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U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES

CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL

NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR OCCUPATIONAL

SAFETY AND HEALTH 

+ + + + +

ADVISORY BOARD ON RADIATION AND

WORKER HEALTH 

+ + + + +

WORK GROUP ON FERNALD

+ + + + +

TUESDAY

FEBRUARY 8, 2011

+ + + + +

 The Work Group convened in the 

Zurich Room of the Cincinnati Airport 

Marriott, 2395 Progress Drive, Hebron, 

Kentucky, at 9:00 a.m., Bradley P. Clawson, 

Chairman, presiding.

PRESENT:

BRADLEY P. CLAWSON, Chairman

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*

ROBERT ALVAREZ, SC&A*

ROBERT ANIGSTEIN, SC&A*

SANDRA BALDRIDGE

BOB BARTON, SC&A*

HANS BEHLING, SC&A*

ZAIDA BURGOS, NIOSH Contractor*

HARRY CHMELYNSKI, SC&A*

SAM GLOVER, DCAS

DAN HENNEKES

KARIN JESSEN, ORAU Team*

KAREN KENT, ORAU Team*

JENNY LIN, HHS

JOYCE LIPSZTEIN, SC&A*

JOHN MAURO, SC&A

ROBERT MORRIS, ORAU Team*

GENE POTTER, ORAU Team*

BRYCE RICH, ORAU Team*

MARK ROLFES, DCAS

JOHN STIVER, SC&A

DAVE SUNDIN, DCAS*

JIM WERNER, SC&A*

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

Welcome and roll-call/introductions........ 4 

Work Group Discussion...................... 8 

Discuss open SEC petition issues

Issue #1: Review of the completeness and 

adequacy of the uranium bioassay data 

available for dose reconstruction and 

supporting the Fernald internal dosimetry 

co-worker model (OTIB -0078) dated November 6, 

2007 9 

Issue #2: Validation of the HIS-20 

database................................... 9 

Issue #3: Review of the recycled uranium 

White Paper dated March 3, 2008........... 45

Break 

Issue #3 continued ................. 105

Radon discussion......................... 280

Issue #4: Review of radon breath data 

for adequacy for reconstructing doses due to

the inhalation of Ra-226 and Th-230...... 278

Issue #5: Review of radon emissions from 

the K-65 silos Thorium discussion........ 288

Issue #6a: Review of breathing zone and 

general air sampling data and associated daily 

weighted exposures (DWEs) being used by NIOSH 

for the purpose of reconstructing Th-232 

intakes (see NIOSH White Paper dated March 11, 

2009) 

 Issue #6b: Use of chest counts to 

reconstruct Th-232 exposures post-1968 
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C-O-N-T-E-N-T-S 

Recap any remaining action items and discuss 

timeframes............................... 416

Discuss Work Group report to the Board... 422

Adjournment.............................. 424
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1 P-R-O-C-E-E-D-I-N-G-S 

2 9:07 a.m.

3 MR. KATZ: Good morning, everyone 

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

5 Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, 

6 Fernald Work Group. 

7 My name is Ted Katz. I am the 

8 Designated Federal Official for the Advisory 

9 Board, and we will begin with roll call as 

10 usual. Since we are talking about a site, 

11 please speak to your conflict of interest as 

12 well, for people, as I say, with the agency.

13 We will begin with the Board, with 

14 Board Members in the room, with the Chair.

15 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: I am Brad 

16 Clawson, Work Group Chair for Fernald. I have 

17 no conflict.

18 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: Phil Schofield, 

19 Board Member, no conflict.

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: Paul Ziemer, Board 

21 Member, no conflict.

22 MR. KATZ: Board Members on the 
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1 line?

2 MEMBER PRESLEY: Bob Presley, 

3 Board Member, no conflict.

4 MR. KATZ: Any other Board Members 

5 on the line? Okay. Zaida, do we have you on 

6 the line? 

7 MS. BURGOS: Yes - 

8 MR. KATZ: Yes, thank you Zaida. 

9 Okay, let's carry on. NIOSH ORAU team in the 

10 room?

11 MR. ROLFES: Mark Rolfes, NIOSH, 

12 health physicist. I have no conflict of 

13 interest.

14 DR. GLOVER: Sam Glover, health 

15 physicist. No conflict.

16 MR. KATZ: And NIOSH ORAU team on 

17 the line?

18 MS. KENT: Karen Kent, health 

19 physicist, no conflict.

20 MS. JESSEN: Karin Jessen, ORAU 

21 team, no conflict.

22 MR. MORRIS: Robert Morris, ORAU 
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1 team, no conflict.

2 MR. RICH: Bryce Rich, ORAU team, 

3 no conflict.

4 MR. POTTER: Gene Potter, ORAU 

5 team, no conflicts.

6 MR. SUNDIN: Dave Sundin, DCAS, no 

7 conflict.

8 MR. KATZ: Very good, thank you. 

9 SC&A team in the room.

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

11 conflict.

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

13 no conflict.

14 MR. KATZ: SC&A team on the line?

15 DR. ANIGSTEIN: Bob Anigstein, 

16 SC&A, no conflict.

17 DR. BEHLING: Hans Behling, SC&A, 

18 no conflict.

19 DR. LIPSZTEIN: Joyce Lipsztein, 

20 SC&A, no conflict.

21 MR. WERNER: Jim Werner, SC&A 

22 team, no conflict.
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1 MR. BARTON: Bob Barton, SC&A 

2 team, no conflict.

3 MR. KATZ: I'm sorry, the last one 

4 we couldn't hear you.

5 DR. CHMELYNSKI: Harry Chmelynski, 

6 SC&A, no conflict.

7 MR. KATZ: Oh, Harry, welcome, 

8 sorry. Thank you. Okay and now HHS officials 

9 or contractors to the feds, HHS, other 

10 agencies in the room.

11 MS. LIN: Jenny Lin, HHS.

12 MR. KATZ: And on the line?

13 MS. ADAMS: Nancy Adams, NIOSH 

14 contractor. Ted, the volume on a lot of the 

15 folks in there is really low, that are in the 

16 room.

17 MR. KATZ: Okay, thanks for that 

18 notice, we will try to do well with the mics. 

19 Might need to spread them around, too. All 

20 right, and now members of the public in the 

21 room?

22 MR. HENNEKES: Dan Hennekes, I'm 
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1 with the Building Trades National Medical 

2 Screening Program, and I worked at Fernald for 

3 23 years.

4 MR. KATZ: And that's Dan?

5 MR. HENNEKES: Dan, yes.

6 MS. BALDRIDGE: Sandra Baldridge, 

7 petitioner.

8 MR. KATZ: Welcome, and on the 

9 line, members of the public?

10 MR. WEBER: Al Weber.

11 MR. KATZ: Welcome. Any other 

12 members of the public that want to be 

13 identified? Let me go back and just see if we 

14 have any other Board Members joined us. 

15 Okay, they'll check in when they 

16 do, I'm sure. We have an agenda for the 

17 meeting. It's posted on the web. It was posted 

18 probably yesterday on the web, and, Brad, it's 

19 your agenda, so.

20 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: I appreciate 

21 that, Tim -- Ted. There we go, sorry about 

22 that. We are going to start out with issue 1, 
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1 which is review of completeness and adequacy 

2 for the uranium bioassay data available for 

3 dose reconstruction at Fernald.

4 And I believe that was --

5 MR. STIVER: Do you want me to 

6 discuss that?

7 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Yes, just if 

8 you would, John.

9 MR. STIVER: Yes, this is a recap, 

10 this was -- this issue has been resolved for 

11 all intents and purposes. This was a 

12 revisional language in OTIB-78 to allow use of 

13 the upper end of the distribution for certain 

14 classes of worker with higher exposure 

15 potential.

16 And that change was made as of 

17 last -- actually it was made after January 

18 29th of last year, so we are in agreement that 

19 that issue is resolved.

20 The only remaining issue has to do 

21 with -- it's kind of related to -- issue 2, 

22 which is the coworker model, and so I guess we 
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1 can kind of segue into that.

2 This is the -- the issue 2 is the 

3 validation of the HIS-20 database. There's 

4 really three subparts. The first subpart had 

5 to do with the completeness of the validation 

6 for the first go-round.

7 I believe there were 25 sets of 

8 data, or I believe five or six that weren't 

9 completely analyzed to the level of 

10 granularity as the others because of -- the 

11 first sets of data turned out to be very 

12 consistent. And so the issue that came up was 

13 that well, we felt that NIOSH should go ahead 

14 and continue and finish up that study, which 

15 they indeed did do in December of 2010. 

16 They submitted a final revision 

17 called Comparison of FMPC Hard Copy Bioassay 

18 Records to the HIS-20 Database, dated May 10, 

19 2010. And our review of that indicates that 

20 they have indeed -- are fully compliant with 

21 our suggestion, and so we can recommend 

22 closing that part of the issue.
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1 The second issue was the 

2 construction workers, and this is the idea 

3 that maybe there is a subset of workers in the 

4 plants -- the construction workers -- who may 

5 have a higher exposure potential and would not 

6 be well represented by the distribution of 

7 bioassay data for the workers.

8 We noticed a statistical 

9 difference for the Savannah River Site and 

10 felt that it would be good to do a similar 

11 type of analysis for the Fernald site.

12 And I believe an action item came 

13 out of the November 10th meeting was -- that 

14 you guys were in the process of developing 

15 that coworker study, for the construction 

16 worker adjunct to it.

17 MR. ROLFES: What we have done is 

18 taken some hard copy records for some of the 

19 subcontractors at Fernald and have compared 

20 those urine excretion concentrations to the 

21 main coworker intake model in OTIB-78. And we 

22 are still gathering some additional data to 
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1 make our comparison a little bit more 

2 complete, I guess, at this time. So as soon as 

3 that is completed we will document that and 

4 then send it out to the Working Group.

5 MR. STIVER: Any estimated time 

6 when that might be ready?

7 MR. ROLFES: Let's see. We have 

8 got some preliminary information, but let's 

9 see -- as far as a time, I couldn't give you a 

10 time on that right now.

11 MR. STIVER: Okay. But it is in 

12 the works now - 

13 MR. ROLFES: Yes, correct.

14 MR. STIVER: -- the analysis is 

15 being done.

16 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: So are we able 

17 to -- this is Brad -- are we able to segregate 

18 the construction workers out of the -- are 

19 they clearly identified then in all the --

20 MR. ROLFES: Yes, if you take a 

21 look at their urine bioassay request cards, 

22 you will see a card with the individual's name 
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1 and the subcontractor that they were employed 

2 by, and then it also gives the sample results. 

3 And so we -- that's -- it's not in the 

4 electronic database so it's all hard copy 

5 records and hand-written results, and so what 

6 we have been doing is going back through the 

7 urine bioassay cards and we have got to enter 

8 those into, like, an Excel spreadsheet and 

9 characterize them that way, rather than 

10 already pulling them from an electronic 

11 database, like HIS-20.

12 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: So I guess, 

13 Mark, one of the things that I am wondering on 

14 this is how much -- because numerous times we 

15 have heard from the construction trades that, 

16 you know, they have worked there for numerous 

17 years and they have never been -- had any kind 

18 of urinalysis and stuff.

19 I guess I was just wondering, are 

20 was also looking at the percentage of them 

21 that were sampled? Was this a random sample 

22 that -- construction?
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1 MR. ROLFES: No, it wasn't random, 

2 it was usually following work. Most of the 

3 construction workers had pre-job bioassays 

4 taken and then post-job samples.

5 There were less post-job samples 

6 however, and a lot of the samples are 

7 identified as special samples, so we are still 

8 looking into the reason for why the bioassays 

9 were taken, and we are not sure if the special 

10 sample stands for something related to, you 

11 know, similar to an incident, but that is one 

12 of the things we are looking into.

13 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay, so beyond 

14 just looking at the construction workers' 

15 bioassay, you are also looking at the process 

16 of why they were pulled and so forth?

17 MR. ROLFES: Correct.

18 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Because what is 

19 interesting about Fernald is -- which is 

20 different than Savannah River -- each one of 

21 these sites have their own unique process to 

22 it. But one individual I talked with had been 
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1 there for 24 years and had worked for four to 

2 five different contractors. He had never left 

3 the site.

4 And that is why I was wondering if 

5 also, when these contractors left, if they did 

6 an off-going bioassay or -- I just wanted to 

7 get a little bit more information of what the 

8 process was with it.

9 MR. ROLFES: Sure. That's 

10 something that we are certainly looking into, 

11 and we have Gene Potter on the line, he's the 

12 one that has been doing a lot of the 

13 comparisons and the analysis of the uranium 

14 intakes for the entire population compared to 

15 the subcontractor population.

16 Gene, I don't know if you have 

17 anything to add on what we have done or if I 

18 have captured everything accurately?

19 MR. POTTER: No, I think you have 

20 captured it accurately. We're unable to draw 

21 any conclusions of what we have done so far.

22 MR. ROLFES: Okay, right now I 
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1 think we have sampled some of the data from 

2 the `70s, `80s, is what we have focused on 

3 right now, and we are looking at additional 

4 data as well, so --

5 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay. Thank 

6 you. 

7 MR. STIVER: Okay, the third part 

8 of this issue deals with the data integrity, 

9 and this was -- the issue was raised by Sandra 

10 about potential falsification of records.

11 And evidently at the last meeting 

12 we -- Bob Barton had presented a paper that 

13 looked at different ways that this data could 

14 be looked at in order to determine if there 

15 were some inconsistencies that might lead us 

16 to believe that there had been some tampering.

17 And one was to compare the 

18 urinalysis to the in vivo chest counts, in 

19 other words to look at the data consistency 

20 with biokinetic models, and a third was to 

21 compare DWE results with urinalysis for 

22 categories of workers we knew were in certain 
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1 facilities at certain times.

2 And there was quite a bit of a 

3 discussion about this. In the end I believe no 

4 action item resulted because past efforts to 

5 address this type of thing had resulted in 

6 great expenditures of resources without any 

7 conclusive results.

8 And so that issue has been tabled 

9 to the best of my knowledge. So I guess in 

10 summary, what we are really looking for now is 

11 the construction worker comparison, and that 

12 would be the end of the discussion on issue 

13 number 2.

14 Which brings us to issue number 3, 

15 which is the recycled uranium issue, and has 

16 everybody got -- 

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, hold on. So 

18 is that unresolved at this point? What are you 

19 saying in terms of the bottom line for that 

20 issue?

21 MR. STIVER: The bottom line is 

22 that in the past, wasn't it the same -- at NTS 
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1 we had the same kind of an issue going on 

2 there.

3 DR. MAURO: We had a conversation 

4 regarding the merits of going through a 

5 process similar to the process we went through 

6 at Nevada Test Site, which was quite 

7 protracted, very expensive, and in the end --

8 we suspected in the beginning that well 

9 listen, in that case, for the purpose of due 

10 diligence, given the amount of attention that 

11 was given at Nevada Test Site, you may recall, 

12 that -- well maybe we should go through this 

13 exercise, at that time certain ideas came up 

14 about how to test it, which we did.

15 And in the end, as we suspected, it 

16 ended up being inconclusive. In other words we 

17 confirmed, yes, there was a lot of deliberate 

18 leaving badges behind. I'm talking Nevada Test 

19 Site.

20 But there was nothing about it 

21 that would prevent us or NIOSH from 

22 constructing distributions for coworker models 
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1 that would apply because it was more or less 

2 across the board. It wasn't that the ones that 

3 were left behind were only in the upper end of 

4 the tail, thereby biasing the distribution. We 

5 found that it was all types of workers under 

6 all circumstances, after lots of interviews 

7 and lots of data comparisons.

8 So in the end we ended up being 

9 inconclusive. Now that was that experience. 

10 The question becomes, here we are at Fernald, 

11 and the question becomes do we want to and 

12 does NIOSH want to initiate any one or other 

13 of the types of strategies that Bob Barton 

14 laid out in his report.

15 Each of them would be quite an 

16 undertaking, and we suspect that there would 

17 be -- we would be in a similar situation at 

18 the end. 

19 We may find yes, there may have 

20 been certain practices at work where bioassay 

21 samples were not collected, were not analyzed 

22 for whatever reasons, or were collected and 
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1 were not analyzed.

2 I mean, these kinds of things, we 

3 will probably find these things. But then the 

4 question comes, is okay, is that going to 

5 affect the ability to build a robust coworker 

6 model that you feel does capture the full 

7 distribution of the kinds of concentrations of 

8 uranium in urine that cut across the board.

9 And until we get there we won't be 

10 able to say one way or the other. We suspect 

11 that this type of problem is very hard to come 

12 to some resolution after loss of resources. 

13 This is SC&A's perspective on it. 

14 However I don't know whether or 

15 not the Work Group had actually come to the 

16 conclusion let's just put this one to bed, or 

17 do you want to go forward?

18 And if it's something that --

19 something to go forward, of course this would 

20 be something that NIOSH would need to 

21 initiate.

22 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: When John spoke 
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1 with me about this, of different avenues that 

2 we would be able to proceed, and one of the 

3 things was, is at the very end, were we going 

4 to be able to actually prove one way or 

5 another. And I don't see any way that we 

6 would really be able to conclusively be able 

7 to do that.

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: I don't think you 

9 are ending up proving one way or the other. I 

10 don't think it's a proof. But you sort of have 

11 to determine whether it's reasonable to think 

12 that the coworker model, using the existing 

13 data, is greatly impacted by either absence of 

14 those or falsification of -- if it's 

15 falsification, I guess you assume that things 

16 are entered lower than they should be. 

17 There's no reason to think someone 

18 would put in a higher number unless they 

19 wanted to get out of working by showing they 

20 had some limits. I suppose it could go either 

21 way.

22 If the data are absent, it would 
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1 be unreasonable to think that -- well, someone 

2 would have to know a priori that they were 

3 either high or low or whatever and say well I 

4 don't want that in the record. So if the 

5 analysis wasn't done, there's no way of 

6 knowing which it would be. So I think it would 

7 be reasonable to think that something that is 

8 missing has got to have a distribution like 

9 what's there.

10 So the only issue in my mind would 

11 be if people are falsifying it, why are they 

12 doing it and what would be the tendency. Would 

13 it be the tendency to put it in lower or 

14 higher or what? I mean, there could be all 

15 kinds of motives there.

16 DR. MAURO: That's exactly what we 

17 found out.

18 MS. BALDRIDGE: As I went through 

19 the documents that were -- the court documents 

20 when this was addressed by the federal court, 

21 the documents showed that Fernald had the 

22 tendency to appear and present themselves as 
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1 being in compliance with DOL requirements, 

2 when in fact they weren't.

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: Which would imply 

4 you would want to have a lower number.

5 MS. BALDRIDGE: Which suggests to 

6 me that they would do everything possible to 

7 present themselves as being in compliance, 

8 even to the point, there's one document that 

9 says, you know, we were challenged on this. We 

10 told them what they wanted to hear as far as a 

11 worker exposure level that was extremely high.

12 I think we have satisfied them for 

13 now, but actually the situation is getting 

14 worse. So that shows me that there were those 

15 people in place who had purpose to 

16 misrepresent the actual working conditions, 

17 even to DOL.

18 Now any of the data that is given 

19 back to NIOSH for dose reconstruction is data 

20 that DOL was suspect of in the first place.

21 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Paul, when me 

22 and John spoke about this, one of the things 
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1 is, and we have seen this at numerous other 

2 sites, is they -- especially in the `80s and 

3 `90 time period -- they were starting to get -

4 - be given limits that they have to be able to 

5 stay under. So the only thing that I can, in 

6 my personal opinion, is they were always 

7 wanting to stay underneath that.

8 Now when you start talking about 

9 that, you have got to have some evidence of 

10 things higher, which could be the air sampling 

11 data or so forth, like that, but were showing 

12 incredibly much higher, but the people's dose 

13 were so much lower.

14 And you start to get into a 

15 situation where it would be very hard to be 

16 able to prove this one way or another. This is 

17 one of our big issues that we are facing. How 

18 do we prove if they were always -- you'd have 

19 to have some kind of data above same old, here 

20 this is, but we are still down, we are still 

21 way down there.

22 DR. MAURO: For example, let's say 
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1 you decide that, okay, does the data ring 

2 true, and one way to ring true is that, okay, 

3 here we have lots and lots of air sampling 

4 data, and we have lots and lots of bioassay 

5 data. Over 90 percent of the workers starting 

6 in `56, well over 90 percent, had bioassays.

7 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Urinalysis, 

8 right?

9 DR. MAURO: Urinalysis, milligrams 

10 per liter of the uranium in urine. And one 

11 could argue, okay, let's just go ahead and 

12 this is not unlike the type of thing that was 

13 done at Nevada Test Site.

14 Let's go grab all the high-end 

15 bioassay results for various buildings at 

16 given time periods, and let's go 

17 simultaneously grab air sampling data and see 

18 if they sort of ring true. Do people -- where 

19 we are seeing high air sampling data, that's 

20 where we are seeing the high bioassay data.

21 Now in my opinion, given the vast 

22 amount of data, bioassay data that was 
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1 collected at every building, in every trade, 

2 and in every decade, it's so enormous, in 

3 order for there to be a conspiracy to 

4 deliberately bias low the high-end tail, in 

5 other words let's cut off the upper-end tail 

6 so that we look good, that would have been 

7 quite an effort because this would -- the 

8 amount of data that we are talking about, the 

9 number of people, the number of samples 

10 throughout the plant, throughout the decades, 

11 throughout the buildings, it would be quite an 

12 effort in order to systematically -- that 

13 doesn't mean it didn't happen.

14 But in order to study this and say 

15 the degree to which we think it might really 

16 have happened, there would have to be pretty 

17 clear and unambiguous evidence that for the 

18 various strategies that Bob Barton laid out, 

19 you could say gee, we look -- we could start, 

20 for example, with the air sampling data and 

21 compare that to the bioassay data and see if 

22 in fact they seem to ring true.
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1 Or do we see a situation where, 

2 holy mackerel, look at this, we are seeing 

3 high air sampling data over and over and over 

4 again, decade after decade, building after 

5 building, and the people that were in those 

6 buildings in those years we're seeing low 

7 urine samples. Just doesn't make sense. If 

8 that came out, yes, we would say well, 

9 something is wrong here. 

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, look, if you 

11 have got those real high levels, number one, 

12 you are going to have some kind of --

13 DR. MAURO: And there'll be - 

14 MEMBER ZIEMER: -- respiratory 

15 protection --

16 DR. MAURO: -- another confounding 

17 variable --

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: -- which if used 

19 properly, should result in --

20 DR. MAURO: There you --

21 MEMBER ZIEMER: -- you can use the 

22 argument, and we don't use the respiratory 
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1 protection category --

2 DR. MAURO: We do not.

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: -- in these 

4 figures.

5 DR. MAURO: You are absolutely 

6 right.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: So that is a --

8 there's a mismatch there that would say if 

9 anything, you are overestimating because you 

10 are assuming no protection.

11 Now the other part of it is -- I 

12 lost that thought. Oh, yes, so you have that 

13 issue. The other part is if you are going to 

14 doctor a sample, you have got to keep 

15 doctoring the successive samples on that 

16 because one bioassay doesn't help.

17 And you would have to be really 

18 clever -- I don't think the people that are 

19 doing the sampling and the recording are in a 

20 position -- you have got to be able to 

21 manipulate that data out for years in order 

22 for it to fit --
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1 DR. MAURO: Absolutely right.

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: -- a biological 

3 model. So it is not an issue of -- I mean, if 

4 you had one thing that is manipulated, it has 

5 almost no effect on the long-term thing if you 

6 have other samples in there.

7 DR. MAURO: That's correct.

8 MR. STIVER: Yes. And you also have the 

9 issue of, you know, workers moving among 

10 different sites, so you may have somebody who 

11 was in a highly-contaminated area and then a 

12 year later he is working in a different job --

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: And somebody would 

14 have to say, well, here's what I did to the 

15 data so now you have got to do this in order 

16 for it to --

17 MR. STIVER: Yes, and that is 

18 something you see with thorium-232 data later 

19 on, too, but it is a different issue, but it 

20 is the same kind of a confounding problem that 

21 comes up in trying to make those types of 

22 comparisons.
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1 MR. BARTON: Yes, this is Bob 

2 Barton. To add on to this discussion here, it 

3 is not only a question of these variables 

4 about moving between job titles and needing 

5 respiratory protection. It is also very 

6 difficult to match certain workers' bioassay 

7 results to specific areas. There's some 

8 limited information in the HIS-20 about that, 

9 but by and large you are not going to have 

10 that information.

11 So, yes, 90 percent of the worker 

12 population has uranium data, but the 

13 percentage that we can actually match to a 

14 building and also have air sampling for that 

15 building and time is very low. So there's 

16 feasibility issues that go beyond just - 

17 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: And this is 

18 what -- what were we going to come up with, 

19 with the final project? You know, we had a lot 

20 more outstanding issues that we really needed 

21 to take care of before we got into that. And 

22 so, as I have told John, it may not be 
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1 something that we even need to look into right 

2 at this time. We just want to make sure --

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, I just wanted 

4 to sort of get a feel for the nature of the 

5 problem and also, Sandra, if you could help me 

6 understand, on those past events where there 

7 was this apparent false representation, do you 

8 know if they simply were taking, like, the 

9 summary data for the year and presenting other 

10 numbers?

11 I mean, the true values might 

12 still be in the database, or did DOL or DOE or 

13 somebody go in and actually look at the 

14 database itself?

15 MS. BALDRIDGE: Well, the big 

16 issue, when this all went to trial, was 

17 especially with the stack emissions, where 

18 numbers were just -- zeroes were entered 

19 instead of an actual reading, and the 

20 explanation was, oh, well we were going to put 

21 those numbers in later.

22 MEMBER ZIEMER: Oh, I see, okay.
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1 MS. BALDRIDGE: In other cases, 

2 numbers were just arbitrarily assigned to 

3 locations and that discrepancy was discovered 

4 and said, hey, how can you have this emission 

5 when that plant wasn't even operating and here 

6 this plant was operating, and you are not 

7 assigning anything there?

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: -- those numbers 

9 aren't used for the dose reconstruction.

10 DR. MAURO: No, so your experience 

11 where this problem arose is more towards the 

12 source term, the airborne emissions to the 

13 atmosphere, as opposed to bioassay data?

14 MS. BALDRIDGE: That is the point 

15 that came out in the trial. But it showed a 

16 pattern, based on correspondence that 

17 management had with DOL, giving them the 

18 answers, telling them what they wanted to 

19 hear, and then later on finding that they 

20 absolutely fabricated data.

21 It just shows a pattern that in my 

22 mind says this means -- what else were they 
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1 doing? They discovered they were applying 

2 factors to the actual numbers to change the 

3 appearance of the outcome, and they were found 

4 to be significantly deceptive.

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: Okay, got you. 

6 MR. STIVER: I think part of the 

7 problem with the airborne emissions had to do 

8 with the way they were calculating the 

9 releases from the stack samples, and as I 

10 recall, there was a -- a mistake had been 

11 discovered and it had never been corrected for 

12 a number of years after the discovery.

13 So there were -- I don't know if 

14 it was a matter of deliberate falsification or 

15 just sloppy accounting practices, and maybe 

16 some combination of the two, but that result 

17 was that there is a suspicion on the part of 

18 our people regarding the integrity of that 

19 data.

20 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: And like any 

21 site, it brings into question any of the data 

22 from then, and as far as bioassay goes, if 
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1 they would have done that, they would have had 

2 to have -- like you said earlier, they would 

3 have to have one set number, you know, 10 

4 percent off or something like that, but 

5 through the whole thing, because there is no 

6 way you would be able to single anything out 

7 like that.

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right, and you'd 

9 have to get a lot of people involved in doing 

10 it.

11 MR. STIVER: Yes, exactly, and 

12 with the stack emissions you have basically 

13 one source term, one number that either might 

14 be right or wrong.

15 But with bioassay, you have 

16 hundreds of workers, you have got multiple 

17 samples, you have to understand the health 

18 physics, you have the biokinetics and you 

19 would have to be able to match that up to 

20 where it would appear to be real results, to 

21 be more -- enormous undertaking, more so than 

22 doing a good program to begin with.
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1 MS. BALDRIDGE: And then there's 

2 the case where the record-keeper said you 

3 can't use this data for determining internal 

4 exposure. Now maybe they knew that there had 

5 been a factor --

6 MR. STIVER: I think that that 

7 particular issue had to do with the fact that 

8 you did not have biokinetic models in place at 

9 the time where you could really use that data 

10 in order to estimate the intake.

11 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, in those days 

12 they couldn't do it.

13 MS. BALDRIDGE: You know it said 

14 the data wasn't reliable.

15 MR. STIVER: Yes, and I think that 

16 was maybe be misinterpreted.

17 DR. MAURO: Oh no, because you're 

18 saying that it's more than that. You are 

19 saying that there was some question - 

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, no, at that 

21 time they didn't have - 

22 MR. HENNEKES: May I ask a 
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1 question here? It seems like everyone is 

2 making an assumption that it was getting this 

3 air -- the data, but working down there, I 

4 know we worked demolition down there, and 

5 there was no air sampling done for a period. 

6 We didn't know what it was for like four or 

7 five years.

8 MR. STIVER: What time period was 

9 this?

10 MR. HENNEKES: This was about `82 

11 to `86, and we worked in the old pile plant, 

12 which we did the demolition there. So there 

13 wasn't any air sampling. It was coming out of 

14 the stack, but -- we were doing the demolition 

15 and there was no BZs or anything. I mean we 

16 didn't even see a rad tech or an IH tech.

17 DR. MAURO: Were you getting urine 

18 collections?

19 MR. HENNEKES: You know I asked 

20 about that, and I'm not really sure if we did 

21 or not back then.

22 MR. STIVER: Did you personally 
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1 have -- were you monitored for urinalysis 

2 yourself?

3 MR. HENNEKES: I could ask -- I 

4 know about `86 we were, but those early years 

5 when I was down there --

6 MR. STIVER: You know what, that's 

7 -- the point that you are making here is that 

8 -- our research has shown that prior to `86, 

9 the program was --

10 MR. HENNEKES: Well it was a non11 existent --

12 MR. STIVER: National Lead of Ohio 

13 was running the program.

14 MR. HENNEKES: Exactly, yes.

15 MR. STIVER: You know, when 

16 Westinghouse came in, they --

17 MR. HENNEKES: It got a little bit 

18 better, and then when Rust came in it got a 

19 lot --

20 MR. STIVER: And that would have 

21 been in about `85, `86 time frame.

22 MR. HENNEKES: When Fluor came in, 
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1 the -- got better, but in those early years, 

2 when we was working in the Pilot Plant, I 

3 mean, a rad tech or an IH tech was non4 existent. We didn't even know what they were.

5 And we were moving around the 

6 different buildings, down at Plant 9, 64, 65, 

7 and there was no one to go in with us, you 

8 know, they said well this is your job, this is 

9 what you need to do, but there was no type of 

10 monitoring available at that time. Thank you.

11 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: And so, Paul, 

12 and maybe this is wrong of me -- I -- we have 

13 kept this open. But it's like what John said. 

14 What are we going to come with at the end, you 

15 know? 

16 It looked like to us that we were 

17 -- it would have had to have been a complete 

18 blatant or -- it would have been harder to do 

19 that than to run the program, so we kept that 

20 in mind but we decided not to do anything with 

21 that because we had bigger issues that were 

22 with the uranium processing and so forth like 
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1 that.

2 We just wanted Sandra to 

3 understand that we have -- we have not 

4 forgotten as we've looked at this, and we have 

5 given it an awful lot of thought of how we 

6 would be able to address this, and it is one 

7 of these ones that I don't think that we could 

8 really come to anything conclusive with, but 

9 we haven't forgotten it. We have tried to 

10 address it and we have been thinking quite 

11 earnestly about how we would address it. 

12 Now the air samples and stack 

13 emissions, we did understand them, we did see 

14 that there was issues with that. That was more 

15 of a procedural problem that nobody can judge 

16 what they did, but they knew of the issue for 

17 years but they never corrected the factor. You 

18 can say that it was to keep it under and it 

19 did, but this is what came out in the lawsuit, 

20 too. So - 

21 MS. BALDRIDGE: And considering 

22 they were under cost plus bonus, you know, you 
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1 keep levels here and there's more money into 

2 your pocket. 

3 (Ms. Baldridge's references to DOL 

4 are meant to refer to DOE, as she clarifies in 

5 a statement prior to the lunch recess.) 

6 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: And as we have 

7 seen at every site that we have dealt with, 

8 any site, if they come into the 1985 to the 

9 1990 time period, we see a big change in how 

10 things were done. That's when the DOE order 

11 RadCon Manual came out and everything 

12 transitioned. It wasn't an overnight change, 

13 but from `85 to `90, `91, you always saw a big 

14 change in how process -- and a lot of the data 

15 that we started receiving was so much better.

16 But anyway, John, I'll turn it 

17 back over to you and --

18 MR. ROLFES: Before we continue 

19 on, I wanted to add a couple of things. I 

20 wanted to keep in mind also that there was 

21 never a cross examination during the court --

22 when the judgment was granted and so the stack 
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1 data wasn't represented very well.

2 And I just drew a little example 

3 up on the board here, for example for 1970. We 

4 had interviewed one of the individuals from 

5 the IH&R department at Fernald. And he had 

6 basically said that they would go and visually 

7 inspect the filters in the stacks to determine 

8 whether there was any visible material on 

9 them, and if there wasn't they would leave 

10 them in service until they did observe some 

11 visible uranium or anything else on them, and 

12 at that point they would replace them with a 

13 new filter and bring that filter back to their 

14 lab to weigh it for uranium, and they had a 

15 factor to apply based on the surface area of 

16 the filter and the flow rate through the stack 

17 et cetera.

18 So there are time periods in 

19 certain months when they were replacing the 

20 filters where they would enter a dash into the 

21 record or a zero. I believe they were actually 

22 dashes.
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1 We did interview this individual. 

2 We documented that as a reference in our Site 

3 Research Database, and it does show that there 

4 are some dashes in for various months where 

5 they left the filter in service but then 

6 subsequently had pulled that filter out and 

7 reported that value for that month.

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: So the June filter 

9 would include all the uptakes or the 

10 depositions from February through June --

11 MR. ROLFES: Correct.

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: -- is what you are 

13 saying.

14 MR. ROLFES: For this example, 

15 that's correct.

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: So yes, got you. 

17 Okay, I'm good, Mark. Thanks.

18 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Actually, I 

19 wanted to make sure. There's been a lot of 

20 talk about this, of how and what we could do 

21 on this, and we didn't -- at the time we just 

22 decided there's too much, and I don't think we 
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1 have come up with anything conclusive at this 

2 time, and maybe later on. But we have other 

3 outstanding issues that need to be addressed. 

4 MR. STIVER: And probably the most 

5 important of those is the recycled uranium 

6 issue, and if everybody here, I believe you 

7 should have the email --

8 DR. GLOVER: Is there any action 

9 item on that, then, as we leave that subject? 

10 Is that -- there's nothing to NIOSH or - 

11 MR. STIVER: At our last meeting 

12 no action item came of it and there's really 

13 nothing at this point.

14 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: There's no action 

15 item. The only thing we have is on action item 

16 one, that you guys are still ongoing with the

17 construction work. That's a separate issue 

18 altogether there. 

19 MR. STIVER: Mark indicated that 

20 one was in process.

21 MR. ROLFES: Correct.

22 MR. STIVER: Okay, so if you would 
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1 all go to your email, and there's three 

2 presentations. There's two PowerPoints and 

3 there's one PDF file. If you could just --

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: This is what you 

5 just sent.

6 MR. STIVER: -- which I just sent. 

7 Open up the PowerPoint presentation entitled 

8 RU Issues, 110206a-NSJJHS. And this is the RU 

9 presentation.

10 Everybody have that up? Okay. All 

11 right. If you go to slide two, which is the 

12 outline. This is basically the road map of the 

13 discussion today.

14 I have a lot of slides. Probably 

15 about a third of them are kind of a recap of 

16 previous discussions. This is a very complex

17 issue. It's been ongoing now at least since 

18 January 29, 2010. We have discussed this issue 

19 in detail, both at that meeting and again in 

20 the November, 2010 meeting.

21 What I am going to do is go 

22 through the background of the RU issue, the 
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1 milestones and action items that led up to 

2 this particular review, then look at the 

3 historical perspective, basically the types of 

4 materials that were received, the processing 

5 that was taking place at Fernald, and the 

6 consequences regarding worker health that 

7 could have resulted from those.

8 But then we are going to move on 

9 and take a look at the NIOSH defaults, 

10 basically looking at default levels for 

11 plutonium-239, neptunium-237, technetium-99 

12 and other fission products, look at the 

13 dosimetric implications, the basis underlying 

14 those default values.

15 And one of the -- probably the 

16 most important document is this Ohio field 

17 office report where the DOE reports on 

18 recycled uranium that came out in the year 

19 2000.

20 And this really is the fundamental 

21 underpinning of the default level that NIOSH 

22 has used.
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1 MEMBER ZIEMER: John, just a quick 

2 -- did you send one of these to Mr. Presley?

3 MR. STIVER: No.

4 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: I've got his 

5 email. I'll send it to him.

6 MR. STIVER: Okay.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: Bob, are you still 

8 there? 

9 DR. MAURO: Also, is this -- PA 

10 cleared?

11 MR. STIVER: Yes, this one has 

12 been PA cleared - 

13 DR. MAURO: So this can be made 

14 available to anyone who wants to look at it?

15 MR. STIVER: And I have to send it 

16 out to the rest of the team.

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: Brad's going to 

18 email this to you, Bob.

19 MEMBER PRESLEY: Okay. Thank you. 

20 MR. STIVER: So, Bob, just kind of 

21 follow along in the discussion, and we will 

22 have that in hand here in about a minute or 
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1 two.

2 But DOE 2000b is the seminal paper 

3 and it has basically been taken to almost be 

4 the bible of RU issues.

5 Jim Werner, who is one of our 

6 associates, who is involved in the preparation 

7 management of that piece of work, is going to 

8 jump in at that point and give his own sub9 presentation regarding that particular 

10 document and its applications in dose 

11 reconstruction.

12 The other thing we are going to 

13 look at is site-specific data. Part of the 

14 action item that the Board directed us to 

15 pursue at the last meeting was to look at, in 

16 particular, these baghouse dust collection 

17 samples that were taken in 1985, which were 

18 presented as an attachment to the NIOSH RU 

19 White Paper.

20 And so we have looked at that, and 

21 in the process our team has done an exhaustive 

22 research effort in the SRDB and other sources, 
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1 and we have found two other sets of data, 

2 actually three other sets of data that bear 

3 directly on this issue of what the ratios of 

4 these RU contaminated water -- actually on 

5 site in various buildings at certain times.

6 And those are some boundary air 

7 samples that were collected as part of an 

8 environment compliance requirement for NESHAPs 

9 in 1983.

10 Air samples were collected in 1989 

11 which were addressed, actually, in the NIOSH 

12 White Paper. And then also some Hanford uranyl 

13 nitrate hexahydrate solution production data 

14 that came out in 1970, 1972. And then in 

15 conclusion we will look at the summary of 

16 findings, and how that all ties together.

17 If we can move on to slide three, 

18 this is just a kind of quick overview of the 

19 milestones. In October 2008, SC&A was tasked 

20 to review the NIOSH White Paper on RU with the 

21 goal of identifying whether the default values 

22 were really bounding for all workers, and 
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1 that's pretty much the same issue that is 

2 alive today.

3 January 29th, the White Paper was 

4 discussed in detail. SC&A's paper, we had 11 

5 findings. NIOSH was going to prepare a 

6 response, which they then delivered prior to 

7 the November 9th meeting. Those responses were 

8 also discussed, and two unresolved issues 

9 emerged from that. If we go on to slide four.

10 The action items for SC&A was to 

11 provide a White Paper response looking at two 

12 things. First -- wait a minute, back up. At 

13 the November meeting we presented a fairly 

14 compelling argument as to why DOE 2000b, the 

15 Ohio field office report, was incomplete and 

16 was probably not suitable for a source 

17 document for dose reconstruction.

18 The Board requested that we put 

19 that down into a formal response. We believe 

20 that the transcripts of the previous two 

21 meetings and our original White Paper present 

22 that data -- that information fairly 
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1 coherently.

2 But we went ahead and did a more 

3 detailed review and put some more information 

4 in and also brought Jim Werner on, who has 

5 this unique perspective of actually having 

6 been involved in the management and the 

7 preparation of that document. 

8 The second was the focused review 

9 of the site-specific data, which I just talked 

10 about, and NIOSH was to provide a memorandum 

11 on the dust collector data, and basically if 

12 they could identify the sources where the dust 

13 collectors were taken, what the sampling 

14 period was, and that kind of thing.

15 And, Mark, I believe you did 

16 provide a memo recently, you posted it on the 

17 O: drive? And so they have fulfilled that 

18 requirement. 

19 We also looked at the availability 

20 of the DOE subgroup data. There were about 

21 4,000 data points all told, 3,000 of which 

22 came from Fernald. And this was really the 
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1 basis for the statistical analysis that they 

2 used in this DOE 2000b report, to really -- it 

3 was more of a materials balance exercise to 

4 identify what processes did this material 

5 report to in the various time periods 

6 involved.

7 Move on to slide five. A 

8 historical overview. I am not going to spend a 

9 lot of time on these slides. I just want to 

10 kind of get everybody back on the same page 

11 here, since it has been a while since we 

12 discussed this.

13 Me on the other hand, I have 

14 basically been -- this has become all15 consuming. It's basically all I've done for a 

16 while so bear with me if you will.

17 RU is basically uranium which was 

18 recovered from irradiated production reactor 

19 fuels and plutonium production target fuels. 

20 They were separated in the chemical processing 

21 plants at Hanford, Savannah River, West Valley 

22 and Idaho.
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1 Basically ended up with two 

2 streams of reprocessed materials, one which 

3 was of most interest to the AEC for weapons 

4 production was plutonium recovery. The second, 

5 which was a lesser concern, was the uranium 

6 that was known to contain transuranics and 

7 fission products, but this is the primary 

8 concern for the workers at Fernald for the SEC 

9 context.

10 I'll move on to slide six. This is 

11 just a listing of different types of chemical 

12 forms to identify the amount of variability 

13 that there was in the data that were coming in 

14 -- or in the types of materials that were 

15 coming into Fernald.

16 There was uranium trioxide, scrap 

17 from Hanford, ash from the Paducah Gaseous 

18 Diffusion Plants and Portsmouth and also from 

19 Oak Ridge, various types of oxides, ashes, 

20 hexahydrate, and so forth.

21 And I guess the most important 

22 thing here is that there really was no agency-
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1 wide or even site-specific limit that were set 

2 for the radionuclide contaminants, all the way 

3 up until the 1980s.

4 On to slide seven. This is just 

5 kind of a summary from the DOE reports, 

6 basically the 2003 report. I looked at only 

7 receipts -- or only shipments, excuse me --

8 that came from the production sites. And this 

9 shows that about -- as we all know who have 

10 been involved in this -- about 80 percent of 

11 the RU came from Hanford, starting in 1953.

12 By 1960, there was about 45 metric 

13 tons of the material on-site. The receipts 

14 peaked in the 1960s and then again in the 

15 1980s, and all told about 18,000 metric tons 

16 of uranium -- of recycled uranium was 

17 processed through Fernald during this period, 

18 which contained about 500 grams of plutonium, 

19 about 38 kilograms of neptunium and roughly

20 about 900 kilograms of technetium-99 

21 introduced into the DOE complex.

