other contexts. I 

21 certainly recall we said it in the context of 
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1 Savannah River Site. And this is from memory, 

2 that Gaussian dispersion plume modeling is not 

3 a very good idea for on-site environmental 

4 dose calculations. You have building wake 

5 effects and so you're taking perimeter models 

6 -- perimeter measurements -- which are really 

7 designed for offsite dose estimation and 

8 compliance for offsite people for which this 

9 is a reasonably defensible approach in many 

10 cases anyway. And then applying it to a 

11 situation where in many cases unless you have 

12 a broad open field on site where you're 

13 placing your worker, it's not applicable 

14 technically.

15 Secondly, because dispersion 

16 factors can vary by two orders of magnitude or 

17 more when you take building wake effects into 

18 account and when you take incidence into 

19 account. And the second thing that's come up 

20 at Savannah River Site which is under 

21 discussion in that SEC certainly, and if I 
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1 recall also at other places -- at least one 

2 other place -- is you have activities on the 

3 ground. You have fugitive emissions at 

4 Savannah River Site. You have burning of 

5 solvents. You have ground-level source terms 

6 that cannot be handled in that way and workers 

7 in the vicinity of ground-level source terms. 

8 And so I think this kind of 

9 environmental dose calculation, we've at least 

10 pointed out -- and you might expect that if 

11 this is the response then we'll have a second 

12 round of discussions so you might want to 

13 consider some of our prior comments in other 

14 cases in preparing your response.

15 MR. KATZ: That's helpful.

16 DR. BUCHANAN: Okay. Move on to 

17 Issue number 2. That was kind of a drawn out 

18 issue with four parts. So it probably is one 

19 of the longer ones.

20 Issue number 2 is interviewing the 

21 workers and from the documentation I could 
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1 find, the workers at Weldon Spring did not 

2 have the benefit of the egress monitors. In 

3 other words, they weren't either surveyed with 

4 pancake probes or something when they left, 

5 they didn't have a monitor to stick their 

6 hands in back in the '50s. And so they 

7 essentially combined with the contamination in 

8 the work area left unmonitored as far as 

9 contamination goes.

10 There was some area monitoring to 

11 keep dust levels down and that sort of thing 

12 at Weldon Spring. But as far as I could find, 

13 there was not a routine set egress monitoring 

14 that either checked them when they left the 

15 production area and went into the cafeteria or 

16 the offices or whatever, which would of course 

17 track contamination around. And also when 

18 they got out in the parking lot and left for 

19 the car and went home, there was no egress 

20 monitoring.

21 So the workers went home with the 
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1 contamination on them. Sometimes they 

2 showered. There were showers there if they 

3 wanted to. There was coveralls available that 

4 they wore. But there was no checking before 

5 they left.

6 And so, this is a case where I see 

7 that there would be a situation where there 

8 was no dosimetry of contamination on the skin, 

9 especially the folds of the skin around the 

10 ears, the nose, the arms and that sort of 

11 thing which they could have went home. They 

12 would have had the contamination on them and 

13 got skin irradiation without any dosimetry to 

14 document it.

15 And so even if they wore a 

16 dosimeter at work, as bioassayed at work, what 

17 brings up the other issue is covert bioassay 

18 for certain periods. They could have had an 

19 intake from the re-suspension and the 

20 contamination they tracked home with them. 

21 And it wouldn't have been detected if they 
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1 weren't happened to be in the queue to have 

2 bioassay for that period of time. So that is 

3 the concern on lack of egress monitoring.

4 I cannot find anywhere where it 

5 would be documented or be able to compensate 

6 for it.

7 MR. ROLFES: Okay. I know we've 

8 taken a look at this previously. And usually 

9 the contamination on the skin would be 

10 visible. To have something that would impart 

11 any external dose, you'd have to have some 

12 visible contamination on your hands.

13 So you can come up with a bounding 

14 value of the time that that material resides 

15 in the skin folds. First of all, the 

16 individual would have to have a cancer 

17 diagnosed for our program. They would have to 

18 have a cancer diagnosed in that particular 

19 location for us to consider something like 

20 that.

21 So for example, an individual has 
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1 a cancer diagnosed on their hand, and they 

2 think that contamination could have 

3 contributed to that cancer. You can come up 

4 with a bounding value of the amount of uranium 

5 that would get stuck on your hand, for how 

6 long it would get stuck there, and come up 

7 with an estimate of the dose received by the 

8 skin in that particular little area. And 

9 typically, that dose value is trivial compared 

10 to the direct radiation from handling large 

11 pieces of uranium such as ingots or aged 

12 uranium materials.

13 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, this is Stu. 

14 I've got a little different perspective on 

15 this. I mean, this has come up at other 

16 places too and how you deal with this possible 

17 skin contamination without evidence of such. 

18 So I think it's something we haven't really 

19 resolved yet. But something that we have and 

20 has to be worked on because it's come up 

21 elsewhere.
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1 DR. BUCHANAN: I was thinking more 

2 of around the neck and the ears and stuff. 

3 That's where you see most cancer --

4 MR. HINNEFELD: Wherever, 

5 wherever. The situation is the same. In a 

6 lot of the uranium plants for the DOE quite 

7 frankly didn't use egress monitors until my 

8 career in some places. And I'm pretty old but 

9 I'm not quite that old.

10 And so, certainly there's question 

11 of these uranium plants and the possibility 

12 for skin contamination that would not have 

13 been detected and how are we going to deal 

14 with that issue programmatically because of 

15 once you start speculating that there was 

16 contamination there, there's no reason to stop 

17 until you have a compensation on your skin --

18 there's just no -- we'll have to see if 

19 there's a reason to stop it. I guess we 

20 haven't figured one out yet.

21 MR. ROLFES: The one other thing 
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1 also I guess we should consider is the odds of 

2 contaminating a body part without 

3 contaminating your badge. If you're exposed 

4 truly to a large quantity of uranium in the 

5 workplace, it's not going to be localized to 

6 one point on your body typically -- possibly 

7 just your hands if you're doing direct 

8 handling. But if you're rolling around in the 

9 mud or whatever, it's going to get distributed 

10 throughout your body -- all over your body. 

11 And so it'd be difficult to not get any of 

12 that on your badge. So in many cases, the 

13 badge could record that contamination that was 

14 also deposited on other parts of your body.

15 MR. HINNEFELD: No, we're not 

16 going to solve it here today.

17 DR. MAURO: Stu, this is John. I 

18 agree with you completely that -- and this 

19 issue has come up -- and I recall the very 

20 first time was a review of I believe it was 

21 OTIB-17 which is the nonpenetrating radiation. 
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1 And that goes back maybe four years.

2 This is a difficult problem. Jim 

3 and I have discussed it at other work group 

4 meetings and other venues. And I do not 

5 believe I've seen an occasion where that 

6 particular exposure scenario -- the one that 

7 was just described by Mark -- you know, where 

8 you do -- run bar skin to see what possible 

9 dose.

10 So yes, this has been a 

11 longstanding issue. And I think it's an 

12 important issue for those people with skin 

13 cancer, especially on exposed surfaces. That 

14 definitely needs to be addressed. And I think 

15 it is a global issue.

16 DR. BUCHANAN: I'm going to move 

17 on here.

18 Issue 3 on page 4, and this is the 

19 lack of worker data for 1967. And one reason 

20 I went through the first summary was it just 

21 illustrates the thought in 1967, the petition 
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1 was through '67. Well, the petition was 

2 through '66 and NIOSH evaluated through '67. 

3 And a lot of this applies to '68, but it's not 

4 really under the SEC.

5 And on December 31st of 1966, the 

6 plant essentially shut down. And then in '67, 

7 apparently the Mallinckrodt safety and health 

8 physician was not present. AEC was not 

9 present. And there was apparently -- and this 

10 is kind of a gray area -- some sort of 

11 contractor, subcontractors and third- and 

12 fourth-level contractors doing work at the 

13 facility to revamp some of the buildings for 

14 herbicide production. And this is where one 

15 of the major worker concerns are is that 

16 during this period, there wasn't a consistency 

17 in any radiation protection.

18 One worker described the job of 

19 going into one of the buildings, digging up 

20 the brick floor and handling the uranium salts 

21 and yellow cake by hand, scooping it out 
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1 without any protective clothing. He wore 

2 boots, had him leave the boots there for a 

3 while and then he could wear them. And after 

4 a while, they let him leave with the boots. 

5 Some of the people around him he described as 

6 wearing moon suits which I assume is the anti7 contamination. That's apparently a different 

8 contractor. And so there did not appear to be 

9 any oversight of health physics practices 

10 there in '67.

11 Looking through the records, I 

12 looked through records to see if I could find 

13 any dose records for '67. And I couldn't find 

14 any. I might have missed them, but the ones I 

15 looked at, I couldn't find any. People that 

16 worked there in '66, I looked at some to see 

17 if claims that worked there in '66, '65, there 

18 was records for them. At '67, there was just 

19 a blank wall. There were no records for '67.

20 And what complicates the issue is 

21 that this wasn't like the operations period, 
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1 it wasn't like the later clean-up period in 

2 the '80s, and so kind of what SC&A's question 

3 is is, what are we going do about 1967 because 

4 the situation was different than any of the 

5 other periods.

6 MR. HINNEFELD: Was the site under 

7 the Army's control or DOD's control in 1967?

8 MR. ROLFES: Yes.

9 MR. HINNEFELD: It transferred to 

10 the Army in '67, right, for work? And the 

11 Army was doing this work?

12 MR. ROLFES: Correct. Correct. 

13 You have to take a look at the specific 

14 workers that you're referring to, but the 

15 production period ended December 31, 1966.

16 There could be potentially some 

17 AEC employees that entered this site during 

18 1967. However, it was officially transferred 

19 from the DOE to the Department of Defense back 

20 to the Army in 1967. So if an individual's 

21 doing Army work, essentially it's not covered 
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1 under this program.

2 MR. FITZGERALD: Was the intent of 

3 having '67 included in --

4 MR. ROLFES: In case --

5 MR. FITZGERALD: -- case there 

6 were AEC workers that came back?

7 MR. ROLFES: Correct.

8 DR. BUCHANAN: How do we know? 

9 And a petitioner -- and I mean, the workers 

10 addressed this directly to me. How do we know 

11 what the cut-off line is? Do we have any 

12 documents to show that there was no workers 

13 employed under the AEC contract there in '67 

14 and '68?

15 MR. ROLFES: We have 

16 documentation. And there's documentation on 

17 the DOE website showing that the DOE handed 

18 the site over to the Department of the Army in 

19 1967. I don't recall the specific month, but 

20 I believe Mel might be able to provide that if 

21 he heard my question.
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1 Mel, do you recall the month that 

2 the Department of Energy handed the control of 

3 Weldon Spring Plant back over to the 

4 Department of the Army?

5 DR. CHEW: Mark, I do not recall. 

6 I think the data is available. I just don't 

7 have it in front of me here.

8 MR. ROLFES: Okay.

9 MR. FITZGERALD: If there was an 

10 AEC worker for whatever reason that came back 

11 on site, it would not be a Weldon Spring 

12 worker per se. It'd be covered under another 

13 site.

14 MR. ROLFES: That's possible, yes. 

15 We'd have to take a look at --

16 MR. FITZGERALD: That's why you 

17 left the door open?

18 MR. ROLFES: Right.

19 MR. FITZGERALD: Okay.

20 MR. ROLFES: There was uncertainty 

21 there. So that's why we included it.
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1 MR. FITZGERALD: Okay. My 

2 understanding is the remediation work was done 

3 by the Army because they weren't -- so they 

4 hired a bunch of contractors to do that 

5 mediation work. Because I was at a worker 

6 meeting in St. Louis for Weldon Spring 

7 workers, and they were describing this very 

8 clearly. And it's one of the injustices of 

9 the program is, I'm sorry, once it went to the 

10 Army, you're not in this program anymore. If 

11 your contract is with the Army, you're not 

12 covered.

13 MR. ROLFES: Okay. That helps 

14 too. I think the confusion was why the ER 

15 didn't go into '67. You're saying, just to 

16 make sure, that it covered those that might 

17 have. Correct.

18 DR. BUCHANAN: Would it be 

19 possible -- so that I could pass that on to 

20 when they question me -- of the document that 

21 shows that it was transferred to the Army? Do 
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1 you have it?

2 MR. ROLFES: Yes. We can get a 

3 reference for you.

4 DR. BUCHANAN: That would be 

5 helpful because that's a real problem there.

6 DR. MAURO: This is John. I have 

7 a question.

8 If I recollect, during the 

9 determination and you move into let's say the 

10 residual period or the D&D period, there's a 

11 distinction between DOE facilities and AWE 

12 facilities where I believe in the case of DOE 

13 facilities, this post-operations period does 

14 not come into play, but it does in AWE period 

15 -- AWE sites. Now I believe this is a DOE 

16 site.

17 MR. KATZ: Right. So you're 

18 correct about all that, John.

19 DR. MAURO: And just for my 

20 edification, what's the rationale for that 

21 distinction?
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1 MR. KATZ: It's legislative, John.

2 MR. HINNEFELD: What the law 

3 wrote.

4 DR. MAURO: Okay. So now is this 

5 year 1967 considered to be part of the post6 operation period for Weldon? And if so, 

7 doesn't that take it off the table?

8 MR. KATZ: When the facility was 

9 transferred to the Department of the Army, 

10 it's no longer a covered facility. It's no 

11 longer covered under the statute.

12 DR. MAURO: Even if it wasn't --

13 stay with me for a minute -- and it represents 

14 post-operations, does that -- 

15 MR. KATZ: No.

16 DR. MAURO: I just want to 

17 understand this.

18 MR. KATZ: No. So a DOE facility, 

19 as long as it's a DOE facility, it's covered 

20 regardless of whether they're operating or 

21 whether they're in a nonoperating --
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1 DR. MAURO: I got you. So the 

2 distinction between operations and post3 operation applies only if the DOE operation 

4 terminated. And I guess this idea of residual 

5 period not applying to a DOE facility is 

6 because DOE is no longer running that 

7 facility.

8 MR. KATZ: Right. So I mean, 

9 again I don't want to speak to legislators' 

10 intent, but it makes sense to me with the AWEs 

11 that they're only covering during the residual 

12 period contamination that's clearly part of 

13 the work that was done during the operational 

14 period. So that's what it's about with AWEs.

15 DR. MAURO: Okay.

16 MR. KATZ: In the case of DOE, it 

17 doesn't really matter whether they're 

18 operating or they're in a nonoperating mode. 

19 It's a DOE facility. It's covered.

20 DR. MAURO: It's covered. So the 

21 residual period would count if in fact it was 
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1 still under --

2 MR. KATZ: Right. As long as it's 

3 a DOE facility, it's covered.

