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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL

+ + + + +

NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR OCCUPATIONAL

SAFETY AND HEALTH

+ + + + +

ADVISORY BOARD ON RADIATION AND

WORKER HEALTH

+ + + + +

82nd MEETING

+ + + + +

TUESDAY

FEBRUARY 28, 2012

+ + + + +

 The meeting convened at 9:45 a.m., 

Pacific Standard Time, in the Waterfront 

Hotel, 10 Washington Street, Oakland, 

California, James M. Melius, Chairman, 

presiding.

PRESENT:

JAMES M. MELIUS, Chairman

HENRY ANDERSON, Member

JOSIE BEACH, Member

BRADLEY P. CLAWSON, Member

R. WILLIAM FIELD, Member

MICHAEL H. GIBSON, Member

MARK GRIFFON, Member

JAMES E. LOCKEY, Member

WANDA I. MUNN, Member
 

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PRESENT: (continued)

DAVID B. RICHARDSON, Member

GENEVIEVE S. ROESSLER, Member

PHILLIP SCHOFIELD, Member

PAUL L. ZIEMER, Member

TED KATZ, Designated Federal Official

REGISTERED AND/OR PUBLIC COMMENT PARTICIPANTS:

ADAMS, NANCY, NIOSH Contractor

AL-NABULSI, ISAF, DOE

ARMIJO, ROBERTO*

BATT, CHRISTINA, CDC

CIVILETTO, SAMUEL*

COX, CHRIS, HHS

CRUZ, RUBEN, CDC

FITZGERALD, JOE, SC&A

GLOVER, SAM, DCAS

HINNEFELD, STU, DCAS

KINMAN, JOSH, DCAS

KOTSCH, JEFF, DOL

LEWIS, GREG, DOE

LIN, JENNY, HHS

MAKHIJANI, ARJUN, SC&A

MCFEE, MATT, ORAU

MCKEEL, DAN*

NETON, JIM, DCAS

ROLFES, MARK, DCAS 

RUTHERFORD, LAVON, DCAS

STIVER, JOHN, SC&A

*Participating via telephone
 

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

Welcome, Dr. James Melius, Chair 4 

NIOSH Program Update 6 

Mr. Stuart Hinnefeld, NIOSH

DOL Program Update; Outreach 30

Mr. Jeffrey Kotsch, DOL

DOE Program Update 59

Mr. Greg Lewis, DOE

NIOSH 10-Year Program Review 98

Implementation 

Dr. James Melius, Chair

Electro Metallurgical (Niagara Falls, 108

NY) SEC Petition

Dr. Sam Glover, NIOSH; Mr. John Stiver,

SC&A; Dr. Henry Anderson, WG Chair;

Petitioners: Mr. Samuel Civiletto

Board Work Session 168

Dr. James Melius

Hangar 481 SEC Petition (Kirtland 208

Air Force Base) Dr. Sam Glover;

Petitioners, Mr. Robert Armijo

Status of Activities for Lawrence 260

Berkeley National Laboratory and

Stanford Linear Accelerator

Mr. Stuart Hinnefeld, NIOSH;

Dr. Paul Ziemer, WG Chair;

Mr. Joseph Fitzgerald, SC&A

Public Comment 279
 

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

2 9:30 a.m.

3 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Good morning. I 

4 am Jim Melius, Board Chair. Welcome, 

5 everybody, and I will turn over to Ted.

6 MR. KATZ: Are our phone lines 

7 open? Thank you.

8 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: And, Ted, you 

9 can do your thing.

10 MR. KATZ: Thank you, Dr. Melius, 

11 and welcome, everyone at the Board, in the 

12 room, and on the line, to the Advisory Board 

13 on Radiation Worker Health, it is the 82nd 

14 meeting here in Oakland. We are glad to be 

15 here.

16 To let people know on the phone, 

17 there are materials for the presentations for 

18 the Board on the NIOSH website under the Board 

19 section, under the Meeting section, and all 

20 the formal presentations should be posted 

21 there at this point; and I also just note for 

22 people on the phone, please mute your phones 
 

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1 so that it doesn't interfere with the meeting 

2 except those of you that are addressing the 

3 meeting at different points. 

