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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 MOUND

+ + + + +

TUESDAY

JANUARY 5, 2010

+ + + + +

The Work Group convened in the 

Zurich Room of the Cincinnati Airport 

Marriott, 2395 Progress Drive, Hebron, 

Kentucky, at 9:30 a.m., Josie Beach, Chair, 

presiding.

MEMBERS PRESENT:

JOSIE BEACH, Chair

BRADLEY P. CLAWSON, Member

ROBERT W. PRESLEY, Member

PHILLIP SCHOFIELD, Member

PAUL L. ZIEMER, Member
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ALSO PRESENT:

TED KATZ, Designated Federal Official

NANCY ADAMS, NIOSH Contractor*

ISAF AL-NABULSI, DOE*

BOB ANIGSTEIN, SC&A*

TERRIE BARRIE, ANWAG*

BOB BISTLINE, SC&A

RON BUCHANAN, SC&A

MEL CHEW, ORAU Team

JOE FITZGERALD, SC&A

STU HINNEFELD, OCAS

EMILY HOWELL, HHS

KARIN JESSEN, ORAU Team

JENNY LIN, HHS

JOYCE LIPSZTEIN, SC&A

ARJUN MAKHIJANI, SC&A

DICK MADDING, Mound worker

JOHN MAURO, SC&A

ROBERT MORRIS, OCAS*

JIM NETON, OCAS

KATHY ROBERTSON-DeMERS, SC&A

WARREN SHEEHAN, Mound worker

DON STEWART, ORAU Team

BRANT ULSH, OCAS

LEW WADE, OCAS*

*Present via telephone
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C-O-N-T-E-N-T-S

PAGE

Roll Call ................................. 4

Neutron Dose Reconstruction, Issues 14

and 15, Dr. Brant Ulsh ............. 12

Stable Tritium Compounds, Issue 6 ....... 243

Radon, Issue 2 .......................... 330
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1 P-R-O-C-E-E-D-I-N-G-S

2 (9:30 a.m.)

3 MR. KATZ: Good morning, everyone 

4 in the room and on the phone. This is the 

5 Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health. 

6 This is the Mound Working Group and we are 

7 about to get started. 

8 As usual we begin with roll call, 

9 and as I do roll call, please address, for all 

10 of the government-related people, address 

11 whether you have a conflict of interest as 

12 well.

13 So beginning with Board members in 

14 the room.

15 CHAIR BEACH: Josie Beach, Mound 

16 Chair, no conflicts.

17 MEMBER CLAWSON: Brad Clawson, 

18 Work Group member, no conflicts.

19 MEMBER ZIEMER: Paul Ziemer, Work 

20 Group member, no conflicts.

21 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: Phil Schofield, 

22 Work Group member, no conflict.
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1 MEMBER PRESLEY: Robert Presley, 

2 Work Group member, no conflict.

3 MR. KATZ: And let me check on the 

4 lines. Are there any Board members attending 

5 on the line?

6 (No audible response.)

7 MR. KATZ: Okay. Then in the room 

8 next: the NIOSH ORAU team.

9 MR. HINNEFELD: Stu Hinnefeld, 

10 Interim Director --

11 MR. KATZ: No conflict?

12 MR. HINNEFELD: -- of OCAS, and 

13 yes, I have no conflict.

14 DR. NETON: Jim Neton, OCAS, no 

15 conflict at Mound.

16 DR. ULSH: Brant Ulsh of OCAS, no 

17 conflict at Mound.

18 MR. KATZ: And on the line, NIOSH 

19 ORAU team?

20 MR. MORRIS: Robert Morris, Oak 

21 Ridge Associated Universities Team, no 

22 conflict.
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1 MR. HINNEFELD: There are other 

2 ORAU Team members.

3 MR. KATZ: Oh, I'm sorry. I said 

4 in the room. Sorry.

5 MR. STEWART: Don Stewart, ORAU 

6 Team, no conflict with Mound.

7 MS. JESSEN: Karin Jessen, ORAU 

8 Team, no conflict with Mound.

9 MR. CHEW: Mel Chew, ORAU Team, no 

10 conflict with Mound.

11 MR. KATZ: Okay. Any other NIOSH 

12 or ORAU Team on the line?

13 (No audible response.)

14 MR. KATZ: Okay. SC&A in the room?

15 DR. MAURO: John Mauro, SC&A, no 

16 conflict.

17 DR. BISTLINE: Bob Bistline, SC&A, 

18 no conflict.

19 MR. FITZGERALD: Joe Fitzgerald, 

20 SC&A, no conflict.

21 DR. BUCHANAN: Ron Buchanan, SC&A, 

22 no conflict.
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1 DR. MAKHIJANI: Arjun Makhijani, 

2 SC&A, no conflict.

3 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: Kathy 

4 Robertson-DeMers, conflicted.

5 MR. KATZ: And on the telephone, 

6 any SC&A members?

7 DR. ANIGSTEIN: Bob Anigstein, 

8 SC&A, no conflict.

9 MR. KATZ: Okay, and then we have 

10 HHS or other government employees or 

11 contractors in the room.

12 MS. HOWELL: Emily Howell, HHS.

13 MS. LIN: Jenny Lin, HHS.

14 MR. KATZ: And on the line: HHS, 

15 other government employees or government 

16 contractors?

17 DR. WADE: Lew Wade, a contractor 

18 to NIOSH.

19 MS. ADAMS: Nancy Adams, a 

20 contractor with NIOSH.

21 MR. KATZ: That was Lew Wade, by 

22 the way, the first one.
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1 MS. AL-NABULSI: Isaf Al-Nabulsi, 

2 DOE, no conflict.

3 MR. KATZ: Okay, and then there 

4 are no members of the public in the room, but 

5 how about on the line? Any petitioners or 

6 other members of the public or staff of 

7 congressional offices who want to identify 

8 themselves?

9 MS. BARRIE: This is Terrie Barrie 

10 with ANWAG.

11 MR. KATZ: Welcome, Terrie.

12 MS. BARRIE: Good morning.

13 MR. KATZ: You did get the agenda, 

14 right, from me?

15 MS. BARRIE: No, the attachments 

16 didn't come through.

17 MR. KATZ: Let me try that again.

18 MS. BARRIE: Okay. Thanks.

19 MR. KATZ: Okay. Other members of 

20 the public?

21 MR. SHEEHAN: Can you hear me?

22 MR. KATZ: No, but now we can, 
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1 yes.

2 MR. SHEEHAN: You can hear me?

3 MR. KATZ: Yes.

4 MR. SHEEHAN: Warren Sheehan, Dick 

5 Madding. We're on the way. We should be 

6 there in about 20 minutes.

7 MR. KATZ: Okay. Warren, Sam and 

8 Dick Manning, is that what you said?

9 MR. SHEEHAN: Yes.

10 MR. KATZ: Warren Sheehan and Dick 

11 Madding.

12 MR. SHEEHAN: And we are ex-Mound 

13 employees. I guess that means we're 

14 conflicted.

15 MR. KATZ: Right. You're not 

16 conflicted because you're not in the same 

17 category.

18 Okay. That's it then. Josie, 

19 it's yours.

20 Let me just say to everyone on the 

21 line, then, please mute your phones. If you 

22 don't have a mute button, use *6, and when you 
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1 want to address the group, use *6 to come back 

2 off mute, and please do not put the call on 

3 hold. Just disconnect and call back in if you 

4 need to leave at some point.

5 Thank you.

6 MR. SHEEHAN: You say put it on 

7 mute?

8 MR. KATZ: Yes, please, put it on 

9 mute.

10 CHAIR BEACH: Okay. Thank you, 

11 Ted.

12 For the benefit of those on the 

13 line, who don't have an agenda. I'm just 

14 going to run through it very quickly. We're 

15 going to start off with neutron dose 

16 reconstruction with NIOSH this morning.

17 Breaks are at 11:00, 12:30, 2:30. 

18 We're going to go into radon after neutrons. 

19 Then we're going to go into stable tritium 

20 compounds. If we have time we will go into 

21 either high fired Pu-238. That is a change 

22 from the printed schedule, and save adequacy, 
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1 completeness, and internal dose records for 

2 tomorrow morning, I believe.

3 And once we're finished with those 

4 two, we'll go into road maps and the remaining 

5 closure items at the end of the day tomorrow:, 

6 beta/shallow dose, PAAA violations, and the 

7 D&D issue.

8 If -- unless that causes any kind 

9 of a conflict for anybody changing that data 

10 adequacy until tomorrow.

11 DR. ULSH: I'll have to check on 

12 the plutonium. It's not the data adequacy, 

13 it's plutonium-238.

14 CHAIR BEACH: It may be that 

15 they're both tomorrow. It just depends on how 

16 long neutron goes. One of our primary 

17 speakers is a little hoarse today and can't 

18 speak very well on the data adequacy. So 

19 that's the only reason for the change.

20 With that, thank you for everybody 

21 being here, and, Brant, if you're ready.

22 DR. ULSH: Sure.
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1 CHAIR BEACH: We can start 

2 neutrons.

3 DR. ULSH: The latest development 

4 on the neutron issue is that we issued a 

5 revision of our White Paper dated December 

6 9th. This is an ongoing -- probably the 

7 latest iteration in our discussions on this 

8 issue.

9 Basically just to recap, at Mound 

10 in the early days like most other places in 

11 the complex, neutron doses were measured with 

12 NTA film. As the technology evolved, they 

13 switched to thermoluminescent dosimetry. That 

14 occurred at Mound in the 70s like other places 

15 in the complex.

16 And our White Paper deals with a 

17 number of issues all related to neutron 

18 dosimetry and neutron dose reconstruction. 

19 Some of the fundamental issues are the 

20 adequacy of NTA film to measure neutron 

21 exposures that were experienced by workers. 

22 That's discussed in our White Paper. 
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1 The issue there in a nutshell is 

2 that in a moderated neutron spectrum like you 

3 might encounter in a workplace, a certain 

4 fraction of that spectrum falls below the 

5 energy threshold of the neutron film. So, in 

6 other words, if the neutrons are very low7 energy, they're not picked up by the neutron 

8 film.

9 We discussed that issue, and we 

10 talked about the correction factors that we 

11 make to NTA films to account for that 

12 phenomenon.

13 We also talk about the situation 

14 where, at least in the early days of the SM 

15 building, where you would find the highest 

16 neutron exposures on the Mound site, pretty 

17 much the people who were stationed in SM 

18 building were assigned both neutron and gamma 

19 dosimetry.

20 A problem comes in though when you 

21 have visitors to the SM building, and by 

22 visitors, let me define what I mean by that. 
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1 Those are people who are not visitors to the 

2 Mound site. They work at the Mound site, but 

3 not in SM building. So think of plumbers or 

4 pipe fitters who might have come up there to 

5 do a discrete, short-term job. That's what I 

6 mean when I talk about visitors to the SM 

7 building.

8 For those visitors, in the early 

9 days they were issued visitor badges, neutron 

10 and gamma. But unless the gamma read a 

11 certain level, in other words, if it was high 

12 enough, then they read the neutron film. But 

13 if the gamma measurement was below that, the 

14 NTA film was not read.

15 So we're left with the situation 

16 where we have to come up with a way to 

17 estimate unmonitored dose essentially for 

18 neutrons, and we have an approach put forward 

19 in our White Paper. It is different over 

20 different periods of time depending on what 

21 information we have.

22 In the early days, we rely on the 
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1 Health Physics Progress Reports, where they 

2 give the number of films that were measured in 

3 that particular time period, and these are 

4 mostly quarterly reports. So over the quarter 

5 they give the number of films that they read 

6 and what dose categories they fall into.

7 So, for instance, less than 100 

8 millirem, 100 to 150 millirem, and above that. 

9 So they give the number of films that fall 

10 into each category, and we have used that data 

11 to come up with a neutron coworker model, if 

12 you will.

13 The problem is, with those 

14 reports, is they are only published in the 

15 early days, up into 1960, and after that we 

16 don't have those reports anymore, so we have 

17 to come up with a different methodology. And 

18 we have looked at N/P ratios, which we've used 

19 at other sites, and we've also looked at 

20 modeling using the MCNP code.

21 And in the modeling, we've used 

22 Mound-specific parameters in terms of neutron 
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1 energy spectra, and we are also using modeling 

2 scenarios that are at least, we believe, 

3 reflective of the worst case, reasonable 

4 scenarios that you would find at Mound.

5 And we have discussed this with a 

6 number of former workers, and we've taken 

7 their input and incorporated that into our 

8 modeling approach as well.

9 So one of the issues, I believe, 

10 that we were still discussing the last time we 

11 discussed this issue, there were some gaps in 

12 our Health Physics Progress Reports in the 

13 early years. We have now filled those gaps. 

14 So we have a complete set of information up to 

15 the 1960s from the Health Physics Progress 

16 Reports, and that's reflected in the latest 

17 revision of our White Paper.

18 We also dealt with the issue of 

19 NTA film fading. That is particularly an 

20 issue when you have long exposure times. So, 

21 in other words, if I wear a badge, say, for a 

22 month, they did studies at Mound and other 
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1 places that demonstrated that, particularly 

2 low-energy photons, the signal on those NTA 

3 films tended to fade up until the time you 

4 develop the film.

5 And I have to take this 

6 opportunity to correct something that we said, 

7 I think, at one of our previous Working Group 

8 meetings. We said that the fading was an 

9 issue after the film was developed, and one of 

10 the people who is on the way explicitly 

11 corrected me on that, and he is correct and we 

12 were wrong. The fading occurs before the film 

13 is developed. Once the film is developed, the 

14 signal is set. So let me take this 

15 opportunity to correct that.

16 But we dealt with the fading 

17 issue. Mound had explicit studies on fading, 

18 and that's in our White Paper as well. So at 

19 this point, I guess, our White Paper is on the 

20 table, and we're open to discussing it.

21 CHAIR BEACH: Any questions? I'm 

22 assuming SC&A's ready for --
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1 MR. FITZGERALD: Yes, thank you. 

2 Joe Fitzgerald.

3 We did have an opportunity to 

4 review this latest White Paper as we did the 

5 one before that and, you know, in general, I 

6 think we raised some concerns at the last Work 

7 Group meeting that focused fundamentally in 

8 two areas. I think some of the issues that 

9 Brant mentioned regarding fading and 

10 completeness of the progress reports, I think, 

11 were, in fact, addressed and resolved.

12 However, I think we still want to 

13 go back to the two larger questions that we 

14 raised, one of which was the application of 

15 the MCNP, and I know at the time we had this 

16 discussion about whether the MCNP, in fact, 

17 incorporated site-specific information: 

18 something that would tie it back to the actual 

19 parameters, geometry, moderators, what have 

20 you, at Mound, something that we felt was 

21 important that that model be sufficiently 

22 accurate.
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1 And the other issue focused on --

2 that was the coworker approach, and some of 

3 the questions that Ron raised which you'll get 

4 into again is the year-to-year variability 

5 that was acknowledged in the paper, something 

6 on the order of 1 in 17. I think we were 

7 questioning that database, that the N/P ratios 

8 in the comparison were, in fact, valid.

9 But those are two central 

10 questions, and I think what we want to do is 

11 go ahead and start talking about the MCNP. 

12 That's where we kind of left off at the last 

13 meeting, questioning whether, I think we used 

14 the term generalized model could be applied 

15 with conservative parameters but without 

16 explicit workplace measurements that we could 

17 discern, and I think that's where I want to 

18 give the floor to Ron and perhaps Bob 

19 Anigstein as well.

20 Ron, do you want to start out?

21 DR. BUCHANAN: Okay. This is Ron 

22 Buchanan of SC&A.
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1 Before we get into the details, I 

2 know this is like Monday morning, and you want 

3 to hear about neutrons, and so I want to lay a 

4 little bit of background because it's 

5 different than if you're used to working with 

6 gamma and beta and alpha.

7 When the neutron -- you have two 

8 situations. You have a bare neutron source 

9 which gives off fairly energetic neutrons, and 

10 then when it passes through moderating 

11 material which contains hydrogen, such as 

12 polyethylene or water or plastics, you degrade 

13 that energy spectrum, and you say that's good. 

14 Okay. We had shielding. That's good for the 

15 worker.

16 That's true. It decreases the 

17 magnitude of dose, but it also softens the 

18 neutron spectrum, which means you get a larger 

19 portion of lower-energy neutrons. And so the 

20 problem that we're discussing here, the basic 

21 problem is that these lower energy neutrons 

22 then would fall below the threshold of the NTA 
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1 film.

2 And just so that you have 

3 something to hang your hat on here, NTA film 

4 is an emulsion, a photographic emulsion, and 

5 instead of just reading how dark it gets, you 

6 actually count little stars that the neutron 

7 interacts with the emulsion, count the number 

8 of proton stars created.

9 And at a certain point, the 

10 efficiency in creating these stars decreases, 

11 and this is about, agreed upon, about one MeV 

12 of neutron energy. You start getting a 

13 decrease in the efficiency of creating these 

14 stars or recognizable stars. These have to be 

15 counted under a microscope, and so if you look 

16 at the Los Alamos TBD-6, that gives a pretty 

17 good figure in there of the decrease in 

18 response as a function of energy, slow 1 MeV.

19 Now at some point it cuts off. 

20 The stars aren't recognizable by the reader, 

21 and this is up to debate. It varies between 

22 .5 and .7. It depends on how long it sets, 
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1 how good the reader is. Somewhere between .5 

2 and .7 MeV is the threshold where it just 

3 drops off a stair step and you can't read 

4 anything below that, and I say that to 

5 illustrate the fact that if you have a glove 

6 box, just a bare metal glove box or work 

7 station of some kind and you have a source 

8 inside that's just a bare source, whatever 

9 configuration it is in a stainless steel 

10 capsule, then the worker is exposed to mainly 

11 the full spectrum of that, I'll call it, bare 

12 source. That's one just in a stainless steel 

13 sealed capsule, all-neutron spectrum.

14 And so your NTA film is going to 

15 see most of those neutrons because they're 

16 around 2 to 4 MeV. However, when you put 

17 shielding there, polyethylene shielding, 

18 that's a good thing, and it decreases the 

19 amount of dose the worker receives, but it 

20 also softens the spectrum, and your NTA film 

21 won't pick it all up.

22 And so, say that you see half of 
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1 it and half of it you don't see. So if you 

2 know that's a constant variable, then you can 

3 multiply your results by two and come up with 

4 the right dose.

5 Now the problem comes in in that 

6 when the Health Physics Group calibrates an 

7 NTA film, they usually use a bare source out 

8 in the open and try to obtain a scatter-free 

9 environment, and they put an NTA film so many 

10 meters away, expose a certain amount of time, 

11 and get a calibration factor. But then when a 

12 worker wears that badge and it doesn't 

13 register some of the lower-energy neutrons, 

14 then his dose would be less than what he was 

15 exposed to actually because the calibration 

16 source had a few lower-energy neutrons and the 

17 worker was exposed to more lower-energy 

18 neutrons.

19 So in this case shielding would 

20 decrease a dose, but actually cause someone 

21 not to be registered, and this was found out. 

22 Mound used NTA film from 1949, 50, in that 
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1 area, up until 1977, and then they switched 

2 out to TLDs, thermoluminescent dosimeters, 

3 which has that better energy response for 

4 lower-energy neutrons.

5 Now during this time, the DOE 

6 complex in general and Mound also recognized 

7 this problem with the lower-energy neutrons in 

8 the mid to late 60s, and so they did some 

9 modification to the dose of record between 70 

10 and 76, and the records were multiplied by a 

11 factor of two to compensate for this. They 

12 felt that Mound used polonium, which is a 

13 high-energy neutron source from the beginning 

14 up to the 60-63 era, and so they felt that 

15 that didn't need adjusted because it was high 

16 energy.

17 And then they started using 

18 plutonium neutron sources in the 60s, and they 

19 got plutonium sources in in 59, but they 

20 really didn't do a large production of 

21 plutonium sources until the early 60s.

22 There was a transition period 
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1 between 60 and 65 in which they tried 

2 separating workers out and using one 

3 calibration factor for plutonium workers and 

4 one for the polonium workers, different 

5 calibration sources, and they said, well, 

6 polonium is going out. We'll just do 

7 everybody using the lower-energy plutonium 

8 sources in 1965.

9 And I say all of this because you 

10 have to consider that, yes, they did use one 

11 major source at one time and one major source 

12 of lower energy at a different time, and so 

13 the problem SC&A has and also NIOSH recognized 

14 is missed dose in the NTA film. The workers 

15 that worked with these sources do have dose of 

16 records in their files showing a certain dose, 

17 say, 100 millirem for exchange or 200, 

18 whatever it is, but we feel that this is low 

19 because this didn't record all of the dose.

20 So what NIOSH has done to propose 

21 to correct this is to go in and do some 

22 correction factors. In other words, you 
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1 multiply the recorded dose by certain 

2 correction factors to bring it up to where it 

3 should be, and one of these -- and I'll just 

4 get this off the table -- is the fading, is 

5 the fading as Brant said between time of 

6 exposure and development. The tracks kind of 

7 disappear. Temperature, humidity and time 

8 have an effect on it. So the reader doesn't 

9 see all of the tracks.

10 And so you can either compensate 

11 for that by some calibration factors. We 

12 really don't have an SEC issue with fading, 

13 perhaps a site profile issue, but not 

14 necessarily SEC issues.

15 NIOSH did do some additional 

16 correction factors in the revised paper for 

17 fading. This is one correction factor. The 

18 other correction factor is for the lower 

19 energy neutrons that were actually not 

20 registered, and this is the main issue.

21 And so what NIOSH did, they set up 

22 an MCNP, which is a Monte Carlo Neutron
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1 Transport Code, which is a generic code 

2 developed mainly at Los Alamos, used 

3 throughout the nuclear industry, and 

4 essentially what this does; it takes a bare 

5 neutron energy spectrum for our case, which I 

6 talked about earlier, and it says, how does 

7 the neutrons interact, each interaction, and 

8 then says what you get out the other side.

9 So if you put a certain amount of 

10 shielding there, certain geometry, then it 

11 says, okay, this is your neutron energy 

12 spectrum which the worker was exposed to.

13 And SC&A doesn't have a problem 

14 with using the MCNP or with -- retract that. 

15 SC&A does not have a problem with the MCNP 

16 model in that it has been used in many other 

17 places.

18 Now the input parameters to this 

19 model are mainly the bare neutron source, and 

20 SC&A does not have a problem particularly with 

21 the bare neutron source. These were pretty 

22 well characterized in most of the national 
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1 labs and universities: a polonium, beryllium 

2 or a plutonium to provide source is fairly 

3 well known, the energy spectrum on the input. 

4 That's your bare source.

5 The other input to the model is 

6 the configuration, the geometry. What 

7 material is between the bare source and the 

8 worker? So that affects the spectrum that the 

9 worker is exposed to. What's behind the 

10 worker? What's above, and what's below?

11 And so this is what the model was 

12 to do, was to take that information. NIOSH 

13 used zero, two, four, and six inches of 

14 polyethylene or water in this case, which is 

15 similar to polyethylene, shielding and 

16 determined the percent of neutrons missed 

17 below the -- they used a .5 ratio. SC&A would 

18 like to see it done between .5 and 1, but we 

19 have to agree that it's an acceptable method 

20 before it's worth doing that.

21 And so what they did is look at 

22 all of the scattered neutrons, and they did a 
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1 silo, concrete silo, put a source in a generic 

2 glove box with so many inches of water around 

3 it, and then the concrete scattered the 

4 neutron, and did it for an operator and an 

5 observer at certain distance and found out it 

6 ranged from 19 to 36 percent of the neutrons 

7 were missed. So you simply take a correction 

8 factor of 1.2 or 1.5, whatever it is, and 

9 multiply your reading by that.

10 And so that's -- and correct me if 

11 I'm saying anything wrong -- that's on NIOSH's 

12 modeling, and so what SC&A would have liked to

13 see was some sort of benchmark that now we say 

14 we have this spectrum outside of this glove 

15 box that the worker is exposed to. We would 

16 have liked to have seen that, yes, at some 

17 place in Mound history somebody did either 

18 Bonner spheres, which are different sized 

19 polyethylene balls with neutron detectors in 

20 it to get a neutron energy spectrum so we 

21 could verify that. A neutron activation 

22 analysis of foils to get a rough idea of the 
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1 spectrum, or a rem ball and an NTA film 

2 together to get a correspondence between 

3 those.

4 Neither NIOSH nor SC&A has really 

5 found good information on that at a work 

6 location, through the years at different 

7 locations and different operations at Mound, 

8 and so this is where SC&A -- we don't know if 

9 this model is conservative, under-conservative 

10 or about right because we don't have anything 

11 to benchmark it against.

12 Now the revised paper did come out 

13 with the one measurement that was made in 1966 

14 outside a glove box using a source inside with 

15 ten- and 12-inch spheres. This is not a real 

16 strong stake in the ground because you really 

17 need more than two spheres to get good energy 

18 measurements. You can get different neutron 

19 spectrum that would satisfy this criteria, and 

20 it was at one location in one building at one 

21 time. It wasn't any other information other 

22 than that one measuring point.
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1 Another issue that we are 

2 concerned with is that the modeling does an AP 

3 frontal exposure, and the NTA film has a 

4 different response depending on whether the 

5 neutron is coming right at it the way it's 

6 calibrated, from the side, zero degrees from 

7 the side right at it, and so NIOSH did propose 

8 a correction factor for AP exposure, frontal 

9 exposure, and if you have any issues with 

10 that, that is a site profile issue.

11 However, at these production 

12 facilities, usually you had rows of work 

13 stations or glove boxes. So you had PA, which 

14 is from-behind exposure, and the film badge 

15 worn on the chest of a worker, the neutrons 

16 that have passed through eight or ten inches 

17 of hydrogenous material before it was 

18 registered.

19 There has not been any studies --

20 MR. KATZ: I'm sorry to interrupt, 

21 but I'm not worried that we can hear in this 

22 room because I have the volume down, but there 
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1 are a number of people that don't have their 

2 phones on mute on the line, and you are 

3 probably causing trouble for other people on 

4 the line who are trying to listen.

5 Hello. There are some people 

6 talking on the line. Please mute your phones. 

7 Use *6 if you don't have a mute button.

8 Thank you.

9 I'm sorry, Ron.

10 DR. BUCHANAN: Okay. So if you 

11 have neutron irradiation from the back, then 

12 we don't know what correction factor needs to 

13 be added to that NTA reading, and we have 

14 not --

15 MR. MORRIS: Excuse me, Ted. This 

16 is Bob Morris. Could you ask Ron to back up 

17 about three minutes on this conversation?

18 (Laughter.)

19 MR. KATZ: I don't know if you 

20 have a rewind button.

21 DR. BUCHANAN: Okay. What was the 

22 last thing you heard?
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1 MR. MORRIS: I think it was when 

2 you were -- it was just before -- let me see 

3 if I've got this right. You didn't have any 

4 problems with our angular dependence. I think 

5 that's really when I couldn't --

6 DR. BUCHANAN: Okay, yes.

7 MR. KATZ: And this is who 

8 speaking? Sorry.

9 MR. MORRIS: It's Bob Morris.

10 MR. KATZ: Bob Morris. Thank you.

11 DR. BUCHANAN: Okay. So that's 

12 just a short period. That -- won't have any 

13 problem with that.

14 Okay. NIOSH did propose in the 

15 White Paper that the AP frontal irradiation 

16 had an adjustment factor for it, and so this 

17 was taken from some earlier work done by 

18 published authors, and if this is a problem, 

19 it's more of a site profile issue from frontal 

20 irradiation.

21 However, we're concerned at Mound, 

22 like Los Alamos perhaps, had rows of work 
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1 stations or glove boxes in which the worker 

2 was irradiated from the back side with 

3 neutrons from a station behind it, and so this 

4 would not compensate for the fact that the 

5 neutrons had to pass through eight or ten 

6 inches of hydrogenous material which would 

7 degrade the neutron energy and would not 

8 necessarily be registered by the NTA film.

9 And so there has not been any 

10 correction factor proposed for this, and we 

11 are not aware of any correction factors 

12 readily available in the published literature 

13 on this. There might be some. If there is, 

14 we'd be glad to hear about it.

15 And so in summary, there's two 

16 main issues here now, the modeling and the 

17 coworker model. So I'm going to summarize. 

18 The modeling issue is that we, again, don't 

19 have a problem with input bare source. We do 

20 have a problem in that the output from the 

21 modeling may be correct. It may not be 

22 correct. We don't have any benchmarks that we 
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1 can tie it to to say it is correct. So this 

2 is an objective decision on the Board whether 

3 they accept a model which could be 

4 conservative, it could be right on, or it 

5 could be under-conservative, which we can't 

6 really benchmark. SC&A can't, and we haven't 

7 found that it has been to this point 

8 sufficiently benchmarked.

9 Now this is for the modeling. Now 

10 the modeling also affects the coworker dose 

11 because if you're going to use the data from 

12 the coworkers that were batched, the dose of 

13 records and say, okay, we're going to apply 

14 this to the people that Brant talked about 

15 that were not badged for neutrons and should 

16 have been badged. Then you have to do the 

17 correction factor for that data also.

18 And that was done. NIOSH did 

19 apply the correction -- all the fading, the 

20 low-energy response and the angular dependency 

21 to the coworker data that was available, and 

22 then generated some coworker information.
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1 Now they did this in two parts, 

2 and Brant briefly explained it, but I will 

3 explain in a little more detail so that you 

4 can understand what the SC&A issues are with 

5 it. There's two sets of data that they 

6 generated. From 1949 to 1977, in Table 4-4, 

7 there is the year listed and N, which is the 

8 number of paired neutron/photon badge readings 

9 they have, and then they have the N/P ratio 

10 that they derived from that. N/P ratios are 

11 usually used when you do not have neutron data 

12 or reliable neutron data, and what that means 

13 is that you take the photon dose; you multiply 

14 it by a factor, say, two, and that is the 

15 neutron dose you assign for that dose 

16 reconstruction.

17 Now this is usually used, such as 

18 Rocky Flats, when you had a period of time, 

19 say, from 1960 to 1980. You didn't have 

20 reliable neutron data, but from 1980 to 1990, 

21 you had reliable neutron data because you 

22 started using TLDs or some good method of 
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1 dosimetry. So you take the neutron reading 

2 average, photon reading. You get a ratio of, 

3 say, two, and then you apply that back to the 

4 workers in the earlier periods when you didn't 

5 have neutron information, but you had photon 

6 information.

7 Photon badges are usually fairly 

8 reliable, and so if a person got 100 millirem 

9 of gamma dose, photon, then you'd multiply 

10 that by two and assign him 200 millirem of 

11 neutron dose.

12 Now this is what is done in Table 

13 4-4, page 21 of the -- no, that was the 

14 earlier issue. Anyway, it's Table 4-4.

15 DR. ULSH: You're correct. It's 

16 page 21.

17 DR. BUCHANAN: It's still page 21. 

18 Okay.

19 And so this gives you the 50th 

20 percentile and the 95th percentile of the N/P 

21 ratio. Now I understand NIOSH means this to 

22 be a bounding upper estimate of the neutron 
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1 dose, and they prefer to use another method 

2 from 1950 to 1960, which is in Figure 6.2, and 

3 the new one has all of the constant quarters 

4 filled in. This is from the HP Monthly 

5 Reports.

6 And so they adjust. What happens 

7 here is the HP Monthly Report only gave the 

8 number of badges that fell within a dose 

9 interval. Zero to 100 millirem, 100 to 200, 

10 greater than 300 millirem. So you may have 

11 had 40 in one, two in another, and none in 

12 another or something. And so they applied the 

13 adjustment factor to it, and then the 

14 adjustment factors to it, and then came out 

15 with a median and a 95th percentile dose.

16 I guess SC&A's question on looking 

17 at this, it recently dawned on me, why did we 

18 use this method when we had all of the NTA 

19 film data available. Usually NTA N/P is used 

20 only when you don't have data available, like 

21 for 1954, we had 32 NTA films available. Why 

22 don't we just make a table of coworker data 
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1 like we do photons? If we want to do photons, 

2 we would just take the badge readings, make a 

3 table, and assign that per year.

4 So Table 4.4 and Table 6.2, I 

5 think it's unnecessary. Why don't we just 

6 take the NTA data and assign it as coworker 

7 with the adjustment factors and such and see 

8 how that looks from a statistical basis 

9 because SC&A feels that the Table 4.4 has too 

10 much variance between years to be valid.

11 Now we have not seen this data. I 

12 could not find it on the O: drive that was 

13 used to create Table 4.4. So we couldn't do 

14 any statistical analysis on it, but now I 

15 understand the White Paper to say that it is 

16 correlated, and it appears perhaps to be 

17 correlated within a year in that your GSD is 

18 not large for each year, we have very much 

19 concern about from year to year for a factory20 type operation, assembly line-type operation, 

21 which should be fairly -- you've got 

22 fluctuation as operations change, shielding 
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1 changes and stuff, but we do have a problem 

2 with going like from 1957, we go from 4.9 to 

3 11.9 in 58, and we have a range of .6 to 18.6.

4 And so we have a problem with that 

5 fluctuation. On the 1950 to 1960, the 

6 intervals information, you don't have exact 

7 data. You don't have real worker data per 

8 worker. You only have a number of badges in a 

9 certain range, and we feel that this is kind 

10 of a hazy area. Is this acceptable or not? 

11 And that may be another subjective decision 

12 like the modeling is, and we'd like to see 

13 what it looked like if we just used the NTA 

14 film badge data with correction factors for 

15 the coworker.

16 So this, issues of the -- that I 

17 just talked about, is the areas that we have 

18 concern whether dose reconstruction can be 

19 done. Number one, they're modeling 

20 benchmarks, and then we have a lot of 

21 correction factors on top of each other, and 

22 it spills over into the coworker dose, and so 
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1 we feel that there remains questions that some 

2 are site profile issues, as I alluded to, but 

3 some, I think, affect the feasibility of doing 

4 reasonable dose reconstruction with neutron 

5 data.

6 Any questions?

7 CHAIR BEACH: Thank you.

8 DR. ULSH: Paul, do you have one?

9 MEMBER ZIEMER: I just had one 

10 question for clarification. On the one 

11 measurement you mentioned, which looked like 

12 an attempt to benchmark or you said perhaps 

13 could be used for benchmarking with a two14 sphere Bonner system, did NIOSH actually do 

15 what Ron talked about with that set of 

16 readings?

17 I mean, you can always argue that, 

18 yes, it would be great to have three Bonner 

19 balls that are four or five and came down the 

20 spectrum, but do we have a rough benchmark? 

21 That's what I'm trying to get a feel for when 

22 you referred to that one set of measurements.
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1 DR. BUCHANAN: In that particular 

2 instance in 1966 with that glove box in that 

3 location. Now, I don't know any of the 

4 others. I tried to find that reference and 

5 could not find that number in the site 

6 research database.

7 DR. ULSH: Do you recall which 

8 reference you're referring to? I know that's 

9 a tall order.

10 DR. BUCHANAN: Yes. It's 76610. 

11 It's what's listed in the White Paper.

12 DR. ULSH: Seven, six, six, one, 

13 oh, is that the SRDB number?

14 DR. BUCHANAN: Yes, the SRDB 

15 reference, ID 76610.

16 DR. ULSH: Okay.

17 DR. BUCHANAN: And I couldn't find 

18 it. I asked Joe to alert somebody, but it 

19 wasn't time over the holidays.

20 Okay. To answer your question, I 

21 don't know the details of the experiment. 

22 Okay? But it would only apply to that one 
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1 particular --

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right, but it 

3 would seem to me that they must have had a lot 

4 of Bonner sphere measurements around the 

5 facility. Do we know that?

6 DR. BUCHANAN: No.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: They didn't? I 

8 mean, they have the equipment.

9 DR. BUCHANAN: I don't know if 

10 they had PNL come in to do all of their 

11 measurements or not. I have not found it in 

12 the literature. I mean, this is the problem. 

13 We cannot find --

14 MEMBER ZIEMER: That's the only 

15 one we know of?

16 DR. BUCHANAN: -- spectrum. 

17 That's the only one.

18 DR. ULSH: Hold on.

19 DR. BUCHANAN: I mean that I'm 

20 aware of. Maybe Brant has others. 

21 DR. ULSH: Bob, do you have 

22 anything to add now? I want to make sure that 
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1 you have a chance to chime in, but do you have 

2 anything to add on that particular issue?

3 DR. ANIGSTEIN: Are you referring 

4 to me, Bob Anigstein?

5 DR. ULSH: No, sorry. Bob Morris.

6 MR. MORRIS: First of all, going 

7 backwards on the Bonner sphere question, 

8 [identifying information redacted] did many 

9 Bonner sphere measurements. They were always 

10 -- and in fact, as we understand it from the 

11 public meetings, every source that was shipped 

12 from Mound was measured with a set of Bonner 

13 spheres after a certain date when those became 

14 in common use. They measured the spectra 

15 width before it was shipped out.

16 Now, the problem with that is that 

17 it's only going to be in the bare 

18 configuration as they set up for that kind of 

19 routine quality measurement on their finished 

20 product. 

21 So there were many, many Bonner 

22 sphere settings -- energy measurements made, 
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1 but do they represent the situation we're 

2 modeling here, and the answer to that is no. 

3 We don't have that recurring measurement in 

4 the workplace.

5 But with regard to benchmarks in 

6 general, MCNP has been benchmarked and 

7 published in peer-reviewed literature over and 

8 over and over again. The question is not, can 

9 MCNP reproducibly predict a neutron dose 

10 given a certain input energy and a certain 

11 shielding configuration. The answer to that 

12 is, yes, that's been proven dozens and dozens 

13 of times.

14 The question is do you agree with 

15 the input assumptions about the shielding 

16 configuration. If you can say, yes, four 

17 inches of water is a reasonable assumption 

18 about the amount of shielding, concrete below 

19 the people's feet, concrete above the people's 

20 heads, concrete as wall material, that's 

21 reasonable assumptions. If you can come up 

22 with those to the point that you agree with 
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1 those assumptions, then there's not much doubt 

2 about the outcome being appropriately 

3 predictive of what happened in real life.

4 DR. ULSH: I would also add that 

5 the particular configuration that we modeled, 

6 as Ron described earlier, was kind of a 

7 generic glove box inside of a concrete silo. 