4 DR. MAURO: I got you. I 

5 understand. Okay. That's helps out.

6 So it sounds like the issue here 

7 has to do with 1967 and whether or not it's a 

8 covered period or not.

9 MR. KATZ: Exactly.

10 DR. MAURO: Okay.

11 MR. KATZ: And then at some point, 

12 it clearly, according to everything that's 

13 been said here, it was transferred to the 

14 Department of the Army.

15 DR. MAURO: Got it. Okay. Thank 

16 you.

17 MR. FITZGERALD: Essentially you 

18 could have just ended it at the end of '66. I 

19 mean, I don't quite see the -- I'm struggling 

20 with this rationale for including '67 because 

21 even if somebody came back, they'd be covered 
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1 under a different facility anyway. I think 

2 that's why everyone's --

3 MR. HINNEFELD: They're not at a 

4 covered facility when they're at Weldon 

5 Spring. Once it turned over to the Army, 

6 regardless of whether they were with AEC or 

7 not.

8 MR. FITZGERALD: You're 

9 effectively talking about the end of `66 as 

10 being the ER.

11 MS. HOWELL: Yes.

12 DR. BUCHANAN: Okay. Now we want 

13 to clarify that the whole facility was 

14 transferred, not just that plant.

15 Was the site, the pits and the 

16 quarry transferred?

17 MR. ROLFES: The quarry was not. 

18 And I'll read from the Energy Employees 

19 Occupational Illness Compensation Program, DOE 

20 page -- the worker advocacy page.

21 The Weldon Spring Plant -- let's 
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1 get to the part that we're discussing -- in 

2 1967, the AEC transferred most of the acreage 

3 including the chemical plant back to the 

4 Department of the Army. The AEC did, however, 

5 retain possession of the raffinate pits and 

6 quarry on approximately 50 acres. The AEC did 

7 not have any contractors performing work on 

8 this land again until August of 1975 when the

9 AEC contracted with National Lead to perform 

10 environmental monitoring on the pits and 

11 quarry. And it goes on.

12 So what we can do is provide some 

13 documentation of the data feed exchange back 

14 over to the Army. And this is certainly 

15 something that we would consider if we have an 

16 individual that has employment during 1967. 

17 The Department of Labor would take a look to 

18 see if that employer is a covered employer in 

19 contract to the Department of Energy. And so 

20 if that individual was on site and had covered 

21 employment, we would receive that from the 
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1 Department of Labor and account for that in 

2 our dose reconstruction.

3 I don't have a feeling. I haven't 

4 looked at all of the claims to determine how 

5 many cases we might have received with 

6 employment during 1967.

7 MS. HOWELL: Can I ask a 

8 clarifying question?

9 The DOE covered period for the 

10 site, according to their website it still says 

11 through '67. Has that been modified and the 

12 website not updated? Or --

13 MR. ROLFES: Well, there was a 

14 production period up until December 31, 1966. 

15 And it wasn't until 1967 that DOE handed the 

16 land back over to the Army.

17 MS. HOWELL: So was it January 1?

18 MR. ROLFES: Exactly. That's --

19 MS. HOWELL: Well, I guess I'm 

20 trying to understand here -- I mean, 

21 ultimately this will wind up being a question 
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1 that the Department of Labor is going to have 

2 to resolve. But I'm a little confused about 

3 this apparent discrepancy in when DOE had the 

4 covered period ending versus what you're 

5 saying DOL is saying and what this information 

6 is. Because we need to know what the proper 

7 bounds of the NIOSH inquiry are and what the 

8 bounds for any SEC might be, et cetera.

9 So I think that this is something 

10 that we might want to resolve because there 

11 seems to be a discrepancy between DOL and DOE, 

12 and ultimately DOL would probably be the party 

13 having to resolve that.

14 DR. CHEW: Mark, this is Mel.

15 The Weldon Spring Site Profile 

16 description says that it was turned over to 

17 the Army in August of 1967. David Harrison 

18 just emailed me that.

19 We'll need to confirm that, making 

20 sure that that's accurate. But that's what's 

21 in the Weldon Spring site description right 
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1 now.

2 MS. HOWELL: Okay. So we should 

3 clarify that, and then we should also clarify 

4 what the DOL and DOE the covered period should 

5 have been. It went through August of '67? I 

6 mean, we need to be clear about this.

7 DR. BUCHANAN: So that if the 

8 issue resurfaces for a person that worked 

9 there until August of '67 --

10 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, if anybody 

11 did.

12 DR. BUCHANAN: And I find five 

13 claims that had '67 as an employment date.

14 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay.

15 DR. BUCHANAN: I think it was 

16 five.

17 Okay. So we move on. And so for 

18 each in 3, we're going to clarify the exact 

19 date and document -- provide a document of 

20 that transfer and then look at the claims and 

21 see what's going to be done that had 
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1 employment date in '67. Even if they're just 

2 getting into the month of January or 

3 something, we still have to address it.

4 MR. KATZ: Sure. And I wonder if 

5 you need to clarify -- I mean, the 

6 remediation-type work that you were talking 

7 about, that's work that would have been done 

8 under the Army, then you can assume that it 

9 occurred then after August, I guess, because 

10 it wouldn't have occurred --

11 MR. HINNEFELD: We'll have to 

12 figure it out.

13 MR. KATZ: Yeah.

14 MR. HINNEFELD: We'll have to see 

15 what we can find out.

16 DR. BUCHANAN: Okay, so --

17 MR. FITZGERALD: Anyone need a 

18 break?

19 MR. KATZ: There's at least one 

20 head nodding here, so let's take a --

21 CHAIRMAN GIBSON: Ten, fifteen?
 100 

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1 MR. KATZ: Fifteen, so at quarter 

2 of, by my watch, about --

3 CHAIRMAN GIBSON: We will restart, 

4 and I'm just going to put the phone on mute, 

5 but I'm not disconnecting it. 

6 (Whereupon, the above-entitled 

7 matter went off the record at 10:30 a.m. and 

8 resumed at 10:47 a.m.)

9 MR. KATZ: Okay. Welcome back. 

10 We're reconvening after a short break. This 

11 is the Weldon Spring Work Group, the Advisory 

12 Board on Radiation and Worker Health.

13 And carry on.

14 DR. BUCHANAN: Okay. This is Ron 

15 Buchanan. And we're looking at SEC issues, 

16 and we've went through 1, 2, 3 and we're ready 

17 for number 4 on page 4 of the handout.

18 And this is concerning radon and 

19 thoron determinations.

20 MR. ROLFES: Ron, I'm sorry. I 

21 had one quick question.
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1 You had mentioned some interviews 

2 with workers. Have you provided those 

3 interviews to us yet?

4 DR. BUCHANAN: Yes. They're on 

5 our site profile review --

6 MR. ROLFES: Okay.

7 DR. BUCHANAN: -- that was issued 

8 in February of '09.

9 MR. ROLFES: Okay. Thank you.

10 DR. BUCHANAN: They're an appendix 

11 on that.

12 MR. ROLFES: Thanks.

13 DR. BUCHANAN: Okay. So issue 4 

14 is radon and thoron. Okay.

15 Now as we said earlier, Weldon 

16 Spring did not have pitchblende so they didn't 

17 have as much radon radium and therefore radon 

18 problems as the Mallinckrodt downtown facility 

19 did. However, radon still does emanate from 

20 the uranium ore. And according to the way I 

21 understand NIOSH -- and there was no 
 102 

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1 measurements at Weldon Spring for radon or 

2 thoron. Thoron comes from the thorium chain 

3 which was processed '63 to '66. It has a 

4 short half-life -- thoron does -- about 55 

5 seconds. So it isn't around as long and it 

6 doesn't penetrate as greatly as the radon. 

7 But it is still an issue. And so in A and B 

8 there of issue 4, if A is radon, B is thoron 

9 -- similar issues with them. 

10 There were no measurements. There 

11 was measurement at the downtown facility, but 

12 you can't extrapolate them out here because it 

13 was a different facility and different ores. 

14 And so what I understand been proposed is that 

15 they use the throughput of uranium, and then 

16 there's a certain emission from the uranium 

17 fraction -- of the radon that escapes.

18 And the way I understand this 

19 modeling here is that it was most prevalent in 

20 one of the locations. And so it was assumed 

21 that the radon that did come off was captured 
 103 

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1 in the hood, and so the workers inside the 

2 building were not exposed to that radon. It 

3 went out the ventilation, went out I think a 

4 ten-meter stack and then dispersed, and used a 

5 simple ground model to calculate its 

6 concentration in number of curies that was 

7 emitted and then its concentration.

8 And it was assumed it was equal 

9 inside and outside and the breathers -- the 

10 workers inside would breath that 

11 concentration, and using an equilibrium factor 

12 of .5 for inside and .3 for outside. And this 

13 would be a sign then as the radon intake.

14 And so I'd like for Arjun to speak 

15 to this. I did look at the measurement that 

16 was done at the downtown site that showed that 

17 the indoor and outdoors weren't equal. It's 

18 four times greater inside than inside. Now 

19 this couldn't be extrapolated directly to 

20 Weldon Spring, but is an indication that equal 

21 inside and outside should be investigated 
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1 further.

2 And so since Arjun had worked on 

3 radon equilibrium at other sites, I'd like for 

4 him to speak to this.

5 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes. I'll address 

6 it briefly. Actually, John, if he's still on 

7 the line, has addressed it more than me.

8 But I think that the dispersion 

9 modeling would be an issue, especially since 

10 it's not validated by any data points. I 

11 think the fact -- do we have -- just as a 

12 factual thing because I haven't looked at the 

13 source data -- do we have kind of concentrate 

14 composition information in regard to the 

15 radium source term there?

16 MR. ROLFES: There really wasn't a 

17 significant radium source term.

18 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes, I'm aware 

19 that concentrates don't have most of the 

20 radium stripped from them. But they don't 

21 have most of the thorium-230 stripped from 
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1 them. That was an issue at Fernald anyway.

2 And I just wanted to know whether 

3 we have some data on the concentrates as 

4 regards -- because there is some thorium. If 

5 you look at the cold metal oxides in silo 3, I 

6 think at Fernald, there's a radium source term 

7 there. It's not zero.

8 MR. ROLFES: Very, very small. 

9 Very, very small.

10 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, it's not 

11 equilibrium with thorium-230. That's for 

12 sure. I don't remember the numbers.

13 But it might be useful to have a 

14 radium source term that's specific to the 

15 site, I think, especially given the recent 

16 history of modeling in regard to radon and a 

17 lot of issues have come up. They've come up 

18 at Linde. They've come up at Texas -- right, 

19 John -- Blockson. I think this looks like a 

20 lot less rigorous than the scrutiny that's 

21 been given and the rigor with which we've 
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1 tried to approach radon at other sites.

2 MR. HINNEFELD: Help me understand 

3 why radon is an issue at Weldon Spring if they 

4 never got ore.

5 DR. MAKHIJANI: The concentrates 

6 do contain some radium. And that's why my 

7 first question was if you have some 

8 characterization of the kind of concentrates 

9 and there isn't really radium in it and we 

10 know that because the source term has 

11 characterized it, then the issue will go away.

12 But we know that some of these 

13 concentrates contain non-trivial amounts of --

14 in my opinion, non-trivial amounts of radium, 

15 but much less than would be in equilibrium 

16 with thorium-230.

17 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, the examples 

18 you all cited about radon being an issue or 

19 sites where radium was at least a readable 

20 component of material that was handled, they 

21 had ore at Linde and radium is a reasonable 
 107 

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1 component of the norm in the phosphate --

2 DR. MAKHIJANI: Right.

3 MR. HINNEFELD: -- since in all 

4 the radioactivity at the phosphate plants like 

5 Texas --

6 DR. MAKHIJANI: And I agree with 

7 that.

8 MR. HINNEFELD: So in all those 

9 cases, radium was a significant portion of the 

10 radiological source term. And I think my 

11 going and belief -- now maybe I'm mistaken 

12 here -- is that concentrate, since you remove 

13 the radium in the concentrate, then you have 

14 to grow the radium back in from the thorium15 230.

16 DR. MAKHIJANI: It won't grow back 

17 in.

18 DR. MAURO: Stu, this is John. I 

19 could help out a little bit here.

20 I've reviewed a couple of AWEs and 

21 cases where the concentrates which are 
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1 primarily U308, they've been separated, 

2 sometimes carry over with it small amounts of 

3 thorium-230 and radium-226. And I agree with 

4 you -- and it's variable depending on how good 

5 a job is done in creating the concentrates.

6 Now that being said, I guess the 

7 only way I could see any radon being of 

8 concern is, okay let's say you could say well, 

9 we know that almost all except for some small 

10 amount of radium-226 may have been removed and 

11 did not show up at Weldon, but there could 

12 have been this much. Now given that there 

13 could be a little bit of radium, the question 

14 is, is it possible that there's any 

15 substantive concentration of radon in the air 

16 that would be of some concern.

17 In theory, one could argue okay, 

18 let's say that there's as much as a certain 

19 amount of trace levels of 226 -- radium-226 

20 associated with the yellow cake. That shows 

21 up at the treatment processing at Weldon. And 
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1 you've got a handle on okay, well, this is the 

2 amount of radon -- construction rate of radon, 

3 that would be entering the air. And again, 

4 we're back to the same old problem again. 

5 Once you know that, you probably could place a 

6 plausible upper bound on what the radon 

7 concentration might be indoor -- making 

8 appropriate assumptions regarding air turnover 

9 rate and emanation coefficients, that sort of 

10 thing.

11 But of course, we're back in the 

12 modeling world again, a model that -- that 

13 class of model applied to that class of 

14 problem, SC&A's very comfortable with as long 

15 as you have a pretty good idea of what the 

16 upper bound might be on the radium-226 in your 

17 yellow cake.

18 But that's the way you would come 

19 at saying well, here's an upper bound on what 

20 might have been the radon concentration. And 

21 if that turns out to be trivial, well, I think 
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1 the problem's been put to bed.

2 Whether or not the work group and 

3 the Board would agree with the strategy like 

4 that because it does in effect employ a model 

5 as opposed to direct measurements. But I 

6 would be the first to agree that in general, 

7 when we're dealing with yellow cake, we don't 

8 really think and worry too much about radon 

9 except as Arjun did point out, there are 

10 occasions when there is a little bit of radium 

11 that comes along with your concentrates.

12 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes. And I agree 

13 with what you said, Stu, in that you're 

14 stripping most of the radium. And sometimes 

15 you might strip essentially all of it. But 

16 concentrates is sort of different than yellow 

17 cake in that you haven't stripped all of the 

18 cake products from the ore.