4 To mute your phone, you press *6, 

5 and then to take your phone off of mute, you 

6 press *6 again, and also please don't put this 

7 call on hold at any point, because that 

8 interrupts the call for everyone else on the 

9 phone. So hang up and dial back in, if you 

10 need to leave the meeting for some period. 

11 Thanks for that.

12 Let us run through Board 

13 attendance. So we will take a formal roll 

14 call, and we have several sites we are 

15 discussing today. So if one of those sites 

16 you have a conflict for, please note that as 

17 we go through roll call, and let's begin with 

18 the Chair.

19 (Roll call.)

20 MR. KATZ: Thank you very much. 

21 Dr. Lemen, are you on the phone with us, by 

22 any chance? We will check again for Dr. Lemen 
 

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1 after lunch.

2 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Good. Our first 

3 presentation today is Stu. There you are. I 

4 couldn't find you. I thought you had run out 

5 on us.

6 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I have 

7 managed to resist the urge so far.

8 I think everybody here knows me. 

9 If you don't, I am Stu Hinnefeld. I am the 

10 director of Division of Compensation Analysis 

11 and Support. I also am supposed to know how 

12 to run a computer. So that remains to be 

13 seen. I don't know how to run the computer. 

14 I can tell you that. It takes its own time.

15 The presentation that is in your 

16 package includes our normal program update and 

17 program statistics. As is our recent 

18 practice, I don't intend to go through the 

19 statistics too much. I will just briefly 

20 mention a synopsis, that at this point we have 

21 now received over 36,000 claims for dose 

22 reconstruction. We have dispositioned, either 
 

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1 through dose reconstruction or cases being 

2 pulled or administratively closed or pulled 

3 for SEC, all but about 1,000 of them.

4 Then, of those 1,000, there are 

5 about 250 that are in the hands of the 

6 claimants. We have draft dose reconstructions 

7 in the claims. So the actual number of cases 

8 in front of us that we know we have to work is 

9 somewhere between 700 and 800. 

10 So we have made a lot of progress 

11 on the dose reconstruction, and we are being 

12 pretty successful at getting those out in a 

13 timely fashion in nine months, except for a 

14 couple of longstanding issues that sites have 

15 been out for a long time, but we think we will 

16 disposition this year.

17 Going through then the actual news 

18 portion of the presentation, I have been 

19 giving updates on internal staff assignments 

20 for the last two meetings, because Chris 

21 Ellison has been acting on a detail as the 

22 Deputy Director of our Division, because David 
 

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1 Sundin, the Director -- or the normal Deputy 

2 Director of our Division was on a detail in 

3 another NIOSH office across the street. 

4 David's detail ended Friday. So 

5 as of yesterday, David is back as the Deputy 

6 Director, and Chris is going back to doing 

7 just one job, which is Team Leader for our 

8 Communications Team. So she has been 

9 essentially laying both roles while she was 

10 acting as the Deputy Director.

11 So Dave Sundin -- you will again 

12 see his name in our communications where you 

13 have normally seen him, and you will see 

14 Chris' name then on Communications, really, to 

15 reflect the activities of our Communications 

16 Team. Chris just did a marvelous job. I was 

17 really happy with the job she did in the 

18 position. I think it may have stressed her a 

19 little bit. I know she spent a lot of long 

20 days trying to keep up with everything.

21 One big piece of news that, I 

22 guess, probably everybody knows already, but 
 

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1 it was kind of significant from our 

2 standpoint. So I want to make sure I talk 

3 about it. That is that on February 6th, HHS 

4 published a final rule about Probability of 

5 Causation that essentially adds chronic 

6 lymphocytic leukemia as one of the covered 

7 cancers in the program.

8 When the Probability of Causation 

9 rule was first published -- that is Part 41, 

10 right? -- 42 CFR 81. When that was first 

11 published, chronic lymphocytic leukemia was 

12 assigned to Probability of Causation of zero, 

13 because there was general consensus that it 

14 hadn't been shown to be radiosensitive.

15 In the intervening years, there 

16 was a fair amount of discussion about, well, 

17 there really does seem to be some evidence 

18 that it might be. There are a number of other 

19 cancers where the evidence is at least 

20 similar. So we pursued and managed to 

21 accomplish this rule change, that it is a 

22 really minor change to the rule. 
 