8 Now if you were to go back in time and look 

9 for a concrete silo at Mound, I don't think 

10 you would find that that's a representative 

11 scenario, and we're not presenting that it is.

12 Rather, we picked that scenario 

13 because it's bounding. It's going to be the 

14 worst case that's reasonably consistent with 

15 Mound. In other words, the fact that we 

16 assumed concrete walls and a concrete -- well, 

17 a concrete floor might be reasonable, but 

18 concrete walls and ceilings, I don't think 

19 that that's necessarily representative of 

20 Mound, but doing that is claimant-favorable 

21 because it increases the scatter. It 

22 increases below the fraction of the neutrons 
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1 that are below the energy threshold.

2 So that's why we picked that to be 

3 a bounding assumption, rather than get into 

4 issues about how many glove boxes were in the 

5 line and how far behind the worker was the 

6 glove box line.

7 Ron, you're right. I mean, in 

8 terms of glove boxes being in a line and 

9 getting some neutron dose from the rear, from 

10 the AP -- no, PA geometry, but I would also 

remind you of the 1/r2 11 rule where basically 

12 the dose decreases as the square of the 

13 distance. So I can't tell you that the 

14 contribution is zero, but it's very, very low.

15 You know, I think that to say that 

16 we don't have benchmarks at Mound, you know, 

17 Mound-specific benchmarks, I don't think is 

18 true exactly. We did have the meeting with 

19 the former workers, and we did run all of this 

20 by them. Now, I don't want to present to you 

21 that this is their model. It's not. This is 

22 our model, but we asked them to point out 
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1 anything that might be unreasonable in what 

2 we're suggesting, and it was a multi-hour 

3 meeting and we had a lot of discussions and a 

4 lot of suggestions which we at least attempted 

5 to incorporate here.

6 We talked to some of the members 

7 of the public about when the shielding was put 

8 in, how much shielding was used, and they 

9 pointed out that there is a limit on how much 

10 shielding you can actually incorporate because 

11 you still have to be able to reach through it 

12 and do the work inside the glove box. So we 

13 incorporated that in how much shielding we 

14 assumed. That, you know, in a way is Mound15 specific. We talked to Mound workers. We got 

16 their input on how much shielding was used at 

17 Mound and that's reflected in what we've done 

18 here.

19 Also, I'm pretty sure that this is 

20 in the SRDB, though I don't have a number. 

21 Just to give you an example -- is it okay for 

22 me to say authors' names or is that -- yes, 
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1 okay.

2 We have neutron energy surveys of 

3 SM building. The one that I'm looking at 

4 right now is dated March 2nd, 1964, where a 

5 guy named [identifying information redacted]

6 used the TMC double-moderated neutron counter 

7 to determine neutron energies in SM building 

8 and presents a table with one, two, three 

9 different rooms, different hoods, what 

10 material was inside, what the ratio was, what 

11 the energy in terms of MeV was.

12 So certainly, I mean, there are a 

13 handful of neutron dosimetry experts across 

14 the complex, and I don't mean this to be an 

15 all-inclusive list. People like [identifying 

16 information redacted], Roger Falk, and 

17 [identifying information redacted] is 

18 certainly among that number in terms of the 

19 foremost neutron energy experts in the 

20 country, and it would be extremely surprising

21 to me if this issue was not -- they weren't 

22 aware of this issue; they didn't take steps to 
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1 address this issue.

2 We have examples, although I don't 

3 want to say a complete set, that they actually 

4 did do neutron energy surveys in SM building 

5 and, you know, one can assume multiple other 

6 buildings as well.

7 And I would also point out to you 

8 if you look at page 41 of our White Paper, you 

9 will see a series of graphs that give the 

10 dose-equivalent weighted spectra at the 

11 different positions from our modeling, and the 

12 important point, I think, to make here, what 

13 you're going to see is a series of curves, and 

14 the dose equivalent. In other words, when 

15 you're trying to calculate millirem or 

16 millisieverts neutron dose to a particular 

17 person, that would be the area under the 

18 curves here, and I know that the people on the 

19 phone may not have this at their fingertips, 

20 but if you look at the lower energies, and I'm 

21 talking about .1 MeV, in particular, the part 

22 of the neutron spectrum that is not reliably 
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1 measured by the NTA film also happens to 

2 coincide with the part of the neutron energy 

3 spectrum that contributes a trivial amount to 

4 the dose equivalent.

5 So I think we've got a tempest in 

6 a teapot here. We're splitting hairs on a 

7 fraction of the energy spectrum that is almost 

8 negligible in terms of what it contributes in 

9 terms of dose equivalent. So even if we 

10 didn't measure any of it, I think it's a 

11 trivial contribution to the total neutron dose 

12 equivalent and that's what we're interested in 

13 here. So I don't think that that's a big 

14 issue.

15 In terms of the coworker model, I 

16 don't know. It's the first time that I've 

17 heard that idea, Ron, about why don't we just 

18 use the NTA films themselves.

19 MR. MORRIS: Brant, before you go 

20 into that, can I chirp in one?

21 DR. ULSH: Yes, sure, jump right 

22 in.
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1 MR. MORRIS: The other thing I'd 

2 point out is that the tables of 7-3 and 7-4 

3 which showed the neutron dose equivalent 

4 missed due to the NTA film energy threshold 

5 effect, they effectively define a sensitivity 

6 study so that you can say, well, you know, I 

7 don't think two inches of water is the right 

8 amount. I don't think -- I think six inches 

9 may be too much. It may be three, perhaps.

10 And what these tables will 

11 actually show you is what your eye will 

12 interpolate between them, and you can see that 

13 you can effectively define the most important 

14 parameter here, which is the water shielding 

15 thickness in the amount of missed dose and 

16 understand, well, what if my assumption was 

17 completely wrong.

18 Well, in the case of a plutonium19 beryllium source, if you assumed two inches of 

20 water shielding, you might miss nine percent 

21 of the dose, and if you assume six inches of 

22 water shielding, you might miss 11 percent of 
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1 the dose.

2 So you can see that it effectively 

3 will help you understand how important these 

4 assumptions are to the overall conclusion. So 

5 whether or not we've got a ground true 

6 benchmark in a specific location, it still 

7 gives you this ability to understand the 

8 importance of the various assumptions that go 

9 into especially the shielding thickness 

10 assumptions that go into the model.

11 DR. ANIGSTEIN: This is Bob 

12 Anigstein. I'd like to chime in with a couple 

13 of comments.

14 One is, again, this Table 7-3 

15 makes the assumption that there is a sharp 

16 cutoff at .5 MeV and that everything above .5 

17 is registered by the NTA film, and that is 

18 just not correct. The fact is that there is a 

19 gray area that, between .5 and one, some 

20 neutrons are registered, some aren't.

21 I point out that in the Hanford 

22 TBD, there was an examination and actually 
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1 they referred to, I think, a meeting or 

2 symposium sponsored by AEC in the late 1960s 

3 where they said that the NTA film cannot be 

4 used below 700 keV or .7 MeV, and this is not 

5 consistent with what is being done here.

6 DR. ULSH: Well, I haven't seen 

7 the particular reference. At least I don't 

8 have enough information to determine whether 

9 or not I've seen the reference that you're 

10 talking about, Bob. I would say to you that 

11 NTA film is always used when neutron energy 

12 spectrums -- I'm sorry. Let me rephrase.

13 During the time period when NTA 

14 film was the methodology used to measure 

15 neutron dose, it was always used in the 

16 presence of low-energy neutrons because you 

17 always have low-energy neutrons. Unless we're 

18 talking about a bare californium source or, 

19 you know, a particular bare source, I think 

20 part of that spectrum is always going to be 

21 below the NTA threshold.

22 I do agree with you that there is 
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1 not a sharp cutoff at .5 MeV. There's a 

2 reduced efficiency above that and, Bob Morris, 

3 sorry, you may want to talk a little bit about 

4 that, but --

5 MR. MORRIS: Sure. The reason we 

6 chose .5 MeV is because that's the OCAS 

7 Implementation Guide. I think that's what the 

8 title of the document is. It tells us to 

9 assume .5 MeV, and so that's what we did in 

10 this case.

11 But I actually ran the 

12 calculations with a .7 MeV energy cutoff, and 

13 they're not incorporated into this White 

14 Paper, but as you would guess, the numbers go 

15 up in terms of missed dose, but they don't go 

16 up precipitously. They're not a big change.

17 We could certainly provide that 

18 information. It wouldn't be a big deal for us 

19 to add those tables into the White Paper, but 

20 it really comes back down to those are TBD 

21 questions. They're not SEC questions. I 

22 mean, whether the correction factor is 31 
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1 percent at its worst for the operator location 

2 or whether it's 39 percent at its worst for 

3 the operator location, it's still a 

4 reproducible number in terms of our 

5 calculating.

6 DR. ANIGSTEIN: And the other 

7 issue which was talked about but not focused 

8 on is the variability from year to year of the 

9 N/P ratio and then the grade variability 

10 within a given year. There was this box-and11 whisker plot which shows that actually at the 

12 extremes the ratio can go within a given year 

13 -- can be as low as one and as high as 33, and 

14 then the fact that the instrumental comparison 

15 showed no correlation, you had five-by-five 

16 survey meters measuring photons and neutrons, 

17 and there was no correlation whatsoever. I 

18 mean, the .15 correlation coefficient, which 

19 we all agree shows a very poor correlation, 

20 calls into question the whole concept of using 

21 the N/P ratio for Mound.

22 DR. ULSH: I kind of disagree with 
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1 that, I think, because when you're talking 

2 about instrument calibrations, of course, 

3 you're measuring a particular point in space, 

4 a particular time, and you're measuring 

5 neutron dose and gamma dose at that particular 

6 point.

7 Well, that will correlate, you 

8 know, assuming that the dosimetry is 

9 effective; that will correlate perfectly if a 

10 particular worker stands at that point in time 

11 100 percent of the time, and as we know that's 

12 not realistic. Workers move around. So 

13 they'll move away from the neutron source. 

14 They'll get gamma dose somewhere else. That's 

15 going to lead to a poor correlation perhaps 

16 between what you might estimate from a neutron 

17 instrument reading, instrument readings taken 

18 at a particular point and what was actually 

19 experienced by at least the dosimeter worn by 

20 the worker.

21 I do agree with you that there are 

22 some years on the box-and-whisker plot, and by 
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1 the way, that's Figure 4-2 on page 20, where 

2 there is, well, the variability that you have 

3 described, but I think we have captured that 

4 variability in Table 4-4.

5 So, yes, I mean, if there is great 

6 variability, what's the effect of that? Well, 

7 it leads to high estimates of the 95th 

8 percentile that's bounding. I mean, that's 

9 claimant-favorable. 

10 It's not claimant-favorable?

11 DR. ANIGSTEIN: The instructions 

12 to the dose reconstructor in the White Paper, 

13 maybe they're a little vague, but they don't 

14 say to give everyone the 95th percentile. My 

15 impression is that it implies you can just 

16 assign the entire distribution, which in fact 

17 is similar to giving the median value rather 

18 than the 100 percent. 

19 It is specifically on page 49, the 

20 second bullet. It says, when using the NTA, 

21 shall multiply the measured photon dose by the 

22 log-normal distribution, not by the 95th 
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1 percentile. Ninety-fifth percentile is 

2 certainly more claimant-favorable than just 

3 throwing in the entire distribution because 

4 with that particular person you don't know 

5 where you would be on the distribution. You 

6 may very well be at the high end. We don't 

7 know.

8 DR. NETON: We have to think about 

9 this, though. I'm not as familiar as I 

10 probably should be with this calculation, but 

11 would that distribution be multiplied by the 

12 photon dose that included all of the missed 

13 dose?

14 DR. ULSH: Yes.

15 DR. NETON: I think that's where 

16 you run into a little bit of a problem. If 

17 you start calculating missed dose that wasn't 

18 measured and you get this inflated value and 

19 then you start multiplying that inflated value 

20 and a 95th percentile, you start to get into, 

21 I think, some unreasonable values.

22 We've run into this before with 
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1 the NPE corrections in the past.

2 DR. ULSH: But you also have to 

3 keep in mind who this methodology is going to 

4 be applied to. If a person was measured by 

5 NTA film, that's what we're going to use. The 

6 people who this would be applied to is the 

7 people who were not measured with NTA film, 

8 and those people are, for instance, visitors 

9 to SM building that came in for a short period 

10 of time and their gamma badge read below the 

11 threshold that would trigger them to read the 

12 NTA film.

13 So I would say to you that it is 

14 reasonable to assume that these are low 

15 exposed workers.

16 DR. MAKHIJANI: Could I ask a 

17 question about that? A little bit of an 

18 observer. First of all, these ranges from the 

19 Health Physics Report, zero to 100, 100 to 

20 200, they're not measurements for the type of 

21 worker you're talking about, say, a 

22 construction worker. They're measurements for 
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1 workers who were badged and whose badges were 

2 read and the ranges were put. So we don't 

3 actually have measurements for them. We're 

4 assuming that what was experienced by those 

5 workers is similar to what was experienced by 

6 glove-box workers, but I'm not sure. It's a 

7 question.

8 Is that what we're doing?

9 DR. ULSH: If you look at Figure 

10 6-1 on page 22, it gives an example of an 

11 excerpt from the Health Physics Progress 

12 Report, and it's typical of what you see, and 

13 it has got a section for film meters, beta and 

14 gamma, and it has got regular and visitor, and 

15 then for neutrons, it gives, the particular 

16 example here, it gives the number of films 

17 processed, 818, regular and visitor, number of 

18 readings, zero to 100 millirem, 100 to 300 

19 millirem, and over 300 millirem, and what it 

20 shows you is -- so the regular and the visitor 

21 are included here.

22 DR. MAKHIJANI: But from what 
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1 you've said earlier, the reason for the 

2 question is from what you said earlier is when 

3 visitors were there, say, for a day or a week, 

4 and then they did their job and they didn't 

5 come back for another six months, in that 

6 week, if they didn't get a measurable photon 

7 dose, their neutron dose was not read, right?

8 DR. ULSH: Correct.

9 DR. MAKHIJANI: And so how do you 

10 know whether any visitors are represented in 

11 this or whether their badges were read in such 

12 a scattered way that -- how do you establish 

13 the relationship between the N/P ratios for 

14 the people you're talking about and the N/P 

15 ratios for whom you actually have data?

16 DR. ULSH: Well, I think the N/P 

17 ratios were calculated based on the type of 

18 information that you see here, which includes 

19 both regular and visitor. I don't think that 

20 we have the ability to separate out the 

21 visitors as a discrete group if that's what 

22 you're asking.
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1 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes, and I'll tell 

2 you the reason I'm asking so I'm not being 

3 mysterious here. I'm working on Savannah 

4 River Site construction worker data with our 

5 team, and we're compiling these, and we not 

6 only see some cases, not all, some cases where 

7 construction workers are more exposed or at 

8 least have the higher bioassay results in this 

9 case, and not compiling neutron data, in some 

10 circumstances than sort of process workers, 

11 even though they may not have been on the job 

12 in a similar pattern.

13 We also see maybe there might be 

14 different distributions. It's so -- I'm just 

15 bringing up the issue in this context because 

16 we've seen something kind of important emerge 

17 in another context. So I give you a little 

18 preview of what's happening.

19 DR. BUCHANAN: I would like to 

20 clarify something. Okay? Now, the Table 6-1 

21 and 6-2 is NTA film readings. These are not 

22 N/P ratios. Table 4-4 is N/P ratios. The 49 
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1 to 77 is N/P ratio calculated from NTA film. 

2 Table 6-1 and 6-2 is actually readings, not 

3 direct readings, but intervals, dose intervals 

4 from NTA film readings. It is not an N/P 

5 ratio methodology.

6 DR. MAURO: I would like to jump 

7 in a little bit. It seems that the rock 

8 you're standing on is the sense that you could 

9 place an upper bound on what the adjustment 

10 factor needs to be to the NTA film. In other 

11 words, you've got a lot of film badge readings 

12 for workers that work with the glove box. You 

13 are getting information back. There are 

14 tracks that could be counted. You have lots 

15 of information, what that looks like when it's 

16 bald or naked source. We all understand that, 

17 but that has very little relevance. That's 

18 more of a quality check that the product you 

19 brought in is the thing you think it is.

20 And then you put this source in a 

21 glove box, and here's where I have been 

22 thinking a lot about this and we've been 
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1 talking a lot about this. Here's here I start 

2 to say to myself, okay, it's 1963, 64 and I'm 

3 a health physicist, and my job is to make sure 

4 that the people who are standing by that glove 

5 box meet their dose limits for the week, for 

6 the quarter, for the year, 5 rem a year, 

7 whatever it is, and I know that neutron 

8 dosimetry is problematic, especially when it's 

9 attenuated. 

10 So I say to myself, okay. If 

11 there were -- now, you went through a number 

12 of scenarios. Well, let's put one inch, two 

13 inches, three inches, four inches of water 

14 between the source and the film badge and the 

15 worker as if that represented a bounding set 

16 of circumstances. That in reality may very 

17 well have occurred at Mound.

18 Now, right now I don't know if 

19 that's true. In other words, when speaking to 

20 folks that have worked quite a bit at Los 

21 Alamos, they were not in a position to say 

22 whether or not that's a realistic scenario.
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1 Where I'm headed with this is that 

2 the construct -- the construct that you have 

3 related to the sensitivity analysis of how 

4 does the distribution of energies change as a 

5 function of changing fitness of shielding is a 

6 construct that inherent in it is a presumption 

7 that somehow you've captured the upper end of 

8 the amount of shielding that might be there. 

9 I'm concerned that if you didn't, in theory 

10 you could have a person standing in front of a 

11 glove box working and if there's enough 

12 shielding there, you're not going to see any 

13 neutron exposure, and he's going to be dosed, 

14 though. He's going to be getting an exposure 

15 to neutrons, all of which might be below .5 

16 MeV. You see nothing on his film badge and 

17 so, therefore, there's nothing to apply an 

18 adjustment factor to.

19 So where I'm going back to is, if 

20 you're going to use MCNP, which is a great, 

21 perhaps one of the best simulations for doing 

22 dosimetry, there has to be a connection 
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1 between the amount of shielding you're saying 

2 places an upper bound on the amount of 

3 shielding that's plausible.

4 Now, you intimated something very, 

5 very important that I didn't hear before when 

6 we were talking about this. You intimated 

7 that the physical setting of these glove boxes 

8 are such that you really could not fit more 

9 than six inches of shielding even if you 

10 wanted to.

11 Now, that's a very important 

12 statement because what that does is it places 

13 a boundary on the physical reality that you 

14 really can't put more than that. So under the 

15 worst-case conditions, you're saying for these 

16 particular glove boxes, you can't have more 

17 than six inches of water or other attenuator 

18 between the source and now when you said that 

19 it's -- coming into this meeting, I was 

20 concerned that if you can't place an upper 

21 bound either by process knowledge, 

22 understanding the design of the facility, what 
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1 the practice was, anything in the literature 

2 that would establish a plausible upper bound 

3 on the amount of shielding, we've got a real 

4 SEC issue here. If you can't put a boundary 

5 on that, then theoretically the story I just 

6 told, you could have someone there being 

7 exposed to .5 MeV photons and less, and you're 

8 not even going to see anything on the film 

9 badges.

10 I would like to zero in on the 

11 level of confidence that you have that when 

12 you did your sensitivity analysis and you laid 

13 in the six inches of shielding as being your 

14 upper bound, that we could hang our hat on 

15 that, and that there's evidence that that's a 

16 real boundary. Because now we are talking 

17 turkey, and not only that. Now we're talking 

18 what goes to the heart of Part 83 where you 

19 have to use site-specific information because 

20 up until now, until I heard that, I didn't 

21 hear any site specific information.

22 DR. ULSH: I don't want to 
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1 interrupt.

2 DR. MAURO: No, I'm done.

3 DR. ULSH: Okay.

4 DR. MAURO: You heard my story.

5 DR. ULSH: I can tell you where we 

6 got that information in terms of the ceiling 

7 characteristics and the thickness, and that 

8 was from workers who worked there first hand, 

9 and they raised a good point that don't forget 

10 you still have to balance dose reduction 

11 versus being able to actually reach inside and 

12 do the job.

13 So that's what made it even more 

14 compelling when we heard it straight out of 

15 the workers' mouths who were there. Really, I 

16 mean, there's a limit on how thick you can put 

17 the shielding in place.

18 DR. MAURO: I was speaking to a 

19 fellow that worked for, I think, 20 years at 

20 Los Alamos, and I asked him, does that sound 

21 reasonable to you?

22 Unfortunately he's not on the 
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1 line. I wish he could be on the line, 

2 [identifying information redacted]. I said, 

3 [identifying information redacted], this is 

4 what you did for your whole career. Could you 

5 say with a degree of confidence based on your 

6 experience at Los Alamos that six inches of 

7 shielding is probably a good number?

8 He says, well, I could say that 

9 probably a pretty good number for Los Alamos, 

10 but I have to tell you I really have no way of 

11 knowing whether or not that's a good number or 

12 not for Mound, and so he said, I couldn't 

13 stand by that, that six inch number. I mean, 

14 I couldn't today sit down at this table with 

15 you and say, yes, in my opinion based on 20 

16 years of doing these calculations and working 

17 with these glove boxes because I don't know 

18 what those glove boxes look like, and I don't 

19 know what the practice was of shielding 

20 neutrons.

21 So we were left in a position of 

22 taking on faith that the six inches was, in 
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1 fact, a good number, but we don't know that, 

2 and I don't know if anyone in this room knows 

3 that.

4 DR. ULSH: I know of two people in 

5 the room who know it.

6 DR. MAURO: Okay.

7 DR. ULSH: Bob, did we use six 

8 inches? We keep talking about that number. 

9 That's what we used, right?

10 DR. BUCHANAN: Used two inches for 

11 your dose.

12 DR. MAURO: And then you get a 

13 sensitivity analysis, though.

14 DR. ULSH: Right.

15 MR. MORRIS: The six-inch number 

16 is available. Let's see. So you're asking 

17 what did I use for the correction factor 

18 calculation?

19 DR. ULSH: What did we assume for 

20 shielding thickness?

21 MR. MORRIS: We calculated it for 

22 zero to six inches thick, and then let me 
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1 double-check because it has been a while since 

2 I wrote that. I'll get back with you in just 

3 a second.

4 DR. ULSH: Okay. Whatever that 

5 number is -- I was pausing to see whether I 

6 should say it or not. We have a former worker 

7 in the room who was one of the primary sources 

8 where we got that information. I think that 

9 six inches was the number we threw out, but 

10 even if it's low, if it's a few inches more, 

11 again, that's a TBD issue. I mean, it's not 

12 infinite. You still have to be able to reach 

13 through it.

14 DR. MAURO: Well, at some point 

15 you're going to block out everything above .7, 

16 and then you've got yourself a headache.

17 DR. ANIGSTEIN: This is Bob 

18 Anigstein.

19 Another issue I'd like to throw in 

20 relevant to this is the fact, going back to 

21 N/P ratio, the fact that workers with low 

22 gamma, low photon doses, they didn't even have 
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1 their NTA film read. That puts a bias on the 

2 ratio because that gets rid of some 

3 potentially very high. It's possible to have 

4 low photon and high neutron. For instance, if 

5 you're sitting in front of a glove box that 

6 has a lot of lead shielding, it will 

7 effectively stop the photons, but it will have 

8 very little effect on the neutrons. So the 

9 two measurements, using that ratio is a very 

10 soft statistic.

11 DR. ULSH: Well, I wouldn't 

12 necessarily disagree that lead shields shield 

13 photons. I don't think lead shielding is 

14 realistic for Mound. At least I haven't heard 

15 of it.

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, that's 

17 another site-specific issue actually, and 

18 unless we know that lead was used -- I mean, 

19 you're talking about a very specific thing. 

20 Yes, you can cause that effect as 

21 Bob described, but did the Mound glove boxes 

22 actually use lead shielding?
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1 MR. STEWART: The answer to that 

2 is no. They use hydrogenous material for the 

3 new glove boxes.

4 DR. MAURO: These are two

5 different -- I think in my mind, unless my 

6 little model in my head is a little different, 

7 we have two questions here. One has to do 

8 with the adjustment factor to the neutron dose 

9 as reconstructed based on NTA film and whether 

10 or not the adjustment factor for the 

11 distribution is, in fact, bounding, and this 

12 goes to the question of how many inches of 

13 hydrogenous material.

14 The other question, I think, which 

15 is separate and equally important, is the 

16 neutron to photon ratio, and that is all over 

17 the place. So, I mean, if we could zero back, 

18 I'd like to -- before we move on, I'd like to 

19 hear a little bit more about this.

20 You see, I am concerned that for 

21 all I know there could have been a common 

22 practice to insert quite a bit of hydrogenous 
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1 shielding material where your adjustment 

2 factors no longer apply. There may actually 

3 be a point where, if only a small percentage -

4 - in fact, Arjun and I discussed this over the 

5 weekend -- if only a small percentage of the 

6 energy of the neutrons that actually reach the 

7 detected film badge, let's say, ten percent, 

8 20 percent, five percent -- I don't know --

9 that adjustment factor all of a sudden goes 

10 through the roof.

11 DR. MAKHIJANI: Right. I mean, 

12 that's the reason I was kind of shaking my 

13 head when you said if everything gets cut off 

14 --

15 DR. MAURO: That posted --

16 DR. MAKHIJANI: Everything doesn't 

17 have to be cut off, right.

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, the mean 

19 free path of these neutrons, as you well know, 

20 so that you can easily put a bound on what 

21 that is --

22 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, you can 
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1 tell. You know, you can calculate a thickness 

2 of helium material where you'd get little or 

3 no 5.5 MeV neutrons out, but my point --

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: No, no. I'm 

5 talking about the FAS, the mean free path of 

6 the FAS. John is talking about a scenario 

7 where you get moderated all the time.

8 DR. MAURO: Moderated, that's 

9 right. That's what I'm saying.

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: It's very easy to 

11 come up with that number. I don't know what 

12 it is, but you can come up with that very 

13 easily. What would it take?

14 DR. MAKHIJANI: What it would 

15 take.

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: And it's a certain 

17 number --

18 DR. MAKHIJANI: To shut it down.

19 MEMBER ZIEMER: -- of paths. If 

20 you get about five to seven mean free paths, 

21 then they're pretty much gone, but I don't

22 know what that is, but they could easily find 
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1 that out.

2 DR. ULSH: Yes, we could. Off the 

3 top of my head --

4 DR. MAURO: But you see the --

5 DR. MAKHIJANI: But the thing that 

6 I just want to finish here is you don't 

7 actually have to cut off all the energy 

8 neutrons to have a problem with this approach. 

9 If you have most of the high energy neutrons 

10 attenuated and then the correction factor 

11 becomes very sensitive to an exact knowledge 

12 of the percentage of high energy neutrons that 

13 are getting through and what that energy 

14 spectrum actually is, because if it's five 

15 percent versus 15 percent, your correction 

16 factor is deferred by a factor of three.

17 MEMBER CLAWSON: I've got a 

18 question. This is Brad.

19 Do we know exactly how much of 

20 this hydrogenous or did it vary on these glove 

21 boxes?

22 I guess what I'm used to is I'm 
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1 used to being able to pull up a print, and 

2 they have got a set boundary of how these 

3 things were put together. Do we have --

4 DR. ULSH: Well, you raise a good 

5 question, Brad, because at the beginning it 

6 was simply, you know, a sheet of plexiglass 

7 per unit, very thin shielding.

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right.

9 DR. ULSH: Over time as they 

10 realized they had a problem, they added more 

11 and more shielding. So you're right. We 

12 can't reproduce the exact time line of when 

13 and where shielding was added, and that's why 

14 we have taken the approach of assuming what we 

15 consider to be the worst case.

16 You know, as Ron described 

17 earlier, adding shielding is good from the 

18 standpoint that it knocks the energy spectrum 

19 down, and it shields the worker from the 

20 neutron dose, but the problem is that as you 

21 add more shielding, more of those neutrons are 

22 below the energy threshold of the NTA film.
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1 So for this particular 

2 application, what we've assumed is what we 

3 consider to be the maximum practicable, the 

4 maximum plausible shielding thickness because 

5 that's what we would consider to be a bounding 

6 scenario in terms of how much neutron dose 

7 could we have missed.

8 And just to give you an idea, I 

9 mean, to go back to something John said, 

10 you're right, John. I mean, at some point if 

11 you add more and more and more and more 

12 shielding all the way out to an infinite 

13 thickness of shielding, you aren't going to 

14 see anything, and I don't know at what point 

15 between zero and infinity that happens, but --

16 DR. MAURO: I'm bringing what I 

17 call my common-sense approach. You pick six 

18 inches, two inches as being your default 

19 value.

20 DR. BUCHANAN: That's what they 

21 used in the tables.

22 DR. MAURO: In the tables for the 
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1 local factor. The basis for that I don't 

2 know, and you used six inches -- I think it 

3 was up to six inches -- in your sensitivity 

4 analysis. I don't know why you stopped there. 

5 I mean, to me you've got to bring that back 

6 to Mound.

7 In other words, when those 

8 assumptions in the end only are useful to us 

9 and only meet the letter intent of part 83, if 

10 you could build a bridge between that and 

11 Mound, somehow you've got to be able to do 

12 that, and I haven't seen that yet.

13 DR. ULSH: Our bridge to Mound is 

14 what we heard from the workers in terms of 

15 their input on what shielding was at Mound.

16 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: I would like to 

17 ask these workers a question. This comes from 

18 many years' experience working glove boxes 

19 myself. A lot of the 238 glove boxes you had 

20 thicker lead or I mean not lead either; 

21 polyethylene or water shielding below the 

22 glove box where you may have instrumentation 
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1 or pumps or whatever you've got down there, 

2 and then at the actual upper level where the 

3 workers performed the hands-on stuff, you had 

4 a thinner layer of shielding.

5 From a practical standpoint, I 

6 know six inches of additional shielding would 

7 make it very difficult for the average worker 

8 to really reach in there and do their work.

9 MR. MADDING: You weren't in there 

10 all the time. You might go in, turn a 

11 valve --

12 CHAIR BEACH: If you're going to 

13 talk, you have to give your name.

14 MR. MADDING: Dick Madding.

15 I started working SM in December 

16 29th, 1963, and was at Mound, working at Mound 

17 through 1981. I had various jobs. My job 

18 when I started out was final assembly of the 

19 product that was attempting to be produced at 

20 NSM. So I didn't have to work back in the 

21 really production area itself.

22 And as Brant said, the shielding 
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1 varied widely. The boxes I worked in had 

2 nothing, practically nothing, because I was on 

3 the tail end of the process, and by the time 

4 it got there, not very much material.

5 Down at SM-35 where the production 

6 was done, toward the end of the cycle, six 

7 inches was the average, and there were some 

8 places that were higher, but what you would 

9 do, you would go in and you might load a 

10 furnace. You might only be in there five or 

11 ten minutes, maybe not even that much, and you 

12 made do with it.

13 And your point about the shielding 

14 below being heavier, I think in the most cases 

15 -- and Warren may have something on this -- it 

16 was more or less the opposite. There wasn't a 

17 lot of shielding down low. The shielding 

18 started, you know, at your waist where the 

19 glove box was, and they kept adding and adding 

20 until you couldn't -- like you say, you 

21 couldn't do anything.

22 MEMBER CLAWSON: Well, this is 
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1 Brad speaking.

2 This is one of my issues because 

3 we got into the history behind this, why they 

4 sent me up to Hanford, because they were 

5 putting everything -- everything was shielded, 

6 but all they were taking care of was the upper 

7 portion. All of the bottoms of the glove 

8 boxes had zip holes. So they didn't calculate 

9 that in because in the calculation they put is 

10 that we have a wall of this much shielding, 

11 but what we ended up doing was getting back12 scatter from it, which increased even more.

13 MR. MADDING: Now, I don't say 

14 there was nothing down below, but you might 

15 have two inches, maybe four inches, but the 

16 boxes basically were shielded above the waist.

17 MEMBER CLAWSON: Right, because 

18 that's what they were trying to protect.

19 MR. MADDING: That's what they 

20 were trying to protect.

21 MEMBER CLAWSON: When you were 

22 getting up there to that, but it gets on into 
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1 some other issues.

2 CHAIR BEACH: So, Brant, do you 

3 have any actual engineering drawings or specs 

4 for any of these glove boxes to give you the 

5 actual --

6 DR. ULSH: You know, I've looked 

7 at so many over these past two years. I don't 

8 want to say that we don't. Nothing jumps to 

9 my mind.

10 MR. MATTING: I'm looking for 

11 them. There are engineering drawings still in 

12 existence, but I've been working on the 

13 technical documents, 8,000 of those, and the 

14 77,000 photographs, but I am coming across 

15 engineering drawings in the documents, and 

16 part of doing the documents is I end up -- in 

17 order to be sure optical character recognition 

18 is on all of the pages, which was not the case 

19 when they were scanned, I am looking at every 

20 page of every document, 93,000 pages, and I'm 

21 90 percent through.

22 But I do run into some engineering 
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1 drawings, but I have been sensitive to your 

2 question about Benelex and that kind of thing 

3 before, and so I've been keeping an eye out, 

4 but I have not seen any.

5 DR. ULSH: So I guess the answer 

6 is that they probably do exist somewhere. I 

7 don't necessarily have them at my fingertips, 

8 I don't think. If you found one in the SRDB, 

9 I wouldn't be surprised, but I don't have them 

10 at my fingertips.

11 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: I would assume 

12 this varied from one glove box to the next 

13 because, based on what the workers had to do 

14 at that station as to the level of shielding, 

15 they could or could not have or may have 

16 existed then. In the early days, like you 

17 said, I would have also assumed there wasn't 

18 shielding of glove boxes.

19 MR. SHEEHAN: To that point, can I 

20 add something to this gentleman's?

21 CHAIR BEACH: Could you state your 

22 name?
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1 MR. SHEEHAN: Warren Sheehan, 

2 Mound, 56 to 89.

3 In doing a little survey work 

4 before I came down here recently to find out 

5 about this proton/neutron measurement that the 

6 surveyors made, I talked to one of our health 

7 monitors and, Dick, you hadn't heard this yet. 

8 I talked to Dave Hites, and Dave mentioned 

9 that back in 34, 34 was waste recovery, liquid 

10 recovery, and he talked about the measurements 

11 down there going below box line, and he 

12 pointed out how much higher it was down there.

13 And I don't recall whether they 

14 added shielding to it later on, but that exact 

15 condition did exist.

16 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: One other quick 

17 question. When they took their measurements, 

18 the health physics technicians took their 

19 measurements, I assume they were taking them 

20 right? I would assume they do two typical 

21 measurements, one through the shielding and 

22 one through the glove ports or whatever 
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1 opening the technicians or the craft had to 

2 work through.

3 But did they record both of those 

4 measurements or just record only the ones 

5 through the shielding?

6 MR. SHEEHAN: I wish I could 

7 answer that. I talked to, I think, four 

8 different monitors or five, and I got two 

9 different answers. I mean about 50 percent. 

10 I think I talked to four, and what I was 

11 trying to find out, did they actually -- where 

12 did they record them.

13 Brant talks about they have like 

14 46,000 measurements. I don't know where they 

15 came from because I don't believe they came 

16 out of SM. I mean, I don't know how many of 

17 them did. In my period there, which was 

18 before they really got into it, we weren't 

19 doing much of anything.

20 But what I do remember is we 

21 recorded it on a plastic card on the box, and 

22 the surveyors come along and update it. I 
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1 asked them, did you ever record it anywhere?

2 Two of them told me no. Two of 

3 them told me they did.

4 CHAIR BEACH: I think Don has a 

5 comment.

6 MR. STEWART: Yes, I just have a 

7 quick question for Dick and/or Warren, and 

8 this goes back to what Ron was talking about 

9 earlier. Were these glove boxes actually in 

10 rows in the SM building?

11 MR. MADDING: They were in SM-31, 

12 and this is Dick Madding. That building, the 

13 glove boxes in that room were like the layout 

14 of this table without a glove box on the end. 

15 So you had a U-shaped configuration 

16 completely filling the room. There wasn't --

17 there wasn't room for two people to pass 

18 between the glove boxes and the wall, and by 

19 the time they added the shielding, you 

20 couldn't go through there in a straight 

21 motion. You had to go sideways to get through 

22 because they had so much shielding to the 
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1 boxes.

2 MR. STEWART: And that was 

3 generally true in SM?

4 MR. MADDING: No. That was SM-35, 

5 which is the high-production area.

6 MR. STEWART: Okay.

7 MR. MADDING: Now, there were, 

8 like my finishing, my final assembly area 

9 happened to be in a U also. SM-35, I don't 

10 know how many boxes. What: 12, 14 boxes down 

11 one side and three or four across the one 

12 end -- it was a relatively big room and a lot 

13 of boxes.

14 MR. STEWART: But not a back-to15 back configuration.

16 MR. MADDING: No, there was space 

17 in between.

18 MR. STEWART: Right. 

19 MR. MADDING: You access the back. 

20 You access the back of the boxes, and the 

21 back of the boxes came off for some types of -

22 - some boxes were that way, but you access the 
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1 back of the boxes because that's where the 

2 filter, all the piping, the filter stuff came 

3 out.

4 MR. STEWART: The maintenance 

5 aisle in the back, yes.

6 MR. MADDING: There was a work 

7 aisle in the back about as wide as this table, 

8 seven feet, six feet, whatever the table is.

9 MR. STEWART: Is this also true 

10 for the PP Building?

11 MR. MADDING: Oh, no. The PP 

12 Building, I helped design PP Building, and I 

13 helped design the glove boxes for PP building, 

14 and PP Building was Mound's reaction to the 

15 problems at SM, the third level reaction.

16 The second level reaction was the 

17 SM addition where we went to a solid ceiling 

18 because the ceiling in the original SM 

19 building was a drop ceiling, a floated ceiling 

20 with panels in it, and it was deadly. In 

21 fact, in one of the big accidents, a person by 

22 the name of [identifying information 
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1 redacted], who is still around, and he was in 

2 the analytical in a low area room. It ran 

3 into the shower, contaminated the whole 

4 building, and he was taking a shower with his 

5 respirator on and plutonium oxide was going 

6 down his back. He came out of the shower 

7 hotter than he went in. He had a stripe down 

8 his back.