22 About 70 percent of the shipments 
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1 went to the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, 

2 and only 15 percent came to Fernald. And it's 

3 estimated that about 50 percent of all the 

4 plutonium that wound up in the Fernald site 

5 came from one shipment of the Paducah tower 

6 ash in 1980. It's a topic of extensive 

7 discussion at these meetings. The balance of 

8 plutonium came from West Valley, Savannah 

9 River, and other sources.

10 Okay. Previous findings related to 

11 receipts, they were from our last report which 

12 I'll call SC&A 2009. Findings one through 

13 three were in relation to inconsistencies and 

14 gaps in the amounts of sources of RU.

15 Finding five is a little more to 

16 the point, and this was a concern we had that 

17 the data were incomplete, that there were 

18 potentially very important sources, source 

19 terms that may have been missed. The one that 

20 we identified was the material recovered from 

21 the high-level waste tanks from 1952 to 1958 

22 at the Hanford U Plant.
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1 And so we are not really concerned 

2 about accounting for every kilogram of 

3 recycled uranium that came through Fernald. 

4 What we are really concerned with is this 

5 apparently incomplete accounting of the 

6 contaminant levels in those receipts and any 

7 distributions that could be built from that in 

8 order to assess worker exposures.

9 What I would like to do now is 

10 just go through a brief summary of the plants, 

11 the processing plants at Fernald, what the 

12 activities were, what the activities and 

13 sources of the high exposure potential were, 

14 and the particular compounds of concern, 

15 without spending an inordinate amount of time 

16 on this. This is all in the report, pages 15 

17 to 19, and it's a very detailed overview of 

18 that.

19 Plant 1 is a sampling plant. This 

20 is a very important plant in terms of 

21 potential worker exposures. It was the AEC 

22 sampling station. They did isotopic analysis 
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1 for uranium there. But they also received, 

2 weighed, sampled, and stored materials and 

3 sources process residues.

4 And probably most importantly is 

5 the milling of by-product slag from Plant 5, 

6 the burning and drum reconditioning, 

7 screening, milling, packaging, and various 

8 sorts of things that went on there. There was 

9 very high airborne dust potential for these 

10 milling operations, drum dumping, dust 

11 collection, and our concern mainly was 

12 magnesium fluoride and black oxide in these 

13 residues.

14 Plant 2 and 3, this is the 

15 refinery, and, incidentally, there is no dust 

16 sampling data available for the refinery, 

17 which is a finding we will get into later on. 

18 This is where the impure feed materials were 

19 processed into pure UO3. It was a three-step 

20 process which we have become pretty intimate 

21 with, acid leaching, solvent extraction, and 

22 then thermal decomposition.
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1 The high exposure potential 

2 activities there were digestion and de3 nitration, and, once again, they're pretty 

4 concerned with feed, black oxide, and 

5 hexahydrate. 

6 MR. ROLFES: John, could you 

7 restate what you said about the air sampling 

8 data in Plant 2/3?

9 MR. STIVER: In Plant 2/3, the 

10 dust collector data we looked at, there was 

11 nothing for Plant 2/3. There was some DWE 

12 data. There was some DWE data. It was done by 

13 Wing and those guys back in, I think it was in 

14 the mid-`80s.

15 MR. ROLFES: I didn't know if you 

16 said air sampling or --

17 MR. STIVER: Yes, I may have 

18 misspoken -- regard to the - 

19 DR. MAURO: So you make reference 

20 to the dust collector data because dust 

21 collection data is an important source of 

22 understanding the ratio of let's say plutonium 
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1 to --

2 MR. STIVER: It really is one of 

3 the only sources of site-specific data we 

4 have. It's -- there are a lot of gaps and 

5 limitations associated with it, but we just 

6 don't have air sampling data of the type you'd 

7 like to have, the -- sampling, breathing zone 

8 samples, not until after `86, when the new 

9 procedures were put in place.

10 Plant 4, Green Salt Plant. This is 

11 the conversion of -- the reduction of UO3 to 

12 UO2 and the production of UNH. Let's see. How 

13 do I go through this.

14 The hydrofluorination bank is 

15 really the most important sources of exposure

16 here. And we do have data for those. We 

17 actually have another set collected in 1989, 

18 in addition to the dust collector sample.

19 So there's a couple of situations. 

20 For Plant 8 and Plant 4 we have data that can 

21 be compared in kind of a generalized sense 

22 although they are separated in time for about 
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1 four years, and one is an aggregate dust 

2 collection and another is an actual -- okay. 

3 Plant 5. This is a very important one here. 

4 Plant 1 and Plant 5 together constitute one of 

5 our main concerns regarding worker exposure 

6 potential.

7 This is the -- there were two 

8 areas here. This is metal production. There 

9 was a reduction area where the tetrafluoride 

10 was converted -- is reduced down to uranium 

11 metal. This process produced large quantities 

12 of magnesium fluoride that was commonly 

13 referred to as dolomite. This material was 

14 then recycled through Plant 1, through the 

15 Titan Mill because they could -- that 

16 particular mill had the ability to get very 

17 fine particle size, consistent particle sizes, 

18 and so they used it quite a bit for preparing 

19 feeds for the refinery, and also one of the 

20 main functions of that was to recycle this 

21 slag for refractory liners in the reduction 

22 pots.
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1 DR. MAURO: Just a question. This 

2 might be important because this is a place 

3 where plutonium may end up?

4 MR. STIVER: This is important not 

5 only where it would end up but it 

6 concentrates. Every pass-through, about 50 

7 percent of the plutonium and about 80 percent 

8 of the neptunium would report into the slag.

9 And so as you can see, if you keep 

10 recycling that through again and again, you 

11 are going to be building this material up.

12 DR. MAURO: And the uranium isn't 

13 coming with it?

14 MR. STIVER: The uranium --

15 actually one of the tables I have here, I 

16 added a column for the percent uranium content 

17 for a lot of these samples and that's one of 

18 the lowest. We'll get into that.

19 DR. MAURO: I'm just sort of - 

20 MR. STIVER: Yes, it's 

21 foreshadowing --

22 DR. MAURO: Foreshadowing, that's 
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1 the right word.

2 MR. STIVER: Yes. The casting area 

3 was another area where the -- for high 

4 exposure potential. There was a graphite 

5 machine shop, where they had basically 

6 graphite crucibles and molds which they would 

7 -- they had the same type of a process going 

8 on here where this material would report into 

9 the graphite, and that is reflected in the 

10 data that we looked at.

11 So that all these activities here, 

12 basically every operation in this plant was 

13 high dust exposure potential, a very, very 

14 dirty environment, charging, blending, 

15 furnacing, break-out.

16 In addition to that you had these 

17 reduction bomb explosions. This happened on a 

18 regular basis, almost on a weekly basis, and 

19 when that happened, you know, you basically 

20 overwhelmed all the ventilation capacity, dust 

21 was just -- practically unbreathable.

22 And so you had a mixture of, you 
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1 know, the uranium, the slag and all these 

2 constituents that reported into it.

3 Onto slide 13. The scrap recovery 

4 plant, this is Plant 8. This is where material 

5 -- process residues, ashes, other types of 

6 scrap were pre-processed into a form that 

7 could be fed into the refinery, typically 

8 low-assay uranium materials, magnesium slag, 

9 filter sump cakes, incinerator ash and so 

10 forth.

11 A lot of chemical processing, the 

12 furnacing operations, screening and blending, 

13 hand-sorting, all these types of things were 

14 going on there, and all of those generate 

15 airborne concentrations of dust.

16 The last line there is the -- the 

17 constituents of concern would be, again, 

18 almost every one of these you got residues, 

19 you got black oxide, uranium metal, all these 

20 different components.

21 And finally the pilot plant. This 

22 is kind of a small-scaled production facility 
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1 where all these different processes were 

2 occurring in one particular facility.

3 Basically you had a small-scale 

4 production of the tetrafluoride, production of 

5 sweetener, which was an enrichment so they 

6 could add it back in to get the proper assay 

7 content in the materials that were being 

8 produced, all kinds of areas with high dust 

9 potential there.

10 And basically you've got the whole 

11 smorgasbord of contaminants. You've got 

12 dioxide, trioxide, tetrafluoride, magnesium 

13 fluoride.

14 So that really is kind of the 

15 thumbnail sketch of the processes that were 

16 going on that could have given rise to worker 

17 exposures to this recycled material.

18 If you go on to slide 15, we are 

19 going to switch gears here and start talking 

20 about the NIOSH default levels, and this is 

21 the infamous table from NIOSH's White Paper, 

22 page 15.
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1 Column 2 lists the default levels 

2 which are going to be added or assumed for the 

3 urine bioassay results, and over here, the 

4 last three columns are the presumed amounts of 

5 additional activity that would be added in to 

6 workers' exposure based on those constituent 

7 levels, the idea being that you have this one 

8 size fits all, you have kind of a bounding --

9 what is assumed to be a bounding level of a 

10 particular contaminant, which is then added 

11 back in to the bioassay data.

12 And the reason they are doing that 

13 of course is because you have got really good 

14 bioassay data. You have lots of it, for a long 

15 period of time, but you don't have any 

16 measurements of these constituents until much, 

17 much later, in the late 1980s.

18 And so you can see, plutonium-239, 

19 the default level is 100 parts per billion, 

20 neptunium-237, 3,500, technetium-99, 9,000.

21 And that also included a column 

22 for where this is reported in microcuries per 
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1 kilogram uranium, because a lot of the data, 

2 historical data is reported in those units, so 

3 just for a quick comparison I put those in 

4 there as well.

5 If we can go on to slide 16. At 

6 the last meeting there was a bit of a 

7 discussion about, you know, what is really the 

8 dosimetric significance of these contaminants.

9 And various numbers were put out 

10 there and so we decided to take a look at 

11 that, and we looked at the -- basically -- the 

12 ones that are of concern.

13 Actually we looked at all the 

14 constituents that were in the dust data, 

15 including thorium, strontium-90, cesium-137 

16 and we really wanted to get an idea, okay, at 

17 the highest level or at the default level, you 

18 look at the whole range, all the different 

19 combinations of solubility class, at those 

20 levels, what are the dose ratios going to be 

21 compared to uranium?

22 And the only two that really stand 
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1 out as being important -- we have numbers 

2 rated in unity. Basically you actually have a 

3 does potential higher than you would get from 

4 the uranium itself, or for the plutonium and 

5 the neptunium.

6 We kind of knew that, or we didn't 

7 really know, we didn't have it quantified, but 

8 basic health physics knowledge, you could kind 

9 of get a ball park estimate on that. 

10 As you can see here, the numbers 

11 outlined in rather the highest values. This 

12 was for plutonium class M to uranium class S, 

13 and the dose ratio for bone surfaces is about 

14 34 and for liver is about 52.

15 And so -- this is at 100 parts per 

16 billion. So as you can see, this is a 

17 significant issue.

18 DR. MAURO: So, just to -- in simplest 

19 terms, if I had a person who is inhaling 

20 soluble uranium and I assume there's no 

21 plutonium there, but there is.

22 But I assume there's no plutonium, 
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1 and then I say no, no, no, we made a mistake. 

2 There's 100 parts per billion of plutonium. My 

3 dose to my liver would go up by a factor of 

4 51.

5 MR. STIVER: It would relative to 

6 what you got.

7 DR. MAURO: In other words I would 

8 get a dose from the uranium alone, but now if 

9 you add that parts per billion of plutonium, 

10 that same dose to the liver, instead of being 

11 one - 

12 (Simultaneous speakers.)

13 DR. MAURO: So I think it's an 

14 important message here, is that this is --

15 these small amounts, parts per billion, sounds 

16 like very, very small amount, part per 

17 billion, do have very substantial dosimetric 

18 implications, especially for plutonium and 

19 neptunium.

20 Now for the others I guess they 

21 are not as important --

22 MR. STIVER: Well yes, the others, 
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1 really -- well, you know thorium obviously is 

2 high, but the default levels are --

3 recommending which is 10 to the minus 3. They 

4 are very small.

5 As you can see I believe I put it 

6 in here. Thorium, it was class M to U class S, 

7 it was only nine to the minus three. 

8 A couple of lines attached at the 

9 bottom of the table, yes.

10 DR. GLOVER: So I would want to 

11 point out here though that uranium is being 

12 treated as a type S that's being bound in the 

13 lungs and we are allowing plutonium to flow 

14 out faster. Plutonium is a minor contaminant 

15 in a bulk matrix. 

16 I don't know that I have ever seen 

17 the bulk matrix hasn't been limited, just like 

18 americium. Plutonium limits the solubility of 

19 the americium constituent, even though it's 

20 type M.

21 So anyway, we are using a very 

22 insoluble material, letting that stand alone 
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1 like uranium, and letting the plutonium leave 

2 more quickly, so it's obviously going to -- if 

3 I change solubility classes for the same 

4 intake -- so you see why you know, there's 

5 biokinetic reasons why we are seeing that 

6 here.

7 MR. STIVER: Yes, oh obviously, 

8 and this is put in there just to show that, 

9 you know, if you are going to try to be as 

10 claimant-favorable as possible you -- a dose 

11 reconstructor might go with that particular 

12 solubility class, even if it didn't really 

13 make sense from the biokinetic standpoint.

14 MR. ROLFES: As Sam stated, for 

15 example, with plutonium exposures, if we have 

16 americium-241 growing into a matrix of 

17 weapons-grade plutonium, we can't assume Super 

18 S for the plutonium - 

19 MR. STIVER: You would have to 

20 follow through.

21 MR. ROLFES: Correct. So you would 

22 have to stick with one solubility.
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1 MR. STIVER: And so even -- but if 

2 you look at the first column, this is 

3 plutonium solubility class S to uranium 

4 solubility class S --

5 MR. ROLFES: Right, there's still 

6 an increase.

7 MR. STIVER: And it's about a 

8 factor of three to five higher at 100 parts 

9 per billion.

10 MR. ROLFES: I did briefly see 

11 this chart in the report that you had produced 

12 but I didn't see exactly how the calculations 

13 were done.

14 MR. STIVER: Actually that is in 

15 the report --

16 MR. ROLFES: It is. Okay.

17 MR. STIVER: There's a sample 

18 calculation right above the table.

19 MR. ROLFES: I did see that but it 

20 didn't really give me -- for example, when we 

21 complete a dose reconstruction, I don't know -

22 - did you use a distribution of all the 
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1 isotopes in natural uranium for example to --

2 MR. STIVER: Oh yes, yes, I 

3 assumed there would be a specific activity of 

4 natural uranium. Actually I used several. I've 

5 got a MathCAD worksheet that has all the 

6 different combinations in that.

7 MR. ROLFES: I'd like to take a 

8 look at that, just because when we complete a 

9 dose reconstruction for Fernald, rather than 

10 using isotopic distribution and natural 

11 uranium, we usually calculate the intake in 

12 that manner for interpreting bioassay data, 

13 but then when we assign dose, we assume all U14 234 --

15 MR. STIVER: Oh, this is -- these 

16 are based on -- this is based on a U-234 --

17 MR. ROLFES: Okay.

18 MR. STIVER: So it basically --

19 the same methods as you guys used.

20 MR. ROLFES: Okay. If it's based 

21 on all U-234.

22 MR. STIVER: If you like I can 
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1 send you the actual workup - 

2 MR. ROLFES: Well, no, no, if it 

3 is based on all U-234, then we are okay.

4 MR. STIVER: Yes, it is.

5 MR. ROLFES: That's 

6 representative. But if --

7 MR. STIVER: Yes, it's natural 

8 uranium 230 intake and then for the dosimetric 

9 - 

10 MR. ROLFES: Can I finish please?

11 MR. STIVER: Go ahead. My 

12 apologies.

13 MR. ROLFES: If it's based on the 

14 entire isotopic distribution, then it would 

15 result in an elevated ratio compared to what 

16 we would do in dose reconstruction. I just 

17 wanted to make sure that if you used U-234, 

18 then we are okay. It will result in a ratio 

19 more representative of what we --

20 MR. STIVER: And that is indeed 

21 what we are doing.

22 MR. KATZ: Someone or at least one 
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1 person on the line hasn't muted on their phone 

2 and it doesn't really bother us so much but I 

3 am worried that it might be bothering other 

4 people trying to listen by phone.

5 So please, everyone on the phone, 

6 mute your phone. Use *6 if you don't have a 

7 mute button. But someone is shuffling papers 

8 or something and it is pretty audible here, 

9 which makes me think it's even worth for other 

10 people listening. Thank you.

11 MEMBER PRESLEY: This is Bob. We 

12 have got pretty good service today. 

13 MR. KATZ: Okay. Good.

14 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Bob, have you 

15 received these papers yet?

16 MEMBER PRESLEY: No. 

17 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay, I'll 

18 resend it again.

19 DR. GLOVER: Bob, I sent those to 

20 your CDC account.

21 MEMBER PRESLEY: I'm at home. 

22 DR. GLOVER: Oh, okay.
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1 MEMBER PRESLEY: I have a slight 

2 stomach problem today. 

3 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: Can I ask you a 

4 quick question? On those reduction bombs, 

5 when they had explosions, were the workers --

6 did they get nasal swipes, urinalysis after 

7 that?

8 MR. STIVER: In those early years, 

9 there's on evidence on the records whether 

10 they did or not.

11 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: Okay.

12 DR. GLOVER: John, I would 

13 probably stipulate that I have done the 

14 calculations too and there is a small 

15 increase, obviously if you are adding 

16 plutonium, and you do see -- don't know if 

17 it's quite triple, but I know that there is an 

18 increase.

19 MR. STIVER: Yes, I can send you 

20 the calculations.

21 MR. ROLFES: I did some similar 

22 calculations as well and across the board, the 
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1 recycled uranium intakes make about a two 

2 percent difference in the committed effective 

3 dose across the board for all organs.

4 But yes, as you pointed out, there 

5 are at least four organs - 

6 (Simultaneous speakers.)

7 DR. GLOVER: I think we agree 

8 there is some --

9 MR. STIVER: And for any 

10 particular organs it could be an issue. 

11 MEMBER ZIEMER: Question, John, in 

12 your columns that are in red though, you have 

13 different solubilities for the plutonium and 

14 the uranium, but you wouldn't use that right?

15 MR. STIVER: Yes, that was just an 

16 illustration.

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: Just to see.

18 MR. STIVER: Just to show you that 

19 this is the highest you possibly could get 

20 with these, even thought it may not make sense 

21 from --

22 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right, 
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1 biologically, it doesn't make sense.

2 MR. ROLFES: If you had a matrix 

3 of a combination of radionuclides and you 

4 assumed that you know, the uranium in it is 

5 all type S, then we would have to assume the 

6 entire matrix is type S. We couldn't, you 

7 know, selectively part out.

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: You just put that 

9 in for illustration purposes.

10 DR. MAURO: It's an important 

11 point though. So you are saying that really, 

12 in physical reality, you never have a type S 

13 uranium coupled with a type M plutonium?

14 MR. STIVER: Yes, you would have a 

15 -- an insoluble oxide, you know, with the 

16 plutonium in the matrix and it would all 

17 behave the same. It would all behave as type 

18 S.

19 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: But Paul, as 

20 you remember, many times we hear well, that's 

21 going to -- that little amount is just going -

22 - it is not going to be much of a dose, and I 
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1 think what was trying to be shown here is that 

2 actually, the small parts were --

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: Oh yes, I'm not 

4 debating that, it's going to -- it gets down 

5 to an issue of whether there's another order 

6 of magnitude here, because --

7 MR. STIVER: Yes, well that's 

8 really the point, is that if you're looking 

9 on, forward, as the -- if you start looking --

10 DR. MAURO: Yes, I think it's 

11 important to point -- I mean you are making a 

12 very important point here. If it turns out, in 

13 physical reality, you were modeling a person 

14 and you were assuming that the uranium was 

15 type S, you would assume the plutonium was 

16 type S also, correct? 

17 And if you were assuming the 

18 uranium was M, you may very well assume the 

19 uranium is M, or maybe not, I'm not sure.

20 MR. ROLFES: Correct, if the 

21 uranium was type M, we would assume --

22 DR. MAURO: And that being the 
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1 case, then, in terms of bounding the problem 

2 that we are dealing with is, yes, you might 

3 end up underestimating the dose to particular 

4 organs, like the liver, by perhaps a factor 

5 five, not a factor of 50.

6 At the default values. And so if 

7 the 100 parts per billion were off, let's say 

8 we had, oh yes, maybe it's 200, maybe it 

9 should be 300, so we are talking about a 

10 factor -- the magnitude of the impact on a 

11 dose reconstruction.

12 MR. STIVER: This really is just 

13 to illustrate the magnitude of how --

14 DR. MAURO: And this -- but it's 

15 good that we point this particular point out 

16 that you made regarding the reality of one of 

17 these scenarios really doesn't --

18 MR. STIVER: We understood that. I 

19 just put that in there just to demonstrate you 

20 know, as high as it could possibly get and 

21 kind of imagine a plausible scenario.

22 Okay, if you could go on to this 
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1 slide 17 here, I am going to start getting 

2 into some of the basis of the defaults and 

3 assumptions that were made to kind of justify 

4 these default levels.

5 And the first one, is kind of, 

6 there's really two sides to this. This is --

7 there's an assumption that there's a specific 

8 level of plutonium that was - 

9 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: My hearing aid 

10 is --

11 MR. STIVER: I was wondering where 

12 that was coming from. There's a bird in your 

13 ear.

14 There's kind of two sides to this. 

15 One of this is that the health physics 

16 practices during the SEC period were 

17 sufficient to maintain worker exposures at 

18 levels that would not exceed the default 

19 levels.

20 And the other side to that is that 

21 there was a working specification that came 

22 out of Hanford, 10 parts per billion, very 
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1 early on in the process of recycling this 

2 material, which was adhered to rather 

3 stringently.

4 So you had those two sides. You 

5 have got a low-level specification and then 

6 you have health physics practices that are 

7 adequate to enforce that, for all workers, for 

8 all periods of time.

9 We'll take a look at the health 

10 physics practices first, and this is in -- I 

11 also sent you guys all copies of the White 

12 Paper. This is on pages 21 to 27. There's a 

13 lot of quotes that came out of the DOE task 

14 force report in 1985.

15 And this was really one of the 

16 recommendations of that report, based on our 

17 findings, was to have a system-wide limit for 

18 these constituents in recycled uranium, 

19 because it didn't exist before that.

20 And also, as you can see, the DOE 

21 2000b report and another report in 1989 by 

22 Bassett et al.
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1 And so basically one of the 

2 findings of the task force report was that 

3 prior to 1986, the radiation safety programs 

4 at Fernald probably were not effective enough 

5 to control exposures and contaminants in RU.

6 And that was one of our first 

7 findings in our report. In 1965, there was a 

8 quote that there were on additional 

9 precautions for recycled uranium other than 

10 the standard.

11 Twenty years later, 20 years go 

12 by, this plutonium out of specification is 

13 POOS PTA is received from Paducah in 1980, and 

14 we acknowledge this is the primary documented 

15 source of plutonium contamination at Fernald.

16 But the task force observations on 

17 the materials were handled however say that 

18 there was marginal contamination control, five 

19 years after this material -- the original 

20 hoppers were -- the first five of them were 

21 packaged in the green salt plant, they were 

22 finding removable plutonium contamination 
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1 there.

2 There was no survey done. There 

3 was a recommendation that workers who were 

4 actually involved in breaking the stuff up by 

5 hand -- they used big poles to allow 

6 packaging, wear -- it was recommended that 

7 they wear respirators. There was no 

8 documentation that it was actually enforced.

9 And so this is kind of troubling 

10 to us. Bioassay program. We talked a little 

11 bit about the bioassay program for the POOS 

12 workers, and we looked into that.

13 Actually this is documented pretty 

14 well in the Bassett report, and also in the 

15 task force report. But this was a program --

16 when they started processing this material 

17 when Westinghouse came on board, 1986, they 

18 started processing the stuff in Plant 4 and I 

19 guess they had a spill pretty early on, and it 

20 shut down everything.

21 So what they did is they went 

22 ahead and ran out what was already in the 
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1 fluorination banks and during this time they 

2 started bioassaying the workers beginning in 

3 1986.

4 They did this all the way up 

5 through 1989 I believe. There's like several 

6 hundred workers with a bioassay. And they 

7 found -- I think there were 10 or 11 of these 

8 guys that came out positive, and so they did 

9 an initial analysis using worst case 

10 assumptions, like you might do in a dose 

11 reconstruction.

12 And one of the guys, the highest 

13 one, was about -- they figured an EDE 

14 effective dose equivalent of about 3.5 rem.

15 And then they did the follow-on 

16 samples and those were inconclusive and then 

17 they finally sent these guys up to Hanford to 

18 get chest counts and those came back negative.

19 And so there's kind of a 

20 disconnect as to whether there were enough 

21 samples taken, did you really capture the 

22 people who were the most highly exposed.
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1 And this is -- I guess this --

2 it's kind of troubling that there are no 

3 bioassay data for all the people prior to 

4 that. By the time this material was received, 

5 until the new contractor came on board, you 

6 got a six-year period there, and the stuff is 

7 on-site. We know it's being processed through 

8 the Plant 1 Titan Mill.

9 So -- but you don't have bioassay 

10 for those particular workers. So it's limited, 

11 and I guess you could say, in summary the 

12 results are somewhat inconclusive.

13 Let's go on. Slide 18. Let's take 

14 a look at this 100 parts per billion. I think 

15 we have talked about this a lot the last 

16 couple of meetings.

17 And this is the Hanford working 

18 specification of 10 parts per billion uranium. 

19 Now, if you look at the data that is reported 

20 in the 2000 DOE reports, yes, there's a lot of 

21 data, a lot of receipts, or shipments from 

22 Hanford that were less than 10 parts per 
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1 billion.

2 We also see a lot that's higher. 

3 DOE 2000b report shows 4,000 data points in 

4 there, and the plutonium levels range over 

5 about eight or nine orders of magnitude.

6 So you have got one set of -- it's 

7 trioxide coming out of Hanford. Granted it's a 

8 large proportion of what comes in there. 

9 But you also have other sources 

10 that are considerably higher, that represent 

11 different processes from different plants and 

12 different time periods.

13 And there was a protraction factor 

14 of 10 thrown on for claimant favorability so 

15 that's where you get your 100 parts per 

16 billion from.

17 Now the task force observations, 

18 there are several I listed here. One that was 

19 kind of striking was that the only formal 

20 limit that was ever adopted by the AEC was in 

21 1971. This was for commercial fuel shipments 

22 of GDP and that was 15,000 dpm per gram 
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1 uranium, which translates to about 110 parts 

2 per billion from plutonium and about 9,500 for 

3 neptunium.

4 And they also go along to say that 

5 a formal, technically sound, understood and 

6 accepted specification for maximum, 

7 transuranic and fission products contaminants 

8 and uranium recycled materials, has probably 

9 never existed either within or between sites.

10 And this definite guideline for 10 

11 parts per billion did not occur until 1985, 

and there's a memo, an April 14th 12 memo, or a 

13 letter to the FMPC management from DOE 

14 imposing that 10 parts per billion guideline.

15 So you had a working 

16 specification, you know, it probably was 

17 effective for large volume shipments.

18 But you don't have a reasonable 

19 health physics program, you don't have 

20 sampling going on, you don't have air 

21 sampling. So there is no way to document 

22 whether this was really effective or not.
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1 And I said, the plutonium results 

2 that were reported -- and this is not a 

3 complete data set by any means -- you have got 

4 eight or nine orders of magnitude, you have 

5 got all the way up to, I think, the highest 

6 value was in the tower ash, was 7,500 parts 

7 per billion.

8 So there's a lot of uncertainty 

9 and a lot of variability that wasn't accounted 

10 for. 

11 MR. ROLFES: John.

12 MR. STIVER: Yes.

13 MR. ROLFES: We certainly 

14 recognize that the shipments that were 

15 received in the `80s are certainly of much 

16 higher contamination levels, and everything we 

17 have seen from the recycled uranium report, 

18 and the data that we have looked at, indicate 

19 everything was typically below, typically two 

20 to three parts per billion plutonium.

21 And during the time period that 

22 they controlled things on basically a 
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1 gentlemen's agreement type, with Hanford, they 

2 had the unwritten specification for products 

3 to keep it below 10 parts per billion.

4 And it was the plutonium that was 

5 received in the 1980s from the tower ash, the 

6 fluorination tower, and that was what 

7 encouraged us to bump it up to 100 parts per 

8 billion.

9 And that source term is a 

10 different type of source term than the typical 

11 recycled uranium, and it really should be 

12 handled completely differently than the rest, 

13 but you know, basically we could, based on 

14 additional data that are available, you could 

15 probably go back and justify reducing 

16 plutonium recycled uranium contamination 

17 levels for the earlier years, and increasing 

18 them for the 1980s perhaps.

19 MR. STIVER: You might argue that 

20 you needed to have more uncertainty in the 

21 earlier years, even though you -- because you 

22 don't have any data to document doesn't mean 
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1 you don't have a complete data set.

2 We talked about this last time, 

3 about this U Plant from `52 to `58. We don't 

4 have any data. It looks like the DOE 2000 

5 report didn't even include it.

6 And so you have an incomplete data 

7 set you are trying to use to justify a value 

8 that was based on a performance specification 

9 that wasn't even a requirement.

10 And so that is what kind of 

11 worries me. From different angles, you can 

12 see there's all kinds of gaps here.

13 MR. ROLFES: Yes, I understand, I 

14 mean, certainly -- there certainly are fewer 

15 data in the earlier years than there are in 

16 the more recent time periods, but then again, 

17 would you look for something that you knew 

18 wasn't there?

19 MR. STIVER: Well, actually in the 

20 `70s, they had this -- Bob Alvarez and Jim 

21 Werner are going to talk about this a little 

22 bit later. 
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1 But they had this complete change2 out of the CIP/CUP program, and there was a 

3 lot of residues and ashes generated from that 

4 which were pretty high. They weren't 

5 necessarily as high as the tower ash. This 

6 material --

7 MR. ALVAREZ: This is Bob Alvarez. 

8 The CIP/CUP program was the multi-billion9 dollar program that essentially expanded the 

10 installed capacity of the three gaseous 

11 diffusion plants by 61 percent.

12 It went on from 1972, `73 and 

13 1981. It involves the opening of 4,000 20-foot 

14 converters, the removal of the barriers, the 

15 compressors, the blades, the other equipment, 

16 and an enormous amount of D&D work that led to 

17 a very large amount of uranium oxide and ash 

18 that was shipped during this time period to 

19 Fernald, and the -- I kind of think about the 

20 POOS material as part of that batch of 

21 material.

22 There is very limited data, hardly 
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1 any information about this, but it involved, 

2 as I said, when you are talking about 40 --

3 4,000 20-foot long converters at the three 

4 gaseous diffusion plants that have been 

5 accumulating recycled uranium for decades, and 

6 then removing that equipment and D&D and then 

7 sending the recovered uranium to Fernald 

8 without any data indicating what the 

9 contaminant content was, it raises some 

10 questions.

11 There is absolutely no reference 

12 to the CIP/CUP program for example in the TBD 

13 written up for the K-25 Plant. However for 

14 Paducah, the -- I'm not sure if it's the TBD 

15 or it's the occupational internal dose -- they 

16 did mention that the mere opening of one of 

17 these converters would yield concentrations on 

18 the order of 2,700 parts per billion of 

19 plutonium.

20 So we are -- this -- it was about 

21 55 metric tons of this ash material that came 

22 from the D&D of the CIP/CUP program that is 
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1 just not -- there's no data on it, except the 

2 POOS data, which was sort of, I thought, 

3 probably part of this, because this was a 

4 major clean-out of the three gaseous diffusion 

5 plants.

6 So this was a very unique 

7 situation and it kind of has not been subject 

8 to much attention.

9 MR. STIVER: Okay thanks. 

10 MR. ROLFES: Thank you. Is Bryce 

11 on the line there?

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: He was. Bryce?

13 MR. RICH: Yes, I am.

14 MR. ROLFES: Bryce, are you aware 

15 of this and do you know what -- well I'm not 

16 sure, I guess I could ask Bob there what the 

17 CIP/CUP program stood for.

18 MR. ALVAREZ: It stood for the 

19 Cascade Improvement/Cascade Upgrade Program.

20 MR. ROLFES: Okay, thank you. 

21 Bryce, do you recall seeing any information on 

22 --
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1 (Simultaneous speakers and 

2 telephonic interference.)

3 MR. STIVER: Actually, there's 

4 some from Oak Ridge that wasn't accounted for 

5 in the mass balance.

6 MR. RICH: That's K-25 that's 

7 accounted for in the mass balance. Well, the 

8 data -- the only data that I see that is 

9 actually quantifying the ash that came out of 

10 these plants during that period is in the 

11 question and answer correspondence with 

12 National Lead in 1985, where the DOE asked 

13 very specifically what types of material went 

14 to Fernald, when.

15 And there's a table in there that 

16 lists the different categories of material, 

17 which includes U3O8 incinerator ash.

18 About 21 -- about 22 metric tons 

19 came from Oak Ridge. About 42 metric tons came 

20 from Paducah. And about 20 metric tons came 

21 from Portsmouth I think. 

22 Now, the process involved in doing 
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1 this, when they were doing this CIP/CUP 

2 program, these are massive -- this is a 

3 massive undertaking and so removing the 

4 equipment from these converters is no small 

5 task, and it involves a greatly expanded 

6 crafts and trades working group and going to 

7 three shifts for a period of about a decade.

8 And it involved taking large 

9 amounts of contaminated equipment to their D&D 

10 facilities at these gaseous diffusion plants, 

11 for example Building 1420 at K-25. 

12 And D&D is material using roughly 

13 equivalent of something if you can imagine a 

14 car wash type operation except they are using 

15 dilute nitric acid, citric acid, some fluorine 

16 compounds to clean out the barriers and then 

17 these wastes would then be gathered and sorted 

18 for recovery, and those wastes that would not 

19 be sorted for recovery would be measured for 

20 transuranics and if they exceeded 10 

21 nanocuries per gram, they had to be stored for 

22 future retrieval.
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1 So there was a recognition at the 

2 gaseous -- at least Paducah -- that the 

3 laboratory, that one of their procedures 

4 involved in terms of measuring the 

5 decontaminated material, the material that was 

6 removed from the contaminated equipment, they 

7 weren't measuring transuranics for purposes of 

8 retrievable disposal of TRU waste, and so --

9 but I saw nothing about how much would wind up 

10 in the ash and what measurements were taken.

11 But this material I think -- I 

12 think the POOS material has to be considered 

13 in the larger context of the cascade 

14 improvement cascade update program.

15 And the POOS material includes an 

16 additional, I don't remember the number there, 

17 but an additional 19 or 20 metric tons above 

18 and beyond this ash material that was sent.

19 MR. ROLFES: This is Mark again. 

20 Thank you Bob. Bryce, I am looking at -- I 

21 don't know if you received the presentation 

22 that I forwarded to you from John Stiver.
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1 I was looking on page 20 here, and 

2 we have got a subgroup, subgroup 9 under 

3 recycled uranium summary values by process 

4 subgroup, and we have indicated there was a 

5 receipt of Fernald of incinerator ash and 

6 scrap residues from the gaseous diffusion 

7 plants, and this is one of the elevated 

8 plutonium shipments.

9 Was this -- do you happen to know, 

10 might this have been the result of the CIP/CUP 

11 program that Bob is referring to, or --

12 MR. RICH: I don't know for sure.

13 MR. ROLFES: Okay.

14 MR. ALVAREZ: Well, the CIP/CUP 

15 programs were written up in different -- DOE 

16 had different reports, and there was a 

17 independent investigation done of Portsmouth 

18 in the year 2000 where they mentioned -- they 

19 didn't quantify, but they simply said that 

20 transuranic contamination from the residuals 

21 involved in this program were significant, and 

22 that the workers were not, at that place, 
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1 being offered adequate protection.

2 The Paducah -- I am not sure if 

3 it's the TBD or it's the internal dose 

4 section, I need to go back and look at that, 

5 let me pull up the memo here.

6 It's the site description, it's in 

7 the TBD. Basically the Paducah TBD mentions 

8 that workers involved in the CIP/CUP program, 

9 we counted residual amounts uranium were 

10 estimated to have plutonium levels ranging as 

11 high as 2,740 parts per billion.

12 MR. STIVER: Hey Bob, I think I 

13 have a table F.51A from DOE 2000b, lists all 

14 the constituents, and that Bryce Richards 

15 writes there is incinerator ash for K-25 and 

16 also for Paducah, but there's nothing there 

17 for Portsmouth.

18 And this was -- these are the 

19 values that were assigned for the process and 

20 all its determinations to the subgroups, and 

21 then --

22 MR. ALVAREZ: The data that I am 
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1 referring to comes from a set of information 

2 that is on the O: drive that is essentially a 

3 package of correspondence dated 1985/86, and 

4 in the midst of that package is a letter by 

5 the manager of National Lead to Jim 

6 Reafsnyder, who was the DOE manager of Fernald 

7 at the time, answering a set of questions.

8 And in that attachment to that 

9 letter, is a series of graphs and tables and 

10 one of those graphs and tables, they provide 

11 you a break-out of the types and forms of RU, 

12 of recycled uranium, that were shipped to 

13 Fernald and there is a set of tables, two or 

14 three pages of tables, I don't recall, that 

15 sets forth the amount of what's called U308 

16 incinerator ash that came from the three 

17 gaseous diffusion plants.

18 And if you look at the table and 

19 also transpose over that the time period of 

20 the CIP/CUP program, you see that the major 

21 preponderance of the ash and U308, which is 

22 probably a product of either calcination or 
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1 some sort of incineration, that was shipped, 

2 came during this CIP/CUP program.

3 DR. MAURO: Could I -- in terms of 

4 when I am listening, and I think about the 

5 history of our discussions, I remember the 

6 tower ash at a very troubling part of our 

7 discussion and it was well-contained.

8 It was my understanding when I 

9 went back to our original discussions that 

10 yes, everyone agreed that the tower ash was a 

11 very specific issue with Paducah, and that it 

12 was as high as 7,000 parts per billion, but it 

13 was well-defined, well-controlled and when it 

14 showed up at Paducah, it was something -- I'm 

15 sorry. When it showed up at Fernald, it was 

16 something that was handled in a manner that 

17 minimized the potential for people to actually 

18 experience any exposure: they had respiratory 

19 protection, I guess it was confined.

20 What I am hearing now is that 

21 there is this other category of material 

22 called the CIP/CUP, which was another source, 
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1 I mean, I'm -- I'm really trying to step far 

2 back and say another source that also went to 

3 Fernald at a different time and also had very 

4 high ratios of plutonium.

5 MR. WERNER: I think it was part 

6 of the CIP/CUP program and they were cleaning 

7 out the converters, you know, 4,000 

8 converters. 

9 I think that one gaseous diffusion 

10 plant, I think Paducah had 1,600 converters, 

11 so they were doing major renovation and clean12 out and replacement of equipment, which 

13 involved an enormous -- or let's say 

14 unprecedented D&D program at their D&D yard, 

15 in an effort to recover uranium and to 

16 segregate out that uranium, which would be 

17 discarded.

18 MR. STIVER: Hey Jim, could I jump 

19 in for a minute? This is John Stiver. You 

20 know, we went into this in the last meeting 

21 quite a bit, into this CIP/CUP program.

22 I think it does illustrate that 
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1 there may be certain amounts of this 

2 incinerator ash that may have been missed in 

3 the DOE 2000 statistical analysis.

4 I am looking at the values that 

5 were reported, and once again these are the 

6 mean values, these aren't the entire range. I 

7 would kind of -- in response to what John just 

8 said, we did -- I think we laid out pretty 

9 well that there were definitely some serious 

10 gaps in the radiation protection program 

11 during the entire time of, even the Paducah 

12 tower ash was being processed, there may have 

13 been certain situations where they claim that 

14 in-line respirators were used -- maybe they 

15 were, maybe they weren't -- for certain 

16 categories of processed workers.

17 So this is a separate source. It's 

18 group 10a in the analysis.

19 DR. MAURO: I need a touchstone in 

20 these conversations, so one of my touchstones 

21 at one time was that there was a great deal of 

22 control over the tower ash, so there were two 
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1 things that happened here. Maybe that control 

2 wasn't there the way we like to think that it 

3 was, and in addition, beside that, there's a 

4 this other source that may have come in around 

5 the same time that has a different name, but 

6 also had levels that were very high that may 

7 not have been a counterpart.

8 MR. STIVER: And actually I can 

9 tell you that those lows in the statistical 

10 analysis, they range from a minimum of about 

11 0.6 up to 3,500 parts per billion.

12 DR. MAURO: So these things 

13 challenge the 100 parts per billion number --

14 MR. STIVER: And we are going to 

15 get into that.

16 DR. MAURO: We are going to get 

17 into that -- in a way I like the idea of 

18 foreshadowing, as we are talking about it, 

19 remember, this is why this is important and 

20 its relevance to our previous conversations, 

21 so those -- sort of anchors me as we talk 

22 these things through. 
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1 MR. STIVER: Yes, this is a very 

2 important source that Bob brought up and it 

3 has been addressed in the statistical analysis 

4 in DOE 2000b, but we are going to get into the 

5 inadequacies of that particular report and 

6 some of the uncertainties involving that.

7 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: I am wondering 

8 if before we talk to that, if we could take a 

9 10-minute comfort break, if we could. Those on 

10 the phone, we are going to -- we are going to 

11 take a 10-minute break and we will come back 

12 then.

13 MR. STIVER: I think everybody 

14 could use one. 

15 MR. KATZ: What time do you have 

16 right now Brad?

17 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: I have got 

18 10:43.

19 MR. KATZ: Okay, so about five to 

20 the hour we will get started again. I am going 

21 to put the phone on mute.

22 (Whereupon, the above-entitled matter went off 
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1 the record at 10:42 a.m. 

2 and resumed at 10:57 

3 a.m.)

4 MR. KATZ: Okay, we just took a 

5 short break. This is the Fernald Work Group 

6 and we are ready to go on. Bob, do we have you 

7 on the line?

8 MEMBER PRESLEY: I am.

9 MR. KATZ: Great, thank you. And 

10 for the record, Mark Griffon is not joining 

11 our group, and let me just ask to check your 

12 emails please, if you are on the line. Thank 

13 you.

14 MR. STIVER: Okay, shall we jump 

15 back in?

16 MR. KATZ: Yes.

17 MR. STIVER: This is John Stiver. 

18 I want to continue the presentation. Slide 19, 

19 about half way down that slide is the crux of 

20 this, is that for the default radionuclides 

21 other than plutonium and NIOSH relied on the 

22 DOE 2000b report and the statistical analysis 
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1 that was produced from that, to arrive at the 

2 3,500 and 9,000 parts per billion for 

3 neptunium and technetium, and also to validate 

4 the default values for plutonium.

5 And it was done because they are 

6 just -- as of 1985, as a matter of fact, there 

7 was no -- 

8 (Simultaneous speakers.)

9 So anyway, let's go ahead and 

10 start segueing into this DOE 2000b report and 

11 Jim Werner is going to take over in a minute 

12 here, but let me just lay kind of a framework 

13 for you.

14 This was produced under the 

15 Clinton administration towards the end, under 

16 the Secretary Richardson, his direction.