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1 It essentially removes one 

2 sentence, which says chronic lymphocytic 

3 leukemia is assigned a probability of zero, 

4 but it has the effect then of making chronic 

5 lymphocytic leukemia a covered cancer. We 

6 expect some small influx of claims. We 

7 estimate maybe 300 claims that were submitted 

8 but never accepted by DOL that they had. 

9 The Department of Labor can pull 

10 those back out. People don't have to reapply. 

11 They can pull those out, and then they will 

12 forward those to us for dose reconstruction. 

13 This adds them to dose reconstruction. This 

14 rule change does not add them to the 

15 presumptive cancer list. So it is 

16 available for dose reconstruction, that those 

17 models and the Probability of Causation IREP 

18 models have been worked out and are being 

19 finalized. The effective date of the rule 

20 change is March 7th, which is 30 days after 

21 the date of publication of the final rule. 

22 So we will start to see those 
 

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1 cases going through the final steps of the 

2 process at least sometime when they get there. 

3 I am not 100 percent sure if Labor has 

4 started referring them or not, but there won't 

5 be any Probability of Causation determinations 

6 made until after March 7th.

7 We have made a bit of a change in 

8 our worker outreach process to, we believe, 

9 better serve our -- integrate it into our 

10 operations, our Division operations. Our 

11 worker outreach contractor has, in large part, 

12 pursued outreach at areas that we feel like 

13 there is interest in the site, where we can 

14 develop populations to either share 

15 information with covered populations or to 

16 obtain information from the population. We 

17 try to do our outreach in both ways in terms 

18 of people to talk to in that process.

19 It occurred to us that, in our SEC 

20 process, we also attempt to find people to 

21 interview. That is one of the things we ask 

22 petitioners, is do you have people -- do you 
 

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1 know of people that you think we should 

2 interview as part of our Evaluation Report 

3 investigation of this SEC petition.

4 On our own device, we would tend 

5 to look for places where contact with the site 

6 would take us: Site management, and so you 

7 would tend to get former safety and health 

8 managers, operation managers and things like 

9 that.

10 We said, well, we really ought to 

11 try to -- when we pursue people to interview, 

12 first of all, we shouldn't put a burden on the 

13 petitioner to identify -- certainly, if they 

14 have people they know, but we shouldn't make 

15 them the major contributor. They shouldn't 

16 have to come up with a large number. We don't 

17 want to put that burden on the petitioner, and 

18 we should also try to make sure we have a 

19 broad list of interviewees.

20 So we have asked our outreach 

21 contractor, who is adept at identifying worker 

22 groups, whether it be organized labor or 
 

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1 retiree groups and things like that, to make 

2 these outreach efforts, too. So we have 

3 incorporated their efforts now into our SEC 

4 evaluation process in hopes of trying to 

5 broaden the types of employees that we 

6 interview during our initial Evaluation Report 

7 for the use of SEC.

8 So that is being worked out. It 

9 is being done at some sites now. I have a 

10 couple of pretty good reports from people who 

11 have worked on our project that the outreach 

12 contractor is pretty helpful, this is really 

13 going well at this particular site. So we are 

14 hopeful that that will add that for us, and 

15 also make it easier to find people to 

16 interview as we investigate these Evaluation 

17 Reports.

18 Then finally, an update on 10-year 

19 program review action items. I have only some 

20 very brief things to mention here, because 

21 since we have a number of actions to do on 10-

22 year review, it turns out we also have other 
 

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1 jobs that we are trying to do to accomplish 

2 what we have to do on the program. We have 

3 our jobs to do as well as these process 

4 changes.

5 So it is always slower than you 

6 would hope when you start to embark upon 

7 things that -- evaluation of the process that 

8 you are using.

9 We have, though -- in the area of 

10 quality of science review, one of our 

11 recommendations that we received was to 

12 evaluate some EPA documents that speak of 

13 surrogate data usage and risk assessment, and 

14 we did agree that we would have, say, a non15 health physics person -- in this case, it is 

16 an industrial hygienist, look at those 

17 documents and look at what we do, give us some 

18 evaluation of how does this document provide 

19 us guidance that maybe we should adopt in our 

20 program.