19 And so, all I'm saying is if you 

20 can characterize the source term, it will be 

21 much simpler to deal with the issue. It might 
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1 just go away, or you might be able to put a 

2 bound on it in a better way than what's on the 

3 table right now.

4 MR. FITZGERALD: Yes. Before 

5 getting to the modeling, the threshold 

6 question sounds like just establishing what 

7 the likely source term was --

8 DR. MAKHIJANI: Right.

9 MR. FITZGERALD: -- from the 

10 concentrate. If it's negligible, then the 

11 issue is less. That seems to be the threshold 

12 question, before getting into the modeling 

13 point. Now thoron, of course, would be a 

14 different issues --

15 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes.

16 MR. FITZGERALD: -- particularly 

17 since thoron -- so, yes.

18 DR. MAKHIJANI: Thoron's an issue.

19 MR. FITZGERALD: Yes. Okay.

20 MR. ROLFES: If I could point 

21 everybody up to a reference in the site 
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1 research database, we've prepared a response 

2 in our site profile review matrix on page 2 

3 that addresses this. And we've got a 

4 statement in here that says, based on uranium 

5 mass throughput and other factors from 

6 Meshkoff, et al, 1986, an estimated annual 

7 release of radon-222 during the operating 

8 period was in the range of 12 to 34 curies.

9 Now if you take a look at this 

10 reference I mention --

11 DR. MAKHIJANI: Mark, excuse me. 

12 Which item in that response are you looking 

13 at?

14 MR. ROLFES: I am looking at 

15 response number 1 which is on page 2 of the 

16 NIOSH responses to SC&A comments on the Weldon 

17 Spring Plant.

18 DR. MAKHIJANI: I have the 

19 document. I just wanted the number.

20 MR. ROLFES: The Site Research 

21 Database reference number for this reference 
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1 is 72152. And it does have information on the 

2 source term of radon at the site.

3 I'll take a look to see if it also 

4 has thoron in there. But I don't see it right 

5 away.

6 But this is a starting point for 

7 --

8 DR. BUCHANAN: This is the same in 

9 the TBD. The TBD used this model, at least 

10 the calculations. The 1986 reference used 

11 this same calculation in it.

12 MR. ROLFES: Okay.

13 DR. BUCHANAN: The TBD 4 or 5 uses 

14 this reference in the calculation of 

15 throughput of uranium and a certain emission 

16 rate and a certain stack height. And then 

17 they calculated 12 to 34 curies released per 

18 year. It's the same thing that I sent to you, 

19 Arjun, earlier.

20 DR. MAKHIJANI: Okay. Is it 

21 72192? I was traveling when I responded to 
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1 you. So I don't remember exactly.

2 MR. FITZGERALD: And this is where 

3 he accomplished the concentrate. In other 

4 words, all the different --

5 DR. BUCHANAN: No, it just uses a 

6 uranium throughput and assuming a certain 

7 emission rate of radon from the throughput. 

8 And it's all captured in the hood and goes out 

9 a ten-foot stack. And then it would emit 12 

10 to 34 curies a year and that would disperse 

11 and then they'd be sucked back into the 

12 building and be equal inside and outside and 

13 then working levels are calculated from that.

14 DR. MAKHIJANI: The dispersion 

15 model would be a problem the same as what I 

16 said.

17 DR. MAURO: This is John. Let me 

18 just step in.

19 So are you saying that at Weldon 

20 the concentrates were not piled up indoors but 

21 they were sitting in hoods? Did I 
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1 misunderstand? In other words -- this is an 

2 important point.

3 If the reality is that any radon 

4 -- any radium, even if it's in trace levels, 

5 contained in the concentrates is -- there's a 

6 confinement system around it whereby as it's 

7 emanated in small quantities, it's captured 

8 and vented. Well, then it wouldn't enter the 

9 workplace the way I just described. What I'm 

10 hearing is it would be exhausted. Now 

11 certainly it could come back in again from 

12 outdoors. But that changes the whole picture 

13 and makes it even a more remote issue.

14 MR. ROLFES: The hood I believe 

15 that you're referring to would have been the 

16 air ventilation system above the acid 

17 digestion tank. And that was where the radon 

18 was assumed to be liberated from and vented up 

19 a stack.

20 DR. MAURO: Okay. So you're 

21 saying that the radon comes -- see, I guess I 
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1 had a little bit different conceptual model.

2 You've got concentrate. The 

3 concentrate if it has any radium in it, will 

4 be exhaling radon all the time whether it's 

5 been digested or not. Certainly if it's 

6 digested, then you're breaking up the matrix 

7 in a way that even more radon could be 

8 released.

9 But even if it's just sitting --

10 I'm visualizing a pile or 55-gallon drums of 

11 concentrate. And they're broken open. But if 

12 they're all sitting in some kind of confined 

13 area with ventilation exhaust control, then 

14 the radon, even if it's small quantities --

15 don't get me wrong, we're talking about 

16 concentrates so we're not expecting very much 

17 radium in there but there might be a little 

18 bit. Any radon whether it's digested or not 

19 will escape to a certain degree. And if it's 

20 a direct access to the general working 

21 environment, there will be some airborne radon 
 117 

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1 in the general working environment.

2 If it doesn't -- if it's being 

3 captured by some kind of ventilation system 

4 that is a hood over it, well, then that radon 

5 as it sort of escapes will be captured and 

6 really not enter the breathing zone of the 

7 working environment. And that does change the 

8 picture a bit. And of course, if you folks 

9 could show that there really wasn't any radium 

10 there in the first place because the 

11 concentrates were of a quality, well, then the 

12 problem also greatly diminishes.

13 So the only reason I jumped in 

14 here is when I heard stack releases, I just 

15 assumed that was general exhaust from the 

16 working area. But you're saying that no, that 

17 was exhaust from hoods. And then I thought 

18 maybe think about this differently in concept.

19 MR. FITZGERALD: Well, going back 

20 again, I think this still comes down to a 

21 source term -- a Weldon source term estimate. 
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1 And I think what Mark's pointing out is we 

2 actually do have some estimation that confirms 

3 there was radium. The only question I think 

4 in my mind is whether that calculation would 

5 encompass the concentrates or not. It sounds 

6 like they just took a kind of a simple feed in 

7 of uranium and just came up with a calculation 

8 over time.

9 And the question is is that source 

10 term, 12 to 34 curies, would that in fact 

11 encompass the probably small contribution from 

12 these things like concentrates or not. So 

13 this is actually a reasonably good number.

14 Then the other question is the one 

15 I think that's raised in the matrix which is 

16 we only have the emissions number from the 

17 stack. Does that necessarily reflect what's 

18 in the workplace itself?

19 DR. MAURO: Yes.

20 MR. FITZGERALD: And I think 

21 that's a pretty good question. I would think 
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1 that if this is the off-gas and the potential 

2 concentrations -- and this is kind of the 

3 things that could keep coming up in this 

4 modeling with the Board is can you show us or 

5 demonstrate how you would know that that is 

6 bounding or not. And I think it'd be pretty 

7 difficult to show that the emissions from the 

8 stack would be bounding the actual workplace.

9 So I think that's the question. 

10 If there's a unique source term for Weldon, 

11 does this range encompass that source term if 

12 in fact the source term is for the workplace 

13 not for the environment? And I think someone 

14 said earlier can we get a source term for 

15 Weldon that we can feel comfortable with. And 

16 I think at this point, there's some questions 

17 around that.

18 DR. MAKHIJANI: We'll definitely 

19 look at the document. I mean, that should be 

20 part of what to do, I guess.

21 DR. BUCHANAN: I sent that to you. 
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1 I went through the whole calculations. And 

2 its assumptions. It's a model that so much is 

3 emitted from a certain uranium throughput. I 

4 understand that it's vats where the digesting 

5 the concentrate in acid. And then they have a 

6 few open. It's not inside a glove box or 

7 something like that. It's in a big room with 

8 vats and they have these hoods over them. 

9 They exhaust to the stack.

10 MR. FITZGERALD: And this is 

11 pretty large-range. I would think that if you 

12 took the upper part of that range, the only 

13 question would be, well, how can you translate 

14 that to the workplace, know that you have a 

15 bounding number for the actual workers 

16 themselves around those vats, not necessarily 

17 in the stack, right.

18 DR. BUCHANAN: Yes. Because the 

19 1986 reference, now what it calculates is the 

20 12-34 curies being emitted.

21 MR. FITZGERALD: Being emitted.
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1 DR. BUCHANAN: And it doesn't say 

2 anything. It doesn't go any further as far as 

3 the intake.

4 Then there's assumptions made on 

5 how that then circulates back to the workers 

6 inside the building and outside the building.

7 MR. FITZGERALD: Because I 

8 remember these other sites that we've had 

9 these lengthy debates before the Board. It 

10 was all predicated on how can you come up with 

11 this search model within the building itself. 

12 And those were lively exchanges. I can't 

13 imagine that if this were a stack emission how 

14 we could backtrack that into the workplace and 

15 argue that it's bounding. So I think that's 

16 probably the biggest issue.

17 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I think we 

18 have the essence of the finding --

19 MR. FITZGERALD: Yes.

20 MR. HINNEFELD: -- is the essence 

21 of the finding.
 122 

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1 MR. MORRIS: Would you say why you 

2 think it couldn't be bounding. This is Robert 

3 Morris.

4 MR. FITZGERALD: No, I think you 

5 would start to get into a question of whether 

6 or not the ventilation, the collection hoods 

7 and what have you were 100 percent efficient 

8 which of course, I don't think that would 

9 necessarily be the case. You'd have workers 

10 around acid. I think you would have to argue 

11 that yes, in those days if you had an 

12 efficiency of 60, 70 percent, that's pretty 

13 damn good. But you would still have perhaps 

14 concentrations of radon. And it's not clear 

15 to me that that necessarily would be bounding. 

16 You'd have to at least come up with some 

17 estimate of what the collection efficiency was 

18 of the --

19 MR. MORRIS: So would you disagree 

20 that if we took that first term and just 

21 pushed it inside the facility in a box model 
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1 that we couldn't be bounding with that?

2 MR. FITZGERALD: I don't know.

3 MR. HINNEFELD: Robert, we need to 

4 have this conversation ourselves.

5 MR. MORRIS: Okay.

6 MR. FITZGERALD: But I think that 

7 gets to the root of the issue that needs to be 

8 answered I think. That's what we're saying.

9 DR. BUCHANAN: Yes. Two reasons 

10 is the source term and then the inhalation 

11 concentration. And that goes with radon part 

12 A and thoron part B.

13 DR. MAKHIJANI: I think that 

14 source term is much more important.

15 The thoron -- you're processing 

16 thorium there. You've got thorium decay 

17 products there. So -- yes.

18 DR. MAURO: I've got a question on 

19 thorium-232. Was that ore unlike the 

20 concentrates of the uranium where it's 

21 primarily uranium oxide of some form? The 
 124 

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1 thorium-232 issue that we're talking about in 

2 thoron, did they process ore? Therefore of 

3 course you'd have thoron. Or was it also 

4 separated thorium?

5 MR. ROLFES: No, this wasn't ore. 

6 It wasn't like a monazite sand for example. 

7 It was I believe received as thorium nitrate 

8 tetraydrate -- TNT.

9 DR. MAURO: Okay. And so the only 

10 thoron you would get is the radium-228 had the 

11 five-year half-life. So if it was somewhat 

12 aged, you might grow in a little radium-228 

13 and therefore have thoron. So I was wondering 

14 if you got a feel for why is there thoron 

15 there. And is the thoron there because it was 

16 ore? Or is the thoron there because the 

17 thorium-232 was somewhat aged? And it doesn't 

18 take that long. I mean, it doesn't take

19 thousands of years before they're -- unlike 

20 the radium-226. The radium-228 has a 

21 relatively short half-life of five years.
 125 

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1 So in principle, you could grow 

2 some radium-228 in. And between the time the 

3 thorium was separated and shipped and maybe 

4 have a thoron coming in. Do you know offhand 

5 which of those we're dealing with here?

6 MR. HINNEFELD: It's the second, I 

7 think, that you described, John. When you 

8 have a thorium product, if it has much age on 

9 it since it was chemically purified, you're 

10 going to have some thoron generation that's 

11 going to -- it becomes an issue a lot quicker 

12 than radon-220.

13 DR. MAURO: I got it. Okay. 

14 Good. That's helpful. Thank you.

15 MR. HINNEFELD: I believe that's 

16 the situation we're talking about.

17 DR. BUCHANAN: Yes. Thorium-228 

18 has a half-life of 1.9 years. So it can go 

19 fairly --

20 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, it doesn't 

21 take a lot. And it doesn't have to go to 
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1 equilibrium. You've just to get a --

2 DR. MAURO: Yes. Growing in.

3 MR. HINNEFELD: You can get some 

4 growing in and you're starting to generate 

5 thoron.

6 DR. MAURO: You know what? Ron 

7 just made a very important point. That's 

8 right. When you separate thorium, you get the 

9 thorium-232 and one of the daughters. But the 

10 radon comes off the radium-228, doesn't it?

11 DR. BUCHANAN: Right.

12 DR. MAURO: And that has a five13 year half-life.

14 DR. MAKHIJANI: No. Radon will 

15 come off of the thorium-228.

16 MR. HINNEFELD: You see, when you 

17 separate the thorium, you get the thorium-228 

18 with the -- you can't separate the two 

19 isotopes. So you've go 228 -- thorium-228 

20 there. The radium-228 Ron says has like a 

21 one-point-something year half-life.
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1 DR. BUCHANAN: The thorium-228 has 

2 a 1.9-year half-life.

3 MR. HINNEFELD: What's the radium?

4 DR. BUCHANAN: The radium has a 3-

5 day -- 3.6-day half-life.

6 MR. HINNEFELD: Radium-228?

7 DR. BUCHANAN: 224.

8 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. Right. It 

9 goes to 224. It goes from thorium-238 to 

10 radium-224, which has a very short half-life.

11 DR. BUCHANAN: A couple days.

12 MR. HINNEFELD: So it's the one13 year half-life of thorium-230 or 228 --

14 DR. BUCHANAN: Right.

15 DR. MAURO: Okay. That's the 

16 driver. Okay?

17 DR. MAKHIJANI: It will take a 

18 couple of months of sitting --

19 DR. MAURO: Is that all?

20 DR. MAKHIJANI: Because thorium21 228 are 1.9-year half-life. So after a couple 
 128 

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1 of months, you're --

2 MR. HINNEFELD: Start to see it --

3 DR. MAKHIJANI: -- you'll see it.

4 DR. BUCHANAN: Any further 

5 discussion on that?