17 It was basically an incredible 

18 program in terms of the amount -- the 

19 intensity. The whole thing lasted nine months 

20 start to finish.

21 Four sites -- Fernald, RMI, West 

22 Valley and Weldon Spring reviewed and 
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1 assembled all of their RU data and basically 

2 resulted about 4,000 points. Fernald had about 

3 three-fourths of those and is really kind of 

4 the repository for all this information that 

5 was available.

6 And it then took all this data set 

7 and he had an assemblage of experts, process 

8 experts, who had been involved in RU 

9 protection over a period of years.

10 And these people basically 

11 assigned this data into different subgroups, 

12 process subgroups that defined certain types 

13 of materials and certain processes, and they 

14 came up with a total of 19 of them.

15 Then they did -- performed a 

16 statistical analysis which was then reported 

17 in Appendix F of DOE 2000b. And table F.31 is 

18 the basis for table 5 of the NIOSH RU report 

19 and that's on page 20, or slide 20.

20 And this itemizes all the 

21 subgroups and then gives what is called the 

22 bootstrap mean and it's very similar to an 
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1 arithmetic average that controls for the 

2 influence of outlier data points.

3 And then these are the values that 

4 were then used by the process knowledge team 

5 to assign to different sites for different 

6 sources of data.

7 And that particular information, 

8 for those of you who are interested and have 

9 access to the O: drive, I sent out an email 

10 yesterday or the day before giving you 

11 directions to the references, and so this 

12 particular table, F.51A, is there.

13 And this shows how those various 

14 bootstrap means for different processes were 

15 then applied to different facilities, 

16 different shipping sites, throughout the 

17 entire complex.

18 And you see a lot of the same 

19 values repeated again and again, because these 

20 are basically process knowledge determinations 

21 and assignments.

22 So let's go back to the slides 
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1 again. If we move on to slide 21. This is 

2 about the basis for the NIOSH defaults, a 

3 continuation of it. 

4 What you see when you look at 

5 table F.31, even a cursory review of that 

6 table shows the enormous amount of variability 

7 in the level of the constituents.

8 And this just really indicates 

9 that you have got all these different 

10 processes moving over time, different feed 

11 materials, a tweaking process, the processes 

12 were changed and improved over this period. So 

13 it's not surprising that there is so much 

14 variability. 

15 One of our findings was we 

16 questioned how the values of 3,500 and 9,000 

17 came out of that data set. I think it's not 

18 really all that important exactly how it was 

19 derived. 

20 I assume it was some upper 

21 quantile of the distribution of values, is 

22 that basically how it was done Mark?
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1 MR. ROLFES: Bryce, could you 

2 answer the question on how we developed the 

3 default ratios of 100 parts per billion and 

4 3,500 parts?

5 MR. RICH: It's a function of the 

6 upper limits of the distribution.

7 MR. STIVER: Okay, that's all 

8 right, it was just some operating portion of 

9 the distribution. And we tried to replicate 

10 that. We came close but we didn't quite get to 

11 those values.

12 So in summary, the DOE 2000b, we 

13 have laid out our position. It's there in the 

14 transcripts. It's in our White Paper, and 

15 basically our position has not changed.

16 We feel that there's still a lot 

17 of outstanding issues and on slide 22, those 

18 are kind of summarized here, in four bullet19 points.

20 First of all, the DOE analysis was 

21 accepted without question. There was no 

22 uncertainty analysis performed to verify the 
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1 estimates that those bootstraps were actually 

2 bounding.

3 We questioned some of the 

4 assumptions that were made in that analysis, 

5 one of them being the partitioning of 

6 plutonium, how it was partitioned. 

7 One example we list here is that 

8 initially they thought about 80 percent was 

9 going to report into the raffinate but it 

10 turned out that only 15 percent did for one 

11 particular process.

12 But more importantly there has 

13 just been no independent analysis of the data 

14 for suitability in dose reconstruction, in 

15 particular for an SEC petition.

16 And this gets back to the whole 

17 surrogate data issue. You are taking data that 

18 may or may not apply to a particular site or a 

19 particular process and it is being assigned 

20 and so we know there is this enormous amount 

21 of variation in the actual data that were 

22 reported, and that doesn't even include the 
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1 uncertainty that goes into the process and all 

2 its determinations.

3 And so we have some issues 

4 regarding the statistical analysis and how 

5 that justification was performed.

6 I put a couple of quotes here from 

7 DOE 2000b, at the bottom of this slide. They 

8 even acknowledge -- you will see that 

9 throughout that document, they caveat it 

10 continuously.

11 One is that they stated the small 

12 number of values represent approximately 40 

13 years of Fernald shipments, receipts and 

14 productions, and also represent other DOE site 

15 recycled uranium receipts.

16 FMPC data from the middle through 

17 the late 1980s, when back-extrapolation was 

18 possible, the limits of it -- the 

19 applicability must be understood.

20 So that they are telling you that 

21 this data set is limited, it can be used for 

22 various purposes, dose reconstruction, maybe 
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1 not, but they were very much aware of the 

2 limitations of that study.

3 On to 23, finding 11. This one had 

4 to do with the statistical analysis, and when 

5 you look at the distributions of data, I know 

6 the DOE people said they didn't feel that that 

7 data showed a log-normal distribution, so they 

8 used this other methodology.

9 Well, our own statistician here, 

10 Harry Chmelynski, did his analysis on it and 

11 found that in fact, most of the data sets, or 

12 at least several of them can be more 

13 represented by log-normal distributions.

14 Those are laid out in the report, 

15 pages 35 to 37, all the details are there. We 

16 just feel that when it essentially amounts to 

17 an arithmetic average of a very large, 

18 uncertain and variable data set, it's just not 

19 claimant favorable for dose reconstruction.

20 You see here at the bottom we have 

21 got the bootstrap mean analysis Harry went 

22 through, and even just from this analysis, you 
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1 look at the GSDs for plutonium, they range 

2 from 8 to 16, neptunium 4 to 10, technetium 

3 all the way up to 20, and if you look at the 

4 log-normal plots in the appendix, the data 

5 seem to fit that little bit better than a 

6 standard arithmetic analysis.

7 Now at this point, Jim Werner, are 

8 you still out there? 

9 MR. WERNER: Yes I am.

10 MR. STIVER: Okay Jim, I'm going 

11 to go ahead and bring out your presentation. 

12 I'm just going to introduce Jim. He 

13 participated in the last meeting.

14 Jim is an SC&A associate. He was 

15 formerly employed by the EM office for the DOE 

16 and he was involved in managing the production 

17 of this DOE 2000 report.

18 He did work as an engineering 

19 contractor at gaseous diffusion plants from 

20 `86 to `89, conducting environmental surveys, 

21 and the Linking Legacies 1997 report by DOE 

22 was prepared through Mr. Warner's office under 
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1 his direction.

2 And at this point I would like to 

3 go ahead and turn it over to Jim. Let me bring 

4 up your -- everybody here in the room, if you 

5 go to the other PowerPoint presentation 

6 entitled RU overview, Jim Werner final.

7 MR. WERNER: Okay thanks John. 

8 While you are bringing that up, let me try 

9 introducing it and maybe a sound check at the 

10 same time, to make sure you can hear me okay.

11 As John suggested, I am going to 

12 describe a little bit of the background and 

13 limitations of the DOE 2000b report, and I 

14 think the basic question to ask and the reason 

15 why it's useful perhaps to examine carefully 

16 this report, is to try to determine whether or 

17 not the data being used is really 

18 representative of the breadth of recycled 

19 uranium that was used over the years.

20 And there's a number of slides but 

21 they basically fall into three categories and 

22 to me the biggest background that I have in 
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1 working in this area is in reprocessing, that 

2 is the operation to extract certain isotopes,

3 particularly plutonium from spent fuel and 

4 irradiated targets.

5 And so I think it is important to 

6 make sure we look carefully at what 

7 reprocessing was in all of its variations, to 

8 understand recycled uranium. That's really 

9 where recycled uranium came from, of course, 

10 so to understand then recycled uranium you 

11 have to understand reprocessing.

12 And then secondly there's a little 

13 bit of background on the report itself and its 

14 production, and lastly the -- I think an 

15 important issue of what are the other issues 

16 that should have been examined in more detail 

17 to ensure that the data was representative.

18 So with that, let me get started 

19 on a little bit of background here, and some 

20 of you already know this in some detail so I 

21 am going to go quickly and get on to the other 

22 issues.
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1 Reprocessing, again, is really the 

2 essential process in linking the production of 

3 plutonium that occurs when you bombard a 

4 target uranium-238 with neutrons and produce 

5 plutonium.

6 Plutonium isn't really available 

7 until you purify it and extract it, and that 

8 reprocessing, as it is known, chemical 

9 separation, was really a very large industrial 

10 operation particularly at Hanford River and 

11 furthermore specialized in Idaho National 

12 Engineering Laboratory where they had really 

13 interesting capabilities, and of course at 

14 West Valley, where an attempt at commercial 

15 reprocessing was made for a number of years.

16 And I wish I had a little model 

17 here to show you, but if you imagine 

18 concentric rings with a target ring on the 

19 outside of 238, and that's the target because 

20 that's where the neutrons were aimed at, 

21 essentially, inside, with this driver fuel 

22 typically high-enriched uranium.
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1 And this is a set-up that is quite 

2 different from naval reactor fuel. It's quite 

3 different from commercial fuel and the idea 

4 wasn't just to generate heat and steam, it was 

5 to irradiate the targets to produce plutonium, 

6 and that then the extraction process was 

7 really what we were talking about here.

8 But I just also wanted to note 

9 that it wasn't only plutonium-239 that was 

10 produced in some cases, and this is a big 

11 issue. I'll put a little commercial interlude 

12 here that the nation really faces a big issue 

13 now with that 238, because we produced it at 

14 one time, we stopped, we then bought it from 

15 the Russians, but the -- and I'll get to this 

16 maybe at the end --- is the radioelectric - 

17 thermoelectric generators, the RTGs used for 

18 like the Apollo space missions and certain 

19 deep space missions, used 238.

20 So, it wasn't all 239 in other 

21 words, but most of it was 239. And let me go 

22 on to slide number three, where it says 
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1 uranium refining.

2 And the important thing is not all 

3 of the details comprehensively -- I'm not 

4 going to go through every single box on this -

5 - but there's essentially a contrast between 

6 this slide and the next one I am going to show 

7 you.

8 You'll see in this uranium 

9 refining slide that -- you'll see all these 

10 very familiar operations occurring within 

11 Fernald, and at the very top, the feed 

12 material is characterized as uranium ore and 

13 concentrate production residues.

14 Okay, and this came from the 

15 document that was done in the very early `90s, 

16 before `93 and its genesis was actually in the 

17 mid- to late-`80s, characterizing Fernald 

18 operations before the real shutdown in `89.

19 And this document came out to 

20 characterize it and you will see there is no 

21 mention of recycled uranium in this.

22 And the next slide, if you could 
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1 just go to slide number four, this is actually 

2 a page from Linking Legacies, and this is more 

3 of a complex-wide diagram.

4 It shows the operations in most 

5 cases flowing from facility to facility, so 

6 you have the radiation and separations at 

7 Hanford and Savannah River, and then shipment 

8 of the material to a fuel or target 

9 fabrication facility, like Fernald, for 

10 uranium refining.

11 But I am not going to make you do an eye 

12 test here and look in detail, so I blew it up 

13 on slide five. In slide five you will see that 

14 the little arrow coming out of chemical 

15 separation saying recycled HEU/LEU/NU for 

16 high-enriched, low-enriched and natural 

17 uranium, to refining.

18 So far as I know this is the first 

19 time this appears and at the time, it was 

20 simply a matter of accuracy, because I had 

21 been aware that the previous flow diagrams 

22 lacked this recycled uranium and it was 
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1 something that I became aware of pretty 

2 acutely working at the gaseous diffusion plant 

3 as a contractor on the EH surveys during the 

4 1980s.

5 And I am an engineer, not a health 

6 physicist, and that's my excuse for not being 

7 really as aware of the health physics 

8 implications.

9 But I was very much aware of the 

10 implications of the recycled at the gaseous 

11 diffusion plants in terms of the impact it had 

12 on operations, and mostly the production of 

13 waste and contamination, particularly in the 

14 CIP/CUP program, and Bob Alvarez discussed 

15 some before.

16 It really had a big impact and the 

17 employees of the facility where we were all 

18 working out there, I was an outside 

19 contractor, I was visiting the various 

20 facilities for maybe two weeks or a month at a 

21 time and spending six months reviewing 

22 documents, producing the reports.
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1 But the full-time employees were 

2 very acutely aware of the impact recycled 

3 uranium had on the separative work unit 

4 efficiency at each of the gaseous diffusion 

5 plants, and of course one of the big impacts 

6 was, at each of the GDPs, when it went back 

7 through for enrichment, it had an impact on 

8 the barrier in the diffusion tubing, which is, 

9 as far as I know, still a classified 

10 technology in the details, but essentially, as 

11 you probably know from the gaseous diffusion, 

12 that that barrier tubing in each of the 

13 converters, is very much engineered to allow 

14 the flow-through of the UF6, uranium 

15 hexafluoride and allow the enrichment process 

16 to occur.

17 So introduction of the 

18 contaminant, the fission products, plutonium, 

19 had a big impact on the barrier tubing and

20 reduced the efficiency, so when Bob says that 

21 going through CIP/CUP improved efficiency by 

22 61 percent, it was in part an improvement 
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1 caused by the reduction from the introduction 

2 of recycled uranium.

3 So the point is here the flow 

4 diagrams weren't widely known publicly. 

5 Perhaps other people knew the implications. 

6 Perhaps it was simply an omission. 

7 For whatever reason, we made a 

8 point of bringing that out and producing 

9 Linking Legacies, that finally came out in 

10 `97. It took seven years to produce that 

11 document. So it was a lot of work and analysis 

12 to go behind it.

13 The next slide is just one of the 

14 overall flow charts. I didn't go through all 

15 the flow charts. These are in Linking Legacies 

16 and they are reproduced in DOE 2000b. I made 

17 sure to put them in to explain the process 

18 overall.

19 This is just the MED process from 

20 `42 to `46, and you will see there is no 

21 recycled uranium flow-through. If you look at 

22 the chemical separation in the upper-right 
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1 corner, where you have the Oak Ridge National 

2 Laboratory X-10 Semi Works, the huge Hanford U 

3 and T Plants, those are just the very 

4 primitive reprocessing plants operated during 

5 the Manhattan Project in the rush to produce 

6 materials in World War Two.

7 And there was, again, no recovery 

8 of the uranium because the focus was on the 

9 plutonium. That was what we were trying to get 

10 then.

11 If you flip to the next slide, AEC 

12 from `46 to the mid-`50s, again this is from 

13 Linking Legacies. You see that big loop at the 

14 top. Essentially, the recycle would flow 

15 through uranium out of the U plant, the U03.

16 This is before the big 

17 construction expansion in the `50s when it was 

18 just Hanford doing the chemical separations on 

19 an industrial scale at that time.

20 But that's when the recycled 

21 uranium of course started. Somebody realized

22 hey, this is valuable uranium we are sending 
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1 to the waste tanks, and as I think Bob wrote 

2 in some detail, there was an attempt to 

3 recover some of the uranium, some of the 

4 recycled uranium actually came from the tanks 

5 at Hanford.

6 And the flow charts, then for the 

7 `50s through the `70s and `80s are somewhat 

8 similar but you obviously have the expansion 

9 with the addition of the F and H canyons and 

10 the chem plants and West Valley later on.

11 So it would just be more 

12 complicated but the same idea as you will see.

13 The next slide is simply to 

14 illustrate the first of what are many 

15 reprocessing facilities, not a huge number but 

16 there were more reprocessing facilities than 

17 there were enrichment facilities, and this is 

18 just the T-Plant at Hanford, and this is just 

19 the very large-scale reprocessing, what we 

20 called canyons of the Queen Mary buildings, 

21 they are sort of shaped like an ocean liner so 

22 that's why we called them the Queen Mary 
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1 buildings.

2 And they are very intensive 

3 operations and very important in terms of 

4 improving the efficiency of plutonium 

5 extraction.

6 If you think about, you know, the 

7 earliest days when Glenn Seaborg did the first 

8 micro-extractions of plutonium, you know, we 

9 were just then beginning to learn about the 

10 basic chemical engineering, how do you extract 

11 plutonium from fission products, how do you 

12 separate from the uranium target material.

13 And that process of improving 

14 efficiency went on continuously and frankly, 

15 it was a competition, particularly in the 

16 `50s, between Hanford and Savannah River to 

17 see who could do it more efficiently.

18 And I don't mean to say Idaho 

19 wasn't in that competition. They certainly 

20 were. But Idaho had some very unique 

21 capabilities, and we can get into that a bit 

22 more, but in terms of large-scale industrial 
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1 reprocessing from plutonium extraction, these 

2 facilities were constantly adapting their 

3 processes and figuring out how they could be 

4 more efficient later on.

5 And of course the same scale of 

6 facilities was built at the Savannah River 

7 site, particularly the S and the H canyons, 

8 but at Hanford you had the U-Plant, the T9 Plant, PUREX, and later on the, the Plutonium 

10 Finishing Plant to add some even more hi-tech 

11 capabilities if you will.

12 And frankly some of the PFP 

13 capabilities were trying to I think learn some 

14 of the very exquisite lessons they learned at 

15 Idaho about how to do better extraction, and 

16 Idaho had a lot of unique capabilities.

17 The next slide is just the inside 

18 of the canyon and you will note the scale is 

19 different from the outside only because the 

20 walls are about eight feet thick with lead 

21 impregnated concrete.

22 And once you get a canyon working 
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1 you really can't change it very easily because 

2 you can't just send a worker in there. It's a 

3 very highly-intensive radioactive atmosphere.

4 And so there's a lot of 

5 documentation about all of the process changes 

6 that occurred. When you make one of those 

7 process changes, you spend a lot of time 

8 writing about it and getting it okayed but 

9 nonetheless they continued changing how you do 

10 the processes, what solvents were used, what 

11 equipment was put in there, the temperatures, 

12 the pressures, the addition of different 

13 catalysts, all to improve your extraction 

14 efficiency.

15 The next slide, and Brad, I guess 

16 it's here for your benefit, because you will 

17 see Idaho, it's somewhat smaller but again has 

18 unique capabilities, as you know very well.

19 And of course one of the main 

20 differences there is the mission was to 

21 extract high-enriched uranium particularly 

22 from naval reactors fuel, which is 
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1 fundamentally different in design. 

2 And at the risk of extending this 

3 discussion, I'll just say that to truly get 

4 into all the variability about recycled 

5 uranium, and the variability of reprocessing, 

6 one perhaps should really go back to the 

7 engineering of the target material, the fuel 

8 and the targets themselves.

9 And particularly, you will note 

10 that at Idaho, one of their big missions was 

11 naval reactor fuel, which is engineered very 

12 differently, and beyond that we really 

13 probably can't say more because it is still 

14 very classified.

15 But suffices to say that it 

16 required Idaho to step up its game to do that, 

17 I mean you have got a different level of 

18 criticality, different health physics issues, 

19 but just different engineering issues.

20 For example they used -- they 

21 operate generally at somewhat higher 

22 pressures. They use hydrofluoric acid instead 
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1 of nitric acid. So a lot more difficulty, a 

2 lot higher level of difficulty, so what they 

3 may have lacked in size, they made up for in 

4 the level of difficulty.

5 Of course a lot of that HEU went 

6 back to Y-12 at Oak Ridge for driver fuel, but 

7 some of the material, because they did a 

8 variety of materials.

9 The Fort St. Vrain fuel of course, 

10 there's the unique sodium-cooled reactor in 

11 Colorado went there, you know, any time you 

12 had a difficult fuel that was somewhat unique, 

13 you know, you would send it to Idaho, just 

14 because they have capacity and flexibility to 

15 do some difficult things there.

16 So again, adding to the 

17 variability, that's the picture that I'm 

18 trying to paint to you, that recycled uranium 

19 wasn't just one constant source. It was a 

20 variety of facilities, a variety of 

21 engineering operations, a variety of 

22 production processes and constantly changing 
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1 over time.

2 So even if you took a snapshot of 

3 say a half dozen facilities one year, two 

4 years later you would have somewhat different 

5 operations in the canyons there.

6 And then just the outside of the 

7 chem plant, you see it's a smaller building 

8 compared to one of the big Queen Mary canyon 

9 buildings.

10 And then the last one is the 

11 inside picture of the PFP, the Plutonium 

12 Finishing Plant at Hanford, and on the walls 

13 you will see there what was called the pencil 

14 tanks and that just shows you some of the 

15 technology that was implemented later, that 

16 even although they produced super grade and 

17 that at the Savannah River, and the Savannah 

18 River folks are very proud of their super 

19 grade, a very high level of purity of 239 

20 compared to some of the other isotopes of 239, 

21 and that was, I think, you know, they 

22 succeeded in integrating their target 
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1 engineering with their reprocessing there, at 

2 the PFP gave you a capacity of doing even more 

3 extraction of plutonium.

4 So I would respectfully disagree 

5 with somebody who said earlier that the 

6 concentrations of plutonium in general were 

7 higher in the `80s than they were in the 

8 earlier years.

9 And I don't doubt that there may 

10 be evidence for that, but I would suggest that 

11 frankly the overwhelming trend was for lower 

12 and lower plutonium concentrations in the 

13 residuals in the raffinate side streams 

14 compared to your plutonium production, just 

15 because we got better at isolating plutonium, 

16 we got better at purifying it.

17 And that was just for the point of 

18 illustrating with the PFP and this was a 

19 particularly challenging facility to manage.

20 And just lastly, the goal was, you 

21 know, what you end up with a puck, there's 

22 your basic puck of 239, it ended up getting 
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1 engineered into a spheroid for a primary and a 

2 thermonuclear warhead.

3 And then there's the last photo, 

4 is just the RTG from the Apollo mission on the 

5 moon because it was the Atomic Energy 

6 Commission, later DOE, who used neptunium-237 

7 targets that were irradiated to produce 238.

8 And you know, we didn't produce a 

9 large quantity of this material, but we ended 

10 up using the same facility. So you know, you 

11 didn't necessarily flesh out everything. You 

12 got your main stream of 238 from processing 

13 your neptunium-237 target material at each of 

14 these facilities.

15 And we continued doing it even 

16 after Apollo for a variety of other missions 

17 and then we stopped, again something that we 

18 are going to continue exploring in space 

19 during these missions. There's really not a 

20 good alternative except for 238.

21 But the point is not to advertize again 

22 for deep space mission budgets, but to again 
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1 note the variety of operations at the 

2 facilities.

3 This is, I'm sorry, last couple of 

4 photos are both at Portsmouth. This is one of 

5 the yards where uranium hexafluoride, in this 

6 case tailing cylinders were stored, and this 

7 guy is just doing a basic sonogram inspection 

8 of the cylinders to make sure that they were 

9 sound and not leaking.

10 And it was one of our concerns 

11 that the folks who were working out there day 

12 after day doing the inspections, there were 

13 certain assumptions about their exposures and 

14 if it was just alpha emitters, that was one 

15 issue, but these were the waste crews who were 

16 out there inspecting tail cylinders and there 

17 was a need to examine better what they were 

18 being exposed to.

19 And the last one is just an aerial 

20 view of the, in this case the K-25 Gaseous 

21 Diffusion Plant, the Oak Ridge Gaseous 

22 Diffusion Plant.
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1 And what you see is just the three 

2 big enrichment buildings in the background, 

3 the big K-25 U and the K-30 and K-33 buildings 

4 across the creek.

5 And they are certainly large, 

6 remarkable buildings. The K-25 U for example 

7 is one mile if you go from one end of the U to 

8 the other, so you know, we rode bicycles 

9 around when we worked there. You know, if you 

10 wanted to go to lunch, you had to ride a bike 

11 just to get some place.

12 But the point here is all those 

13 other buildings around it, there was an 

14 enormous amount of support work that went on 

15 constantly, and I think there was only one 

16 building added since the CIP/CUP program, and 

17 as Bob alluded to, this was a very big deal.

18 In removing the compressors and 

19 the other equipment in there, they were 

20 roughly the size of a boxcar, each one of 

21 them, about 4,000 had to be cleaned out.

22 And you were lifting them with 
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1 these overhead cranes, they needed to have 

2 overhead cranes, putting them on railcars, 

3 shipping them over to the different buildings 

4 that -- at Oak Ridge you had 1420 and you 

5 know, different, very large support buildings.

6 The support buildings were nearly 

7 as large as the facilities doing the 

8 enrichment itself, just for the cleanup, 

9 particularly the CIP/CUP program was a massive 

10 undertaking, where you had to dip these pieces 

11 of equipment in large tanks of nitric or 

12 chromic acid and TCE, and it was sent then to 

13 disposal.

14 One of the things that I always 

15 thought would have been a good idea to do, if 

16 you had more time, is to go at the daily log 

17 data about what was discharged, because some 

18 of those tanks, where they dipped the 

19 equipment in to clean them out, some of that 

20 was just discharged to a ditch out back and of 

21 course that was our environmental concern in 

22 our investigation.
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1 But there was an improved ability 

2 to do analysis of that and that might have 

3 been one source of data had we had more time 

4 to analyze it. But it would take a pretty big 

5 effort, and I can't guarantee there would be 

6 something there at the end if you did the 

7 analysis of all the waste coming from the 

8 CIP/CIP program.

9 But again, that was just one of 

10 the suggestions I made in entering into this.

11 And so let me just talk about the 

12 production of the report itself on slide 18. 

13 Overall, I appreciate John being 

14 complimentary, because it would be sort of a 

15 gift horse for me to say it myself.

16 Because I think that despite the 

17 limitations, it really was a massive and 

18 extraordinary effort and I think, again 

19 despite its shortcomings, it was pretty 

20 impressive that so much material was put 

21 together. 

22 It was a pretty big team effort, 
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1 people were working at the top of their game 

2 under a lot of pressure. And the kick-off 

3 really was around Labor Day in 1999.

4 But I think it's important to 

5 understand some of the background of it. 

6 Remember, if you go back to Labor Day 1999, 

7 and you may -- everybody here may have had 

8 something else going on in their lives, but 

9 for many of us this was a pretty intense 

10 period.

11 You recall that the Wen Ho Lee 

12 scandal was going on, the New York Times burst 

13 that out in March of 1999, the first 

14 polygraph, and the security concerns were 

15 raised in December of `98, and then after the 

16 New York Times burst it in March of `99 to be 

17 actual -- there was just a lot of pressure 

18 about what was going on with DOE, and who was 

19 in the headlines with security concerns in the 

20 Secretary's office, and just a real concern 

21 that why was DOE in the newspaper.

22 We had to just get DOE out of the 
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1 newspapers day to day, you know, all the way 

2 up to the indictment, and it didn't do 

3 anything to stop the indictment of course, 

4 which was December of `99.

5 And you know, while all that was 

6 happening and people were working to try to 

7 get DOE out of the newspapers day to day, you 

8 had the whole issue of recycled uranium came 

9 up, initially with the qui tam lawsuit. 

10 Qui tam refers to somebody acting 

11 on behalf of protecting the interests of the 

12 government, from some ancient Latin legal 

13 phrase, in this case from a false claims 

14 lawsuit that was led by the Natural Resources 

15 Defense Council in cooperation with some of 

16 the labor unions at the time.

17 And the central assertion was that 

18 there was new information made public by DOE 

19 that indicated that the use of recycled 

20 uranium had been known previously but not 

21 reported to DOE by the contractor, and so 

22 whatever bonuses the contractor had received 
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1 had been based on lack of full disclosure, and 

2 the allegation of a false claim that a 

3 contractor made a false claim and received 

4 some benefit based on information that was 

5 later known publicly to be incorrect.

6 And so the initiation of that 

7 false claims lawsuit, the qui tam suit, 

8 actually occurred when they actually came to 

9 visit me and delivered the initial 

10 documentation. 

11 There is apparently some legal 

12 requirement that you notify your target in 

13 advance, like an advanced notice of intent to 

14 sue. In this case you have to deliver the 

15 documentation to your target and to the 

16 relaters, as it is know, that's the equivalent 

17 of a plaintiff in a lawsuit, the relaters came 

18 and brought that to me because they knew I had 

19 been involved in recycling uranium and making 

20 public that information and you know, for 

21 whatever reason I was just a convenient person 

22 to deliver that information to, to inform the 
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1 Department officially of the intent of the 

2 relaters to bring this suit.

3 But of course, that was just the 

4 beginning, you know, it really went into the 

5 legal department mostly after that initially. 

6 But there was a lot of media scrutiny.

7 The Washington Post, as I think I 

8 list on the next page, l9, had two front-page 

9 articles about the whole issue of recycled 

10 uranium.

11 And of course, recycled uranium is 

12 sort of a complicated issue to explain in the 

13 public so they mentioned that I think only in 

14 passing in the articles, but essentially that 

15 there was more exposure than previously known, 

16 and I think that was the basic message to it.

17 But there were congressional 

18 hearings that went on in September. I just 

19 mention a couple of them there just because 

20 O&I and government affairs were doing some 

21 pretty heavy -- O&I is Oversight and 

22 Investigation -- and governmental affairs, it 
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1 had been previously chaired by Senator John 

2 Glenn, for whom Bob worked as an investigator 

3 for a while before he joined DOE himself.

4 But there was just an enormous 

5 amount of other types of pressure going on at 

6 the time, just constant letters, inquiries.

7 Even hearings that were not about 

8 recycled uranium -- if you went up to the Hill 

9 to do a briefing on your budget, very quickly 

10 the question started to turn around to what 

11 about recycled uranium, what about this 

12 lawsuit, you know, how big a deal is it, and 

13 most importantly for the appropriations 

14 committee, how much money is it going to cost 

15 us.

16 And that is really how 2000b came 

17 about, is trying to answer the question, well, 

18 how big a deal is this if there is a worker 

19 claim bill, as we were then proposing, and 

20 that is what eventually came to be enacted, as 

21 the Energy Employees Occupational Injury 

22 Compensation Program Act. We just call it the 
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1 worker comp bill.

2 If that bill was going to go to 

3 through, people didn't want to enact a bill 

4 without knowing what it was going to cost.

5 Well, one side wanted to know what 

6 it was going to cost, they were concerned 

7 about high cost, and another was simply 

8 concerned with, is this legitimate, is there 

9 any basis to this, or is this a spurious 

10 allegation.

11 So DOE 2000b was -- the intent was 

12 to just answer those two questions initially, 

13 and if we succeeded in answering those two 

14 questions, that would be a successful report.

15 And we had to constantly reminder 

16 ourselves, people working on it, that as much 

17 research as we went into to detail all the 

18 technical details, and I do think there's a 

19 remarkable amount of material given the short 

20 time period, it wasn't necessarily intended to 

21 be the last word, it was in a way the first 

22 word on it, to address those two questions.
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1 Again, number one, was there any 

2 legitimate technical basis to allege that 

3 there was the use of recycled uranium, and 

4 number two, how many facilities and 

5 consequently how many workers were affected to 

6 get kind of a ballpark estimate of the cost if 

7 you were to enact a worker comp bill.

8 I should mention one of the other 

9 pressures, and this may seem trivial, but it 

10 wasn't at the time. We were still trying to 

11 absorb a pretty major reorganization. 

12 As you know, DOE's organization 

13 was, going back to the Atomic Energy 

14 Commission, was done by operations offices, 

15 and so you think of Hanford as a site or 

16 Savannah River as a site, and each of those 

17 had an operations office, Ridgeland or 

18 Savannah River.

19 But Oak Ridge operations office 

20 wasn't just Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Oak Ridge 

21 operations office had a functional 

22 responsibility, largely for what we called the 
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1 secondaries. You know, in a nuclear warhead 

2 you have got a primary and secondary, and the 

3 secondary was mainly a uranium component.

4 So they were responsible for all 

5 the uranium facilities, so that included all 

6 the GDPs, Portsmouth, Paducah, Oak Ridge, you 

7 know, K-25, but also Fernald, Weldon Spring, 

8 all those facilities were managed out of Oak 

9 Ridge.

10 And there was somewhat of a 

11 geographic proximity but it was mainly a 

12 functional organization. It was one place 

13 where you had all the expertise for managing 

14 and processing uranium.

15 Well that changed, officially, in 

16 1994, but the changes were continuing right up 

17 until the late `90s, because you had, you 

18 know, 50 years or so of tradition and people 

19 and employees and contractors working for Oak 

20 Ridge operations in Tennessee, where the folks 

21 at Fernald reported to.

22 And what we did is we created a 
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1 new field office called the Ohio field office, 

2 and the mission of Ohio field office of course 

3 was clean-up, environmental management and not 

4 doing uranium production operations any 

5 longer.

6 That meant the type of personnel 

7 and the type of contracts and management you

8 had, were, instead of operations processing 

9 experts who -- some of them retired or were 

10 reassigned -- we had project managers 

11 overseeing clean-up contractors and clean-up 

12 experts.

13 And the reason this is relevant is 

14 because that changeover that happened in the 

15 mid-`90s, that was still going into the late 

16 `90s, I think it was somewhat of a problem 

17 trying to get those process experts working.

18 At Hanford it was a simple matter. 

19 You'd go down the hallway, the same guy was 

20 there at Ridgeland, or at Savannah River or at 

21 some of these other facilities.

22 In the case of Oak Ridge, they 
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1 were no longer involved or no longer even 

2 there. In some cases we brought them back and 

3 people were interviewed, wherever, you know, 

4 brought in for interviews and got the 

5 information.

6 But again, it was in the midst of 

7 this massive reorganization of -- going from 

8 an organization at Oak Ridge that had been 

9 there for 50 years to a whole new set of 

10 people.

11 New people were hired and the old 

12 people who had been responsible for Fernald 

13 were simply not there anymore. You were trying 

14 to do a report through a new organizational 

15 structure and that is the way these reports 

16 are done.

17 People at headquarters don't do 

18 the research, which probably doesn't surprise 

19 anybody that people in Washington don't do a 

20 lot of work.

21 But headquarters’ job is to set up 

22 the structure, oversee it, get the funding 
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1 mainly, you create templates, you organize 

2 people. 

3 But it was the people out in the 

4 field offices who did all the heavy lifting 

5 and in the case of Fernald, we didn't have the 

6 same people doing that heavy lifting who had 

7 been there.

8 So I don't want to dwell on that 

9 too much, but I think that was an important 

10 context of what was going on at the time. It 

11 just was an extra little barrier going on.

12 Okay, I mentioned the 

13 congressional hearings and the lawsuit and the 

14 lawsuit was found to be at least valid enough 

15 for the Justice Department to get involved in, 

16 and I am not even sure what the final outcome 

17 was.

18 But it's not really significant 

19 here. The important thing was that the lawsuit 

20 was going on at the time and Lockheed Martin 

21 was one of the targets and so it just, you 

22 know, it caused everybody to be very careful 
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1 about what information you provided to whom to 

2 make sure there wasn't any conflict of 

3 interest going on.

4 It wasn't a huge deal, but you 

5 know, the main thing is just added pressure. 

6 People kept asking about what's the status, 

7 DOE is being sued, or the contractors are 

8 being sued here.

9 But going back to the variety of 

10 reprocessing operations that we had to examine 

11 and obtain data from, just at Hanford you have 

12 got the multiple plants going on up there and 

13 as John said earlier, 

14 80 percent of the Pu was said to have come 

15 from Hanford, and that is not surprising given 

16 the long history and the multiple large-scale 

17 plants there.

18 Savannah River, you had to look at 

19 both F and H canyons, who had different 

20 missions, you know, F specialized in plutonium 

21 extraction. H did a variety of things, but 

22 mainly did some of the HEU recovery.
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1 West Valley was probably the 

2 smallest in terms of total throughput, but 

3 West Valley may have been the largest in terms 

4 of diversity of target.

5 They took a lot of -- of course 

6 the main goal was to try to demonstrate 

7 commercial reprocessing, which failed for 

8 economic reasons.

9 But it also took some of the 

10 material from Hanford and then we used some of 

11 the plutonium and in fact some of the reactor 

12 grade plutonium that was extracted there was 

13 used for a test out at Nevada Test Site to 

14 demonstrate whether or not you could actually 

15 make an operational warhead out of reactor 

16 grade plutonium. 

17 And that was one of the diversity 

18 of things done at West Valley. The answer by 

19 the way was yes, because that doesn't have a 

20 very good yield.

21 And then the next slide, 24, if 

22 you think about this in terms of at least a 
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1 two-sided matrix and permutation, each of 

2 these facilities was constantly tweaking their 

3 processes, and I am not going to get into all 

4 the details, but suffice it to say that people 

5 were changing the solvents they used, the 

6 organic phase compared to aqueous phase.

7 You had different additives being 

8 used, again HF was used more commonly at the 

9 Chem Plant in Idaho, but rarely used 

10 elsewhere, and that had very different impacts 

11 on the efficiency of extraction that occurred.

12 The technologies changed. We to 

13 this day I think try to keep classified some 

14 of the geometries of the later slab tanks that 

15 were developed for non-proliferation reasons, 

16 but suffices to say that the geometries were 

17 important and they were improved greatly over 

18 the years.

19 The geometry of a slab tank or an 

20 extraction column from the 1950s and `60s and 

21 `70s was much different, significantly 

22 different from what we later developed during 
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1 the mid-`70s and `80s to really improve the 

2 efficiency.

3 I mean, we would have really never 

4 had the super grade material we got out of 

5 Savannah River except for the integration of 

6 the target and the extraction and the 

7 improvement of the extraction efficiency.

8 And then of course temperature and 

9 pressure changes, even subtle things like 

10 that, people kept changing and the records are 

11 replete with examples of memos of chemical 

12 engineers trying to adjust everything to 

13 improve efficiency in whatever way they could.

14 So again going back to the 

15 question, was the data representative, and I 

16 can't necessarily answer that. That is a 

17 statistical question that would need to be 

18 examined.

19 But I could tell you that the use 

20 of data from the `80s, I would say was not 

21 necessarily representative of the multiplicity 

22 of operations and facilities that occurred to 
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1 produce recycled uranium over the many years, 

2 and it was something we were very aware of, as 

3 John mentioned earlier.

4 But getting this report out, the 

5 report was officially published in June, but 

6 the draft, which essentially when all the 

7 technical work was done before the lawyers and 

8 the policy people got into review, was done in 

9 April.

10 So if you kick it off on Labor Day 

11 and finish it in April, you have got nine 

12 months of very heavy duty work. It was not a 

13 fun Christmas, I can tell you.

14 But, I think everybody involved 

15 was pretty proud of what they did, but I also 

16 think that few would argue that it was fully 

17 comprehensive and necessarily representative, 

18 and that to do so would have required some 

19 follow-up work. It would have required quite a 

20 bit more time. 

21 But, you know, I left DOE soon 

22 after that in 2001 and it appears that none of 
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1 the expected follow-up analyses occurred. With 

2 that, am I going back over to John, or --

3 MR. STIVER: Jim, I have a follow4 up question for you. At the end of your write5 up that we put in the report, you listed three 

6 areas where you believe that -- you used 2000b 

7 as kind of a starting point, and made some 

8 significant improvements on that effort.

9 Could you talk about that just for 

10 a minute?

11 MR. WERNER: Well sure, and that is 

12 what I was alluding to at the end. I mean, if 

13 you know, I had my druthers, there's a number 

14 of analyses that it would have been good to 

15 back on, and I think as perhaps Paul at the 

16 table knows, I was, I wouldn't say obsessed, 

17 but certainly very interested in all the 

18 reprocessing facilities both at DOE when I was 

19 at a non-profit, and later in the later `80s 

20 and early `90s.

21 And for each one of these 

22 reprocessing plants, one could have, I think, 
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1 gone through all the, you know in some cases 

2 there's daily records or certainly monthly 

3 logs, and I actually went to the Hagley 

4 Museum, and I know some of the NIOSH folks 

5 went to the Hagley library too, and I was 

6 pretty dismayed to see that they had only very 

7 superficial information about that, when I 

8 know that there is more detailed information 

9 about the operations in each of those 

10 facilities, and it would have been interesting 

11 to have time to follow up on just going to 

12 each of those, and whatever archives exist.

13 And I know enough to know from 

14 having gone to NARA, the National Archives 

15 that those files are classified, so you would 

16 have to have somebody with a security 

17 clearance or wait for possibly two years or 

18 more for those to be declassified to look at 

19 each of those facilities.

20 But when I would look at them, I 

21 would want to ask the question, how did the RU 

22 characteristics change for each of the 
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1 locations, how did the RU change within each 

2 location for the process operation that was 

3 going on, and lastly, how, within a process 

4 operation at a facility, how did the RU change 

5 depending on the feed material that was being 

6 processed?

7 And those are some of the details 

8 that I think deserve to be examined and make 

9 sure that you are really understanding the 

10 characteristics of the RU being produced.

11 And then of course at each 

12 reprocessing facility you are getting 

13 consistent improvements in it, you know, how 

14 much did that change even within a facility, 

15 within a process, within a target, how much 

16 did sort of the tweaking of things like flow 

17 rates and temperatures and catalysts and 

18 things affect it.

19 And then you know, lastly, when 

20 you got the target material within a process, 

21 within a location, within a particular 

22 operation, how did switching from one target 
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1 material to another affect things?

2 Were there offset conditions going 

3 on, when we know that they didn't always have 

4 time to clean out the facilities. 

5 Cleaning out one of these canyons 

6 is a huge operation and you don't do it 

7 lightly. So if you could avoid having to do, 

8 you know, flush it out, you do it. You 

9 sometimes, you just, you bring in the next 

10 operation behind it. You know, they are called 

11 runs or kind of batch operations, so you 

12 dissolve a new feed material and then you feed 

13 in the dissolved material into your extraction 

14 process without necessarily flushing out. What 

15 effects did that have, too?

16 I think all those are more than 

17 just interesting. I think that they are 

18 relevant to answering the question about what 

19 the RU data was really representative of the 

20 range of conditions over time that occurred.

21 MR. STIVER: Okay, well, thank you 

22 Jim. Appreciate that very detailed historical 
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1 account. Is anybody ready for a break?

2 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: It's lunchtime 

3 and so I was thinking that we would break for 

4 an hour, be able to go get lunch and --

5 MR. STIVER: That's a good break 

6 point. We come back and talk about the site7 specific data and wrap it up probably in about 

8 half an hour or so.

9 MR. KATZ: It would be good to 

10 have some response too.

11 MS. BALDRIDGE: Could I make a 

12 correction? When I was speaking earlier, when 

13 we first got started, I was referring to the 

14 DOL instead of DOE and I think that was 

15 because I watched where AOL made this big 

16 purchase on the television before I left and I 

17 had the OL on my mind.

18 MR. KATZ: Okay. Right. Maybe for 

19 the transcription, if they could -- you just 

20 put a note by her comments, you keep the 

21 comments as they were said but if you could 

22 put a little parenthetical note that she 
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1 corrected herself with respect to attribution 

2 there.

3 So we are breaking for lunch and 

4 we will be back. It's by my watch, it's about 

5 -- so we will be back at one. Thank you 

6 everyone.

7 (Whereupon, the above-entitled 

8 matter went off the record at 11:51 a.m. and 

9 resumed at 1:03 p.m.)

10 

11 

12 

13 

14 

15 

16 

17 

18 

19 

20 

21 

22 

23 
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1 A-F-T-E-R-N-O-O-N S-E-S-S-I-O-N 

2 1:03 p.m.