21 We have, I believe, just a draft 

22 so far, a draft report, and it is being 
 

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1 finalized by the industrial hygienist who has 

2 performed that review that will have -- I 

3 believe there are a couple of recommendations 

4 in there for us that we will pursue, 

5 completing the implementation of that.

6 In the area of dose reconstruction 

7 quality -- this is in the dose reconstruction 

8 area of the 10-year program review -- we have 

9 been working with the Dose Reconstruction 

10 Review Subcommittee, because that item was on 

11 their agenda already. We have been working 

12 with that in terms of ways to improve the 

13 QA/QC process on dose reconstruction.

14 As part of that conversation or as 

15 a result of those conversations with the 

16 Subcommittee, we have adopted -- or 

17 implemented a kind of a -- it is a duplicate 

18 PR process where we have health physicists for 

19 our organization perform what we consider a QC 

20 dose reconstruction independent of what ORAU 

21 does.

22 The cases to be performed in 
 

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1 duplicate are chosen at random by computer 

2 application. The computer application then 

3 populates essentially an inbox for our staff. 

4 ORAU is not told which claims are selected 

5 for our review. 

6 Our health physicist then does a 

7 dose reconstruction following the guidance 

8 that is available, and then when what we call 

9 the production dose reconstruction arrives 

10 from ORAU, then we have a way to compare how 

11 our health physicist prepared the dose 

12 reconstruction compared to how ORAU or 

13 whatever contractor prepared the production 

14 dose reconstruction.

15 We started selecting about two per 

16 month, I think, two claims per month for this 

17 process, as they come in, as they are referred 

18 to us. Last I checked, there were eight of 

19 those. Quite a number have been selected. I 

20 think we may be up to 50 selected. That 

21 sounds like too many. There are quite a 

22 number selected.
 

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1 There have been eight so far where 

2 we now have production dose reconstruction and 

3 a duplicate that we can do comparisons. We 

4 are preparing what we are going to call 

5 essentially an assessment report. We are 

6 going to start assessing these in blocks, 

7 write a formal assessment report of what did 

8 we learn from these comparisons that then we 

9 will be sharing with the Dose Reconstruction 

10 Subcommittee. 

11 We want to do these fairly 

12 frequently at the start. We may go to a less 

13 frequent formal assessment kind of document 

14 later on, but I don't want these to sit around

15 for six months because we are waiting to get a 

16 bunch of them to do. We want to start doing 

17 this very frequently.

18 Just informally, we have seen in 

19 these first eight -- one of the items we have 

20 seen is they tend to be biased toward AWE dose 

21 reconstructions. Now the reason for that is 

22 that AWE dose reconstructions are not 
 

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1 typically done by ORAU. 

2 They are typically done by 

3 contractors, a set of contractor health 

4 physicists that work essentially in our midst. 

5 There are three contract health physicists 

6 that work in our building. They do much of 

7 the AWE work and much of the AWE dose 

8 reconstruction, plus you don't have to ask for 

9 DOE exposure history on an AWE. You don't 

10 have that part of the process.

11 So those tend to get done on a 

12 more rapid turnaround. So they think those 

13 production ones came in first. They tended to 

14 come in first. So we tend to have more than 

15 you would expect AWE dose reconstructions in 

16 these first eight, because we can start work 

17 on the claim as soon as it comes in, in terms 

18 of the -- well, once we get -- since we don't 

19 have to wait for a DOE response.

20 What we see is there are some 

21 variations in the overestimating expedited 

22 processes that were used in those. Nothing in 
 

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1 particular came out of those.

2 One of the claims we did get, we 

3 identified that there is some lack of clarity 

4 in instruction in a Site Profile. This is not 

5 an AWE one, I don't believe. This had to do 

6 with there was some lack of clarity in how to 

7 interpret the Site Profile and individual 

8 exposure record bioassay report, particularly 

9 in interpreting limited protection on bioassay 

10 that led to a fairly significant difference in 

11 dose reconstruction from the duplicate to the 

12 production.

13 We have concluded that the 

14 production one was the one that was done 

15 correctly. So we just need to work now on the 

16 clarity of the instruction to make sure that 

17 everybody is doing it appropriately. Then 

18 there may be something further to follow up, 

19 is did all the production -- developed 

20 production dose reconstructions get done 

21 right. You know, the one we have looked at 

22 got done the right way. Have they all been 
 

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1 done the right way, given the apparent lack of 

2 clarity in the instruction.