6 MR. KATZ: No, you can move on.

7 DR. BUCHANAN: Okay. Another 

8 issue which -- it's 5 -- which is recycled 

9 uranium. And the ore concentrate that came in 

10 in '57 through '60 supposedly did not have 

11 recycled uranium. Recycled uranium of course 

12 comes from uranium that's been recycled, taken 

13 from a reactor and tried to re-use the uranium 

14 -- unfortunately this has some byproducts with 

15 it -- that came to light and in year 1999, DOE 

16 went and did a study to try to find where this 

17 came from and where it flowed to.

18 And in 1961 -- and this is a two19 part issue; one I'm sure is resolvable -- it 

20 is the year that Weldon Spring started 

21 receiving recycled uranium. From what I can 
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1 see from '57 through '60, there was no 

2 indication of recycled uranium being resided 

3 at Weldon Spring. I don't have any smoking 

4 gun saying it was. But now in '61, documents 

5 start referring to it.

6 However, in the TBD and in the ER, 

7 there's a mixture of terms -- after 1961, 

8 after 1962 -- and those sort of terms which 

9 are an inconsistency in the date that we're 

10 supposed to start using recycled uranium at 

11 Weldon Spring. And I'm sure that that's 

12 resolvable. Just need to look at that and get 

13 those consistent.

14 And also, I would like to see a 

15 reference that says that Weldon Spring didn't 

16 start receiving recycled uranium until 1961. 

17 I'm sure that's probably available. I 

18 couldn't find it. It was really stated in the 

19 Fernald document or in DOE 2000. However, I 

20 didn't read all of DOE 2000, because it's 1200 

21 pages long, looking for it. But I do think we 
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1 need to set a documented date on when recycled 

2 uranium was received at Weldon Spring.

3 I did go through the 

4 recommendations in TBD 5 and the ER looking 

5 for how they planned on finding the recycled 

6 uranium -- the first issue or the start date. 

7 The second issue is the use of the bounding 

8 number. If you decipher through Fernald's TBD 

9 5 and look at their conversion factors, it 

10 drops out for plutonium -- of course, the key 

11 issues that we have is the recycled uranium 

12 contained trace amounts of plutonium, 

13 technetium and neptunium or the most 

14 significant amounts of some U-236.

15 So I looked at Fernald's TBD 5. 

16 And they recommend 100 parts per billion 

17 plutonium per uranium. And so, the ER though 

18 states on page 27, Table IV-6, an average of 

19 2.9 parts per billion plutonium and 6.3 to be 

20 bounding.

21 Okay. I have two issues. Number 
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1 one, would you clarify why the TBD says one 

2 thing and the ER says another thing? And 

3 also, I looked at some of the claims that had 

4 dose reconstruction done on them. One of them 

5 had 100 parts per billion plutonium added in 

6 correctly as the TBD instructed them. Two 

7 others did not, even though it was less than 

8 50 percent. And so I think probably there's a 

9 lack of clarification there to the DR.

10 And so I guess the first issue is 

11 why is there a difference between the 100 

12 parts per billion in the TBD and 2.9 and 6.3 

13 in the ER?

14 MR. ROLFES: Okay. The TBD for 

15 Weldon Spring Plant was written back in 2005. 

16 And so at that time, we had adopted surrogate 

17 data from the Fernald site.

18 The reason for that 100 parts per 

19 billion default at the Fernald site was

20 because of the elevated transuranic 

21 concentrations of the Paducah flame and tower 
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1 ash which was shipped to Fernald in the late 

2 '70s. And it was that that formed the basis 

3 for that 100 parts per billion default even 

4 though the majority of all the other shipments 

5 except for a handful were much less than 10 

6 parts per billion plutonium on the uranium 

7 mass basis.

8 The TBD that was written in 2005 

9 for the Weldon Spring Plant defaulted to the 

10 Fernald data of 100 parts per billion. The 

11 actual data in reviewing the Weldon Spring 

12 site-specific data as part of this Special 

13 Exposure Cohort Evaluation Report indicated 

14 that the average concentrations were 2.9 parts 

15 per billion plutonium on a uranium mass basis 

16 and gave a 95th percentile value of 6.3 parts 

17 per billion. So the actual site data that we 

18 looked at for the Weldon Spring site indicates 

19 much lower levels of transuranic evidence.

20 DR. MAKHIJANI: There are site 

21 measurements of contaminant data for Weldon 
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1 Spring --

2 MR. ROLFES: These are based upon 

3 the --

4 DR. MAKHIJANI: -- from the time?

5 MR. ROLFES: -- DOE 2000 report 

6 from Weldon Spring.

7 DR. MAKHIJANI: So part of this 

8 issue is how reliable is this DOE 2000 report. 

9 And by the accounts of people who were there 

10 when it was prepared, it was prepared in a big 

11 hurry. It was prepared in response to a 

12 scandal essentially on the front pages of 

13 newspapers about Paducah. And it was rapidly 

14 prepared as a mass balance. And then in 2003, 

15 the DOE issued another report that said, oops, 

16 the 2000 report was rapidly prepared.

17 So we've expressed a fair amount 

18 of discomfort with the use of the report in 

19 the Fernald case. And that issue is still on 

20 the table. So I think the question of whether 

21 you can use that mass balance data. So far as 
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1 I remember, the measurements are not from the 

2 time. The inferences are from measurements 

3 that were made in the '70s and '80s. Now at 

4 Fernald at least you can say they were still 

5 processing uranium there.

6 What was happening at Weldon 

7 Spring was in a completely different time 

8 period. And if there was recycled uranium 

9 involved at Weldon Spring, it would have not 

10 probably come from Paducah and tower ash. And 

11 so I would suspect, or at least you have to 

12 establish that it's connected to that source 

13 term.

14 I would suspect that the recycled 

15 uranium dominant source term in the DOE 

16 complex which isn't very well treated in the 

17 literature originated in the U Plant at 

18 Hanford -- and I've raised this issue before 

19 -- is when you're dealing with a U Plant at 

20 Hanford, a set of ratios that is key to 

21 plutonium doesn't work. It's sort of like the 
 135 

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1 raffinates at Mallinckrodt. Once you've 

2 stripped the uranium, then a set of ratios of 

3 thorium and radium and protactinium to uranium 

4 does work when you strip the uranium.

5 It's the same problem. You've 

6 stripped the plutonium at the reprocessing 

7 plant during the Manhattan Project. You've 

8 put uranium, neptunium and fission products in 

9 the tanks. And then you've taken that back 

10 out -- the uranium, fission products and 

11 neptunium -- and you strip the uranium and 

12 then you have entrained fission products in 

13 neptunium. But you may not have any 

14 significant entrained plutonium.

15 So you've got all these other 

16 contaminants whose relationship to plutonium I 

17 haven't seen established by measurement data. 

18 And Hanford did have guidelines. But we 

19 don't know whether they had out-of20 specification material. We don't have 

21 measurements. And we don't know what went to 
 136 

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1 Weldon Spring.

2 So I think these back3 extrapolations of measurements of recycled 

4 uranium are much more problematic, at least as 

5 things stand, at Weldon Spring than they would 

6 be --

7 MR. ROLFES: I think we need to be 

8 careful about saying we don't know what went 

9 to Weldon Spring because there is an 

10 evaluation of the data that was done at Weldon 

11 Spring. And it's reference ID 11818. And 

12 it's Health Physics Concerns for Recycled 

13 Materials. And it's an interim report on the 

14 data through November 1, 1964. It has alpha 

15 and gamma versus nuclide content.

16 It's a report which is 12 pages 

17 long. It is an evaluation --

18 DR. MAKHIJANI: What did you say 

19 -- 11?

20 MR. ROLFES: 11818. It's an 

21 evaluation of the alpha and gamma activities 
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1 for the materials that were sent back and 

2 considered to be recycled uranium.

3 DR. MAKHIJANI: From the time?

4 MR. ROLFES: 1964. So, yes.

5 DR. MAKHIJANI: Excellent. I'll 

6 take a look at it.

7 MR. ROLFES: It's an evaluation of 

8 recycled feeds for additional health problems. 

9 And I don't know, I don't think we need to 

10 discuss it --

11 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, so far 

12 what's on the table is surrogate data. And so 

13 if there's something else on the table, then 

14 we'll look at that.

15 MR. ROLFES: It has a discussion 

16 of the findings with health activity and it 

17 mentions neptunium-237 versus 234 and 235 as 

18 well an analysis of actinium-227 and 231s.

19 DR. MAKHIJANI: Great. If there's 

20 substantive data from the time, this 

21 simplifies things considerably. And then you 
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1 have the question of reprocessing of recycled 

2 uranium and how you're treating the 

3 raffinates. And then it becomes a more --

4 MR. FITZGERALD: I guess I'm a 

5 little confused.

6 This document comes after -- after 

7 the ER? I'm just trying -- why did you go to 

8 the Fernald surrogate data?

9 MR. ROLFES: This document was 

10 from the 11,800 range in the site research 

11 database.

12 MR. FITZGERALD: No, I'm just 

13 saying you didn't choose to use that as a part 

14 of the recycled uranium assessment.

15 MR. ROLFES: Correct. I guess at 

16 the time just with the pressure to get claims 

17 done, we didn't want to go back and -- just 

18 because of the length of the reports -- we've 

19 got a 1,000-page report -- we felt that it 

20 would be claimant-favorable to default to the 

21 100 parts per billion --
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1 MR. FITZGERALD: Right.

2 MR. ROLFES: -- for the Fernald 

3 site.

4 MR. HINNEFELD: I think originally 

5 the surrogate data from Fernald was used for 

6 expedience --

7 MR. ROLFES: Yes.

8 MR. HINNEFELD: -- in the Weldon 

9 Spring PR program.

10 MR. ROLFES: Right.

11 MR. HINNEFELD: And it definitely 

12 bounds what you had in that report.

13 MR. ROLFES: Correct, correct.

14 DR. BUCHANAN: And you're saying 

15 that's reference 11818?

16 MR. ROLFES: Yes. It's 11818, 

17 Health Physics Concerns for Recycled 

18 Materials.

19 DR. BUCHANAN: And is this where 

20 the 2.9 and 6.3 figures come from?

21 MR. ROLFES: No, that is not. 
 140 

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1 That data is from the DOE report from 2000, I 

2 believe, for Weldon Spring Plant.

3 MR. HINNEFELD: So that question 

4 about the quality of the 2000 report still 

5 remains then?

6 DR. MAKHIJANI: Right. So what my 

7 suggestion would be since you're re-looking at 

8 this stuff is that you go to the site data 

9 that you have and then we can assess the 

10 quality of the site data because we've raised 

11 all these issues in another context, and 

12 they're still on the table and they're still 

13 being discussed and they're unresolved at 

14 Fernald. And then so you're kind of thinking 

15 what's going to happen in that other arena 

16 that will bring you back into this arena. If 

17 you've got site data, it's much better. Then 

18 we can look at that.

19 DR. BUCHANAN: Okay. Want to move 

20 on to issue number 6, neutron exposure 

21 dosimetry records.
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1 There were processes at Weldon 

2 Springs that would create -- that's on page 8, 

3 issue number 6 -- that would create potential 

4 neutron exposure. According to some 

5 documents, there was NTA film issued to some 

6 workers that were involved in these operations 

7 in a slight risk of uranium of one to two 

8 percent that was received during different 

9 campaigns. But there are no results 

10 documented. They're either in a claimant's 

11 file or they're otherwise -- see if they could 

12 locate.

13 And so, the question comes up if 

14 there's a potential exposure without any 

15 records -- dose records -- to reconstruct the 

16 dose, what do we do about that? And so 

17 recently in the TBD -- and this is an area 

18 that we would like to clarify. Recently in 

19 the TBD, the use in Fernald measurements --

20 one-time measurements of beta gamma -- I mean, 

21 neutron gamma and do a .1 I think in the 
 142 

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1 method. And SC&A did not agree with that in 

2 their site review report.

3 I see in the ER that it is 

4 mentioned that the OTIB-24 would be invoked if 

5 necessary on a case-by-case basis for neutron 

6 dose assignment. And there was a mention of 

7 missed dose assignment. And so at this point, 

8 I'd just like some clarification on how 

9 neutron dose would be assigned. It's still 

10 TBD-6, or are you going to use OTIB-24? Or

11 misquotes come in when you don't have any 

12 comeback data.

13 MR. ROLFES: Well, I'll have to 

14 delay a response to that. I'm not certain. 

15 But I know for the Fernald site what we've 

16 done in the past for workers that were 

17 handling enriched uranium, we've applied a 

18 neutron-to-photon ratio. From the top of my 

19 head, that was around .3 to 1 for the 95th 

20 percentile.

21 And Fernald handled higher 
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1 enrichments. It had larger quantities of 

2 material there. So that would have probably 

3 been a bounding neutron-to-photon ratio for 

4 the Weldon Spring Plant.

5 We'll prepare a response on that 

6 and make sure that it's addressed for the 

7 revision.

8 DR. BUCHANAN: Okay. Thank you, 

9 Mark.

10 I did have one question. Do we 

11 know -- I mean, just as a general question --

12 do we know that Weldon Spring only received RU 

13 and enriched uranium from Fernald?

14 MR. ROLFES: I will have to delay 

15 my response to that once again. I --

16 DR. BUCHANAN: Because that's 

17 important. If we're going to use any of 

18 Fernald's data, whether it's DOE 2000 or the 

19 enriched uranium 1 to 2 percent and that sort 

20 of thing, we need some documentation that they 

21 only received that material from Fernald.
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1 MR. HINNEFELD: If we only use 

2 what now?

3 DR. BUCHANAN: If we only use 

4 Fernald data for enriched and recycled uranium 

5 --

6 MR. HINNEFELD: Oh, okay.

7 DR. BUCHANAN: -- then we need 

8 some documentation. They didn't receive some 

9 from Hanford, they didn't receive some from 

10 other places that is available through the 

11 years.

12 MR. ROLFES: Does anyone on the 

13 phone perhaps -- Mel or Bob or Monica -- know 

14 if there were uranium shipments to Weldon 

15 Spring from sites other than Fernald?

16 MR. MORRIS: Mark, not that we are 

17 aware of. Again, not that we're aware of.

18 MR. ROLFES: Okay. So based on 

19 what we currently know, everything that Weldon 

20 Spring received would have come from Fernald 

21 then?
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1 MR. MORRIS: Yes, sir.

2 MR. ROLFES: Okay. We'll double 

3 check on that for you.

4 DR. BUCHANAN: Okay. I mean, it 

5 would be good to have some documentation 

6 showing that they didn't receive anything from 

7 anyplace else.

8 Okay. So that was issue number 6 

9 on neutron dosimetry.