3 MR. KATZ: Good afternoon. 

4 Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, 

5 Fernald Work Group. We are reconvening after a 

6 lunch break.

7 And let me just check on the line 

8 and see. Do we have Mr. Presley on the line?

9 MEMBER PRESLEY: I'm here.

10 MR. KATZ: Great. Thank you, Bob. 

11 Let me remind folks on the line to mute your 

12 phones. If you don't have a mute button, use 

13 *6. That will mute your phone. Use *6 again to 

14 take it off of mute, and Brad, we are back to 

15 your agenda.

16 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: We got done 

17 finishing SC&A just giving a -- going through 

18 their presentation. Wanted to give NIOSH an 

19 opportunity if they had anything to say on it 

20 or --

21 MR. ROLFES: Well, thank you, 

22 Brad. I know we just recently submitted a 
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1 White Paper, a memorandum as John had alluded 

2 to earlier, basically responding to some 

3 previous issues that SC&A had asked us about.

4 Since we have just seen these 

5 presentations today and our subject matter 

6 experts haven't had an opportunity to review 

7 this new information, we would probably prefer 

8 to wait until we have had more time to go 

9 through in detail each of these presentations, 

10 and we will prepare a written response to 

11 these.

12 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay, with that 

13 I'll turn the time back over to John.

14 MR. ROLFES: One other thing, I'm 

15 sorry, I forgot to add one point. We were 

16 talking about uncertainties in the levels of 

17 transuranic contaminants earlier on, and 

18 really, you know, what it comes down to is, 

19 you know, there are uncertainties.

20 And when we have uncertainties, we 

21 apply those to the benefit of the doubt of the 

22 claim when we are completing a dose 
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1 reconstruction.

2 That's not necessarily something 

3 that precludes a dose reconstruction from 

4 being done. It's just an added uncertainty. It 

5 doesn't become a precise estimate because we 

6 are applying what can be considered worst-case 

7 assumptions to an employee's claim in the dose 

8 reconstruction process.

9 So that's all I had to add, and if 

10 you would like to carry on with the rest?

11 MR. STIVER: Okay. All right.

12 MR. ROLFES: Thanks.

13 MR. STIVER: We will go back to 

14 the original presentation on RU issues 

15 110206a, slide number 25. 

16 And what I would like to do now is 

17 kind of move into the second half of the 

18 action items provided to us, which was to go 

19 out and look at what site-specific data we 

20 could find that might help clarify whether 

21 these bounding default values are in truth 

22 bounding, or if there are data that indicate 
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1 that there may have been higher levels 

2 encountered at certain times.

3 And on page 25, the first set of 

4 data we looked at was this set of baghouse 

5 dust collectors that was done basically with 

6 a new M&O when Westinghouse replaced NLO, in, 

7 I believe, 1985.

8 And a part of that program is to 

9 go back and look at, ascertain what kinds of 

10 emissions took place during the previous M&O's 

11 operation period.

12 And so what they did is they took 

13 a whole series of samples from these stacks 

14 downstream of the dust collectors, and what 

15 they were really trying to get a handle on was 

16 what were the uranium discharge rates over 

17 that 34-year period.

18 And as kind of a -- not really --

19 I guess a side-study, and, you know, it would 

20 be really nice to know what other 

21 radionuclides were in these emissions.

22 And so what they did is they went 
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1 and they took these baghouse dust collectors 

2 and I believe the little memo that Mark sent 

3 out had a nice diagram of what the dust 

4 collector looks like.

5 It's kind of like what you would 

6 expect in a wood shop, we're not talking about 

7 a giant scale. You have got an inlet. It's got 

8 a cyclonic collector with a bag at the bottom 

9 and then you have got a set of filters and 

10 then the air is drawn up through those filters 

11 and then out through the stack.

12 And where most of the sampling was 

13 done is on the stack, downstream of the 

14 collectors. That is what was used to ascertain 

15 what the releases of uranium were to the 

16 atmosphere as part of NESHAPs compliance.

17 And so they collected a set of 

18 data that were -- you can see on the slide 

19 here, kind of summarized it here. They 

20 analyzed for 14 radionuclides in addition to 

21 uranium.

22 They took 36 samples all told and 
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1 there were actually 53 functioning collectors 

2 at the time of 1985, when these were done, and 

3 they selected 36, but they didn't really 

4 explain why they didn't look at some of the 

5 other samples, except for three.

6 And these were samples that didn't 

7 have high uranium content. And in the context 

8 of what the study was all about, which was to 

9 ascertain uranium discharges, I can understand 

10 that.

11 However some of -- at least one of 

12 the sample was for a magnesium fluoride 

13 dumping station in Plant 1 and given these 

14 mechanisms and chemical processes that were 

15 taking place that could arise and elevate and 

16 enhance concentrations of plutonium and some 

17 of these other constituents, it would have 

18 been nice to have that data as well.

19 And I might also point out that 

20 this is not exclusive from the data that was 

21 analyzed in DOE 2000b. This was actually part 

22 of the data set.
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1 So it not only includes receipts 

2 to Fernald from other process plants or from 

3 production plants, but it also includes data 

4 that were actually collected on site.

5 We limited our analysis to 

6 plutonium-239, 240, neptunium, technetium and 

7 strontium-90. We also looked at cesium-137 

8 because there were enhanced levels, even 

9 though there is no default level assigned to 

10 cesium.

11 We did not look at thorium even 

12 though there were very high levels of thorium 

13 with dose potential far in excess of uranium 

14 doses.

15 And the reason being is that 

16 thorium production took place in Fernald from 

17 about 1954 on into the `70s, and so most of 

18 the thorium we are seeing in the 232 and the 

19 228 is a result of those manufacturing 

20 processes.

21 And so NIOSH has a different 

22 methodology in place for analyzing those types 
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1 of doses and it's really outside the scope of 

2 this particular study.

3 We can move on to page 26. First 

4 thing we need to talk about are the gaps and 

5 limitations in this data set. First of all 

6 it's obviously a sparse set, 36 samples 

7 collected in one year.

8 So it's a snapshot in time. Like I 

9 said, there were 53 operational collectors and 

10 processes flow with uranium content were 

11 omitted, and well, this is understandable, as 

12 I said, in the context of this study.

13 There were no data reported for 

14 the refinery, Plant 2 and 3, although there 

15 was a study that looked at DWEs, I believe, in 

16 `83, I think it was like `85 and `86, which is 

17 actually reported in your RU report. I believe 

18 you have that as an attachment to that. 

19 MR. ROLFES: There were daily 

20 weighted exposure results, a lot of them done 

21 in the earlier years at Fernald, prior to 

22 1968.
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1 MR. STIVER: Yes, so there were --

2 there are some other data but they are not 

3 tied to uranium content, but there are some 

4 air concentrations of uranium from Plant 2/3.

5 MR. ROLFES: That particular plant 

6 or grouping of plants was one of the lowest 

7 air concentrations.

8 MR. STIVER: Yes, they were fairly 

9 low level, fairly low concentrations at 2/3. 

10 At Plant 8, there are limited data there, and 

11 this is an important plant because of the 

12 preprocessing of the incinerator ash and tower 

13 ash which had to go through that plant in 

14 order to prepare for feeding into the 

15 refinery.

16 Another big issue here is that 

17 these baghouse collections are aggregated in 

18 mixes that are collected over an indeterminate 

19 period of time.

20 We don't know how long those 

21 collectors were sampling before these grab 

22 samples were taken. It could have been a year. 
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1 It could have been a few months. It could have 

2 been a longer period of time than that.

3 So what we have then is a 

4 situation where if you have episodic releases 

5 into the atmosphere, or into the workplace 

6 environment, of high ratios of constituents, 

7 intermingled with dispersion uranium 

8 production or low content uranium, you are 

9 going to have a diluting out process that 

10 takes place.

11 So what you see in that sample is 

12 not going to necessarily represent the 

13 concentration that a worker might have 

14 experienced during the time that that RU 

15 material was actually handled.

16 So you can only go down and those 

17 values never represent a maximum of what was 

18 actually present in the atmosphere.

19 Finding 5, I put here at the 

20 bottom that we feel the data is not an 

21 adequate basis for establishing default 

22 levels. However we do feel it is useful in 
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1 determining whether the NIOSH defaults are 

2 bounding for all classes of workers.

3 If we go on to slide 27, this is 

4 kind of a summary of the dust collectors 

5 covered data and what we looked at here, of 

6 all the 36 samples for all the different 

7 radionuclides, we picked out those that were 

8 at or above, or close to or above the NIOSH 

9 defaults. 

10 And you can see, those are all 

11 highlighted here in red bold. You see Plant 1, 

12 there's three samples there. Obviously, the 

13 Titan Mill, the sample GT64 is the highest by 

14 far. 

15 You can see the very top line 

16 across the second row on the table is the 

17 default levels, the NIOSH defaults, in units 

18 of microcuries per kilogram uranium.

19 And then down the left-hand column 

20 are the plants that had samples that exceeded 

21 or were close to at least one of these 

22 constituent level defaults.
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1 DR. MAURO: So plutonium 6.3 is 

2 the anchor for the default?

3 MR. STIVER: 6.3 is the anchor 

4 that corresponds to --

5 DR. MAURO: And we want to compare 

6 the other numbers with the 6.3?

7 MR. STIVER: Yes.

8 DR. MAURO: At least for 

9 plutonium. Okay. 

10 MR. STIVER: And you can see Titan 

11 Mill is obviously sky-high. It's about 3,500 

12 parts per billion and the packaging station 

13 also is knocking on the door, 6.3.

14 Plant 5, there's a couple of 

15 samples that are at the jolters - GT67, I'm 

16 not exactly sure what that one was. It should 

17 be 2.32, not 232.

18 And then Plant 8, one of the --

19 the box from the scrubbers was the second 

20 highest plutonium concentration. We are not 

21 really sure what the reason for that might be.

22 Neptunium, you can see, Plant 5, 
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1 you have got three samples that are fairly 

2 elevated. One is actually higher than the 

3 default, that was from the graphite machine 

4 shop.

5 And recall that the graphite and 

6 the casting area -- the graphite had -- tended 

7 to concentrate the materials in similar ways 

8 that the dolomite did with the magnesium 

9 fluoride.

10 And also for Plant 5, and we'll 

11 stick on that for just a second, you'll see 

12 that strontium and cesium, basically the 

13 calcium and potassium analogues in the 

14 periodic table are also elevated, and I think 

15 this relates to the tendency for them to 

16 migrate into the magnesium fluoride.

17 MR. MORRIS: John?

18 MR. STIVER: Yes.

19 MR. MORRIS: This is Bob Morris 

20 here.

21 MR. STIVER: Yes, Bob, go ahead.

22 MR. MORRIS: Could you clarify the 
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1 units on this? Are these -- for example, the 

2 220 value for the Titan Mill?

3 MR. STIVER: Yes.

4 MR. MORRIS: Is that microcuries 

5 per kilogram of uranium or microcuries per 

6 kilogram of mass sample?

7 MR. STIVER: Microcuries per 

8 kilogram uranium.

9 MR. MORRIS: Okay. Thank you.

10 MR. STIVER: Okay?

11 MR. MORRIS: And that's true for 

12 all of these numbers?

13 MR. STIVER: That's for all those 

14 numbers, yes.

15 MR. MORRIS: Okay.

16 MR. STIVER: I probably should 

17 have put that in the table. 

18 MR. ROLFES: John, I got a 

19 question also.

20 MR. STIVER: Yes.

21 MR. ROLFES: These were from 1985 

22 now?
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1 MR. STIVER: This is from 1985, 

2 that's correct.

3 MR. ROLFES: Okay. Then I believe 

4 these samples were collected as a result of 

5 processing the POOS material, then.

6 MR. STIVER: I think this was --

7 it was part of an overall process of the new 

8 M&O coming on board and trying to beef up the 

9 health and safety program and I really wanted 

10 to do some --

11 MR. ROLFES: Okay. From my 

12 recollection, you had earlier on said that 500 

13 grams of plutonium was in the recycled uranium 

14 but you didn't really specify which site 

15 received what.

16 And I wanted to clarify that that 

17 500 grams wasn't necessarily all handled at 

18 Fernald.

19 MR. STIVER: Oh no, no, no, not, 

20 that was for the entire complex. 

21 MR. ROLFES: Right, right, okay.

22 MR. STIVER: Yes.
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1 MR. ROLFES: But I think that the 

2 74 grams that were sent to Fernald over the 

3 entire history, and I believe about 25 grams 

4 came in the one shipment from the Paducah --

5 MR. STIVER: About 50 percent came 

6 from -- at least of the documented materials, 

7 about 50 percent came from that.

8 MR. ROLFES: And so --

9 MR. STIVER: And that's what we are 

10 seeing here.

11 MR. ROLFES: And what we are 

12 seeing here, correct, is the results of 

13 processing that high plutonium bearing 

14 material, which was a different kind of 

15 material separate from the remainder of the 

16 recycled uranium that was processed.

17 MR. STIVER: It would be different 

18 than the trioxide coming in from Hanford and 

19 some of the other feed materials.

20 MR. ROLFES: Okay.

21 MR. STIVER: The tower ash and the 

22 incinerator ash were elevated and these would 
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1 then -- they would feed through Plant 8 and 

2 then back into the refinery.

3 MR. ROLFES: And I don't recall 

4 the numbers, but I believe the first year that 

5 they started bioassaying the workers for 

6 plutonium exposures was 1986.

7 MR. STIVER: Yes, they started in 

8 `86. That was -- I think I brought that up 

9 earlier on in the discussion.

10 MR. ROLFES: Okay. I just wanted 

11 to clarify.

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: Could you clarify 

13 now, these values are the values found in the 

14 collectors, or is this the output here?

15 MR. STIVER: No, no, this is the 

16 actual dust that was collected in the bag.

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: That was what I 

18 wanted to --

19 MR. STIVER: Yes. The stuff that 

20 went out would have gone through the filter 

21 and down range.

22 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right, this is --
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1 MR. STIVER: This is not an 

2 outdoor area. We do have some outdoor samples 

3 we are going to talk about in a minute.

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right. I just 

5 wanted to clarify that. So this is the higher 

6 concentration.

7 MR. STIVER: Yes.

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: Okay.

9 MR. STIVER: And let's see. Let's 

10 move onto the -- let me bump down here. Slide 

11 28, this is the discussion of some of the 

12 higher values. Obviously, the highest reported 

13 plutonium neptunium values came from this 

14 Titan Mill sample, GT64 in Building 1, and I 

15 just have those values restated here.

16 And it should be interesting to 

17 note that when you put this back in the units 

18 of PPP, that plutonium content was about half 

19 the maximum that was ever reported in the 

20 tower ash.

21 The tower ash, the highest in the 

22 16 hoppers was about 7,700 parts per billion. 
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1 And here we are three years later, after the 

2 material was begun to process, I believe in 

3 1982 and so right on to about throughout `89.

4 So here you are three years into 

5 the processing, and you have this baghouse 

6 dust which we know typically is going to under 

7 represent workplace exposures, and yet you are 

8 still at half the maximum value.

9 So that is a -- it's a high value 

10 but I think it represents a data point that is 

11 not an anomaly, that really represents a 

12 concentrating process which we are going to be 

13 getting into in just a second.

14 At the Titan Mill, I'll tell you a 

15 little bit about that, it was a ring-roller 

16 mill and they processed the enriched slag and 

17 recycled materials for use in Plant 5 and also 

18 for chemical processing in the refinery.

19 So this would -- essentially they 

20 -- you can imagine the scenario where they 

21 bring in one of these hoppers of this POOS 

22 material and they want to break it up, process 
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1 it and mill it so that they can run it through 

2 the refinery.

3 But after it has gone through the 

4 refinery, through Plant 4, Plant 5, the 

5 uranium metal has been produced, then you have 

6 this magnesium slag that is becoming enriched, 

7 and these materials.

8 And then this material then is recycled 

9 back through Plant 1, through the Titan Mill, 

10 to be ground up into the proper consistency to 

11 generate these refractory liners with the 

12 double pots.

13 And I believe it was 50 percent of 

14 the plutonium and about 80 percent of the 

15 neptunium reports into the slag. And so every 

16 pass around, you are getting an enhancement, 

17 you are getting an enrichment in these 

18 constituents in that magnesium fluoride.

19 And so I think what this 

20 represents is this kind of concentrating loop 

21 going on between Plant 1 and the Titan Mill in 

22 Plant 5, by which plutonium and these other 
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1 contaminants concentrate and persist. 

2 And this is the, in our view, is a 

3 source of elevated exposure potential in those 

4 two plants during the time of processing, and 

5 in addition to that we feel that, you know, 

6 due to the fact that if you look back -- I 

7 think I -- if you go back to slide 27, I have 

8 the percent uranium by weight over here in the 

9 second column, and you can see the graphite 

10 machine shop. 

11 This is analogous to the magnesium 

12 fluoride. That's about 0.1 percent uranium, so 

13 it's very low in uranium and trying to tie 

14 that back to uranium bioassay results, it 

15 almost indicates to me that there should be a 

16 different way of looking at this particular 

17 source of exposure separate from the method 

18 that has been proposed. But we will get into 

19 that in more detail in just a minute.

20 So basically I put in a little 

21 discussion on the high values here in Plant 5. 

22 This is all documented in DOE 2000b and in our 
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1 report.

2 This thermite reduction process, 

3 how you get basically the magnesium turnings 

4 mixed up with the fluoride. They put it in 

5 this -- essentially it's called a bomb, they 

6 put it in the furnace, they heat it, it gets 

7 to a certain point, this thermite reaction 

8 takes place, you have got thousands of 

9 degrees.

10 Occasionally these things blew up 

11 and contaminated the entire building, but in 

12 the process the magnesium gets converted to 

13 magnesium fluoride, uranium fluoride gets 

14 reduced to uranium metal.

15 So a lot of this magnesium 

16 fluoride is being generated. I would say about 

17 half of that was recycled. Some of it was 

18 disposed of, so there's a certain percentage 

19 that is being recycled -- it's absorbing more 

20 material on each pass, and so there's a 

21 concentration mechanism here.

22 I also put in here that in the 
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1 NIOSH report, they basically said that this 

2 measure is meaningless in subgroups in which 

3 there is very little uranium, and I guess it 

4 is if you are looking at only that particular 

5 assay method.

6 I think what this really points 

7 is, as I said a minute ago, that we may need 

8 to look at a different approach to determining 

9 what the concentration might have been in the 

10 fluoride.

11 I know there are data out there 

12 that report parts per billion of uranium in 

13 that part, so they had to get a measurement of 

14 the plutonium and the neptunium at some point, 

15 and whether that data are available or not is 

16 a point of question.

17 Slide 30. Continued discussion of 

18 the high values. This is -- some of the 

19 workers in certain jobs, as we said, may have 

20 been exposed to higher levels.

21 These would be guys who were 

22 manning the dumping stations and cleaning 
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1 equipment. We have one example of graphite 

2 molds that were cleaned out -- these were 

3 interviews with the actual workers.

4 And one guy said they would 

5 actually stick their heads way down as far as 

6 they could in these pots. They had this, 

7 basically a broom handle with steel wool on 

8 the end, and they would scrub the inside of 

9 this thing out.

10 And while they were doing this, 

11 their head was down in the pot and they were 

12 not wearing any respiratory protection at all.

13 And so you definitely have a high 

14 potential for intermittent exposures to this 

15 material. Actually, for the guys who were in 

16 that particular job, this would be a very high 

17 exposure.

18 And you also have the uranium, I 

19 mean, look at the DWE data for Plant 5 and 

20 Plant 9 for thorium, these are some of the 

21 highest feeding zone samples were for the guys 

22 that were in the bomb breakout areas and pot-
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1 cleaning operations.

2 Also, the bomb explosions, these 

3 resulted in very high dose loading, so you 

4 have these different factors all combining 

5 together to create an environment for a 

6 certain category of workers, which may not be 

7 amenable to this approach in the NIOSH report.

8 So this Slide 31 is kind of a 

9 summary of what is going on in this Plant 5, 

10 Plant 1 loop. The data for -- the dust bags

11 data show that -- would tend to corroborate 

12 this as a concentrating mechanism.

13 The neptunium levels were elevated 

14 in three of the 14 Plant 5 dust samples, 

15 strontium-90 was high, we saw that.

16 The highest neptunium level was in 

17 the graphite machine shop and so we feel that 

18 -- as opposed to the sources of elevated 

19 exposure, it wasn't limited to the building up 

20 of POOS material and then so you have -- it is 

21 indeed the case that the workers were provided 

22 with airline respirators when they were 
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1 processing the POOS material to go into the 

2 refinery and also in Plant 4 and Plant 8.

3 It doesn't appear to me that this 

4 particular category of workers would be 

5 captured in those types of processes, and 

6 especially when you look at the long period in 

7 which this was going on from `82 all the way 

8 through `89.

9 It's hard to believe that -- you 

10 know, given the state of the health and safety 

11 program when Westinghouse came in, that during 

12 that intervening, earlier four- to five-year 

13 period, that these workers' health and 

14 respiratory protection was paramount. 

15 Slide 32. We also went ahead and 

16 did some statistics on the dust data. We did 

17 log-normal fits. We got normal score plots for 

18 all the different buildings and all the 

19 radionuclides.

20 These are our figures, 1 through 

21 32 of attachment 3. They show the log-normal 

22 distribution does fit the dust data very well, 
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1 despite the limited sample sizes.

2 And we just summarized here for 

3 the different plants, 1, 4, 5 and 8, the GSDs, 

4 we list what those are, and in certain cases, 

5 the log-normal -- for Plant 1, the log-normal 

6 mean was consistent with the arithmetic mean.

7 But the little caveat here that 

you know, given that data set, the 95th 8 

9 percentile could be more representative of 

10 Titan and general milling workers, or workers 

11 that were proximal to those operations.

12 Plant 4 was kind of interesting. 

13 You saw for technetium-99 there's some samples 

14 basically from the hydrofluorination banks 

15 that were really, really high.

16 The arithmetic -- the log-normal 

17 mean was 15 times higher than the arithmetic 

18 mean, so that shows you that there is some 

19 little subgroup that is getting smeared up in 

20 this giant log-normal distribution, a GSD of 

21 20.

22 And that is -- when you go back to 
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1 the source documentation on that, they did 

2 identify that technetium was volatilizing 

3 during the high temperature processes in that 

4 --

5 MR. MORRIS: This is Bob Morris.

6 MR. STIVER: Yes.

7 MR. MORRIS: So you are saying 

8 that you have GSDs of 20 or 36? Are those 

9 realistic approximations of a true data set?

10 MR. STIVER: I think what's that 

11 telling you is that there are some high-end 

12 activities -- that there is some -- there's 

13 probably a separate sub-distribution, but in 

14 the overall data set, it's driving the upper 

15 bound of the GSD, yes.

16 MR. MORRIS: It makes me think 

17 that that's not a very well picked data set.

18 MR. STIVER: Well, maybe it is, 

19 maybe it isn't. I think for strontium-90 

20 there's just a few samples that were elevated, 

21 and those were related to the activities in 

22 Plant 5, where there was a concentration in 
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1 those few samples that were involving the bomb 

2 reduction operations.

3 So yes, you can really identify --

4 overall, it really indicates statistically 

5 that there is a sub-population possibly, 

6 either that or a very, very widely diverse set 

7 of different processing materials being 

8 analyzed here.

9 In this case, I think we are 

10 looking at a sub-population and our concern is 

11 that the sub-population is not being 

12 adequately addressed. Plant 5, you have got 

13 the strontium-90, it's just ridiculously high. 

14 MEMBER ZIEMER: I have never heard 

15 of a log-normal distribution with GSDs as 

16 large as --

17 MR. STIVER: Well, yes, this is 

18 just a log-normal fit. This is just to show, 

19 just to illustrate the fact that there are 

20 some points that are way out there.

21 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes. I mean, the 36 

22 --
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1 MR. STIVER: Is that really a log2 normal? 

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well --

4 MR. STIVER: Is it really best 

5 defined by a log-normal? All the data are --

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, I mean, a 

7 standard deviation of three to five is pretty 

8 big, I mean it gives you a big tail. I can't 

9 even think --

10 MR. STIVER: Think of what it 

11 looks like, you have got two or three samples 

12 that are very high --

13 (Simultaneous speakers.)

14 MEMBER ZIEMER: There's a point way 

15 out there that are part of the same 

16 distribution --

17 MR. STIVER: And this also relates 

18 to the fact that there was a very sparse data 

19 set.

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes.

21 MR. STIVER: And you have captured 

22 some very high operations and you have got 
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1 some others that are very low. And so, you 

2 know, if you were able to go through and do a 

3 comprehensive sampling process, you would 

4 probably see two or maybe three distributions 

5 --

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: We don't have the 

7 true mean, which may be much higher actually, 

8 or it's a very different distribution. It does 

9 look very strange.

10 MR. STIVER: Yes, it does. And so 

11 that is really what we were able to discern 

12 from this dust collector data. Like I said, 

13 it's not adequate for generating any kind of a 

14 bounding value, but it certainly asks some 

15 questions on whether the defaults that NOISH 

16 are using are really applicable to all 

17 categories of workers. They have to be 

18 addressed.

19 The next set of data is on page 

20 33. This is the perimeter air sampling data 

21 that Bob Barton located in the DOE task force 

22 report, 1985, also reported in the Fernald `87 
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1 data set for which the dust collector data 

2 were a subset.

3 And this is looking at the 1983 

4 environmental monitoring report. I have listed 

5 the reference here as NLCO-2018. They have a 

6 nice little map there that shows where the 

7 samples were collected around the site 

8 boundaries, and they went out, they had a very 

9 detailed description of how the samples were 

10 collected, the filter dimensions, the flow 

11 rate, the diameter of the sampling apparatus.

12 And they changed the filters out 

13 weekly, and what they reported was an annual 

14 average of 53 samples, and as you can see 

15 here, samples 1 through 5 are clearly over 100 

16 parts per billion plutonium.

17 Sample 6 is close at 94 and then 

18 sample 3 is about half the default level --

19 sample 7, excuse me. Neptunium was high but 

20 not exceedingly. The default BS3 was actually 

21 getting close.

22 And it's interesting, if you go on 
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1 to slide 34, the report in the narrative here 

2 is that the values in `83 are about 10 times 

3 higher than in `82 for plutonium.

4 And this also coincides with a 

5 period of the POOS processing that was taking 

6 place and so you have kind of a confluence of 

7 data sets here.

8 You have got the baghouse data for 

9 Plant 1 and Plant 5 and now you have the 

10 perimeter samples that are also showing for 

11 that year there was a 10-fold increase in 

12 plutonium concentrations -- or ratios, excuse 

13 me -- for five out of the seven site 

14 boundaries.

15 So this would tend to corroborate 

16 this notion that there's a process by which 

17 this material was being concentrated and it's 

18 actually being reflected in the downstream 

19 samples. 

20 And even given the dilution that 

21 is taking place, by the time this material is 

22 collected on the boundary, we are still seeing 
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1 about twice the default level.

2 DR. MAURO: So you have got a 

3 kilometer away, whatever the distance is, 

4 that's picking up air dust samples over the 

5 course of a given year, and in that year, the 

6 ratio, the default number we are looking at is 

7 100, you are seeing plutonium concentrations 

8 that exceed it.

9 Now the numbers that -- the air 

10 samples that are being pulled have to reflect 

11 the integration of all of the releases 

12 occurring from the plant, so it's sort of like 

13 a smearing average of all the different lots 

14 of stacks sending stuff out, and also time.

15 Now, when I saw this, it said to 

16 me, my goodness, that 100 can't be a good 

17 number, because in fact, that means there are 

18 locations in the plant that are -- where it's 

19 got to be a lot higher than 100.

20 Now the only thing that came to 

21 mind that would say that maybe NIOSH is okay 

22 with 100 is that if the source of that --
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1 let's say the one that is causing this to be 

2 so high, happened to come from a location in 

3 the plant where let's say the what-do-you4 call-it is being handled, the tower ash.

5 Is it possible that the tower ash 

6 is, where it's 7,000 parts per billion, is one 

7 of the contributors, and look, I'm always 

8 looking for places where our position might be 

9 soft. And I say how in the world can you get 

10 this number and still say the 100 parts per 

11 billion is a good number?

12 The only thing that I could think 

13 of is if we are looking at -- there's only one 

14 source of high plutonium and that is the tower 

15 ash, and that is coming out of a particular 

16 building at a particular time.

17 Now I don't know if that was going 

18 on in `86 and it's making its release but the 

19 workers that are working on it inside that 

20 building, they are all protected, so they are 

21 not experiencing that ratio, and -- but there 

22 is something going out and that commingles 
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1 with everything else that is coming out that 

2 is much lower.

3 And what you are seeing at the 

4 back end of the process is an integration 

5 where you are still above the 100, but that 

6 doesn't mean that you have got lots of 

7 locations where there are workers in the 

8 plants that are above 100.

9 That's the only way I can 

10 reconcile these numbers with the possibility 

11 that 100 might be okay. Just look, this is 

12 all. Forget about everything else we have 

13 talked about.

14 Now, was the year that the air 

15 samples was collected, we were seeing this, 

16 was that the very same time period when the 

17 7,000 parts per billion material was being 

18 processed?

19 MR. STIVER: They started 

20 processing the POOS material in 1982.

21 DR. MAURO: Oh.

22 MR. STIVER: `83, you see a 
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1 tenfold increase. Now we have previously 

2 discussed this operation going on in Plant 1 

3 of the Titan Mill, where the POOS material and 

4 also the incinerator ash and other high 

5 sources were being ground up and particalized 

6 to go through the refinery in Plant 3, and 

7 also through Plant 8, so you have got Plant 3, 

8 4 and 8 all involved.

9 And ultimately it ends up in Plant 

10 5, where you have this concentrating process. 

11 And so you do have a situation where you 

12 probably have limited stack effluent -- you 

13 have hotspots. 

14 You have point sources here that 

15 are elevated, and those are being diluted out 

16 with other sources that are obviously not, so 

17 there are certain areas in that plant, certain 

18 categories of workers that we have kind of 

19 tried to demonstrate here that could possibly 

20 have been exposed to these elevated levels 

21 during the processing chemistry that was going 

22 on.
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1 And that is in turn reflected in 

2 these somewhat diluted yet still high values -

3 - 

4 DR. MAURO: Ratio to ratio, and we 

5 are seeing the ratio after it's been 

6 commingled with all the other uranium coming 

7 from the rest of the --

8 MR. STIVER: It's also in every 

9 direction, of course the winds blow prevailing 

10 from one direction or another, but all told, 

11 except for one sample -- one station, they are 

12 all elevated.

13 DR. MAURO: Just to jump in a 

14 little bit, as you iron out this process I was 

15 staying close to the whole thing and I always 

16 like to listen to -- collectively, when the 

17 story starts to coalesce in your mind.

18 The weight of evidence seems to 

19 be, to me -- and this is what I would believe 

20 no matter where I was sitting -- the weight of 

21 evidence seems to me that there's 100 numbers 

22 a week. There's just too many places, given 
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1 the story Jim told -- combine that with the 

2 grab samples from the dust collectors and the 

3 fact that some of them were above, combine 

4 that with the dolomite issue and combine that 

5 with the boundaries, air sampling of the 

6 boundary.

7 You know, to me, it all boils down 

8 to, you know, we don't have an answer to this, 

9 but I got to tell you that 100 does not look 

10 good, notwithstanding the argument about the 

11 10 parts per billion and multiply by 10, you 

12 know, on first blush, sounds like, well, 

13 that's pretty good.

14 But then when you look at the 

15 data, the way data just screams at you. Isn't 

16 there something wrong with that 100 parts per 

17 billion? I mean, I am ready to hear an 

18 argument why this data and everything you just 

19 said does not undermine the 100 parts per 

20 billion, but I've got to tell you, I can't 

21 think of a way to prop up that 100 parts per 

22 billion.
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1 MR. ROLFES: Let me ask a question 

2 of SC&A then. What did the environmental 

3 perimeter concentrations for other years 

4 besides 1983 show? Did they show ratios that 

5 exceeded our --

6 MR. STIVER: This was the only 

7 data set we were able to locate.

8 MR. ROLFES: Okay, well, you did 

9 mention that the air concentrations were 10 

10 times higher than 1982.

11 MR. STIVER: It was mentioned in 

12 this report. Now there may be additional 

13 samples from other ASERs. This was the one 

14 that was kind of unique in that this was when 

15 Westinghouse was trying to really get their 

16 house in order and identify what the releases 

17 were for the previous years.

18 And so that was reported, whether 

19 the subsequent years may have data similar to 

20 this that we could then go back and compare, 

21 that would certainly be one of the first 

22 things I would look into.
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1 MR. ROLFES: Right. Right. We 

2 can't really base a decision based on one year 

3 --

4 MR. STIVER: Yes, exactly.

5 MR. ROLFES: -- when we have got a 

6 previous year that says that the 

7 concentrations were 10 times lower, which 

8 would make them less than 100 parts per 

9 billion.

10 MR. STIVER: But yet you have a 

11 process that occurs in that year which gives 

12 you a plausible explanation for why it went up 

13 by a factor of 10.

14 MR. ROLFES: Exactly.

15 MR. STIVER: And if you can then 

16 look at subsequent years beyond that, that 

17 would --

18 DR. MAURO: I'm not disagreeing 

19 with what you are saying, it's just that this 

20 does raise into question, and if the outcome 

21 of everything you looked at, the dust 

22 collectors and these air samples all came in 
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1 under 100, and perhaps well under 10, because 

2 we keep talking about the 10, I'd say, their 

3 arguments are compelling.

4 If everything seemed to ring true 

5 that 10 is really a roof, but that's not what 

6 came back out of this, just, that's what it 

7 says. 

8 Now I'll be the first to admit, 

9 you know, there may be nuance here that I'm 

10 missing, but it's simple. This 100 is not 

11 holding up very well.

12 MR. ROLFES: Sure. I would expect 

13 that if we had plutonium being processed, this 

14 special material that was being processed and 

15 we didn't see that elevated concentration on 

16 the air monitoring data, that would raise some 

17 suspicions.

18 But since we have that data and it 

19 has shown that the concentrations were in fact 

20 higher, that tends to corroborate the story 

21 that the material was different and received 

22 special focus.
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1 And so, you know, we have chosen 

2 our defaults based upon the processing of this 

3 single shipment or single handful of shipments 

4 of material versus the other thousands of 

5 shipments of material that get concentrations 

6 below 10 parts per billion.

7 And as you have said, we have 

8 jumped up in order of magnitude, essentially 

9 because of the small set of higher transuranic 

10 contaminated materials that were sent to 

11 Fernald in the late 1970s and early 1980s, 

12 processed in the 1980s.

13 So you know, we could certainly 

14 look back. We feel that what we have got is 

15 claimant-favorable and I'll let John continue 

16 his presentation here and we will certainly 

17 respond to this in writing.

18 MR. STIVER: I think that you are 

19 right in that you have -- 100 parts per 

20 billion is probably good for a good number of 

21 workers for a good part of the time in certain 

22 areas of the plant.
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1 I think what this shows is that 

2 there are classes of workers for which the 100 

3 parts per billion is just not a strong number. 

4 It could have been significantly higher, even 

5 up to an order of magnitude higher.

6 MR. ROLFES: That's true and you 

7 have got to also consider the set of bioassay 

8 data that we have for plutonium.

9 MR. STIVER: Oh, I know, I know. 

10 We looked at that.

11 MR. ROLFES: Okay.

12 MR. STIVER: And unfortunately it 

13 is a very limited data set, basically it was 

14 done in response to a spill that took place in 

15 `86, I believe, and they sampled the workers, 

16 I think there was only a total of about 400 of 

17 them that were in Plant 4 and Plant 8. 

18 MR. ROLFES: However, any previous 

19 exposures that those workers incurred would 

20 have been detected if they had a significant 

21 enough intake of plutonium.

22 MR. STIVER: If they were the same 
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1 workers.

2 MR. ROLFES: If they were the same 

3 workers, that's correct. And so you have that 

4 data, if that is available to us, and as you 

5 had indicated before, you know, there were 

6 roughly 10 individuals who had results which 

7 were around the MDA, and they were lung8 counted. 

9 I guess the person that had, I 

10 think there was one person that actually had a 

11 positive or what was deemed to be a positive 

12 sample based on the calculations that were 

13 done at that time, and that individual ended 

14 up not having a positive lung burden when he 

15 was counted at Hanford.

16 MR. STIVER: Yes, I think there 

17 was some issue about the counting interval or 

18 the elapsed time being too long for it to have 

19 been detected.

20 But yes, it shows that there is a 

21 subgroup who were sampled with this one 

22 particular operation in these two plants, 
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1 during the initial processing, until they had 

2 the spill and they had to run it out.

3 That doesn't count for the people 

4 who were employed under NLO the previous five 

5 years and whether they were the same workers 

6 and whether they were groups of workers, say 

7 in the -- we keep getting back to the metal 

8 production plant, who were exposed to 

9 significantly higher values for which uranium 

10 bioassay would not be a viable method for 

11 determining a dose.

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: John, or maybe 

13 Mark, in these perimeter samplings, were these 

14 at ground level or where were they sampling?

15 MR. STIVER: That's all in the 

16 report. I believe there were about -- about a 

17 meter high or so. They are all on the 

18 perimeter fence --

19 (Simultaneous speakers.)

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: -- points were from 

21 stacks?

22 MR. STIVER: Yes, from stacks.
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1 MEMBER ZIEMER: Okay --

2 (Simultaneous speakers.)

3 MR. STIVER -- the ratios --

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, no, my 

5 question has to do with particle sizes. At 

6 ground level, what you are most likely to see 

7 are the heavier particles. I wondered if we 

8 know whether -- what the particle sizes are. 

9 Are they actually respirable?

10 MR. STIVER: Actually, there are 

11 particle size data out there. But we are 

12 really kind of concerned about right now about 

13 the ratios, not so much the absolute values of 

14 the different materials, but what were the 

15 ratios, what will we see --

16 DR. MAURO: It is going to be low 

17 concentrations.

18 MR. STIVER: Yes, the 

19 concentrations are very low.

20 DR. MAURO: So that's why I keep 

21 reminding you --

22 (Simultaneous speakers.)
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1 MR. STIVER: There are particle 

2 size data for the samples available, if you 

3 want to use that data alone to generate an 

4 intake from. 

5 But what we are really concerned 

6 with is here we have got ratios, they are low 

7 concentrations but the ratios are twice 

8 the default. And if you are going to use that 

9 with uranium bioassay data to bound 

10 transuranic intakes and doses, that becomes a 

11 problem.

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, I think you 

13 can still make the argument on the ratios, if 

14 it's a ratio, the ratios could be different 

15 for the respirable particles, that's the point 

16 I was trying to make.

17 MR. STIVER: Yes, you could have 

18 some -- yes, there could be some fractionation 

19 coming up.

20 (Simultaneous speakers.)

21 MEMBER ZIEMER: Do they go all the 

22 way around the perimeter, these are not just 
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1 downwind values?

2 MR. STIVER: These are -- that's 

3 the interesting part, is that they are not all 

4 downwind, they're basically all around, and 

5 there's an actual map -- 

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: There's a lot of 

7 mixing.

8 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: You know, 

9 something that I am looking at is -- and we 

10 have seen this at numerous other sites -- and 

11 that is it's trying to fit all the people in 

12 one mold, and, you know, I can -- my small 

13 assumptions here, a lot of these plants are a 

14 lot higher.

15 And were these people all 

16 separated out into different jobs? My whole 

17 issue is that I am having a hard time fitting 

18 everybody into one mold, because --

19 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, that's why 

20 you try to find an upper bound so that you can 

21 do that, otherwise you are exactly right.

22 You work out the wrong upper 
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1 bound, and you are going to have a lot of 

2 people that are above whatever you called it.

3 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Well, I'm just 

4 sitting here looking at like the Titan Mill 

5 and so forth like that and those people are 

6 going to be far, far higher. It's just --

7 anyway.

8 DR. MAURO: We would be the first 

9 to agree that to integrate the average across 

10 the site over all time, you are going to be on 

11 to 10, I mean, that's what it seems to me.

12 But what the real problem is there 

13 are periods of time and locations in 

14 particular streams where you are well above 

15 100, and if that's what the guy -- now, if he 

16 had to work, would he -- you have not gone to 

17 his dose. 

18 We are always in this situation. 

19 There's a small group of hard-to-define people 

20 that, we have to ask ourselves, do we feel 

21 that the bounding number you have is 

22 convincingly bounding?
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1 And right now I think there's 

2 enough evidence here that says that it may not 

3 be, and --

4 MR. MORRIS: This is Bob Morris.

5 DR. MAURO: Yes, please.

6 MR. MORRIS: Are all of these data 

7 that are on site 33 statistically significant 

8 above the detection limit threshold?

9 MR. STIVER: Yes, they were.

10 MR. MORRIS: Okay. 

11 MR. STIVER: There were some that 

12 were under the threshold which we didn't 

13 analyze.

14 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: One possibility 

15 is the fact that you could have people in the 

16 process still working out in the plant 

17 actually be getting less exposure via 

18 inhalation than those people working outside 

19 that plant because -- based on the ventilation 

20 system.

21 How much is actually being 

22 filtered going out the stacks?
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1 DR. MAURO: I agree with you. The 

2 ratio is going to hold. 

3 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: But now those 

4 people out there actually had the potential 

5 for seeing the higher dose.

6 DR. MAURO: Yes, and that's okay 

7 if we have got bioassay data --

8 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: But you don't.

9 DR. MAURO: -- and over 90 percent 

10 of the workers have it. But if you don't, you 

11 have got a problem. 

12 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: Yes, if you 

13 don't have the bioassay then you have a 

14 problem. 

15 DR. MAURO: Yes. We are operating 

16 on the premise that there has been -- the vast 

17 majority of the workers, over 90 percent, at 

18 least beginning in around `56, I think earlier 

19 than that it was a little lower -- but even in 

20 1953, it was 25 percent, not a bad number --

21 have urine bioassay, milligrams per liter in 

22 the urine.
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1 And so whether you worked inside, 

2 whether you worked outside, everybody had this 

3 -- just about everybody, 90 percent, had 

4 bioassay data.

5 So we think you could reconstruct 

6 the doses to uranium. That's what it comes 

7 down to, because of the vast amount of 

8 bioassay data, notwithstanding the, what do 

9 you call it, construction worker questions on 

10 the table.

11 That is still on the table, I 

12 agree with that. Of course that could upset 

13 the apple cart a little further. But let's say 

14 for a moment that we have got -- we are pretty 

15 solid on that, and then we come in and say all 

16 right, well, the approach, this one size fits 

17 all, with 100 possibilities et cetera, you 

18 know, if that holds for everyone, or the vast 

19 majority, well, then you know you have got a 

20 pretty good way of reconstructing the doses 

21 that are plutonium too.

22 But what happened was, when we 
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1 went through this process, we were hit with 

2 these numbers. And these are numbers and they 

3 speak to you. 

4 What does that mean? That means 

5 that 100 doesn't look so good, at least for 

6 some workers. That's what we walk away with. 

7 What the right number is is hard to say.

8 And it's not only these numbers 

9 that we are looking at in this last table, but 

10 it's the arguments we heard earlier, about 

11 what went on, the complexity of the problem.

12 So just because we are looking at 

13 `86 doesn't mean that there wasn't anything 

14 unusual going on in `57 and `58 or `60, 

15 whatever, I don't know.