3 So those are the kinds of things 

4 we expect to learn. That is why we want to 

5 look at these very quickly as they come out, 

6 so these issues don't hang out there for a 

7 long time, and that we start to do these 

8 remedies pretty quick.

9 We will be dealing with the Dose 

10 Reconstruction Subcommittee pretty closely 

11 with this, and when we have the assessment 

12 report, we will provide a detailed report to 

13 the Dose Reconstruction Subcommittee when that 

14 is ready, and we would certainly expect to 

15 have it ready well in advance of their next 

16 meeting, which I believe is the end of March. 

17 Isn't that true, the last couple of days in 

18 March? 

19 So we would expect to have that 

20 assessment report to the Dose Reconstruction 

21 Subcommittee for discussion at their end of 

22 March meeting.
 

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1 I don't believe I have any other 

2 news other than that, that comes to mind. I 

3 am going into my statistics on my slides. So 

4 I will be glad to answer any questions, either 

5 about the statistics slides or what I have 

6 covered so far in the meeting. Yes, Paul?

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: Stu, it sounded 

8 you are doing this quality check mainly on 

9 current cases as they come in, or are you? 

10 Did I understand that correctly, or are you 

11 going back and looking at any of the older 

12 completed cases in the same manner?

13 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, there are 

14 activities that are being done on some of the 

15 older completed cases as well. What we are 

16 trying to do, though, is to keep it with 

17 pretty recent work, because dose 

18 reconstruction processes have changed a lot 

19 over the 10 years of the program, and a lot of 

20 things that were done four or five years ago 

21 are not done anymore.

22 So if there is a quality issue 
 

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1 with a process that you are not using anymore, 

2 what we are trying to do is fix what we are 

3 doing going forward. Certainly, as the Board 

4 reviews dose reconstructions -- so those tend 

5 to be historical, somewhat historical at least 

6 -- we then follow up from those findings to 

7 determine is this a broad issue, and is there 

8 something we need to look at a broad 

9 population of claims? That has been going on.

10 This is sort of to make the 

11 processes we are using now as we go forward, 

12 to make sure those were appropriate and clear.

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: Just to follow up 

14 on that, is your group attempting to get a 

15 good distribution of cases over sites and 

16 types of cancers, sort of parallel to what the 

17 Dose Reconstruction Subcommittee is doing? 

18 How are you selecting these cases?

19 MR. HINNEFELD: I will have to 

20 check the criteria. I don't know, speaking 

21 right here today. I know that the application 

22 selects the cases. I don't know if it is 
 

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1 strictly a random pull or whether it is sort 

2 of a stratified and whether it has particular 

3 selection criteria. I don't know.

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: Thank you.

5 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Anybody else? I 

6 have a couple of questions, Stu. I am looking 

7 at your statistics slide on submittals versus 

8 production. I am just curious. I can't tell 

9 is that is fiscal year 2012 or calendar year.

10 MR. HINNEFELD: Those are fiscal 

11 quarters.

12 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: So it seems to 

13 be falling, production falling off there. 

14 MR. HINNEFELD: There is a little 

15 bit. Yes, production has come down recently, 

16 and that is intentional. We have gotten to 

17 the point where the backlog of claims is 

18 essentially done. We are getting claims done 

19 in about nine months, which is the objective. 

20 In certain categories of claims, we are 

21 getting done quicker.

22 On the other hand, though, whereas 
 

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1 that sort of backlog has sort of been tamed, 

2 as long as we don't let it get out of control 

3 again, we have a significant backlog on the 

4 technical work for the Board, SEC reviews that 

5 have been going on, Site Profile reviews where 

6 either the discussion has been going on or the 

7 discussion hasn't been joined particularly, 

8 largely waiting for us.

9 So the backlog that we need to 

10 work on now is those bodies of work, the SEC 

11 work and the Site Profile work. So there has 

12 been an intentional shift of the resources of 

13 our contractor from dose reconstruction to 

14 those activities.

15 So, yes, that was an intentional 

16 drop in the production rate.

17 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Some of us were 

18 talking earlier and saying that there is an 

19 issue with our dose reconstruction reviews and 

20 the amount of resources available for them. 