9 This was the filter excursion, the 

10 worst accident at SM, in my opinion, which was 

11 late 1964.

12 MR. SHEEHAN: On [identifying 

13 information redacted] of 64.

14 MR. MADDING: [identifying 

15 information redacted] of 64.

16 CHAIR BEACH: I think Ron has the 

17 floor.

18 DR. BUCHANAN: This is Ron 

19 Buchanan.

20 At the PP Building, how were the 

21 glove boxes arranged at the PP Building?

22 MR. MADDING: PP Building was --
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1 first, you must know that the glove boxes were 

2 served by an overhead conveyor, a fiberglass 

3 conveyor, and interspersed in the box lines 

4 was a service box which took a large, probably 

5 two-foot tall by 18-inch bucket which came 

6 down, which went up on an elevator and went up 

7 into that conveyor, and the conveyor ran in a 

8 big loop over six lines of boxes, each line 

9 running the length of the building and 100 

10 feet, you know, maybe 25 boxes in a row.

11 DR. BUCHANAN: Okay. What were 

12 they in, a row of glove boxes? Was there 

13 glove boxes behind the person working at a 

14 glove box?

15 MR. MADDING: No, because you had 

16 the same situation that you did in SM-35 

17 expanded vertically because you would have a 

18 row of glove boxes, and then you would have a 

19 service corridor, and that service corridor 

20 was almost as wide as this room, 12, 14 feet, 

21 and that was the service corridor for two 

22 lines of glove boxes. So you would have two 
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1 lines of glove boxes and the service quarter, 

2 and then you would have another two lines of 

3 glove boxes and a service quarter and a third 

4 one.

5 DR. BUCHANAN: So you had workers 

6 back to back. You'd have a glove box here 

7 with a worker on this line. You'd have a row 

8 of globe boxes here with a worker facing that 

9 way.

10 MR. MADDING: Thirty foot, 25 feet 

11 apart.

12 DR. BUCHANAN: Twenty-five feet 

13 apart.

14 MR. MADDING: Because you had a 

15 row of glove boxes and then you would have the 

16 working area, and these were nice working 

17 areas. They were -- you had seven feet. 

18 These were big rooms, and then you had a 

19 corridor which accessed the room. Then you 

20 had the work area for the next set of glove 

21 boxes, and then the glove boxes themselves.

22 So you might have from the fronts 
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1 of the glove boxes, you would have 30 feet.

2 CHAIR BEACH: Can I inject here 

3 for a second?

4 Do you want him to draw a little 

5 diagram?

6 What I'd like to do is open that 

7 out. If you would sketch that out, and let's 

8 take a comfort break for 15. Let's do 15 

9 minutes. Is that okay?

10 MR. KATZ: So at 12:15 we'll take 

11 it off mute again.

12 Eleven fifteen. Sorry.

13 (Whereupon, the above-entitled matter 

14 went off the record at 11:00 a.m. and resumed 

15 at 11:19 a.m.)

16 MR. KATZ: Okay. We're 

17 reconvening after a short break. This is the 

18 Mound Working Group of the Advisory Board on 

19 Radiation Worker Health, and we're in the 

20 middle of a discussion about neutron dose 

21 reconstruction and the configuration of the 

22 glove box rooms.
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1 CHAIR BEACH: Okay. Where we left 

2 off was the glove box discussion as Ted said. 

3 Does anybody have any more questions or 

4 comments or where are we at on that?

5 DR. BUCHANAN: Do you want to 

6 explain this? Does Dick want to explain this 

7 to the rest of the group?

8 CHAIR BEACH: Sure, that would be 

9 great.

10 DR. BUCHANAN: Would you do that?

11 MR. MADDING: The PP Building was 

12 the third generation of design for handling 

13 plutonium-238. The first generation was SM 

14 building. The second generation was the SM 

15 addition, which was attached to the SM 

16 building and had a hard ceiling, which was a 

17 huge difference. A lot of the SM building's 

18 hazard was due to the drop ceiling. Something 

19 that happened at one place in the building 

20 would go through the ceiling and come down in 

21 another laboratory that the people were doing 

22 what they should be and had no idea that it 
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1 was going to happen.

2 When I went into SM in December of 

3 1963, you didn't have rad worker training. 

4 What you had was a mentor. My mentor was a 

5 guy by the name of [identifying information 

6 redacted], [identifying information redacted], 

7 and he told me. He said, Madding, you may 

8 wish you had gone to Vietnam before this is 

9 over.

10 (Laughter.)

11 MR. MADDING: He said, this is 

12 war. He said, and if you want to be safe, he 

13 said, you're going to know everything that's 

14 going on in that building on the hot side 

15 before you go over there. You're going to 

16 know who's pulling trash, how competent he is. 

17 You're going to know what maintenance is 

18 going on. You're going to know everything 

19 that you had better know. You had better do 

20 your situational awareness and know what's 

21 going on before you go over there.

22 So I made a few trips to the 
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1 library and a few trips to the warehouse over 

2 on the other hill, and missed a lot of the 

3 accidents, but you couldn't miss it all in SM 

4 building because they ran 24/7 starting in 

5 1964 through 1965, trying to get this failed 

6 design to work.

7 The building was designed for a 

8 liquid, low quantities of liquid. SM building 

9 we're talking about. Two people from SM, from 

10 Mound, [identifying information redacted] and 

11 [identifying information redacted] spent a 

12 year at the design agency pre-1961 to try to 

13 get this thing to work, and the liquid concept 

14 wouldn't work.

15 And today we know that with the 

16 calcining and the self-heating and the gaseous 

17 build-up from the nitrogen and the constant 

18 nature of plutonium nitrate which will eat 

19 through welds and anything else, that it 

20 would. So they switched to the oxide, but by 

21 that time the building had been designed for 

22 liquid, small quantities of liquid, and so 
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1 they converted. The building went hot in 

2 1961, trying to make this concept that was 

3 virtually impossible to make.

4 In fact, it was impossible to make 

5 in the original design, and they had to change 

6 the specifications in order to get anything 

7 out of it, and then they only got a few 

8 percent.

9 So during that SM era, you 

10 created, if you've seen the attachment to our 

11 White Paper, in February of 1966 a monthly 

12 report talked about 1,788 drums, 1,788 55-

13 gallon drums of trash ranging from nothing way 

14 up to--

15 CHAIR BEACH: Pardon me. You just 

16 said attachment to your White Paper?

17 MR. MADDING: Yes.

18 CHAIR BEACH: Okay. Which White -

19 - I'm looking at --

20 MR. MADDING: You're not looking 

21 at Brant's White Paper.

22 CHAIR BEACH: No, no, no. Which 
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1 one are you talking about?

2 MR. MADDING: You're looking at 

3 Warren Sheehan. Warren Sheehan and I, the SM 

4 paper --

5 CHAIR BEACH: Okay. So is this 

6 the one, the document?

7 MR. MADDING: That's the one. 

8 That's the one.

9 CHAIR BEACH: Okay. I just wanted 

10 to make sure everybody knew that it's the two 

11 documents that I sent out that were released 

12 from DOE last week. So those are the two he's 

13 talking about, and not to be confused with the 

14 other White Papers.

15 Thank you.

16 MR. MADDING: And by the way, the 

17 SM building up until the addition was put on 

18 in 1966 was used exclusively for DoD purposes. 

19 There was no space, there were no RTGs and 

20 that kind of stuff. And this has been 

21 declassified, and I have declassified 

22 documents which show this, some basic aspects 
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1 of this.

2 So the heat source work as far as 

3 SM building didn't really come into play until 

4 late in the game, 1967, I think there was a 

5 kilogram for space applications went out, and 

6 then in 1968 we had the SNAP 27, which is 

7 higher numbers, but during all of this time 

8 from 1963 on through material in kilogram 

9 quantities was being shipped into the 

10 building. Nothing was going out except as 

11 drums of trash and a lot of hold-up in the 

12 building.

13 So the point I want to make is 

14 that building was loaded and a lot of neutrons 

15 everywhere. In fact, it was so severe that 

16 the badge board, dosimeters, that was kept in 

17 the corridor outside where you went in the 

18 change room, they had a background badge, a 

19 background dosimeter which was kept on there, 

20 and I remember vividly because it had a metal 

21 clip on it like you would use on your gloves, 

22 and I skied, and I kept using those metal 
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1 clips and I always had my eye on that clip on 

2 that dosimeter.

3 But the background, and I don't 

4 know whether the background -- how that 

5 background information was used. Do you know, 

6 Brant, if that background badge board,

7 background information was used in any way?

8 DR. ULSH: I don't know about the 

9 specific instance, but in general, the 

10 background is subtracted from the badges that 

11 the workers wear, in general.

12 MR. MADDING: Right. The 

13 background got so high that management people 

14 who were running the building in 1964 realized 

15 that this could be a problem in the dosage 

16 calculations and everything. So they moved 

17 that badge board 100 feet out to the guard 

18 shack to get it out of the area.

19 So the potential was there. The 

20 potential was in the building for high dosage. 

21 In fact, at that time the limit was three rem 

22 a quarter. Many people, in fact, in the 
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1 attachment to our White Paper we mention one 

2 guy in specific. He was done six weeks into 

3 the quarter. He had gotten his three rem. I 

4 personally in the three years I worked in 

5 there, I ended up with 25 rem -- that's with a 

6 big R -- external exposure.

7 CHAIR BEACH: Once again, can you 

8 refer to yours as a document? Otherwise we're 

9 going to have people requesting --

10 MR. MADDING: Right.

11 CHAIR BEACH: -- White Papers.

12 MR. MADDING: Right.

13 CHAIR BEACH: Okay. Thank you.

14 MR. MADDING: The SM --

15 CHAIR BEACH: They are both right 

16 here.

17 MR. MADDING: Right. I want to 

18 see how it's typed. I just want to see the 

19 title so that I get the title right. Special 

20 Metallurgical Building, Mound Laboratory, 1961 

21 through 1968, and there is an attachment which 

22 is a weekly report from Huddleston, who was a 
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1 building manager to Bradley, and I don't see 

2 that in yours.

3 CHAIR BEACH: Those are the only 

4 two that were cleared and given to me.

5 MR. MADDING: Okay.

6 CHAIR BEACH: Do you have a 

7 question?

8 DR. MAURO: Yes, I do.

9 CHAIR BEACH: Okay.

10 DR. MAURO: When you had mentioned 

11 the dose limit of three rem per quarter and --

12 MR. MADDING: Nineteen sixty-four.

13 DR. MAURO: In 1964, I'm familiar 

14 with that dose limit. Of course, that dose 

15 limit was a combination of both photon and 

16 neutron exposures, I presume. Now, when they 

17 did the neutron contribution to the dose, 

18 obviously they were aware at the time that 

19 some of that neutron dose that was experienced 

20 was from neutrons that were detected from the 

21 track to the NTA film, but also there was a 

22 contribution from neutron flux that the energy 
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1 was relatively low and did not cause tracks on 

2 the film.

3 So health physicists in charge at 

4 the time had to use some type of judgment, I'm 

5 presuming, that there was an add-in, some 

6 contribution. Now, in order to do that, he 

7 had to have some knowledge on what he believed 

8 was a reasonable distribution of the energies 

9 of the neutrons, and that has to be in my mind 

10 based on some type of measurements that 

11 someone made, and I haven't seen those 

12 measurements.

13 MR. MADDING: I can't really 

14 answer your question as to what kind of 

15 factors were put in. Brant has a lot of 

16 information on that, I believe; is that right?

17 DR. ULSH: Yes, yes.

18 MR. MADDING: He has got a lot of 

19 information on that. He is far, far more 

20 qualified to answer than I am. I do know that 

21 the badge reading cycle was compressed as you 

22 got closer and closer to the limit. It might 
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1 be a week, and then it got down to days. They 

2 were bringing people from the other hill over, 

3 totally unqualified people, Ph.D.s, anybody. 

4 You were subject to being assigned to SM, and 

5 there was no way out of it. It was a 

6 unanimous decision, and you went.

7 And there were a couple of people 

8 who went out the door because they wouldn't 

9 go, and there was one person who when he went 

10 to lunch or whatever, he taped his badge, he 

11 taped his dosimeter to the bottom of the box 

12 to get out early. The only problem was he 

13 forgot and left it, and all of a sudden they 

14 come up with this huge death-dealing reading 

15 and forced him to admit what he had done, and 

16 he may not have been the only one. He's the 

17 only one I know of that was documented.

18 But this was a bad place to be, 

19 and the people on the other hill, on the main 

20 hill, they were hearing the evacuation, the 

21 sirens go off, and they evacuated SM building, 

22 evacuated SM building once a week, you know.
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1 I mean, it's hard. Looking back, 

2 of course, I'm fresh out of college. It was 

3 an adventure.

4 CHAIR BEACH: Does anybody have 

5 any other questions pertaining to the glove 

6 boxes?

7 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes, I have one. 

8 In the SM building you said a lot of material 

9 was coming in and they were trying to 

10 transition into a new process and it wasn't 

11 working. So everything basically was being 

12 stored as trash in the building, and then it 

13 was taken out of the building.

14 MR. MADDING: Yes.

15 DR. MAKHIJANI: If you look at a 

16 typical drum of trash, trash in it --

17 MR. MADDING: Plutonium, yes.

18 DR. MAKHIJANI: -- and if you look 

19 at a typical drum of trash, what else would be 

20 in a typical drum. I mean, would it be 

21 solutions? Would it be --

22 MR. MADDING: No, no solutions, no 
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1 liquid, no liquid.

2 DR. MAKHIJANI: Would it be solid 

3 trash, paper?

4 MR. MADDING: It was paper. It 

5 was paper, metal, syringes from the analytical 

6 department. In fact, one guy in R&R 

7 accidentally injected himself with a syringe 

8 when he was cleaning out a box.

9 CHAIR BEACH: Trash .

10 MR. MADDING: Yes, a lot of 

11 gloves.

12 MEMBER CLAWSON: Anything that had 

13 an attempt to clean up a mess or clean up an 

14 operation?

15 MR. MADDING: No, just normal 

16 trash that would come out. This material was 

17 run through sieves for sizing, particle 

18 sizing. You run it through a sieve stack.

19 Do you know what a sieve stack is? 

20 Okay. Those things eventually didn't work 

21 right. They got clogged and everything. 

22 Trash.
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1 The big problem was for the first 

2 couple of years or first four or five years, 

3 there was a no discard policy. Plutonium-238 

4 was hard to come by. I mean, they didn't make 

5 it before 1960 or whatever, 58, 60, and it was 

6 very difficult to come by. So the AEC had a 

7 no-discard policy.

8 CHAIR BEACH: So one last thing.

9 MR. MADDING: Yes.

10 CHAIR BEACH: While you're here; 

11 we talked to Warren. Warren Sheehan and Dick 

12 Madding are former Mound workers. They 

13 supplied documents to the Work Group which 

14 everybody has. I have given them out to 

15 everybody.

16 Is there any other comments? I 

17 know you were going to summarize possibly or 

18 just note that they're here. We have them.

19 MR. MADDING: Warren has some 

20 comments. I have made the comments that he 

21 was going to go first and hand it over to me 

22 and that I was going to make.
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1 CHAIR BEACH: Okay.

2 MR. MADDING: Which is the 

3 building had a lot of potential. By the time 

4 you got the PP Building, all that is gone.

5 CHAIR BEACH: Okay.

6 MR. MADDING: Full amount is 

7 coming in, shielded, conveyor system so that 

8 there was no pulling trash. I don't know of 

9 any release in the PP Building. Do you, 

10 Warren? No releases, none.

11 CHAIR BEACH: Okay, and you're 

12 going to be here the rest of the day in case 

13 anyone has other questions.

14 MR. MADDING: Here for a while.

15 CHAIR BEACH: For a while.

16 MR. MADDING: Warren does have 

17 some comments.

18 CHAIR BEACH: Okay.

19 MR. KATZ: Before we get to that, 

20 Dick, I mean, one of the reasons before we 

21 broke, you drew a diagram up there to explain 

22 that there was a lot of muddle about how the 
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1 glove boxes were configured.

2 MR. MADDING: Okay.

3 MR. KATZ: And actually, although 

4 you clarified it for people in the room while 

5 we were on break, but for the record and for 

6 the people on the phone, they really haven't 

7 heard the discussion of actually how things 

8 were configured with the glove boxes.

9 CHAIR BEACH: Thank you. That's 

10 correct.

11 MR. MADDING: This is PP Building. 

12 It consists of six box lines running the 

13 entire length of the building, maybe 100 feet. 

14 Those boxes --

15 CHAIR BEACH: Do you have an idea 

16 of how big the building was? Forty feet or --

17 MR. MADDING: Oh, no, no, no. 

18 We're talking 150 feet long by 120 feet wide.

19 CHAIR BEACH: That's the 

20 perspective I wanted for the glove box. Thank 

21 you.

22 MR. MADDING: Right, right.
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1 MR. FITZGERALD: You said the 

2 glove boxes were very close to the walls or I 

3 think you said --

4 MR. MADDING: No, no. The glove 

5 boxes were backed on a service quarter. So 

6 there was one service quarter, and I haven't 

7 drawn the one over here, but there was one 

8 service quarter for each set of boxes. This 

9 has -- the two end lines had a service quarter 

10 which only served one set, and then the other 

11 four boxes had service quarters between them.

12 MR. FITZGERALD: Was this 

13 configuration pretty stable? I would assume 

14 it got modified as --

15 MR. MADDING: Oh, no. There was 

16 no mod.

17 MR. FITZGERALD: No modification.

18 MR. MADDING: No modification. 

19 This building was built with prestressed 

20 concrete T beams for the ceiling and the 

21 floor. The services were all done from the 

22 basement. There was no overhead lines, no 
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1 overhead services. Everything came up through 

2 the floor in the service areas behind the 

3 glove boxes. And that's why there were no 

4 incidents, no releases, no internal exposures 

5 at all out of PP Building, and very little 

6 neutron, relatively little neutrons.

7 DR. MAURO: This is a glove box.

8 MR. MADDING: That's a glove box. 

9 This is a person working.

10 DR. MAURO: There's the source.

11 MR. MADDING: Right.

12 DR. MAURO: And the shielding is 

13 between this source and this wall, and flocks 

14 of neutrons is coming out and striking --

15 MR. MADDING: Right, but this 

16 shielding in PP Building was relatively small, 

17 maybe four inches maximum.

18 DR. MAURO: Okay. You mentioned 

19 something about six inches before.

20 MR. MADDING: Six inches in SM 

21 building and more.

22 DR. MAURO: So it was different. 
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1 Now, then you have the space from here and you 

2 have another --

3 MR. MADDING: Sure. You've got --

4 DR. MAURO: And the space from 

5 here to here is what?

6 MR. MADDING: Well, it's 25 feet.

7 DR. MAURO: Twenty feet.

8 MR. MADDING: To the next one.

9 DR. MAURO: And now -- but there's 

10 21 here, this neutron flux. There's a person 

11 over here, there's a person over here, there's 

12 a person over here.

13 MR. MADDING: Well, generally not.

14 DR. MAURO: Oh, no?

15 MR. MADDING: You might have two 

16 people in a room, maybe three maximum, but 

17 each one of these rooms, you know, each one of 

18 these was a room down along here the entire 

19 length of the building. There might be four 

20 or five rooms down.

21 CHAIR BEACH: Are you talking 

22 rooms with shielding walls?
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1 MR. MADDING: Yes, rooms with 

2 shielding walls, hard shielding and painted 

3 with a special paint that would clean off, a 

4 special glossy paint that was used everywhere, 

5 ceilings. The outside of the building was 

6 blocked, and all that was coated with this 

7 paint, special paint, and very easy to clean 

8 up.

9 DR. BUCHANAN: This orange? Is 

10 that concrete or plastic?

11 MR. MADDING: No, no, no, it's 

12 drywall, basically drywall with this special 

13 paint on it. And the ceilings were high 

14 ceilings because you had this big fiberglass 

15 conveyor. You had this big fiberglass 

16 conveyor which started here, and it ran here, 

17 and it ran here, and it ran here, and it ran 

18 here, and it ran here, and then it came across 

19 and started again.

20 DR. MAURO: What is this?

21 MR. MADDING: That is the typical 

22 SM building.
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1 DR. MAURO: Are these glove boxes?

2 MR. MADDING: Yes, those are glove 

3 boxes.

4 DR. MAURO: And they were dealing 

5 with neutron sources in there?

6 MR. MADDING: No, you were dealing 

7 with plutonium-238 dioxide.

8 DR. MAURO: Okay.

9 MR. MADDING: Nitrate or dioxide.

10 DR. MAURO: And so this is a 

11 complete different configuration.

12 MR. MADDING: Completely different 

13 thing, completely separate.

14 DR. MAURO: Are we worried about 

15 this, too?

16 I know we were looking at this 

17 one. I was wondering.

18 MR. MADDING: Yes. We got off 

19 onto the difference between PP Building and 

20 the SM building.

21 MR. FITZGERALD: Now, SM and PP, 

22 is that it? I'm sure there's other 
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1 operations.

2 MR. MADDING: Well, you had our 

3 building. You had a lot of small work going 

4 on in our building. Our building had hard 

5 ceilings, but our building did get one thing. 

6 When the big heat source push comes on and 

7 mother nature is calling for the spacecraft to 

8 go and you don't have the fuel, they put a 

9 plasma torch down in our building, and I 

10 worked on that one, too.

11 And so they had kilogram 

12 quantities basically in one room in our 

13 building going in and out of a torch box, of a 

14 plasma torch box.

15 Go ahead.

16 DR. MAURO: So we've got glove 

17 boxes here.

18 MR. MADDING: Right.

19 DR. MAURO: Six feet from this 

20 wall to this wall.

21 MR. MADDING: Yes.

22 DR. MAURO: A person standing 
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1 here.

2 MR. MADDING: No, no, no. 

3 Everybody is on the outside. This is service.

4 DR. MAURO: Oh, thank you.

5 CHAIR BEACH: That's the one, 

6 John, where you couldn't walk straight.

7 MR. MADDING: Yes, you couldn't 

8 walk. Once they got the shielding on, you had 

9 to go sideways.

10 DR. MAURO: Okay. Got it.

11 MR. MADDING: And Building 35, was 

12 you know, I mean, SM-35, it was to the SM 

13 building what the SM building was to the other 

14 hill. Nobody at SM building wanted anything 

15 to do with 35 because of the radiation and the 

16 potential for release, and there were a number 

17 of releases.

18 DR. ULSH: Dick, just to clarify 

19 for people who aren't familiar with it, when 

20 you say 35, you're talking about Room 35 in 

21 that building.

22 MR. MADDING: Room 35 in SM 
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1 building, right.

2 MR. FITZGERALD: Now, you did say 

3 earlier that they hung Benelex to the point 

4 where, you know, a certain proportion of the 

5 kind of exposure they were reading. You're 

6 saying at the very end there wasn't as much of 

7 being hot as far as shielding.

8 MR. MADDING: No, the PP Building 

9 was designed --

10 MR. FITZGERALD: No, I'm talking 

11 about SM. You were saying that --

12 MR. MADDING: Thirty-five was the 

13 most heavily shielded room in the building.

14 MR. FITZGERALD: It was almost 

15 empirical where they were basically putting as 

16 much shielding as they could.

17 MR. MADDING: They put it on there 

18 till you couldn't do the work.

19 DR. MAURO: And how thick was 

20 that?

21 MR. FITZGERALD: Pretty thick.

22 MR. MADDING: There were some --
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1 there was a couple boxes here across the end 

2 of the U that did have close to 12 inches on 

3 them. The other major accident happened, I 

4 believe this was in 68, Warren?

5 MR. SHEEHAN: What's that?

6 MR. MADDING: The Talbert --

7 MR. SHEEHAN: Oh, Talbert 35. That 

8 was 35.

9 MR. MADDING: Well, I know, but it 

10 was at the end of the year here and what they 

11 had was the glove box gloves had a special 

12 coating. What was that coating, Brant? The 

13 coating on the glove box gloves, there's a 

14 special name for it.

15 DR. ULSH: I don't know.

16 MR. MADDING: I can't --

17 MR. MORRIS: That would be Hypalon 

18 probably, Hypalon probably.

19 MR. MADDING: That's it, Hypalon, 

20 Hypalon-coated gloves. So they did recovery 

21 on these Hypalon-coated gloves, and since you 

22 don't want to put any kind of moisture, you 
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1 don't trash out, you don't send for burial 

2 anything, any kind of liquid or moisture.

3 They had some furnaces. They had 

4 a big, tall furnace in here that they hung 

5 those gloves in to dry them out. Well, what 

6 they didn't realize was the Hypalon out7 gasses, and the furnace temperature got up a 

8 little bit maybe more than it should, and 

9 suddenly with three people in that room it 

10 exploded and blew the front off and dropped 

11 these pieces of shielding which actually 

12 knocked the one guy out.

13 Another guy who lost his 

14 respirator, one guy took off. He was out of 

15 there. The other little guy about my size 

16 handled the 300-pound guy that was knocked 

17 out. He dragged him out of there without a 

18 respirator on, the most contaminated man in 

19 there, and he died a year and a half ago, and 

20 he was not a claimant, right? You said he was 

21 not a claimant.

22 DR. ULSH: I can neither confirm 
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1 nor deny.

2 MR. MADDING: Okay. I thought I 

3 heard you say he was not a claimant.

4 CHAIR BEACH: All right. Any 

5 other questions.

6 MR. FITZGERALD: Another question. 

7 You had said something to the effect that if 

8 you, I guess, were a rad worker at the time of 

9 the national production cycle, where 24/7 you 

10 had to do your time and ask them to -- I mean, 

11 it sounded there was a lot of -- --

12 MR. MADDING: Not even a rad 

13 worker. Any scientist on the other hill, you 

14 could be down there doing research in NMR, and 

15 you got sent to SM.

16 MR. FITZGERALD: But just about 

17 everybody on the plant were rad workers, not 

18 just the --

19 MR. MADDING: No, they weren't rad 

20 workers.

21 MR. FITZGERALD: They weren't rad 

22 workers?
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1 MR. MADDING: I wouldn't call them 

2 -- I don't know that I would.

3 CHAIR BEACH: Anybody that was 

4 working on that.

5 MR. MADDING: Anybody that was 

6 capable, anybody that was a body and hands 

7 that was capable of going to SM, and this 

8 included women as well as men, they went up 

9 there.

10 CHAIR BEACH: I guess I wonder if 

11 they would be considered visitors or if they 

12 were badged.

13 MR. MADDING: Oh, no, they were 

14 badged. The only visitors were the thing that 

15 Brant talked about where you would have a 

16 maintenance guy from the other hill come up in 

17 an unusual circumstance.

18 DR. ULSH: I have a question.

19 MR. MADDING: Yes.

20 DR. ULSH: The drawing there that 

21 you have that represents SM-35 --

22 MR. MADDING: Right.
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1 DR. ULSH: -- where you've got 

2 thick shielding, if I were working in there 

3 would I be badged, NTA film badged?

4 MR. MADDING: Oh, yes. I mean, 

5 there was -- anybody who ever says that people 

6 weren't badged and un-whatever dose was 

7 incurred by people in the SM building, that 

8 did not occur.

9 CHAIR BEACH: When did they badge

10 with NTA?

11 DR. ULSH: NTA film, from 

12 beginning of operations up through --

13 DR. BUCHANAN: Seventy-six.

14 CHAIR BEACH: From the beginning.

15 DR. BUCHANAN: Yes.

16 CHAIR BEACH: Not backwards.

17 MR. STEWART: Just to clarify, 

18 that's also true for bioassay, including 

19 bioassay. That worker would also be monitored 

20 for any intake.

21 MR. MADDING: Yes, absolutely, 

22 absolutely. You peed in a jug every so often. 
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1 MR. STEWART: It's consistent with 

2 the records I've seen. I just wanted to get 

3 that on record.

4 MR. MADDING: Absolutely. There 

5 was no slackness on management's part or on 

6 the health physics people's part about keeping 

7 track, and part of the reason is because in 

8 1964 and the first part of 1965 until the 

9 design was changed to a workable design, they

10 had people were running right up against the 

11 limit, and they wanted to know everything that 

12 was going on. They were very careful.

13 DR. BUCHANAN: And what years was 

14 this that they were calling people off the 

15 hill?

16 MR. MADDING: Sixty-four and the 

17 first half of 65, 1964 and the first half of 

18 65. After 65 when they went to the different 

19 concept, the throughput completely reversed, 

20 and so there was no more really high 

21 quantities being put in and nothing coming out 

22 the other end.
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1 The problem was that you had all 

2 these lines, all these boxes and everything 

3 had been heavily contaminated, and that 

4 contamination was still there, but it wasn't 

5 kilogram quantities. The kilogram quantities 

6 were in trash barrels outside the building, 

7 and the first place they went was where the PP 

8 Building was to be built, and when the PP 

9 Building was under construction starting in 

10 1967, they were moved out by the thorium 

11 storage building to pads out there.

12 One of my other jobs -- I love 

13 jobs -- was testing DOT containers.

14 CHAIR BEACH: Anybody else have 

15 any other questions?

16 DR. ULSH: Yes.

17 CHAIR BEACH: Okay.

18 DR. ULSH: Think now in terms of 

19 N/P ratio. Do you know what I mean, neutron 

20 to photon ratio?

21 MR. MADDING: Yes.

22 DR. ULSH: People who were badged, 
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1 and let's just take that SM-35, do you have an 

2 opinion as to whether or not the N/P ratio 

3 that would have been seen from those workers, 

4 do you have an opinion about whether it would 

5 have been higher or lower than other people, 

6 like visitors?

7 MR. MADDING: Well, what you had, 

8 what you had in the SM-35 was a process with 

9 plutonium dioxide, and it was essentially all 

10 plutonium dioxide. The outside contaminant to 

11 that was nothing that was going to change the 

12 neutron to photon ratio. 

13 So as far as the neutron to photon 

14 ratio, I mean the whole building was 

15 plutonium-238 oxide. There wasn't anything 

16 else in there, and there wasn't anything added 

17 on that would, in my opinion, change anything. 

18 The only thing was the shielding was quite 

19 different in different parts of the building.

20 For example, right next to SM-35 

21 was SM-39, which was a manipulator operation, 

22 which was the original place they made the 
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1 plutonium-238 metal sources, and they kept it 

2 to milk the cow for [identifying information 

3 redacted] and other people to get the U-234 

4 and --

5 CHAIR BEACH: Okay.

6 MR. FITZGERALD: Let me ask you 

7 another question. You indicate that really in 

8 that time period, about a year, whatever --

9 MR. MADDING: Sixty-four to mid10 65.

11 MR. FITZGERALD: -- that really 

12 they brought people in. Based on the film 

13 badge, they dosed them up to, I guess, three 

14 rem a quarter or close to it. Well, they 

15 actually used more readings to make sure they 

16 didn't cross the line, but they kind of came 

17 up to the line.

18 MR. MADDING: Absolutely.

19 MR. FITZGERALD: And then they'd 

20 annotate.

21 MR. MADDING: They shortened the 

22 badge reading time as you got closer to your 
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1 limit.

2 MR. FITZGERALD: Right.

3 MR. MADDING: They started out 

4 with like two weeks, and as you got close it 

5 came down and--

6 MR. FITZGERALD: And they rotated 

7 a group of workers in --

8 MR. MADDING: Yes.

9 MR. FITZGERALD: -- and did the 

10 same.

11 MR. MADDING: Yes. Everybody got 

12 through during the time in the barrel. 

13 Everybody got their shot in the barrel.

14 MR. FITZGERALD: You say 

15 everybody. I mean it was really almost 

16 everybody, and you're talking about --

17 MR. MADDING: They went over and 

18 you were doing some innocuous research on NMR 

19 and you were a Ph.D. and they thought you were 

20 capable of doing this, you were up there until 

21 you burned out, and then you went back to your 

22 regular job, and this went on for a year and a 
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1 half.

2 And it was three shifts a day, 

3 actually two shifts, really, of really hard 

4 work.

5 The other incident that I was 

6 talking about where they were boiling off the 

7 ethanol and the glove box blew off as one of 

8 the guys was walking by and blew him through 

9 the double doors into the SM addition. He was 

10 fine. In fact, I just recently saw him here 

11 last year.

12 Well, he was -- he was a QC guy, 

13 but he was assigned the third shift up there, 

14 and he just happened to be making his rounds 

15 and happened to be walking by that box when it 

16 let go, and bang.

17 And of course, the consequence was 

18 that they decided, hey, while the building is 

19 all contaminated, now is a good time to change 

20 the filters in this Unit 35, and that's when 

21 the November 11th actually --

22 CHAIR BEACH: Anybody, any other 
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1 questions for Dick?

2 Thank you very much.

3 MR. MADDING: Okay.

4 CHAIR BEACH: All right. So where 

5 are we now?

6 MR. MADDING: Warren has shot the 

7 barrel on our SM?

8 CHAIR BEACH: Yes. Warren, do you 

9 want to just go now or do you want to wait 

10 till we're finished? Go ahead.

11 MR. MADDING: It ties together 

12 with what I said.

13 CHAIR BEACH: Why don't you go 

14 ahead, Warren?

15 MR. SHEEHAN: My time in the 

16 barrel?

17 CHAIR BEACH: Do you want to sit?

18 MR. SHEEHAN: No, no.

19 CHAIR BEACH: So Warren Sheehan.

20 MR. SHEEHAN: I think most of you 

21 know who I am by now, but anyhow, Warren 

22 Sheehan. I worked April 56 to June of 89, 
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1 through June of 89.

2 So I had experience in the SM 

3 building as the initial health physics 

4 supervisor when the place went hot, and then I 

5 was taken back out of there to -- I guess the 

6 best words I ever heard from [identifying 

7 information redacted] was he called me one 

8 night and he said, I'm going to split the 

9 dosimetry group and bring you back and head up 

10 the bioassay group, and he said he proposed it 

11 to his boss and he said, [identifying 

12 information redacted] wants to put that like a 

13 duck to water.

14 Well, not only he did; I did. So 

15 that was my ticket out, but I soon went back 

16 when the second shift went on because when 

17 they put the second shift on, then I had to go 

18 back, and I never could remember when I did 

19 actually get myself extracted from the place.

20 Nevertheless, I had some 

21 experience not during the period Dick was 

22 there, at least some of the period.
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1 Anyhow, one remark I would say 

2 about the location of the facility there, that 

3 had the AEC's thought process that was 

4 prevalent in 69 and 70 been prevalent in 59 

5 and 60, that project would have never been 

6 located there. It would never have been there 

7 at all. The SM stack was only 200 feet from a 

8 public road, and there was the state park from 

9 which the lab got its name, Mound Lab. It was 

10 across the road. There's a five-acre state 

11 park there. That's where the mound is, and 

12 that whole park was within 1,200 feet of the 

13 SM stacks.

14 So we didn't have miles to dilute 

15 our emission sends. They were right across 

16 the road, very, very close. So eventually 

17 they decided they didn't want us to work open 

18 plutonium.

19 Well, anyhow, let's move on then 

20 to dosimetry, which I think is probably what 

21 you people are primarily interested in, and 

22 when I first approached Chairperson Josie here 
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1 about putting together a paper, I promised her 

2 I didn't want to get into a technical 

3 discussion, and I still don't because I don't 

4 believe I could match wits with these people. 

5 My history is four decades old, and three 

6 decades as far as health physics. So you guys 

7 have moved down the road quite a ways from

8 where I was.

9 But I was a, I want to say 

10 bystander, not a bystander; a spectator at the 

11 time this took place. So these are 

12 observations that I want to make regarding 

13 dosimetry and on the evaluation process.

14 As I say here, it's been 40 years 

15 since I worked in the field, but that said, 

16 the state of the art that has been employed 40 

17 years ago has not changed. Only the 

18 evaluation processes have, and here are some 

19 of the major issues I see with bounding the 

20 dose.

21 Number one, only yearly dose 

22 summaries are available, and I picked that up 
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1 out of your TIB documents. Without individual 

2 badges on, badge cycles are only a guess, and 

3 the time of exposures, counting first as 

4 acute, also are not know. The time interval 

5 between exposure and the film being developed 

6 are a major concern.

7 I'd like to, if you will allow me, 

8 to read a letter I got from a fellow by the 

9 name of [identifying information redacted]. 

10 Now, [identifying information redacted] was a 

11 certified health physicist that worked at 

12 Mound from 61 to 70, and he related this story 

13 to me the other night over the phone, and I 

14 said, well, [identifying information 

15 redacted], would you write that up and send it 

16 to me?

17 He and his coworker were doing 

18 neutron modification studies using the 

19 incoming shipment from Savannah River, and 

20 this is a story he wrote about that.

21 The thing that I remember, I did 

22 most of the handling of the material and 
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1 [identifying information redacted] ran the 

2 counter. Of course, I wore my regular film 

3 dosimeter, which as I remember was monthly 

4 issue. It may have been bi-weekly, and 

5 [identifying information redacted] wore a 

6 visitor film badge.

7 At that time [identifying 

8 information redacted] was assigned to, he was 

9 working in, I think, Advanced Devises. So he 

10 was a member of the Criticality Committee, but 

11 he wasn't assigned to a radiation building. 

12 So he wore a visitor badge.

13 I was interested in just how much 

14 neutron exposure dose I accumulated on this 

15 project. The thing that sticks in my mind is 

16 that most visitor December film was developed 

17 soon after the work was accomplished, and my 

18 dosimeter developed at the end of the 

19 dosimeter wearing period, which I think was 

20 monthly. 

21 [identifying information redacted]

22 dosimeter result was a relatively high 
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1 reading, and mine much, much lower reading, 

2 just the opposite of what was expected. The 

3 light came on that the neutron backfeeding was 

4 much greater than ever anticipated. As a 

5 result of this knowledge, I had some 

6 experiments done where neutron film was 

7 exposed and then developed, read at different 

8 intervals afterwards to get a handle on the 

9 fading problem.