16 And then, of course, there's the 

17 dust sample collection, the argument being, 

18 well, places where you are seeing the high 

19 dust collection levels have something to do 

20 with this POOS that may have come through the 

21 tower ash, came through.

22 But then again you see it in more 
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1 than one place. In other words, the dust 

2 collecting, the problem you are seeing wasn't 

3 only in the building that would have received 

4 this material. It was in other places too.

5 MR. STIVER: And that was our main 

6 concern, that it wasn't just isolated, you 

7 know, a certain processing facility in one 

8 certain building, which then moved to another 

9 process, so those workers are using airline 

10 respirators or being bioassayed, which they 

11 weren't until later.

12 But the basic argument being that 

13 the health and safety processes were not 

14 adequate to capture what portion of the 

15 workers. Most of them? We don't know. We just 

16 don't know at this point.

17 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Let me get a 

18 better handle on this bioassay that we keep 

19 bringing up. Now, this was urinalysis for 

20 uranium.

21 DR. MAURO: Right, milligrams per 

22 liter of uranium. That's where we have got 
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1 tons of data.

2 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: And that's --

3 and you know, I have seen that at 250,000 or 

4 something like that. But that just looked for 

5 uranium.

6 DR. MAURO: Uranium. That's it.

7 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: It doesn't do 

8 anything else with any of the other 

9 radionuclides.

10 DR. MAURO: Correct.

11 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: So, when they 

12 brought in these raffinates or transuranics, I 

13 believe that's the right term, it's put in a 

14 whole other issue?

15 DR. MAURO: That's the essence of 

16 the problem. You are working. They take a 

17 bioassay sample from you, they look at your 

18 milligrams per liter of uranium, they can 

19 predict what your intake of uranium was.

20 But then all of a sudden you say, 

21 wait a minute, by the way, he was handling 

22 recycled uranium, and we know there was some 
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1 plutonium and some neptunium in that stuff 

2 that you inhaled. How are we going to account 

3 for that?

4 Well, once we know the number, in 

5 effect, we know the ratio, you can predict how 

6 much plutonium you inhaled along with that 

7 uranium, and that's the way to track the 

8 problem, if you felt confident that you had a 

9 good appreciation for how much plutonium was 

10 associated with the uranium that you inhaled.

11 And the argument being made that 

12 100 parts per billion is that relationship, 

13 and our position is that, you know, when we 

14 came into this, we'll see if that's good.

15 And now you are looking at our 

16 data and it says that, hmm, it is not as good 

17 as you might think. We have got some real 

18 serious questions for the -- for reasons that 

19 are right in front of us, that 100.

20 And if you made a factor of two 

21 error in that for you, for example, that would 

22 have a substantial increase on the dose to 
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1 certain organs. Not all organs, but certain 

2 organs.

3 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: That's what you 

4 showed earlier.

5 MR. ROLFES: To clarify that 

6 factor of two though, you also have to keep in 

7 mind the claimant-favorable assumptions built 

8 into the reconstruction of the uranium 

9 intakes, which is used as the basis for adding 

10 in those other radionuclides, the 

11 transuranics.

12 We are not doing a best estimate 

13 type fit. We are not looking at individual 

14 acute intakes. We will basically assume a 

15 chronic exposure of the most claimant16 favorable solubility type for the target organ 

17 in question, estimate our intake -- if it was 

18 before 1965 we use natural uranium, after 1965 

19 we default to a two percent regimen -- then on 

20 top of that we use RU-234 to assign the 

21 internal dose for the target organ, which 

22 gives another 30-something percent that we are 
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1 --

2 DR. MAURO: Did those conversion 

3 factors between 234, 235, 238, for picocuries 

4 or becquerel inhaled are not that different.

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

6 take a look at the numbers -- but if you take 

7 a look, I'll have to take a look back at the 

8 U-234 versus the isotopic distribution of 

9 natural uranium.

10 But that internal dose is pretty 

11 claimant-favorable, and that's the basis for 

12 us to add in the transuranics on top of it.

13 So I mean, basically, to start 

14 off, we are assigning uranium as a chronic 

15 exposure, most claimant-favorable solubility 

16 class, calculating all internal dose from U17 234 and then adding in the 100 parts per 

18 billion plutonium, the 3,500 parts per billion 

19 of neptunium-237 and then 9,000 parts per 

20 billion of technetium-99.

21 MR. STIVER: You know, Mark has a 

22 good point. What they are trying to do is 
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1 bound the dose, and our concern is, are we 

2 really bounding the dose for all categories of 

3 workers for the SEC period?

4 Now, all these claimant-favorable 

5 assumptions are great, but is 100 parts per 

6 billion a claimant-favorable assumption for 

7 all categories?

8 DR. MAURO: And I've got to say, I 

9 do have to take on one of the points you are 

10 making. When you are trying to reconstruct a 

11 dose from uranium -- let's forget about the 

12 plutonium; make believe there's no plutonium -

13 - what you are doing is reasonable. 

14 This is what you have done 

15 everywhere, and that is, let's use the form --

16 because very often you are not quite sure what 

17 the form is. If you knew for sure what the 

18 form is, you would use that form.

19 But maybe we don't know, and there 

20 is some question, because we all know uranium 

21 is sort of a strange animal. Sometimes it's M, 

22 sometimes it's S, sometimes it's something in 
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1 between.

2 So you are doing the prudent thing 

3 for uranium. So I wouldn't -- now the fact 

4 that, embedded in that, there may be a certain 

5 degree of conservatism and claimant6 favorability because you had no choice. You 

7 had to do that, in order to make sure that you 

8 were treating that worker claimant-favorable.

9 I separate that now. Now we are 

10 going to move on to plutonium, and we are 

11 going to layer in plutonium, and I think that 

12 now when you are dealing with plutonium, you 

13 have to deal with it in a way that is going to 

14 be claimant-favorable for the worker.

15 And the 100 seems to be a really 

16 good number for most workers, but we certainly 

17 -- now we see that certainly there were 

18 probably categories of workers where that may 

19 not be.

20 So I mean, what you are doing is 

21 say, well, we threw in so much conservatism 

22 over here, that is going to protect us from 
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1 all other things that we might have missed 

2 over there. I don't know that you want to do 

3 that.

4 MR. STIVER: It's kind of an 

5 apples to oranges issue, isn't it? 

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: Are we confident 

7 that it's only this few years during this 

8 particular episode where these numbers are 

9 high? I mean, you are assigning your 100 for 

10 every year. You assign the doses year by year.

11 MR. ROLFES: Correct, starting in 

12 1961, because that was the time period when 

13 they first started processing the recycled 

14 uranium that they had received.

15 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right.

16 MR. ROLFES: So for all uranium 

17 intakes that we assign to an employee, we 

18 would assign the transuranic intakes as well, 

19 from 1961 forward.

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: Now, is there any 

21 indication that outside of these years where 

22 you have this information, which seems to 
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1 correspond with that --

2 MR. STIVER: It corresponds with 

3 that tower ash.

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right, but the 

5 prior years and the after years?

6 MR. STIVER: The after years, I 

7 think you have got this influx, this injection 

8 of plutonium into the system and it persists 

9 up until `89.

10 So it's really the pre-1980 

11 period, and the problem we have there is that 

12 before 1970, we just don't have data.

13 You have shipment data from Hanford and that 

14 is pretty much about it.

15 But as you can see there's 

16 chemical processes going on that concentrate 

17 the stuff. Regardless of whether it was POOS 

18 or not, you are still going to have that same 

19 concentrating mechanism going on.

20 And as Jim said earlier, the 

21 process improvements over time result in less 

22 transuranics and fission products making it 
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1 through in the final product.

2 So if anything, in earlier years, 

3 you would expect to have more of the material, 

4 notwithstanding the POOS material.

5 That is kind of a unique -- in 

6 addition, it's an order of magnitude higher, 

7 but you know if you look -- without POOS I 

8 think you would see a trend towards less and 

9 less concentration over time.

10 So, I guess the -- you can make 

11 some kind of a common sense judgement that 

12 well, you know, without the POOS, we have got 

13 this data here from the Hanford for the `70s 

14 that shows that you have got a lot of data 

15 down in the three to five parts per billion 

16 range, that's probably a good number.

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, but the 

18 argument earlier was -- 

19 (Simultaneous speakers.)

20 MR. STIVER: -- you just don't 

21 have the data.

22 MEMBER ZIEMER: -- that these were 
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1 years where they had big input of plutonium 

2 into the system, so you can't have it both 

3 ways.

4 MR. STIVER: Yes, they are going 

5 to be bounding for those early years, you can 

6 say maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, yes, I was 

8 kind of thinking about the possibility of 

9 having a default value for a certain time 

10 period, and --

11 MR. STIVER: Yes, it's not one 

12 size fits all.

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: -- and then at the 

14 part where you knew -- I mean, yes, you may 

15 have these concentration things going on, but 

16 the source term has got to have been much 

17 lower.

18 DR. MAURO: And you have got that 

19 dolomite problem.

20 MR. STIVER: You have got the 

21 dolomite, you have that concentration problem 

22 going on, and it's not really reflected in --
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1 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, I was just 

2 starting to think about the possibility of 

3 having a set of default values for a certain 

4 period, and then a different --

5 MR. STIVER: I think the only way 

6 to really get a handle on this is to go back 

7 to the source data and -- see you later, John 

8 -- John Mauro has left us. He is trying to get 

9 home in a reasonable amount of time.

10 DR. MAURO: I'm leaving.

11 (Laughter.)

12 MR. ROLFES: John? This is Mark 

13 Rolfes. I am looking back at my -- our 

14 response to the SC&A findings related to the 

15 White Paper on recycled uranium at Fernald and 

16 it's from October 2010.

17 I think we have actually described 

18 fairly well about the changes in the 

19 processing from different sources of uranium 

20 and the potential plutonium concentrations 

21 over time, and we provided a summarization 

22 that starts back in 1944.
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1 MR. STIVER: All right, yes, we 

2 read that.

3 MR. ROLFES: Okay. Now from my 

4 recollection, the earlier materials that were 

5 processed had some of the lowest plutonium 

6 concentrations in the complex, and then --

7 MR. STIVER: For which we have 

8 data.

9 MR. ROLFES: And then subsequent 

10 to that, it really was that 19 -- late 1970s, 

11 early 1980s POOS material which was separate 

12 from all the other recycled uranium materials, 

13 that was its own special case, own special 

14 class of materials, where we had the 7,700 

15 parts per billion plutonium on a uranium mass 

16 basis.

17 The earlier stuff, the earlier 

18 uranium that was sent to Fernald based on 

19 everything we have seen, was typically less 

20 than the agreed 10 parts per billion.

21 There may have been some 

22 exceptions, and I'm sure there were, but I 
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1 don't recall seeing anything that exceeded our 

2 default of 100 parts per billion.

3 I don't know, Bryce, this is Mark, 

4 if you have anything to add on our research 

5 that we have done on the recycled uranium 

6 issue, if you --

7 MR. RICH: I'm having a little bit 

8 of trouble with my phone. I am losing contact 

9 every once in a while. But the Hanford data, 

10 for example, did start out in the five parts 

11 per billion range, and over the years it did 

12 drop into the threes.

13 So there is a slight reduction as 

14 indicated, until of course then we hit the 

15 POOS material and then everything went up by 

16 an order of magnitude. 

17 A couple of other things -- Plant 

18 1 had a role of handling and feed preparation. 

19 Titan Mill handled much of the POOS material 

20 and that was prepared for introduction into 

21 the rest of the plant, that the Titan Mill was 

22 a grinder reducing the particulate size so it 
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1 could be dissolved and/or blended into other 

2 lower-grade, lower-level material.

3 So the stuff that came out of 

4 Plant 1 either went directly into processing 

5 or it was blended and reduced in contaminant 

6 concentration that way. 

7 The -- and again, as has been 

8 mentioned I think several times, is that the 

9 air filter data was used only for illustrative 

10 purposes not for default evaluations.

11 The default streams the process 

12 streams were used to derive the maximum 

13 feasible that appeared to us at the time and 

14 default values, and even the magnesium 

15 fluoride, regardless of the fact that it was a 

16 process, it was a product stream that was 

17 reduced to metal, was -- had significant 

18 levels of the Pu but not above the 100 parts 

19 per billion.

20 MR. STIVER: Actually, I think the 

21 issue is that Titan Mill was not only used for 

22 preparing this material for feed into the 
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1 refinery. It was also used to reduce down and 

2 pulverize the slag for use in Plant 5.

3 And so we had a situation where 

4 you've got this concentration mechanism that 

5 is causing a persistence in the -- between 

6 Plant 5 and Plant 1, and I think that's really 

7 our concern, is that you have a --

8 MR. RICH: A good deal of that 

9 slag, magnesium fluoride was reprocessed for 

10 the uranium that was remaining also.

11 MR. STIVER: It was reprocessed 

12 for realigning the pots.

13 MR. RICH: It was, and also there 

14 was a remainder of uranium in that slag also.

15 MR. STIVER: But there's very 

16 little actually. I mean there is some, from 

17 what we are seeing is it's about 0.1, 0.2 

18 percent compared to some of the other values. 

19 It's quite low. There is some. There is some.

20 MR. RICH: But generally not a lot. 

21 In other words that process stream was sampled 

22 routinely and that is indicated in the process 
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1 analyses and --

2 MR. STIVER: Well that's another 

3 issue we have, is with the quality of that 

4 process data, which we had discussed earlier.

5 MR. RICH: I understand.

6 MR. STIVER: Yes. We have a few 

7 more, if we could I would like to go ahead and 

8 talk about some of the other data sets we 

9 have, if we could go ahead and move on, and 

10 then maybe we could take questions, some more 

11 questions, after.

12 We still have some other issues 

13 that hopefully we will be able to get to 

14 today. 

15 Slide 35, these were some air 

16 sample swipes and swipes that were reported in 

17 a U.S. testing company report from 1989, and 

18 also this Bassett report in 1989 as well.

19 And this is -- what's really 

20 important to our analysis here, these 

21 additional air filter samples that were taken 

22 in Plants 4 and Plant 8. During -- and this 
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1 would have coincided with the POOS processing 

2 that was going on in those plants, for which 

3 the bioassay data that Mark had alluded to, 

4 were collected.

5 There were 54 total results they 

6 had about 20 smear samples for reach building, 

7 none of which exceeded the default levels, and 

8 then they had air samples, and they have a 

9 very good description of how the samples were 

10 collected, where they were.

11 They have survey maps for both 

12 Plant 8 and Plant 4 that describe where the 

13 samples were collected, and also demonstrate 

14 where the dust collectors were relative to 

15 where their samples were collected.

16 So we were able to do kind of a 

17 generalized comparison and -- granted there is 

18 a four-year differential in time, so you can't 

19 make any concrete deductions from it, but you 

20 can certainly, it's interesting from just kind 

21 of a general perspective.

22 If we can move on to 36. For Plant 
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1 4, air filter samples, two of them, AF1 and 

2 AF4, are significantly higher than the NIOSH 

3 default and we had one neptunium value that 

4 was getting close.

5 And when you look at the survey, 

6 these samples that were collected in `89 were 

7 over the hydrofluorination banks, and if you 

8 look at the survey map, they are about 

9 anywhere from about 20 to 150 feet away from 

10 the packaging stations where the dust 

11 collection samples were done forty years 

12 earlier.

13 So what you could be seeing is 

14 just a variability within a plant relative to 

15 the processes, and the amount of material that 

16 happens to be collected in a given place.

17 We also found the technetium 

18 volatilization was not expected but -- and it 

19 was detected in the hydrofluorination, so we 

20 think it's possible that the neptunium could 

21 have volatilized as well, and possibly the 

22 plutonium.
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1 We have no concrete evidence that 

2 that is the case, but it is kind of 

3 inconclusive as to how those samples would be 

4 so much higher other than just the basis of 

5 their relative location close to the 

6 fluorination banks.

7 Plant 8, none of the samples are 

8 higher than the defaults for plutonium or 

9 neptunium. However we were able to pair up 

10 three samples with the dust collector data 

11 based on the survey maps, and while you didn't 

12 have any higher than defaults, we had values 

13 that were probably by a factor of 10 higher 

14 than the later dust collection samples that 

15 were in the areas around the drumming stations 

16 where the workers would be, which kind of 

17 lends credence to this notion of a dilution in 

18 the baghouse concentrations over time.

19 Let's see. Anything else in this 

20 slide that we should discuss -- one thing that 

21 we noted about the Bassett collections, these 

22 were 24-hour collections and they don't really 
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1 tell us anything about off-normal occurrences. 

2 All they do is kind of give you a really 

3 generalized comparison to the previous data 

4 set.

5 So you know, there are potentials 

6 for failures in both Plants 1 and Plant 8 

7 which wouldn't be captured by this data set.

8 Finally, the last data set we 

9 looked at, Bob Alvarez was able to pull some 

10 PUREX UNH data from Hanford from 1970 to 1972, 

11 and this is really kind of unique because we 

12 had about 330 data points for plutonium and 

13 neptunium in this material over about a two14 year period, so we can actually generate a 

15 distribution for a -- one subset of feed 

16 material.

17 Now granted, this material is 

18 several steps removed from what workers at 

19 Fernald might have experienced, because it 

20 would have gone into the -- but would have 

21 been calcined to produce the trioxide powder, 

22 and then shipped to the receiving sites.
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1 But it does -- it's illustrative 

2 in that there are -- it demonstrates that this 

3 10 parts per billion production specification 

4 was not -- was violated in a couple of 

5 different -- I don't know if violated is 

6 really the best term -- it's just that you had 

7 material that was in excess of 10 parts per 

8 billion that was actually being produced there 

9 in their own plant.

10 If we can move on here to the next 

11 slide, 38. This is kind of a summary of what 

12 we found here. The plutonium-239, there were 

13 329 samples.

14 The highest was about 1,550 parts 

15 per billion and if you look at arithmetic 

16 values, you have got a median of about 15 and 

17 an SD of 98.

18 About 15 percent of them were over 

19 10 parts per billion and about, only seven 

20 were over 100 parts per billion. If you look 

21 at the normal score plot, basically you've got 

a log-normal distribution up to about the 95th 22 
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1 percentile.

2 But you have this high, you have 

3 seven high batches up in the high -- up in the 

4 upper tail.

5 Of the neptunium, we had 84 that 

6 were less than the detection limit out of the 

7 336. You look at the plot, look at about one 

8 GSD, you have got a fairly good log-normal 

9 fit, then below you have so many down in the 

10 detection limit, and above you have got some 

11 that really aren't modeled very well by the 

12 log-normal either.

13 So it's really, what this tells us 

14 is that you have got high batches, we isolated 

15 those to -- there were only about six batches 

16 that came through that were high in about the 

17 same time period.

18 And so the question remains, the 

19 story is in our minds, is, is this an isolated 

20 occurrence, and we have got one data set that 

21 demonstrates there are feed materials that are 

22 out of spec but whether they left Hanford --
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1 And so I guess the question in our 

2 mind is, is this isolated and if this material 

3 was not blended before shipment, was the 

4 Fernald personnel aware of its arrival 

5 beforehand. So it's just --

6 MR. MORRIS: Bob Morris with a 

7 question.

8 MR. STIVER: Yes, go ahead.

9 MR. MORRIS: On the plutonium-239 

10 data set on page 38, you didn't provide the 

11 log-normal GM GSD as you did for neptunium. Is 

12 there a reason for that?

13 MR. STIVER: I just didn't put it 

14 into the slide. That's in the report though. 

15 All that information is there.

16 MR. MORRIS: And was it well fit.

17 MR. STIVER: For the plutonium?

18 MR. MORRIS: Yes.

19 MR. STIVER: Yes. It fit within 

20 that. There was really only those seven 

21 batches that were clearly up above the log22 normal fit. Those were the ones that were the 
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1 outliers that we identified in certain batches

2 at certain -- in a given time period.

3 MR. MORRIS: So when you say two 

4 percent above 100, that's not the log-normal, 

5 predictive two percent. That's - 

6 MR. STIVER: No, that's the actual 

7 data. That's what -- the actual number that we 

8 are above. Yes.

9 MR. ROLFES: It seems like the 

10 bigger question might be whether this material 

11 even went to Fernald, since --

12 MR. STIVER: Well yes, we don't 

13 know. We don't know if it went to Fernald or 

14 not. It was just to illustrate that it was the 

15 only data set we actually found of a 

16 production run, and we were actually able to 

17 look at it and do some statistics on it.

18 MR. ROLFES: If it went to Paducah 

19 (Simultaneous speakers.) 

20 MR. ROLFES: It would certainly --

21 it would purify essentially the uranium and 

22 remove those contaminants, the neptunium and 
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1 the plutonium, from the recycled uranium, just 

2 by process.

3 MR. STIVER: It's really just 

4 illustrative of what a distribution material 

5 would be in a production setting, and we 

6 weren't able to find any other data from --

7 especially prior to 1980, other than this 

8 particular data set.

9 MR. RICH: So this is Bryce. A 

10 quick comment. Those records of the peer 

11 shipments from Hanford to Fernald, those were 

12 over the ten parts per billion limit and there 

13 was an agreement to ship them as they came, in 

14 the 28 to 30 parts per billion range.

15 So it was not -- if the analysis 

16 were done carefully by Hanford and any 

17 violation of intent was communicated and an 

18 agreement reached.

19 MR. STIVER: Certainly, this does 

20 not illustrate or indicate there is a smoking 

21 gun or anything. It's just to show that you 

22 know, we had a data set that we were able to 
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1 evaluate and we felt it was worth putting in 

2 the report just because there is kind of a 

3 dearth of data on the actual production side.

4 So yes, whether it actually made 

5 it to Fernald, and whether, was it down 

6 blended or not, that's all open to 

7 speculation.

8 So we can't really draw 

9 conclusions on that particular data set.

10 DR. GLOVER: If you look at SRDB 

11 67613, actually it stored U03 quite a long 

12 time at Hanford, and they talk about the 

13 product specifications that were going to go 

14 to Fernald in -- about that same time frame, 

15 about `69 is the heavy specs.

16 And they said, they sent those 

17 four, so these things -- this is U03, what the 

18 assays were, and also it describes 

19 specifically that anything exceeding that had 

20 to -- when AEC -- no, they would require a 

21 waiver by the AEC, so there was a mechanism to 

22 ship stuff higher than that.
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1 But I did want to say that that 

2 did go to Fernald, it looks like, they did 

3 have material, obviously --

4 MR. STIVER: Yes, there is always 

5 some going to Fernald. This particular data 

6 set, it's not really clear if it went to 

7 Fernald or not.

8 DR. GLOVER: Sure you don't know 

9 if they were.

10 MS. BALDRIDGE: I have a question. 

11 When they determine what the bounding level 

12 is, I assume they will assign those doses 

13 based on the employment records as far as who 

14 was supposed to be working, where?

15 MR. STIVER: They are based on the 

16 actual bioassay records.

17 MS. BALDRIDGE: On the bioassay 

18 rather than the --

19 MR. STIVER: What they have is 

20 kind of a one-size fits all approach where 

21 they have got it evaluated at what they 

22 believe is a bounding value. 
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1 MS. BALDRIDGE: Okay.

2 MR. STIVER: And so, given the 

3 uranium content in urine they can calculate an 

4 intake and a dose from that, and they can add 

5 an equivalent amount that would correspond to 

6 100 parts per billion for plutonium and --

7 MS. BALDRIDGE: Will they be doing 

8 that for everyone that was working in that 

9 year or just those people that were supposed 

10 to be in Plant 8 and Plant --

11 MR. STIVER: I believe this 

12 applies across the board, the dose 

13 reconstruction --

14 MR. ROLFES: Yes, this is a dose 

15 reconstruction question, I guess, that we 

16 should probably answer rather than SC&A. 

17 Anybody that worked on site from the years of 

18 1961 forward and was involved in uranium 

19 operations, and had a bioassay result, would 

20 be assigned recycle uranium intakes as well.

21 Now, some people weren't 

22 monitored. We would also assign a coworker 
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1 intake to those individuals and also assign 

2 the plutonium and other transuranics to them 

3 as well, based upon the coworker intake models 

4 of uranium.

5 MS. BALDRIDGE: But this is across 

6 the board?

7 MR. ROLFES: Across the board, for 

8 everyone. Now, separate from that, there are 

9 some dose reconstructions that were completed 

10 early on where we used this completely 

11 separate methodology, OTIB-2, where we 

12 assigned 28 radionuclides, a worst-case 

13 approach that was used for dose 

14 reconstruction.

15 And so those dose reconstructions 

16 likely did not have recycled uranium 

17 components assigned in the method that we are 

18 discussing.

19 However, when we go back and look 

20 at those cases and compare the doses that we 

21 have assigned based upon that OTIB method 

22 versus the individual's own bioassay data, the 
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1 dose reconstruction using the individual's own 

2 bioassay data typically result on lower 

3 internal doses.

4 So we wouldn't have to go back and 

5 assign a smaller dose to those previous dose 

6 reconstructions. Did I address what you are 

7 asking? I know it's not something we typically 

8 talk about in normal conversations when we --

9 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Let me ask you 

10 this. My understanding that if you showed --

11 if you took a bioassay urinalysis and you 

12 showed uranium, then you got the other 

13 radionuclides. This is where this 10 parts per 

14 billion was coming in.

15 MR. ROLFES: What we would do, 

16 let's see here. Let me write up on the board 

17 here. Let's say we have got an individual that 

18 worked from 1965 through 1980, and let's just 

19 say they had a urine sample taken once a 

20 month. We'll just say that. 

21 MS. BALDRIDGE: Once a year.

22 MR. ROLFES: Once a year, okay, we 
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1 can say once a year too, I mean, either way 

2 it's you know, but basically the limit of 

3 detection for Fernald was about 14 micrograms 

4 of uranium per liter of urine, depends on the 

5 year.

6 But what we would do, and we will 

7 say, for example this individual had 100 

8 samples over their employment history during 

9 these years, all of them were at the limit of 

10 detection so they never had a positive 

11 bioassay result, what we would do is take each 

12 of those bioassay results reported to us and 

13 we would convert those 14 micrograms of 

14 uranium per liter into a value that was 

15 excreted per day.

16 So we would multiply this value by 

17 1.4 to account for a number of liters of urine 

18 produced per day to get a 24-hour excretion 

19 rate.

20 So this gives us -- I am not going 

21 to do the math here in my head, but if we 

22 multiply 14 micrograms by 1.4 liters, that 
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1 gives us our excretion in mass quantities per 

2 24 hours.

3 What we would want to do if the 

4 individual was exposed to natural uranium, we 

5 would use a default of 683 picocuries per 

6 milligram of uranium, or 0.683 per microgram.

7 We would use that, we would plug 

8 that data into a computer program called the 

9 integrated modules for bioassay analysis, 

10 IMBA, and that will give us an estimated 

11 intake rate.

12 Then we typically use the 

13 solubility class that results in the highest 

14 internal dose to the target organ. So once we 

15 have this intake in activity, in picocuries, 

16 we would go back and assign the intakes of 

17 plutonium, neptunium and technetium on top of 

18 that uranium intake, and also calculate the 

19 internal dose from those.

20 And we would assign that dose from 

21 1965 -- those intakes from 1965 through 1980, 

22 and then we would calculate the internal dose 
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1 through the year of cancer diagnosis.

2 When we have a large bioassay data 

3 set, and multiple results, you can go and 

4 assign acute, small duration intakes, but 

5 usually those approximate a larger chronic 

6 intake.

7 And so what we do, rather than 

8 trying to get a best estimate, we will assume 

9 that that individual was chronically exposed 

10 for his entire employment period to uranium.

11 So the way we complete the dose 

12 reconstructions, we are making some very 

13 claimant-favorable assumptions regarding the 

14 exposure duration, the types of materials that 

15 the individual was exposed to, the enrichments 

16 that they were exposed to, and then on top of 

17 it, the plutonium and transuranic intakes are 

18 added in.

19 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: I thought 

20 earlier that if they came up with a -- if they 

21 came up with any uranium I guess it was when 

22 Jim Neton was here, that they came up with any 
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1 uranium in their bioassay, then they got all 

2 these other radionuclides.

3 MR. ROLFES: Yes, and even if an 

4 individual -- say for example, during some 

5 years in a more recent time period, the 

6 sensitivity of the uranium urinalysis method 

7 that was used decreased, so during the more 

8 recent years, say this limit of detection 

9 dropped down to about five micrograms per 

10 liter, and then after that, using different 

11 analyses, like inductively coupled plasma mass 

12 spectrometry, they were able to get less than 

13 a microgram per liter of uranium in their 

14 minimum sensitivity values.

15 And so even if an individual -- my 

16 point of this is, even if an individual had a 

17 result reported -- if they had a bioassay 

18 sample, whether or not it was positive, we 

19 still would use that in dose reconstruction, 

20 even if it's a non-positive result below the 

21 minimum detectable amount, we would still 

22 assign an intake of uranium and then the 
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1 subsequent plutonium, neptunium and technetium 

2 radionuclides, regardless of whether they did 

3 in fact have a bona fide positive result.

4 MR. STIVER: So it's all tied back 

5 to your bioassay, any result is going to have 

6 with it the transuranics that go along.

7 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Do we need to 

8 take a break or anything?

9 MEMBER ZIEMER: It's up to the 

10 chair.

11 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Why don't we 

12 take about a 10-minute break and we will 

13 continue back on with this.

14 MR. STIVER: I think we are just -

15 - I am just about done with my presentation. 

16 Down to the last slide. But yes, let's take a 

17 break.

18 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Let's take a 

19 break real quick and --

20 MR. KATZ: Okay, about 2:35 then.

21 (Whereupon, the above-entitled matter went off 

22 the record at 2:22 p.m. 
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1 and resumed at 2:35 p.m.)

2 MR. KATZ: Okay, we're back after 

3 a short break. Do we have Mr. Presley?

4 MEMBER PRESLEY: Hey Ted, this is 

5 he. I had trouble getting back in for some 

6 reason.

7 MR. KATZ: Okay, but you did it.

8 MEMBER PRESLEY: Yes, finally.

9 MR. KATZ: Yes. Good to have you. 

10 Okay. 

11 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay well John, 

12 you are just about finished --

13 MR. STIVER: Yes, I have just 

14 about finished up here. Go to slide 40, this 

15 is basically the summary of our findings here. 

16 And the ones that I have highlighted are 

17 number 4, 6 and 7.

18 Number 4 relates to the DOE RU 

19 reports and our summary here is that that 

20 report is questionable as a basis for the 

21 NIOSH defaults.

22 We believe that the source data 
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1 that went into that statistical analysis, 

2 those 4,000 data points, should be reviewed in 

3 the context of dose reconstruction, and 

4 especially for an SEC petition, particularly 

5 as regards the statistical analysis and the 

6 type of distributions that are assumed.

7 Finding number 6 and number 7, the 

8 dust data and the boundary air concentration 

9 data do not support the NIOSH defaults, and 

10 they are consistent with the elevated levels 

11 observed in the dust collector data that in 

12 turn would tend to indicate that there are 

13 classes of workers in certain types of jobs of 

14 which the NIOSH defaults are clearly not 

15 bounding.

16 And that is basically all I have 

17 to say regarding this particular paper. Is 

18 there a follow-on item here?

19 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Well, I guess I 

20 am looking at what type of an action item we 

21 have. We have got to be able to give NIOSH the 

22 opportunity to be able to respond to this, and 
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1 issue their paper to us on this.

2 But I do want to keep us all in 

3 mind of the timeliness of this. This has been 

4 almost five years now, so I guess in tasking 

5 NIOSH that, to be able to respond to the paper 

6 that has been submitted by SC&A, I guess it 

7 would be a response to SC&A's RU paper.

8 And we will get into that and go 

9 from there. I know this is a hard one to do, 

10 but what type of a time frame do you think we 

11 would be looking at for -- to be able to --

12 DR. GLOVER: One suggestion I 

13 would have is that I mean, you have an entire 

14 paper, you are going to have an entire paper 

15 back. There are certain things that are more 

16 focused on what are either SEC-driven or --

17 I'm just, you know, if you really want a 

18 timely solution, and you want to be very 

19 specific, then we would probably be quicker in 

20 response if we were focused.

21 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: As far as an 

22 SEC, a lot of it brings your default value in 
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1 question. This is what I glean from this 

2 paper, that the default value that we have, if 

3 you are not able to really justify that, that 

4 is an SEC issue.

5 And I guess I don't want to push 

6 NIOSH into a position of just -- I want them 

7 to understand where our issue is at with it.

8 DR. GLOVER: So the nine findings 

9 here -- this is really Mark's thing -- but you 

10 basically would like a response on the summary 

11 of these nine findings?

12 MR. STIVER: Yes, the really 

13 important one I think is the basis for the 

14 defaults, this -- the DOE RU reports. The way 

15 that data was analyzed, you have got 

16 distributions that are probably more 

17 characterized by a log-normal.

18 The analysis, I looked at the 

19 arithmetic mean or some derivation thereof, as 

20 the basis for the defaults, and also to 

21 justify the choice of the 100 parts per

22 billion.
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1 I think that that's probably one 

2 of the most important of these findings, is to 

3 go back and ascertain that data is available 

4 for review, and if so to analyze it in terms 

5 of its adequacy in dose reconstruction. 

6 Instead of just taking it directly 

7 from the report, do your own uncertainty 

8 analysis and your own review.

9 DR. GLOVER: I guess in your 

10 discussion you sort of seemed to throw in 

11 there about it being a snapshot in time and 

12 about its ability to be back-extrapolated back 

13 and -- 

14 MR. STIVER: Yes, but that's an 

15 issue as well, is you know, this scenario 

16 would involve really reviewing the adequacy. I 

17 mean, I guess, you would almost need to do a 

18 scoping study to determine if it's worth the 

19 expenditure of resources to go down that 

20 route.

21 DR. GLOVER: I guess I just want 

22 to make sure that your question, what you were 
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1 trying to get a response back on was fully 

2 fleshed out, so we were provided adequate 

3 response.

4 It was a very long presentation, 

5 obviously, you know, multiple slides that we

6 haven't seen before, and I just want to make 

7 sure we came -- we get from it what the Board 

8 would like us to be responsive on.

9 MR. STIVER: Yes, I really believe 

10 that at the reevaluation of the available data 

11 and using that to bound sources of exposure 

12 for different categories of workers, and I 

13 think the other issue that is kind of related 

14 to that is the idea of the magnesium fluoride 

15 and the concentration processes, and potential 

16 exposures to those workers as well. 

17 And the other back-extrapolation. 

18 Are data available for the early years? Is it 

19 possible to bound doses during those times for 

20 which data don't exist?

21 So really a kind of three-part --

22 MR. KATZ: So, may I make a 
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1 suggestion? I mean you have got -- I think 

2 that was helpful, that why don't you, DCAS, 

3 write up a proposal for what you think are the 

4 sort of critical issues that you would address 

5 in a White Paper response, share that with 

6 SC&A, in the Work Group, SC&A can say yes, 

7 that seems to pin down the critical issues, or 

8 not, whatever, elaborate and then we will have 

9 a clear path forward.

10 At the same time I would give you 

11 a little time to figure out not only what you 

12 are proposing but a good sense of how much 

13 time you need to be able to deliver that.

14 That way the path forward is clear 

15 rather than -- I mean this is still kind of 

16 vague, this discussion, but --

17 MR. ROLFES: Yes, let's see here. 

18 I certainly would want to respond in writing 

19 to the findings that we have, but I also want 

20 to keep in mind that we have responded to 

21 these same findings previously in some of our 

22 responses.
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1 You know, it's coming down to what 

2 I am seeing, because SC&A is just -- as you 

3 had pointed out you know, the distribution 

4 that you guys derived from the data is 

5 slightly different than what we have derived.

6 And so, in my mind, that 

7 necessarily isn't of itself an SEC issue. It's 

8 more of a dose reconstruction on what 

9 uncertainties we are applying.

10 So you know, if you would like us 

11 to back and look for some additional data, 

12 that is going to take a lot more time than it 

13 is to just look at the data that we already 

14 have.

15 I don't know if we want to have 

16 Bob or Bryce add anything to what we are 

17 discussing on the time line et cetera, or what 

18 things we haven't answered previously or what 

19 we feel we should clarify in our response. Is 

20 there anything that you want to add Bryce? 

21 MR. RICH: Not right now, Mark. I 

22 think what you have said is sufficient.
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1 MR. STIVER: I just am afraid 

2 that, we kind of got to this impasse really, 

3 where NIOSH has their position and we have our 

4 position, and the two are kind of at 

5 loggerheads here, and I have laid this out as 

6 best as I think I can, as to what our concerns 

7 are, and that is the issue of Classes of 

8 workers for which the defaults are not 

9 bounding, and we would like to see some 

10 response as to how different values might 

11 possible be applied.

12 There may be a situation where you 

13 can't have a one-size-fits-all, where you may 

14 need to look at different bounds for different 

15 categories of workers. It's not our position 

16 to really give that kind of guidance.

17 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Go ahead Paul.

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, we already 

19 know that they can't easily put workers in 

20 certain spots, locations and so on. So you are 

21 really going to have to deal with some 

22 defaults and some ratios and so on.
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1 I am kind of thinking what 

2 information is new that was brought to the 

3 table? Some of it is sort of the same stuff 

4 recast a little bit.

5 But the numbers on the plutonium 

6 ratios, those new numbers today are -- that's 

7 new information isn't it?

8 MR. ROLFES: Our ratios have not 

9 changed.

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: No, not yours, the 

11 numbers that they brought.

12 MR. ROLFES: Correct. His 

13 environmental data, his analysis for the 

14 particular year when the POOS was being 

15 processed is above our defaults.

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right, and it 

17 seems to me that that sort of focal point, 

18 which NIOSH needs to sort of say okay, does 

19 this impact on what we are proposing to do? 

20 And it may be that it would impact 

21 on the specific year, or it may be that taken 

22 in combination with other years for the 
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1 plutonium, it's a no, never mind that, I don't 

2 think we necessarily know, but you know, one's 

3 gut feeling is well okay, that year is high, 

4 and are there some other years like that, or 

5 is that -- see I still think if we make the 

6 argument that it's associated with bringing in 

7 the 20 percent or whatever, yes, if you make 

8 that argument then you can sort of say okay, 

9 there's a period of time for which these 

10 higher default values may in fact be the ones 

11 that you use, and maybe you develop a model 

12 that --

13 I am just saying it seems to me 

14 that that is where they have to respond. 

15 That's new information and you sort of have to 

16 say okay, is this sufficient for us to modify 

17 how we are going to do dose reconstruction, or 

18 does it mean we can't, which is the SEC issue?

19 MR. STIVER: From 1980 on, you 

20 definitely have a sea change in the 

21 environment there, and so that really needs to 

22 be addressed.
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1 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right, and it 

2 seems to me that the other issues are sort of 

3 less important.

4 MR. STIVER: Well the other 

5 issues, yes, they really relate to a lack of 

6 data and a lack of system-wide, agreed-to 

7 specifications and still, the chemical 

8 processes for concentrating and potentially 

9 exposing workers are still there in the early 

10 years. It's just that you don't have, as far 

11 as we know, this injection of plutonium with 

12 transuranics until 1980.

13 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Well when did 

14 they start receiving?

15 MR. STIVER: They started 

16 receiving -- the Paducah ash? Or the other --

17 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Well, the 

18 uranium, the recycled uranium. I thought it 

19 was --

20 MR. STIVER: Oh that was about in 

21 the early `50s when they first started getting 

22 the recycled uranium. The very first batch 
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1 came in `53. There was a peak in the `60s and 

2 again in the 1980s.

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: But it seemed 

4 pretty clear that the earlier stuff, we know 

5 had a lower concentration.

6 MR. STIVER: Yes, yes, it would be 

7 kind of a stretch to -- you're not going to 

8 get the same kind of concentration you got in 

9 the tower ash. 

10 Now in the 1970s of course there 

11 were several batches of tower ash and also 

12 incinerator ash which have also, this was that 

13 CIP/CUP program that Bob Alvarez was talking 

14 about.

15 So you have that period, you know, 

16 from the `70s you get kind of a build-up and 

17 then in 1980 you get a big spike and so you 

18 have that period that --

19 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, I'm sort of 

20 interested in finding out whether the existing 

21 model still covers everything or has something 

22 changed here, are there two periods, are there 
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1 three, or what?

2 And I guess NIOSH has to look at 

3 that. I don't know Mark, but how do you feel 

4 about that?

5 MR. ROLFES: Yes, that's -- I mean 

6 that -- our awareness of the tower ash that's 

7 coming to the Fernald site is one of the 

8 reasons that we defaulted an order of 

9 magnitude above what the controls were from 

10 the very beginning.

11 That's what it comes down to. We 

12 can certainly look into providing additional 

13 justification as to why we still feel that 

14 answer is not bounding, and if there is an 

15 exception for example, you know, it may be 

16 that the 10 parts per billion plutonium 

17 concentration on the uranium S basis is 

18 bounding for all years except for the time 

19 period where they received the Paducah tower 

20 ashes.

21 So maybe we would need to go back 

22 and maybe we could provide a -- it may be, 
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1 like I said earlier on in the meeting, that 

2 the earlier materials could have been much 

3 less than 10 parts per billion.

4 So it might be that our dose 

5 reconstructions, by assigning 100 parts per 

6 billion, are certainly very claimant7 favorable, and maybe it could be that the 

8 1980s forward time period maybe for certain 

9 workers, the mass concentration or excuse me, 

10 the plutonium concentrations could be lower 

11 for certain operations.

12 We will see what we can do to look 

13 through our data that we have and also see 

14 what additional data is available to us.

15 But we can certainly do our best 

16 to research this more, so the more data that 

17 we go and look for though, the longer it is 

18 going to take, so we will focus on what we 

19 currently have and go back to the records and 

20 to DOE and see what additional information we 

21 can recover.

22 MEMBER ZIEMER: I wasn't 
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1 suggesting you go back and look for more data 

2 so much as saying does the current model 

3 handle the issue that was raised or not, and 

4 if not, how do we do it?

5 MR. STIVER: That's really the 

6 crux of the issue. Is the current model 

7 adequate for all workers in the SEC period and 

8 I think we presented a pretty compelling 

9 argument why --

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: I mean it may be 

11 one thing for a worker who has worked a whole 

12 span and it sort of averages out. It may be 

13 very different for a worker who started at 

14 that time.

15 MR. STIVER: Say the worker who 

16 was involved in one of these high 

17 concentration processes, from 1980 to 1986, 

18 when they started instituting the health 

19 protection measures that were really more 

20 robust at that point, so you have got that 

21 aspect of it as well.

22 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: As the Work 
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1 Group chair I am kind of sitting here in a 

2 situation, are we also spinning our wheels, 

3 you know, it kind of seems like we have been 

4 at loggerheads for the last four to five 

5 meetings of -- on these issues and I am 

6 wondering if, you know, this is why I put this 

7 on for the Augusta meeting, because I want to 

8 start -- I want to get this before the Board, 

9 because I don't think as a Work Group here we 

10 are going to be able to come to -- there's an 

11 awful lot there, so.