21 Your response, I believe, if I understood 

22 correctly, that our Dose Reconstruction Review 
 

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1 Subcommittee is, what, about eighth set or 

2 ninth set of reviews, and our contractor is --

3 what, you are working on the 16th or something 

4 like that? The 15th?

5 MR. HINNEFELD: The 15th, I 

6 think, yes.

7 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I was trying to 

8 get all this to -- how much is a resource 

9 issue? How do we sort of -- and then, with 

10 your increased efforts on sort of QA/QC, how 

11 do we get the resources involved with these 

12 efforts sort of coordinated in some way?

13 I am not expecting sort of a full 

14 answer to that, but I think it is something we 

15 need to be talking about here and later, and 

16 probably with the Dose Reconstruction 

17 Subcommittee.

18 MR. HINNEFELD: I think it is 

19 certainly worth discussing with the Board, 

20 because we have no particular preconceived 

21 notion of priority. We come up with 

22 priorities in things to work on. Now then, we 
 

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1 did have a preconceived -- you know, my 

2 management was really interested in the dose 

3 reconstruction backlog.

4 From this point forward, I have 

5 not received any kind of a marching order 

6 about here is your next thing I really want 

7 you to work on. So since these are Board 

8 activities, whether it is dose reconstruction 

9 review, procedure review or Site Profile or 

10 SEC, those are all work we are doing with or 

11 for the Board, however you want to look at it.

12 So I think the Board's 

13 prioritization of those activities would 

14 inform us. So we are not bringing an argument 

15 here for one over the other.

16 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I would think, 

17 again without sort of knowing all the effort 

18 involved in detail, but certainly, the SEC 

19 effort should be -- I won't say winding down, 

20 but diminishing. We have handled a lot of the 

21 large SECs. However, there is, I suspect, a 

22 backlog in terms of TBD updates and Site 
 

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1 Profile, then TBD reviews at a number of these 

2 sites to deal with.

3 We have the question with what we 

4 were just talking about with the dose 

5 reconstruction reviews and how to address 

6 them. I think both of those are -- those are 

7 important, because I think it is one of the 

8 major mandates in the law for the Board to do, 

9 and I think we need to sort of address that.

10 I think, as we go through our 

11 discussions today and tomorrow, I ask all the 

12 Board Members and NIOSH to be thinking about -

13 - and SC&A -- thinking sort of about how do we 

14 -- what is the best way of sort of triaging 

15 our available resources in a way that will 

16 address these different mandates and do it as 

17 efficiently as possible and as fairly as 

18 possible to the claimants that are out there.

19 I don't know if any other Board 

20 Members have thoughts or comments on that at 

21 this point, but it is something I think we 

22 need to talk about. On top of that, we have 
 

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1 the 10-year issues to deal with, some of 

2 which, I think, will require some effort, but 

3 also are intertwined in how we approach dose 

4 reconstruction and SEC issues also. So a lot 

5 of work there to do.

6 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, there is.

7 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I have one other 

8 question. That is regarding the DOE response 

9 to a request for exposure records, and the 

10 slide is, of January 31st, had 267 outstanding 

11 requests and 44 that are more than 60 days.

12 I know there is an issue with LANL 

13 that we will talk about a little bit later 

14 with Greg, but are there other sites where 

15 there are particular problems at this point?

16 MR. HINNEFELD: The problem sites 

17 are sort of dynamic, like you will have a 

18 problem for a while at the site, and then they 

19 will catch up, and they will be good. So 

20 today, I don't know that there is any 

21 particular site that is a problem, like you 

22 have mentioned LANL, which, on and off, there 
 

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1 have been issues there. 

2 Sometimes the issues are with data 

3 capture for investigation, and a site may be 

4 doing fine with individual exposure history 

5 responses, but the data capture stuff is an 

6 issue, and sometimes they have trouble with 

7 individual exposure requests.

8 I believe Brookhaven is not 

9 problematic with exposure history requests. 

10 They were for a while. I believe they have 

11 now remedied that. So I don't know of any 

12 sites right now that are raising enough 

13 information to rise to my level of concern.

14 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Greg, when you 

15 give your talk, we will ask questions. 

16 Any other Board Members have 

17 questions for Stu? We will do a conflict of 

18 interest review, and everybody is quiet for 

19 the rest of the day. Okay, thank you, Stu.