10 As a result of this study, the 

11 neutron calibration film at Mound Lab was 

12 exposed to a neutron source in the middle of 

13 the week instead of immediately prior to 

14 developing the film, which would more closely 

15 assimilate the worker's exposure and dose 

16 conditions.

17 So that's sort of how that little 

18 affair with his own personal experience 

19 resolved with them changing the calibration 

20 procedures that were used.

21 MR. STEWART: Question, Warren.

22 MR. SHEEHAN: Yes.
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1 MR. STEWART: What time frame was 

2 that statement?

3 MR. SHEEHAN: Well, this, I gather 

4 from what tells me was 6/24. If I'm correct, 

5 it's MLM-1340, and this was June of 66.

6 MR. STEWART: Right, and 1968 is 

7 when they implemented the protocol to do step8 wise calibrations.

9 MR. SHEEHAN: Right.

10 MR. STEWART: So that work 

11 resulted in change.

12 MR. SHEEHAN: Right, right. There 

13 was a couple papers that were put out, 1490, 

14 which was a plutonium fluoride source which 

15 showed 33 percent in one week, 56 percent in 

16 two weeks. Then that was followed later on by 

17 another study which involved a plutonium, 

18 moderated plutonium oxide source, which is 16 

19 and 30 percent. Then the combination of those 

20 two papers was reported in Health Physics in 

21 Volume 17, 1969.

22 Anyhow, I lifted one statement out 
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1 of there. Contrary to what was expected, the 

2 results indicated less fading in the Pu-2 

3 moderated source, which was considered to have 

4 the lesser energy, but they were confused on 

5 that.

6 Well, anyhow, that kind of is the 

7 story, the introduction of the track fading. 

8 It was known to exist, but not to exist to the 

9 extent that it did because all of our 

10 experience heretofore in the higher energy, 

11 PuBe or POBE -- I'm sorry -- POBE, which was 

12 around four and a half MeV and gave you a nice 

13 track to read, but this stuff is different.

14 While we're on tracks, I lifted 

15 something out of [identifying information 

16 redacted] and [identifying information 

17 redacted], the only thing I could find. I 

18 wish you people could see an SM film of proton 

19 recoil tracks that came out of our SM field 

20 failed exposed people. It wasn't anything 

21 like this. It was nothing like that. I mean, 

22 that just doesn't give it. That gives you a 
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1 false impression of what you're looking at.

2 Now, a polonium beryllium track 

3 will look more like that. I mean not even 

4 that extensive, but the tracks that we were 

5 seeing, not only were the tracks with a 

6 slimmer -- slimmer? -- short; they were 

7 occluded, if you will, by a photon fault. 

8 Those films had an awful lot of trash on them, 

9 and I think one of the ladies best expressed 

10 it, and I'll clean it up. She said it was 

11 like trying to pick fly dung out of pepper, 

12 and I couldn't have found a better term, 

13 although she used a more earthy term.

14 So anyhow, okay. Track failure. 

15 So we have conflicting results even on that, 

16 and then we have faults, which was a real 

17 problem, and no consistent neutron/photon 

18 ratio. I don't know. Brant has a better 

19 handle on it than I have by far, I'm sure.

20 Calibration methods cannot 

21 duplicate all field conditions, and I think 

22 Ron Buchanan addressed that a few meetings ago 
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1 about that, and I read the account in the 

2 transcript, and I thought Ron was right on 

3 target with that.

4 I don't know how you do your 

5 calibration under field conditions, but the 

6 question is still there. If you're going to 

7 get the scatter and all of these other things, 

8 it's hard to go into a sterile situation, such 

9 as normally is done in the calibration.

10 So finally, what corrections were 

11 made at various time periods, that is, track 

12 fading, and flux quality factors applied are 

13 not clear.

14 One other thing is I think we're 

15 right at the inflection point on these 

16 neutrons at SM building, inflection point 

17 meaning around one MeV, and you know, it's an 

18 inflection point not only so far as dose 

19 relationship, but it's also an inflection 

20 point so far as film response.

21 So we've got both of those things 

22 working against us, and the more shielding you 
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1 put up, the more you force that in that 

2 direction. So I really think that's one of 

3 the pivotal problems we have in bounding the 

4 dose, is not only the dose, say, flux, the 

5 quality factor, while I tend to build -- they 

6 used to be called RVE, but quality factor --

7 and I assume the fading.

8 Well, I'll leave it there on the 

9 external.

10 CHAIR BEACH: Warren, I think you 

11 have a question.

12 DR. BISTLINE: We've been talking 

13 about shielding. Did you have shielding over 

14 the glove ports in the well? Because at Rocky 

15 we actually had doors that you, Benelex doors 

16 that you could shut.

17 MR. SHEEHAN: I don't think so, 

18 but Dick?

19 MR. MADDING: They had plugs. 

20 They stuck a Benelex plug with a big handle on 

21 it at the end of the glove ports.

22 DR. BISTLINE: When did that --
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1 MR. MADDING: As they added more 

2 shielding, the plug went right along with the 

3 shielding and the plugs got thicker as the 

4 shielding got thicker.

5 CHAIR BEACH: How thick were the 

6 plugs? Do you have any idea?

7 MR. MADDING: The same as the 

8 shielding. If you had six inches of 

9 shielding, you had a six-inch plug.

10 CHAIR BEACH: Okay.

11 MR. FITZGERALD: And you made the 

12 point that even though it got cumbersome, and 

13 you're talking about 12 inches, I mean, that's 

14 hard to imagine how you would reach, but you 

15 said that you went ahead and you just went 

16 with it anyway.

17 MR. MADDING: It depended on what 

18 you were doing. If you were doing the furnace 

19 like drying the gloves, I mean, the only thing 

20 you did, the furnace stuck out from the back 

21 wall a foot and a half or so or you had it 

22 positioned where you could reach it, and you 
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1 went in and opened the door and took some 

2 gloves out and put some other gloves in, and 

3 closed the door and you went on.

4 This was not -- except in the 

5 production days of 35 where they were actually 

6 processing the material, you were not standing 

7 in front of a glove box working six hours a 

8 day.

9 DR. BUCHANAN: In PP Building you 

10 didn't?

11 MR. MADDING: PP Building was 

12 probably even less, except for the analytical 

13 workers who worked with very low quantities, 

14 because the different recovery operations they 

15 did you would digest material or you would put 

16 it in an ultrasonic cleaner and turn the 

17 ultrasonic cleaner on to clean the material 

18 off of it.

19 The different processes that you 

20 did in recovery did not really require you to 

21 stand there constantly eight hours a day or 

22 six hours a day.
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1 CHAIR BEACH: You had mentioned 

2 shielding some times more than 12 inches. Did 

3 you --

4 MR. MADDING: No, no, no. I 

5 didn't say more than 12 inches.

6 CHAIR BEACH: So just 12 inches at 

7 the --

8 MR. MADDING: I don't know of 

9 anything -- I don't know everything about it 

10 because I stay out of there.

11 CHAIR BEACH: Okay.

12 MR. MADDING: But I as in there, 

13 and like I said, I can recall specifically 

14 going through that U and I didn't see how the 

15 300-pound guy ever got in there and worked. 

16 CHAIR BEACH: Okay.

17 MR. MADDING: He had to be pushing 

18 up against it, seriously.

19 CHAIR BEACH: -- to manipulate if 

20 you had that situation where you had 12 

21 inches?

22 MR. MADDING: Probably not. For 
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1 the most part you set your equipment up inside 

2 the boxes to suit, but it wasn't -- you know, 

3 that was the recovery operation beginning in 

4 mid-'65 through mid-'68 when the building was 

5 shut down. A lot of the boxes were converted 

6 for recovery operations. So more or less in 

7 line recovery trying to clean up boxes which 

8 had been contaminated in the high process 

9 period, 64 through mid-65.

10 CHAIR BEACH: Okay. Thanks.

11 Any other questions? Okay.

12 DR. MAKHIJANI: When did you do 

13 this experiment to determine the amount of 

14 fading and you found it was more than spots?

15 MR. SHEEHAN: Well, that, I think, 

16 was six -- the reports that came out, and I'm 

17 going from that, one of them was 67 and the 

18 other one was 69.

19 DR. MAKHIJANI: And then did 

20 anybody go back and correct the old number?

21 MR. SHEEHAN: I'm not aware of it.

22 MR. MADDING: It's hard to correct 
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1 something that's been published and 700 copies 

2 been sent out.

3 DR. MAKHIJANI: Okay.

4 MR. SHEEHAN: You're just asking 

5 whether or not the doses were.

6 MR. MADDING: And we have copies 

7 of all those papers if you'd like. We also 

8 have them on a flash drive if you'd like them 

9 that way.

10 MR. STEWART: The SRDB as well.

11 DR. ULSH: Actually I was 

12 wondering if you'd like the Health Physics 

13 citation. I can give it to you.

14 DR. MAKHIJANI: Oh, great.

15 DR. ULSH: I'm looking at it right 

16 now, at least the 1969 one.

17 DR. MAKHIJANI: Why don't you just 

18 send me an email.

19 DR. ULSH: Sure.

20 CHAIR BEACH: Okay, Warren. You 

21 had some other comments?

22 MR. SHEEHAN: Well, before I leave 
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1 that, I will say that Room 39, they did have a 

2 manipulator box and done with water shielding. 

3 That was a metal reduction where the middle 

4 one was made. The 4X bond in that process, it 

5 gave off a pretty high level of neutrons, but 

6 that was the only manipulator operation in the 

7 building that I know of.

8 MR. MADDING: That's right.

9 CHAIR BEACH: I just know how 

10 operators are. We tend to create tools that 

11 we need to do our job. So I'm sure Brant 

12 knows what I'm talking about.

13 MR. MADDING: There was some of 

14 that being done. I'm not saying -- you know.

15 CHAIR BEACH: Well, that was what 

16 I was asking.

17 MR. MADDING: And in the 

18 manipulator line particularly. I worked in 

19 there also.

20 CHAIR BEACH: Well, I didn't 

21 mean --

22 MR. MADDING: They had all kinds 
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1 of --

2 CHAIR BEACH: I just -- anyway, 

3 that's okay.

4 MR. SHEEHAN: Okay. Well, on 

5 internal, on this subject I feel a lot better. 

6 Maybe that's because I'm a bioassay man, but 

7 I feel much better about the data that goes 

8 into trying to bound the dose here, but what 

9 your major problem is here is the modeling 

10 process, and when you get into the modeling 

11 process, then you have to concern the mode of 

12 entry, the particle size, distribution, the 

13 chemical nature, type S and so forth, again, 

14 chronic or acute exposure, and the end effect 

15 of chelating therapy on the internal organ 

16 distribution, and finally, last but not least, 

17 the fact that we did not have a lung counter 

18 at the time that we were in operation and we 

19 really could have used it certainly.

20 And we used to have to send people 

21 out to Bob here and have him count it, but 

22 different places. So we didn't get a lot of 
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1 lung counts done unless we had a real crisis, 

2 and then we would send them also.

3 And the lung counter, body 

4 counter, well, I don't know that in the 

5 earliest years that the science had been 

6 developed that far, but at least with the low 

7 energy stuff that you had to look at relative 

8 to P-38, that was the problem there. I mean, 

9 if you had high energy things, you know, they 

10 were around. People were doing it, and it was 

11 being reported on.

12 But I go back to a paper that 

13 [identifying information redacted] -- I don't 

14 know if many of you people know [identifying 

15 information redacted].

16 If you knew [identifying 

17 information redacted], you knew [identifying 

18 information redacted]. He published a paper. 

19 He was at National Reactor Test Site, and in 

20 1962 he gave a paper at Savannah River, and it 

21 was titled What Value Urinalysis, and he based 

22 it on the fact that if you had insoluble 
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1 material that was in the lung then you'd never 

2 see it in the urine. So he was campaigning 

3 for routine fecal samples. Well, that went 

4 over like a lead balloon. There was a lot of 

5 controversy about that, but he had a point. 

6 No doubt about that. So anyhow.

7 Well, then finally, and I'll wrap 

8 it up, our remote location did not help us 

9 much there. It created problems, but in 

10 summary, to talk about the dose situation, and 

11 I don't want Brant to take offense to this, 

12 but --

13 DR. ULSH: Don't worry. I won't.

14 MR. SHEEHAN: -- to bound the 

15 neutron dose when using 45-year old NTA film 

16 data is like, as the old saying goes, trying 

17 to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. The 

18 data was flawed to begin with, and with all of 

19 the reworking of this data 45 years later, 

20 with all of the best intentions does not 

21 change these facts. In today's computer 

22 language we say garbage in, garbage out.
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1 While we did have a credible 

2 monitoring program, it was what it was, flawed 

3 method. So you can't make much more of it out 

4 of it.

5 Finally, Congress signaled a 

6 strong desire to rectify damages by 

7 stipulating claimant-favorable handling of 

8 claims. Employees in the SM building endured 

9 exceptional hardship and risk while working 

10 with kilogram quantities of the most hazardous 

11 isotope known not in caves, but in glove 

12 boxes. They deserve no less than SEC status.

13 CHAIR BEACH: Thank you.

14 Any other questions for Warren?

15 I do appreciate you braving the 

16 weather to come out and join us today. Thank 

17 you.

18 MR. SHEEHAN: Very good.

19 CHAIR BEACH: Thank you very much.

20 MR. SHEEHAN: I hope we didn't 

21 torpedo your meeting.

22 CHAIR BEACH: No, no, no. You're 
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1 fine.

2 MEMBER CLAWSON: Actually this 

3 meeting is about you as workers and so forth. 

4 So we greatly appreciate what you have to say 

5 to us.

6 MR. SHEEHAN: Well, you know, one 

7 thing, Brad, I think Dick and I probably share 

8 the same thing. Once you worked at SM you 

9 were branded. It was sort of like it was in 

10 your brain and you can't get it out, you know, 

11 and so we were both branded.

12 MEMBER CLAWSON: Appreciate it.

13 MR. SHEEHAN: Thank you.

14 CHAIR BEACH: It's ten after 12. 

15 It would be nice if we could wrap up neutrons 

16 before lunch, but I don't know if SC&A has 

17 some further comments.

18 DR. ULSH: Well, I would just like 

19 to make one comment. Brad asked me at the 

20 break if Warren and Dick worked for ORAU or 

21 NIOSH. Just to clarify, they don't. I mean, 

22 they're here of their own accord. In fact, I 
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1 didn't even know they were coming today.

2 But I would like to take the 

3 opportunity to thank both Warren and Dick not 

4 just for coming down today, but in the past 

5 couple of years, they've been extremely 

6 helpful, especially these two and a handful of 

7 other former workers. So these are the guys 

8 who were there on the front lines, and I would 

9 encourage you, the working group, to give what 

10 they say a lot of credibility in terms of they 

11 were there. They were there first hand. So 

12 to be honest, none of us were.

13 CHAIR BEACH: Okay. Work Group, 

14 what's your -- NIOSH, are you considering 

15 bringing anything else to the table on this 

16 issue, neutrons, the issues raised by SC&A?

17 DR. ULSH: Well, at this point, I 

18 think the latest revision of our White Paper 

19 stands. I mean, we don't envision any changes 

20 to it. If I interpret where we are in the 

21 process correctly, I don't know that there 

22 would be time to make any further changes 
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1 anyway, but it kind of depends on the 

2 deliberations of the working group, whether or 

3 not you want to see something in addition.

4 But I think for where we are now, 

5 we're comfortable with what we've got out 

6 there.

7 CHAIR BEACH: Okay. Paul?

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: We've heard a lot 

9 of comments from SC&A today, but we've seen 

10 none of that in writing. I understand that it 

11 may be in the process or is there an intent to 

12 formalize any of that in terms of what your 

13 bottom line is?

14 I mean, we've talked around a lot 

15 of things. To some extent there appears to be 

16 some agreement on approaches, but maybe some 

17 disagreements on what the inputs to the system 

18 look like particularly under modeling. So 

19 it's not completely clear to me how close or 

20 how far apart our contractor and NIOSH are and 

21 what we have available as work group members 

22 to sort of come to a bottom line on this 
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1 neutron issue.

2 MR. FITZGERALD: Yes, I guess I 

3 would respond that we did get -- well, first 

4 off, we had a Work Group meeting. When was 

5 that? May, I think it was.

6 CHAIR BEACH: May.

7 MR. FITZGERALD: Right. Where we 

8 discussed these issues. We didn't have a 

9 paper, White Paper, from NIOSH and we did 

10 discuss the MCNP issue. We discussed some of 

11 these issues, and based on that discussion, 

12 NIOSH did give us a slightly revised White 

13 Paper December 9th.

14 And I can only tell you we did 

15 review the White Paper and had discussions 

16 amongst ourselves in preparation for this 

17 meeting, and there is a lot of material that 

18 could go into a White Paper, but I think what 

19 we wanted to do is be in a position to respond 

20 to this revised White Paper from December 9th 

21 and take the guidance of the Work Group.

22 If it appears that it would be 
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1 beneficial to provide what we've said in 

2 writing, we could do that. However, I think 

3 we have actually provided most of it already.

4 I mean this to me is a refinement 

5 of what we said in the summer, our concerns 

6 over the MCNP input data not reflecting actual 

7 work place parameters.

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right. That's 

9 what John was emphasizing, but it appeared, 

10 John, that you're feeling now that there is 

11 more work place specificity, although you may 

12 have some concerns about, for example, do we 

13 have the right numbers for the shielding and 

14 so on.

15 DR. MAURO: As I mentioned before, 

16 it really comes down in the sensitivity 

17 analysis which attempted to show how much of 

18 an adjustment factor is needed. My concern 

19 was that there was no connection from where I 

20 looked at between the two inches and six 

21 inches of shielding and mount. Is there 

22 reason to believe that that is -- we heard 
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1 just now something I didn't know, that, well, 

2 maybe a foot is the most it really could have 

3 been.

4 Now, having that kind of feedback, 

5 it really now becomes a judgment call on 

6 whether or not that kind of information makes 

7 it Mound specific. Has a bridge been built 

8 now?

9 Before today, I have to tell you 

10 there was no bridge. When I read that they 

11 took these numbers because someone felt they 

12 were reasonable, but our feedback from our 

13 people was they could not tell from looking at 

14 everything whether that was unique, whether or 

15 not we could say that was applicable to Mound.

16 We heard a little bit of 

17 information today from first-hand experience, 

18 and it really becomes a judgment call now: 

19 does that build a bridge or not or can more be 

20 done to build a better bridge?

21 We also heard that there may be 

22 some drawings; there may be other information 
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1 that may be out there. In my mind this one --

2 now, I'm not talking neutron/photon now. I'm 

3 talking just simply this idea of the 

4 adjustment factor, and the use of the film 

5 badge to try the NTA film as the rock you're 

6 going to stand on.

7 To me that rock has to be solid, 

8 and right now that rock seems to be a little 

9 shaky because we're not quite sure whether a 

10 bridge has been built between the MCNP runs 

11 and the assumptions used in the MCNP runs in 

12 order to come up with the adjustment factor. 

13 To me that's the rock that this house is built 

14 on, and it's really a matter of, you know, 

15 your own personal sense. Do you feel 

16 comfortable with the basis for that 

17 assumption? Is there enough to build on?

18 DR. NETON: I just would add 

19 remember that this model value was only used 

20 for those visitor badges that had non21 detectable photon. That's the only time it's 

22 used.
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1 DR. MAURO: Well, that brings us 

2 to the N/P at the model. The model is to fix 

3 the N/P, and to me what we really --

4 unfortunately what we only really covered was 

5 the NTA film adjustment factors because of the 

6 uncertainty in the distribution. I think 

7 there are other subjects we really haven't 

8 delved into.

9 I think this issue of the N/P 

10 ratio and the fact that it's all over the 

11 place, I mean when I heard what I heard, when 

12 I heard numbers of ratios, it went from 18 to 

13 one to 18 to less than one, and that there's a 

14 presumption that there is a relationship 

15 between the two.

16 They may be stochastically 

17 independent. They may not be any relationship 

18 between a given photon reading and a given 

19 neutron dose because on each application where 

20 there's a change-out. The design of the 

21 shielding may have been so different that 

22 there is no correlation, and that means that 
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1 there is no reason to believe there is a 

2 correlation between the neutron dose and the 

3 photon dose. You can't use neutron to photon 

4 ratios. It becomes like stochastically 

5 independent of each other, and then that goes 

6 out the window, and we haven't talked about 

7 this yet.

8 So I'm concerned about that. Now 

9 that becomes the place where when you don't 

10 have NTA film and you want to --

11 DR. NETON: Well, it's going to be 

12 on the correction factor maybe.

13 DR. MAURO: Oh, no, I'm just 

14 saying right now you heard where we are on the 

15 correction factor.

16 DR. NETON: Well, I don't know.

17 DR. MAKHIJANI: I had a comment. 

18 We've heard, at least I heard new information. 

19 I don't know if it's new to the veterans

20 MR. FITZGERALD: No, it's new to 

21 us.

22 DR. MAKHIJANI: That as I 
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1 understand the model that's on the table, it's 

2 a bare source that is giving high energy 

3 neutrons. It's moderated by some kind of 

4 shielding.

5 Now, we see that because a lot of 

6 stuff was going in starting around 59 or 60 

7 and nothing was coming out, you've got a lot 

8 of trash. You've got a lot of trash. You've 

9 got a lot of hydrogenous material that 

10 constitutes the matrix for storing the stuff 

11 in the building. So now you've got barrels 

12 with paper, booties, gloves that have 

13 kilograms and kilograms of plutonium-238 whose 

14 characterization is not known, but you can 

15 infer that the neutrons would be much more 

16 heavily moderated than just or possibly more. 

17 They may not.

18 DR. NETON: I don’t know Arjun, 

19 that’s a stretch.

20 DR. MAKHIJANI: No, it is a 

21 stretch. I agree. I say maybe.

22 MR. MADDING: May I inject? This 
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1 is Dick Madding again.

2 May I inject that the drums went 

3 out of the building.

4 DR. MAKHIJANI: So the drums were 

5 not in the building.

6 MR. MADDING: Oh, absolutely not. 

7 They were stored outside alongside the 

8 building, and when PP Building was built in 

9 that space, they went 500 feet --

10 DR. MAKHIJANI: So then you've got 

11 a new place outside the building.

12 MR. MADDING: Yes, but it was down 

13 alongside the building and not in the regular 

14 path of people going by.

15 DR. MAKHIJANI: Right, but I just 

16 heard something that caused me to sit up to 

17 say that the whole source issue is more 

18 complicated. Whether it's an issue of 

19 significance for those or not I don't know, 

20 but I just want to put that on the table 

21 because it was a new issue.

22 MR. FITZGERALD: Well, I think 
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1 certainly the information on the --

2 DR. ANIGSTEIN: This is Bob 

3 Anigstein. I'd like to make one comment 

4 based on the workers' description of how 

5 crowded the rooms were where the glove boxes 

6 were.

7 So this idea that we had brought 

8 up earlier, it sounds the exposure would have 

9 been PA, becomes much more realistic now, and 

10 it sounds as if the worker might have been 

11 just as close to the glove box behind him or 

12 almost as close as the one in front.

13 MR. KATZ: Bob, you couldn't see 

14 the drawings. So it's understandable that 

15 that's not clear to you, but actually they're 

16 in separate rooms, and there's hallways 

17 between the rooms. So they really aren't back 

18 to back as you imagined.

19 DR. ANIGSTEIN: Oh, okay.

20 MR. FITZGERALD: But, Paul, to 

21 answer your original question, sure, I mean, 

22 we could take our notes from the last week or 
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1 so and put them into a White Paper. I don't 

2 see the value on this particular issue, but I 

3 think what we discussed today is pretty much 

4 what we discussed last summer. You know, what 

5 we're saying, again, is that -- and I think, 

6 you know, some of the -- I would think it's a 

7 revelation to me. I think the new information 

8 is not only the material that was in the 

9 source material, but also the shielding 

10 thickness being up to 12 inches.

11 MR. MADDING: I do have a number 

12 of photographs of SM boxes and PP boxes with 

13 shielding on them, if those are of interest to 

14 you.

15 MR. FITZGERALD: Well, I think 

16 that is what we were saying last summer and 

17 now, that without building this bridge --

18 let's just keep the analogy going -- without 

19 building this bridge to actual parameters, 

20 engineering drawings, something that would 

21 bring this down better, I think the confidence 

22 in the adjustment factor is still not there, 
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1 and that's what we kind of said this summer 

2 and what we said in our White Paper.

3 I think this discussion 

4 underscores it even more. So I don't think we 

5 can say more than what's been said at the 

6 table today.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: Just a follow-up 

8 question, though. As I understood it, it is 

9 to me a very different picture of the 

10 operation as well. Many of the glove box 

11 people were working in different locations.

12 MR. MADDING: Oh, absolutely.

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: And so, you know, 

14 you might have a 12 inch, but you weren't 

15 working with the 12 inch shielding 24-7.

16 MR. MADDING: No.

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: You might be in 

18 there for ten minutes and then you were at a 

19 different place with different amounts. So 

20 there is a kind of built in I don't know if I 

21 want to call it averaging procedure, but I 

22 think you could make the argument that some 
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1 kind of reasonable distribution of that 

2 shielding thickness would not be a bad 

3 approach.

4 I mean, yes, you could bond it and 

5 say let's take the maximum shielding, but it 

6 seems to me that's also unreasonable in terms 

7 of what they're doing.

8 MR. MADDING: And I'm not in 

9 conflict with what Brant has found out from 

10 other workers because it depends on when you 

11 were there as to what the thickness of the 

12 shielding was. If you were there --

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: For any given 

14 worker, it's likely to be changing --

15 MR. MADDING: Right, oh, 

16 absolutely.

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: -- from time to 

18 time.

19 MR. MADDING: Nobody could -- SM20 35 was a respirator operation practically from 

21 the start, 100 percent respirator operation, 

22 100 percent of the time. Nobody can work in 
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1 respirators six hours of the day. It's not 

2 just --

3 CHAIR BEACH: Okay. Warren has 

4 been waiting patiently to add something.

5 MR. SHEEHAN: I want to interject. 

6 You talk a lot about this neutron/proton 

7 ratio and being somewhat box related, how much 

8 shielding and all of that. I want to point 

9 out something that I think you haven't maybe 

10 considered. I think it is more job oriented.

11 The reason I bring that out, there 

12 was a lot of trash bagging, and if you had 

13 seen trash bagging, you're hugging that trash 

14 bag. You have no shielding. So in this case 

15 there is no shielding. You can talk about six 

16 inch, 12 inch or whatever, and you can talk 

17 about pi r squared. There's not much there, 

18 you know, when you're hugging that bag and 

19 there was an awful lot of trashing out done 

20 and you can come out through the glove ports.

21 So I think maybe the doses were 

22 more job-related than box related in the end. 
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1 That's my point.

2 CHAIR BEACH: Thank you.

3 DR. MAKHIJANI: Just to throw a 

4 number in here, we found a number doing a 

5 little Google search. Scattering mean free 

6 path in water of neutron decreases from six 

7 and a half centimeters to 11.25 centimeters 

8 and the neutron energy decreased from 5 MeV to 

9 .22 MeV, probably a couple of centimeters of 

10 mean tree path is what we're talking about, 

11 and then decreasing. That's to start with, 

12 and then after the first collision would 

13 decrease.

14 DR. ULSH: Sorry.

15 DR. MAKHIJANI: I'm done. This is 

16 right. I mean, I'm just doing it.

17 DR. ULSH: Again, I would remind 

18 you what the purpose of this White Paper is, 

19 and it is to estimate the unmonitored neutron 

20 dose from visitors. When you're talking about 

21 SM-35 with the shielding where some workers 

22 could have been in there for short periods of 
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1 time, those workers wore NTA film. Those are 

2 not the people that this White Paper is going 

3 to be applied to.

4 The people that this is going to 

5 be applied to are the visitors to the building 

6 that got low photon doses so that they didn't 

7 read the neutron dose.

8 DR. MAKHIJANI: I was just talking 

9 about the correction factor. I'm not talking 

10 about duration.

11 DR. ULSH: I'm not addressing what 

12 you said yet.

13 DR. MAKHIJANI: Oh, okay.

14 DR. ULSH: I'm talking about the 

15 past ten minutes of discussion.

16 DR. MAKHIJANI: Okay.

17 DR. ULSH: I would also direct you 

18 to page 41 of our White Paper where it clearly 

19 shows the fraction of the dose equivalent that 

20 is contributed by low energy neutrons, and it 

21 is trivial down below the neutron energy 

22 spectrum.
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1 DR. MAURO: That's unshielded. 

2 That's a naked source.

3 DR. ULSH: No.

4 DR. MAURO: What is that? That's 

5 a shielded source? That dose --

6 DR. ULSH: Two inches of water 

7 here, but the point is --

8 DR. MAURO: Okay. It's the 

9 relative dose?

10 DR. ULSH: In terms of the 

11 relative dose equivalent. If you look at the 

12 area under the curve, it will give you the 

13 dose equivalent.

14 DR. MAURO: And this would be 

15 for -- all of these represent two inches of 

16 water.

17 DR. ANIGSTEIN: Which page are you 

18 on?

19 DR. ULSH: These particular 

20 pictures do. Forty-one of 53 in our White 

21 Paper.

22 Now, if you're interested -- I'll 
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1 let John finish looking before I go forward.

2 DR. MAURO: So it looks like about 

3 half or less. The area under the curve?

4 DR. ULSH: Right, the area under 

5 the curve if you look at -- Bob Morris, you 

6 can help me out. We've got a table here that 

7 shows -- but that's in there.

8 DR. MAURO: Okay.

9 DR. ULSH: And the last thing that 

10 I would add is far from being an unknown 

11 factor here, if you look at a paper by 

12 [identifying information redacted] in Health 

13 Physics in 1980, and if you're interested I 

14 can give you the complete citation, it gives 

15 you the effect in terms of the fraction of 

16 neutrons with energy less than one MeV in this 

17 case, and it has different shielding 

18 thicknesses. It goes from zero, a bare 

19 source, up to 30.5 centimeters. So about a 

20 foot coincidentally, and what you see is you 

21 get to a point of diminishing returns; that 

22 you add more and more shielding, the effect, 
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1 it flattens off. It's less and less.

2 So I mean, this is not an unknown 

3 thing that we have just discovered here. 

4 Mound was well aware of this problem, and the 

5 reason that we picked the scenario that we did 

6 is not because Mound was full of concrete 

7 silos. It's because it's meant to be a 

8 bounding scenario.

9 I would present to you that the 

10 scenario that we picked with the glove box in 

11 the middle, concrete floors, concrete walls is 

12 the claimant favorable upper bound on what you 

13 would see that Dick drew up on the board.

14 CHAIR BEACH: But you're saying 

15 its scenario is not site specific data, which 

16 is what we're looking for.

17 DR. ULSH: It's not. The reason 

18 that we picked that scenario is to be a worst 

19 case so that we didn't have to model 14, 15 

20 different configurations. We picked the one 

21 that would be the claimant-favorable bound.

22 In other words, if we went in in 
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1 MCNP and modeled specifically each of these 

2 scenarios and you could go on ad infinitum, it 

3 would not be worse than what we've got in this 

4 paper. That's why we picked it.

5 CHAIR BEACH: But the law says 

6 that it has to start with site specific.

7 DR. NETON: We knew it was 

8 plutonium dioxide. We knew, you know, the 

9 material it was starting with, the glove box 

10 configuration, the use of shielding. There 

11 was a lot of site specific information that 

12 was used.

13 DR. BUCHANAN: I'd like to make 

14 one clarification. The adjustment factors 

15 from the modeling apply to all NTA film 

16 readings, the workers and the visitors and the 

17 coworkers. Okay. All of these adjustment 

18 factors, each worker that has a dose of record 

19 of NTA film and then these adjustment factors 

20 applied to his record to assign a dose, and 

21 then they are coworkers' data to assign a 

22 person that wasn't badged. Okay?
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1 So this modeling affects 

2 everybody's dose reconstruction.

3 DR. MAURO: That's why I kept 

4 saying the lock we're going to stand on it, 

5 and we've got to make sure --

6 DR. BUCHANAN: Not just coworkers.

7 DR. MAURO: Yes, I'm with you. So 

8 this is where it starts.

9 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: On the waste 

10 materials, I assume they had some type of NTA 

11 instrumentation to verify what was in those 

12 drums.

13 CHAIR BEACH: Can I stop for just 

14 a second. Phil, I don't want to interrupt 

15 that thought, but shall we take an hour lunch 

16 break and continue this afternoon? Because 

17 we're right at 12:30, and then some of those, 

18 maybe you can ask those questions. Will that 

19 work for everybody?

20 You think from 12:30 till 1:30?

21 MR. KATZ: Okay. For everyone on 

22 the phone then, we're going to disconnect the 
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1 line, and we'll be back up at 1:30.

2 Thank you all.

3 (Whereupon, the above-entitled 

4 matter went off the record at 12:30 p.m. and 

5 resumed at 1:30 p.m.)

6 MR. KATZ: So good afternoon. 

7 This is the Advisory Board on Radiation and 

8 Worker Health, Mound Working Group, and we are 

9 reconvening after a lunch break.

10 Before we get started, I just want 

11 to check in. Joyce Lipsztein, are you with us 

12 on the phone?

13 DR. LIPSZTEIN: Yes, I am.

14 MR. KATZ: Joyce, would it be 

15 possible -- the Work Group is still 

16 deliberating about neutron dose 

17 reconstruction, and there's probably up to 30 

18 minutes to go on that topic. Would it be 

19 possible for you to call in in 30 minutes?

20 DR. LIPSZTEIN: Oh, yes, of 

21 course.

22 MR. KATZ: I mean, you're welcome 
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1 to stay on the line. I just mean that you 

2 don't need to be hogtied to it if you have 

3 other things you need to do.

4 DR. LIPSZTEIN: Okay. I'll call 

5 back in 30 minutes.

6 MR. KATZ: Okay.

7 CHAIR BEACH: Thanks, Joyce.

8 DR. LIPSZTEIN: Okay. Bye-bye.

9 CHAIR BEACH: Okay. What we're 

10 going to do is we're going to switch the 

11 tritium with the radon. So we'll talk about 

12 the tritium after we finish up with neutron, 

13 and then we'll go into radon at the end of the 

14 day.

15 What I'd like to do is ask SC&A if 

16 they would tee up all the issues, if there's 

17 any other issues for neutrons, and then give 

18 NIOSH a chance to say whether there's anything 

19 more they want to provide, and then see how 

20 the Work Group feels at that point with what 

21 we would like to see from either SC&A or 

22 NIOSH. 
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1 If that's okay with everybody, 

2 we'll move forward.

3 MR. FITZGERALD: You want to re4 summarize. I think it's summarized pretty 

5 well, but we have a new chapter and new 

6 information.

7 DR. BUCHANAN: Okay. SC&A's 

8 position at this point is what I'd like to 

9 recap, and we have said this previously, but 

10 at this point our position essentially is the 

11 same as it was last May and June and when we 

12 came into the meeting with the additional fact 

13 that we felt that we see stronger issues with 

14 the working conditions that existed at Mound. 

15 With what has been presented today, we do not 

16 feel that the generic model of a glove box 

17 represents or can be tied to the many working 

18 conditions as we've seen on the board here in 

19 PP and SM and SM 35, without knowing more 

20 about what the working conditions were there 

21 to tie it to the model or the model tied to 

22 the working condition.
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1 In addition, we have not found 

2 that the results of the modeling can be tied 

3 to actual dose data or spectrums taken to --

4 at the Mound site to verify it. It's actually 

5 a combination of both, but we do not see 

6 either, and so we don't feel that the MCNP 

7 model, while we agree with their input 

8 parameters for the source, we agree that the 

9 model can be used to do these calculations, to 

10 do calculations from the nuclear industry. We 

11 don't feel that it has been proven beyond a 

12 reasonable doubt that it would provide correct 

13 dose reconstruction for the workers.

14 We're not sure if two or six 

15 inches or ten or 12 inches would be adequate. 

16 It may be. It may not be. I'd like to 

17 emphasize that the MCNP modeling will be 

18 applied to all dose of record. This is for 

19 the everyday worker and for the visitors and 

20 coworkers, anything. It all has to be 

21 adjusted, and the dose of record is in their 

22 folder, reads a certain millirem, and it will 
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1 have to be adjusted by applying a factor of 

2 1.2 or two or whatever it is. This is derived 

3 from the model and the other fading factors 

4 and such, and so this applies to all doses, 

5 neutron doses.

6 That's the number one issue. 

7 Number two issue is the coworker model. We 

8 feel that the variance in coworker data taken 

9 from the NTA data for the neutron to photon 

10 ratio shows a large amount of variance. We do 

11 not have the data available to do the 

12 analysis. We cannot just say looking at Table 

13 6-2 tell whether it's correlated or not. 

14 That correlation needs to be done 

15 within the years and between the years because 

16 they vary quite a bit, and the intervals in 

17 the second map that I'm using, the dose 

18 intervals, zero to 100, 100 to 200, and 

19 greater than 300, is not based on actual 

20 individual dose measurements, but on 

21 categories. This does not really stand on 

22 solid ground as far as dose reconstruction, we 
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1 don't feel.

2 The other item is we do not 

3 understand why the NTA values themselves, 

4 since you have some for each year, from 49 to 

5 77, was not looked into to see if those could 

6 be used for coworker dose assignments because 

7 this would be less complicated. It wouldn't

8 be adding a factor of photons or intervals to 

9 it, and it would be of interest to see if that 

10 would provide coworker dose data as the 

11 adjustment factors were applied.

12 So I think that summarizes our 

13 position on neutrons at Mound at this time.

14 CHAIR BEACH: Anybody have 

15 questions for SC&A?

16 And then NIOSH, Brant, do you have 

17 a counter there?

18 DR. ULSH: Sure. Bob, do you want 

19 to weigh in before I do? Bob Morris.

20 MR. MORRIS: No, you go ahead.

21 DR. ULSH: Well, I tried.

22 MR. MORRIS: Please.
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1 DR. ULSH: On the first point that 

2 Ron raised about the generic model, I guess 

3 the issues are clearly on the table for the 

4 Work Group to consider. We have laid out the 

5 bases for why we think our model is a 

6 plausible upper bound for what we're going to 

7 apply. We do not agree that it is not tied to 

8 Mound-specific data. There is a lot of Mound9 specific data in it in terms of the source 

10 term, in terms of an estimate on the 

11 shielding, although if you want to argue that 

12 the -- let me get my tongue back in my mouth

13 here -- the shielding should be thicker, that 

14 is in what John in past meetings has called a 

15 tractable issue. It can't go on forever. 