12 You know, but we have got to be 

13 able to give NIOSH the opportunity to be able 

14 to respond to these findings and come forward 

15 here and --

16 MR. KATZ: I was just going to 

17 suggest, I mean, a part of this, for some of 

18 the questions that have been raised at this 

19 meeting and probably were raised before but 

20 were raised more elaborately in this meeting, 

21 I mean in terms of uncertainty of the data 

22 that you are relying on or what have you, I 
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1 mean you may answer it by saying we can only, 

2 you know, sort of make any progress in 

3 resolving this uncertainty by getting more 

4 data.

5 You can simply -- that could be 

6 part of your response: that's the only way we 

7 can resolve it. Or you can say you know, we 

8 don't really need to go to more data to answer 

9 that question, and just lay it out as it is.

10 Then they are not hostage to 

11 another data capture or whatever, but they 

12 know what is involved, and if you -- and the 

13 Work Group can decide, they can say, look we 

14 are not going fishing for more data at this 

15 point. We are going to decide based on 

16 information that is available currently.

17 And then you are not sitting doing 

18 a lot of work that possibly may or may not 

19 move the ball forward.

20 MR. STIVER: Yes basically you 

21 need to say this is a tractable problem and 

22 here's some proposed methods that we could use 
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1 to bring it to closure.

2 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Because this 

3 is, in my personal opinion, this is a 

4 significant SEC issue. Are we able to bound 

5 this with this, and with this presentation, 

6 you know, in my mind brings a question.

7 But also too, at the same time, it 

8 comes into timeliness. We have been at this 

9 for an awful long time.

10 But then, on the other hand too, 

11 any of the sites that I have seen or been 

12 involved with, here we have this large amount 

13 of urine data that is sitting out there too.

14 So it's a complex issue and I'm 

15 really having a hard time with how we are 

16 going to proceed forward with it. First of all 

17 we need to be able to allow NIOSH to be able 

18 to digest what has been presented here today 

19 and to deal with it, and decide which way we 

20 are going to go, and then it may end up just 

21 coming to the full board to be able to look at 

22 this and make their decisions from there.
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1 MEMBER ZIEMER: Of course this was 

2 just the recycled uranium issue. There's 

3 several other issues.

4 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: But this one, 

5 you know, I will be right honest with you, 

6 this is a big one, because we don't have much 

7 data. We have got some samples and so forth 

8 from other sites. We were playing with a lot 

9 of things back in there. I know that there was 

10 even some HEU that came into Fernald one time 

11 and that made a big mess there and it ended up 

12 the rest going to Oak Ridge and so forth like 

13 that.

14 But there was a lot of things that 

15 we were dealing with there. There was a lot of 

16 unknowns that came into this site, and I am 

17 just -- I'm really wondering which way to be 

18 able to go.

19 But anyway, that's the tasking for 

20 NIOSH. We will wait for that. We have got to 

21 be able to give them an opportunity to be able 

22 to respond to this, to be able to address the 
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1 issues and as Ted put it, to let us know which 

2 way we are going.

3 Because we have been at this too 

4 long. It's not another big data capture plan, 

5 I'd just rather say enough is enough and go 

6 from there.

7 MR. ROLFES: One other 

8 clarification I guess I wanted to ask. We are 

9 basically relying -- our 10 parts per billion 

10 was bumped up to the 100 parts billion because 

11 of that tower ash material, that we are using 

12 the concentrations of plutonium reported by 

13 DOE in their 2000b reference.

14 And if you look at those 

15 shipments, the material balance data. Now 

16 correct me if I am wrong Bryce, we looked at 

17 that data and one of SC&A's concerns is that 

18 we didn't reanalyze the data ourselves, but we 

19 are relying upon a bootstrap mean analysis of 

20 those shipments. 

21 Bryce, could you --

22 MR. RICH: That's correct.
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1 MR. ROLFES: Okay.

2 MR. RICH: We did look at 

3 distribution and if you look at the chart for 

4 example, you can look at the distribution 

5 graphically and as has been indicated, some of 

6 the data looks like it's a log-normal 

7 distribution but there's a very wide spread, 

8 and it appears that the defaults that we chose 

9 were bounding the high values in all, but the 

10 gaseous diffusion plant POOS material.

11 MR. ROLFES: So do you have an 

12 idea of how many of those results would have 

13 been less than 10 parts per billion versus how 

14 many of the results or shipments would have 

15 been above the 100 part per billion default 

16 that we currently use?

17 MR. RICH: I don't have that 

18 number except to say that most of them are a 

19 bit off.

20 MR. ROLFES: Okay thank you.

21 MR. STIVER: Actually, if you go 

22 to -- we can argue about this I guess, 
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1 forever, but Appendix F has the analysis here, 

2 so all these categories are low but you know, 

3 there are quite a few, 6c, 6e, f, and the --

4 particularly the magnesium fluoride, the 

5 incinerator ash, the tower ash samples are 

6 significantly higher.

7 And also, you know, the bootstrap 

8 mean is --

9 MEMBER ZIEMER: Higher than the --

10 MR. STIVER: Higher than, 

11 definitely higher than 10 and in some cases 

12 higher than the --

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: Than the 100.

14 MR. STIVER: Well, there's only 

15 one bootstrap mean that is higher than 100, 

16 but when you start looking at the spread in 

17 the data, and the log-normal means, and the 

18 uncertainty bounds on those log-normal means, 

19 they are significantly higher than 100, and 

20 they are certainly higher than 10.

21 You know, this is one thing we 

22 think that if you are going to really capture 
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1 the upper bounds for all classes of workers, 

2 you have to do something other than, whether 

3 it amounts to an arithmetic mean for an 

4 incredibly diverse and variable and uncertain 

5 distribution.

6 Jim has laid it out in our paper 

7 very well, about the limitations of this data 

8 set. This is not the bible. This is a starting 

9 point. It's a framework that was intended to 

10 be built on beyond that.

11 This data cannot be used to 

12 justify 10 parts per billion in any way shape 

13 or form, for 100, and certainly not for all 

14 Classes of workers. And that is probably the 

15 biggest issue we have with the NIOSH 

16 methodology.

17 MR. ROLFES: I just wanted to make 

18 sure that we point out basically the control 

19 level was 10 parts per billion. We --

20 MR. STIVER: It was a production 

21 specification. It was not accepted throughout 

22 the facility. It could be changed on a matter 
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1 of a phone call.

2 MR. ROLFES: Yes, with awareness, 

3 but basically we have defaulted to, we have 

4 gone from 10 parts per billion up to 100 parts 

5 per billion, and all of the recycled uranium, 

6 plutonium concentration data that we have 

7 looked at, only that one set of data 

8 essentially exceeded the 100 part per billion 

9 default that we currently use for dose 

10 reconstruction.

11 MR. STIVER: If you looked at the 

12 bootstrap mean, but if you look at the spread 

13 of the data, you will see that that -- it's 

14 significantly higher for at least three 

15 categories.

16 MR. ROLFES: Okay, so that 

17 particular fact then, doesn't necessarily make 

18 this an SEC issue. It's an application of what 

19 distribution.

20 MR. STIVER: Well actually it 

21 does, because there may be categories of 

22 workers that you can't -- the one that I think 
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1 is really the most problematic is the Plant 5 

2 metalworkers. You have got people, you have 

3 got concentrations making magnesium fluoride 

4 and a very low uranium content, and to tie 

5 that back to uranium bioassay is really 

6 problematic.

7 So there is a potential SEC issue 

8 there. There's the earlier period where you 

9 have no data. You are basing this off a 

10 production specification but you have no data 

11 on receipts, you know there is chemical 

12 processes that concentrate the stuff. 

13 In my mind that's an SEC issue.

14 MR. RICH: And the magnesium 

15 fluoride process stream was still based upon 

16 parts per billion uranium, even though the 

17 uranium was -- 

18 MR. ROLFES: Well, it is in this 

19 analysis, but I am questioning the validity of 

20 that approach for that particular source of 

21 exposure.

22 DR. GLOVER: So this is why I was 
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1 asking about the -- making sure we frame the 

2 questions, because we actually, like, finding 

3 forward what you ask us to go back and review

4 the data. 

5 I think one of your main findings 

6 is that the source term coming in, does not 

7 necessarily reflect what the workers could 

8 have got because of chemical changes along the 

9 operations, and therefore we need to show that 

10 our data deals with that along the various 

11 steps and that in addition to the snapshot in 

12 time, that it is back-extrapolatable when 

13 controls throughout the DOE system were not in 

14 place maybe as well as --

15 MR. STIVER: Yes that is a good 

16 summary, that's a good summary.

17 DR. GLOVER: Is that reasonable? 

18 Because that seems to be one of your key 

19 points.

20 MR. STIVER: And if you read 

21 through the details of the report, this is all 

22 laid out there. It's just too much to try to 
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1 present in one bit. As you read through it you 

2 will get a good feel for exactly why we feel 

3 this is a big issue and what possibly could be 

4 done to rectify it.

5 DR. GLOVER: And then you had 

6 another point, which was after the POOS came, 

7 you had outside external stuff at the edge of 

8 the boundary which is above what we found. 

9 Another clear thing that we need to make sure 

10 we -- maybe it's a separate point, so that is 

11 another clear one that our number didn't seem 

12 to be --

13 MR. STIVER: Yes, it's just this 

14 idea that you have got data within the plant 

15 that represent worker exposures that are above 

16 the defaults, and you also have boundary data 

17 that tend to verify that.

18 And so that kind of casts doubts 

19 in my mind on the bounding nature of that 

20 particular number that we selected.

21 MR. KATZ: We'll get an action 

22 plan from DCAS, which you guys can take a look 
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1 at and say yes, this is what will move us 

2 forward, and then we will have agreement and 

3 it will be clear. What's to do we will be 

4 clear.

5 MR. STIVER: Okay I guess we can 

6 go on to --

7 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Number 4. This 

8 is review of radon data for adequacy.

9 MR. STIVER: There was evidently 

10 some confusion at the last meeting on this 

11 about the version of the report that SC&A had 

12 reviewed, and this gets back to the use of 

13 radon breath analysis data to -- as a 

14 mechanism for calculating the doses or the 

15 intakes from thorium-230.

16 And I guess the remaining issue 

17 there was whether -- what would you do in a 

18 situation where you have a thorium-230 that is 

19 depleted and radium-226, so you don't have a 

20 radon source to use to bound those or to even, 

21 to use as a surrogate for determining thorium 

22 intakes.
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1 And I believe the latest version 

2 of the paper, the NIOSH White Paper by Bryce 

3 Rich as revision 7, called the White Paper on 

4 Thorium-230 and Other Associated 

Radionuclides, and dated January 6th 5 , 2010.

6 And that is the latest version, 

7 Mark?

8 MR. ROLFES: That is correct. 

9 MR. STIVER: And we did indeed 

10 review that and I believe Joyce Lipszstein, 

11 Joyce are you still on line? 

12 DR. LIPSZTEIN: Yes I am.

13 MR. STIVER: Joyce is the primary 

14 author of that report and we asked her to go 

15 through and summarize our findings and at this 

16 point we have not received a response from 

17 NIOSH on our review.

18 So this will be mainly just laying 

19 out what our concerns are for the most part 

20 and discussing them. So Joyce, would you like 

21 to just go ahead and I'll turn it over to you.

22 DR. LIPSZTEIN: Okay. Thank you. 
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1 So the purpose of the NIOSH White Paper was to 

2 address the elevated thorium-230 concentration 

3 in areas as you say that we don't have radium4 226 and so we cannot calculate intakes based 

5 on radon in breath.

6 In the White Paper, NIOSH proposes 

7 to calculate bounding intakes of thorium-230 

8 based on intakes from uranium. So with respect 

9 to reconstructing doses in thorium-230, NIOSH 

10 White Paper presents a dose reconstruction 

11 strategy that takes advantage of the 

12 preparation of thorium-230 relative to 

13 uranium-238 and the changes in operations as a 

14 function of time.

15 Basically, NIOSH White Paper 

16 describes four different categories of areas 

17 where workers could have been exposed to 

18 thorium-230. 

19 There was first areas where 

20 uranium and the uranium-238 daughters 

21 including thorium-230 and radium-226 are 

22 present, as for example the Pilot Plant, Plant 
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1 1, Plant 2/3, where the chemical processing of 

2 uranium ore took place through the three step 

3 process of digestion, extraction and de4 nitration and Plant 8, the Recovery Plant.

5 Facilities that fall within this 

6 category are distinguished by the fact that 

7 uranium-238 and its progeny are all present.

8 SC&A agrees in theory that 

9 bioassay data that is providing for maximum 

10 concentration of uranium in the urine, can be 

11 used directly to estimate intake rate of not 

12 only radium, but also its progeny including 

13 thorium-230 and radium-226.

14 What we have to say is that NIOSH 

15 have to show us that the workers that worked 

16 in those areas did not perform jobs or did not 

17 spend time in the raffinates areas of Plant 3 

18 for example, or the silos areas where exposure 

19 to uranium was negligible.

20 Because if you have the areas 

21 where there was no exposures from uranium, you 

22 cannot calculate the intakes based on the 
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1 uranium bioassay data.

2 So we think that, for this study, 

3 we are waiting for further data from NIOSH, 

4 characterizing with respect to the work who 

5 was working in which area and if the workers 

6 rotated and how they rotated in time.

7 Now, so there are other areas like 

8 the raffinate areas located in Plant 3. In 

9 these areas, thorium-230 is present after 

10 separation from uranium. Radium-226 is present 

11 in some of the operations but not in all the 

12 processes conducted in the raffinate areas of 

13 Plant 3.

14 And then, what we see in the --

15 well okay, in the raffinate areas we had the 

16 hot and cold sides. There were two streams 

17 depending on where the resinate originated.

18 Hot resinates were those resulting 

19 from radium-containing oils, while cold 

20 resinates were radium-free.

21 And then these filtered hot and 

22 cold resinate streams were received in the 
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1 combined resinate area, and the combined 

2 resinate stream was evaporated to obtain a 

3 concentrated methyl nitrate solution.

4 So in these areas, we have workers 

5 that are exposed to thorium-230 and radium6 226, but they are exposed to insignificant 

7 quantities of uranium. So it is not possible 

8 to estimate uranium-238 or thorium-230 based 

9 on bioassay results of uranium-238, in areas 

10 where exposures to uranium were negligible.

11 And what NIOSH states is that in 

12 the resinate process, there was a -- the 

13 resinate process was essentially contained in 

14 a closed piping system and was not a source of 

15 significant exposure to workers in Plant 3.

16 And NIOSH concluded on this, based 

17 on historical DWE results. And this leads us 

18 to what we put in our papers, finding 3 and 

19 finding 8.

20 In finding 3 we have seen some 

21 papers saying -- there were reports by, for 

22 example, Wing, it's a 1958, 1959, 1962 and 
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1 from Ross from 1968, on exposure of personnel 

2 from Plants 2 and 3, which is in-site pipe 

3 leaks.

4 So this contradicts the 

5 presumption that the high thorium waste 

6 observed in single-stream material is 

7 associated within a safely confined system, 

8 which presents little, if any exposure 

9 potential to workers.

10 And then also, we have looked very 

11 carefully at the DWEs that were given to us by 

12 NIOSH. It turns out that these data are not 

13 complete. They were not derived within a 

14 complete set of results taken during the whole 

15 years. 

16 And for example, the area 3 DWEs 

17 in 1958, for example, are based on August to 

18 October sampling, and we have documents that 

19 show that the breathing zone as samplings for 

20 operators in the Plant 3 hot raffinates are 

21 much higher than the maximum permissible, the 

22 MAC, in the Plant 3 hot raffinates building.
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1 So, and when we looked at the 

2 Appendix A results for Plant 3, they don't 

3 show this result. So we have all those 

4 listings of results that we show that many 

5 times the GA and the breathing zone samples in 

6 Plant 3 are much higher than the DWEs that are 

7 shown in Appendix A that were used to conclude 

8 that results in the raffinates area 3 are very 

9 low.

10 For example, NIOSH says that the 

11 DWEs in Plant 8, which houses the raffinates 

12 operations, were low essentially at background 

13 levels, and we found other documents showing 

14 that the DWEs were much higher and the 

15 breathing zones also.

16 Also, then we have another area 

17 where thorium-230 and radium-226 are present 

18 and there is no uranium exposure, which are 

19 silos area 1 and 2.

20 And there was a time that there 

21 were radium monitoring data for this period of 

22 workers, then radon in breath is available, 
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1 then radium-226 intakes can be determined and 

2 thorium-230 also can be determined.

3 But there are other periods of 

4 time where radon in breath was not data, when 

5 radon in breath are not available. So we want 

6 to ask what -- how can we calculate the 

7 thorium-230 intake when bioassay doesn't make 

8 -- uranium bioassay doesn't make sense because 

9 there was essentially no exposure to uranium.

10 The same happens with silos 3 

11 area, where thorium-230 is present in much 

12 higher activities than uranium-238 or radium13 226.

14 So, we, I think we expect an 

15 answer to all those questions from NIOSH and I 

16 think in summary that's the problem. We agreed 

17 that bioassay uranium can be used to calculate 

18 thorium-230 intakes, if for workers that have 

19 worked solely on areas where they were exposed 

20 to uranium, thorium and radium.

21 But for workers that worked in 

22 areas that they were not exposed to uranium 
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1 but only to thorium-230 and/or radium-226, 

2 then we need further guidance from NIOSH on 

3 how they are going to calculate the thorium4 230 data. I think that's it. John? Did I --

5 MR. STIVER: Yes, I think that 

6 summarizes it. Evidently at the last meeting 

7 there was some confusion about which version 

8 had been reviewed and so I guess at this point 

9 NIOSH has not issued a formal response to our 

10 paper.

11 I would think that would be the 

12 best logical choice, would be for you guys to 

13 go ahead and put together a formal response 

14 for us. It's been a while since we talked 

15 about this, and I guess the issue of how to do 

16 thorium-230 in the situation where there has 

17 been depleted radium-226 and no radon breath 

18 data, is probably the key issue here.

19 MR. ROLFES: I was just looking 

20 back at your notes and I just wanted to make 

21 sure that you have submitted a paper. It says: 

22 White Paper on Thorium-230 and Other 
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1 Associated Radionuclides Rev 7. All right, we 

2 will take a look at that and get a response.

3 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: So that's 

4 already been cleared to --

5 MR. STIVER: Yes. We produced that 

6 last June, I believe. 

7 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay.

8 MR. STIVER: It's already been 

9 cleared and all. Okay, Bob Anigstein, are you 

10 online still?

11 DR. ANIGSTEIN: Yes, I am.

12 MR. STIVER: Okay, I realize you -

13 - it's been a long wait for you.

14 DR. ANIGSTEIN: Okay. 

15 MR. STIVER: Bob has followed up 

16 on the issue of the radon emissions for the K17 65 silos and this particular issue has a 

18 storied history, much like recycled uranium, 

19 in that we had, over the past two Work Group 

20 meetings, over the course of action items that 

21 arose from that, SC&A has produced two 

22 different White Papers and NIOSH has issued 
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1 response to those about the source term.

2 And we have provided a fairly 

3 comprehensive paper that really lays out our 

4 position on that. And I think at the last 

5 meeting, the Board had agreed that there was 

6 really nothing more to discuss on the source 

7 term but that what they wanted was an 

8 evaluation of whether the model used by NIOSH 

9 would result in bounding doses to workers on 

10 site.

11 And Bob Anigstein has generated a 

12 review and a very nice work-up that looks at 

13 that model and how it was generated and all 

14 the details of it and the implications of 

15 combining that with the source terms that have 

16 been derived either by SC&A and also in 

17 comparison with NIOSH's source term.

18 So Bob, at this point I'll go 

19 ahead and let you take over and the third -- I 

20 sent around a PDF file, which is Bob's latest 

21 presentation, I believe it's called Anigstein 

22 3, and you should have that available. We 
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1 distributed it. That's the most recent one.

2 DR. ANIGSTEIN: I also emailed it 

3 to everyone. 

4 MR. STIVER: Okay, so everybody 

5 else has already got that, then okay.

6 DR. ANIGSTEIN: Yes, it's called 

7 presentations2.pdf. 

8 MR. STIVER: Okay.

9 DR. ANIGSTEIN: The only 

10 difference is there was some formatting 

11 glitches in the early one.

12 MR. STIVER: Okay.

13 DR. ANIGSTEIN: Some symbols --

14 there's no substance change. It was some 

15 symbols didn't appear properly.

16 So shall I go ahead?

17 MR. STIVER: Sure, yes, go ahead.

18 DR. ANIGSTEIN: Okay. So if you 

19 start on -- slide 1 is just a title page --

20 start off with slide 2. I just listed the 

21 objectives for doing this calculation.

22 And we were specifically asked by 
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1 one of the Board Members at the last meeting 

2 to explain how NIOSH, explain the NIOSH 

3 methodology of data readouts.

4 And so we then went ahead and 

5 calculated the relationship between the radon 

6 concentrations and the emission rate, which is 

7 a term commonly called chi over q, chi is the 

8 concentration, q is the source term.

9 And then we evaluated the chi over 

10 q derived by NIOSH where we had some questions 

11 about it, and so we performed an independent 

12 assessment so that we could have a basis for 

13 comparison.

14 And finally, there were two 

15 reports by the Pinney Group, Dr. Susan Pinney 

16 from the University of Cincinnati, studying 

17 radon at Fernald. We were also asked to look 

18 at that.

19 Our finding, to start with the 

20 end, is that we find that NIOSH used an 

21 unrealistic model to calculate the atmospheric 

22 dilutions, otherwise known as chi over q.
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1 It was not a model that is 

2 applicable to steady states from the extended 

3 structure, and it did not use the correct 

4 site-specific meteorological data that is 

5 available.

6 The results fortuitously were 

7 higher than the one that we calculated using a 

8 general site-specific model, using the 

9 substantive information applicable to the 

10 particular exposure conditions.

11 However, it was not high enough to 

12 compensate for the underestimated radon 

13 release rate.

14 As far as the Pinney studies are 

15 concerned, they do not validate the RAC model. 

16 RAC is the Radiological Assessments 

17 Corporation. 

18 The RAC model prediction were 

19 actually used to calibrate the Pinney 

20 measurements, so you can't have a circular 

21 thing. You can't say we have to calibrate the 

22 measurements and then the measurements confirm 
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1 the data, the model.

2 They did describe a Masters 

3 thesis, a Masters student from the University 

4 of Cincinnati who did some measurements, but 

5 that was in 1991, so they do not apply to the 

6 period of highest releases in 1959 to 1979.

7 And also, we could not -- I could 

8 not establish that even in that limited sense, 

9 the RAC model was validated. The information 

10 presented was not conclusive.

11 And finally, the Pinney -- I could 

12 find no indication that the Pinney work was 

13 used in actual dose reconstructions that had 

14 been done during the past year.

15 So going into greater detail, on 

16 slide 4, I am trying to explain, perhaps for 

17 people who are not familiar with this air 

18 pollution dispersion modeling, just a very, 

19 very, very quick tutorial on this model.

20 On the left, there is a model of 

21 an elevated release from a tall stack. So here 

22 you see the grey area, the plume, as it 
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1 spreads downwind. The stack is correctly 

2 represented as a thin, narrow structure, so of 

3 a certain height. In the NIOSH model, they 

4 assumed a 10-meter height at the release 

5 point. It seemed rather arbitrary.\ 

6 And the plume gets wider as it 

7 goes away and you see the two curves in the 

8 middle of this grey area, a horizontal and a 

9 vertical one.

10 And this is the Gaussian plume 

11 model. It's assumed that as you go away from 

12 the center, either up or down or left and 

13 right, you get a normal distribution like this 

14 typical Gaussian curve, which you can see on 

15 the right, which is known as the bell curve, 

16 and the sigma here is a standard deviation and 

17 that is used to characterize the vertical, 

18 there is a sigma y, which is the horizontal, 

19 and the sigma z that is vertical, to 

20 characterize the dispersion of the plume.

21 The problem with this model, if 

22 you look on the next slide 5, here is a cross-
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1 section of the actual silo. Initially they 

2 stood alone, but even then they were wide, 

3 relatively low, wide structures, 24 meter in 

4 diameter, eight meter high plus the dome.

5 In 1964, mostly to support the 

6 crumbling concrete walls, or the concrete 

7 walls that were in danger of crumbling, they 

8 added an earthen berm.

9 So essentially now you have a 

10 little hill and just the tip of the dome 

11 sticks out, and the small drawing on the right 

12 shows you the size of the silo in the center, 

13 and this is the earthen berm all around.

14 So you can visualize the wind 

15 coming, blowing, let's say arbitrarily from 

16 the left in the drawing. The wind is going to 

17 come up to this berm, or even without the 

18 berm, it's going to come up to the silo and 

19 start sweeping above it.

20 It has to go somewhere. It doesn't 

21 just come to a dead -- it's going to go above 

22 it and around it. Then all these air streams 
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1 are going to then meet on the other side.

2 So it is not true that a release 

3 will simply remain elevated, even the part 

4 that goes through that gooseneck vent that 

5 shows on top, which incidentally as shown, 

6 goes up and then it curves down again. So the 

7 actual gases, if there is any velocity, will 

8 be pointing downward.

9 So the whole thing gets mixed in 

10 together and you do not have an elevated plume 

11 and the guidance -- we did not just make this 

12 up -- the guidance from the Nuclear Regulatory 

13 Commission specifies, for steady releases from 

14 a structure, unless the stack is at least 

15 twice the height of all surrounding 

16 structures, which includes the structure that 

17 it is on, you cannot treat it as an elevated 

18 release.

19 And even then it's only the 

20 certain gas -- velocity of the effluent 

21 vertical blocks or the effluents.

22 So the appropriate way to treat it 
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1 would be a ground-level release with 

2 additional dilution due to the mixing, there's 

3 mixing in this because of the size of the 

4 building.

5 The next slide, 6, is taken out of 

6 that same Regulatory Guide and this also 

7 appears in the NIOSH TBD, a very similar 

8 drawing, showing how sigma z, the vertical 

9 dispersion, the one I am showing here, varies 

10 with the stability class.

11 Stability class is just the 

12 dispersability of the atmosphere. So F or G 

13 stability classes mean the plume is very 

14 tight. There's very little turbulence, you 

15 have a smooth flow of air, very little 

16 turbulence.

17 And as you get up to A, the 

18 atmosphere is more and more turbulent. The 

19 sigma z is much larger and the plume gets 

20 dispersed much more quickly. 

21 But interestingly enough, this 

22 works in the opposite direction if you have an 
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1 elevated release, because then a narrow plume 

2 means if you are near the stack, it passes 

3 right over your head.

4 There is virtually no effect from 

5 the ground, whereas, let's say with class A, 

6 there would be much more hitting the ground.

7 Then the next page 7, table, these 

8 are data copied from the TBD and it shows that 

9 for ground-level releases, which NIOSH did 

10 use, but only for a very limited source term, 

11 it's only for the K-65 material that was 

12 stored in drums on the pad in Plant 1, near 

13 Plant 1, and was only there for two or three 

14 years -- `52 to, middle of `52 to middle of 

15 `54.

16 So there it would be appropriate 

17 to use the ground level releases. For the 

18 silos, they used the elevated release, which 

19 was by far the more important term.

20 And if you go down the table, 

21 particularly where it says elevated, you go 

22 down and under the TBD column, you see that it 
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1 starts off extremely low, then it reaches a 

2 maximum at about 500 meters, actually 550 --

3 yes, 500 meters. Sorry. And then it starts to 

4 go down again. 

5 That's because first the plume 

6 hits the ground and then it gets more and more 

7 diluted as it goes further away.

8 And we calculated these numbers 

9 just as a QA check using the NIOSH formula, 

10 and I got different results. I don't know why. 

11 I think there was an error. We checked on this 

12 several times.

13 So we get much higher -- even 

14 using the NIOSH model we get much higher 

15 values up until you get to about 400 meters, 

16 then it becomes essentially the same. So I 

17 think there is a calculational error there.

18 It doesn't really affect the 

19 results because they only use the numbers from 

20 250, starting with 250, and they were off --

21 the discrepancy is a factor of two. I think 

22 it's something that NIOSH should look at to 
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1 see where these errors crept in.

2 Going on to slide 8, this is taken 

3 straight out of the TBD and is showing the 

4 NIOSH method, which is I simply added the red, 

5 to show the location of K-65 silos, and what 

6 they did was, using that elevated release 

7 model, calculate the chi over q at each 

8 location of each of these 11 -- exposure 

9 areas, they called them, one of which actually 

10 includes the 16 K-65 silos.

11 And they used that, then they 

12 took, on the next page, slide 11, you see 

13 those are wind rows, taken from a later year, 

14 but probably not very different, the year 

15 2000.

16 And they simply multiplied, they 

17 calculated the chi over q for each exposure 

18 area by the frequency that the wind blows in 

19 that region.

20 But curiously enough, they did 

21 some summing, because apparently if the 

22 exposure area fell into more than one compass 
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1 direction, which took the 16 compass 

2 directions and if it's wider than one sector, 

3 they actually added to this.

4 So if the wind is blowing 

5 simultaneously to the northeast and to the 

6 east-northeast, for instance. Anyway, that is 

7 the way it was done.

8 The commentary on page 10, the 

9 summation of our take on this, is that there 

10 were -- on the one hand they were 

11 underestimated because they used an elevated 

12 release. 

13 Secondly, the wind speed, which 

14 was based on an accident analysis done by 

15 Parsons for some thorium redrumming, and 

16 Parsons simply used the Cincinnati area 

17 average wind speeds, which came out to -- they 

18 quoted it at 7.1 miles per hour, which is 3.2 

19 meters per second.

20 The actual wind speed at the 

21 Fernald site is 2.1 meters per second. This 

22 can be verified by looking at the wind rows on 
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1 the previous page and also on the next page --

2 getting a little out of sequence here -- we 

3 actually have the detailed data.

4 We have five years' worth of 

5 measurements done on-site between 1987 and 

6 1991 of hour by hour, of wind speed, wind 

7 direction and stability class.

8 And that is the data that should 

9 be used in an alternate on-site analysis, and 

10 we get 2.1 instead of 3.2 meters per second.

11 On the other hand, they 

12 overestimate because they assumed that all 

13 year long, you have the worst atmospheric 

14 stability, almost a class F, rather than 

15 looking at how the atmospheric stability 

16 changes, hour by hour, day by day, month by 

17 month.

18 And they also make the unrealistic 

19 assumption that the receptor is always dead 

20 center, on the center line of the plume. 

21 And that is appropriate for an 

22 accident analysis. If you are doing the a 
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1 priori accident analysis, the accident hasn't 

2 happened, but what if an accident happens, and 

3 it would be a short-time release, then it's 

4 appropriate. 

5 You don't know which way the wind 

6 is blowing, so you assume the worst case. You 

7 assume that you have a receptor, somebody 

8 nearby, you usually have the sense lag because 

9 you are doing off-site impacts, and the 

10 weather is blowing straight at him, and then 

11 you have -- and you say class F because that 

12 is about as bad as it can get.

13 But that is not appropriate when 

14 you have a year-long release, steady and going 

15 on year after year.

16 So therefore, either you don't use 

17 the center line, you just use the general 

18 direction of the plume and I will get to that 

19 in a moment, how that's done in a moment, and 

20 you use the actual stability class.

21 So on the next page, page 11, is 

22 the data that I was referring to. This is --
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1 there are six such tables and they would take 

2 much too much room so I am just showing one 

3 for the class A.

4 And this was data that was the 

5 hourly data that was then used by the RAC team 

6 to compile what is called a joint frequency 

7 table and this is something that is used 

8 consistently for -- at nuclear power plants 

9 when they have to report their releases and 

10 the impact on the surrounding environment.

11 And so you see the first number in 

12 the upper left-hand corner, the wind blows 

13 from the north and the wind velocity between 

14 zero and two meters per second, is 0.005, half 

15 of one percent is in that direction, and so 

16 forth for the rest of the table.

17 And then this is, assume that it's 

18 always class A and then you multiply each of 

19 these by the class A frequency, which is on 

20 the top, or about six percent, and you get the 

21 actual frequency, we call it joint frequency.

22 You get the frequency of a given 
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1 wind direction, a given wind speed, and a 

2 given stability class. And with all of that 

3 data you can do a very site-specific, accurate 

4 analysis of chi over q.

5 And the equation to do that is 

6 shown on 12. This was again taken, based on 

7 this US NRC Regulatory Guide.

8 And it is simpler than it looks. 

9 What it really means is that you start off 

10 after the big sigma. These are just the 

11 numbers I was showing on the previous page.

12 The frequency of a given stability 

13 class, a given wind speed and a given sector, 

14 meaning 16, one of those 16 compass 

15 directions.

16 And you divide by the wind speed 

17 and you divide, which you always -- which we 

18 just take as the middle of each range, and you 

19 divide by this calculated sigma, and then to 

20 the left, you multiply, you divide by x, which 

21 is the distance in meters and this factor of 

22 2.03, which I won't go into.
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1 And then the sigma, as it is 

2 called, it has a sigma prime. And the sigma 

3 prime takes into account the building. So it's 

4 your sigma taken off of that curve and then 

5 you add a number that is sort of roughly 

6 related to the cross-sectional area of the 

7 building, not exactly. The square of the 

8 height divided by two pi, that can be a 

9 prescribed number.

10 But it's always less than the 

11 square root of three times the lesser of these 

12 two, of the second and third line.

13 So this is the regulatory approved 

14 way of calculating these releases. So how have 

15 we applied this model to the event site then? 

16 You took the map of the site on slide 13, on 

17 the left. This is simply a drawing taken from 

18 the TBD but I added the red outline to simply 

19 have a simplified mathematical model, because 

20 I didn't want, I couldn't follow every single 

21 turning, kind of left out that upper right22 hand corner just to simplify the model.
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1 It's well away from the silos, so 

2 it wouldn't have much of an effect.

3 And then on the right, this is 

4 generated by the computer program. This is an 

5 Excel file taken out from the resulting 

6 computer program, which shows we reproduce, 

7 nicely reproduce the outline of the site.

8 We show the little rectangle in 

9 the middle, that's -- I just pasted that in, 

10 just a representation of the silos. The red 

11 line is part of the computer model and that is 

12 the security fence around the silos.

13 Nobody is allowed inside that 

14 fence, so we didn't model that. And the small, 

15 little fine blue squares, these are your 9,586 

16 locations of possible places where a worker 

17 could be and the chi over q at that location, 

18 given the site-specific direction, speed, and 

19 speed of the wind and stability class.

20 So we assumed the source is the 

21 center of the silos and these are each of --

22 and each of these locations were calculated 
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1 separately.

2 And the result was we took, on 

3 page 14, under SC&A, this is the arithmetic 

mean of those 9,586 locations, and the 95th 4 

5 percentile makes no assumption about 

6 distribution, it simply ranks them in order 

7 and takes the -- starting at the bottom, the 

95th percent high value is the 95th 8 percentile.

9 On the left, NIOSH did not -- the 

10 TBD does not give the chi over q -- it gives 

11 the chi over q at each of the exposure areas. 

12 It does not tell how they were combined. We 

13 actually could not reproduce the numbers, it 

just said it was the 95th 14 percentile of the 

15 distribution.

16 It is a little confusing. I think 

17 the geometric mean originally. So I take back 

18 what I just said.

19 But I could not reproduce the 

20 numbers. But nevertheless, what we could do is 

21 simply take the number, the exposure assigned 

22 in working level months for each period of 
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1 time, and there is a conversion factor which 

2 was presented in the report, that was 

3 standard.

4 So you divide by that conversion 

5 factor to get the concentration and then you 

6 back-calculate a source term, a release rate, 

7 and you end up with a chi over q.

8 So we took a little indirect 

9 calculation but it was based on the data 

10 presented. So as I said, they have a -- their 

11 mean is about a little over twice ours, their 

95th 12 percentile is 1.5 times ours.

13 So the argument is not so much 

14 with the numbers but with the method. So our 

15 position is, finding position is that their 

16 methodology is unrealistic, page 15, does not 

17 use the appropriate site-specific

18 meteorological data and it is potentially 

19 overstated by roughly a factor of 2.

20 On the other hand, their estimate, 

21 and this goes back to our previous White 

22 Paper, so this is not new information, the 
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1 estimate of the radon emissions from the silos 

2 fails to account for the deficit of the lead3 210 with respect to radium-226. 

4 Had there been no radon 

5 whatsoever, the two would be essentially in 

6 equilibrium and actually the lead-210, having 

7 a shorter half-life, will be something like 

8 1.4 percent, if my memory serves me, higher 

9 actually than the radium.

10 Instead, it's lower, it's 

11 somewhere around the order of a 50 percent 

12 deficit, just round numbers, from memory.

13 So this potentially underestimates 

14 the release of radon by about an order of 

15 magnitude, depending on the temperature, it 

16 could be a factor of 10 or 20 lower.

17 However, the question we were 

18 asked is: well, do we believe that the radon 

19 concentrations can be bounded? And the answer 

20 is yes, we can, we do.

21 One reason we went through the 

22 exercise of calculating chi over q is to see 
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1 is there an acceptable method of calculating 

2 it and we found at least an acceptable method.

3 So we believe that you can 

4 calculate the historical source term that 

5 accounts for the deficit of lead-210, with 

6 respect to the radium-226, account also for 

7 the other sources, the drum K-65 waste, which 

8 NIOSH did account for, and the Q011

9 silos which was something new that was 

10 uncovered by the Pinney study when they found 

11 unexpected radon -- a history of unexpected 

12 radon exposure and interviewed workers and 

13 found it had been smaller silos but they were 

14 nearer to the production buildings, so they 

15 actually resulted in higher radon 

16 concentrations during the early years of 

17 operation. They were only there for a few 

18 years and I forget exactly what the years 

19 were.

20 And then if they use an acceptable 

21 and appropriate model with respect to the 

22 data. It is possible to create, to have 
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1 bounding radon exposures.

2 We were also asked to discuss the 

3 Pinney reports, because they were -- NIOSH had 

4 cited them as another source of information. 

5 So here is another very quick 

6 didactic, going to page 16. This has a couple 

7 of formatting errors, where you see the a with 

8 a little accent mark, that was supposed to 

9 have been an alpha. It got garbled.

10 I hope nobody minds a quick 

11 physics lesson. What you have -- we are 

12 showing the right just of the K scheme, of 

13 radon-226. If you go down, a little over half14 way down that decay chart, opposite where it 

15 says 130, which is the number of neutrons.

16 You see polonium-214 and this is 

17 an extremely short-lived nuclide, has a half18 life of 1.6 times 10 to the minus 4 seconds, 

19 like one sixth of a millisecond, and it decays 

20 by alpha emission to lead-210.

21 So on the left is a little picture 

22 of this. So you have -- what you have is the 
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1 alpha comes out with certain energy, certain 

2 velocity which gives it a momentum, and what 

3 you have is a recoil, just like if a rifle or 

4 a pistol fires a bullet, the bullet goes 

5 forward, the gun goes backward. Anybody who 

6 has fired a gun will realize that.

7 So in this case, if it happens 

8 that the lead-214 -- actually the polonium9 214, which is the parent nuclide now, happens 

10 to be attached, sitting on, very close to a 

11 pane of glass, and if the alpha shoots out in 

12 the opposite direction, the remaining atom, 

13 which is now lead-210 --polonium-214 minus an 

14 alpha becomes lead-210 -- so the remaining 

15 atom now gets shot into the glass with a 

16 certain force and if it goes in the right 

17 direction and if it is close enough so it 

18 doesn't bump into too many air molecules on 

19 the way, it can become embedded in the glass.

20 So this is the basis of that 

21 analysis done by the Pinney team. And then, so 

22 what they did was they took this -- there is 
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1 this plastic film called CR-39 that is useful 

2 as an alpha detector. They pasted it on the 

3 glass, both on the inside and the outside, and 

4 left it on for a couple of weeks.

5 So in equilibrium with the lead6 210, lead-210 is just a beta emitter so it 

7 doesn't -- it won't show up. But the polonium8 210 is its daughter product. It will be in 

9 equilibrium.

10 And it is another, the last alpha 

11 emitter in the chain. So the polonium-210, the 

12 alpha from polonium-210, will cause like a 

13 defect in this film, like a little groove so 

14 to speak. Basically they leave a track, on a 

15 photograph it's going to be called a track.

16 So they take these films and send 

17 them off to a lab in England, it was the one 

18 that originated this process, and they will 

19 come back and tell them how -- basically how 

20 many polonium alphas there were per square 

21 centimeter, and then if you do some very 

22 elaborate calculations, you can figure out how 
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1 much lead-210 there is in the glass, and 

2 therefore, how much radon it had been exposed 

3 to over the years.

4 Now the limitation of this process 

5 is you have to -- these processes have been 

6 developed and used for assessing radon 

7 exposures in homes, in epidemiological studies 

8 to try to relate incidences of lung cancer to 

9 the radon concentrations.

10 One thing they did was, let's see 

11 if we can figure out over the years how much 

12 radon was in this home on average. And they 

13 would put this film, and they did it both on 

14 the insides of the windows and over glass 

15 covering, picture frames.

16 But there, they had the assumption 

17 that it was a steady situation, that it didn't 

18 change year by year, and also, they had a test 

19 chamber. 

20 So they would have a -- the glass 

21 would be exposed to a known radon 

22 concentration and they could use the same film 
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1 to see what the lead in it was.

2 So they had something, basically 

3 they had a calibration so they could relate 

4 the readings on that CR-39 film to what was a 

5 known radon concentration, and then you can 

6 say okay, this home has twice as much, it has 

7 half as much, you could do a straight ratio.

8 They didn't have that for Fernald. 

9 The process by which the lead-210 goes into 

10 the glass is very different in an indoor 

11 environment and an outdoor environment. The 

12 source term is not steady, and we know the 

13 barriers over the years. For instance, there 

14 is a very big difference if the lead-210, was 

15 it positive a year ago or 45 years ago?

16 Because that is two half-lives of the lead and 

17 so it decayed about 25 percent as much.

18 So if they don't know the 

19 concentration history, they can't do it. If 

20 they don't know -- basically, they don't know 

21 the concentration and so they can't do it.

22 So they used a RAC model. They had 
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1 somebody from the RAC team. They hired him as 

2 a consultant, to do the calculations for them, 

3 and then to give them a history. This is the 

4 radon concentration year by year for each of 

5 these buildings.

6 And from that they say okay, now 

7 we know how to calibrate the film. So that's 

8 fine for their study, but that does not 

9 validate the -- the RAC model validated their 

10 CR-39 film detector. So you cannot then use 

11 the same detector to validate the RAC model. 

12 That would be circular reasoning.

13 The additional data they furnished 

14 was this 1991 measurement done by a Masters 

15 student. First of all we could not verify this 

16 because we could not obtain -- we asked, true, 

17 we did not independently, we had very little 

18 time to do this actually, we did not 

19 independently contact the University of 

20 Cincinnati to obtain the thesis. So NIOSH did 

21 not have it available. 

22 DR. GLOVER: Is that Cardarelli's 
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1 report? Do you really want the data?

2 DR. ANIGSTEIN: I don't know, at 

3 this point --

4 (Simultaneous speakers.)

5 DR. GLOVER: Do we really need it?

6 DR. ANIGSTEIN: Well, at this 

7 point, I will defer the answer to that 

8 question.

9 DR. GLOVER: All right. Okay.

10 DR. ANIGSTEIN: I will put off 

11 answering that question. I will defer to John 

12 Mauro, project manager, to see if we are going 

13 to continue anything with that.

14 DR. GLOVER: Okay.

15 DR. ANIGSTEIN: But even so, what 

16 I did look at, there were these two Pinney 

17 reports, the 2004, which was a report to the 

18 project sponsor, which has to be NIOSH, and 

19 then 2008, there's a journal article.