10 Issue number 7 was the quarry and 

11 raffinate pits exposures. This is kind of a 

12 problem area in that the operators -- we might 

13 be able to use their data to bound, say, the 

14 secretaries or the lawn workers or the non15 production workers so to speak at the site 

16 that were roaming around the site and stuff in 

17 between admin and the plant and such. 

18 However, the quarry and the pits are different 

19 sources -- different source terms. And 

20 apparently there was not too much attention 

21 paid to it back in the active days from '57 to 
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1 '66 and '67. The quarry was kind of looked at 

2 as a dump. And in fact, downtown brought a 

3 lot of junk out there from their plant --

4 contaminated junk -- and dumped it in the pit. 

5 In other words, there was a dump truck 

6 apparently.

7 And so, there wasn't much done 

8 about characterizing it until 1970s, 1980s. 

9 And so, I guess I have an issue with using 

10 1970 and '80s data for the active period of 

11 the quarry and they were dumping stuff in it. 

12 And also, the pits that were 

13 characterized later on and now the 

14 justification in the TBD and/or the ER was you 

15 grow in equilibrium of these decay products or 

16 any measurements done later would be limiting 

17 to what was there during the production era. 

18 And I agree from a scientific basis that the 

19 ingrowth would increase. But I don't know if 

20 that necessarily extrapolates to exposure 

21 potential because after you do a measurement 
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1 and a situation -- a physical and chemical 

2 component in the '80s -- wouldn't necessarily 

3 reflect say the dust and the contamination 

4 stuff which was present there in dumping into 

5 the quarry in the earlier years and the 

6 condition of the pits in the earlier years.

7 And I did note that Mason did do 

8 some pit characterization in the Site Research 

9 Database. I think there's a '58 article in 

10 there.

11 And so, that's an issue I'd like 

12 to bring up is how can we extrapolate from 

13 later days back to earlier days when the pits 

14 and the quarry was active as opposed to a 

15 stagnant period after they had set 20 or 30 

16 years.

17 MR. FITZGERALD: So this is kind 

18 of a source term question as well -- the 

19 question of whether the source term --

20 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, theoretically 

21 they're okay. So there were measurements 
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1 probably during remediation of the pits and 

2 the quarry.

3 DR. BUCHANAN: Yes.

4 MR. HINNEFELD: But the problem 

5 being that during the operation of the site 

6 when they were putting things in the pits and 

7 ostensibly in the quarry, then those exposures 

8 -- those materials since they were essentially 

9 bereft of uranium would constitute an exposure 

10 that you don't have uranium markers for, 

11 whereas the operators, uranium is pretty much 

12 the marker for the internal exposure. Is that 

13 kind of where we're at on this?

14 DR. BUCHANAN: Yes.

15 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. Not bereft. 

16 They were devoid. They lacked uranium.

17 MR. FITZGERALD: And I guess just 

18 to wrap that up, the ingrowth of the decay 

19 products was in the time frame substantial 

20 enough that -- I guess it's a hypothesis --

21 would hold. But I mean, but it is --
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1 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, you're 

2 talking uranium decay change, I don't see a 

3 whole lot of change in those nine years.

4 MR. FITZGERALD: But I'm just 

5 saying that that's just sort of the premise 

6 here -- right -- that that would make it 

7 bounding. But on the other hand --

8 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, your point 

9 though is that the work activities and the 

10 exposures during -- because the activities 

11 were different, you can't necessarily assume 

12 that the remediation activities mimic the 

13 actual operational activities as they were 

14 loading that. That's the issue here. Is that 

15 true?

16 DR. BUCHANAN: That's correct.

17 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. Well, 

18 unless you've got something to speak to that, 

19 we'll just take it back and work on it.

20 MR. ROLFES: I was just going to 

21 say just to point out, the .65 picocuries per 
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1 liter is about what you measure normally in 

2 backgrounds.

3 MR. HINNEFELD: Of what?

4 MR. ROLFES: Radon.

5 MR. HINNEFELD: And that was 

6 measured when?

7 MR. ROLFES: Let's see. This was 

8 in the 1970s and '80s. The weakest was for 

9 radon.

10 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. So that's 

11 when --

12 MR. ROLFES: Yes, yes.

13 MR. HINNEFELD: -- Ames started 

14 doing some environmental monitoring around --

15 MR. ROLFES: Yes. Let me --

16 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay.

17 MR. ROLFES: -- read that there.

18 MR. HINNEFELD: I think the issue 

19 here is going to be though that in '75 to '80, 

20 these pits were sitting there and stagnant and 

21 no one was working around it and putting 
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1 things in -- and putting materials in the 

2 contained quarry. Is that the issue?

3 DR. BUCHANAN: Yes.

4 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. So the fact 

5 that we have environmental monitoring from a 

6 quiet situation, the issue raised here is how 

7 can we convince people that environmental 

8 monitoring from a quiet situation is 

9 sufficient to bound or measure the exposures 

10 from two workers who are actually filling 

11 those materials now. I don't know what the 

12 filling processes were and whether there was 

13 potential or not.

14 I mean, some waste pits were 

15 slurries of radioactive material that no one 

16 got close to, and it was a liquid or a slurry 

17 anyway. So you don't have a lot of exposure 

18 potential as long as you keep it under water. 

19 But I don't know anything about that, and I 

20 don't necessarily think we need to go any 

21 further to know what we need to address.
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1 DR. BUCHANAN: Okay. I'll move on 

2 to issue 8. This is probably equal with -- is 

3 incidents and off-normal situations.

4 When I interviewed the workers and 

5 talked to them since -- has stopped, this is 

6 probably the biggest issue that sticks in 

7 their mind is that back in the '50s and early 

8 '60s, uranium was mainly viewed as a chemical 

9 hazard, and there was debate going on. But it 

10 was mainly a chemical hazard with some minor 

11 nuisance of radiation and beta activity to it. 

12 But it was not necessarily recognized as a 

13 health hazard until later on.

14 And so, we're not so much 

15 concerned with the identified high activity 

16 bioassay result and stuff which obviously sent 

17 up a red flag under AEC was investigated I 

18 think. What their concern is, is that there 

19 were incidents that weren't recognized as 

20 being radiologically hazardous. And so, they 

21 tended to the situation whether it was a 
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1 medical situation or whether it was a physical 

2 or a plant situation or what. And there 

3 wasn't any follow-up, there wasn't any 

4 indication in the records.

5 And so, I went back and looked at 

6 a few of these -- of the claims. And I looked 

7 at their DOE files. And the couple I looked 

8 at were fat in that they were involved in what 

9 we consider today a serious accident with 

10 contamination and possible intake. But their 

11 records didn't show any attention to it other 

12 than just what they would normally -- if they 

13 happened to be one of the members being 

14 bioassayed. See, they had cohort monitoring. 

15 And so they would take a certain operational 

16 group and they'd do bioassays -- one or two 

17 guys would do bioassays for that group. And 

18 then the next month, they'd have another 

19 representative from that group.

20 And so if there was an incident, 

21 it wouldn't necessarily be caught if they had 
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1 an intake unless there was a special bioassay. 

2 And this did not seem to occur anyway in the 

3 records that I looked at.

4 And so, I don't have a suggestion 

5 or a solution to this problem. And again, 

6 it's kind of a global problem with the site is 

7 how do you address incidents back in the 

8 earlier days when they weren't really 

9 recognizing radiological incidents, and so 

10 therefore weren't necessarily entered in the 

11 record as radiological incidents. If they 

12 were entered in, it was more of an occurrence 

13 -- a plant occurrence or from a medical 

14 standpoint of view -- injuries, cuts and that 

15 sort of thing as opposed to a radiological 

16 incident, especially at a production plant. 

17 How do you address these?

18 And so, like I say, we don't have 

19 an answer for it. But it is something that is 

20 large in the claimant's mind, and it's an area 

21 that I can't answer them. I can't say well, 
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1 we include this in all the bioassay data 

2 because nobody was continually bioassayed. 

3 And so that's the way we brought up issue 

4 number 8.

5 DR. MAKHIJANI: Could I supplement 

6 that?

7 This has come up recently at 

8 another site, and I'm struggling in my head to 

9 remember which one I brought it up at. I 

10 can't remember. But it's the issue of 

11 blowouts.

12 There were pretty frequent 

13 blowouts at Fernald. And there were also 

14 pretty frequent blowouts where the process was 

15 developed at Ames.

16 Now at Fernald, blowouts went on 

17 into the '70s. That's documented. At Ames, 

18 of course, they were quite frequent when the 

19 process was developed. And indications are 

20 that blowouts continue to be a problem and 

21 maybe to a different extent at different 
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1 sites, but continue to be a problem.

2 Now at Weldon Spring in the TBD, 

3 you said there's no record of accidents. But 

4 I can't imagine the record of uranium 

5 tetrafluoride reduction to metal using the 

6 magnesium reduction process is at the sites 

7 where there are records of accidents is that 

8 blowouts were an issue. 

9 And so, I think a default 

10 assumption has to be that there were blowouts. 

11 But I didn't see that in the literature. I'm 

12 just supplementing what --

13 MR. ROLFES: Yes. We suspect that 

14 there was. But I guess the concern would be 

15 whether the people that were involved in those 

16 incidents were bioassayed.

17 DR. MAKHIJANI: That's right. So 

18 we recognize that the bioassay record does 

19 reflect whatever happened whether there was an 

20 incident or not.

21 MR. FITZGERALD: I think it sort 
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1 of get into the threshold of what a bioassay 

2 -- would it be done. Portables were such that 

3 it was a very high threshold. It was more 

4 chemical-based than radiological-based because 

5 low enriched uranium, certainly you're missing 

6 a lot of the bioassays. And how do you 

7 portion that?

8 And I'm not sure it's an easily 

9 solvable issue because they just didn't 

10 recognize low enriched uranium as a 

11 radiological issue in all cases. It's a 

12 dilemma.

13 It sort of reminds me of the 

14 contamination issue. How do you do something 

15 with that if you know that was the practice 

16 and the perception, but your instances were 

17 based on something other than radiological?

18 MR. HINNEFELD: So we know for a 

19 fact that bioassay was a cohort monitoring 

20 scheme at Mallinckrodt?

21 MR. FITZGERALD: I don't think so. 
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1 I'm just saying that --

2 DR. BUCHANAN: Yes, it was. Yes, 

3 bioassay was cohort.

4 MR. FITZGERALD: Yes. There were 

5 more people that were monitored. And I 

6 believe -- it is discussed in our evaluation 

7 report. And I'm trying to recall if they had 

8 monitored members of each individual work 

9 group like three times per week. I don't 

10 recall.

11 Maybe Bob, on the telephone, if

12 you could explain. Do you recall the method 

13 for the little cohort bioassay sampling?

14 MR. MORRIS: No, I don't remember, 

15 that, Mark.

16 MR. ROLFES: Okay. I know that we 

17 had discussed it. And I guess basically our 

18 concern is whether a person that was involved 

19 in an incident would have had a bioassay is 

20 the bottom line. And I guess what we'll do is 

21 take a look and see if we can find some 
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1 indications of workers that were involved in 

2 incidents, et cetera, and take a look at their 

3 bioassays.

4 MR. FITZGERALD: Can you pull, I 

5 guess, a small sample of just trying to --

6 DR. BUCHANAN: Yes. Of the actual 

7 people I talked to and see it was in the 

8 record.

9 MR. FITZGERALD: See if it was in 

10 the record. I think --

11 MR. HINNEFELD: As I see your 

12 write-up, one person's bioassay who was in 

13 furnace fire was not -- there was no bioassay 

14 in his record. But something said bioassay 

15 available in investigation report or 

16 something? Is that what your write-up says?

17 DR. BUCHANAN: No, I think it 

18 didn't really indicate -- it didn't really 

19 indicate that he was involved in a fire. It 

20 says personnel monitoring summary reports --

21 there was another -- 
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1 MR. ROLFES: Okay. So there's --

2 DR. BUCHANAN: It's written up in 

3 a MCW report. And there's information in that 

4 that the dose reconstructor could use. But it 

5 didn't say anything in his report that he had 

6 the bioassay.

7 And the other one just had 

8 something about medical aspect of the worker's 

9 complaint. It didn't have anything on 

10 bioassay.

11 MR. ROLFES: So this was, like, 

12 you're referring to his file as, like, the DOE 

13 response file didn't contain it?

14 DR. BUCHANAN: Right.

15 MR. ROLFES: Okay. Yes, that's 

16 one thing that we have had in the past. Some 

17 of the records don't always make it into the 

18 DOE response file when they're related to an 

19 incident and such.

20 And so one of the things that 

21 we've done to resolve these types of issues 
 161 

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1 from our data captures from various sites --

2 all the documents that are put into the Site 

3 Research Database -- what we can do is 

4 actually search each of these documents and 

5 find any kind of bioassay data or exposure 

6 data and link those back into our NIOSH OCAS 

7 claims tracking system.

8 So, yes, that certainly is 

9 something important. So we want to make sure 

10 that any bioassay data from an individual's 

11 incident is included in the DOE response file. 

12 And if it isn't, we want to make sure that 

13 it's available to the dose reconstructors 

14 during the dose reconstruction process.

15 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I think the 

16 issue here is pretty clear though is that in 

17 this one instance where the person had --

18 there was a notation or a personal file and 

19 there was an investigation report, and we 

20 could go find that bioassay and do dose 

21 reconstruction. That's one instance where 
 162 

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1 we'll find it.

2 But the idea, though, is if it's 

3 done in that fashion, how do you know you 

4 don't miss something? How do you know you 

5 always have that notation about data included 

6 in an accident file?

7 And another important question 

8 here is how was the cohort sampling done.

9 DR. BUCHANAN: And that changed. 

10 Cohort sampling changed over time. First it 

11 was just Fridays and then it was Monday --

12 Friday, Monday, Friday. And then it went --

13 they changed it two or three times during the 

14 ten-year period if I recall right.

15 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. 

16 DR. BUCHANAN: Okay. So that 

17 brings us up to issue number 9. And that is 

18 one of the concerns of the petitioners that 

19 qualified the ER was the geometry factor not 

20 being included.

21 And so, this was important in that 
 163 

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1 if a person generally practiced to wear the 

2 badge on the chest, and if the exposure source 

3 term was some distance away, it would 

4 duplicate the calibration of the badge so that 

5 a reading was correct for dosimetry purposes. 

6 However, if the source term was close or 

7 further away from the badge than part of the 

8 bodies, then there's a problem. Or if there 

9 was a shielding in between. That's a spatial 

10 issue -- a spatial and space-type issue.

11 And if a lot of this uranium have 

12 high theta doses -- and in fact some of them 

13 quote 20 r per hour on some of the lathe 

14 material. And so shielding as it interfered 

15 between the badge and the source but didn't 

16 interfere between the source and the person's 

17 head or hands or feet or whatever the 

18 situation might be, then you'd rest your dose 

19 lower than what the person or organ received.