16 Your human arm is only so long.

17 If you want to argue that it 

18 should be a foot or ten inches or eight 

19 inches, fine. You know, that's a tractable 

20 issue, and I would say that it's a TBD issue 

21 and not an SEC issue.

22 Ron stated that the modeling would 
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1 be applied to all doses of record. I don't 

2 agree with that. First of all, it would be 

3 applied to unadjusted NTA films. I don't 

4 know. I think that you probably wouldn't say 

5 that it would be applied to TLD data.

6 DR. BUCHANAN: No, no. I wasn't 

7 talking at 49-77.

8 DR. ULSH: Right, but I would also 

9 point out to you that, well, like I say, it's 

10 only during the NTA era. 

11 Models are just that. They're 

12 models. They are meant to be an approximation 

13 of what you see. They're not meant to be a 

14 one-to-one representation, and the reason is 

15 you can envision just looking up on the board 

16 that we have here in the room; you can 

17 envision any number of scenarios. It's just 

18 not possible to model every single scenario.

19 That's why we picked the one that 

20 we did, because it represents the worst case 

21 that would still be reasonable for Mound in 

22 terms of concrete walls, concrete floor, 
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1 concrete ceiling. That is meant to be 

2 claimant-favorable because it maximizes the 

3 scattering. It maximizes the moderation that 

4 would occur to the neutron spectrum.

5 So, quite frankly, our White Paper 

6 stands. I mean, that's our position in terms 

7 of modeling.

8 On point number two, the coworker 

9 model, Ron raised a concern that the N/P ratio 

10 was too variable from year to year. I would 

11 say to you that that represents the reality of 

12 the situation at Mound, and it's very 

13 understandable why you would expect to see 

14 variable N/P ratios. I think Dick alluded to 

15 it earlier. If you start at one end, if you 

16 follow the plutonium-238 material through, for 

17 instance, the SM building, you go across a 

18 number of different glove box lines. You go 

19 through an entire process that is operated on 

20 on plutonium-238, and you would expect to have 

21 different N/P ratios throughout that process.

22 Yes, it's variable, but I think 
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1 that captures the reality at Mound. I didn't 

2 know that being variable was a 

3 disqualification. It's variable because it 

4 was variable.

5 In terms of categorical data being 

6 somehow not sufficient for dose 

7 reconstruction, I simply disagree. We have 

8 the summary data from the Health Physics 

9 Progress Reports. What it shows by and large 

10 is that of the multitude of film badges that 

11 were read, and there were hundreds, in some 

12 quarters thousands, they all fall into the 

13 lower dose category. So we're talking about 

14 at least in terms of these badges them being 

15 low.

16 Yes, they are influenced by the 

17 badge exchange cycle, and they're influenced 

18 in a claimant-favorable way. In terms of when 

19 you have a more frequent exchange, the missed 

20 dose is higher and that's claimant-favorable. 

21 I don't see a problem with that.

22 Yes, it is categorical data. I 
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1 don't know. I'm not ready to commit and say 

2 that we haven't done that anywhere else. I 

3 can't think of a specific example. So I'll 

4 just be silent on that issue, but I haven't 

5 heard a real technical basis for why that is 

6 unacceptable.

7 So there again, I think we're 

8 going to stand on that unless the Working 

9 Group has another specific request for us, and 

10 we will gladly try to accommodate that, but in 

11 terms of what we've heard so far, I think our 

12 position is well on the table.

13 Bob, do you want to add anything 

14 now?

15 MR. MORRIS: I really do think 

16 that you've said it very appropriately. We do 

17 have a model that is capable of finding a 

18 bounding exposure, and we have a model that is 

19 arguable about whether we've got the right 

20 assumptions in it for the technical basis 

21 document, but those can be changed if we need 

22 to.
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1 If you want to say our judgment is 

2 four inches or five inches of water shielding 

3 to make the adjustment factors, that's very 

4 doable. Nevertheless, it can be done, and so 

5 I think it's not a question of can we do it in 

6 terms of the SEC. It can be done.

7 If you don't like the assumptions, 

8 we can change the assumptions.

9 DR. ULSH: So I guess at this 

10 point I would put it in the Working Group's 

11 hands. You've heard both sides of the issues, 

12 and I guess it's really kind of up to you guys 

13 now.

14 CHAIR BEACH: Joe, do you have 

15 anything else to add?

16 MR. FITZGERALD: No. I think, you 

17 know, again, we've pretty much reiterated our 

18 position since last summer. So I think 

19 everything is on the table.

20 There is, I would add though, some 

21 new wrinkles that came up in today's 

22 discussion, which you know we weren't aware of 
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1 in terms of the actual workplace conditions 

2 that could bear some, you know, review in 

3 terms of augmenting what we've done already, 

4 but our central position is nothing has 

5 changed from that standpoint. We don't think 

6 the -- if I can use the analogy of the bridge 

7 -- we don't think the bridge to the site 

8 parameters would make this, in our view, a 

9 valid model has been built in terms of 

10 parameters.

11 CHAIR BEACH: Well, I guess I'd 

12 like to ask the Work Group. Paul, you brought 

13 up earlier that you'd like to see something in 

14 writing from SC&A based on --

15 MEMBER ZIEMER: No, I was really 

16 asking that as a question as to whether there 

17 was an intent to add anything to the record 

18 based on the discussion today or whether 

19 everything that they have already given us is 

20 pretty much their position. It sounded like 

21 there was perhaps some new wrinkles, and I 

22 thought that John was saying that he was 
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1 perhaps interpreting things a little bit 

2 differently based on the information about the 

3 sort of limits on how much shielding you could 

4 put in.

5 So it wasn't clear to me where 

6 SC&A was ending up. So that was the only 

7 question I was raising as to whether something 

8 else was going to be in the record that we 

9 don't already have.

10 CHAIR BEACH: Okay. So as a Work 

11 Group, are we ready to decide on this issue 

12 or, John, do you have something?

13 DR. MAURO: I did have a question. 

14 To go back for a moment to the coworker 

15 model, the neutron to photon ratio where 

16 you're going to reconstruct doses to people 

17 who don't have NTA film but do have photon, 

18 and you're going to use that ratio, now, I 

19 have to say it's one of these brain teasers. 

20 If the two parameters are stochastically 

21 independent of each other, I don't mean this 

22 facetiously, but it's almost like saying I'm 
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1 going to take the person's height and 

2 correlate it with another parameter.

3 I mean, there's no relationship 

4 between them, and you have a real person. You 

5 have a real person showing up and say, I want

6 to reconstruct this person's neutron dose. I 

7 have his photon dose, and I'm going to use a 

8 neutron to photon ratio, but if there's no 

9 relationship between the two --

10 DR. NETON: Am I missing 

11 something?

12 DR. MAURO: -- that's when you 

13 do --

14 DR. NETON: But a lot of these 

15 people had NTA badges. They just weren't 

16 read. So these people were monitored. Their 

17 photon badges were non-detectable, and 

18 therefore they didn't read the neutron back.

19 DR. MAURO: Okay. So that's why 

20 I'm asking the question.

21 DR. NETON: The only class of 

22 people -- and I think I'm right -- does this 
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1 one apply to.

2 DR. MAURO: So you've got a group 

3 of people.

4 DR. NETON: Visitor badges.

5 DR. MAURO: These are visitors. 

6 They had --

7 DR. NETON: They are workers, but 

8 they have visitor badges.

9 DR. MAURO: They have visitor 

10 badges, and they have both neutron and photon 

11 record.

12 DR. NETON: They were badged.

13 DR. MAURO: They were badged, and 

14 now what was it that you -- now, you're going 

15 to be using a neutron to photon ratio. Now, 

16 you have results back that are photons.

17 DR. NETON: No.

18 DR. MAURO: No, you don't have 

19 that.

20 DR. ULSH: Wait, wait, wait.

21 DR. MAURO: Help me here. My 

22 fault because I haven't delved in -- I was 
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1 listing to the problem. Let me hear some more

2 about this.

3 DR. ULSH: Maybe I can clarify. 

4 The group of people that we're talking about 

5 are what in Mound terms were called visitors. 

6 They were Mound workers, but they weren't 

7 permanently stationed in, for instance, SM 

8 building.

9 DR. MAURO: Okay.

10 DR. ULSH: So they were, you know, 

11 the crafts or the trades people that came up 

12 to do a specific job. When they did that, 

13 they were termed visitors. They were given a 

14 visitor neutron and photon badge. They went 

15 in and they did their job, and then they 

16 turned in their badge. They read the photon 

17 badge, and I can't remember exactly what the 

18 cut point was, but there was a photon dose, 

19 and if the photon dose was above that cut 

20 point, then they went ahead and read the NTA 

21 film. If the photon dose was below that cut 

22 point, they didn't read the NTA film.
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1 So essentially if the photon dose 

2 is below the cut point, you could think of 

3 them in terms of being unmonitored for 

4 neutrons.

5 DR. MAURO: Okay.

6 DR. ULSH: Because they wore 

7 badges, but they weren't read. So they're 

8 essentially unmonitored.

9 DR. MAURO: So you've got the 

10 photon reading, and based on that reading, you 

11 may or may not have a neutron. If you don't 

12 have the neutron, the neutron dose was not 

13 read out, then you're going to apply neutron 

14 to photon ratio to somehow assign that.

15 DR. ULSH: During a certain time 

16 period.

17 DR. MAURO: During that certain 

18 time. Okay. Now, the neutron to photon ratio 

19 that is going to be used to make that 

20 assignment is based on data where you have 

21 both measurements, paired measurements that 

22 are in detectable range, and it's my 
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1 understanding that those paired measurements 

2 do not show -- in other words, there was no 

3 correlation done.

4 Has any analysis been done to show 

5 that, yes, when the photon doses are higher 

6 the neutron doses are higher and there's a 

7 relationship?

8 And I understand that that wasn't 

9 done. It seems to me without having that, 

10 looking at the actual date and see the 

11 correlation coefficient between your paired 

12 numbers where you do have positive readings, I 

13 can't see how you could do this.

14 DR. ULSH: Bob Morris, I'm not 

15 going to give you an option now. Jump in and 

16 help. Tell what we have or have not done in 

17 terms of correlating neutron to photon.

18 MR. MORRIS: That's true. We did 

19 not make a correlation there.

20 DR. ANIGSTEIN: This is Bob 

21 Anigstein.

22 Identifying with what John was 
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1 saying, I did -- one year on the box and 

2 whisker plot in the 70s where the ratio goes 

3 from, just reading it off the plot, it seems 

4 to go from about one to 33. So with Brant's 

5 point, as Brant said yes, the neutron to 

6 photon ratio -- is variable. We're not 

7 disputing that. We're not saying there's 

8 something wrong about the calculation. But 

9 that's the whole point. It is so variable 

10 that where does this particular individual who 

11 may have had a blank -- whose neutron dose 

12 wasn't read, and I'll just make up a number. 

13 Let's say the threshold was 100 millirem on 

14 the photon dose. Well, he could be assigned 

15 100 millirem for a neutron dose or he could be 

16 assigned 3 rem for a neutron dose depending 

17 where on this range you pick off that ratio.

18 And there's a huge amount of 

19 variability which does not sound like it meets 

20 the standard of sufficient accuracy in dose 

21 reconstruction.

22 DR. MAURO: But, Bob, I'll go a 
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1 step further. If there's no correlation 

2 between those two parameters, even if you were 

3 to pick the worst one, the 33, it doesn't mean 

4 anything anyway.

5 DR. MAKHIJANI: No, I think that 

6 that is the most fundamental point now. This 

7 is from memory of a couple of years ago. 

8 Maybe Brant remembers it better than me, but I 

9 think this was an issue at Rocky Flats where 

10 part of the problem with the use of the N/P 

11 ratio is that it did not seem to be -- and in 

12 that place it's a different kind of N/P ratio 

13 we're talking about admittedly because that 

14 was building N/P ratios. There didn't seem 

15 to be a correlation between the N and the P.

16 But this is from memory, but I 

17 think this is a very important issue.

18 DR. MAURO: I think it has to make 

19 sense to me. You know, even if you were to 

20 pick 33, the worst one, if there's no 

21 relationship, that doesn't mean -- it's just 

22 arbitrary that 33 happened to show up. If 
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1 there's no correlation between the two, that 

2 just happens to be the number that showed up.

3 Do you see what I'm saying?

4 DR. NETON: There are universal 

5 ratios that are out there, right? Think of it 

6 as a universal ratio, and if you pick the 

7 highest one, then you have a sampling of all 

8 these universal ratios and you pick the 

9 highest one. I think that does say something. 

10 That's not a happenstance.

11 DR. MAURO: But there's no reason 

12 to believe the next one -- if they're 

13 stochastic independent, there's no reason to 

14 believe the next one is going to fall within 

15 that spread.

16 DR. NETON: Oh, but you have -- I 

17 don't know.

18 DR. MAURO: Do you see what I'm 

19 saying?

20 DR. NETON: I'm just saying if you 

21 had a legitimate sampling of all the work 

22 activities that are out there that have been 
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1 done and you have a population, a distribution 

2 of ratios, that is a valid upper limit of a 

3 ratio of the monitor population.

4 DR. ULSH: John, let's take for 

5 the sake of discussion what you're saying is 

6 true. The neutron dose and the photon dose 

7 are completely uncorrelated. What would be 

8 the effect of the estimated neutron dose if 

9 you took that measured N/P ratio, given that 

10 has nothing to do with photon dose whatsoever, 

11 and multiplied it by the photon dose?

12 Well, at worst, if you picked a 

13 high ratio you would overestimate the neutron 

14 dose.

15 DR. MAURO: See, I would agree if 

16 we knew that as the neutron dose went up, 

17 there was a correlation coefficient, and then 

18 you knew that there was a relationship between 

19 the two and you say, okay. We know there's a 

20 relationship between the two. There's a 

21 variability, and you operate and you make a 

22 bunch of slopes and you picked the 95th 
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1 percentile slope. Do you see what I mean?

2 DR. NETON: If there's not a one3 to-one correlation, then what you have is a 

4 distribution of ratios. That's what you have.

5 DR. ANIGSTEIN: If I could, Bob 

6 Anigstein again. 

7 The point is what is the effect 

8 even if there is no correlation? What is the 

9 effect of assuming, one, you have a 

10 scientifically invalid dose reconstruction 

11 which does not meet the letter of the law.

12 DR. NETON: No, no, no. I'm not 

13 saying assume one, Bob. I'm saying if you 

14 have a distribution of ratios and you take the 

15 highest ratio, that is an empirical sampling 

16 of that work activity. There are only so many 

17 different activities that can generate these 

18 ratios.

19 DR. ANIGSTEIN: But John's point 

20 was that if it's really uncorrelated, this is 

21 just a spurious number, and the one that 

22 wasn't measured could have higher.
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1 DR. MAURO: It's almost as if I 

2 took a random number generator and I picked 

3 100 numbers randomly.

4 DR. NETON: I don't think so, 

5 John. You just sample the work force 

6 population, and I have all of these ratios of 

7 work activities that were ongoing at that time 

8 at that facility, and of all those ratios, 

9 here's what I have as the worst case activity.

10 I'm not saying it couldn't be 

11 higher. I'm just saying that based on that 

12 empirical sampling this is what you have. You 

13 have data to indicate that under some 

14 condition it can be 30-to-one.

15 DR. BUCHANAN: But next year it's 

16 four, you know. In the production or, say, 

17 like, it doesn't change that rapidly from year 

18 to year.

19 DR. NETON: One work activity that 

20 occurred that could have been 30-to-one.

21 DR. ANIGSTEIN: But you also have 

22 a biased sample in the sense that the one that 
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1 would give you the highest ratio by definition 

2 or by implication would be the ones with the 

3 lower photon doses, and the ones with the 

4 lower photon doses they didn't even bother 

5 measuring reading the NTA film.

6 So you could have 100-to-one, but 

7 because the photon dose was low, they were 

8 never read. So we have no record of it.

9 DR. ULSH: No, I could also turn 

10 that around and say by definition we have a 

11 biased sample because the ones that give you 

12 the highest ratio are the ones with the 

13 highest neutron doses, and if they had high 

14 neutron doses, they were measured.

15 DR. ANIGSTEIN: I know, but we 

16 don't know that because if they had a low 

17 photon dose, they never read the NTA film. So 

18 they don't know what's on it.

19 DR. MAKHIJANI: Actually, I think 

20 in this very narrow point, Bob is right. If 

21 there was a high neutron dose and a low photon 

22 dose, you don't know what it was, but you 
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1 know, suppose one takes what Jim Neton was 

2 saying at face value, that you sample the 

3 universe of people and then you use the 

4 highest number and you have a range of work 

5 activity that is sampled, my question actually 

6 would supplement. I'm not saying that this --

7 you know, I'm not taking sides on the earlier 

8 argument. I think there's another question. 

9 Have you sampled? You have a sample of the 

10 nature of activities that were being done, and 

11 that's why I asked the question before the 

12 break. Are we sampling the right population?

13 We're taking an N/P ratio from one 

14 population, which is dominated by the process 

15 workers and applying it to the visitor 

16 population. I think Warren was actually 

17 saying something very interesting about 

18 visitors to us after the break, which I think 

19 deserves to be heard, you know, about the way 

20 visitor badges were used, and with the 

21 indulgence of the Chair, I think it would be 

22 important for people to know.
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1 MEMBER CLAWSON: It would be nice 

2 for all of us to hear it.

3 CHAIR BEACH: Sure.

4 MR. SHEEHAN: I think the question 

5 was, again, the usage. One of the things, if 

6 workmen were, say, assigned to a job that went 

7 on for several days, some of them would keep 

8 the badge in their locker or wherever, shoe 

9 box, and reuse it. Many times they're thrown 

10 in from one visit, one badge, one visit, one 

11 badge. So you could never correlate the 

12 project.

13 DR. MAKHIJANI: So we don't know 

14 this universe of monitoring in terms of either 

15 photon or neutron dose because if it was more 

16 frequent that people kept their badges for the 

17 job, it will be more likely they got a photon 

18 dose that would be above a threshold and a 

19 neutron dose. But if they were changing their 

20 badges every day, then it would be much more 

21 likely that they got -- I think we don't have 

22 enough information about the universe of 
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1 workers to whom we're trying to apply this N/P 

2 ratio other than this problem that John was 

3 talking about in terms of lack of correlation, 

4 which is also a problem.

5 DR. NETON: I need to know more 

6 than about -- it seems to me that these were 

7 short duration exposures to these workers. 

8 They ran out. They didn't have much exposure. 

9 Probably most of them, I'm assuming right 

10 now, are probably non-detectable. 

11 DR. MAKHIJANI: And the reason I 

12 put this issue on the table, you know, having 

13 not gotten the read in Mound is that we 

14 started with this assumption at Savannah River 

15 site, and what we're finding at Savannah River 

16 site is that that assumption is not correct.

17 Now, I don't know whether -- I 

18 think the lesson from that is that is that it 

19 bears looking into and that we shouldn't be 

20 assuming a prior that because it was 

21 maintenance workers, that their exposure 

22 potential was somewhat less because they were 
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1 in there for shorter periods of time.

2 MR. MADDING: Dick Madding.

3 I'd like to comment on that. A 

4 lot of times the maintenance workers came up 

5 there to do really high level maintenance 

6 without shielding because they were removing 

7 glove box fronts and changing glove box

8 fronts, putting new equipment in and taking 

9 equipment out without shielding and were 

10 working in areas, in service areas which were 

11 intentionally not shielded because it was not 

12 intended to be worked in.

13 So, for example, behind the lines 

14 changing filters or working on things in the 

15 SM Room 35, and so those workers did have --

16 the visitor workers did have a potential for a 

17 high number.

18 DR. MAKHIJANI: I think Savannah 

19 River is not likely to be an isolated case. 

20 It just bears looking into. That's all.

21 DR. ULSH: So keep in mind what 

22 would have happened in a situation like Dick 
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1 just described. That badge with a high dose, 

2 by definition you would have exceeded the LOD, 

3 and you'd get a positive reading on that 

4 badge.

5 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, do you know 

6 the photon threshold for reading the neutron 

7 dose? It isn't above detectable limit with 

8 some other threshold.

9 DR. NETON: I'm trying to envision 

10 the scenarios which alter these neutron-photon 

11 ratios. You know, you almost have to look at 

12 the specific activities.

13 DR. MAURO: So there's this 

14 subgroup of workers who experienced a photon 

15 dose that's below some cutoff that you didn't 

16 measure the neutron. We're working with this 

17 subgroup by definition at least that had 

18 relatively low photon dose.

19 DR. NETON: Exactly.

20 DR. MAURO: So that's important. 

21 So we know that category, and they didn't read 

22 the neutron dose, I presume, because they 
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1 presumed at the time that it would be low. So 

2 it now all seems ring true until I heard that 

3 no attempt was made to see if there is a 

4 correlation between the two. In fact, what 

5 I'm hearing is that there's very little 

6 correlation between for each one of these 

7 campaigns or operations, the ring which they 

8 set up the shielding, whether they shielded 

9 the gamma or shielded the neutron, it was 

10 dealt with in a way -- and I don't know what 

11 the rationale was -- but I could imagine in 

12 some cases they set up the shielding and 

13 eliminated the neutron dose and not the 

14 photon. More likely they eliminated the 

15 photon, not the neutron, and all of a sudden 

16 this relationship that they were operating on, 

17 in other words, the thought process that they 

18 had at the time may have been fundamentally 

19 flawed, and until you do the correlation, 

20 which shows, no, no, they were right; there is 

21 correlation, and we know if we cut off at 100 

22 millirems for the photon, we know that the 
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1 dose for a neutron really can't be much higher 

2 than this.

3 Right now I don't see where that 

4 analysis has been done to provide a compelling 

5 argument that, yes, that is reasonable and not 

6 only reasonable, but also claimant favorable, 

7 and I think that's where we're having trouble.

8 MR. MORRIS: Well, John, this is 

9 Bob Morris.

10 It's true that we haven't done 

11 that, but it's also true that this is the 

12 first time that anyone has ever brought it up 

13 as an issue with the year's worth of 

14 consideration of it, will you? When we didn't 

15 think to do that, it didn't make our thought 

16 process when we set up the analysis, but it's 

17 not that we couldn't do that analysis. It's 

18 just a matter of doing it.

19 DR. NETON: Yes, well, this is 

20 Jim.

21 I think after, you know, going 

22 through this discussion, I think there is an 
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1 open issue there for us to review. It is true 

2 that these probably lower-exposed type 

3 individuals, there must be some upper limit 

4 though on this.

5 DR. MAURO: That's what I'm 

6 looking for. That's what I'm looking for.

7 DR. NETON: And whether there's 

8 the universe that we sampled, if that's the 

9 appropriate one, or if one can make some 

10 correlation with that, maybe that would be 

11 true. I don't know at this point. I 

12 certainly couldn't make that judgment sitting 

13 at this stage

14 CHAIR BEACH: So can I wrap this 

15 up a little bit? NIOSH, you're agreeing to go 

16 back and review the correlation between the --

17 and I probably won't say this totally correct 

18 -- the N/P ratio and give us what, a memo on 

19 that?

20 DR. BUCHANAN: Within the year, 

21 between years.

22 DR. NETON: Well, just in general 
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1 the use of the N/P ratio for visitor badges.

2 DR. MAKHIJANI: I think that 

3 probably will cover the universe.

4 DR. NETON: Just in general the 

5 applicability N/P ratio with the visitor 

6 badges, the validity of that ratio to bound 

7 visitor badge.

8 DR. MAKHIJANI: That's the only 

9 group that --

10 DR. NETON: I think that's what 

11 Brant said, and I think that's true, that it's 

12 only the visitor badges that weren't read that 

13 were below a certain threshold.

14 And I'd also like to get a handle 

15 on how many workers are we talking about here. 

16 Is this a few people, thousands of people? I 

17 really don't know. I have not looked into 

18 this very closely.

19 CHAIR BEACH: Okay. So to that 

20 end, I believe that's the only action item for 

21 NIOSH, and I would like to ask SC&A if they --

22 and if you have more after this -- I'd like to 
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1 ask SC&A to come up with their final version 

2 of what we've learned today, what we've heard 

3 today, and deliver that to the Work Group 

4 also.

5 DR. ULSH: Josie, can I ask at 

6 least for our item what time frame are you 

7 looking?

8 CHAIR BEACH: Well, I think that 

9 we should probably wait until after the 

10 transcripts come out and give people the 

11 opportunity to go back and look at transcripts 

12 and then -- I don't really want to give you a 

13 hard fast right now.

14 MEMBER CLAWSON: It would be nice 

15 tomorrow.

16 (Laughter.)

17 DR. NETON: Close of business 

18 today maybe.

19 CHAIR BEACH: There has been a lot 

20 of discussion for a lot of hours, and it just 

21 might be something that you'd want to go back 

22 and look at before you finish that.
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1 MR. MORRIS: Josie, this is Bob 

2 Morris.

3 CHAIR BEACH: Hi, Bob.

4 MR. MORRIS: With regard to the 

5 question that SC&A has on the table, I'm 

6 curious if you could come to a position about 

7 whether there's anything that we could say 

8 short of having measurements that we've never 

9 found that would satisfy your need for the 

10 bridge from modeling to the work floor at 

11 Mound.

12 I mean, is there anything you can 

13 imagine that would ever satisfy your concern?

14 CHAIR BEACH: Well --

15 MR. FITZGERALD: Yes, I was going 

16 to say I think back in the summer when we 

17 first raised this issue, we were pointing to 

18 whether there would be any characterization 

19 information on the -- I just felt there must 

20 be some engineering drawings or something that 

21 would give you some of the spatial information 

22 that we talked about today for the first time.
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1 MR. MORRIS: Last summer you said 

2 a sensitivity analysis.

3 MR. FITZGERALD: Yes.

4 MR. MORRIS: Which is essentially 

5 what Figure 7-15 is.

6 DR. ULSH: Repeat that, Bob.

7 MR. MORRIS: Last transcript, I 

8 think you said that you could be satisfied by 

9 a sensitivity analysis, and if you look at 

10 Figure I think it's 7 -- I'm going by memory 

11 -- 7-15, the picture of the -- I'll find it in 

12 just a second -- that effectively does give 

13 you the sensitivity of the shielding values to 

14 the changing --

15 DR. ULSH: But we're in the 

16 context, if I recall what was in there, in the 

17 context of the bare source in one location, 

18 not certainly a sensitivity analysis against 

19 the operations that took place at Mound, but I 

20 think we're looking for some -- we're calling 

21 it bridge now, but some way to link this to 

22 the conditions at Mound itself.
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1 DR. ULSH: But a sensitivity 

2 analysis, in my understanding in terms of 

3 modeling, is you vary one parameter, hold all 

4 the others constant, and you see how much of 

5 an impact it has.

6 MR. FITZGERALD: Right, but to 

7 what extent is that one parameter, in fact, a 

8 bounded parameter. I don't know whether, 

9 again, this notion of the shielding versus the 

10 sources, I think the answer to his question, 

11 some sense of whether or not you can 

12 demonstrate that bounding amount, I think 

13 that's where we started this thing; some 

14 evidence that, in fact, it is the most 

15 conservative condition that would have 

16 existed.

17 DR. MAURO: You see, one of the 

18 difficulties in doing everything that we're 

19 doing is that we're now looking at the 

20 average. We want to make sure that each time 

21 we do a dose reconstruction for someone that 

22 we feel confident that we have given him the 
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1 benefit of the doubt.

2 Now, so then within that context, 

3 each person -- because we're so used to 

4 thinking in groups, averages, you know, 

5 collective dose, but when you're dealing with 

6 each person, you have to walk away with a 

7 sense of, listen, I think I'm doing the right 

8 thing by this guy.

9 Now, within that, within that kind 

10 of mindset I say, okay, a judgment has been 

11 made that we're going to use two inches of 

12 shielding to come up with a distribution of 

13 the neutron energies, and that will define the 

14 adjustment factor, whatever it was, 1.3. I 

15 forget what number, whatever the number was 

16 that you were going to multiply your film 

17 badge reading by.

18 Whatever dose it was, let's say 

19 it's 100 millirem. You'd multiply by 1.3, and 

20 I think a sensitivity analysis is certainly a 

21 good thing to do, and you say, okay, well, 

22 let's see how much it changes if we didn't use 
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1 two but we used three, four, five, six, and we 

2 got a sense of how it changed. It didn't 

3 change that much. I think it went to 1.5 or 

4 whatever. In other words, it started to 

5 change, and I think that adds value because 

6 you want to know that.

7 But in the end, but in the end, to 

8 me, if I was the worker, I'd want a level of 

9 assurance there because I know I spent a lot 

10 of time maybe working out of a glove box where 

11 the neutron shielding was, you know, pretty 

12 heavy. I don't know. I'm making this up now. 

13 I'm putting myself in the mind of this worker 

14 who is going to have his dose reconstructed.

15 And let's say he knows and we 

16 should know that he knows it's really unlikely 

17 that there was any worker that spent 2,000 

18 hours per year in front of, working on one of 

19 these sources where the thickness of the 

20 hydrogenous material just couldn't have been 

21 more than eight inches, ten inches. It just 

22 physically couldn't be more than that.
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1 Now, I would say that in keeping 

2 with Part 83, you would like to be able to 

3 say, and that applies to Mound and here's why 

4 it applies to Mound, because we have a pretty 

5 good idea of the kind of glove boxes they use. 

6 You may have some drawings. You may have 

7 whatever it is, but I realize on a case-by8 case basis they may have added different kinds 

9 of shielding. In other words, sometimes they 

10 use a little bit, sometimes. I don't know.

11 But here's where the bridge comes 

12 in, is that you want to be able to say with a 

13 degree of confidence that for every worker 

14 that you're going to reconstruct that neutron 

15 dose for using this adjustment factor, you'll 

16 want to be confident that you have given him 

17 the benefit of the doubt.

18 So it puts you in this funny place 

19 where you have to maybe make an assumption 

20 that may not be applicable to 90 percent of 

21 the workers, but you've got to capture them 

22 all.
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1 Now, right now the two inches 

2 doesn't sound like it does that. Now, whether 

3 the three inches, the four inches does nor not 

4 I don't know, but I --

5 MR. MORRIS: Well, if you would, 

6 look at Figure 7-15, please.

7 DR. ULSH: That's on page 45, I 

8 believe. Bob, will you explain what the Y 

9 axis is real quick?

10 MR. MORRIS: Sure. This is the 

11 graph showing the percentage of neutron dose 

12 when at the observer position; is that 

13 correct?

14 DR. ULSH: Yes.

15 MR. MORRIS: Okay. So the Y axis 

16 is the percentage of the missed dose 

17 equivalent for the observer, who it turns out 

18 gets lower dose than the operator position, 

19 but because there's more scattering at that 

20 position farther away from the end shield, of 

21 course, the missed doses by percentage is 

22 higher.
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1 So we have three different 

2 materials in consideration so that we've got 

3 the sensitivity of higher to the lower energy 

4 of first material, and then we've got 

5 different shielding thicknesses from no 

6 shielding up to six inches of shielding.

7 DR. MAURO: I think this is a 

8 great figure. I mean, it's a very useful 

9 figure. What it shows you is a great 

10 sensitivity analysis. It's a sensitivity 

11 analysis, and you make a case without a doubt 

12 that if you had six inches of shielding and 

13 you were working with I guess it's plutonium 

14 fluoride, you might have missed about 50 

15 percent of its dose, 50 percent of the 

16 neutron. That's what this says, about 50 

17 percent.

18 DR. MAKHIJANI: I have a question 

19 about this calculation. The shape of the 

20 curve seems wrong because if you have enough 

21 thickness of water, you're going to wind up 

22 with thermal neutrons and miss everything, 
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1 whereas these curves seem to be asymptotic to 

2 something less than 100 percent.

3 You have to have curves where a 

4 certain thickness of water you'll miss 100 

5 percent of the dose because you're going to 

6 be --

7 DR. MAURO: But that's not --

8 you'll never reach 100 percent.

9 DR. MAKHIJANI: Right. These 

10 curves don't look right to me because none of 

11 them will ever reach 100 percent. There's 

12 something wrong with this calculation in my 

13 opinion.

14 MR. MORRIS: The calculation has 

15 been available for review for a year.

16 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, I'm just --

17 get inside a nuclear reactor. You have .0253 

18 electron volts in a tank of water. The 

19 starting electron volts in a nuclear reaction

20 are about 5 MeV, so a little bit more than 

21 what we're talking about potentially. Very 

22 soon before it reaches from one fuel rod, 
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1 which is very close to another fuel rod, 

2 you've got .0253 eV, total neutrons.

3 So this calculation, I believe, is 

4 highly unlikely to be correct.

5 DR. ULSH: There's an important 

6 factor that is not being considered here, and 

7 that is that as you thermalize or collide the 

8 neutrons, more and more of the neutron energy 

9 is being absorbed by the moderator and less 

10 and less is contributing to the dose that is 

11 received.

12 DR. MAKHIJANI: That's right.

13 DR. ULSH: That's why it's going 

14 asymptotic because, yes, it's true if you look 

15 at the amount that's below the .5 MeV 

16 threshold, at some point it's going to be 100 

17 percent.

18 DR. MAKHIJANI: The dose received, 

19 not the dose registered.

20 DR. ULSH: This is the dose 

21 equivalent received.

22 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, this is not 
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1 the chart you want because this is not the 

2 adjustment factor. The adjustment factor has 

3 to come from the -- the adjustment factor is 

4 the dose received divided by the dose 

5 registered. This chart tells you nothing 

6 about the relationship of the thickness of 

7 water to the actual attenuation factor. At 

8 six, eight inches of water, you're not going 

9 to have any .5 MeV neutrons. You're going to 

10 have essentially all thermal neutrons.

11 DR. ULSH: Exactly. 

12 DR. MAKHIJANI: So whatever 

13 neutron dose you have, I'm not saying that the 

14 neutron dose is high or low. I'm saying 

15 neutron dose can be very small. My question 

16 is: do you have an ability to calculate it by 

17 assuming a six inch water moderation between 

18 the source and the person?

19 I'm saying that because you're 

20 measuring only high energy neutrons, on the 

21 other side of six inches you've got pretty 

22 much something close to thermal neutrons.
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1 DR. ULSH: But the point of this 

2 graph --

3 DR. MAKHIJANI: All you're doing, 

4 the calculation.

5 DR. ULSH: The point of this graph 

6 is to show that the more and more shielding 

7 you add, the less and less dose you get 

8 because all of the energy is being absorbed by 

9 the moderator.

10 DR. MAKHIJANI: I totally agree 

11 with that. I have no problem with that.

12 DR. ULSH: Well, that's the only 

13 point of this graph.

14 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, I'm saying 

15 this graph cannot help you with adjustment 

16 factor because the thermalization of the 

17 neutrons at a certain thickness of water will 

18 just cut off your ability to measure any dose 

19 with this badge.

20 DR. ULSH: But the question is how 

21 much of the dose is missing. That's the 

22 question.
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1 DR. MAKHIJANI: No, no, no. The 

2 question is at what thickness of shielding is 

3 your badge useless to register a dose. 

4 That's the number I think you want without 

5 prejudice to the idea as to whether doses were 

6 high or low. You want to know that number 

7 because that's the most important number.

8 You've got workers saying that you 

9 have four inches, six inches, eight inches, 12 

10 inches. If you can't register a dose beyond 

11 four inches or polyethylene shielding, I don't 

12 see what good it does you to say, well, you 

13 know, the dose is attenuated by 50 percent by 

14 the time it gets on the other side because you 

15 don't really know. You don't have a 

16 measurement with which you can validate that.

17 DR. MAURO: See, it presumes --

18 this goes back -- it presumes that you are 

19 going to get some dose registered on the film 

20 badge.

21 MR. MORRIS: Yes, this is still a 

22 significant amount of the neutron energy 
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1 that's above half an MeV. You know, the half 

2 value layer for neutrons is sort of what, four 

3 inches or something like that?

4 MR. CHEW: The tenth value layers 

5 is about what?

6 DR. MAURO: The tenth value.

7 DR. BUCHANAN: And that value is 

8 about four inches.

9 MR. CHEW: In what, in air?

10 DR. BUCHANAN: Water.

11 DR. NETON: We've done this before 

12 at several other sites, and I know we had 

13 moderators around this dimension and I don't 

14 recall this being an issue. We use for 

15 assessment a factor of two, for instance, I 

16 think, at Y-12 where I'm not sure --

17 DR. MAKHIJANI: I just think that 

18 you have a pretty thick shielding of water and 

19 you need to know what portion of the .5 --

20 DR. NETON: Oh, no, I appreciate 

21 if SC&A feels that way they'd do a calculation 

22 to document it because this ad hoc sort of 
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1 calculation gets us nowhere.

2 CHAIR BEACH: Right.

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: Are you saying 

4 that you think they are missing 100 percent of 

5 the dose just to go --

6 DR. MAKHIJANI: I think we need to 

7 know that. I think we need to know the number 

8 at which you're missing a very large fraction 

9 of the dose, not just --

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, if you 

11 believe the curves, it says that you reach an 

12 equilibrium.

13 DR. MAURO: Yes, that's what it 

14 says.

15 MEMBER ZIEMER: And if you put in 

16 more shielding, you're not reducing the dose 

17 further. You're not missing more.

18 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, I can show 

19 you a Los Alamos paper right here where a 30-

20 centimeter radius of polyethylene attenuates 

21 the neutron dose by a factor of 1,000. That's 

22 what it shows here.
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1 That may be starting neutrons and 

2 outside of a 30-centimeter sphere, at least 

3 that's how I read the chart.

4 DR. ULSH: Well, I haven't seen 

5 this plot.

6 DR. MAKHIJANI: I'm not sure. I 

7 just pulled it up on Google.

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: That's different. 

9 You're looking at a shielding equation.

10 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes.

11 MEMBER ZIEMER: This is a percent 

12 of the dose missed, which conceptually is a 

13 different thing.