20 And the way they cited the data, 

21 which, by the way, I was told I cannot mention 

22 the student's name, I think it was just 
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1 mentioned, the way they reported it was 

2 inconsistent between the two reports, and we 

3 could -- and even, and we are not convinced 

4 that it really validated the mean. 

5 It was inconclusive. But more 

6 important, even if it did validate, even if it 

7 was in the ballpark from 1991, it doesn't tell 

8 us anything about the 1959 to `79 period, 

9 before the dome was sealed.

10 So that's the size of it.

11 MR. STIVER: Well, thanks Bob. 

12 That's a very thorough and succinct 

13 presentation. 

14 DR. ANIGSTEIN: Thank you.

15 MR. STIVER: I think at this point 

16 we have -- SC&A has done basically all that we 

17 can do. I think we have addressed the source 

18 term in our previous White Papers, and Bob has 

19 laid out in very crystal clear detail what the 

20 issues were regarding the model, and the 

21 implications basically that, in the worst 

22 case, it looks like we have got factor of two 
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1 overestimates, but the chi over q combined 

2 with an order of magnitude, potential 

3 underestimates of the source term, which would 

4 result in underestimates of about a factor of 

5 5 in the first order of approximation.

6 Something else that we really need 

7 to bring up, though, is that despite all this, 

8 this particular issue really in our opinion 

9 does not rise to the level of an SEC. 

10 And I believe Mark had brought up 

11 at the last meeting that I think almost all 

12 the lung cancer cases are compensated on the 

13 basis of uranium alone, and I think there was 

14 only a handful of cases where radon is --

15 DR. ANIGSTEIN: I can add 

16 something to that.

17 MR. STIVER: Okay.

18 DR. ANIGSTEIN: I had noted that 

19 from the -- I wasn't involved in the last 

20 meeting, but I did read the transcript.

21 I went back and picked out the 

22 cancer diagnosis code, I believe it was 1.62 
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1 was the one for the -- 

2 MR. STIVER: 1.62 sounds right. 

3 DR. ANIGSTEIN: -- for lung. So I 

4 did a query on all the cases from Fernald that 

5 had been processed in 2010, figuring it would 

6 give me the most up-to-date result, and there 

7 were 12 such cases that had actually been 

8 processed and of these, 10 had been 

9 underestimated, meaning deliberately 

10 underestimated.

11 They left out the environmental 

12 exposure. And then they were compensated.

13 MR. STIVER: An expedited case.

14 DR. ANIGSTEIN: Pardon?

15 MR. STIVER: Yes, they called those 

16 efficiency methods where they --

17 DR. ANIGSTEIN: Yes, exactly. 

18 Thank you for clarifying it for other people. 

19 Right, they used the efficiency method of 

20 underestimating the exposure and they found 

21 that the cases could be compensated primarily 

22 on the basis of uranium intake.
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1 And there were two others, there 

2 were only two where the radon calculation was 

3 actually made, and it did not -- the only way 

4 it used was it took the exposures and working 

5 level months straight out of TBD, I believe it 

6 was labeled 4-12.

7 So there was no indication, 

8 perhaps there was some confusion where it 

9 appeared that NIOSH was using the Pinney data 

10 to do dose reconstructions. But there was no 

11 indication of that.

12 I just wanted to sort of throw 

13 that in.

14 MR. ROLFES: I was just going to 

15 say, from the beginning we have said that we 

16 would use the Pinney data for dose 

17 reconstruction, and actually last year it was 

18 actually SPEDELite linked to all Fernald 

19 claimants' files.

20 So there is data now from the 

21 Pinney model in the NIOSH OCAS claims tracking 

22 system and what we would have to do for any 
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1 claims that used a previous model that had a 

2 lower internal exposure assigned, we would go 

3 back and look at any claims under 50 percent 

4 Probability of Causation, under a Program 

5 Evaluation Plan.

6 So we would have to take a look at 

7 those two cases to determine whether in fact 

8 we would need to reevaluate the radon 

9 exposures, because it may be that the Pinney 

10 model for those particular years actually 

11 resulted in lower radon exposures than what we 

12 assigned.

13 I'd have to take a look at the 

14 specific --

15 MR. STIVER: You'd have to look at 

16 the PoCs.

17 MR. ROLFES: Yes. Yes.

18 MR. STIVER: And all of the 

19 specifics. 

20 MR. ROLFES: But for the --

21 there's you know, 90-something percent of the 

22 respiratory tract cancers from the Fernald 
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1 site have received compensation, and it's 

2 typically from uranium exposures alone.

3 MR. STIVER: Do you recall off the 

4 top of your head what the magnitude of the 

5 doses from radon might be, compared to, say, 

6 over a given year for --

7 MR. ROLFES: From the Pinney 

8 model, the highest were from the earlier time 

9 periods, from the Q-11 silos, for basically 

10 the Q-11 material in process. That was for the 

11 years up until 1958.

12 And then from `59 forward, the 

13 working level models dropped pretty 

14 dramatically. And there's ranges reported in 

15 the Pinney -- I can probably pull some up if 

16 you like.

17 MR. STIVER: No, I was just 

18 curious. 

19 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: So basically, 

20 with this K-65 issue, we have had to deal with 

21 this for quite a while. This is -- so we have 

22 come to the determination that we can bound 
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1 the dose using whichever --

2 MR. STIVER: Yes, I think the 

3 issue more is that the scientifically valid 

4 models and the source term are being used. 

5 That would be the issue of going through and 

6 doing a program evaluation on the cases for 

7 which there may have been an impact on the 

8 claimant side.

9 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Well, this 

10 could be more of a Site Profile issue. Okay. 

11 So I guess, Mark, you have just stated that if 

12 we do have any of these in any of the does 

13 reconstructions, that you are going to have to 

14 reevaluate it or --

15 MR. ROLFES: Yes, that's something 

16 that we have done. Very early on, you know, we

17 started off with efficiency methods for our 

18 dose reconstructions to get as many claims 

19 that we could out with, you know, worst case 

20 scenarios that we would assign.

21 And you know, we may have to go 

22 back and look at some of the -- and, excuse 
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1 me, for a lung cancer case, you know, if an 

2 individual was bioassayed, we would use that 

3 uranium bioassay data to calculate an intake 

4 and the resultant dose to their lung.

5 Usually that's enough to put them 

6 over 50 percent. However, there are some cases 

7 where that doesn't happen, and those typical 

8 types of cases may be individuals who were 

9 employed on site for a matter of days or weeks 

10 and didn't have much exposure potential, or 

11 the other -- these are two, you know, this 

12 isn't an all-inclusive type of explanation but 

13 these are a couple of examples of why someone 

14 with a respiratory tract cancer may not have 

15 received compensation.

16 The other would be, the type of 

17 cancer may not in fact have been a lung 

18 cancer, sometimes like a mesothelioma or 

19 something for example.

20 It's associated with the lung, but 

21 it's in the spacing between the lung and the 

22 chest wall so it's not lung tissue.
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1 MR. STIVER: It's not respiratory 

2 tract cancer.

3 MR. ROLFES: Correct. Which may be 

4 perceived as a lung cancer, but is not 

5 technically a lung cancer. It's a different 

6 type of tissue, different location.

7 The other thing is the latency 

8 time period between the exposure and the date 

9 of cancer diagnosis, and sometimes there are 

10 individuals that don't have more than the 

11 required five years of latency between their 

12 exposure and the diagnosis of a solid tumor.

13 So there's several reasons, and we 

14 can look into, you know, if you would like an 

15 explanation for the couple of cases that may 

16 not have been compensated with uranium plus 

17 any other exposures that we assign in addition 

18 to the radon exposures, then we can look at 

19 those.

20 But we always do -- continually, 

21 when dose reconstruction methodologies change, 

22 we do go back and look at those cases that are 
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1 less than 50 percent, based upon new data. If 

2 we receive new data, then it is considered. 

3 MR. STIVER: I guess I have one 

4 question mark. In regards to the program 

5 evaluation, would this involve a rewrite of 

6 the model itself and the process that would go 

7 into the procedures then as well?

8 MR. ROLFES: It would ultimately 

9 come down to the significance. It may be that 

10 -- we would have to see if there are a 

11 significant number of claims that are affected 

12 first, before we --

13 MR. STIVER: What is the threshold 

14 for that, for triggering a revision of a 

15 document, of a basis document?

16 MR. ROLFES: Off the top of my 

17 head, I don't feel -- I'm not involved in the 

18 program evaluations typically, so, but if it's 

19 -- if we receive new data that warrants, you 

20 know, we can get you an answer for that if you 

21 like.

22 MR. STIVER: Okay. Yes. I guess 
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1 the next step would be to go through the 

2 evaluations and determine what number of 

3 cases, if any, are affected.

4 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: And this has 

5 basically become a Site Profile issue. We have 

6 got -- Item Six is -- can we take a 10-minute 

7 break and --

8 DR. BEHLING: Brad, can I make a 

9 comment before you take a break? This is Hans 

10 Behling.

11 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Sure, Hans. 

12 DR. BEHLING: Yes, I was 

13 listening ardently to Bon Anigstein to 

14 elaborate this discussion about chi over q, 

15 and I can only assume that his testimony will 

16 play a part in this.

17 But I have not really heard what 

18 NIOSH really intends to do with regard to the 

19 issue that is a much broader and larger issue, 

20 and that is the two White Papers that I 

21 authored that identify a source term for the 

22 K-65 silos that may be as much as a factor of 
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1 20 higher than the 5-6,000 curies that have 

2 been assumed as being the least quantity, 

3 prior to the 1979 remediation project.

4 In other words, for the early 

5 years prior to 1979, my calculation would 

6 suggest, and I have shown that in two White 

7 Papers, that the source term for the radon 

8 releases may be a factor of 20 times higher 

9 than the assumed value of five to 6,000.

10 Now if there is a PER, will NIOSH 

11 actually then make use of those revised 

12 release estimates and incorporate that into 

13 the other factors that Bob Anigstein had 

14 identified with regard to the changes that 

15 might have to be applied in terms of chi over 

16 q?

17 MR. ROLFES: I guess ultimately it 

18 will depend if there's any claims that would 

19 be affected by this, and you know, the 

20 discussion of the source term is a slightly 

21 different issue because we are not using that 

22 model per se anymore. We are using the Pinney 
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1 exposure model. So --

2 DR. BEHLING: Well, I hate to 

3 interrupt you, but I think what was clear in 

4 both the report that I had offered -- in fact 

5 there's a third report which was never 

6 released.

7 The problem is both the Pinney 

8 model and the TBD-4 approach model that is 

9 identified in the Site Profile, they both 

10 suffer from the same problem. They both used 

11 the RAC 1995 source term as a starting point, 

12 and then they simply made it a chi over q 

13 approach for modeling the actual 

14 concentrations that individual workers were 

15 exposed to. 

16 But in both cases, the errors that 

17 I see that have not to be -- has not yet been 

18 addressed in this discussion, is the fact that 

19 both models have that same error, in other 

20 words, prior in 1979, during 1979, the assumed 

21 releases from the K-65 silos was 5-6,000 

22 curies, which I have shown are likely to be an 
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1 error of 20-fold, and that is something you 

2 cannot ignore.

3 MR. ROLFES: Well, I think we 

4 disagree with your assessment, Hans, and I 

5 think we have documented the reasons that we 

6 disagree. I mean, that's, I think, as far as 

7 we can go. We have provided our basis and you 

8 have provided yours.

9 DR. BEHLING: Well, I think 

10 there's a gross misunderstanding, because from 

11 what I recall, and this is a discussion that 

12 John Mauro and I had, he came to me and said, 

13 you know, they have basically conceded that 

14 your estimate prior to `79 was potentially 

15 twenty-fold higher and now I am hearing that 

16 you are disagreeing with it and you are 

17 basically backing away from that, and I think 

18 I want to have this on record.

19 MR. ROLFES: I think I just stated 

20 that we disagree with your assessment, Hans, 

21 that we provided some evidence, essentially, 

22 and some pretty detailed research projects 
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1 that documented worker exposures in quite a 

2 bit of detail, and --

3 DR. BEHLING: I just don't believe 

4 that I am going to accept that explanation 

5 because this is what we have been talking 

6 about for the last three years, and I think 

7 this needs to be aired, and I'm going to ask 

8 John Stiver and John Mauro to make some 

9 comments to this.

10 MR. STIVER: Yes, Hans, I believe 

11 you are right. I don't have the transcript in 

12 front of me at this moment, but that was what 

13 I gathered from our discussions at the 

14 November meeting, that the source term had 

15 been accepted as flawed and that ours was 

16 going to be utilized. I thought that would be 

17 a part of this overall PER process, would be 

18 to evaluate the terms of both the atmospheric 

19 dispersion model and the source term.

20 DR. ANIGSTEIN: Perhaps I could --

21 this is Bob Anigstein again. Perhaps I could 

22 interject something at this point, which 
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1 again, going back to my discussion, and that 

2 is -- please correct me if I am wrong.

3 What I am hearing from NIOSH is 

4 that they are treating the Pinney data as an 

5 independent source of information that is 

6 separate from the RAC calculations of the 

7 source term. Is that correct?

8 MR. ROLFES: No, but the Pinney 

9 data also has additional information in it 

10 that the RAC source term didn't really 

11 consider, and that's the Q-11 silos for the 

12 earlier years.

13 So ultimately we are taking, you 

14 know, in addition to the RAC source term, we 

15 are also taking the Q-11 silo data and we had 

16 individualized exposure estimates based upon 

17 very detailed analyses and worker interviews 

18 which positioned those workers in the worst 

19 case location of highest concentration if 

20 there was uncertainty as to where they were 

21 working on site.

22 DR. ANIGSTEIN: I read that report 
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1 very carefully. But the point is, the 

2 concentrations, that's fine, I mean, I have no 

3 quarrel on how they assign doses, how they 

4 assign locations.

5 But that data still is based on 

6 the RAC model. There, the measurements that 

7 they made on the window glass, it's my 

8 impression, and I'm not an expert on this and 

9 of course, you see a journal article, you 

10 don't see their notebooks and every detail of 

11 the calculation, but that they used the RAC 

12 model to calibrate their method.

13 So if the RAC model is incorrect, 

14 the calibration is incorrect. And the 

15 validation, also the RAC model, without 

16 meaning to be disparaging of it, has several -

17 - besides the fact that it does not account 

18 for the lead-210 deficit, which is very large 

19 -- now whether every one of those atoms of 

20 radon got out into the air, you know, it could 

21 have been held up somewhere, it could have 

22 been held up in the walls of the silo, but not 
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1 to that extent.

2 It just seems much too large an 

3 amount to have been held up, and also, as was 

4 pointed out actually by Hans Behling in the 

5 earlier paper, and also the RAC report itself 

6 acknowledges it, the fact that there were 

7 early readings of gamma exposure rates on the 

8 roof of the silo that showed relatively low 

9 exposure rates compared to what was later 

10 found, after the ceiling, indicates that the 

11 radon was not held up in the dome. 

12 If the radon had been held up in 

13 the dome for many days, had decayed in the 

14 dome and perhaps the lead-210 did not go back 

15 into the raffinate but was plated out on the 

16 surface where samples were not taken, so you 

17 could say okay, this accounts for the fact 

18 that radon was transferred from the raffinate 

19 to the head space. It decayed in the head 

20 space and therefore you did not see the lead21 210 in the raffinate.

22 However, it did not decay in the 
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1 head space, because it didn't stay there or it 

2 would have given rise to much higher gamma 

3 readings.

4 So there is this -- and the way 

5 the RAC model got calibrated against some on 

6 site measurements, they used so many arbitrary 

7 parameters to make it fit, that if you throw 

8 in enough parameters -- I mean, the model that 

9 I show, which I take no credit for, it is 

10 copied straight out of the US NRC Reg Guide, 

11 it's based only -- it makes no assumptions --

12 based only on measurable data, meteorological 

13 measurements and measurement on the building.

14 The RAC model is a very convoluted 

15 model. I tried to understand it and I honestly 

16 could not. There's probability distribution 

17 thrown into it, not a probability of it coming 

18 out of it, but a probability solution inserted 

19 into it.

20 It has all kinds of parameters to 

21 enable it to fit the data. Well, you have 

22 enough parameters, you can fit any data.
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1 DR. BEHLING: And Bob, let me also 

2 bring it back to a single point that has been 

3 brought up over and over again, that relates 

4 to the November 2008 White Paper, the first 

5 one I wrote, and subsequently to the April 

6 2010 second White Paper.

7 And the fundamental issue here is 

8 this is so, as far as I am concerned, so 

9 compelling as evidence. In 1987, the dose rate 

10 measurements were so high that they installed 

11 a radon treatment system.

12 That system, by and large, was 

13 able to evacuate the head space air at 1,000 

14 cubic feet per minute. It was operated for 

15 three hours continuously to the point where 

16 essentially all of the air that had been 

17 accumulated had been vented, to the point 

18 where less than three percent of the radon was 

19 remaining in the head space.

20 When you look at the dose rates on 

21 top of the silo prior to 1979 and look at the 

22 dose rates after the radon treatment system 
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1 had been operating for a full three hours, 

2 they again identified a dose rate that is 

3 virtually identical, meaning that the natural 

4 ventilation rate prior to June of 1979, had in 

5 essence the same effect as the radon treatment 

6 system that was run for three hours at 1,000 

7 cubic feet per minute.

8 Now if that doesn't comply with 

9 the understanding that there was no hold-up in 

10 the head space and no decay, then I don't know 

11 what else would.

12 And to me, that is the compelling 

13 evidence that says that radon was, in fact, 

14 prior to `79, released into the environment 

15 with no hold-up and no deposition in the head 

16 space or anywhere else, and that accounts for 

17 this equilibrium between radium-226 and lead18 210.

19 And if that doesn't register with 

20 anybody, then I have to say, then there's 

21 nothing left to argue here.

22 MR. ROLFES: I think what NIOSH 
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1 can do to move forward on this issue maybe is 

2 to go and look at the cases where the 

3 Probability of Causation for a respiratory 

4 tract cancer was less than 50 percent, and 

5 look to see if any change in the radon 

6 exposures that are assigned would put that 

7 case over 50 percent.

8 And that would be one of the 

9 things that would trigger us to do a Program 

10 Evaluation Report.

11 And if we are concerned about pre12 1979, since the silo was capped in 1979, we 

13 can focus our efforts on that time period, the 

14 earlier years from `51 to 1979. Does that 

15 sound like something that, you know, would be 

16 satisfactory to everyone?

17 We don't want to go and do, you 

18 know, I mean to revise a model is going to 

19 take a significant amount of effort for a low 

20 number of claims, and it's going to cost a 

21 significant amount of money for this work to 

22 be conducted.
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1 We don't want to go and do that 

2 work if there are no claims that would be 

3 affected. It wouldn't be responsible of us. 

4 So.

5 MR. STIVER: I guess the gap here 

6 is that you may have a model that is, I am not 

7 saying this one is necessarily, but if, 

8 hypothetically, you have a model that is just 

9 wrong, and it is giving you bad results, but 

10 you come to find this out after the fact, but 

11 yet there are no more claims coming in for 

12 which that model would be applied, what then 

13 happens to that discredited model?

14 Is it just -- is it rescinded? Is 

15 it altered? Is there some sort of statement 

16 that this was done incorrectly, and the 

17 results that were based on it are no longer 

18 valid? 

19 I mean, what kind of closure do 

20 you get on a situation like that?

21 MR. ROLFES: Well, right now what 

22 we would do is basically put a statement into 
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1 the Site Profile that says, you know, we 

2 wouldn't be using this current approach in the 

3 dose reconstruction methods. We would use the 

4 Pinney data, which is linked to each 

5 individual claim.

6 DR. ANIGSTEIN: If I can interrupt 

7 --

8 MR. STIVER: Please, Bob.

9 DR. ANIGSTEIN: I keep hearing the 

10 same thing over and over and over again about 

11 the Pinney data. SC&A does not agree that 

12 Pinney data can be used any more than it 

13 agrees that the RAC model can be used.

14 MR. ROLFES: Right, but my point 

15 is that if no claimants' dose reconstructions 

16 would be affected by a change in the model, 

17 then it's not worth revising the model.

18 DR. ANIGSTEIN: I understand.

19 MR. ROLFES: Okay. And what I 

20 propose to do is to look to see if any 

21 claimants would be affected, and we would plan 

22 our path forward from there.
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1 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, aside from 

2 that, though, I don't think NIOSH has agreed 

3 that the Pinney model is invalid.

4 MR. ROLFES: No, we haven't, 

5 didn't reach that conclusion.

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: So I mean, the 

7 assertion that it is doesn't have any more 

8 weight than the assertion that it isn't. I 

9 think you presented your evidence and they 

10 have theirs. If that model needs to be used in 

11 the future, then that may be an issue.

12 But part of that revolves around 

13 how it was calibrated and I am not sure we 

14 know how it was calibrated. Bob, that seemed 

15 to be a fuzzy part of the argument. You're 

16 thinking that it was circular calibration --

17 DR. ANIGSTEIN: Well, according to 

18 the report, I think they say very explicitly. 

19 They hired, I think his name was Killough, as 

20 a consultant. They took certain buildings that 

21 were, they said, far away so they would not be 

22 affected by the Q-11 silos, and they would be 
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1 only affected by the K-65 releases and the 

2 natural background.

3 And they calculated the -- they 

4 had Killough calculate the radon concentration 

5 history. Then they had their health physicist 

6 calculate the decay rate, so how much was 

7 deposited in year one, how much was deposited 

8 in year two and so forth, assuming a constant 

9 deposition fraction.

10 And then they took those window 

11 panes and said okay, here is our calibration 

12 standard. And now we will apply this to other 

13 window panes where we have not done this 

14 calculation, which simply sounds to me like an 

15 interpolation procedure.

16 Well, we don't want to ask 

17 Killough to calculate for every single 

18 building, so for the buildings in between we 

19 will ratio it based on the window pane 

20 measurements.

21 But there is no absolute 

22 measurement of radon exposures using the 
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1 window glass. They don't claim to have made 

2 one.

3 So if you don't accept the RAC 

4 model, you can't accept the Pinney data. If 

5 you accept the RAC model, you don't need the 

6 Pinney data.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, it seems to 

8 me, Mark, that would be an issue one way or 

9 the other. It's sort of this thing, are you 

10 going to keep it on the books, even if you 

11 don't use it, or are you going to declare it 

12 to be invalid?

13 I mean, I'm not even sure you 

14 should be going back and looking at all those 

15 other cases. I mean, if you can show that the 

16 Pinney data is okay to use, then let it be.

17 If you can't, then --

18 MR. STIVER: Then it needs to be 

19 taken off the books. Yes. 

20 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: But what about, 

21 you know, we keep missing the source term on 

22 this. Now, if the Pinney report is good, then 
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1 it doesn't matter what the source term was?

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: They are saying 

3 the calibration in essence is circular. You 

4 are using the data that you want to study to 

5 calibrate it and then you are going back 

6 again, so, I understand the argument. That may 

7 be a very well and good argument, unless they 

8 somehow have isolated their data.

9 MR. STIVER: Unfortunately, these 

10 two issues were separated at the last meeting. 

11 There was disagreement on the source term. 

12 I've got it right in front of me here on page 

13 329 of the transcript.

14 MEMBER ZIEMER: I was checking my 

15 notes.

16 MR. STIVER: It's a statement by 

17 Mark Griffon. He says, "What I'd like from 

18 SC&A is the position of what you had just 

19 discussed with John, and there might be a 

20 difference on our acceptance of source terms, 

21 but what's our position on the ability to 

22 bound considering the approach Pinney used to 
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1 the data." Basically --

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: Hans raised the 

3 same question but I don't see anything that 

4 says NIOSH accepted that.

5 MR. STIVER: We never accepted it.

6 DR. ANIGSTEIN: This is Bob. The 

7 response which we processed which was between 

8 John Mauro, John Stiver and myself was that 

9 if, here in the example of what we considered 

10 an approach, if we had a release rate which 

11 was consistent with the lead-210 deficit in 

12 the silos, and if we have an atmospheric 

13 dispersion model that is site-specific, it 

14 doesn't have to be exactly what we did, we 

15 made some arbitrary decisions about, for 

16 instance, the worker can be anyplace on the 

17 site with equal probability, maybe there are 

18 areas where those workers would never spend 

19 time, waste disposal areas or something, it's 

20 just a simple one.

21 But if we used those two things, 

22 then we will conclude that yes, the releases 
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1 can be bounded and it is just a matter of 

2 detail of how it is done.

3 But if we -- if the insistence is 

4 on sticking with the RAC source term and with 

5 the Pinney data, then our opinion is that 

6 NIOSH has not demonstrated that the ranges can 

7 be bounded.

8 I mean, we think they can be. 

9 MR. STIVER: But to do that they 

10 have to have a model that is validated and 

11 scientifically robust, for lack of a better 

12 term.

13 MR. KATZ: It seems to me that it 

14 still devolves to a TBD issue, either way, 

15 whether there remains disagreement on the 

16 source term, or whether DCAS decides that they 

17 agree with you about source term, it's still a 

18 TBD issue.

19 I think just the way to move this 

20 forward is to -- if we don't have an in21 writing response to the whole package, because 

22 now we have both sort of pieces of the 
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1 question addressed, from SC&A, the source term 

2 and the other, and we need a response on both 

3 pieces, whether DCAS decides in the end that 

4 they disagree with the source term and agree 

5 with this latter part that Bob Anigstein’s

6 analysis has produced, or however it be, once 

7 you have that, then I mean, once you have that 

8 response, the Board can then make a decision 

9 itself. 

10 Do we think this should be changed 

11 in terms of the TBD or not, and that will be 

12 then in their lap to make a judgment as to 

13 whether they are going to comply with, 

14 depending on what the Board's decision is, 

15 with the Board's recommendation to change the 

16 TBD or not.

17 But that sort of fulfils the 

18 process.

19 MR. STIVER: Yes, that sounds like 

20 a reasonable way to proceed on it.

21 DR. GLOVER: Brad will put before 

22 the Board the recommendation of the Work Group 
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1 that it's a TBD issue.

2 MR. KATZ: I mean, it's a TBD 

3 issue but I mean it's --

4 DR. GLOVER: That sounds -- they 

5 don't have to agree to that. They could say 

6 that that's unmodelable, they could -- I mean 

7 there's been lots of different ways --

8 MR. KATZ: It's sort of inherent 

9 that it is a TBD issue because either way, if 

10 you disagree about the source term in your 

11 case you are still saying there is a source 

12 term that that can be derived, that is valid, 

13 and that bounds it.

14 MR. STIVER: If you couldn't 

15 derive a source term then it would become an 

16 SEC issue but we had demonstrated that it is 

17 not an SEC issue. Now, you just -- a 

18 scientifically defensible model has to be 

19 applied and a source term that comports with 

20 the observations.

21 MR. KATZ: But that's a TBD --

22 MR. STIVER: That is a TBD, we 
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1 have shown, SC&A has shown, that it is a 

2 tractable problem.

3 MR. KATZ: Part of the Board's 

4 charge -- so even, it's not an SEC, it's a TBD 

5 matter, the Board's charge with dose 

6 reconstructions is to make judgments about the 

7 validity and quality of dose reconstructions, 

8 and this falls squarely into that camp, and 

9 the Board can make a judgment about that, and 

10 then DCAS has to wrestle with whatever the 

11 judgment of the Board is about the validity 

12 and quality of dose reconstructions.

13 This is an element of those dose 

14 reconstructions. So I think that's --

15 MR. STIVER: So the action item 

16 then would be for Brad to bring this up as a 

17 TBD?

18 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Well, this 

19 would be probably part of the -- at the 

20 Augusta meeting, to be able to bring this up 

21 of where we are at with Fernald and some of 

22 the overlying issues that we have.
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1 MR. KATZ: Yes, I mean, you are 

2 going to give them an update at the Board 

3 meeting, right?

4 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Right.

5 MR. KATZ: And this one, I don't 

6 know whether you are going to get a final word 

7 from DCAS in advance of -- that's just a week 

8 and a half away, so you probably won't have 

9 resolution of this for then, but you can 

10 certainly tell them about this issue.

11 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: I think that if 

12 we look at the transcripts, they are pretty 

13 well held -- been holding to this for a long 

14 time. This is what the dispute has been and so 

15 I don't think that will change before the 

16 meeting.

17 MR. KATZ: But I guess we could --

18 we have Sam and Mark here, I mean, if they 

19 want to take a stand now that this is resolved 

20 as far as they are concerned, and that they 

21 disagree --

22 MR. STIVER: As far as an SEC?
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1 MR. KATZ: No, in terms of the 

2 source term, with this question that Hans is 

3 raising. If you want to take a stand now you 

4 can, otherwise, it sounds like this didn't 

5 really get resolved in the transcript, is what 

6 you are saying. We moved on from it.

7 MR. STIVER: We moved on.

8 MR. KATZ: And then we don't have 

9 a piece of paper, I don't believe, from DCAS 

10 that actually lays the line down and says no, 

11 we disagree with Hans's analysis and we are 

12 sticking with our source term, whatever it 

13 might be.

14 MEMBER ZIEMER: Actually, wasn't -

15 - the work Bob did was a result of the last 

16 meeting.

17 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Yes, it was 

18 because we had, Chew did a report on this, 

19 this is where we got separated.

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right, and Mark, 

21 according to my notes, and you have the 

22 transcript there, John, but my notes said that 
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1 you had indicated the Pinney study and then 

2 there was a question of whether or not SC&A 

3 agreed with the source term involved there and 

4 I think they were going to go back, which is 

5 what Bob did, and take a look at that, which 

6 he did.

7 And now you are saying no, we 

8 don't agree with it. 

9 DR. BEHLING: Let me also, Dr. 

10 Ziemer, let me just make a point here. I have 

11 in both White Papers stated very, very 

12 distinctly that the -- both the Pinney report 

13 and the NIOSH's assessment models as defined 

14 in TBD-4 of the Fernald Site Profile, they 

15 both essentially used the RAC 1995 and 

16 modified by RAC 1998 data.

17 In both cases the central value or 

18 median value prior to 1979 is assumed to be 

19 5,000, 6,000 curies, and that is basically the 

20 fundamental issue that I have argued from day 

21 one.

22 And I have shown in both White 
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1 Papers my assessment, based on the 

2 disequilibrium, based on the dose rates that 

3 were observed on top of the silos and on the 

4 basis of the radon treatment system in being 

5 able to evacuate the head space, that those 

6 numbers were essentially identical, which 

7 essentially provides indirect proof that the 

8 release of radon prior to 1979 was essentially 

9 97 percent into the environment.

10 And I don't know how anyone can 

11 argue with these issues. We're just going in 

12 circles at this point, going back and forth on 

13 the Pinney report.

14 MR. STIVER: I guess we need a 

15 statement from NIOSH as to whether they agree 

16 with us or not on this.

17 DR. GLOVER: It won't happen here.

18 MR. STIVER: It's not going to 

19 happen? What's going to happen about a week 

20 and a half before the meeting?

21 MR. KATZ: Nothing, I'm sure.

22 DR. GLOVER: The boss is not here.
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1 MR. KATZ: No, I know, he's not 

2 back until the 18th, but the Work Group can 

3 report on where this stands. But it can't 

4 really be resolved until we get final word 

5 from DCAS in terms of how it is going to 

6 handle, how it would handle the source term 

7 question going forward, whether it is going to 

8 revise the TBD in the short term, or whether 

9 that's a low priority because there are no 

10 cases that are affected, whatever.

11 Because I think in the very end of 

12 the day, even if there are no cases right now 

13 that would be affected, at the end of the day, 

14 I think DCAS wants to have methods that are 

15 valid, that have validity and quality, but 

16 obviously it wouldn't be a high priority if 

17 there are no cases in the hopper to be 

18 affected.

19 MEMBER ZIEMER: In fact, in view 

20 of what Hans told us, it's not clear to me why 

21 we had Bob do anything more since then.

22 MR. STIVER: The first studies 
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1 focused on a source term and the last issue 

2 that came up in the last meeting was well, 

3 given a source term, is the model they are 

4 using -- can you use that to bound doses?

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: Independently.

6 MR. STIVER: And this is what gave 

7 rise to Bob's study. In reality of the two are 

8 kind of tied. Okay, basically wait for a DCAS 

9 response on --

10 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Wait for a DCAS 

11 response on that, and --

12 DR. BEHLING: Brad, can I make a 

13 final comment on this issue? It sounds as if 

14 we are not going to get any concessions from 

15 NIOSH and if that ends up being the point 

16 where we sort of, say, well, we are in a 

17 stalemate, it has always been my feeling that 

18 we are in an adversarial relationship here, 

19 where we say one thing and NIOSH responds by 

20 saying the opposite.

21 However, I think the resolution 

22 may have to come from the Work Group that 
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1 looks at the data much like a jury in a 

2 courtroom, and says well, we have listened to 

3 both sides, there's no agreement between the 

4 two sides, but based on our technical 

5 understanding of the issues, we have to come 

6 down on one side or the other. The issue may 

7 have to be resolved at that point.

8 MR. KATZ: Hans, there's no 

9 question about that. The Board is the last 

10 word. It's not SC&A or DCAS has the last word 

11 on what the Board thinks, it's the Board. So 

12 the Board will ultimately make a judgment on 

13 this, and that will result in a recommendation 

14 or a lack thereof if it doesn't have a 

15 recommendation to make in terms of resolving 

16 this TBD issue.

17 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: And I'll be 

18 right honest, because this Site Profile issue 

19 versus an SEC issue, if we can't come to a 

20 resolution on it, and that we have an 

21 appropriate means to be able to do it, to me 

22 it falls in -- that is an SEC issue, though.
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1 MR. KATZ: If it's feasible to do 

2 dose reconstruction, it's not an SEC issue. 

3 Then it's a question of TBD.

4 DR. ANIGSTEIN: This is Bob, I 

5 have to interject. I have right in front of 

6 me, because it is mentioned on page 329 of the 

7 transcript, which is Member Griffon.

8 MR. STIVER: Yes, that's the 

9 second --

10 DR. ANIGSTEIN: I'd like to read 

11 this, I think it might be helpful. It's one 

12 quick paragraph. 

13 "Member Griffon: What I would like 

14 from SC&A is the position, sort of what you 

15 just discussed with John, that there might be 

16 a difference in our acceptance of the source 

17 term, however here's our position on the 

18 ability to bound and considering the Pinney --

19 the approach used in the Pinney data or 

20 whatever, I want to see SC&A's assessment of 

21 that.

22 And then if it just comes down to 
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1 differences in the source term, we can move it 

2 off the SEC."

3 Now, that is the position that we 

4 have explained -- that yes, we believe that 

5 the radon exposures can be bounded.

6 MR. KATZ: Thank you, Bob, that's 

7 exactly what we have discussed here. Thank 

8 you.

9 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay, should we 

10 just keep on plugging here?

11 MR. STIVER: What I'd like to do 

12 is slightly switch up the schedule here. The 

13 last two Work Group meetings we have never 

14 gotten around to in vivo monitoring for 

15 thorium-232.

16 And it looks like if we continue 

17 in the trajectory we are on, that's going to 

18 happen again today.

19 So I'd like to go ahead and let 

20 Joyce and Bob talk about the thorium-232 post21 1968 in vivo report.

22 MR. ROLFES: John, if you mind, 
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1 before you have them do that, I just wanted to 

2 make everybody aware, in case you didn't see 

3 your email, that NIOSH did issue a response to 

4 SC&A's review of the thorium-232 coworker 

5 study.

6 MR. STIVER: That's right, we did 

7 get that.

8 MR. ROLFES: Okay, and we also 

9 proposed a bias correction factor. So both of 

10 those, both the responses to your review as 

11 well as the bias correction factor have been 

12 provided.

13 MR. STIVER: Absolutely, and we 

14 have gathered those and reviewed them.

15 MR. ROLFES: Okay. And there's 

16 also supporting spreadsheets if you'd like to 

17 see those as well.

18 MR. STIVER: Yes, we may very well 

19 want those. Okay, so Joyce and Bob, I guess 

20 Joyce, your issue is really about the data 

21 quality and Bob is going to address whether 

22 there is enough granularity to assess doses 
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1 based on those data, is how I understood it.

2 So I guess you should go first, 

3 Joyce, if you would like to lead out.

4 DR. LIPSZTEIN: Okay, there was a 

5 response from NIOSH that got into the O: drive 

6 last week that was a very brief response to 

7 our review paper. 

8 And I am going to touch on it 

9 while I am describing our problems with the 

10 interpretation of data for chest counting of 

11 thorium-232.

12 Okay, one of the biggest problems 

13 we have is the uncertainty in the 

14 interpretation of data for the period of 1968 

15 to 1978.

16 These thorium lung burdens are 

17 reported in milligrams of thorium in lung. We 

18 don't know how the in vivo measurements in 

19 this period of time, `68 to `78, were done.

20 And there are some descriptions in 

21 ORAU documents on TKBS-00175 saying that they 

22 were most likely based on actinium-229 
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1 measurements for thorium-232, but that lead2 212 also might have been used to access the 

3 thorium-232 and thorium-228.

4 What happens is that there is no 

5 paper or no proof of how those results in 

6 milligrams of thorium were calculated or were 

7 measured.

8 If we -- does everybody have our 

9 review in hand so that I can refer to the 

10 figures in it?

11 MR. STIVER: I think -- do you 

12 guys have that?

13 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: I do.

14 MR. STIVER: It should be in one 

15 of the -- it should have been mailed out.

16 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: By John.

17 DR. LIPSZTEIN: Okay, we have, let 

18 me just say one thing, that we have taken data 

19 from several workers which had body burdens of 

20 thorium in chest recorded in milligrams.

21 Those workers came from a 

22 compilation that Bob did. Those results came 
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1 from a compilation that Bob did. 

2 And we looked at the data, and we 

3 could see that the thorium content, there is a 

4 monotonic increase of the thorium content 

5 along the years, and this could be compatible 

6 with the estimation of thorium-230, actinium7 228.

8 Could also, because this thorium 

9 was separated, then the actinium-228 would 

10 increase in the lung, so this monotonic 

11 increase could be characteristic of measuring 

12 thorium in the chest through actinium-228.

13 On the other hand, it could also 

14 be that workers were exposed clinically to 

15 insoluble forms of thorium and then you would 

16 see also an increase of thorium, or could be 

17 that they would be exposed in several places 

18 to thorium, to increased quantities of 

19 thorium, and then you would have the same 

20 thing.

21 So there is a big uncertainty of 

22 how this thorium was measured. In the response 
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1 we got last week from NIOSH, it only says it 

2 was measured by lead-212, but there is no 

3 proof or nothing or no documentation saying 

4 that.

5 So we still think that there is a 

6 lot of uncertainties on this. Also, when we 

7 look at the -- just one second -- when we look 

8 at the consistence of the data in milligrams 

9 of thorium, that were until `78 on, that were 

10 measurements done using lead-212, we see that 

11 if you look at the results, their results 

12 using lead-212 and their results from 

13 actinium-228.

14 So nothing tells us what was used 

15 for milligrams to derive the milligrams of 

16 thorium in the early times. Then, there was an 

17 overlap in the reporting convention that 

18 occurred between 1971 -- `78 and 1979.

19 In those years there were in vivo 

20 thorium measurements that were reported as 

21 milligrams of thorium and some were reported 

22 as nanocuries of lead-212 and nanocuries of 
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1 actinium-228.

2 NIOSH suggests a conversion factor 

3 of 0.11 nanocuries would correspond to one 

4 milligram of thorium, and so we converted the 

5 results and then we got -- we compared the 

6 results from workers that were measured both 

7 in the `78 using milligrams of thorium and 

8 workers that were measured at the same time 

9 that had results of lead-212 and actinium-228, 

10 and there was a large fluctuation of results.

11 You cannot say either the 

12 conversion factor was not correct, or the you 

13 know, there is a very big -- we think there is 

14 a very big uncertainty on the data that was 

15 measured in milligrams of thorium, and we have 

16 reported 22 entries of thorium in milligrams 

17 and the same activity measured in lead-212 in 

18 nanocuries.

19 So we could have a direct 

20 comparison and the ratio of activities runs 

21 from minus 6.4 to 13, the ratio of thorium 

22 activities is measured two ways.
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1 So we think there is a very big 

2 uncertainty on the thorium's activities that 

3 were measured in milligrams of thorium.

4 And we also illustrated this high 

5 variability of in vivo measurements recorded 

6 as milligrams for thorium then later 

7 measurements record as activity of actinium8 228 and lead-212 with some graphs that could 

9 show this large variability.

10 We also looked at the MDA of 

11 thorium. The MDA of thorium is reported in the 

12 Technical Basis Document as six milligrams of 

13 thorium. 

14 This is not -- it's an acceptable 

15 MDA for the time, but if you look at the data 

16 there are many results that are below -- or 

17 the majority of results -- are below the six 

18 milligrams MDA, and those are reported as 

19 positive results.

20 So this leads also to our 

21 conclusion on the large uncertainty of thorium 

22 results in milligrams.
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1 And also, we don't have any -- we 

2 don't have information on the calibration of 

3 the system at that time period. I'm just 

4 looking --

5 MR. STIVER: Should we maybe let 

6 NIOSH respond to the issue of the MDA, because 

7 that's one that kind of jumps off the page at 

8 me as well.

9 DR. LIPSZTEIN: Okay.

10 MR. ROLFES: Yes, I think we have 

11 documented that in our response of six 

12 milligrams. Bob, if you are still out there, I 

13 am going to make -- correct me if I am wrong, 

14 but let's see here, yes, okay. It is in here.

15 We basically identified that we 

16 used the data as it was reported to us, 

17 whether it is above or below the MDA for a 

18 coworker model.

19 So it essentially doesn't matter 

20 what the MDA in fact is.

21 (Simultaneous speakers.)

22 DR. LIPSZTEIN: May I respond to 
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1 it? I am not saying that you don't use the --

2 that you don't need -- what I am saying is an 

3 example of the uncertainty of the data, all of 

4 that contributes to saying -- there is a big 

5 uncertainty on the significance of the in vivo 

6 results.

7 MR. STIVER: But also, Joyce, if 

you have got -- the 84th 8 percentile of your 

9 distribution is less than the MDA, what does 

10 that say about the quality of the data?

11 DR. LIPSZTEIN: Exactly.

12 MR. STIVER: I mean, your 

13 instrument can't really detect it. It could be 

14 giving you any kind of number at that level, 

15 and it really has no meaning in terms of an 

16 intake or a dose.

17 I just, I'm trying to get my mind 

18 around how that could be used in a coworker 

19 model that would have any validity.

20 MR. ROLFES: That's not true, 

21 because any data that is reported to us would 

22 be used in the dose reconstruction process, 
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1 similar to a non-positive uranium sample.

2 DR. LIPSZTEIN: Yes, but if this 

3 isn't really a measurement, that's our 

4 problem. If you know which nuclide was used, 

5 if it was lead, if was actinium, and how they 

6 accounted for the calibrations. 

7 So there are lots of uncertainties 

8 if you compare the -- when there were results 

9 measured in -- by lead-210 at the same time as 

10 results from thorium in milligrams, the 

11 difference between the two results is so big 

12 that you can accept that one of them is wrong.