20 And so a lot of places that 

21 recognize this, especially using glove boxes 
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1 and stuff, have a geometry factor for people 

2 that worked certain jobs. And of course the 

3 compound disc at Weldon Spring just for 

4 extremity monitoring was implemented and 

5 basically wasn't there. And so there's no 

6 extremity monitoring to show any extremity 

7 doses that they were approximately equal to 

8 whole-body doses. If they were, then you can 

9 say well, there's probably not too much in 

10 geometry factor, but that it doesn't exist.

11 And so the geometry factor is an 

12 issue here even though we haven't had claims 

13 for extremities or that sort of thing. It 

14 shows that from readings -- the literature on 

15 their operating fields and operations that the 

16 geometry factor could be important in some 

17 organ doses. And so, we would like to bring 

18 up the issue that geometry factors need to be 

19 implemented at Weldon Spring.

20 MR. ROLFES: Yes, I would agree 

21 with you if we had a dose reconstruction that 
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1 needed it. But I just did a quick review of 

2 the claims that we have in NOCTS and I didn't 

3 see any cases where the individual had a 

4 cancer on their hands, for example, on an 

5 extremity. But yes, I do agree that if a 

6 situation where an individual was handling 

7 uranium materials and had recorded doses, et 

8 cetera, we would certainly want to develop 

9 some geometrical correction factors to make 

10 sure that we're accounting for the dose to the 

11 extremity properly.

12 The other question I had was the 

13 reference you had mentioned -- the 1958 office 

14 memo. It mentioned dose rates from 10,000 to 

15 35,000 millirem per hour. That doesn't sound 

16 like uranium to me. I mean, that didn't 

17 really sound like it was something that was 

18 coming from Weldon Spring Plant. Do you 

19 recall if it was another site?

20 DR. BUCHANAN: No, no. This was 

21 -- let's see. I can give you the reference 
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1 number for that document. That's a Weldon 

2 Spring document. I can give you the reference 

3 number for that.

4 It was on a lathe, I think.

5 MR. ROLFES: All right. So it 

6 wasn't uranium. It's likely protactinium-234 

7 and such.

8 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. If it was on 

9 a lathe, it was probably a machine that could 

10 surface off the -- 

11 DR. MAKHIJANI: Mark, where did 

12 the protactinium-231 and actinium-227 come 

13 from at Weldon Spring?

14 MR. HINNEFELD: That's U-235 decay 

15 chain. I mean, you're mainly protecting 234.

16 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes. But if it's 

17 being processed already, you expect that stuff 

18 to have gone away, right?

19 MR. HINNEFELD: I don't remember 

20 the ingrowth of those.

21 DR. MAKHIJANI: They're slow. 
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1 They're very slow.

2 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. It may not 

3 be 231.

4 MR. ROLFES: Are you referring to 

5 --

6 DR. MAKHIJANI: I just saw it in 

7 the document you referenced.

8 MR. ROLFES: In the health physics 

9 concerns for the safety materials?

10 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes.

11 MR. ROLFES: Okay. Yes, that 

12 would have been a small amount from U-235 

13 decay.

14 DR. MAKHIJANI: All right.

15 DR. BUCHANAN: I'll get you that 

16 document.

17 MR. ROLFES: You don't have to 

18 provide it right now. But if you could after 

19 the meeting.

20 MR. FITZGERALD: But it doesn't 

21 sound like we have a -- here either. It's 
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1 there for your -- it's a tool that you're 

2 going to use if you need to use the tool.

3 DR. BUCHANAN: Well, and it's more 

4 though than just the extremities. It's brain 

5 cancers and anything above the neck up and 

6 your feeling bad doesn't necessarily reflect 

7 it if it's coming from a lathe or something.

8 MR. FITZGERALD: So they're still 

9 geometry questions.

10 DR. BUCHANAN: Yes. Even though I 

11 have a shield here and you're not -- the 

12 brain, it could be receiving a different dose 

13 than the benches.

14 DR. MAKHIJANI: At Mallinckrodt, 

15 there was an also an issue of geometry where 

16 the source was below which applied to the 

17 vats.

18 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, there are 

19 serious --

20 DR. MAKHIJANI: And there's a --

21 MR. HINNEFELD: -- there's not 
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1 that -- is there? There are certain parts in 

2 the orientations which may interest us if 

3 needed. I'd have to go back and check on 

4 that.

5 MR. FITZGERALD: So you're talking 

6 about with maybe an analog for Weldon that may 

7 be drawn from this.

8 DR. MAKHIJANI: Right. But I 

9 think that issue was resolved.

10 MR. FITZGERALD: A lathe was one 

11 of the set-ups in the Mallinckrodt document. 

12 A lathe was one of the set-ups.

13 DR. MAKHIJANI: There's quite a 

14 lot of very good work done --

15 MR. FITZGERALD: Well, maybe a lot 

16 of the leg work was done on them checking out 

17 the factories --

18 DR. BUCHANAN: Okay. That's the 

19 nine issues that I had on the SEC.

20 CHAIRMAN GIBSON: Is everyone 

21 clear about consulting these to further look 
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1 into and respond back to?

2 MR. HINNEFELD: I took some notes. 

3 I guess Mark probably took notes. I think 

4 we'll -- if we have some questions -- about 

5 what -- but I think we've got it straightened 

6 out. And we are within written responses for 

7 these matrix issues. Now this is clear that 

8 this must be a summary out of a report that is 

9 going to PA clearance or something --

10 DR. BUCHANAN: Well --

11 MR. HINNEFELD: -- security 

12 clearances?

13 DR. BUCHANAN: It's just a draft. 

14 It's not --

15 MR. FITZGERALD: We want to slow 

16 them up.

17 The report is in draft, ready to 

18 go --

19 MR. HINNEFELD: That's okay. 

20 Before you go to DoD for their security or 

21 applications first.
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1 MR. KATZ: So it should come out 

2 in - 

3 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I'm just 

4 saying that normally the written reports are 

5 very instructive about the basis behind this 

6 number 5. That's when I'm --

7 DR. BUCHANAN: Yes, they'll be 

8 more -- more details.

9 MR. HINNEFELD: Because I hate to 

10 compliment the contractor -- the Board's 

11 contractor here -- but there's a lot of well 

12 written stuff in the actual review reports. 

13 And the ideas usually come across pretty 

14 clearly that the basis for the finding in some 

15 has been more so than just what he did in the 

16 matrix.

17 MR. FITZGERALD: So that would 

18 take a couple of weeks that we'll be done with 

19 this.

20 MR. KATZ: Well, it sounds like 

21 the TBD revision is also correct or at least 
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1 for a couple months.

2 MR. ROLFES: Correct. 

3 MR. FITZGERALD: There's been a 

4 couple of portions that have been in the 

5 works, I guess. I believe the site 

6 description has been updated. But I believe 

7 the other significant TBDs - the internal and 

8 the external as well as the environmental dose 

9 portions of the site profile are still in 

10 internal review at ORAU. And I believe we're 

11 hoping to get those out by the end of the 

12 year.

13 MR. ROLFES: And when you say out 

14 of ORAU or do you mean through DCAS review 

15 too?

16 MR. KATZ: I would expect that 

17 they'd be through DCAS review too by the end 

18 of December -- early January.

19 MR. ROLFES: And will that have to 

20 go to DOE too then?

21 MR. KATZ: Yes, it will.
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1 MR. HINNEFELD: That's usually two 

2 weeks.

3 MR. KATZ: Yes. Okay. So it 

4 sounds like that'll be out by January --

5 sometime in January?

6 MR. HINNEFELD: We'll do what we 

7 can.

8 MR. KATZ: I mean, obviously it's 

9 something --

10 MR. HINNEFELD: Everything we do 

11 is a juggling act about which fire are we 

12 planning today or this week.

13 DR. BUCHANAN: And I know that the 

14 matrix usually comes out after the report. In 

15 this case, we signed that in the spring and we 

16 didn't want to clog up the clearance pipeline 

17 with a report --

18 MR. HINNEFELD: I didn't mean to 

19 complain at all. I'm just saying that usually 

20 the report includes really clear descriptions 

21 --
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1 MR. FITZGERALD: We sort of push 

2 the matrix out faster given schedules.

3 MR. HINNEFELD: I'm not 

4 complaining. I understand.

5 DR. BUCHANAN: And that reference 

6 number on the beta dose is 14938.

7 MR. ROLFES: Thank you, Ron.

8 DR. BUCHANAN: That's a 1959 

9 Mallinckrodt lathe operation, shielded and 

10 unshielded.

11 MR. KATZ: That was an item that 

12 you wanted a chance for someone from the ORAU 

13 staff to come back.

14 MS. HOWELL: Monica.

15 MR. KATZ: Monica. Early on. Is 

16 that still open? Do we want to see if she's 

17 back with us from her call?

18 MR. ROLFES: Well, I don't know. 

19 Did we want to discuss that? That probably 

20 falls back into the technical discussion of --

21 MR. HINNEFELD: If it's a 
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1 technical discussion of the timing then I 

2 don't think we need to do it.

3 MR. KATZ: It was about the 

4 pedigree of the data.

5 DR. BUCHANAN: Using the ER.

6 MR. KATZ: So is that useful to 

7 decide anymore?

8 MR. HINNEFELD: No, I don't think 

9 so because we got to the point where the key 

10 question was what's the origin of the exposure 

11 history in the individual file. And if we 

12 have a dose reconstructor here, do you really 

13 need that?

14 I've had a couple email exchanges 

15 with ORAU, and I'm not entirely sure I 

16 understand them. So I don't know that it's 

17 worth talking about.

18 But apparently, the individual 

19 exposure records apparently are hard copies, 

20 records from the site. Some are handwritten. 

21 Some are printouts from Weldon Spring 
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1 monitoring program. And those are obtained 

2 from Oak Ridge Operations who is the holder of 

3 those records. So that's what shows up in the 

4 person's file is a report that was generated 

5 from Weldon Spring. That's what the dose 

6 reconstructor gets.

7 And it should be a little look in 

8 on Weldon Spring's claims if not and see 

9 exactly what's in there. It would be under 

10 the DOE response in the claim docs. It's part 

11 of the documents -- claim documents.

12 CHAIRMAN GIBSON: Okay. Is this a 

13 good time to break for lunch before we come 

14 back and cover the Site Profile preliminary 

15 responses for --

16 MR. HINNEFELD: I mean, it's 

17 convenient now to break again.

18 CHAIRMAN GIBSON: Come back after 

19 12:00 then?

20 MR. KATZ: Yes, It's noon. So 

21 after 1:00?
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1 CHAIRMAN GIBSON: Yes.

2 MR. ROLFES: Well, I think we sort 

3 of discussed both of -- I think the Site 

4 Profile issue's really been discussed in the 

5 SEC evaluation portion. But I don't know how 

6 much detail you want. We can certainly 

7 discuss them if you --

8 MR. HINNEFELD: I mean, we might 

9 as well run through them. It'll take what 

10 it'll take.

11 MR. ROLFES: Sure.

12 DR. MAURO: This is John. Real 

13 quick before you break, I just wanted to check 

14 with you this paper by Adams and Strom in 

15 Health Physics on DWEs. I'd like to ask do we 

16 get the green light to go ahead and look into 

17 that and perhaps write up a white paper on it?

18 MR. KATZ: Yes. It may not 

19 require a white paper out of this. But 

20 certainly take a look at it and see --

21 DR. MAURO: Okay. We'll take a 
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1 look at it and be prepared just to report 

2 back. And certainly the work group could then 

3 decide whether it'd like a white paper or not 

4 depending on the complexity.

5 DR. MAKHIJANI: John, let me 

6 suggest that what we might do is compare 

7 what's in that paper with what we did before 

8 and write a short memo on that. It might be 

9 as simple as that. Or it might need a white 

10 paper. I don't know.

11 DR. MAURO: Right. Well, I'd like 

12 to also look at what's in that paper and what 

13 actually done for example on a number of 

14 places where DWEs were used in the past and 

15 whether or not that -- let's say we find that 

16 protocol reasonable in Adams, and then we'll 

17 see whether or not that protocol was in fact 

18 employed in many of the cases that we've 

19 reviewed in the past.

20 MR. KATZ: Yes. And John, the 

21 only thing I'm feeling a little uncertain 
 179 

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1 about is DCAS has part of this equation too to 

2 explain how that paper or its methodology sort 

3 of relates. And until you have that, you may 

4 not be able to respond fully on this issue.

5 DR. MAURO: Yes. I think I'd just 

6 like to do a little homework to see what was 

7 done.

8 MR. KATZ: Absolutely.

9 DR. MAURO: And you know why? 

10 Because it's going to come up again on Fernald 

11 real soon. And the more we know about it, the 

12 more intelligently we can speak about it.

13 MR. KATZ: Sure. But absolutely 

14 you can dig into it.

15 DR. MAURO: Okay. But we'll keep 

16 it light just enough so we get familiar with 

17 it.

18 CHAIRMAN GIBSON: Well, I guess I 

19 have no idea how much their work -- Mark, 

20 what's your sense as to how much is there to 

21 go through with TBD review that hasn't been 
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1 covered?

2 MR. KATZ: Well, we've sort of 

3 hinted on some of these things. If you look 

4 at issue number 1, we've discussed atmospheric 

5 monitoring data for the operational period. 

6 And basically, many of these responses were 

7 basically saying that we're updating the Site 

8 Profile, and that should be coming out at the 

9 end of this year.

10 We might be able to run through 

11 these in 15 minutes possibly.

12 MR. HINNEFELD: It's okay with me.

13 CHAIRMAN GIBSON: We'll take a 

14 quick break, make sure we've got everyone 

15 still on the phone and then just --

16 MR. KATZ: Yes. You want to take 

17 a ten-minute break and then come back and 

18 we'll try to knock this off about half past 

19 the hour or so?

20 It may be useful, Mark, because it 

21 may help you in your final review of the TBD 
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1 to hear whatever -- okay. So in ten minutes, 

2 yes?

3 MEMBER LEMEN: Does that mean 

4 you're not going to take a lunch break and 

5 you're just going to try and finish the whole 

6 agenda and then --

7 MR. KATZ: I think so. We're 

8 going to try to do that. So if we find that 

9 it takes longer, we'll break at 12:30 for 

10 lunch.

11 MEMBER LEMEN: If we can finish 

12 the agenda, then we'd be done.

13 MR. KATZ: Then we would be done 

14 for the day. Yes.

15 The only other thing we have to 

16 talk about is possibly scheduling the next 

17 one.