14 DR. MAKHIJANI: Not exactly the 

15 same thing, yes. I think the amount of points 

16 --

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: It's a gamma 

18 simulation you'd get what you're talking 

19 about, but when you go way out, see, what 

20 percent of the dose is being missed way out?

21 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes, it is a 

22 different question. You're right. 
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1 CHAIR BEACH: What I'd like to do 

2 is not interrupt, but to bring this to a 

3 close. The first thing I do want to say is we 

4 haven't had a meeting in eight months, and so 

5 a lot of these issues were just brought up at 

6 the last meeting, and so this is the first 

7 time we've gotten together and actually talked 

8 about them.

9 Second, NIOSH, I think, we're 

10 going to probably need your paper before SC&A 

11 can give us that final. So whenever you think 

12 that the review and the correlation between 

13 the MCNP, whenever that would be available, 

14 you can tell me today or we can get that at 

15 the end of the meeting tomorrow.

16 DR. ULSH: Well, in order to give 

17 you that answer, I guess I would like to go 

18 back to Bob Morris' question. I don't want to 

19 get into a situation where it's a bring me a 

20 rock thing and we bring you what we think you 

21 want and it turns out not to be what you want. 

22 So if you could maybe crystallize a little 
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1 more discussion among the Work Group: here's 

2 what it would take to satisfy our concerns. I 

3 think then we would have a better picture on 

4 either we can't satisfy that or we can and 

5 here's how much effort it's going to take.

6 At this point I'm a little unclear 

7 as to what it is that you guys need to see to 

8 satisfy your concerns.

9 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, I need to 

10 get clarity on John's point. In my mind, if 

11 you sampled gamma and neutron at some point 

12 for some process and did that repeatedly, 

13 you'd see that correlation. Go to a different 

14 place and a different time and a different 

15 process you'll get a number.

16 So I'm thinking that the 

17 correlations are there for each point, but now 

18 you're sampling a body of correlations.

19 DR. MAURO: Different situations.

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: In my mind, the 

21 only outstanding question I had because I 

22 agree with Jim; I think here's the body, and I 
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1 think the only question is have we missed 

2 something, and you said maybe at the really 

3 low end where the gamma dose was so low --

4 DR. MAURO: That you didn't worry 

5 about those.

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: -- that you didn't 

7 worry about the neutrons, or do we have enough 

8 data to know? And you should be able to cap 

9 that, too.

10 I don't know of any case where 

11 there's neutrons without gammas. If someone 

12 can point one out to me, I always teach my 

13 students this. There are always gammas where 

14 there are neutrons, and there will be a 

15 correlation for that particular scenario.

16 DR. MAURO: That situation.

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: Now, if that ratio 

18 is so great that we're missing some assigned 

19 dose, I think we could pick that out, but with 

20 all the sampling you have, there can't be many 

21 cases; it would have to be really unusual, but 

22 there may be one other ratio out there, but 
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1 it's not going to be like ten, 20, 30 times 

2 that distribution in my mind. It may be 

3 just --

4 DR. MAURO: Okay.

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: I want to know 

6 what you're talking about.

7 DR. MAURO: This is good. This is 

8 good. So you're saying that the reason 

9 there's such a variability --

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, it's not that 

11 there's no correlation between gamma-neutron.

12 DR. MAURO: There is.

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: It's that there's 

14 a distribution correlation.

15 DR. MAURO: The design, the 

16 physical setup that was being dealt with in 

17 case number one was a particular situation.

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right.

19 DR. MAURO: Was generating certain 

20 neutrons.

21 MEMBER ZIEMER: And you agree.

22 DR. MAURO: I agree with that.
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1 MEMBER ZIEMER: You could 

2 reproduce all of the parameters. We should get 

3 that same ratio every time.

4 DR. MAURO: I agree.

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: Otherwise the 

6 universe has no logic.

7 (Laughter.)

8 DR. MAURO: This is a good 

9 thought.

10 DR. LIPSZTEIN: When a miracle 

11 occurs.

12 DR. MAURO: No, no, no. The high 

13 variability in the neutron to photon ratio 

14 that was observed, 31 or whatever it is is an 

15 artifact or an outcome that --

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: I would say plus 

17 the real situation.

18 DR. MAURO: Because the conditions 

19 under which they were measured was so 

20 different.

21 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right.

22 DR. MAURO: Now, so the argument 
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1 is that there's enough of those measurements 

2 where they measured this situation.

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: Or is there some 

4 upper limit beyond that?

5 DR. MAURO: Well, you could say --

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: Which you could 

7 identify, and I think Jim sort of --

8 DR. NETON: Here's what I thought 

9 the issue was. We have this universe of 

10 ratios, this distribution of ratios. The 

11 question is though for the people that we're 

12 applying those ratios, that is, the visitor 

13 badges who were apparently to a large extent 

14 maintenance workers, are those ratios valid to 

15 apply to -- these are glove box workers 

16 primarily, to these maintenance crafts? Is 

17 there something unique about the maintenance 

18 craft that those visitor people that had a 

19 unique -- is there a plausible, unique 

20 neutron/photon ratio that would not be 

21 captured in this universe of N/P ratios that 

22 we have from the worker.
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1 MEMBER ZIEMER: And if not, why 

2 not?

3 DR. NETON: And if not, why not, 

4 and that could either be explained empirically 

5 or logically or a number of different ways.

6 DR. ULSH: But keep in mind that 

7 what we do have is not only the workers 

8 stationed in, for instance, for SM, but also 

9 the visitors that were high enough to be part 

10 of that.

11 DR. MAURO: What is very important 

12 is that I was wrong about the idea that there

13 should be a correlation. No, no, no. I was 

14 thinking there should be a correlation. 

15 You've got a high neutron dose. You've got a 

16 high -- but no. Each one of these are unique 

17 situations that have their own neutrons and 

18 photon relationships.

19 MEMBER ZIEMER: And their own 

20 correlation and that limited --

21 DR. MAURO: And that limited 

22 space. So to plot the individual neutron 
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1 dose, the photon dose for all of these 

2 different circumstances, you're going to get a 

3 scattered graph graph. It's not going to be a 

4 relationship, and the question is: is that 

5 okay?

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: But it doesn't 

7 tell you what to do with it.

8 DR. MAURO: Yes. So is that okay? 

9 That means that there's a way to come to 

10 grips with it.

11 DR. NETON: And that's why I think 

12 that we suggest that we're going to apply the 

13 distribution of those ratios to the adjustment 

14 factors. The question then was whether it was 

15 the distribution of the 95th percentile. 

16 That's where we ended up.

17 DR. MAURO: Well, it seems to me 

18 that there's a mechanistic issue here. What 

19 we have is a class of workers that have only 

20 had -- and may represent a lot of different 

21 kinds of job categories as Arjun pointed out 

22 -- there could be a lot of different kind of 
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1 job categories where their full-time doses 

2 were always less than some number.

3 So these are a group of workers. 

4 It's a subclass of workers. Now, right?

5 DR. NETON: I don't want to put is 

6 in a position to prove the negative, I mean, 

7 prove that this didn't happen.

8 DR. MAURO: Well, no, no.

9 DR. NETON: You have to come up 

10 with some plausible scenario.

11 DR. MAURO: I'm putting myself in 

12 the shoes of the worker. I'm a worker that is 

13 one of the workers that worked there this year 

14 and my photon during my change-outs, I guess 

15 each one of my change-outs, I was always below 

16 this cutoff, whatever. What is the cutoff you 

17 guys --

18 DR. NETON: We're not sure.

19 DR. MAURO: All right. Let's say 

20 it's 100 millirems. Okay? Now, what you're 

21 saying in my case every one of those cutoffs 

22 was less than 100 millirems, and let's say I 
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1 know that. I worked in a number of different 

2 situations.

3 And now what you're going to say 

4 is that, well, for you we're going to assign a 

5 multiplier, and maybe a distribution of the 

6 multipliers. You take the dose that you 

7 receive and assign this distribution of 

8 multipliers to that person.

9 Now, that distribution of 

10 multipliers is somehow going to come out of 

11 this array of values which is going to be one 

12 to 33. Now, I guess there has to be some --

13 now, there has to be a degree of comfort that 

14 you're not short-selling this guy.

15 And what happens if this 

16 circumstance was one where the nature of the 

17 operation was that there was a lot of 

18 shielding to reduce this photon exposure, and 

19 that was a problem, and the neutron, we don't 

20 know where the neutron exposure was. It may 

21 have been at the high end.

22 You see?
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1 DR. NETON: I understand. You're 

2 speculating and making up these scenarios, but 

3 the point is --

4 DR. MAURO: But it's a real -- you 

5 have to go through these things.

6 DR. NETON: I understand, but the 

7 question is, can a plausible scenario be 

8 envisioned in this class of visitor badge 

9 workers that had a neutron ratio that was 

10 higher than we would propose to assign based 

11 on the known universe of that.

12 DR. MAURO: Well, based upon what 

13 you understand about the operation of the 

14 facility.

15 CHAIR BEACH: Can I ask? Do you 

16 understand that all I'm asking for, what John 

17 is asking for is to be able to put something 

18 in writing?

19 DR. NETON: We just have to 

20 demonstrate that these ratios are valid to 

21 apply to the visitor badge workers, why those 

22 ratios would not plausibly be different for 
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1 that class of workers than what was 

2 experienced in the general plant environment.

3 DR. ULSH: And do you have a 

4 picture of what that evidence would be?

5 DR. NETON: I think there's a few 

6 things to look at. One is to look at the 

7 visitor badges that did have positive readings 

8 that were read. I don't know how robust 

9 that's going to come out, you know, what 

10 percentage, but that's one place to look.

11 Another place is to do sort of a 

12 theoretical analysis and you know, you get a 

13 30-to-one ratio of photons to neutrons. Based 

14 on what we know about what happened in this 

15 plant, what scenarios could you envision where 

16 there would be 30 times more neutrons than any 

17 measure of photon dose out there greater than 

18 that?

19 And, frankly, I don't know the 

20 answer to that, but that's one.

21 CHAIR BEACH: I'm not going to 

22 give you a time frame. We'll talk about that 
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1 later.

2 And then on the other side, SC&A, 

3 give us their final piece, their final to the 

4 Work Group. Is everybody okay with that?

5 MR. FITZGERALD: Yes, with maybe 

6 the supplement of making sure that we have 

7 access to the data, the neutron/photon data. 

8 It may be there. We just could not locate it.

9 DR. BUCHANAN: I couldn't find it 

10 on the O: drive.

11 DR. ULSH: In terms of N/P ratio, 

12 I think that's MESH, isn't it, Bob?

13 CHAIR BEACH: Was that your 

14 earlier --

15 MR. MORRIS: Yes, that was MESH. 

16 I can certainly take a look at my spreadsheets 

17 that we've got that data stored in and see if 

18 I got something that I could post for you to 

19 review.

20 CHAIR BEACH: Is that the one we 

21 mentioned 76-610 or was that a different 

22 effort?
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1 DR. BUCHANAN: No, that's a 

2 different.

3 Bob, if you could send us the 

4 spreadsheet you've worked off of to create 

5 those N/P ratios, it would save us a lot of 

6 hunting time.

7 MR. MORRIS: Ron, I'll certainly 

8 promise that I'll look for them hard and try 

9 to get them on the O: drive for you.

10 CHAIR BEACH: And could you send a 

11 notice out to Ted or somebody to let us know 

12 that you've done that, Bob?

13 MR. MORRIS: Yes, of course. 

14 We'll go through normal chain of communication 

15 on that.

16 CHAIR BEACH: Okay. Is everybody 

17 ready to stop, to move on? Okay.

18 We're actually at a break time. 

19 Shall we take a ten-minute break?

20 DR. MAURO: Did Joyce call in?

21 CHAIR BEACH: I'm sure she did a 

22 half hour ago.
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1 (Laughter.)

2 CHAIR BEACH: Let's take ten 

3 minutes and then we'll start on the table of 

4 tritium compounds.

5 MR. KATZ: I am just putting the 

6 phone on mute. I'm not disconnecting.

7 (Whereupon, the above-entitled matter 

8 went off the record at 2:34 p.m. and resumed 

9 at 2:47 p.m.)

10 MR. KATZ: Okay. Then this is the 

11 Mound Working Group. We're reconvening after 

12 a short comfort break, and we're finished for 

13 the day with discussing neutron dose 

14 reconstruction, and we're moving on.

15 CHAIR BEACH: Okay. Could you 

16 check and see if Joyce was back on the line?

17 MR. KATZ: Joyce, are you with us 

18 on the line, Joyce Lipsztein? Joyce?

19 (No audible response.)

20 MR. KATZ: Perhaps you're on mute? 

21 I'll last call Joyce. Joyce, are you with us 

22 on the line right now?
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1 If not, I guess we could just do 

2 another topic before. 

3 That sounded something like a fax. 

4 Okay. Last call. Joyce Lipsztein, are you 

5 with us?

6 (No audible response.)

7 MR. KATZ: Is there anyone on the 

8 line?

9 MS. AL-NABULSI: I'm here.

10 MR. KATZ: Oh, is that you, Joyce?

11 MS. AL-NABULSI: Isaf.

12 MR. KATZ: Oh, that's Isaf. Okay. 

13 So we can be heard. Okay. Well, maybe, 

14 Josie, do you want to do a different topic?

15 CHAIR BEACH: Actually I think 

16 we're going to go ahead and go with stable 

17 tritium compounds. We did say we were going 

18 to start and hopefully Joyce will join us in a 

19 few minutes, and I believe, SC&A, you're going 

20 to take the lead on this. John is going to 

21 call Joyce.

22 DR. ANIGSTEIN: Yes. We went 
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1 ahead and put together a reset of talking 

2 points. The reason we did that, we had some 

3 challenges discussing this topic because it 

4 does relate to the weapons program, and there 

5 are some sensitivities, and this is a review 

6 for those sensitivities. That's one reason we 

7 wanted to go ahead and use the talking points, 

8 you know, as a starting point.

9 We did have a work group meeting 

10 in July where this was discussed, and we 

11 raised concerns at that time on a proposal by 

12 NIOSH to use -- I'm sorry. I'm looking at 

13 something else here. Let me back up a little 

14 bit.

15 In April, you know, we sent a 

16 White Paper certainly to the Work Group and 

17 NIOSH that dealt with some of the issues we 

18 felt revolved around the handling of special 

19 tritium compounds, tritides, and a lot of 

20 these issues revolved around, you know, the 

21 application of site specific information to 

22 the model OTIB-0066 that would be used, and 
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1 also with some concerns expressed over whether 

2 or not you could define a worker population 

3 exposed to the most insoluble tritides.

4 We did have a number of questions 

5 regarding whether or not you could, you know, 

6 use hafnium tritide as, you know, the sort of 

7 insoluble tritide that was in active use at 

8 the site. But certainly that was the thrust 

9 of that.

10 In NIOSH's October 2009 response, 

11 and again, this was relatively recent, we did 

12 have a chance to review it though in some 

13 detail. I think the contention that was, you 

14 know, whereas intermediate solubility

15 compounds present at least a theoretical 

16 exposure potential to a large number of 

17 workers, exposure to the very insoluble 

18 tritides -- in this case we're talking hafnium 

19 tritide -- was, in fact, limited to a very 

20 small, discrete group of workers that NIOSH 

21 had a roster for.

22 And it was emphasized and, again, 
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1 we had addressed this issue in our White 

2 Paper, but I think the concern that NIOSH has 

3 raised that perhaps we would conflating the 

4 worker population at Mound that were, in fact, 

5 exposed to the so-called more intermediate 

6 solubility tritides with what was being 

7 defined as a much smaller group, much more 

8 discrete group that would have been exposed to 

9 the hafnium tritide.

10 I think it was emphasized that the 

11 fact that these workers were identifiable by 

12 name was a key difference and, you know, 

13 certainly made dose reconstruction more 

14 manageable in terms of assignment of dose.

15 And, in fact, the concern, I think 

16 we expressed some concern that maybe there was 

17 a wider exposure potential to the Mound worker 

18 population to the more insoluble tritide, that 

19 that wasn't true; in fact, that there was a 

20 very constrained potential exposure to the 

21 insoluble tritides.

22 Okay. Essentially what we did and 
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1 what I think Brant and NIOSH has done is just 

2 try and pin down a little better what the 

3 operational use of hafnium tritide was 

4 historically at Mound, and that required 

5 certainly a number of trips to OSTI to look at 

6 classified information.

7 So what I'm going to go through is 

8 basically a summary of what we have found, and 

9 I know Brant has looked as well, and we had 

10 the benefit of looking at some of the 

11 documentation that was at OSTI that he had 

12 looked at. So this is our basic summation of 

13 this.

14 And, again, I'm reading from our 

15 three-pager. While SC&A acknowledges that the 

16 handling of hafnium tritide began at Mound as 

17 a confined, discrete operation, as described 

18 by NIOSH, with a select number of workers, 

19 based on this review I just referred to, the 

20 historical records indicate we believe 

21 otherwise that the number of locations and 

22 workers handling this compound, again, hafnium 
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1 tritide, expanded over time. 

2 In other words, essentially in the 

3 beginning, in the 60s, you had a discrete 

4 operation, set number of workers, a specific 

5 geographical location, whether it's one or two 

6 or three rooms, whatever, and you certainly 

7 could define it by workers. You probably, 

8 again, as has been done, you could tie it to 

9 identities.

10 But that changed over time. You 

11 get into the 70s and 80s, and as with most 

12 operations, it matured and changes took place. 

13 What we identified were a much more extensive 

14 handling of hafnium tritide that went beyond 

15 this initial fabrication and included as a 

16 minimum, and this is what we could determine 

17 in a relatively short period of time, that as 

18 a minimum you had storage operations that took 

19 place and make sense in terms of material. 

20 You had a destructive testing quality 

21 assurance program at Mound that extended over 

22 a number of years. You had a major scrap 
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1 metal recovery operation involving hafnium 

2 tritide as well as other materials where the 

3 quantities were actually substantial.

4 And ultimately, of course, you had 

5 D&D that would have taken place for all of 

6 these specific activities.

7 So the picture I'd want to paint 

8 is that, yes, you had a very confined 

9 operation involving a set number of workers 

10 that started in the 60s, but as time went on, 

11 you had a number of other activities that got 

12 underway as the program matured, and these 

13 other activities and programs involved 

14 additional workers, new categories of workers 

15 and involved operations that were at the tail 

16 end of the process, involving things like 

17 scrap metal recovery and what have you.

18 So a different picture, I think, 

19 than what we've been playing with beforehand, 

20 and you know, again, there's documentation 

21 albeit a lot of it is classified, that gets 

22 into time frames, gets into specific 
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1 locations, and whatnot, but so far it is not 

2 clear there's any specific information about 

3 the workers that may or may not have 

4 frequented those activities during those time 

5 frames.

6 And from this documentation, these 

7 programs weren't, you know, sort of brief, one 

8 time only programs. They were longstanding 

9 programs, and the significance of the 

10 quantities, these weren't trace quantities. 

11 These were substantial quantities of hafnium 

12 tritide that were handled, processed and 

13 stored.

14 And so, you know, again, without 

15 going into the long history of looking at this 

16 question, I think this question of whether one 

17 could identify a specific work force that one 

18 could dose reconstruct based on information on 

19 hafnium tritide, if one assumes that to be 

20 most insoluble tritide at Mound, we find that 

21 problematic at this point because I think it's 

22 clear there were many more activities and 
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1 certainly more workers that would have been 

2 involved in this.

3 Now, that's sort of the key issue 

4 that we kind of belted around and certainly 

5 figured in NIOSH's response. There's other 

6 questions, and part of the reason we want to 

7 have Joyce available is there's other 

8 questions of whether or not, you know, even 

9 with the intermediate sources of tritides, 

10 diffusion, rust, what have you, you know, this 

11 was reflected, I think, for the first time in 

12 the last NIOSH White Paper that you had an 

13 additional source of exposure to a larger 

14 group of workers, and so there was an 

15 acknowledgment that certainly NIOSH would 

16 consider how that would be addressed with that 

17 recognition.

18 But I think, you know, sort of 

19 bottom line, we don't see at this point, not 

20 to say it couldn't be done, at this point we 

21 can't see how you would distinguish those 

22 workers that might have been exposed to, say, 
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1 the highly insoluble hafnium to those workers 

2 that were exposed to the more ubiquitous 

3 intermediate solubility tritides, and I think 

4 that's essential for dose reconstruction.

5 And the other point that we raised 

6 in that three-pager was, you know, if you 

7 can't distinguish those worker cohorts, then 

8 it sort of pushes you on a direction of 

9 perhaps considering how to assign an upper 

10 bound with the worst case of maybe hafnium 

11 gets you into a space of maybe implausibility 

12 because clearly hafnium was constrained in 

13 terms of exposure pathways, but not as much as 

14 I think was originally thought by NIOSH.

15 MEMBER ZIEMER: Could I ask a 

16 question? Joe, this may have been covered in 

17 the past and I just don't remember. I don't 

18 even know if I'm asking a question that can be 

19 answered in terms of security things, but is 

20 the hafnium tritide in a liquid or solid or 

21 what form is it in? Are you allowed to say 

22 that?
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1 I'm trying to envision --

2 MR. FITZGERALD: I can't.

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: You can't say 

4 that.

5 MR. FITZGERALD: I'd rather not 

6 get into --

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: All right. I 

8 wasn't sure, but because it has to do with 

9 routes of ingestion and where does it go in 

10 the bottom?

11 And let me ask another question, 

12 if you can answer it. Is it a compound or is 

13 it an occlusion? Can you answer that?

14 MR. FITZGERALD: It's a metal 

15 substrate compound.

16 DR. BISTLINE: It's a compound, 

17 and this has been cleared through 

18 headquarters.

19 MEMBER ZIEMER: It is a compound.

20 DR. BISTLINE: It is a compound, 

21 and it's a stable metal tritide.

22 MEMBER ZIEMER: Because there's 
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1 mention in here of the tritium diffusing out 

2 of containers, and if it's a true compound as 

3 opposed to an occlusion, like nickel tritide 

4 is really tritium occluded on nickel and it 

5 diffuses off.

6 DR. BISTLINE: Well, but the 

7 diffusion is when it's in a gaseous form, and 

8 it's diffusing through the metal, but there is 

9 reactivity which creates tritides, which 

10 creates solid metal tritides, forms.

11 CHAIR BEACH: And, Paul, that is 

12 on the last page of the three-pager.

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: Oh, is it?

14 CHAIR BEACH: And I believe, 

15 Kathy, you had your hand up. Did you have a 

16 question or comment?

17 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: I was just 

18 going to point out that the confusion issue is 

19 separate.

20 DR. BISTLINE: And I need to point 

21 out that there are a number of different 

22 tritide forms, stable metal tritides that have 
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1 been handled throughout the DOE complex, and 

2 there's a list of these, hafnium tritide, 

3 uranium tritide, palladium tritide, titanium 

4 tritide, zirconium tritide, erbium, scandium 

5 tritides, those to name some of the ones that 

6 are listed, and these are not -- I cannot 

7 elaborate on how they were used or where they 

8 were used, but these have been used throughout 

9 the DOE complex, and all of these are forms 

10 which were also used at Mound Laboratories. 

11 And these were in levels that were 

12 in production processes. So we're not talking 

13 about insignificant amounts that have been 

14 used throughout the complex. So it becomes 

15 more than just an issue with Mound, but we are 

16 talking about Mound at this point.

17 MR. FITZGERALD: But it's a form 

18 that's readily dispersible and available for 

19 inhalation. We certainly can say that without 

20 getting into the makeup of the compound.

21 MEMBER ZIEMER: And there are some 

22 cases where the gas is leaving the metal 
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1 matrix, maybe even by recoils.

2 DR. BISTLINE: Right. One of the 

3 problems that has been found especially on the 

4 site return type situations is a diffusion 

5 through metal containment and through gaskets 

6 and other.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: That would be 

8 diffusion of the tritium, not of the tritide.

9 DR. BISTLINE: Yes, but it forms 

10 tritide, where you've got reactivity which 

11 creates tritide forms, and then you also get 

12 into the rust issue with iron tritides and 

13 glove box situations, gaskets, gloves and 

14 glove ports, where if you've got tritium gas 

15 in an enclosed environment, with time -- and 

16 it's accentuated by temperature and pressure. 

17 Any time you get temperature and pressure, 

18 why then that just increases the amount of 

19 diffusion and reactivity that will occur.

20 But it's not a trivial amount 

21 that's involved here.

22 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: And the 
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1 temperature and pressure will also indicate 

2 how deeply into the matrix it goes and how 

3 readily it will be released later.

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right.

5 MR. FITZGERALD: You sort of have 

6 several facets to the issue. Certainly one 

7 is, you know, what represents sort of the 

8 bounding prevalent type S insoluble compound 

9 that would be applied to certain groups of 

10 workers and what represents the more soluble 

11 forms of tritide.

12 Mound handled a lot of different 

13 types of tritide, some of which were only 

14 handled in small bench scale research. So it 

15 didn't represent anything that was 

16 substantial. As a part of what I think we 

17 jointly were looking for is what represents 

18 the most insoluble form of tritide and 

19 represents an exposure pathway, you know, 

20 tangible exposure pathway to workers, and 

21 certainly what was in the White Paper that we 

22 received from NIOSH was hafnium represented 
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1 certainly that species of tritide.

2 Now, there's some debate and I 

3 don't think we've settled it out completely 

4 about whether there's others that represent a 

5 substantial source or not of a different form 

6 of tritide, but certainly we've keyed in on 

7 hafnium because I think that was the one that 

8 was identified as NIOSH's concern and also, 

9 not to put words in Brant's mouth, but in 

10 terms of the White Paper was the one for which 

11 specific workers were identified, and I think 

12 we've been having this discussion for some 

13 time, and specific activities were defined.

14 At this point what we're raising 

15 is some questions or concerns about whether or 

16 not that sharply defined fence around a 

17 specific operation and specific main set of 

18 workers is, in fact, that constraint. We

19 don't think so, based on what we've looked at. 

20 That's what we're bringing to the table that 

21 is new.

22 I think the issues that we've 
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1 raised on the fusion we've raised before, and 

2 I think NIOSH did respond to some of those 

3 issues. At this point I think it is probably 

4 the new one, the going-in proposition.

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: Another question 

6 on solubility, and maybe, Kathy, you could 

7 answer this, but does the -- when you're 

8 talking about solubility, let's say, of 

9 hafnium tritide or tritide, as some say 

10 tomatoes and some say --

11 (Laughter.)

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: -- is the 

13 hydrogen, the tritium atom readily 

14 exchangeable with the hydrogen in solution or 

15 is it truly -- what's insoluble? Is it the 

16 whole compound or is it just the hafnium 

17 metal?

18 CHAIR BEACH: You need to come to 

19 the table, Kathy. I'm sorry. He can't hear 

20 you.

21 MEMBER ZIEMER: You understand 

22 what I'm saying. In other words --
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1 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: It's the 

2 actual compound.

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: The compound. So 

4 it's not exchanging freely.

5 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: In other 

6 words, the exchange is totally bounded to --

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: It's not 

8 exchanging freely with other hydrogens like 

9 many tritium compounds.

10 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: Right. 

11 Some of them are soluble.

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: Got you. So they 

13 are talking solubility.

14 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: That's why 

15 Mound refers to them as stable metal tritides.

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, thank you.

17 MR. FITZGERALD: Now, the dilemma, 

18 of course, is we can't go too much further 

19 because the operations in this case define 

20 sort of the presence of the compounds we're 

21 talking about and the workers that may have 

22 been associated with those compounds, and 
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1 that's about all we can really talk to at this 

2 point.

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: Can we talk about 

4 bioassays?

5 DR. BISTLINE: Well, yes, I think 

6 that's an issue.

7 MR. FITZGERALD: Let's stay within 

8 the body. Then what? How would you bioassay 

9 it?

10 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: And Joyce 

11 might have a more extensive knowledge of this. 

12 There's about seven of the compounds that 

13 were handled at Mound where a solubility 

14 determination has been made either through in 

15 vivo or in vitro studies, solubility studies 

16 that are based upon the DOE standard tritium 

17 compounds.

18 DR. BISTLINE: Let me read a 

19 couple of statements from a Pantex metal 

20 tritides Technical Basis Document that was 

21 published by Pantex. It states, no special 

22 swipe techniques have yet been identified to 
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1 apply to metal tritide surveys. Savannah 

2 River site has investigated the use of mass 

3 spectroscopy but found it only identifies the 

4 base metal and does not tell if it is a 

5 tritide or not. No special bioassay 

6 techniques have yet been identified, and this 

7 is a 2004 publication, have yet been 

8 identified, but a longer than expected 

9 biological half-life provides an indication of

10 the presence of metal tritides, and D.M. 

11 Taylor, radiation doses from some tritium 

12 labeled organic compounds states it has 

13 concluded that although the ICRP OBT model may 

14 underestimate doses for specific compounds by 

15 up to an order of magnitude, it can still be 

16 applied with caution for prospective 

17 radiological protection purposes, but it 

18 should not be applied for interpretation of 

19 bioassay data.

20 I think those are important 

21 statements.

22 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: Can I add 
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1 something to that? The DOE handbook actually 

2 goes and states the physical and chemical 

3 behavior of STCs common to the bioassay 

4 methods implemented at Mound for the 

5 measurement of HTO intakes and the subsequent 

6 internal dose calculation models can be 

7 ineffective.

8 DR. ULSH: Is it our turn yet?

9 (Laughter.)

10 CHAIR BEACH: I'm checking to see 

11 if there's any other questions.

12 MR. FITZGERALD: Joyce, did you 

13 have anything before turning the table to 

14 Brant?

15 DR. LIPSZTEIN: The amount that 

16 comes out that you expect to come is very, 

17 very small, and if a worker is exposed at the 

18 same time to, let's say, hafnium tritide and 

19 he is exposed also to tritium, tritiated 

20 water, then you can't really distinguish what 

21 comes from the hafnium and what comes from 

22 tritiated water because what comes from the 
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1 tritiated water will dominate the excretion 

2 rate. What comes out in urine is very, very 

3 small.

4 And if you consider that 

5 everything that comes out in urine comes from 

6 the bypass of hafnium tritide, then you get an 

7 unbelievable high dose of 10,000 higher than 

8 the dose if you consider it tritiated water. 

9 So that's a really big problem.

10 OTIB-0066 talks about this problem 

11 a little bit, and the example that was done 

12 for us also shows an unbelievable high dose if 

13 everything is considered type S.

14 DR. MAURO: Joyce, that would be 

15 for the respiratory tract, but for the other 

16 organs?

17 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: That's for 

18 the lung, yes. That's for the lung, and we 

19 don't know exactly what's happening on the GI 

20 tract, but if we apply the ICRP GI tract 

21 model, it's also going to be a very big dose 

22 to the GI tract, but to the other organs it's 
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1 more or less the same things. It doesn't 

2 matter. A little bit depends -- a little bit? 

3 No, a lot depends on how long after an intake 

4 you collect the urine sample.

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: The GI tract, 

6 shouldn't it pass right through?

7 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: Yes, but 

8 very little would pass through the GI tract if 

9 you consider type S.

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: Oh, no, I'm 

11 talking about ingestion, not inhalation.

12 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: Oh, no, no, 

13 no. I was talking about inhalation, yes.

14 MEMBER ZIEMER: Oh, oh.

15 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: I'm 

16 thinking about the inhalation. So it's very 

17 difficult to self-discover, especially if 

18 someone is -- you don't know who was exposed 

19 and you expect so little in the urine sample.

20 So because it's best not to match 

21 a urine sample, then when you go back to the 

22 dose to the lungs, it comes out to a very, 
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1 very high dose. And unless you know exactly 

2 who was exposed and when, it's very difficult 

3 to calculate the dose and distinguish what 

4 comes out really from the hafnium tritide and 

5 what is expected in urine because of exposure 

6 to tritiated water.

7 CHAIR BEACH: Anybody have any 

8 more questions for Joyce?

9 I would like to say, Joyce, thanks 

10 for your patience, and I believe Brant is 

11 ready to speak now.

12 DR. ULSH: All right. As had been 

13 mentioned, this discussion has been ongoing 

14 for quite some time, like most of the Mound 

15 issues, and that includes some discussions 

16 that took place in the cone of silence.

17 We have interviewed three workers 

18 with hands-on experience in the tritium 

19 program at Mound. They had responsibility for 

20 that program, and they have all told us, all 

21 three of them; they gave us a list of workers 

22 who could have possibly been exposed to 
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1 hafnium tritide. They named them by name, and 

2 we have provided those interview notes and 

3 provided those names to the Working Group and 

4 SC&A.

5 Now, we also, to verify that --

6 Joe, I would like to get a clarification. In 

7 terms of the documentation that you're using 

8 to conclude that a wider group of workers 

9 could have been exposed, are these the 

10 references that are cited in your notes from 

11 your August 18th visit to OSTI?

12 MR. FITZGERALD: No, these are 

13 documents that were collected during your 

14 visit in November that DOE shared because 

15 these were all tied up in classification 

16 review. So these were essentially your 

17 documents, your notes that are under 

18 classification review at DOE and will be for a 

19 while, I guess, at this point.

20 DR. ULSH: Okay. To clarify the 

21 chain of events, on October 5th, Joe faxed me 

22 a copy of these notes from a visit to OSTI 
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1 that occurred on August 18th.

2 MR. FITZGERALD: Right.

3 DR. ULSH: And then in November --

4 I don't remember the exact date -- I went to 

5 OSTI to look at the references that were cited 

6 in Joe's notes. Just like always we 

7 bootstrap. We take a look at the report and 

8 then we look at what's referenced. Then we 

9 went beyond that.

10 So I looked at all of the 

11 references that were cited in Joe's notes, and 

12 I'm bumping up against the exact same problem 

13 that we've been having since the beginning, 

14 and that is none of those references 

15 specifically mention hafnium tritide. They 

16 mention tritides, and it's my interpretation 

17 that SC&A has interpreted that to mean hafnium 

18 tritide.

19 Work with other more soluble 

20 tritides, for instance uranium tritide is 

21 commonly used as a tritium storage bed. 

22 Lithium tritide is another one that was used 
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1 widely at Mound. Those were much more 

2 extensive operations, and I think if you look 

3 at least at the references that were cited in 

4 your notes, Joe, and I would say any of the 

5 ones that I saw down there, nowhere did I see 

6 any indication whatsoever that the work with 

7 hafnium tritide was larger than what we have 

8 represented.

9 In fact, we found an explicit 

10 document that gave a month and year and a 

11 location where hafnium tritide operations 

12 began, and I would be happy to discuss that 

13 under the appropriate circumstances, and it 

14 exactly supported what the workers told us in 

15 terms of the scale of the operations involved.

16 I still come back to I think the 

17 mistake that's being made is a conflation of 

18 hafnium tritide with other tritides. For 

19 instance, in your notes, Joe, you go into a 

20 lot of depth about the square footage 

21 dedicated to tritide operations, the extent of 

22 the physical infrastructure that was used and 
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1 the manpower that was used in tritide 

2 operations. I looked at those documents. 

3 They do nowhere that I saw specifically relate 

4 to hafnium tritide. And in fact, it's 

5 consistent. I know what the uses were. It's 

6 consistent with Mound's work with other 

7 tritides, uranium and lithium primarily, that 

8 were used for other purposes.

9 I have seen no evidence whatsoever 

10 to indicate that hafnium tritide was more 

11 extensive. If you feel that such evidence 

12 exists, I would love to see it, and maybe we 

13 can discuss that under the appropriate 

14 circumstances.

15 MR. FITZGERALD: Well, I think we 

16 can talk in general terms. Kathy is trying to 

17 prime me here, but essentially we did find 

18 certainly some indications in Appendix B of

19 the [identifying information redacted] report 

20 that hafnium by name existed in a number of 

21 named and numbered rooms, other than the ones 

22 that were cited in your original assessment. 
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1 That was a starting point, but not necessarily 

2 the basis for our conclusion at this point.

3 I call it reconnaissance survey at 

4 OSTI essentially because I think as we 

5 understood your point, the so-called confined, 

6 discrete nature of hafnium operations, what we 

7 want to do is go beyond. We recognize the 

8 expertise of the three individuals who talked 

9 to you. That's not in question, but we wanted 

10 to see if there's any corroboration on paper, 

11 meaning, you know, what can we find in records 

12 that would substantiate that conclusion.

13 And so my visit to OSTI was 

14 essentially in response to maybe some concerns 

15 that despite the expertise of the individuals 

16 we're hoping for some corroboration in reports 

17 of documentation.

18 Also on the classified database, 

19 meaning that certainly we looked at the open 

20 literature, but we wanted to look at the 

21 classified as well because of the nature of 

22 these operations much of it would be in that 
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1 area.

2 So my visit -- I guess it was 

3 August. In August was to see what was there, 

4 and we did some search terms, and what we had 

5 found on tritides, I think, was essentially as 

6 you alluded. You know, square footage, 

7 basically in S and RW, you know, just areas 

8 that were identified as being devoted to 

9 tritide operations, and I don't disagree that 

10 it wasn't clear what types of tritides. It 

11 just was tritide operations in the many square 

12 feet.

13 And as I recall when I sent the 

14 notes into NIOSH, I did not try to draw any 

15 conclusions. I just sort of said, well, you 

16 know, here's the data. You know, it's too 

17 early to know whether the data suggests one 

18 thing or another, and I think you actually 

19 acknowledged that I did not do that. I did 

20 not say one way or the other, except the fact 

21 that this was a large area being devoted to 

22 tritide operation, much larger than I would 
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1 have thought, but you know, again, it wasn't 

2 clear what types, and it's not clear we could 

3 even talk about it anyway.

4 So anyway, that was sort of the --

5 you know, again, based on the reconnaissance, 

6 you know, you parachute in for a day or so, go 

7 through dusty records. That's the best I 

8 could come up with.

9 Now, that's where it's at. I 

10 think you made a return visit, which you 

11 mentioned to me at Savannah River, and at that 

12 time indicated that you had found something 

13 that perhaps corroborated better the notion, I 

14 think, that you have come up with that this 

15 was confined, discrete operation.