13 And we made a table in our report 

14 showing that for 22 individual reports of 

15 thorium-232 chest measurements in milligrams 

16 and lead-212, for the same in vivo 

17 measurements of the chest, and we transform it 

18 using the transformation factors that NIOSH 

19 has given in the paper.

20 And we can see that there is no 

21 correspondence between the two, and it's not 

22 that there is an error on the factors that we 
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1 have to multiply, because if there was, if it 

2 was a problem of the factors that we have to 

3 find how to transform the lead-212 results 

4 into thorium-232 in milligrams, then there 

5 would be a constant error that you would see.

6 But you see a high situation that 

7 results from negative ratios to an order of 

8 magnitude ratio.

9 So this shows us that results in 

10 milligrams of thorium-232 are very uncertain, 

11 that they probably cannot be used to calculate 

12 thorium activity in the lung.

13 MR. ROLFES: Okay, I think you 

14 asked about the MDA and where we got the six 

15 milligram level. In our response we pointed 

16 out that SRDB 4140 is a paper in the AIHA 

17 Journal that lists the minimum level of 

18 sensitivity --

19 DR. LIPSZTEIN: I saw it, and but 

20 in this paper they don't say how the 

21 calibration was done. But I don't think this 

22 six milligrams is a problem. The problem --
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1 because if you analyze the data from all the 

2 whole body counts for that time, six 

3 milligrams is, you know, an acceptable result. 

4 Could be six milligrams.

5 The problem is that the data in 

6 milligrams of thorium-232 has a lot of 

7 uncertainties.

8 MR. ROLFES: Sure, yes. Right. We 

9 agree with that. We agree that there are a lot 

10 of uncertainties. In the dose reconstruction 

11 process, those uncertainties are used to the 

12 benefit of the doubt of the claimant for the 

13 dose reconstruction.

14 So, I mean, this is essentially 

15 coming back to a Site Profile issue, whether 

16 or not we should apply this correction factor 

17 or that correction factor. It's not 

18 necessarily an SEC issue.

19 DR. LIPSZTEIN: Yes, but that's my 

20 problem, there is no way you can correct this. 

21 What we have shown on these 22 activities that 

22 were calculated using the -- you know, that we 
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1 had the reported results in milligrams and the 

2 reported results in nanocuries of lead-212 

3 that we transformed to nanocuries of thorium4 232, using the factors, is that there is a 

5 high formulation of the data.

6 So it's not a problem of having 

7 the right transformation factor. It's a 

8 problem that you can't do it because the 

9 ratios vary so much that you can see that the 

10 data on milligrams is not -- you cannot be 

11 confident on it, and you cannot derive thorium 

12 activities based on those results.

13 There's a high imprecision in the 

14 pre-1979 individual thorium measurements.

15 DR. GLOVER: So this is a real 

16 person, right, Joyce? This is real people 

17 data?

18 DR. LIPSZTEIN: This is 22 real 

19 persons. 

20 DR. GLOVER: Okay, and as you know 

21 thorium translocates to the bone, so if we 

22 look at this over a long term, we are going to 
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1 use the lung -- whatever they calibrated, they 

2 would be looking at the lung, and so it's 

3 going to have a lower efficiency compared to 

4 what may be in the bone.

5 And so you could see that the 

6 ratio may be widely varying compared to a 

7 fresh intake. I mean, you could see the 

8 actinium and the lead, which is very low 

9 energy. It's 238 KeV compared to a much higher 

10 energy gamma rate, that's a more difficult 

11 measurement to make.

12 And so there may be some biases or 

13 some bouncing around. 

14 DR. LIPSZTEIN: Yes, but the 

15 bouncing is too big. The uncertainty is too 

16 much. We don't know anything about those 

17 measurements done at that period that thorium 

18 was measured in milligrams.

19 We don't have that much 

20 information to validate those data and say, oh 

21 those are real measurements. 

22 A lot of evidence saying we don't 
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1 know what is the significance of this data.

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: Whose whole body 

3 counter is this?

4 MR. ROLFES: This came from Mike 

5 Wells and they developed incorporation 

6 factors, et cetera. There's a document from 

7 1965 which has basically some of the --

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: Okay, they must 

9 have a calibration procedure. I just was 

10 wondering about the concern about calibration. 

11 It apparently was not made available but they 

12 certainly had a calibration procedure.

13 MR. STIVER: The procedure should 

14 be out there and should be available, I would 

15 think, somewhere.

16 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: I thought we 

17 had looked for that once before and we never 

18 came --

19 MR. STIVER: Joyce, your research 

20 showed that you couldn't locate any 

21 information on calibration, then, for lead-212 

22 system?
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1 DR. LIPSZTEIN: No. No.

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: Where do they look 

3 for that?

4 DR. LIPSZTEIN: I'm sorry?

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: Does NIOSH have 

6 calibration information?

7 MR. ROLFES: I'll have to look 

8 back. What we can do is look through the Site 

9 Research Database for the calibration 

10 information. From what I recall we did not 

11 find it at the time.

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: Who was the whole 

13 body guy at Oak Ridge at that time? Was it Max 

14 Scott?

15 MR. ROLFES: It may have been. I

16 know that some of the discussion in the report 

17 on the mobile in vivo radiation monitoring lab 

18 for Y-12, there was some information written 

19 up by Hap West back in 1965.

20 MEMBER PRESLEY: Hey, Mark?

21 MR. ROLFES: Yes, Bob.

22 MEMBER PRESLEY: You all get with 
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1 Danny Rowan at Y-12, he will probably be able 

2 to help you.

3 MR. ROLFES: Okay. Thank you, Bob.

4 MEMBER PRESLEY: Danny Rowan. His 

5 department. He has been there since Hap West 

6 was.

7 MR. ROLFES: Okay.

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: I think the 

9 calibration issue could be put to bed, I would 

10 think.

11 Then the other part I am trying to 

12 understand was that the variability in 

13 milligrams detected versus the body burden 

14 calculated from that.

15 MR. STIVER: Yes, that 

16 differential between the two methods, I guess 

17 there was an overlapping period so they tried 

18 to compare those and get -- see if there was 

19 reasonable compatibility. You were getting up 

20 to the same endpoint and I guess there was --

21 MEMBER ZIEMER: Now, if they 

22 calculate lung burden per -- milligrams per 
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1 lung burden in the lung, it's a very different 

2 ratio than body burden and that is going to 

3 depend on time after exposure.

4 So, I don't know, Joyce? Do you 

5 lack the information to address that part of 

6 the issue?

7 DR. LIPSZTEIN: These are lung 

8 burdens and they were calculated using lead9 212, actinium-228 results and thorium in 

10 milligrams, on the years that they overlapped.

11 MEMBER ZIEMER: So they only 

12 looked at the lung burdens. Okay. 

13 DR. LIPSZTEIN: And there is a big 

14 difference between the two measurements, and 

15 it's not that it's a constant difference then 

16 you say, oh, something is wrong with the 

17 calibration factor. No, it's not that. It 

18 varies widely.

19 And we don't have enough 

20 information, if the thorium, when they were 

21 measured in milligrams, if they were measured 

22 -- if actinium-228 was measured or if lead-212 
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1 was measured.

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: Okay, and can we -

3 - was there information to tell us, you know, 

4 obviously you have to calculate some 

5 correction factor for lung wall thickness on 

6 this for each individual I think, right?

7 MR. STIVER: It has to be a 

8 specific calculation for every person.

9 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right. So was that 

10 information made available? Is it lung burden 

11 per -- let's see, they are calculating 

12 milligrams in the lung based on some count.

13 See, I think that minimum 

14 detectable activity is going to vary with the 

15 person's size, I would think. You know what I 

16 am saying?

17 MR. STIVER: Yes, the ability to 

18 detect a signal would vary depending on the 

19 chest wall thickness.

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, for a small 

21 person --

22 MR. STIVER: All other things 
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1 being equal.

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: You could detect x 

3 milligrams easier than in a heavy person.

4 MR. STIVER: Yes, that's another 

5 concern.

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: So minimum 

7 detectable activities I think could vary quite 

8 a bit. I don't have a good feel for this data 

9 set. I just have done enough whole body 

10 counting to know that those are variables that 

11 you'd have to look at.

12 DR. GLOVER: So would it suffice 

13 to say the Board would like us to review the 

14 calibration -- the information surrounding the 

15 -- maybe we have done that to some degree, 

16 Mark.

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, I was just 

18 asking if we -- if calibration is an issue, 

19 that should be, if it's the Y-12 stuff, surely 

20 they calibrated it so --

21 MR. ROLFES: I'm looking back at 

22 our response here and SRDB 32612 has 
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1 calibrations. It basically indicates that 

2 calibrations could be tailored to a specific 

3 individual when intake conditions were known 

4 for a specific type of material, for example 

5 the document contains some calibration 

6 information for a specific individual who 

7 appears to have been involved in an intake at 

8 Erwin, Tennessee, at separate facilities.

9 MR. STIVER: 32612, huh?

10 MR. ROLFES: 32612. 

11 MR. STIVER: Say, Bob Barton, 

12 could you pull that one down at some point?

13 MR. BARTON: Yes, what was that 

14 number again?

15 MR. STIVER: 32612.

16 MR. BARTON: Got it.

17 MR. ROLFES: I don't know if Bob 

18 Morris and Bryce Rich are still on the line, 

19 if they have anything to add on what we have 

20 stated previously here.

21 MR. RICH: I'm still on and I 

22 don't.
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1 MR. ROLFES: Okay. Thank you. 

2 MR. BARTON: This is Bob. I don't 

3 have too much more to say except that when you 

4 would inspect a population of unexposed 

5 workers, you would get a lot of variation in 

6 that and half of the numbers would be below 

7 zero.

8 Now I am not suggesting that we 

9 have got unexposed workers here, it's just 

10 that there is, for a marginally exposed 

11 population of workers, a lot of variation in 

12 the data set.

13 So I guess I am not quite as 

14 surprised at that as others seem to be.

15 MR. STIVER: Like I say, after 

16 sampling an old distribution, you would expect 

17 a -- I guess the other question is, if so many 

18 of the data are beneath the detection limit, 

19 that's another issue. 

20 Typically, what we would do in 

21 cleaning up a data set would be to look at all 

22 the LOD values and maybe assign them some 
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1 nominal value; I think typically what you guys 

2 use is about half the LOD.

3 MR. BARTON: Well, that is 

4 typically done in the coworker modeling 

5 process.

6 DR. LIPSZTEIN: But I think that 

7 the problem here is not the MDA. I think the 

8 problem here is that we cannot, we don't know 

9 what those results in milligrams signify. 

10 There are many workers that were measured and 

11 had significant results and some that were 

12 below the detection limit. There is -- but the 

13 results varied a lot, even for the same 

14 worker.

15 For example, we had one worker 

16 that had 40 milligrams of thorium and then 40 

17 days after, he was measured again and had 0.5, 

18 so what could this be? This could be a 

19 contamination of his clothes, yes.

20 But there is no explanation. You 

21 don't know. And there are many workers with 

22 this problem, so we also would suppose that if 
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1 they were monitored by Y-12 monitoring, one of 

2 the procedures is to take out the contaminated 

3 clothes and all that.

4 But there is a lot of variation 

5 and it goes up and down and up again. So these 

6 contributed to the uncertainty of the data on 

7 this time period.

8 MR. STIVER: Joyce, what kind of 

9 information would you like to see that might 

10 help us to reduce the uncertainty in these 

11 measurements given that -- 

12 DR. LIPSZTEIN: I don't know.

13 MR. STIVER: -- fresh information 

14 would be available. 

15 DR. LIPSZTEIN: I don't know. Is 

16 there any explanation why a thorium 

17 measurement would go down 10 times -- 100 

18 times and then go up again? I don't know, 

19 unless it was not well measured. That's my 

20 point. I think that during this period of 

21 time, the uncertainties in the measurements 

22 are so high that you cannot use them to 
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1 calculate the thorium dose.

2 MR. ROLFES: Well, maybe we could 

3 start with looking at the individual that you 

4 just cited that had a 40 milligram lung burden 

5 of thorium that dropped down to 0.5 milligrams 

6 40 days later.

7 That might help us to understand 

8 what some of the contributing factors to those 

9 measurements, whether they in fact were caused 

10 by a surface contamination on the individual's 

11 clothing, you know, we would have to look. 

12 Maybe that individual had an in vivo count 

13 during the shift that he was working for 

14 example, and had some contamination on him, 

15 which would have over-estimated the lung 

16 burden if it was on the surface of his skin or 

17 clothing.

18 It could be that there -- we would 

19 have to take a look at a specific case like 

20 that to determine what the reason for that 

21 observed result was.

22 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, I can tell 
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1 you this, the whole body counting people do 

2 not want to put contaminated people in the --

3 and they normally don't let them wear work 

4 clothes, number one --

5 DR. LIPSZTEIN: Yes.

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: And it's possible 

7 there could be surface, skin contamination 

8 that they missed, I suppose. But I mean, in 

9 our place we always had people shower and --

10 MR. STIVER: Yes, you would think 

11 you would have some kind of a protocol in 

12 place.

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: We put clean gowns 

14 on them. 

15 MR. ROLFES: Usually at the 

16 beginning of the shift.

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right.

18 DR. LIPSZTEIN: I think that 

19 whatever you analyze, this thorium data, the 

20 variability is so high on a measurement basis 

21 of this same individual, that if you are used 

22 to work with thorium exposure you see that 
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1 these are not credible data.

2 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Paul, also too, 

3 whenever we have got a positive one like that, 

4 they always recounted it.

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, that, plus 

6 you would do follow-ups very soon after. But 

7 anyway, Mark is going to take a look at it.

8 MR. STIVER: Pre-1979, could be a 

9 significant issue regarding the ability to 

10 reconstruct the doses.

11 MR. ROLFES: So if you guys at 

12 SC&A or Joyce could provide that information 

13 to us, then we will take a look at it and

14 prepare a response.

15 MR. STIVER: Okay. Joyce, could 

16 you get that data together and forward it on 

17 to Mark Rolfes?

18 DR. LIPSZTEIN: Okay.

19 MR. KATZ: So that's an action 

20 item for SC&A and for DCAS.

21 MR. STIVER: And also you had to 

22 look into this issue of uncertainty and the 
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1 calibration information that may be out there.

2 Joyce, do you have more discussion 

3 on the data quality or does that pretty well 

4 sum it up for us?

5 DR. LIPSZTEIN: I think those were 

6 the most important conclusions that we had, so 

7 given the time I think maybe Bob could --

8 MR. STIVER: Let's let Bob Barton 

9 come on then and talk about the applicability 

10 and completeness of the data set.

11 MR. BARTON: Okay. Thanks, John. I 

12 guess in the interest of expediency I will try 

13 to give the patented John Mauro 30-second 

14 sound bite. And the real issue we see is that 

15 with the exception of 1968, we have not found 

16 sufficient information that would give us 

17 confidence that we can identify who the 

18 thorium workers were in the period of 

19 interest.

20 In addition to that, we feel that 

21 the in vivo monitoring program didn't target 

22 thorium workers for counting and this is based 
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1 on the response from NIOSH, it looks like they 

2 would agree with that premise.

3 We also provide evidence that it 

4 looks like the thorium workers had a higher 

5 exposure potential for thorium, so then the 

6 question becomes, if you are going to create a 

7 thorium coworker model, is it going to be 

8 bounding for those workers who handled and 

9 were in thorium production campaign?

10 So that's pretty much the summary 

11 of our position in this second tour of the 

12 report.

13 MR. ROLFES: Okay, the first time 

14 the mobile in vivo counter came on site was 

15 in 1968 and they actually did prepare a memo 

16 listing, I don't recall the number of 

17 individuals who had been involved in previous 

18 thorium operations, but they did in fact 

19 prepare a list of thorium workers that had not 

20 been monitored.

21 And their intent with the bringing 

22 the mobile in vivo radiation monitoring 
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1 laboratory to the Fernald site for the first 

2 time, was to take a look to determine whether 

3 there were significant lung burdens or a 

4 fraction of a lung burden in the Fernald work 

5 force who had previously been exposed to 

6 thorium.

7 MR. BARTON: If I could stop you 

8 right there, I did say with the exception of 

9 1968, because that was one of the two pieces 

10 of information we found that actually 

11 identified thorium workers. The memo came out 

December 26th 12 , 1967.

13 So one of the things we did is we 

14 assumed all right, those workers were still 

15 thorium workers in 1968, how many of them were 

16 actually counted?

17 Turns out it was just over half of 

18 them and when you look at the actual numbers 

19 of those individuals, half of the 51 workers 

20 who were counted, they showed higher 

21 concentrations of thorium than the whole 

22 worker population for that year in 1968.
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1 So that's one of those pieces of 

2 evidence that they had a higher exposure 

3 potential, and past 1968 it becomes very 

4 difficult to try to figure out which workers 

5 were actually involved in these operations.

6 And I don't know if that's a 

7 problem that can be got around, if there's an 

8 argument that can be made that after those 

9 years they had the same exposure patterns as 

10 the general population.

11 But from some of the analysis we 

12 did in that second section, it shows that the 

13 ones that we suspect were thorium workers in 

14 the later years had a higher exposure 

15 potential.

16 MR. ROLFES: Yes, the people that 

17 had the highest exposure potential were 

18 typically the chemical operators and there 

19 wasn't any kind of bias to select them 

20 specifically to look for a uranium exposure or 

21 a thorium exposure.

22 The individuals who were in that 
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1 highest exposure class would have been the 

2 ones that were counted first and those were 

3 the typical -- you know, we can, we have got 

4 various methods of assessing a potential for 

5 exposure to a worker and the chemical 

6 operators are among the highest exposed 

7 individuals, and they were the ones that were 

8 typically most frequently counted.

9 Now there were also some 

10 occurrences and incidents on the site in 

11 between the trips that the mobile in vivo 

12 counter made to Fernald, and if an individual 

13 was exposed to an incident in between, well, 

14 if he had an incident, prior to the mobile in 

15 vivo count -- mobile in vivo unit coming to 

16 count employees, that individual would have 

17 been also among the individuals who would have 

18 been counted first.

19 Other individuals that would have 

20 been counted were those that had a high count 

21 on the previous trip of the mobile in vivo 

22 unit.
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1 MR. BARTON: I understand what you 

2 are saying, but irregardless of what their job 

3 title was, I am saying that if we have any 

4 evidence that they were a thorium worker, and 

5 we pull those files, we put them in a simple 

6 rank order, because then it would be all 

7 worker population, which presumably is still 

8 the chemical operators as well, it shows that 

9 the thorium workers, at least based on the 

10 limited analysis we were able to perform, have 

11 a higher potential than the general 

12 population.

13 So it would seem like from an SEC 

14 context, when you are forming a thorium 

15 coworker model, you should have to be able to 

16 identify or at least prove that those thorium 

17 workers who are not monitored, which I think 

18 we agree that there is certainly a portion of 

19 that class who wasn't monitored, are they 

20 going to have doses that are bounded?

21 MR. ROLFES: Okay, well, I guess 

22 it comes down to whether we have a 
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1 representative set from the individuals who 

2 were monitored.

3 MR. STIVER: This is John Stiver. 

4 It looks real similar to the problem we had at 

5 Savannah River with the construction worker 

6 data set versus the rest of the workers, and 

7 so I guess the issue is, do you have enough 

8 personnel identified as thorium workers or who 

9 you are relatively sure are at later periods 

10 to where you could build that kind of a 

11 distribution?

12 And from what Bob is saying, there 

13 is some serious doubt as to whether you can 

14 even identify those workers.

15 MR. ROLFES: That's why we have 

16 created the coworker intake model, to assign 

17 to workers, to give them the benefit of the 

18 doubt that they were exposed even if we have 

19 no indication that they were.

20 MR. STIVER: But I guess the 

21 problem is that if that real subset have 

22 higher intakes, that's going to get smeared 
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1 out if they aren't identified, if they are 

2 just lumped in with all the rest of the 

3 workers.

4 MR. MORRIS: This is Bob Morris. 

5 The chemical operators really were the focus 

6 of the lung counting operations and that was 

7 done without bias to what their job assignment 

8 was.

9 So at any rate, you have got a 

10 random distribution of the worst case 

11 exposures.

12 I guess my question would be how, 

13 as the model is currently constituted, if you 

14 don't know someone worked with thorium, how do 

15 you know that this model will bound the doses 

16 to an unmonitored thorium worker?

17 MR. BARTON: Because the thorium 

18 workers were the chemical operators.

19 MR. STIVER: There are other 

20 categories other than the chemical operators, 

21 though, that had high exposure potential.

22 MR. ROLFES: Like who?
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1 MR. STIVER: I am just asking.

2 MR. ROLFES: Well, you made a 

3 statement.

4 MR. STIVER: It was more of a 

5 question really: are there other categories 

6 that potentially could have been exposed? I 

7 know --

8 MR. ROLFES: That's why --

9 (Simultaneous speakers.)

10 MR. STIVER: We had the issue of 

11 the metal production workers had a very high 

12 potential for exposure to airborne 

13 contaminants.

14 MR. BARTON: If there are 

15 unmonitored thorium workers, I mean, I 

16 understand that maybe all the thorium workers 

17 were chemical operators, but if you have a 

18 significant portion of that subset who had a 

19 higher exposure potential, who are not 

20 factoring into this distribution, how are you 

21 going to account for that?

22 MR. MORRIS: Well, we have got 
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1 interviews from people who planned the 

2 counting operation and we have got documented 

3 memos, I am sure you have read them too, that 

4 say there was no bias into that process of 

5 selecting after the first year.

6 MR. BARTON: Well, irregardless of 

7 the first year, which again, only a little 

8 over 50 percent of those guys in the Starkey 

9 memo were actually counted that year. 

10 Irregardless of that, you are 

11 saying that it wasn't biased towards thorium 

12 workers, what I am saying is the thorium 

13 workers had a higher potential.

14 So how does this unbiased monitor 

15 account for that bias?

16 MR. MORRIS: There was no bias 

17 involved with it. It was chosen only to focus 

18 on the workers who have high exposure 

19 potential.

20 MR. BARTON: So if you had an 

21 unmonitored thorium worker, how does this 

22 model apply to them?
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1 MR. MORRIS: Well, these are the 

2 same people.

3 MR. BARTON: But I -- are you 

4 saying that all of the thorium workers were 

5 monitored?

6 DR. GLOVER: I guess that was my 

7 question.

8 MR. MORRIS: There's no doubt the 

9 thorium workers were part of the general work 

10 force that they were monitoring.

11 DR. GLOVER: The premise of the 

12 coworker model --

13 MR. BARTON: I'm not saying you 

14 can't find the numbers to bound their doses 

15 but I mean, if you are just going to take the 

16 whole work force, even though we know this 

17 subset of workers at a higher potential, that 

18 would seem to be an issue.

19 DR. GLOVER: The premise of a 

20 coworker model is you don't have to measure 

21 every high exposure worker, but that you had 

22 to have at least measured some. And so it 
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1 doesn't sound like we have tried to exclude 

2 them, they sound like they had an opportunity 

3 to be included in the coworker set, so --

4 MR. STIVER: I guess the question 

5 I have, have you captured enough of those high 

6 exposures that you haven't biased your 

7 distribution to where you might not include 

8 personnel who might have been in that subset 

9 of thorium workers?

10 MR. MORRIS: But we did reflect --

11 the criteria for including a worker in the 

12 counting system was on an annualized basis or 

13 even more often than that. 

14 So those are the memos in the 

15 record of memos and essentially, the intent 

16 was to capture people who had the most high 

17 exposure.

18 I guess my question still remains, 

19 if you know their -- I would go out there and 

20 assume that there are unmonitored thorium 

21 workers and I believe that's how NIOSH put in 

22 their most recent response, that it's likely 
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1 that the thorium worker population wasn't 

2 completely included, so if 

3 you have this population of workers that have 

4 a high potential, like John says, it is just 

5 going to bias the distributions to where when 

6 you apply coworker doses to that unmonitored 

7 worker, you are not being claimant-favorable.

8 MR. BARTON: I have heard the 

9 conversation before about what disqualifies a 

10 coworker data set and it is it systematically 

11 excludes the highly exposed workers. Now there 

12 is no reason to think that this data set 

13 systematically excludes the highest exposed 

14 workers.

15 MR. MORRIS: I would agree with 

16 that. I guess you just can't identify who 

17 those more highly exposed workers are; so what 

18 do you do with that?

19 MR. BARTON: Well, again, I'll 

20 say I've heard, in the last two weeks have 

21 heard John Mauro say this probably twice, the 

22 reason you disqualify a coworker model data 
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1 set is if it systematically excluded the 

2 highest exposed workers.

3 And there's no evidence in this 

4 case that that occurred.

5 MR. MORRIS: But there is really 

6 no evidence that it didn't occur either, 

7 because we can't identify who those thorium 

8 workers were other than real 1968.

9 MR. BARTON: Well, we got them in 

10 1968 as you know, at least half of them, and 

11 we also know that -- I mean, that was 

12 retrospectively looking through the historical 

13 thorium workers. 

14 Now we got half of those as an 

15 early counting group and then systematically 

16 after that, there was all workers who were in 

17 the high exposure potential group were 

18 included. That also included the group that 

19 did thorium work. 

20 I don't see how you can come up 

21 with this criteria that you have to prove that 

22 the people were in the -- who was in that 
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1 group. We have an unbiased attempt to grab the 

2 highest, most exposed workers in the plant, 

3 without regard to their thorium exposure.

4 We know that that group overlapped 

5 because of the way that they made assignments 

6 into the thorium processing which was a 

7 periodic assignment, not a continuous 

8 assignment.

9 And there's no evidence, based on 

10 the memos that we do have, that there was 

11 exclusivity on this, and in fact the reasons -

12 - there is reason to believe that it was an 

13 inclusive monitoring process.

14 MR. STIVER: Bob Barton, this is 

15 John Stiver. If you could kind of restate for 

16 me, 1968 you had a group of thorium workers 

17 who were monitored and compared to the non18 thorium workers, there was definitely higher 

19 exposure potential in that sub-population.

20 MR. BARTON: And actually that 

21 included all the workers. That didn't exclude 

22 those that were lifted in the Starkey memo and 
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1 monitored.

2 MR. STIVER: Okay, and then you 

3 also compared it then to their subsequent 

4 years, for which the thorium workers were not 

5 identified?

6 And that 1968 thorium workers --

7 excuse me, let me just -- the 1968 thorium 

8 workers, were they also higher than the 

9 distributions for later periods for which you 

10 can't identify thorium workers?

11 MR. BARTON: What we did there, 

12 John, is there's a second source for trying to 

13 determine who is a thorium worker, except it's 

14 not really specific to years.

15 What happens is you have a logbook 

16 sheet which lists all the in vivo counts 

17 listed for the workers, presumably during 

18 their employment, and sometimes in the upper19 right corner of that sheet, it would either 

20 state "thorium worker" or "former thorium 

21 worker."

22 Now there are only 26 of these 
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1 individuals, nine of whom had ticked "thorium 

2 worker" and the other 17 said "former thorium 

3 worker."

4 We don't really know how to apply 

5 that to a year-by-year basis to compare their 

6 specific --

7 MR. STIVER: So if you just took 

8 those ones that you knew were thorium workers 

9 and you compared them to all others -- 

10 MR. BARTON: At some point I 

11 lumped them all together and all their data 

12 points were for thorium work and compared that 

13 to the all-worker again, and once again you 

14 find that those we suspect were thorium 

15 workers at some point past 1968, again, they 

16 have a higher lung burden than the general 

17 population.

18 MR. STIVER: How about at the 

19 upper end of the distribution?

20 MR. BARTON: There are some. The 

21 very top of the distribution, the highest 

22 values, were for workers that didn't have the 
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1 writing up in the upper right corner.

2 MR. STIVER: Okay, so you could 

3 possibly presume that the high end of that 

4 overall distribution would capture even the 

5 highly exposed thorium workers.

6 MR. BARTON: Yes, I would think 

7 so, I guess our question is, can anything be 

8 done for this group of workers who, we have 

9 evidence of having a higher dose than the 

10 general population but we are going to apply 

11 the general population dose to them and that's 

12 --

13 MR. STIVER: I guess that depends 

14 on what --

15 MEMBER ZIEMER: That's not how you 

16 use the coworker models. You're not taking the 

17 average for the population. You are --

18 MR. STIVER: You're taking some 

19 upper bound of that.

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, and that's 

21 why you --

22 (Simultaneous speakers.)
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1 MEMBER ZIEMER: -- representative 

2 which includes the higher people, because you 

3 don't want it to be biased one way or the 

4 other and then you are assuming that all these 

5 people are up at the upper bound.

6 MR. STIVER: You can show that 

7 overall distribution, you are looking at the 

95th 8 percentile, and you have this subgroup of 

9 thorium -- actual thorium workers or suspect 

10 thorium workers -- and there you look at the 

11 upper bound of that distribution and that is 

12 not above the other, I think you are okay.

13 And you don't really care if you 

14 can identify them. It's only when you are 

15 looking at the central estimates of those 

16 distributions and without regard to the tails, 

17 that you might get in trouble, I would think.

18 MR. BARTON: So what I am hearing 

19 is that the higher dose assignment would be 

20 made for thorium workers?

21 MR. STIVER: I would think for 

22 those who were suspected of high exposure 
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potential, you would assign a 95th 1 percentile.

2 MR. BARTON: I'm not sure if that 

3 was in the original report. Maybe NIOSH could 

4 verify if that is actually in the language 

5 there, that those who were suspected of having 

6 higher thorium intakes were not -- would be at 

7 a higher --

8 MR. STIVER: Well, that's the 

9 issue we had with TIB-78 too, and we had 

10 language put in that that would allow for an 

11 assignment for workers who were suspected to 

12 have had higher exposure potential.

13 As long as you could show that 

14 that upper bound of the overall distribution 

15 captured the subset, I think you would be okay 

16 and it sounds like that is what they have got 

17 here.

18 MR. STIVER: Well, I can't say. 

19 Was that language in the original report? 

20 I don't recall that. It might be 

21 something to look into. I haven't read the 

22 original report in that kind of detail to 
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1 recall it. It was about a year ago when I read 

2 it.

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, isn't it 

4 really covered by the broader issue of how 

5 NIOSH uses coworker data? It's not specific to 

6 this -- this is the same issue you have 

7 everywhere. How are you going to tolerate --

8 (Simultaneous speakers.)

9 MR. BARTON: Well, I think that's 

10 certainly an argument that we felt should be 

11 made for this class of workers, which we have 

12 shown that -- well, we can't find any evidence 

13 that you would be able to identify them by 

14 year so you can't really -- you can't really 

15 develop, or take a look at thorium workers 

16 versus non-thorium workers because the 

17 connection is not made to compare by year.

18 So I guess our argument was, will 

19 there be something done with this co-worker 

20 model to address that issue, and what I am 

21 hearing is that it will.

22 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, in essence 
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1 it says that you are treating all the people 

2 as if they had the possibility of thorium 

3 exposures because that's what the distribution 

4 includes.

5 MR. STIVER: I guess I would like 

6 to see that document back and look at the 

7 original paper to see if that language is 

8 actually in there.

9 DR. GLOVER: This sounds like it's 

10 still in the SC&A's workup, that we don't have 

11 a response on that.

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: But, Mark, isn't 

13 that how you apply it?

14 MR. ROLFES: We have a standard 

15 method of applying coworker intakes and that's 

16 -- I don't remember the TIB, but one of the 

17 people that are responsible for putting 

18 together our coworker intake models would be 

19 able to answer that.

20 MR. KATZ: I think I recall it 

21 because I have heard it so many times, I mean, 

22 for people with high exposure potential, and 
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1 chem operators always fall in that basket, I 

believe, they get the 95th 2 percentile, the 

3 coworker model. Right?

4 MR. ROLFES: Yes, correct, if they

5 have no monitoring data and, for example we 

6 had to take a look at the specifics of a 

7 case, if you had an individual who was 

8 routinely monitored for external dose and 

9 never had any kind of internal exposure 

10 information that would certainly raise a lot 

11 of questions with us and certainly would 

12 prompt us, if an individual was routinely 

13 receiving external doses, it would certainly, 

14 you know, make me wonder where is the data. It 

15 has got to be there, you know, because every 

16 time we look into it, we end up finding it if 

17 we don't initially have it.

18 But if that was the case, if we 

19 couldn't find data for that individual, for 

20 his internal exposures, then we would 

21 certainly use the most claimant-favorable --

22 MR. STIVER: Give them the upper 
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1 threshold, upper 95% percentile?

2 MR. ROLFES: Yes.

3 MR. STIVER: Okay, I am inclined 

4 to defer on this until I have a chance to 

5 actually read up and see if the language is 

6 there, at least in the TIB. So maybe we will 

7 get back on that particular issue. I don't 

8 feel comfortable buying off on it at this 

9 point.

10 MR. KATZ: That's fine.

11 MR. STIVER: Bob, maybe later in 

12 the week we can get together and go over that 

13 data set in a little more detail.

14 MR. BARTON: Sure.

15 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: So this one 

16 will fall into SC&A --

17 MR. STIVER: Yes, we will follow 

18 on and review that particular issue of the 

19 subset of workers being bounded by the upper 

20 bound of the overall distribution. 

21 The only remaining issue was the 

22 DWE data and we have put out a revision to our 
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1 paper from November of last year to address 

2 the Revision Three of the NIOSH DWE model and 

3 there are a few findings there that are -- I 

4 don't believe this rises to the level of an 

5 SEC at this point, one more Site Profile Issue 

6 as to -- there is one issue on data validation 

7 and the applicability of the Davis and Strom 

8 GSD to Fernald and we feel there should be 

9 some kind of a site-specific evaluation of 

10 that data set to make sure that Davis and 

11 Strom uncertainty is applicable and is 

12 bounding at Fernald.

13 The other issue was this issue of 

14 blunders in the original data, and to the 

15 extent that that original data is available 

16 for Fernald.

17 There may be some -- a scoping 

18 assessment should be done on that to identify 

19 the frequency of blunders. That was a big 

20 issue for the Davis and Strom paper. There 

21 were not that many, I think there was about 11 

22 percent or so, but they could range up to --
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1 on average they were underestimated by a 

2 factor of two and some were up to a factor of 

3 10.

4 So we feel that the GSD of five is 

5 probably going to be adequate to capture that, 

6 but there should be some site-specific 

7 assessment of that data set to identify if 

8 that is an issue.

9 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: The third issue 

10 --

11 MR. STIVER: The third thing --

12 there were actually two others that were 

13 problematic for us. One was the assignments of 

a 95th 14 percentile in unrelated air 

15 concentrations for a building if DWE data 

16 weren't available. 

17 We felt that it would be more 

18 plausible to assign actual DWE data from an 

19 adjacent year or from the same building in a 

20 different year or from another building with 

21 some --

22 MR. MORRIS: Mark, this is Robert 
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1 Morris. On that topic, there were some --

2 especially the pilot plant if I recall the 

3 data --

4 MR. STIVER: Yes, the pilot plant 

5 in Table 2 of your report I believe.

6 MR. MORRIS: Yes, we didn't think 

7 that the other applications that were going on 

8 in other buildings were close enough to make 

9 that assertion.

10 MR. STIVER: How about the early 

11 data for the pilot plant? The process has 

12 changed enough to --

13 MR. MORRIS: Well, they were 15 

14 years earlier, right?

15 MR. STIVER: I don't recall if it 

16 was 15, but with -- did the processes change 

17 in the pilot plant?

18 MR. MORRIS: Well, of course, it 

19 was a pilot plant.

20 MR. STIVER: Yes, but regarding 

21 thorium processing.

22 MR. MORRIS: I guess the issue 
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1 there is, if you take that to the extreme, you 

2 could look at the, I believe it was Plant 9, 

3 where they had the highest DWE was like 600 

4 and some MAC and if you were just to take the 

5 highest air concentration, it was like 9,000 

6 MAC, and if you assign that, it would 

7 certainly be claimant-favorable but it's 

8 completely implausible.

9 I guess that was the issue we had 

10 about using that particular approach.

11 MR. MORRIS: We noticed that that 

95th 12 percentile value was identified in the 

13 Strom and Davis paper, and definitely bounding 

14 although --

15 MR. STIVER: And I guess it was a 

16 plausibility issue as far as I am concerned.

17 MR. MORRIS: And so if you were 

18 wondering why we chose that line of thinking, 

19 that was it. They said they can go back and, 

20 if you think it is more appropriate, reduce 

21 those numbers.

22 MR. KATZ: This is Ted. I am going 
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1 to interrupt, actually, because we are running 

2 out of time and we really, we don't have time 

3 to discuss this, we really -- let's just put 

4 it on the agenda for the next meeting so it 

5 can be properly discussed.

6 MR. STIVER: They are just minor 

7 issues, I think, that are TBD-type issues that 

8 need to be resolved.

9 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Did SC&A put a 

10 new revision of this out?

11 MR. STIVER: Yes, we sent it out.

12 MR. KATZ: So there is a response 

13 to be developed by DCAS and that is the action 

14 item here.

15 MR. ROLFES: I want to add a 

16 caveat. I think we should focus our efforts 

17 right now on the SEC issue of most importance, 

18 the recycled uranium, I think that is what you 

19 would like us to do.

20 MR. STIVER: Absolutely that is the 

21 most --

22 MR. KATZ: So before we -- before 
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1 Sam loses all his brain cells on the table --

2 (Laughter.)

3 MR. KATZ: We have a place on the 

4 agenda for Fernald Work Group update and we 

5 set aside a lot of time for this on the 

6 possibility that the Work Group would be ready 

7 to make recommendations to the Board.

8 It is clear that the Work Group 

9 is not ready to make recommendations to the 

10 Board. Now just what would you like? Would you 

11 like to simply report as part of the Work 

12 Group updates?

13 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: That is what I 

14 am going to have to do, just -- I'd like to 

15 start getting this before the Board so that 

16 they are not blindsided with everything.

17 MR. KATZ: If you think you have a 

18 substantial, say, 20-minute presentation or 

19 whatever, we can preserve that session and 

20 just shorten it.

21 If you, for example, want a full 

22 half hour to discuss with the Board where we 
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1 are at this point, as opposed to just moving 

2 it out into the Work Group report session.

3 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: I'd like a 

4 little bit of time to be able to discuss the 

5 issues where we are at, and give the Board 

6 just a little heads up as we come into it.

7 It may be shortened a little bit.

8 MR. KATZ: So it's an hour and a 

9 half right now, so you probably would want it 

10 at 30 minutes. 

11 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Yes, about 

12 thirty.

13 MR. KATZ: Thirty minutes, and then 

14 I guess the other Members of the Work Group, 

15 it would be probably good to help Brad out 

16 just in the -- because I think a lot of it

17 will be informal report out.

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: But you may went 

19 to prepare a little PowerPoint or something 

20 and we can review it and play it.

21 MR. KATZ: Absolutely.

22 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay.
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1 MR. KATZ: And SC&A, Brad, if you 

2 want SC&A to help you with that, that's 

3 absolutely okay.

4 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Either John or -

5 - yes, he said he would line us up so -- 

6 (Simultaneous speakers.)

7 MR. KATZ: I think that would be 

8 good. Okay. So just let him know that we have 

9 shrunk the session to, how about half an hour 

10 or so?

11 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay.

12 MR. ROLFES: We have somebody 

13 here, I didn't know if you wanted to --

14 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Right, I wanted 

15 to just give him a few minutes. We have got a 

16 former Fernald worker here and I know that he 

17 had some things that he would like to be able 

18 to say.

19 MR. KATZ: Yes, I have to catch a 

20 plane and this meeting can't go without me.

21 So I guess if we can keep it to 

22 two minutes or less that would be great.
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1 MR. HENNEKES: Okay, the reason I 

2 am here is I am trying to get some 

3 clarification, okay? Let me read a brief 

4 statement here.

5 My name is Dan Hennekes and I 

worked at Fernald from July 24th 6 , 1982 through 

June 16th 7 , 2005.

 On February 24th 8 , 2009 I was 

9 diagnosed with basal cell carcinoma of my 

10 neck. The U.S. Department of Labor determined 

on June 29th 11 2009 it was at least as likely as 

12 not that the exposure to the toxic substance 

13 of the feed material production center was a 

14 significant factor in aggravating, 

15 contributing to, or causing my skin cancer.

16 Okay, so that was one part of it, 

17 so then I went through NIOSH and the dose 

18 reconstruction. Well, I got back the 

19 preliminary findings and they came back with -

20 - okay, with this statement.

21 "The majority of Mr. Hennekes' 

22 radiation exposure was received during 
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1 employment as a construction engineer 

2 according to records received from the 

3 Department of Labor and information provided 

4 in the interview process."

5 So I seen this and of course I 

6 said, well, wow, I must have done a poor real 

7 job at explaining what I did at Fernald during 

8 this time.

9 So what I did, I made a little 

10 work history, okay? And here, I explain here 

11 from 7/82 to 6/84 we averaged 55 hours of 

12 work. I was working in a pilot plant. Okay? 

13 Which was not a whole lot of monitoring going 

14 on there, and with the things we did, we did 

15 the demolition of the existing systems, we had 

16 the red and the black drums and found out a 

17 bit later that the red ones had to be 

18 geometrically spaced for criticality reasons. 

19 There was no radiological coverage 

20 there at the time and basically that is what 

21 it was, it was the enrichment process and then 

22 we was doing the maintenance and the startup 
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1 procedures on this process.

2 And then again, we went in there 

3 in 1986 to do a hydrofluoric recovery system, 

4 and I'm just saying that -- there's three 

5 pages all in, we don't have the time to go 

6 through it, but basically we worked in Plant 

7 9, 5, all these different buildings, we were 

8 doing construction work in these buildings.

9 So my point was, does it seem 

10 logical or plausible to anyone that I would 

11 receive more radiological exposure working as 

12 a construction area engineer, construction 

13 manager on new projects, or spending from 1982 

14 to 1993 working as a pipe fitter working in 

15 and around uranium on a daily basis?

16 Basically all I want to do is just 

17 be able to get that on the record. So that's 

18 it in a nutshell.

19 MR. ROLFES: Thank you very much. 

20 Did you provide a copy of that to NIOSH?

21 MR. HENNEKES: Yes, I did. And in 

22 fact I brought you another one.
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1 MR. ROLFES: Thank you.

2 MR. HENNEKES: Okay. This is what I 

3 sent the Department of Labor on that. I don't 

4 know if you want a copy of that.

5 MR. ROLFES: Well, thank you for --

6 I'll take a look at this. 

7 MR. HENNEKES: Yes, I appreciate 

8 it.

9 MR. ROLFES: You have a copy of my 

10 card if you have any questions. I would be 

11 happy to talk to you. Thank you for coming in 

12 and sitting through this meeting.

13 MR. KATZ: Yes, we do appreciate 

14 it.

15 MR. HENNEKES: Well, I appreciate 

16 you giving me the opportunity, and apologize 

17 for putting you through that.

18 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: With that said, 

19 as usual we are going to send both action 

20 items, SC&A if you will send -- and make sure 

21 that we are all on the same page with this. 

22 Frankly, with the recycled uranium 
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1 I want to make sure that we are on board with 

2 which way we are going with this. With that 

3 said, we will adjourn.

4 MR. KATZ: We are adjourned. Thank 

5 you, everyone on the line.

6 (Whereupon, the above-entitled 

7 matter was adjourned at 5:32 p.m.)

8 

9 

10 

11 

12 

13 

14 

15 

16 

17 

18 

19 

20 

21 

22 
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1