18 MEMBER LEMEN: Okay. I just 

19 wanted to -- never mind. I'll just wait until 

20 I get back.

21 MR. KATZ: Okay. Thanks.
 182 

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1 (Whereupon, the above-entitled 

2 matter went off the record at 12:02 p.m. and 

3 resumed at 12:14 p.m.)

4 MR. KATZ: Okay. We are 

5 reconvening after a short break. We're going 

6 to try to wrap things up. I think we can do

7 it pretty quickly because Mark during the 

8 break looked at the TBD review responses and 

9 found that a lot of this has been discussed.

10 MR. ROLFES: Yes, I think we've 

11 been discussing these issues really as part of 

12 the SEC discussion that we had earlier.

13 Just to go through some of these, 

14 the first issue on the NIOSH responses to 

15 SC&A's review of the Weldon Spring Site 

16 Profile, we had discussed the lack -- well, 

17 SC&A found that there was a lack of 

18 environmental monitoring data for the 

19 operational period. We now have more robust 

20 perimeter data. And we've listed reports from 

21 which we got the environmental monitoring 
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1 data. I don't know if we need to discuss that 

2 any further.

3 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, not in terms 

4 of that. There's still the main issue of 

5 back-extrapolation using the plume model on 

6 the site. That's still something that needs 

7 to be talked about.

8 MR. ROLFES: Okay. All right. 

9 Let's see. Number 2, I think we have --

10 special data for unmonitored workers internal 

11 environmental dose. That's essentially 

12 addressed in number 1 as well.

13 And number 3, lack of validation 

14 for maximum environmental dose, we've once 

15 again pointed back to our response to item 1 

16 and have mentioned the additional 

17 environmental monitoring data from Weldon 

18 Spring Plant environmental monitoring reports.

19 Let's see. Now if we take a look 

20 at number 4, basically SC&A has identified 

21 that there's an incomplete assessment of 
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1 uranium decay products. And taking a look at 

2 what's presented here -- let's see -- I think 

3 if you look at the last paragraph of our 

4 response here, it says, NIOSH intends to 

5 revise the TBD to include contributions of 

6 thorium-230, -232 and decay products which are 

7 more important to internal dose. So this is 

8 something that we have agreed with you and 

9 have decided to update our Site Profile. And 

10 so that should be incorporated in the December 

11 revisions of Weldon Spring Site Profile.

12 DR. BUCHANAN: Question. I have a 

13 question on number 4, the last sentence there. 

14 It says, change will only be appropriate with 

15 intakes before initial processing.

16 MR. ROLFES: Yes. Okay. The 

17 initial processing of materials would separate 

18 the thorium from the uranium. So that's --

19 DR. BUCHANAN: At what point would 

20 that be? How are you going to determine that 

21 in dose reconstruction? If a person was 
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1 exposed to the whole chain or the purified 

2 chain?

3 MR. ROLFES: Well, usually if you 

4 actually take a look at the dose 

5 reconstruction methods that we use, if you 

6 are interpreting an individual's bioassay data 

7 for uranium, you convert that mass quantity 

8 into a specific -- into an activity that is 

9 excreted in a 24-hour time period. If you 

10 assume that all of that activity resulted from 

11 U-234 rather than all of the different 

12 isotopes that make up natural uranium, the 

13 dose is always going to be higher for the 

14 majority of the organs. I think there might 

15 be one or two organs where considering another 

16 issue, the internal dose could be slightly 

17 elevated.

18 But the bottom line is when you 

19 assume that all of the internal dose from 

20 uranium results from U-234 rather than a 

21 distribution of U-234, U-235, U-238, the U-234 
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1 internal dose is always going to be greater 

2 and more claimant-favorable. And that's the 

3 method that we use in dose reconstruction.

4 So I think that your concern about 

5 thorium-234, if we would evaluate thorium-234 

6 intakes, if we would look at the individual 

7 components -- the isotopic make-up of what the 

8 individual was exposed to -- the actual 

9 internal dose that we would calculate would 

10 likely be lower than what we would do in our

11 dose reconstructions now.

12 DR. BUCHANAN: Well, my question 

13 though is what do you mean by that last 

14 sentence. These changes will only be half of 

15 the intakes before initial processing. Can 

16 you explain what that sentence means?

17 MR. ROLFES: Well, I think I 

18 mentioned it would be the -- let me see, let 

19 me read through this entire -- so the ratios 

20 of thorium-230 versus the U-234, we would 

21 really only be concerned about the thorium-
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1 230.

2 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I mean what 

3 that sentence says is that after you would 

4 find it, then that stuff's gone. And that's 

5 what that sentence says. And your question is 

6 beginning new dose reconstruction, how do you 

7 know if this guy was exposed before or if it 

8 was afterwards.

9 So we'll have to take a look at 

10 what exactly is intended on that response. 

11 I'm having a little trouble following it 

12 myself.

13 DR. BUCHANAN: Okay.

14 DR. MAURO: This is John. I have 

15 a question.

16 Now we're dealing with 

17 concentrates where the material predominantly 

18 is the naturally occurring isotopes slightly 

19 enriched slightly enriched -- the two percent 

20 -- which would include the thorium-234 

21 protactinium, and of course uranium-234. But 
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1 you wouldn't have very much thorium-230 or 

2 radium-226, right?

3 DR. MAKHIJANI: No.

4 DR. MAURO: So I guess the 

5 question I have for Ron, are you concerned how 

6 they're going to deal with the internal doses 

7 to thorium-230 and radium-226? Or did the 

8 question go toward more the short-lived 

9 progeny of the 238?

10 DR. BUCHANAN: I'd have to go back 

11 and re-read the whole thing again. But I 

12 remember that the inhaled thorium-234 was not 

13 included from the decay of the material in the 

14 person's body itself.

15 DR. MAURO: Okay. Yes. When you 

16 do the internal dose from 238 -- this goes to 

17 IMBA, I guess -- I believe the thorium-234 

18 ingrowth and the protactinium, that's all part 

19 of it.

20 Well, I'm drawing a little bit of 

21 a blank now, but --
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1 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. Well, the 

2 response here is that what we wrote is that 

3 the protactinium-234 and the thorium-234 

4 intakes are small contributors to the dose. 

5 And as a routine practice, what we do at 

6 uranium intake, we assume all the uranium 

7 activity is thorium-234. Uranium-234. And so 

8 -- which gives you more dose per amount 

9 inhaled than uranium-238. And by doing that, 

10 you've covered essentially not only U-238 but 

11 also those intervenings short- and half-life 

12 daughters.

13 DR. MAURO: Yes. I would agree 

14 with you completely that --

15 MR. HINNEFELD: That's the first 

16 part of the response then.

17 DR. MAURO: Yes.

18 MR. HINNEFELD: The second part of 

19 the response gets into thorium-230 and 232 --

20 DR. MAURO: Okay.

21 MR. HINNEFELD: -- and their 
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1 presence in the concentrates.

2 And what we say in our response is 

3 that we're going to revise it to take those 

4 into account that those will only be 

5 applicable to intakes before initial 

6 processing. While that's technically true, as 

7 a practical matter, it's not clear that we'll 

8 know when we do a dose reconstruction whether 

9 somebody's exposure was to pre-refined or 

10 post-refined uranium. And so why even make 

11 the distinction? I mean, to me, it's not 

12 going to be a lot.

13 DR. MAKHIJANI: It's a small 

14 thing.

15 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. So I think 

16 we understand the whole thing. It's just 

17 we've got to clarify exactly where we're going 

18 with the response here.

19 I don't know that this response 

20 which has to do with the technical feasibility 

21 of doing dose reconstruction and the way that 
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1 you would theoretically do a dose 

2 reconstruction translates real well into how 

3 actually dose reconstruction is going to be 

4 done. So that's the thing we need to think 

5 about on our part of this response.

6 MR. ROLFES: All right. Looking 

7 on at issue 5, we discussed the radon 

8 exposure. I don't know if we need to discuss 

9 this any further. But we did discuss the 

10 method that we are coming up with. We 

11 discussed our radon source term and our 

12 assumptions for employee exposure. I think 

13 we've agreed that we would take a look at that 

14 again as well.

15 Let's see. If we move on to 6, 

16 the issue here was the different solubility 

17 classes listed for the same element. This is 

18 really a dose reconstruction issue.

19 And what NIOSH does when we 

20 complete a dose reconstruction, we would use 

21 the chemical solubility for the given nuclide 
 192 

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1 which resulted in the highest internal dose to 

2 the target organ in the dose reconstruction. 

3 So it's a matter of assumption that is 

4 claimant-favorable.

5 Should we move on?

6 Okay. Number 7, missed dose and 

7 co-worker data not adequately addressed. Our 

8 response here is that the TBD did not have a 

9 formal co-worker study in it. However, the 

10 urine data summarized in Tables V-8 through V11 17 may be used by dose reconstructors to 

12 estimate the doses if an employee's records 

13 are not available for a given time period.

14 And the data included part of the 

15 median and 95th percentiles.

16 DR. BUCHANAN: Yes. That kind of 

17 goes back to our original verification of data 

18 and stuff.

19 Now I did have a question on the 

20 MDA. It wasn't really clear on page 18 of TBD 

21 5 exactly how it was decided upon to use that 
 193 

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1 MDA value. Maybe that was page 18.

2 There were some discussions made 

3 on the bottom of page 17. And then it was 

4 said that the .008 milligrams per liter was 

5 derived from Rocky Flats and supported for use 

6 at Weldon Spring. And so, to me, that's not 

7 quite a lot of support for it. If we're going 

8 to use .008 milligrams per liter at Weldon 

9 Spring, is there any other way we could 

10 substantiate that rather than say well, we 

11 used it at Rocky Flats? That was the way I 

12 understood it. If there's a different work 

13 for that, if I could hear it --

14 MR. ROLFES: All right. Yes, we 

15 can certainly look at the MDA.

16 Let's see. Yes, we didn't address 

17 that I don't believe in our responses. But 

18 that's something we'll look at -- the limit of 

19 detection for the uranium bioassay. And we 

20 can take a look back and see if they reported 

21 any less than values for example.
 194 

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1 But the fluorometric method that 

2 was used; it was pretty common and we can 

3 probably come up with a good estimate based on 

4 other sites that were doing the same 

5 operations in the same time period.

6 DR. BUCHANAN: I would think as 

7 thorough as Mason was -- and he was there at 

8 that time -- that he would have said something 

9 somewhere about that detected limit because he 

10 was pretty thorough.

11 DR. MAKHIJANI: And this also 

12 brings up the Mason comment in the mid-70s. 

13 And I think you have that document. Ron, did 

14 you send that document to Mark? I think NIOSH 

15 has that document --

16 MR. KATZ: Yes.

17 DR. MAKHIJANI: -- where there was 

18 this objection that bioassay data was never 

19 meant to be used for dose reconstruction.

20 And this has come up before. And 

21 I think -- and I actually addressed this by 
 195 

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1 saying using new models and reinterpreting old 

2 data.

3 But the thing that was different 

4 that struck me about this memo -- just to call 

5 your attention to it -- was that it was 

6 written in the mid-70s when the methods were 

7 already more developed and as a retrospective 

8 on what happened at Mallinckrodt by Mason. 

9 And I think it's worth another re-look and a 

10 response -- well, since a petitioner has 

11 raised it.

12 MR. ROLFES: Okay. What was the 

13 issue? I'm sorry.

14 DR. MAKHIJANI: The issue was that 

15 bioassay data was never collected for dose 

16 reconstruction.

17 MR. ROLFES: Okay. Yes, I mean, 

18 just explain that I don't have the document in 

19 front of me at this moment. But I did look at 

20 it a couple weeks back. And I suspect that 

21 this issue is related to the unavailability of 
 196 

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1 the biokinetic models to --

2 DR. MAKHIJANI: Right.

3 MR. ROLFES: -- interpret bioassay 

4 data.

5 DR. MAKHIJANI: I agree. And I 

6 know that NIOSH has addressed this before. 

7 But since it came up explicitly from the 

8 petitioner -- and I guess I should have 

9 remembered to bring it up in our prior 

10 discussion -- but since we're discussing 

11 uranium right now, I remembered it and 

12 forgotten all morning. It might be worth just 

13 if you feel the same response is valid since 

14 this came up explicitly.

15 MR. ROLFES: Okay. Sure.

16 Shall we move on to 8? This is 

17 related to shallow and extremity doses. And 

18 let's see. I'm looking at the review of the 

19 -- I don't know if you want to introduce this, 

20 Ron, or not. But I think we've already 

21 touched on the geometrical correction factors 
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1 you had previously mentioned.

2 DR. BUCHANAN: Yes.

3 MR. ROLFES: We have no extremity 

4 monitoring data for the time period that 

5 Weldon Spring was operating. But then again 

6 we don't have any cases right now for 

7 individuals that were handling uranium that 

8 had a skin cancer, for example, on an 

9 extremity like for example their hand was the 

10 specific search that I had done, or their 

11 forearm. But we do agree that if a case comes 

12 up where we need a geometrical correction 

13 factor or an extremity, then we would 

14 certainly look at that issue.

15 As far as the other organs, you 

16 had mentioned the head or lower torso, for 

17 example. You'd have to take a look at the 

18 dosimeter position. And I think Stu had said 

19 that this was more of a generic issue that 

20 spanned multiple sites rather than one 

21 specific site.
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1 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. What we 

2 should do is take a look at the Mallinckrodt 

3 because I'm quite -- about the use of geometry 

4 models. We should take a look at that and see 

5 how we feel about that or something similar to 

6 that.

7 DR. MAKHIJANI: You might consider 

8 generalizing it.

9 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. Exactly. 

10 Right.

11 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, beyond the 

12 geometry question, the skin piece of that is 

13 less a geometry question. And the geometry 

14 question is that deep dose where the badge 

15 was, the organ.

16 The skin dose question is a little 

17 more difficult. I was telling Stu off line 

18 that it might be worth -- I mean, this has 

19 come up a number of times also. And it might 

20 be worth looking at the Bethlehem Steel 

21 discussions where this came up first in our 
 199 

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1 review process. There's quite a lot that was 

2 done. I mean, there's an item in the exposure 

3 matrix I just checked. I don't remember all 

4 of the discussion that led up to that item 

5 being in the exposure matrix. But I think 

6 with uranium -- and we've got to assume that 

7 uranium was handled at Weldon Spring because 

8 all of this was metal, right? And so people 

9 were handling it.

10 And so, even though you don't have 

11 wrist-to-ring dosimeters, you have to 

12 calculate it --

13 MR. ROLFES: Sure. I can work 

14 with -- but I'm not sure what the issue that 

15 you're --

16 MR. HINNEFELD: What he's saying 

17 right now is --

18 DR. MAKHIJANI: The literature 

19 available to you that you can refer to.