16 And when I checked into seeing 

17 whether or not we could be privy to this 

18 material because, again, I think it makes the 

19 meeting much better if everybody has the same 

20 documentation; I think DOE's response --

21 remember this was right before Christmas --

22 was, no, actually it didn't appear that any of 
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1 this material would be available as 

2 declassified, what have you.

3 So, you know, at my request they 

4 did make arrangement to go down and actually, 

5 you know, view the documentation, you know, 

6 your notes and the documentation that you 

7 collected, not only the references that I had 

8 identified as part of my August review, but I 

9 guess, you know, again, new documents that you 

10 might have identified in the course of your 

11 review, and that's pretty much what I reviewed 

12 at OSTI the second time, and you know, my 

13 notes are still actually in declassification, 

14 too. So in a sense, for this meeting the best 

15 I could do -- and this, again, is the two or 

16 three pager -- was to see what DOE would do in 

17 terms of allowing something to be said on this 

18 subject based on that review.

19 So the source of this information 

20 is essentially the new documents that you 

21 identified in your November review, which I 

22 think pointed to certain activities that 
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1 existed at Mound historically that, again, 

2 involved things like scrap metal handling, 

3 destructive testing, QA programs, and I picked 

4 up on storage the first visit, where there was 

5 certainly some inventories of hafnium being 

6 stored by me, but that, you know, is 

7 essentially it.

8 Again, this is a thin read, but it 

9 certainly raises some questions about how 

10 discrete and how confined as a hypothesis, 

11 whether or not it's true. And I can almost 

12 see where if you had three experts that were, 

13 you know, sort of handling the fabrication 

14 side of the house, focused on that particular 

15 operation where it wouldn't necessarily know 

16 about other workers in other places and other 

17 times that were going on. 

18 You know, if you think of the 

19 evolution, this is the front end. It wouldn't 

20 really be familiar with those who were 

21 complementing the activities at the back end 

22 of a cycle, you know, that took place at 
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1 Mound.

2 DR. ULSH: That's not an accurate 

3 characterization of the three workers that we 

4 interviewed. They were involved in radiation 

5 protection in terms of the tritium program. 

6 So they didn't have just a limited perspective 

7 in terms of their particular discrete part of 

8 the operation. They were involved, like I 

9 said; they were responsible for radiation 

10 protection for that program.

11 All I can tell you is that the 

12 account that was given to us by those three 

13 workers was corroborated by everything that I 

14 reviewed at OSTI, which included everything 

15 that was cited in your report or your notes, 

16 plus other documents that were referenced in 

17 there that we pulled.

18 I could give you a specific 

19 reference that is especially helpful. I'll do 

20 that off line if you'd like.

21 MR. FITZGERALD: Okay..

22 DR. ULSH: That's the one you need 
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1 to look at. It's on microfiche at OSTI. That 

2 would be very convenient, I think, for Bob to 

3 go look at. I could even inquire at OSTI if 

4 they can have a copy sent up to --

5 MR. FITZGERALD: Actually I've 

6 reviewed it.

7 DR. ULSH: Okay. So what that 

8 document does, if we're talking about the same 

9 document, it tells the exact month and year 

10 that the operations started in terms of 

11 renovating facilities to house this operation. 

12 I believe it was two rooms. If you look at 

13 the size of the lathe that was involved, you 

14 had to look at it under a 4X microscope to 

15 even see it. So it's not consistent with the 

16 thousands of square feet that are in your 

17 notes.

18 MR. FITZGERALD: Well, you know, 

19 let me interject. I am not disagreeing at all 

20 with what was in the microfiche. I think it 

21 describes very accurately the initiation of 

22 the program in the 60s and the fact it was in 
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1 two rooms and sort of discrete work force, 

2 everything, no dispute there at all. I think 

3 that was very true. It began as a very 

4 discrete operation at that point in time.

5 What I'm saying and what I think 

6 is corroborated by these documents is that 

7 over the next ten, 20 years -- this actually 

8 makes a lot of sense in DOE land -- you know, 

9 as you produced whatever you were producing, 

10 you had to support QA programs. You had to 

11 support recovery programs. You had to support 

12 waste management.

13 So you know, as you go down the 

14 life cycle of the thing that you're making, 

15 it's the rest of that cycle where you have 

16 handling at Mound where additional workers 

17 would have been involved, and that's 

18 corroborated by the documents that were 

19 reviewed at OSTI.

20 And, again, it does not negate the 

21 premise that it started that way, very 

22 discrete, very specific, but it does suggest 
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1 that that wasn't the case as time went on. I 

2 think that's pretty much the position that 

3 we're taking.

4 DR. ULSH: I think I understand 

5 the operations that you're talking about, and 

6 again, I saw nothing that indicated that those 

7 operations were not handled by the very same 

8 people who worked with the material in the 

9 first place, which makes sense. The weight of 

10 the evidence, again is the workers who were 

11 there and told us, and it also makes sense if 

12 you just think about it from a logical 

13 perspective. If you've got a highly 

14 sensitive, highly secure operation and you 

15 take great pains to make it discrete and well 

16 classified, you don't want every worker 

17 knowing about this; what sense would it make 

18 to at some point later in the operation to 

19 expand it?

20 So I know that there's some 

21 sensitivity in going further. If you could 

22 provide me the documents that you think show a 
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1 wider operation, I would be happy to go back 

2 to OSTI and take a look, but --

3 CHAIR BEACH: Before you start, 

4 Kathy has been patient.

5 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: So are you 

6 saying that all of this operation has to be in 

7 one building?

8 DR. ULSH: I believe, well, no, 

9 because they did nuclear magnetic resonance on 

10 some samples -- but, again, those were 

11 contained. They were in sealed glass vessels. 

12 There would be no exposure potential there. 

13 That's all I can think of off the top of my 

14 head.

15 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: Okay. I'm 

16 just going to talk generically, okay, about 

17 Appendix B of the [identifying information 

18 redacted] document, which is a 

19 characterization by room.

20 First of all, lithium, uranium, 

21 and hafnium are not the only tritides that are 

22 listed in that.
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1 Second of all, I believe we found, 

2 identified tritides in at least five 

3 buildings.

4 CHAIR BEACH: I was with Kathy 

5 when we made the list.

6 DR. ULSH: Yes, that wouldn't 

7 surprise me: tritides.

8 CHAIR BEACH: No, they were named 

9 specifically.

10 DR. ULSH: Right. You're saying 

11 there was hafnium tritide at Mound in five 

12 different buildings?

13 CHAIR BEACH: At least.

14 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: I'm not 

15 going to specify any further. I can tell you 

16 off line.

17 DR. ULSH: All right.

18 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: But the 

19 document does exist, and it seems to 

20 contradict your position.

21 DR. ULSH: I'll reserve judgment 

22 until I see the document myself.
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1 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: And I know 

2 that you guys have a copy of it.

3 MR. CHEW: We need to also know 

4 the basis of the [identifying information 

5 redacted] document, that the [identifying 

6 information redacted] document was written, 

7 and so to give some people some opportunity 

8 making sure when you come back and do D&D, 

9 what potentially was put at those facilities. 

10 The qualification is that if there was any 

11 potential speculation that that tritide might 

12 have been in that particular room was 

13 mentioned but not confirmed. I think if I 

14 remember correctly, [identifying information 

15 redacted] did not have a clearance; is that 

16 correct?

17 DR. ULSH: I believe that's 

18 correct, and in fact, two of the three workers 

19 that we interviewed served as the technical 

20 experts with the clearance to assist 

21 [identifying information redacted]. So when 

22 they say this is it --
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1 CHAIR BEACH: And these are the 

2 rooms.

3 DR. ULSH: Right, I think that 

4 carries --

5 MR. CHEW: I'll just make one more 

6 statement then. If you look at the list of 

7 the tritides that was mentioned, there was 

8 only potentially speculated that maybe even a 

9 small quantity might have shown up, but it was 

10 not confirmed. That's what I'm saying. I 

11 don't recognize it as in the [identifying 

12 information redacted] document.

13 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: It seems to 

14 me that we have conflicting sources, and there 

15 has to be some resolution

16 DR. BISTLINE: And I think it 

17 needs to be stated that the paper by 

18 [identifying information redacted] and 

19 [identifying information redacted], which is 

20 published by Mound, classifies eight such 

21 stable metal tritides, and it gives a list of 

22 the eight stable tritides, and we keep coming 
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1 back and narrowing it down to hafnium tritide, 

2 but there are eight that were listed by Mound 

3 themselves as stable metal tritides, which 

4 raises an issue with me as to why we keep 

5 limiting it to one stable tritide when there 

6 are at least eight, and some of those were 

7 forms of tritides which, as I mentioned were 

8 used throughout the complex.

9 And I'm not going to go any 

10 further than that, except to say that these 

11 were used at production levels, and I'm not 

12 stating anything that hasn't been cleared by 

13 headquarters as far as classification of 

14 these. I could give you a list of the eight. 

15 That's not classified.

16 DR. ULSH: Without getting into 

17 that, I'm aware of other common -- common is a 

18 relative term -- other tritides that were used 

19 in I guess a significant scale, I would say, 

20 of different sites, and they are the ones that 

21 were examined by a researcher named Yang from 

22 Lovelace, another researcher name Zhou --
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1 it's Chinese. I assume I'm saying it right --

2 at Lovelace, and they're cited in our report. 

3 Since they're now physics literature, I don't 

4 think it's going to be less. Things like 

5 erbium, things like titanium, things like 

6 zirconium, these are the ones that --

7 MR. FITZGERALD: Scandium, 

8 uranium, lithium, these are the ones that are 

9 all in the literature. 

10 There were some others, if you 

11 recall, I don't know if you were at the 

12 meeting, but I know you were.

13 MR. FITZGERALD: I actually think 

14 he was. You were at the Germantown meeting, 

15 right? Germantown or Savannah River, yes.

16 MR. CHEW: Well, I don't think he 

17 was at the Germantown meeting though.

18 DR. BISTLINE: Yes, I was in 

19 Germantown.

20 DR. ULSH: Okay. There were some 

21 specific ones you asked us about, and we went 

22 back and checked with one of the guys that we 
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1 interviewed about the scale of the operation. 

2 They were listed in [identifying information 

3 redacted], and he confirmed for us that they 

4 were, to quote loosely, like science-fair type 

5 project scale operations, not production 

6 operations. We investigated a couple of 

7 those.

8 MR. FITZGERALD: Yes, they were 

9 all bench scale operations, right.

10 DR. ULSH: The articles that we 

11 have cited by Zhou, Chang, even SC&A's OTIB12 0066 review all say that hafnium tritide is 

13 type S, and the workers that we interviewed to 

14 a man say that hafnium tritide is the limiting 

15 case.

16 Now, we could speculate. Maybe 

17 there's worse ones out there. Fine, but 

18 that's speculation. If there's any evidence 

19 of that, I would gladly review and entertain 

20 it, but I haven't seen it.

21 DR. LIPSZTEIN: The problem is that

22 there are some tritides that were not studied 
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1 and there are some forms of that nobody -- you 

2 know, there is one paper that says that it's 

3 type S. Other papers have classified them as 

4 type M.

5 DR. ULSH: Not hafnium tritide. I 

6 have not seen a paper that classified --

7 DR. LIPSZTEIN: No, no, no. I'm 

8 not talking about hafnium tritide. I'm 

9 talking about other kinds of --

10 DR. ULSH: Right. They range 

11 anywhere --

12 DR. LIPSZTEIN: And say that 

13 people might be exposed to other kinds of 

14 tritides. They would not be classified as 

15 type M, and we don't know.

16 DR. NETON: This is Jim.

17 I've let this go on for a while. 

18 I may want to take this conversation in a 

19 slightly different direction, and that is what 

20 I thought I heard was the sort of implication 

21 that if we were to assign this to a larger 

22 group of people, let's say, for instance, it 
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1 were true that there were these other types of 

2 tritides out there that also exhibited type S 

3 behavior, and if we didn't know, we would 

4 assign the more conservative or claimant5 favorable dose.

6 I'm not sure why that's an issue 

7 here. I mean, we've heard that there is no 

8 valid bioassay technique for identifying 

9 tritide.

10 DR. ULSH: Can I jump in?

11 DR. NETON: Yes.

12 DR. ULSH: This relates to the 

13 quote that Kathy gave from the DOE handbook 

14 and, I think, some of the other ones that say 

15 that tritium bioassay is ineffective for 

16 tritide loosely. You have to keep in mind the 

17 context of that document. The DOE 

18 requirements at the time were you had to be 

19 able to detect 100 millirem or less exposures.

20 It is true that the urinalysis in 

21 place at the time were ineffective in 

22 detecting doses from hafnium tritide less than 
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1 100 millirem. That does not mean -- I mean, 

2 all that means is that the missed dose is 

3 high. We grant that.

4 DR. NETON: No, I didn't mean to 

5 imply that the bioassay techniques that were 

6 used to analyze the tritium were invalid, but 

7 there's no way to identify a tritide exposure 

8 by looking at the urine. You just can't tell. 

9 What comes out in the urine is not useful.

10 But, secondly, I'm not hearing any 

11 fundamental objections to our type S model for 

12 vary insoluble forms of tritides. So given 

13 that, and I don't know why it would be 

14 improper for NIOSH to use type S in cases 

15 where we didn't know if in every insoluble 

16 tritide exposure occurred to bound the 

17 exposure for those workers.

18 I'm not buying the argument that 

19 just because they come up in these very large 

20 doses makes it wrong. I mean, it is what it 

21 is. If the model is valid and you get a very 

22 large lung dose from inhaling a highly 
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1 insoluble form of a tritide, so be it. But if 

2 we don't know, and I'll read right from our 

3 regulation, 82.18, Paragraph DB, when NIOSH 

4 cannot establish exposure conditions with 

5 sufficient specificity, the dose calculation 

6 will assume exposure conditions that maximize 

7 the dose to the organ under consideration.

8 And that's exactly what we would 

9 do. I see this no different than how we're 

10 treating Super S across the DOE complex 

11 currently. So I'm not sure, you know, why 

12 SC&A seems to be going down this path.

13 MR. FITZGERALD: Well, I guess 

14 it's not a path per se. It's just reacting to 

15 certainly the approach where for Super S or 

16 type S, the proposal is to focus on a small 

17 group of workers that would have been 

18 potentially exposed and everybody else is not 

19 covered.

20 So I think we're not proposing any 

21 particular approach. We're reacting to --

22 DR. NETON: Well, I've heard two 
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1 issues here. One is that there's a small 

2 group of workers, and SC&A is arguing that 

3 that's not necessarily true. There's a larger 

4 group of workers, and I'm saying if what 

5 you're saying is true, why is it not valid for 

6 us to assign super or type S to those forms of 

7 tritium where we don't know. You can't make a 

8 value judgment on the person's exposure 

9 conditions.

10 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: Because the 

11 only bioassay that you have was for HTO 

12 insoluble forms of tritium.

13 DR. NETON: But we have already 

14 agreed, and I think Joyce would agree that 

15 TIB-0066 is a valid way to calculate the lung 

16 dose for highly insoluble materials.

17 DR. ULSH: And that's what comes 

18 out in the urinalysis, tritiated water. The 

19 tritium comes off the hafnium, enters the body 

20 and comes out in the urine. It's created 

21 by --

22 DR. NETON: That's what makes it 
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1 type S. It very slowly decouples from the 

2 metal form, comes out in the urine, and we're 

3 accounting for that by using the very 

4 insoluble lung model. 

5 DR. ULSH: And McConville and 

6 Woods even described the exact pattern that 

7 you see in these insoluble tritides.

8 DR. MAURO: I think I see where

9 this is going, and it goes like this. Let's 

10 say in the process of doing dose 

11 reconstruction according to the way you just 

12 described it, you find that, well, we really 

13 don't have the records or the information that 

14 lets us put a boundary around them. Who might 

15 have spent the say or two working with -- as I 

16 understand it, it doesn't take very much 

17 tritide, hafnium tritide, inhaled to deliver a 

18 very large dose. We're talking about a 

19 10,000-fold difference between chronic 

20 exposure to hafnium tritide and chronic 

21 exposure.

22 So it may turn out that even if a 
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1 person only worked a few days with, let's say, 

2 a volatile or aerosol, a form of hafnium 

3 tritide or stable tritide that could be 

4 inhaled. You'd be in this very difficult 

5 situation. From a practical sense, one could 

6 argue that we really can't rule anybody out. 

7 Anybody that worked at Mound that was involved 

8 in handling tritium may at some point -- let 

9 me go through the line and then show me where 

10 it breaks down.

11 We may have to assign hafnium 

12 tritide models to everybody, everybody with a 

13 bioassay, except for maybe -- maybe the 

14 easiest question is we probably can identify 

15 those that certainly were not, and that may 

16 turn out to be only a small percentage of the 

17 population of workers.

18 So what then we're confronted 

19 with, let's say we go out with that. Okay. 

20 Let's agree that, yes, I think we could all 

21 agree that this group of people in no way ever 

22 came in contact with a stable metal tritide.
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1 But the rest of it, the rest of 

2 that group of workers -- and I don't know how 

3 many there are -- maybe some time they could 

4 have been exposed.

5 DR. NETON: I would suspect that 

6 you would limit the population of people you 

7 are monitoring for tritium exposure. 

8 DR. MAURO: We're getting there.

9 DR. NETON: This one bioassay has 

10 the potential to be --

11 DR. MAURO: Okay. So look. You 

12 have this whole population. Then you say 

13 there's a subpopulation that has been 

14 monitored for tritium, whatever that group is. 

15 I don't know if that's 100 people or 10,000 

16 people. Whatever, I'm with you.

17 Then they say, okay, in that 

18 group, one thing. We probably could sit 

19 around the table maybe under a classified 

20 setting and say we know these people could not 

21 have been exposed to that form. Okay?

22 And let's say we can actually do 
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1 that. That leaves the rest. I don't know 

2 what that rest is, but now we're at a point --

3 and that could be a lot of people. I don't 

4 know, and they were going to assign the worst 

5 case. So we'll be assigning doses to some 

6 relatively large number of people that are on 

7 the order -- some very high doses to the 

8 respiratory tract, and there may be a 

9 relatively large number of people.

10 Which brings me to the end of the 

11 story. Do we have a plausibility argument 

12 here?

13 DR. NETON: Why is that any 

14 different than Super S where everyone in the 

15 complex that was potentially exposed to 

16 plutonium in the DOE weapons complex now is 

17 essentially getting the Super S plutonium 

18 intake exposure, whether that existed at all 

19 of those facilities or not.

20 So I fail to see the difference. 

21 I think we're splitting hairs here. It's a 

22 large dose, but so is Super S, I mean, and we 
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1 would definitely limit it to people who were 

2 on bioassays or should have been bioassayed.

3 I don't know. I don't know how 

4 it's going to come out. Dose reconstruction 

5 is not done in aggregate. We don't take and 

6 apply this to everybody and say, there's your 

7 dose.

8 You take the case; you look at the 

9 file; you look at the exposure potentials, 

10 monitoring history. All those things come into 

11 play in a dose reconstruction. So I don't see 

12 why this is an issue, whether it's ten people 

13 or 100 people or the entire site. I really 

14 don't see it.

15 CHAIR BEACH: I think because 

16 Brant was limiting it --

17 DR. NETON: Well, no, that's not 

18 what I'm hearing.

19 MR. FITZGERALD: What I was 

20 pointing out was certainly the proposal that 

21 NIOSH has on the table is to distinguish two 

22 populations of tritium monitored workers, 
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1 those that were definitely exposed, 

2 potentially exposed to hafnium, and those, the 

3 balance, that may or may not have been 

4 exposed. Intermediate, that's kind of a yet 

5 to be decided issue.

6 DR. NETON: Let me pose this 

7 question then. Is SC&A okay with NIOSH 

8 assigning on a claimant-favorable basis type 

9 S tritide exposures to --

10 MR. FITZGERALD: Well, this is 

11 certainly a completely new proposal.

12 DR. ULSH: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait 

13 a minute, wait a minute.

14 MR. FITZGERALD: No, no. I mean 

15 what was being proposed was certainly --

16 DR. NETON: If I read the talking 

17 notes that were prepared for this meeting that 

18 you provided. That was your fundamental 

19 argument, was that it was inappropriate to 

20 apply Super S tritide exposure to Mound 

21 workers because it was an implausibly high 

22 dose. That's what I read.
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1 MR. FITZGERALD: The concern was 

2 the implausibility question, I think, that 

3 John just raised. Is it implausible to assign 

4 every tritium exposed worker a factor of 

5 10,000 in terms of the dose?

6 DR. NETON: I would say we would 

7 apply it as we can given, if we can't, we have 

8 two equally plausible scenarios or two 

9 plausible scenarios, we'll assign the higher 

10 dose.

11 DR. ULSH: But I want to make it 

12 clear. I want to go on record and make it 

13 clear that we're saying even for the sake of 

14 discussion, if everything you say is true and 

15 it's greater than these ten, and by the way, I 

16 vehemently disagree with that, but for the 

17 sake of discussion, even if we applied it to 

18 everyone, you can't say on the one hand, it's 

19 a bigger group than these ten, and then we 

20 say, okay, well, then we could apply it to 

21 everybody.

22 And then you say, no, no, no, but 
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1 that's not plausible. You can't have your 

2 cake and eat it, too, here.

3 MR. FITZGERALD: Well, I guess, 

4 you know, by its nature it's a policy 

5 interpretation question. I think you framed 

6 it that way, that, you know, certainly the 

7 regs allow you to make that call, and in this 

8 case, is the call -- does it present an 

9 implausible situation? Is 10,000 times more 

10 dose to the lung a plausible condition that 

11 would exist in some circumstances?

12 I think that's the kind of 

13 question that you come up against, which is 

14 sort of the test, and it is --

15 DR. NETON: I find that dose is 

16 irrelevant. If the model is valid and the 

17 dose is 10,000 times higher, that's what it 

18 is. I mean, that's off the table.

19 MR. FITZGERALD: Is that true?

20 DR. NETON: Well, the magnitude of 

21 the dose is irrelevant if you buy that the 

22 model is technically accurate. It is what it 
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1 is. That's the exposure incurred by a person 

2 who inhaled an insoluble tritide.

3 DR. MAURO: What would have to 

4 happen for a person to get that dose? There 

5 is sort of a dilemma here, and it lies in the 

6 regulation, the way the regulation is. We 

7 have to live within that regulation. On the 

8 one hand, we have a situation. Well, listen. 

9 Since we don't really know for sure whether 

10 this person was exposed to hafnium tritide or 

11 one of the more insoluble tritides.

12 We have no choice but to assign 

13 the worst case assumption, which means that 

14 this person would be inhaling the tritium that 

15 we're observing in his urine, that week after 

16 week after week after week after week in a 

17 given year. We're going to assume that that 

18 tritium that we're observing in his urine was 

19 all due to hafnium tritide.

20 DR. NETON: If we cannot tell.

21 DR. MAURO: If you can't tell, and 

22 you may very well be in that situation.
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1 DR. NETON: Well, first of all, it 

2 would have to be a lung cancer.

3 DR. MAURO: Yes.

4 DR. NETON: A small -- not small, 

5 but like 20 percent of the cases.

6 DR. LIPSZTEIN: Jim.

7 DR. NETON: Yes.

8 DR. LIPSZTEIN: We were discussing 

9 this yesterday with Rich Leggett, and he 

10 pointed out to us the very interesting thing 

11 is that when you calculated dose using OTIB12 0066, you don't take into account the self13 absorption of the tritium beta particles 

14 within the particle, and these would reduce 

15 the dose by around -- he made a very quick 

16 calculation, but around one to five percent. 

17 Very quickly it was a particle of five 

18 microns.

19 DR. NETON: If it's one to five 

20 percent, it's not worth doing.

21 DR. LIPSZTEIN: No, no. The dose, 

22 one to five percent, the only fraction of beta 
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1 energy that would escape was in the range of 

2 one percent. So the dose to the lungs would 

3 be 100 times lower.

4 DR. NETON: And we looked at that, 

5 Joyce, and I'd be happy to entertain any 

6 calculations that could accurately come up 

7 with that value because anything that I've 

8 seen is a best guess.

9 DR. ULSH: No, in fact not.

10 DR. NETON: There is a paper out 

11 there.

12 DR. ULSH: -- published it and he 

13 explicitly calculated the self-absorption 

14 factor.

15 DR. NETON: No.

16 DR. MAURO: Along the order that

17 Joyce is saying.

18 DR. LIPSZTEIN: Yes.

19 DR. NETON: But we looked at that 

20 early on, and I can't remember why. I made 

21 the decision to discount that correction, and 

22 there must have been a good reason for it or 
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1 otherwise --

2 (Laughter.)

3 DR. NETON: I remember dealing 

4 with this issue because this issue was brought 

5 to the table, and we didn't include it.

6 But nonetheless, okay. So the 

7 doses are --

8 DR. MAURO: Whether it is ten 

9 thousand or a thousand.

10 DR. NETON: That's a modeling 

11 issue.

12 DR. MAURO: But now, see, I'm 

13 going to go back to something that Paul 

14 pointed out to me, which I think is important 

15 for us to entertain. Now, let's say it turns 

16 out when you implement it the way you just 

17 described. Let's say there are 300 workers. 

18 We're going to end up treating them as if all 

19 their exposure was to hafnium tritide, and so 

20 every bioassay sample from them that they --

21 DR. NETON: Only the lung cancers.

22 DR. MAURO: No, no. I'm with you. 
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1 They all --

2 (Simultaneous speaking.)

3 DR. MAURO: -- it turns out the 

4 other organs as Joyce calculated, it's only a 

5 factor too high. In other words, the lung is 

6 going to be 1,000 to maybe 10,000 times higher 

7 and the other organs would be maybe a factor 

8 or two higher.

9 But let's say we decide to do 

10 that. I think that's what --

11 DR. NETON: They're not the same.

12 DR. MAURO: Well, I think she said 

13 it was -- well, anyway, now I'm going through 

14 a line of thought. For that to happen, we 

15 know that's impossible because the amount of 

16 tritium that moved through the facility 

17 compared to the amount of hafnium that -- so 

18 but Paul made a very good point when we were 

19 talking about thorium. The question becomes 

20 that person, that person. Is it plausible 

21 that that person, in theory, could have spent 

22 two, three years full time -- that's all they 
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1 worked with, nothing else -- hafnium tritide 

2 and therefore, every -- now, it comes to the 

3 plausibility issue. Now, if that's plausible, 

4 that is, we have a person that says, well, 

5 listen. It's plausible that that guy could 

6 have worked with highly insoluble forms of 

7 tritium his entire time he worked at that 

8 facility.

9 And if the answer to that is yes, 

10 then it becomes plausible. If it turns out 

11 it's really not plausible, but the reality is 

12 that when you work at Mound, only an extremely 

13 small fraction of the time are you actually 

14 working with hafnium tritide. The rest of the 

15 time you're working with something else. 

16 So I think this all does come down 

17 to a plausibility question, notwithstanding 

18 the fact that Brant, you know, may want to 

19 resist that and say no, we could really define 

20 the population. Because I could see the 

21 population growing, the number of workers, to 

22 the point where are we now in the realm where 
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1 it's now considered no longer plausible, and 

2 I'm hearing that the interpretation of the 

3 regulations -- and we don't interpret 

4 regulations. I know that --

5 (Laughter.)

6 DR. MAURO: -- is, okay, you know, 

7 I guess if NIOSH decides that it's all --

8 we're going to make a very big tent. We have 

9 to. We have no choice because of the 

10 information you're limited by.

11 DR. NETON: I'm not saying we've 

12 made that decision, but --

13 MR. KATZ: Before you go on, let 

14 me just -- I'm hearing a lot of static on the 

15 line, and I'm afraid that maybe the people on 

16 the line can't hear. Someone on the line or 

17 maybe more than one has their phone off of 

18 mute, and we're hearing a lot of static -- and 

19 it went away. So maybe that solved the 

20 problem.

21 Thank you. Sorry.

22 DR. MAURO: I'm done. I guess I'm 
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1 saying I've been struggling for a long time 

2 with this plausibility issue. You know, when 

3 does the assigning some conservative 

4 assumption, you know, to cure the lack of 

5 information get to the point where it borders 

6 on the absurd?

7 DR. NETON: I think you have a 

8 very good point, and quoting Dr. Ziemer or I 

9 paraphrase Dr. Ziemer, which is dose 

10 reconstruction is for individuals. When you 

11 look at that individual case, is it plausible 

12 that that particular person that you're 

13 looking at worked with hafnium tritide? Yes 

14 or no, or can I tell? 

15 I've got two exposure scenarios. 

16 One says no; one says yes. The other one 

17 gives me a higher lung dose. I'm going with 

18 it. I'll go back to Bethlehem Steel right 

19 now, the poster child for this.

20 Every worker who we did a dose 

21 reconstruction for at Bethlehem Steel after 

22 extensive review by a lot of people received 
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1 the same dose whether it was the secretary the 

2 pipefitter, the parking lot paver or the guy 

3 working with uranium himself. So I'm not sure 

4 why this argument is now coming into being.

5 CHAIR BEACH: Well, I think 

6 because it was limited to those ten people, 

7 and so we found proof that there was more than 

8 ten people and maybe we need to go back, sit 

9 down and --

10 MR. FITZGERALD: The situation was 

11 different.

12 DR. NETON: I've heard two issues 

13 from us here. That's what's confusing me. 

14 One is there's more than ten. It's more than 

15 ten, but you can't apply it to everybody, and 

16 I'm saying, yes, you can because to find 

17 everybody who was plausibly exposed to that 

18 scenario.

19 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, if it's more 

20 than ten and you can't identify who the rest 

21 of them are, you've got a problem. It's not 

22 unlike what we had, say, at Oak Ridge Hospital 
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1 where intuitively you say not everybody could 

2 have gotten that maximum dose, but you can't 

3 tell who it was or who it wasn't, and so is 

4 that plausible? Well, on an individual basis 

5 it becomes plausible only in the sense that 

6 you can't tell from that worker.

7 DR. NETON: Well, I'd say it was a 

8 little different at Oak Ridge Hospital. We 

9 didn't know what the maximum dose was.

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: All right. That's 

11 a different thing in that sense, but it's 

12 still the issue of you're treating everybody 

13 the same because you can't define what the 

14 restrictions were.

15 You know, if there are some other 

16 places that you agree if Brant said, yes, 

17 okay. Here's another spot and there's 20 more 

18 people, that's not an issue per se. It's just 

19 a matter of -- on the other hand, if there's 

20 evidence that it's all over the place and we 

21 can't tell who, that's a completely different 

22 issue, I think.
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1 It would be awfully surprising, 

2 based on what I'm hearing about this material 

3 and its use, that it was just all over the 

4 place for anybody to work with.

5 DR. ULSH: That would be 

6 completely contrary to everything that we've 

7 seen.

8 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: The other side 

9 of that is I would be willing to wager that if 

10 you look at that, you may have ten people who 

11 are, quote, assigned as tritium workers, but 

12 then you have crafts, guards, you name it, 

13 come through there, and they're not going to 

14 be on a bioassay necessarily for tritium. 

15 They may even be --

16 DR. ULSH: They probably will be 

17 on a bioassay for tritium. You cannot go into 

18 these buildings without being on a bioassay 

19 for tritium. They will be.

20 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: At Mound?

21 DR. ULSH: Absolutely.

22 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: Okay. I would 
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1 disagree with you at other facilities.

2 DR. ULSH: I'm just saying Mound.

3 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: Maybe at Mound. 

4 Mound might be a different horse.

5 DR. ULSH: You don't just wander 

6 into these double security-padlocked rooms or 

7 even the other tritide areas that you've 

8 described unless you're --

9 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: These people 

10 may have been escorted in there a lot of 

11 times, too, to do a job. They weren't told 

12 what was necessarily they were working with. 

13 They were in there to do a job, get the job 

14 done, and get out of there.

15 DR. ULSH: If you visited that 

16 building, you peed in a bottle before you went 

17 in and after. I mean, well, definitely after. 

18 You definitely left one on the way out.

19 MR. FITZGERALD: We reviewed that. 

20 I think we're pretty secure on that issue.

21 Maybe what should have -- you 

22 know, again, this was framed up in a way which 
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1 should have been a question of the 

2 plausibility. Of course, the interpretation 

3 of plausibility for the regs is not -- yes, I 

4 think we posited that thing because we didn't 

5 see anywhere you could go if you could define. 

6 We saw the intent of defining the 

7 population, but if the population could not be 

8 defined, then, you know, the question was is 

9 there a plausible way to go.

10 DR. NETON: Either way we can do 

11 it.

12 MR. FITZGERALD: Yes.

13 DR. NETON: It's either ten or 

14 it's more, and if it's more, we're going to be 

15 claimant-favorable.

16 DR. BISTLINE: How about the waste 

17 from that facility and D&D of the facility? 

18 Were other people exposed? I don't know. I'm 

19 just asking.

20 DR. ULSH: We asked that question 

21 specifically of the workers that we 

22 interviewed, and due to security concerns, 
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1 they didn't want anyone to even know that that 

2 stuff was there. Due to security concerns, 

3 the lab people, meaning the people on the list 

4 of ten that we were given, cleaned up their 

5 own labs. Well, in terms of the equipment 

6 that was used in this operation, they cleaned 

7 it down to clean standards because you don't 

8 want, if you've got highly secret materials, 

9 you don't want to release free release 

10 equipment that has that material in it. You 

11 want to protect the confidentiality of it.

12 So if you read the notes from the 

13 interview that we provided, we asked 

14 specifically what about D&D workers; what 

15 about people climbing around in the rafters, 

16 and they all three of them answered in the 

17 negative. That wouldn't be a significant 

18 exposure potential.

19 Now, if you read some Mound 

20 documents, in particular, related to tritides 

21 during the D&D era, they were concerned about 

22 being able to detect. They didn't have a 
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1 bioassay in place, as Kathy indicated in that 

2 quote that she gave earlier.

3 DOE requires you to have a 

4 bioassay method in place to be able to detect 

5 doses as low as 100 millirem. And, indeed, 

6 they did not. That was the source of a lot of 

7 heartburn with relation to this material.

8 DR. NETON: So it sounds to me 

9 that there is some work to be done in the 

10 background related to these other documents 

11 that indicate that this material could be 

12 elsewhere.

13 DR. BISTLINE: How about the other 

14 tritides that are stable tritides, not 

15 intermediate tritides, but considered stable 

16 tritides besides --

17 DR. NETON: It would default to 

18 the class that would give the highest dose to 

19 the organ being constructed just like I read 

20 out of our regulation.

21 DR. ULSH: Well, and again, I go 

22 back to --
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1 DR. NETON: There's Type M or --

2 DR. ULSH: Right. You have to 

3 also not only consider the solubility in 

4 isolation, but the exposure potential, and 

5 that's why we specifically looked at the ones 

6 that we were asked to look at in the 

7 Germantown meeting in terms of what was the 

8 exposure potential, how extensive the scale 

9 was, and to a man all three of them said 

10 hafnium tritide was the worst. If you look at 

11 the articles from Zhou and Chang, they clearly 

12 indicate that hafnium is the worst, and again, 

13 I go back to what I said earlier. If there's 

14 a worst one out there, I can't prove a 

15 negative. I can't prove --

16 DR. BISTLINE: No, I'm not saying 

17 worst, but I'm saying that's close to that,

18 scandium, iron oxide, et cetera --

19 DR. ULSH: Nothing that I've seen. 

20 Everything that I've seen indicates that 

21 hafnium tritide is in a class by itself, and 

22 you have to keep in mind what the purpose of 
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1 working with these compounds was.

2 DR. BISTLINE: Oh, yes.

3 DR. ULSH: It was to tightly bind 

4 tritium. You didn't want this stuff floating 

5 off.

6 DR. BISTLINE: Well, but there 

7 were others that were used for the same 

8 purpose.

9 DR. ULSH: Well, exactly. I mean, 

10 uranium tritide is --

11 DR. BISTLINE: No, I'm talking 

12 about other ones that are classified as stable 

13 tritides.

14 DR. ULSH: Okay. Well, obviously 

15 I'm not going to go into that.

16 DR. BISTLINE: Okay.

17 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: Bob 

18 mentioned that Mound had eight stable metal 

19 tritides that they identified. Just for your 

20 benefit, why we brought up the fusion is two 

21 of them are byproducts of handling a lot of 

22 tritium gas and HTO, and that's where it comes 
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1 into play in D&D and in evasive maintenance 

2 operations and stuff.

3 And there's also insoluble 

4 organically bound tritium that exists and is 

5 produced through diffusion of tritium.

6 MEMBER CLAWSON: Well, I guess I 

7 go back to what we got into in Savannah River, 

8 which reverts even up to Mound, and that is 

9 that these people may have been escorted into 

10 these facilities and so forth, but any of the 

11 maintenance on any kind of pumps, any kind of 

12 -- how it dispersed through everything, and 

13 you're telling me that all of this stuff was 

14 taken care of by these people. I'll bet you 

15 any of these pumps or oil or anything else 

16 like that went out, I think you'd be pretty 

17 hard pressed.

18 You can say that, but I'll bet 

19 you're pretty hard pressed.

20 DR. ULSH: Well, certainly there 

21 is an issue of organically bound tritium in 

22 pump oils. I wouldn't dispute that. I would
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1 also not represent to you -- in fact, I made 

2 this mistake in Germantown and Bob called me 

3 on it -- I won't tell you that these people 

4 cleaned their own trash cans. They didn't. 

5 They were escorted in. They were on tritium 

6 bioassay, but hafnium tritide was always 

7 handled doubly contained. 

8 They did have two incidents that 

9 I'm aware of where you would call it a spill, 

10 two discrete incidents that we know about. 

11 The doses from those have been estimated. So 

12 I don't think that that's an SEC issue, but 

13 under normal operating circumstances that 

14 you're describing, Brant, day to day 

15 operations where people come in to do 

16 maintenance, to clean the floors, whatever, 

17 first of all, they didn't handle this material 

18 outside of a containment environment under 

19 normal operating circumstances, and certainly, 

20 number one, you would never just take it out 

21 and work on a bench and, number two, even if 

22 you did, you wouldn't then open the door and 
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1 let some guy in to change the trash.

2 MEMBER CLAWSON: Well, you've got 

3 different people going in there though. This 

4 is what I'm trying to say. You'd have 

5 instrument techs. You'd have everything else 

6 like that.

7 The way I do right now, we bring 

8 lots of people into our area there, but they 

9 don't know what we're doing and they don't 

10 need to. They've got to change. They've got 

11 to change a parameter or they've got to change 

12 something on our --

13 DR. NETON: So they have a need to 

14 know.

15 MEMBER CLAWSON: Yes.

16 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: Can I make 

17 a clarification here? There are really two 

18 sets of people here. There's the individuals 

19 who produced material on purpose.

20 MEMBER CLAWSON: Right.

21 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: Then 

22 there's the individuals who are potentially 
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1 exposed to tritides since tritium gas and HTO 

2 diffuse into material, and as D&D and 

3 intrusive maintenance came, this was re4 suspended. Okay? So this side is non5 production. This side was not directly 

6 involved with processing of a product.

7 DR. ULSH: Okay. I don't 

8 necessarily disagree. I think we have to 

9 differentiate between hafnium tritide and 

10 other tritides. No one, I would contend to 

11 you, was accidentally making or exposed to 

12 hafnium tritide that way. You can envision 

13 other tritides, for instance, iron oxide, 

14 rust, that kind of thing, and that's exactly 

15 why we're saying with the exception of this 

16 group of ten people that we know were exposed 

17 to hafnium tritide, for everyone else on the 

18 tritium bioassay program at Mound, we're 

19 assuming that they could have possibly been 

20 exposed to some of these intermediate 

21 tritides, intermediate compounds, intermediate 

22 solubility tritides like the kinds you are 
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1 describing.

2 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: But where 

3 is the solubility study on iron oxide tritide? 

4 Because I haven't been able to locate one, 

5 and like I said, Mound calls it a stable metal 

6 tritide.

7 DR. ULSH: It is specifically 

8 addressed. I specifically asked about rust in 

9 terms of in the interview that we did with 

10 three workers, and they all to a man told me 

11 that it is less soluble than hafnium tritide. 

12 It is certainly delimiting or more soluble.

13 I mean, keep in mind what we're 

14 going to do with this. You've got on the one 

15 end of the spectrum hafnium tritide. On the 

16 other end of the spectrum you've got tritiated 

17 water. Hafnium tritide is highly insoluble. 

18 Tritiated water is highly soluble. For lung 

19 and I would say maybe even respiratory tract 

20 organs, hafnium tritide will be the limiting 

21 case.

22 At the other end of the spectrum 
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1 every other organ that I can think of 

2 tritiated water will be the limiting case. 

3 We're getting all balled up in these 

4 intermediate things, but these are the two 

5 that we're going to use in practice because 

6 that's what's claimant favorable.

7 We are not proposing -- with the 

8 exception of the ten people possibly exposed 

9 to hafnium tritide, we are not proposing to 

10 make any kind of a differentiation for the 

11 rest. We're going to say if it's claimant12 favorable, we're going to assume hafnium 

13 tritide. If it's claimant-favorable, we're 

14 going to assume exposure to some of these 

15 intermediate solubility tritides, and if it's 

16 claimant-favorable, we're going to assume 

17 tritiated water. These are the bounding; 

18 these are the ends of the spectrum.

19 I think that the proposed approach 

20 that we're putting out there accurately 

21 reflects what we know about Mound, and 

22 considers the claimant-favorable application 
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1 to this approach.

2 DR. LIPSZTEIN: So did I 

3 understand correctly if you don't know the 

4 solubility of the tritide, you will assume 

5 Type S?

6 DR. ULSH: No. Well, I don't 

7 agree with the premise of your question. If 

8 we truly don't know the solubility, then 

9 assume type S? Sure, but I would say to you 

10 that we do know that hafnium tritide is the 

11 worst of --

12 DR. LIPSZTEIN: Yes, because it 

13 has even a longer half-time in lung than type 

14 S.

15 DR. ULSH: No, it doesn't.

16 DR. LIPSZTEIN: -- the ones that 

17 were studied but not all of them were studied.

18 DR. ULSH: Well, again, we're 

19 getting into prove a negative. Prove to me 

20 that there is not something worse than 

21 hafnium. If you've got any evidence to 

22 suggest that, I would gladly entertain it.
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1 DR. LIPSZTEIN: I don't know. I 

2 don't know because if you don't have 

3 literature based on some kinds of tritides, 

4 you don't have literature data. You cannot 

5 prove anything either way.

6 DR. ULSH: But, Joyce, we know 

7 what tritides were in use and what the scale 

8 was, and everyone that has researched this 

9 that has at least published results on it and 

10 everyone that we interviewed to a person said 

11 hafnium tritide is the worst. They didn't 

12 say, oh, but then there's this other one 

13 that's even worse.

14 There's no reason to think --

15 DR. LIPSZTEIN: Well, yes, but 

16 those were not studied.

17 DR. ULSH: I can't prove a 

18 negative.

19 DR. LIPSZTEIN: The ones that have 

20 been studied, the worst is hafnium tritide, 

21 but there are others that have been studied 

22 also and could be type S like carbon tritide, 
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1 for example.

2 DR. ULSH: Carbon tritide was 

3 not -- it was not in wide use in the complex.

4 DR. NETON: Well, Joyce, are you 

5 saying that there's a potential compound out 

6 there that's more insoluble than S?

7 DR. LIPSZTEIN: I don't know 

8 because there are some tritides that were used 

9 at Mound from which we don't have papers on 

10 it.

11 DR. ULSH: They were not in wide 

12 use at Mound. I can tell you that. The ones 

13 that were in wide use at Mound were lithium 

14 tritide, uranium tritide. Hafnium tritide 

15 wasn't in wide use. It was very discrete. I 

16 might be missing one or two, but all of the 

17 ones that I've just mentioned have been 

18 studied, and they know the solubility is very 

19 well determined.

20 There are some exotic ones that 

21 were like I said one-off science fair type 

22 experiments, but those don't present an 
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1 exposure potential.

2 DR. NETON: Well, I think 

3 everything -- we were sort of talking around 

4 in circles.

5 MR. FITZGERALD: Yes, we have a 

6 path forward.

7 DR. NETON: Yes, we have a path 

8 forward, I think.

9 (Laughter.)

10 DR. NETON: I think in my mind we 

11 need to get together with those who are in the 

12 know and look at these other potential sources 

13 of hafnium tritide exposures at Mound outside 

14 of what you believe the universe to be.

15 DR. ULSH: Joe, if you can --

16 MR. FITZGERALD: Yes, we need to 

17 have another cone of silence looking at these 

18 actual references and locations cited, 

19 including Appendix B, and just everything.

20 CHAIR BEACH: Well, and I think 

21 they all need to be delivered to one location 

22 so everybody can be there at the same time.
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1 MR. FITZGERALD: Well, yes, that's 

2 the idea.

3 DR. NETON: And wherever we agree 

4 that that may or may not-- that potential 

5 exposure may have occurred, we will use --

6 MR. FITZGERALD: Let the chips 

7 fall where they may on that.

8 DR. MAURO: So what I'm hearing 

9 then it may turn out at the end of the whole 

10 process that no one will be assigned tritiated 

11 water vapor. I can see you ending up there.

12 DR. NETON: Not likely, John, 

13 because this only applies to lung cancers that 

14 we're talking about.

15 DR. MAURO: No, no. What I'm 

16 saying is, yes, the purpose of maximizing 

17 those.

18 DR. LIPSZTEIN: -- the doses to 

19 the colon are about 100 times higher if you 

20 come to the type S. The doses to the lower 

21 intestinal wall --

22 DR. NETON: GI tract.
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1 DR. LIPSZTEIN: -- are 1,000 times 

2 higher.

3 DR. NETON: Yes, I can agree with 

4 GI tract because of the swallowing.

5 DR. MAURO: But there are other 

6 organs where tritiated water is higher than

7 hafnium.

8 DR. NETON: Well, because it's 

9 systemic. You've got to maximize your 

10 systemic organ. You're not going to maximize 

11 the systemic organs by having an insoluble 

12 material in your lungs.

13 So basically, as Joyce corrected 

14 me, it's GI tract plus lung cancers, that 

15 subpopulation of those workers who were on a 

16 bioassay monitoring program who we can maybe 

17 all agree worked in areas where hafnium 

18 tritide existed.

19 I think that's it. I mean, Brant 

20 right now says it's ten people and SC&A has 

21 some evidence that might speak to some other 

22 locations, and we need to look at that. Don't 
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1 you agree with that, Brant?

2 DR. ULSH: I agree that I would 

3 like to see what papers it is that you feel 

4 indicates a wider, and I'll reserve judgment 

5 until I see that.

6 DR. NETON: Well, yes. I'm not 

7 saying that we agree that there were 

8 locations, but we --

9 CHAIR BEACH: And Mel would like 

10 that to take place at Livermore.

11 (Laughter.)

12 MR. FITZGERALD: This time of year 

13 I won't argue with you.

14 CHAIR BEACH: As soon as possible. 

15 Okay. We can talk about that probably later.

16 MR. FITZGERALD: Right.

17 CHAIR BEACH: So what do you guys 

18 think? Do you want to move on to radon or 

19 have you had enough for one day?

20 We can take a break. What's your 

21 pleasure?

22 MR. KATZ: You guys want a ten-
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1 minute break? A ten-minute break for folks on 

2 the phone, too. So we'll start back up at 20 

3 after four.

4 (Whereupon, the above-entitled 

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

6 resumed at 4:21 p.m.)

7 MR. KATZ: Okay. We are 

8 reconvening after a brief break.

9 We have just concluded, I believe, 

10 discussions of stable tritium compounds on the 

11 agenda, and moving on from there.

12 CHAIR BEACH: And we are going to 

13 move on to radon, and this is the last topic 

14 of discussion this evening. Let's give me 

15 some ideas. Is there anybody that needs to be 

16 done by any certain time or are we all good 

17 for another hour or so?

18 MEMBER PRESLEY: It's my nap time.

19 (Laughter.)

20 CHAIR BEACH: I was thinking about 

21 the local folks that have problems with 

22 family. The rest of us are stuck.
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1 Okay. So we'll just finish radon 

2 or not finish radon for the next hour or so, 

3 and I guess, NIOSH, we're going to throw it 

4 into your court.

5 DR. ULSH: Okay. Radon is one of 

6 those issues that has been hanging out there 

7 for a while, and I guess we have to go back to 

8 the currently established SEC class, and that 

9 is 1949 to 59, and that is based on radium 

10 separation operations which occurred in the SW 

11 cave. That operation commenced in about the 

12 mid-50s and was D&Ded in about 1959, and by 

13 D&D what I mean is they removed as much of the 

14 source term as they could, removed as much of 

15 the equipment as they could feasibly remove, 

16 and basically they poured concrete on top of 

17 the old cave facility.

18 And let me describe just briefly

19 what the old cave facility was. Basically 

20 think of a hot cell, only not quite so 

21 confined. The basis of our SEC class was that 

22 the documented contamination that spread not 
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1 only throughout the old cave, but throughout 

2 the R and SW Buildings from this very, well, I 

3 have to call it a messy operation.

4 And we determined that we could 

5 not reliably say who might have been exposed 

6 to this material. People could have traveled 

7 in and out of these buildings. So it was 

8 everyone on site. That's the currently 

9 defined SEC class.

10 Those operations by and large 

11 ceased in 1959 and the full cave was concreted 

12 in. When they concreted it in, they made some 

13 office space up on top of this facility in 

14 Room SW-19, I believe.

15 And fast forward now about 20 

16 years, and there was a particular individual 

17 that went in for a body count and came up with 

18 a very strange result, and that led to an 

19 investigation, and what they discovered was 

20 that there was a tunnel, an access tunnel. 

21 Now, this is not a tunnel that people 

22 frequented. It was only like two and a half 
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1 by two and a half approximately, I think. 

2 Yes, Don?

3 MR. STEWART: Two foot, three 

4 inches tall.

5 DR. ULSH: Okay. Two foot, three 

6 inches tall.

7 Right by this guy's desk in SW-19 

8 there was a square hole cut in the floor for 

9 reasons that aren't clear to me, and basically 

10 what you had was in this access tunnel, you 

11 had radon gas, and when I say radon, I'm using 

12 the term loosely. Not just 222, but also 

13 thoron and actinon. This is left over 

14 contamination from the radium separations 

15 operation.

16 So this tunnel provided pretty 

17 much an ideal environment to build up 

18 extremely high concentrations of the three 

19 radon isotopes, and then, of course, it came 

20 out in this hole right by this guy's desk.

21 Now, I'm not going to mention the 

22 guy by name for Privacy Act reasons. I can 
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1 tell you that he's not a claimant. To my 

2 knowledge, he doesn't have lung cancer, but so 

3 what happened when this guy came up with a 

4 high body count, they did an investigation and 

5 they discovered this tunnel.

6 Apparently the investigator at the 

7 time, I am inferring that he didn't have 

8 historical knowledge of the operations that 

9 occurred, and he measured a very low radon-222 

10 concentration, but just screaming-high 

11 daughter product concentrations, and it was a 

12 mystery to him why there was such a 

13 disequilibrium.

14 Well, of course, it's because you 

15 didn't just have a radon-222 source. You had 

16 these other radon isotopes as well, and so at 

17 the time it didn't occur to him what he was 

18 actually observing.

19 He sampled. They put a person in 

20 a bubble suit, went down into the tunnel and 

21 sampled, and discovered these very high 

22 concentrations. They measured at the outlet, 
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1 the square hole in the floor, and discovered a 

2 high concentration, and then they measured in 

3 the breathing zone and discovered a reduction 

4 by a factor of ten.

5 So what I am telling you is I 

6 think there are enough uncertainties with that 

7 investigation in terms of issues of instrument 

8 calibration that were used in terms of 

9 possible played out of the material in the 

10 Tygon Tubing that was used. He mentioned 

11 that. For that guy sitting there, I can't 

12 really put a plausible upper bound on his lung 

13 dose. The other organs, I think it's going to 

14 be trivial. I mean, it's radon. I can't say 

15 that it's zero, but it's trivial.

16 The weight of the evidence to me 

17 suggests that, due to the factor-of-ten 

18 reduction he saw simply between the outlet and 

19 the breathing zone, if you dilute first out 

20 further into the room and then out further 

21 into the building, I can tell you that it's my 

22 best scientific judgment that the doses, the 
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1 concentrations that you would see are low, but 

2 I can't put a number on it. All I can say is 

3 it's low.

4 Given that, I also have to tell 

5 you that I know that this guy was sitting here 

6 in 1979. I don't know who might have been 

7 sitting there prior to that, no idea.

8 What happened as a result of this, 

9 they sealed cracks around that room and sealed 

10 off that access tunnel, and then they stacked 

11 it. So they vented off the radon that was in 

12 there.

13 So from 1959 to 79, we have an 

14 issue certainly for this guy and anyone else 

15 who might have been sitting there. We've 

16 discussed this matter with DOL in terms of 

17 their administration of a class, and it's 

18 their input, their view that if we were even 

19 to say that it was only this one room, SW-19, 

20 they couldn't really administer that because 

21 they don't know who frequented that room, who 

22 went in, who went out.
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1 I think it's certainly true; at 

2 least I have not seen any evidence nor do I 

3 have any reason to believe that this would be 

4 an issue, well, number one, outside of SW-19, 

5 but number two, outside of R and SW Building. 

6 That's where this was. R was connected to SW.

7 And so I can't envision that this 

8 source term would present significant exposure 

9 potential outside of these two buildings. So 

10 given that, what I'm telling you is I can't 

11 accurately reconstruct lung dose for this guy 

12 or anyone else who might have been sitting 

13 there, and nor can I reconstruct or put a 

14 plausible upper bound on lung dose for anyone 

15 else who spent a significant amount of time in 

16 there.

17 So that's where we are with radon. 

18 We struggled with this for weeks and months, 

19 and basically we don't have a solution for 

20 that.

21 CHAIR BEACH: I'm sorry to make 

22 you, but can you give me the exact years again 
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1 and the room?

2 DR. ULSH: The current SEC period 

3 ended in 1959. This issue was discovered in 

4 1979.

5 CHAIR BEACH: Okay.

6 DR. ULSH: The room number 

7 involved, I believe, is SW-19. Don, can you?

8 MR. STEWART: That's correct. SW9 19 was actually built over the old cave area, 

10 and due to plate drain tiles there was 

11 significant amount of that processed material 

12 that had diffused through the soil. So we've 

13 got an ongoing generation of all three 

14 isotopes of radon.

15 MR. FITZGERALD: And the remedial 

16 action, wasn't that in 1980? These 

17 measurements were 79, I thought. I thought 

18 the remedial action was 80.

19 MR. STEWART: Yes, I believe that 

20 was 1980.

21 DR. ULSH: Yes, it might have been 

22 the end of 79 where they were investigating 
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1 again back in '80. That's possible.

2 DR. NETON: It's bad, but what 

3 Brant said is exactly right. This is really 

4 not trivial levels of radon. I mean, hundreds 

5 of thousands of picocuries per liter in this 

6 tunnel and more importantly, to back-calculate 

7 20 years for the thoron exposure, they 

8 actually started with a thorium-228 source 

9 term. I thought it was originally thorium10 232, but it was thorium-227. That has 

11 something like a couple of year half-life. So 

12 you back-calculate those concentrations 20 

13 years and you have some enormous potential 

14 amounts of thoron gas in that tunnel, and it 

15 ended up with some plausibly high doses.

16 MR. STEWART: An example, you can 

17 illustrate what Jim is saying. We've 

18 calculated an ET-1 dose from thoron, almost 

19 18,000 rem in the year 1959.

20 DR. NETON: That would have been 

21 our best estimate, and who knows? Given all 

22 of the compounding factors that Brant 
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1 mentioned, sort of the lack of understanding 

2 of really what was in that tunnel at the time 

3 led to some very confused scientists for a 

4 while. There are about eight pages or so of 

5 handwritten notes that are kind of interesting 

6 to read in the SRDB on this.

7 MR. FITZGERALD: Now -- oh, go 

8 ahead. I'm sorry.

9 DR. ULSH: No, go ahead.

10 MR. FITZGERALD: Well, a couple of 

11 other considerations. We've talked about this 

12 before. When we did the site profile review, 

13 it seems like eons ago now, but you know, we 

14 interviewed folks on this issue, and the 

15 question of where this tunnel underlaid -- is 

16 that the right word -- was underneath, you 

17 know, and the R and SW Buildings are 

18 contiguous buildings. They were, you know, 

19 built together. They weren't separate, and 

20 the tunnel, you know, was not only under --

21 well, certainly the capped old cave was under 

22 SW-19, but the tunnel itself was under several 
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1 other rooms or whatever in SW and may have 

2 extended to R, although I think -- I'm not 

3 sure if we heard definitive answers to what 

4 the length of the tunnel was.

5 But the one thing that sticks in 

6 my mind was the interview we had with rad 

7 techs, who sort of similar to what 

8 [identifying information redacted] -- similar 

9 to this individual who monitored in SW-19, 

10 also volunteered that in terms of the alpha 

11 monitors over tracks in our building and 

12 actually R-218 was the room that specified in 

13 the interview notes. They, too, pegged out, 

14 and their response was that, yes, they were 

15 getting a lot of influx of what they thought 

16 was radon.

17 Now, they didn't do an analysis to 

18 pin down the constituents, but, again, it was 

19 a very high influx of gaseous alpha emitting, 

20 which they considered radon. And so to sort 

21 of compound the situation, it's not clear, you 

22 know. This was certainly a major source, a 
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1 major opening, if you may, but it's not clear 

2 from the breadth of that tunnel and where it 

3 was located where else the R/SW complex was 

4 getting its influx of radon, but certainly in 

5 that one data point, the rad tech acknowledge 

6 that they were seeing a high level radon 

7 coming through in R-218.

8 So it's difficult. There aren't 

9 that many measurements, but the ones that do 

10 exist suggest the very high level radon and an 

11 implication that may have existed wherever 

12 this tunnel might have provided that source 

13 term.

14 DR. ULSH: Well, given the input 

15 that we've had from DOL that it's not feasible 

16 to limit it to just SW-19, that may be an 

17 academic question anyway because I think, you 

18 know, I can't speak for anyone making SEC 

19 classes or anything like that, but one can 

20 logically conclude perhaps that DOL would be 

21 inclined to make it all of R/SW Building.

22 CHAIR BEACH: And then possibly 
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1 expand the years? Because I know there was 

2 some -- the same interview he's talking about, 

3 Joe was, they were talking about wells that 

4 they found up until the late 80s, and didn't 

5 really do a lot of sampling until the 90s for 

6 radon.

7 DR. ULSH: Wells? Are you talking 

8 drinking wells?

9 CHAIR BEACH: No. I'm sorry. Let 

10 me find it. You want to go ahead. I'll find 

11 it.

12 DR. ULSH: Okay.

13 DR. NETON: The other fact was 

14 that any gas measurement that was made of the 

15 radon detector built to measure gas would give 

16 you an inappropriate reading because of the 

17 unique mixture of the three radioisotopes. 

18 They're calibrated usually to radon-222, which 

19 had a certain diffusion consonant across the 

20 membrane, and you're measuring radon-219 and 

21 radon-220, and so that's what really threw the 

22 original measurements off.
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1 They were measuring, I think, 

2 several hundred picocuries per liter, but not 

3 seeing any daughter activity. They were like, 

4 well, what's going on. There's a huge 

5 disequilibrium here, and it really was they 

6 were measuring these other radon gases.

7 CHAIR BEACH: Oh, manholes. I'm 

8 sorry. Yes, they talked about down in the 

9 manholes. That's the same one.

10 MR. FITZGERALD: That's the same 

11 analysis.

12 CHAIR BEACH: Sorry. I thought it 

13 was a separate one.

14 DR. ULSH: So this may be a short 

15 discussion. I don't know.

16 MR. FITZGERALD: No. I mean, I 

17 know where we're coming from. There are 

18 certainly uncertainties and the level of radon 

19 was such that we thought it was a concern.

20 CHAIR BEACH: So at this point 

21 it's up to Department of Labor to give us --

22 MR. FITZGERALD: I'll let them 
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1 speak to the process.

2 DR. ULSH: No, we would have to 

3 revise our evaluation report to conclude this. 

4 We can't bound to an additional class.

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: Were those 

6 buildings themselves restricted? In other 

7 words, can you define who had access to those 

8 buildings?

9 DR. ULSH: Yes, they were tritium 

10 buildings. Paul, again, we're relying on if 

11 you went into those buildings, you --

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: If there was a 

13 record of it, you can tell which workers it 

14 would apply to.

15 DR. ULSH: Well, basically, if you 

16 did not have tritium bioassay, you didn't go 

17 into those buildings because if you did, you 

18 gave tritium bioassay.

19 CHAIR BEACH: What about 

20 maintenance workers?

21 DR. ULSH: If maintenance workers 

22 went into our R/SW Building, they gave tritium 
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1 bioassay.

2 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: I can tell 

3 you for a fact that I went into many rooms in 

4 R building and never submitted a tritium 

5 bioassay because I was in R Building.

6 DR. ULSH: What years?

7 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: Nineties.

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, what's the 

9 implication of this? Anyone who got tritium 

10 bioassay could have been in that building; is 

11 that what you're saying?

12 DR. ULSH: Yes.

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: And therefore, 

14 could have gotten high radon exposure.

15 DR. NETON: Right. This would be 

16 a class, the 250-day requirement.

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes. I'm just 

18 trying to get a feel for who it applies to. 

19 That's a fairly large group.

20 DR. ULSH: I can understand why 

21 you might not have had tritium bioassay in the 

22 90s, because of DOE Order whatever it was that 
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1 was in place at the time.

2 DR. NETON: Eight thirty-five?

3 DR. ULSH: Yes, that said, if you 

4 didn't have 100 millirem exposure potential, 

5 you didn't have to give a bioassay. But we're 

6 talking about 1959 to 1979, before that order 

7 was in effect.

8 MR. FITZGERALD: Now, the only --

9 not to throw a fly in this fine ointment at 

10 this point -- you know, the 1980 venting, you 

11 know, you've read the same things that I've 

12 read. You know, it got much better, but as 

13 far as what I would call a decent survey of 

14 radon, that didn't happen until, I think, the 

15 early 90s. They did a DOE-wide survey, 

16 including a lot of these buildings, and one 

17 thing that I don't think has been nailed very 

18 well, I just sort of accept it on faith based 

19 on, you know, the memos I've read after they 

20 vented.

21 They said, well, it went down 

22 appreciably, blah, blah, blah, blah, but you 
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1 didn't see what you would like to have seen, 

2 which is some subsequent surveys.

3 There was one interviewee who I 

4 won't name who was a health physicist that, 

5 you know, said that, you know, there was just 

6 a lot of radon amount, a lot of, you know, I 

7 think it was attributed maybe wrongly to a 

8 local coal burning plant or inversions, but he 

9 said, you know, they have alarms going off a 

10 lot.

11 So I guess the only thing that 

12 might be useful to do is the punctuation point 

13 in 1980. You know, even though there was a 

14 memo or two that said, hurrah, the problem is 

15 solved, in 1980, given the source term and the 

16 levels involved, you know, we certainly did 

17 not find any more documentation, but it would 

18 be probably helpful just to firm that up that 

19 there wasn't this unsubstantiated radon 

20 exposure occurring at levels that would pose a 

21 problem after '80.

22 I think we assume that's the case 
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1 because the memo suggested that made a big 

2 difference, but I'm not sure what a big 

3 difference translates into.

4 DR. ULSH: Yes, I can't pull the 

5 exact dates off the top of my head, Joe, but I 

6 do remember that after they remediated, in

7 other words, sealed, you know, the cracks and 

8 the holes and everything --

9 MR. FITZGERALD: The cracks.

10 DR. ULSH: -- put the stack in, 

11 they did go back and re-survey. I don't know 

12 what the levels they measured were, but I have 

13 the same recollection that you do, that they 

14 concluded that, okay, problem fixed.

15 MR. FITZGERALD: Right. You 

16 probably would want to -- you just, given 

17 where we are at this point, that would be the 

18 only question I'd have.

19 DR. NETON: You also have that 

20 radon cup data that was taken in the 90s that 

21 you mentioned, and I don't know how widely 

22 distributed those cups were in Mound, but I 
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1 know at Fernald they were -- what the numbers 

2 of the public buildings were. So there might 

3 be some SW cup data that was taken in 1990.

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: But the surveys 

5 made after the remediation, they had taken 

6 care of the issues on correctly characterizing 

7 the equilibrium factors in the mix. I mean, 

8 how -- do we have a reliable survey after the 

9 remediation that will give you confidence that 

10 that's the cutoff?

11 DR. NETON: Well, I think the 

12 radon levels went down dramatically.

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: Okay.

14 DR. NETON: The radon levels that 

15 were measured themselves were an overstatement 

16 of the radon-222 because they were responding 

17 to the whole three gases.

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right.

19 DR. NETON: And so they went down 

20 by I forget how much, but it was --

21 MEMBER ZIEMER: It should be 

22 orders of magnitude I would think, yes.
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1 DR. NETON: Order of magnitude. 

2 So it was certainly much better.

3 MR. FITZGERALD: But you know, in 

4 terms of the additional dose, was it good 

5 enough to not give you a problem? I don't 

6 know because we didn't go any further and 

7 neither, I think, did Brant. So that would be 

8 the only question. If you were going to drive 

9 a stake in 1980, that would probably be the 

10 only question.

11 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: I can help 

12 you guys out with about 1994 forward in our 

13 samples about initial counts and decay counts. 

14 So if you needed to get a concentration.

15 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, but you still 

16 have 1980 as, I guess, the cutoff point for a 

17 proposed class, right? And you're talking 

18 about 94.

19 MS. ROBERTSON-DeMERS: Yes, I'm 

20 just eliminating those years.

21 MR. FITZGERALD: Brant, we have 

22 the same recollection, that really what 1980 
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1 represented based on the memos we read and the 

2 measurements they took, and again, I think the 

3 measurements were no less primitive than the 

4 original ones they took to find the problem. 

5 So the only question is can one have 

6 confidence that it wasn't residual issues 

7 beyond 80. That's all.

8 DR. NETON: They eventually did 

9 take working level measurements, which was 

10 specific for the progeny of radon-222. I 

11 hadn't read those in a while.

12 DR. ULSH: And another piece of 

13 information, it doesn't definitively answer 

14 the question, but the same person who 

15 investigated this incident then became the 

16 head of a radon group at Mound, and it was 

17 based at Mound, but they studied radon 

18 throughout the DOE complex and even other 

19 places, too.

20 MEMBER CLAWSON: He's still doing 

21 it.

22 DR. ULSH: Yes, even from coal 
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1 plants.

2 MEMBER CLAWSON: And he's been 

3 interviewed.

4 DR. ULSH: Well, by both of us.

5 MR. FITZGERALD: And I think it 

6 may be a matter of going back and just making 

7 sure that, you know, that's still the 

8 truncation point, and that's a clean 

9 truncation point. You know, again, I remember 

10 it being said that way.

11 CHAIR BEACH: And I don't know the 

12 process on that. Jim, will you come back to 

13 us and tell us what you've decided or will it 

14 go straight to Labor?

15 MR. KATZ: No, no, no, it will 

16 come to the Board.

17 CHAIR BEACH: Well, no, I meant --

18 go ahead.

19 DR. NETON: See, we have an SEC 

20 Evaluation Report on the table, correct? 

21 That's what we're discussing here. So we 

22 would have to amend the SEC Evaluation Report 
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1 to include this class. Since the Board hasn't 

2 heretofore voted on that, I think we can just 

3 issued an amended report, but I guess a 

4 decision has to be made as to whether it would 

5 be more expeditious to like finish all of the 

6 debate on Mound and then issue one report or 

7 just issue this amendment to get that on the 

8 table and then move forward from there. I 

9 don't know how.

10 MR. HINNEFELD: I think we'll need 

11 to have that discussion internally.

12 CHAIR BEACH: Well, I was just 

13 curious about how that all would work, if it 

14 would come back to us because I wasn't sure.

15 MEMBER ZIEMER: Could you clarify 

16 for me, Brant? At some point this survey was 

17 done. That was when they discovered the 

18 tunnel or when was the initial survey that led 

19 to the concern?

20 DR. ULSH: That happened in 1979 

21 when this particular individual went for a 

22 whole body count.
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1 MEMBER ZIEMER: Okay. It's sort 

2 of like the watchers thing.

3 DR. ULSH: Exactly.

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: Where did it come 

5 from?

6 Okay. So they went back and 

7 surveyed the room, but you indicated an 

8 inadequacy in that survey and some 

9 uncertainties, but were those uncertainties so 

10 bad that you can't use that data? Because 

11 we're dealing with uncertainties all the time.

12 It's more than just the 

13 characterization of the levels at that point 

14 because who knows what they were for 20 years 

15 as part of that, I suppose.

16 DR. NETON: That's part of it. 

17 First you have basically one measurement or a 

18 series of measurements taken over a very short 

19 period of time in 1979. That's the only thing 

20 you had to hang your hat on, and then there's 

21 technical issues with the relative 

22 contribution of three different isotopes of 
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1 radon. They went into the tunnel as Brant 

2 said and pulled a sample, but they had to pull 

3 it through this Tygon Tubing.

4 So trying to come up with this 

5 equilibrium, the equilibrium of the different 

6 radon isotopes, and there's documentation that 

7 says, well, we probably had some wall losses 

8 in tubing and we don't know. It was pretty 

9 hard to decipher.

10 I looked at this thing for --

11 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, I was trying 

12 to get a feel. I mean, those kind of problems 

13 we do deal with.

14 DR. NETON: We do.

15 MEMBER ZIEMER: But it's more than 

16 just that. It's the fact that you have 20 

17 years. We know radon values bounce all over 

18 the place by orders of magnitude.

19 DR. NETON: Exactly.

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: You'd like to have 

21 it extended through the -- actually you'd like 

22 a whole integrated year and so on, but I'm 
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1 sort of pressing. You guys are sufficiently 

2 convinced that you can't bound what the doses 

3 would have been, you know, integrated over a 

4 year based on samples and knowing how radon --

5 I mean, there's all kinds of data in the 

6 literature about how radon fluctuates, and you 

7 could take the worst kind of fluctuation.

8 I'm just trying for us to make 

9 sure that we --

10 DR. ULSH: There are a lot of 

11 uncertainties associated with the measurements 

12 that were taken in 1979 which was described.

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right.

14 DR. ULSH: But even if you took 

15 them at face value and said, these are golden. 

16 These are great, the problem is -- and even 

17 this researcher admitted this or investigator 

18 -- that for that particular guy sitting at 

19 that desk it would be difficult to estimate, 

20 put an upper bound on his lung dose because we 

21 don't know how long he was exposed to it.

22 And like Jim said, if you go back 
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1 20 years and decay correct for what was it, 

2 thoron? I mean, you get and I think Don said 

3 like 18,000 rem.

4 MR. STEWART: Yes, that's to 

5 the --

6 DR. ULSH: I think we might have a 

7 lot of spirited discussions about what 

8 sufficiently accurate is and what a plausible 

9 upper bound is, but I think that that clearly 

10 exceeds it.

11 DR. NETON: You've got this sort 

12 of age old issue with radon. Is the building 

13 ventilation rates over time going back 20 

14 years and was that hole there recently or was 

15 there other holes and bigger holes.

16 Given this 100,000 picocuries per 

17 liter source term directly underneath this 

18 room or this building, we found that it's just 

19 too uncertain to be able to assign not only 

20 the dose of this particular individual, but 

21 anyone else that frequented that office or 

22 other area, where there might have been holes. 
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1 It's hard to say.

2 On face value, the original 

3 measure might think -- the highest I saw was 

4 200 picocuries per liter, but there's an 

5 uncertain mixture of the three different 

6 isotopes, and I'm not even sure that 200 was 

7 valid because it was sort of a EPERM type 

8 detector. It was calibrated for radon-222. 

9 So how much radon-219 could have been there, 

10 that's what caused the original alarm in his 

11 mind, was that 200 picocuries but I'm seeing 

12 no progeny for radon-222, almost none. So 

13 where is this gas coming from?

14 Well, we've got some sort of 

15 unquantified concentration of thoron and 

16 actinon in there. So it gets to be quite a 

17 messy problem.

18 DR. ULSH: And the frustrating 

19 thing is that we're really talking about lung 

20 and respiratory tract doses primarily. We're 

21 talking about a guy who's not even a claimant 

22 at this point in time, and furthermore, even 
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1 if he was, plutonium missed dose would 

2 probably be sufficient to compensate him, but 

3 there's no remedy available to us for that, to 

4 address those things.

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: Were there other 

6 measurements made in the rest of the building 

7 at that time? I mean, you're sort of 

8 assuming.

9 DR. ULSH: If there were, I'm not 

10 aware of them, but I can't say there weren't.

11 DR. NETON: Well, we're not 

12 assuming is there's a problem throughout the 

13 entire building. I think originally, as Brant 

14 said, in discussions with Department of Labor, 

15 if it was even only that one room, they

16 wouldn't be able to administer a class based 

17 on a one-room class definition.

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, I mean --

19 DR. NETON: I mean, you could 

20 define it that way, but --

21 MEMBER ZIEMER: You could define 

22 it that way and say you have to be in that 
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1 room 250 days a year.

2 DR. NETON: That's true, yes.

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: I mean, someone 

4 casually going into an area like that, it's --

5 DR. ULSH: It's another point of 

6 frustration.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: I know.

8 MEMBER CLAWSON: You said this was 

9 a hole they cut in it? I understood it was a 

10 crack in the floor.

11 DR. ULSH: Don, do you have any 

12 insight on that? I thought it was a square 

13 hole.

14 MR. STEWART: I don't remember 

15 whether it was --

16 MEMBER CLAWSON: Well, in the 

17 interview that we had with this individual, he 

18 said that the person came back with this and 

19 so they went in there to check this, and it 

20 was an actual crack in the concrete, was what 

21 I remember.

22 DR. ULSH: Could have been.
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1 MEMBER CLAWSON: And he put it 

2 down that this is where he got all of this 

3 from. We asked him the same thing about his 

4 instrumentation and stuff. He says, you know, 

5 this was very crude. We're just starting out 

6 everything else like that.

7 When you were saying this hole, 

8 that's what I was wondering because as one of 

9 the things about these facilities that I 

10 understood, it was that they were kind of 

11 stacked one on top of another, kind of -- how 

12 could I politely put this? -- they were kind 

13 of put together in a hasty way.

14 The issue that came up was that 

15 there was lots -- the way that the facility 

16 was built, that there ended up to be several 

17 cracks, and this is what pushed them into 

18 actually opening up the end of that and 

19 putting the tunnel on there, because it made a 

20 perfect breeding ground for radon and 

21 everything else like that.

22 DR. ULSH: Could very well be, 
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1 Brad. I can't tell you if it was a square 

2 hole why it was there. It could have been a 

3 crack. I don't know.

4 I do remember when they discussed 

5 the remediation that they talked about 

6 ceilings and cracks. So maybe that's the 

7 case.

8 MEMBER CLAWSON: Right. Well, 

9 this pushed them over the edge, and there were 

10 several other cracks, but what they wanted to 

11 do was get to the root of the problem. What 

12 was it? And that's when they found the 

13 passageway underneath it, and they had sealed 

14 off both ends.

15 So by venting it, you're -- you 

16 know, years earlier they had vented it, and 

17 that took care of the issue of being able to 

18 move that, plus sealing up the holes.

19 CHAIR BEACH: Okay. Is there any 

20 other discussion? There's nothing really for 

21 us to do at this point for radon.

22 Tomorrow I'd like to propose that 
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1 we move data adequacy and completeness to the 

2 first thing in the morning, unless there is 

3 some reason to start with high-fired based on 

4 other schedules.

5 DR. ULSH: I don't have an issue 

6 with it.

7 CHAIR BEACH: So we'll just start 

8 with the last one first thing in the morning, 

9 9:30.

10 MR. KATZ: Okay. Are we 

11 adjourned?

12 CHAIR BEACH: We're adjourned.

13 (Whereupon, the above-entitled 

14 matter went off the record at 4:52 p.m.)

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22
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1

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5