20 MR. HINNEFELD: The issue of what 

21 we were talking about working with uranium and 
 200 

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1 not having egress monitoring and what do you 

2 do in a situation like that has been addressed 

3 and apparently resolved in Bethlehem Steel is 

4 what he's saying.

5 MR. ROLFES: Oh, okay.

6 MR. HINNEFELD: So we can look at 

7 Bethlehem Steel for ideas on how to deal with 

8 it.

9 DR. MAKHIJANI: Just trying to be 

10 helpful.

11 MR. ROLFES: It's really the 

12 contamination --

13 MR. HINNEFELD: You were acting so 

14 out of character, we didn't recognize you.

15 (Laughter.)

16 DR. MAKHIJANI: It's totally in 

17 character. You just don't know my character.

18 MR. ROLFES: Just to make sure 

19 we're on the same page, you're relating your 

20 concern about skin contamination rather than 

21 the shallow dose from a direct radiation 
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1 source.

2 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. We should 

3 just go into Bethlehem Steel and see what it 

4 says. I think it would be helpful for the 

5 discussion.

6 DR. MAKHIJANI: It would. I was 

7 part of that discussion.

8 MR. ROLFES: Okay. Issue 9, we 

9 have the badging policy was not consistent. 

10 And let's see. I don't know if you want to 

11 introduce this, Ron. Yes, we have quite a 

12 large response.

13 DR. BUCHANAN: Yes, our main 

14 emphasis there is that yes, the operators were 

15 badged, and we know that. But there are 

16 people probably would have been badged today 

17 that weren't badged back in those days.

18 And so, my concern is that how is 

19 the dose reconstructor going to know whether 

20 to assign them environmental external dose or 

21 some form of operator dose. And this is 
 202 

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1 problematic in that if you look at the 

2 workers' records, they don't really say where 

3 they worked very explicitly as a function of 

4 time. They may be assigned to a certain 

5 department or a division or even a building. 

6 But that doesn't necessarily mean that the guy 

7 mowed the lawn or he stayed in that area. He 

8 could have been around any of this.

9 So as far as badging, not so much 

10 that the workers were badged as opposed to the 

11 other workers that weren't badged. How do we 

12 know they shouldn't have been badged in 

13 certain times and certain instances? And so 

14 how are we going to sort out the difference 

15 between people that should just receive 

16 environmental dose and those that should 

17 receive say 50 percent of the operator's dose 

18 or something?

19 MR. ROLFES: Again, that's 

20 certainly something that's important if an 

21 individual is monitored but appears to have 
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1 had a potential for exposure. We certainly 

2 would assign an unmonitored dose to that 

3 employee. However, if we had indication that 

4 that individual had never entered into a 

5 production area or an area where they were 

6 storing radioactive materials, I would think 

7 that the ambient exposures would certainly be 

8 the more appropriate.

9 Let's see.

10 DR. MAKHIJANI: Can I ask an 

11 information question? What fraction of the 

12 workers were routinely badged at Weldon 

13 Spring? Just order of magnitude.

14 DR. BUCHANAN: About half.

15 MR. ROLFES: I was going to pull 

16 up our evaluation report and give you an idea 

17 of the external monitoring data here. I know 

18 it's answered in there.

19 DR. MAKHIJANI: That's a lot less 

20 than at other sites --

21 DR. BUCHANAN: Yes.
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1 DR. MAKHIJANI: -- typically for 

2 the period.

3 DR. BUCHANAN: Right. The 

4 probable correct answer is about half.

5 MR. ROLFES: I'm hunting through 

6 the document at this --

7 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, I'll find 

8 out. It's fine. I have the answer I need.

9 DR. BUCHANAN: It wasn't the kind 

10 of -- where everybody walked through the cave 

11 that day.

12 DR. MAKHIJANI: Right.

13 MR. ROLFES: Right. I'm not 

14 seeing it. Did you want me to continue to 

15 look for it?

16 DR. MAKHIJANI: No, no. I can 

17 find it. I have the answer.

18 MR. ROLFES: Okay. Did we discuss 

19 that, or is there anything else that you 

20 needed clarification and/or a response on?

21 MR. HINNEFELD: For this one, 
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1 since it's such a long response, I would like 

2 SC&A to let us know if there are still 

3 questions after they've gone through the 

4 response.

5 MR. ROLFES: Sure.

6 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay?

7 DR. BUCHANAN: Yes. We haven't 

8 had time. I got this Friday.

9 MR. HINNEFELD: This one came out 

10 a little bit ago.

11 MR. ROLFES: Okay. And the final 

12 issue that we had in here is lack of 

13 sufficient co-worker data development for 

14 external dosage. It essentially is part of 

15 the previous question that was had.

16 DR. MAKHIJANI: That was the 

17 reason for my question. We established that.

18 MR. ROLFES: Okay. What we've 

19 identified in our evaluation report was that 

20 there were 8,000 external monitoring records 

21 in the CER database representing 1,850 
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1 employees during the period from 1957 through 

2 1967.

3 DR. MAKHIJANI: So the whole 

4 question of the CER database that we talked 

5 about in the morning becomes a lot more 

6 important.

7 MR. ROLFES: Okay. I think that 

8 covers the Site Profile Review matrix.

9 Is there anything else that we 

10 need to discuss?

11 DR. BUCHANAN: There were 28 

12 findings in Site Profile.

13 MR. ROLFES: Okay. I know that we 

14 didn't receive a matrix from SC&A. So for 

15 this meeting in advance of it, we prepared 

16 what we felt were the issues of concern. And 

17 so we tried to lump some of them into --

18 MR. HINNEFELD: Into those ten.

19 MR. ROLFES: Right.

20 (Laughter.)

21 MR. ROLFES: I know one of the 
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1 issues that wasn't included in this matrix was 

2 the recycled uranium issue. However, we did 

3 previously discuss that as part of the SEC 

4 evaluation.

5 So I don't know if there's other 

6 things that we did not address. If there's 

7 other issues that you've identified that we 

8 haven't really discussed or at least 

9 understood better, then we'd certainly --

10 DR. BUCHANAN: I haven't had time, 

11 of course. Like I say, I got this Friday at 

12 noon. I haven't had time to go back and look 

13 at this and see if it covers any update --

14 lumped them all in for --

15 MR. FITZGERALD: Maybe that's an 

16 action that we should take just to come back 

17 and look at later. You've listed the primary 

18 ones. Whether there's any others that you 

19 haven't set as primary.

20 MR. KATZ: Right. If there are, 

21 you can just add them to this document.
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1 DR. MAKHIJANI: Could I make a 

2 process suggestion that worked quite well at 

3 Hanford?

4 Since we have two matrices going 

5 on the same site that the issues that we think 

6 are SEC issues be at the top and the issues 

7 that are residual be in the same matrix. Then 

8 if we resolve SEC issues and agree that 

9 they're separate issues, then you can just 

10 note that and work from one matrix.

11 MR. FITZGERALD: Sort of avoid the 

12 duplication?

13 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes. And then we 

14 can go back to our Site Profile and kind of 

15 bend those 22 and make a reference to those 

16 findings in this new consolidated matrix. It 

17 might make it easier.

18 MR. KATZ: So does SC&A want to 

19 merge these matrices and make a spreadsheet?

20 DR. MAKHIJANI: It might be 

21 useful.
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1 MR. FITZGERALD: Yes, we'll draft 

2 them and bring them back a lot earlier before 

3 the next meeting. That way you can read it 

4 and see if you agree with it or not.

5 MR. HINNEFELD: Do you want to use 

6 the one that we assembled as a starting point? 

7 Or do you want to start with the 28 that you 

8 wrote and sort of match up what these may 

9 address or we should address?

10 Well, there are two reasons I ask 

11 that. You can use this one. Fine. But we 

12 should probably get you a Word version of it 

13 as opposed to a PDF version of it based on my 

14 experience.

15 Can we do that for him -- get a 

16 Word version of it?

17 MR. ROLFES: Yes. Certainly.

18 MR. FITZGERALD: If you want to 

19 just take a look and decide -- I'm not 

20 familiar enough with the 28.

21 MR. HINNEFELD: It's something to 
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1 think about going forward.

2 MR. FITZGERALD: -- which way you 

3 want to start.

4 DR. BUCHANAN: Well, if you'll 

5 send me a Word version of this, and what I'll 

6 do is I'll go in and I'll take our 28 issues 

7 and somehow put this in with that. These are 

8 the ones that we didn't answer.

9 MR. HINNEFELD: If for nothing 

10 else, send us the 28, and we'll cross out 

11 which ones we think are addressed in number 1 

12 response or something because we're the ones 

13 who did that. Or there may be some that are 

14 not responded to.

15 MR. KATZ: Well, going back to 

16 Arjun's suggestion too, I mean, I think 

17 obviously a lot of these will go into the SEC 

18 portion of it. So just that meld will go into 

19 the new matrix.

20 DR. BUCHANAN: I can redo the Site 

21 Profile issue with the SEC's up front --
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1 listed first, and then list the other 28 --

2 remaining 28.

3 MR. HINNEFELD: If they remain 28. 

4 DR. BUCHANAN: Yes. They'll be --

5 MR. HINNEFELD: Some of the 

6 findings for review may be considered SEC.

7 MR. ROLFES: Well, it made sense 

8 to merge them but that's what they've done and 

9 that makes the conversation simpler if they're 

10 merged.

11 But we're coming out with one 

12 matrix, not two.

13 DR. BUCHANAN: Okay. And once I 

14 do that, do you want me to send it to you and 

15 you say okay, I answered these in here? Or do 

16 you want me to take this and put it into my 

17 matrix and say this is for the answers --

18 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I'd kind of 

19 leave it to your discretion probably. And 

20 probably whatever works for you. You're 

21 assembling this matrix. Whatever works for 
 212 

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1 you whether you want to use the 28 original or 

2 the 10 that we feel like we kind of summarized 

3 the 28 into -- whichever works for you. If 

4 you use the 28, we'll take a look and we'll 

5 see which one we think -- the three --

6 MR. FITZGERALD: Yes, with the 

7 admonition I think if we can simplify it by 

8 consolidation, then it would make more sense 

9 to have fewer than that.

10 DR. BUCHANAN: If you'll send me 

11 and --

12 MR. HINNEFELD: I don't have a 

13 Word file of it.

14 MR. FITZGERALD: Yes, I have the 

15 Word file.

16 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay.

17 DR. MAKHIJANI: Maybe since you 

18 know which of the 28 were merged if you could 

19 indicate that to Ron, it would make the job a 

20 lot easier.

21 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. Can you do 
 213 

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1 that at this point, do you think?

2 MR. ROLFES: I'd certainly ask 

3 ORAU to do that since they're the ones that 

4 prepared this from the SC&A's review.

5 DR. BUCHANAN: If they merge some 

6 of them --

7 MR. HINNEFELD: Talk to -- make 

8 sure they don't an additional some sort of 

9 tasking --

10 MR. ROLFES: Right. There may 

11 have been something for example like the 

12 recycled uranium issue we discussed as an SEC 

13 issue that --

14 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay.

15 CHAIRMAN GIBSON: Okay. Do we 

16 want to hunt for a date now or do we want to 

17 at least get a time frame and how long is this 

18 going to take?

19 DR. MAKHIJANI: Seems like late 

20 January is --

21 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. It sounds 
 214 

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1 like at least the evaluation report revision 

2 will be available in late January.

3 I hate to make schedule 

4 predictions very precisely in these meetings 

5 because there are a lot of things that go into 

6 what happens on a schedule between now and 

7 January.

8 CHAIRMAN GIBSON: Well, couldn't 

9 you just plan on late January? If you guys 

10 just keep me in the loop be it email then 

11 maybe after the first of the year we can start 

12 tossing around some dates or something. Does 

13 that sound right?

14 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. I think for 

15 my purposes if I'm to be here, late January 

16 would be the preference rather than getting 

17 into February. I'm going to be on vacation 

18 for most of February until the Board meeting.

19 MR. KATZ: So why don't we just go 

20 ahead and grab a date for now? We can change 

21 it.
 215 

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1 MR. HINNEFELD: Sure. Can we make 

2 it tentative or something?

3 MR. KATZ: But why don't we pick a 

4 date while we can?

5 Like in the last week of January 

6 which in my look is clear.

7 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, I'm good that 

8 whole week.

9 MR. KATZ: Dick, are you still 

10 with us?

11 MEMBER LEMEN: Yes, I am.

12 MR. KATZ: So how's, for example, 

13 the middle of the week -- the 26th of January 

14 -- on your calendar?

15 MEMBER LEMEN: Twenty-sixth? I 

16 would prefer the 25th. The 26th is kind of 

17 heavy. But I can probably switch things 

18 around.

19 MR. KATZ: The 25th? That makes 

20 no difference.

21 MR. HINNEFELD: It makes no 
 216 

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1 difference to me.

2 Mark, you got a --

3 MR. ROLFES: The 25th? I don't 

4 believe I have any -- let me make sure. I'll 

5 be silent and let you know if I have a problem 

6 as soon as I can get back into my calendar 

7 here.

8 The 25th is Tuesday? That works 

9 for me.

10 MR. KATZ: Okay. Let's just set 

11 that as a tentative. Right now, we'll have 

12 that as a date. If we need to change it, 

13 we'll change it down the road.

14 MEMBER LEMEN: The 25th, right?

15 MR. KATZ: The 25th of January. 

16 And that would be another meeting here face to 

17 face.

18 DR. MAKHIJANI: I'll have to 

19 participate by phone probably. But that'll be 

20 just fine. I don't have a problem. That's 

21 fine. 
 217 

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1 CHAIRMAN GIBSON: Okay. And just 

2 one more thing before we close out.

3 If there's anyone on the line --

4 any claimants or petitioners that have any 

5 comments or questions about today's meeting or 

6 anything that we could potentially address in 

7 the future, we'd like to open the floor and 

8 hear from you now.

9 Any claimants or petitioners who 

10 would like to make a comment?

11 (No response.)

12 Okay.

13 MR. KATZ: Okay. Thank you, Mike.

14 MR. ROLFES: The one other thing, 

15 are we going to exchange emails about what 

16 we've agreed to do sometime in --

17 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. You should 

18 put together your patch-on list. You send it 

19 to Ted and the work group members and then the 

20 --

21 MR. KATZ: Right. SC&A will do 
 218 

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1 the same.

2 MR. HINNEFELD: And copy Emily.

3 MR. ROLFES: Okay. Great.

4 MR. KATZ: And we're adjourned?

5 CHAIRMAN GIBSON: Yes.

6 MR. KATZ: We're adjourned. 

7 Thanks.

8 (Whereupon, the above entitled9 matter went off the record at 12:47 p.m.)

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