20 Next, Jeff Kotsch from Department 

21 of Labor will give us a program update. We 

22 had asked Jeff to also update us in a little 
 

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1 bit more detail than usual on the outreach 

2 program.

3 MR. KATZ: While we are waiting, 

4 just listening on the line I noticed some 

5 people joined after we got started, and we 

6 gave instructions to people listening on the 

7 phone to please mute your phones. If you 

8 don't have a mute button, press *6, and that 

9 will mute your phone. Thank you.

10 MR. KOTSCH: Good morning. I am 

11 Jeff Kotsch with the Department of Labor.

12 Just to follow on what Stu was 

13 saying earlier, we have the implementation of 

14 the new CLL policy, the change to the Part 81, 

15 and as the DOL portion we are writing a 

16 bulletin to implement that, to exchange lists 

17 with NIOSH on cases that we consider are 

18 affected by that. 

19 Obviously, there were cases that 

20 never went to NIOSH that were simply CLL as 

21 the sole cancer. So we will be sending those 

22 back, essentially real brain cases that were 
 

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1 denied previously, sending those along with 

2 the cases that we have looked at with NIOSH 

3 that had CLL with another cancer but were 

4 denied. 

5 I thought I saw a number that was 

6 in the realm of 500 of total for everything. 

7 That may be high, but whatever it is. It is 

8 somewhere up in that range. It is not 

9 insignificant as far as our activity as far as 

10 reopening and resubmitting those things. So 

11 that is -- again, that becomes effective March 

12 seventh.

13 Just a quick overview: there are 

14 some follow-on slides to the Act and the 

15 requirements of the Act, but they are in the 

16 back of the attachment, and they are not 

17 really addressed during the -- in the back of 

18 the handout that is back there, but we won't 

19 really go through those slides today.

20 Just quickly, the summary of the 

21 Act is Part B and Part D were enacted in 

22 October 2000. Part B is the portion that is 
 

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1 basically of interest here, the mandatory 

2 federal entitlement which is run by the 

3 Department of Labor. Part D was the portion 

4 run by DOE, which in October 2004 the Act was 

5 amended, and that part became Part E and 

6 transferred to the Department of Labor.

7 To date, roughly, as of January 

8 16th of this year we have had 150,000 cases 

9 filed, with a little over $7.7 billion in 

10 total compensation, and there you see the 

11 agencies that are involved overall in the Act 

12 Labor, Energy, Health and Human Services, and 

13 Department of Justice for the RECA portion.

14 This is just the pie chart we 

15 always send up for the Part B cases filed and 

16 how they are essentially dispositioned, and 37 

17 percent going through the NIOSH track, and you 

18 see the other distributions, the other 

19 primarily being the portion labeled other, 

20 being beryllium, product beryllium, silicosis, 

21 and things like that.

22 36,500 cases have been referred to 
 

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1 NIOSH for dose reconstruction, and we are 

2 showing 34,539 returned that are currently at 

3 DOL. About 30,300 had dose reconstructions, 

4 and about 4,200 without dose reconstructions. 

5 And then we are showing -- and again, these 

6 numbers never seem to agree ultimately because 

7 of some of the disparities in our tracking 

8 systems. About 1961 cases are currently at 

9 NIOSH, 1,413 as initial referrals and 548 as 

10 reworks.

11 This is our standing slide for the 

12 status of dose reconstructions and the 

13 distribution of final approvals and final 

14 denials. We have 16,620 final denials and 

15 8,628 final approvals, based on dose 

16 reconstructions. That is 34 percent approval.

17 This is just a summary of the Part 

18 B cancer cases with final decision to accept. 

19 Just going through some of them: Accepted 

20 dose reconstruction cases, 8,095 for 11,424 

21 payees. Payees is always greater than the 

22 number of actual claims or cases, because 
 

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1 there are generally more than one claimant or 

2 survivor in a particular case.

3 So for accepted cases, that is 

4 $1.2 billion in compensation. Accepted SEC 

5 cases is about 14,818 for about $2.2 billion 

6 in compensation. Going down to the bottom 

7 line, the totals for all of the accepted, 

8 23,446 cases for $3.4 billion in compensation.

9 This is just the Part B summary 

10 for final decisions for all covered 

11 applications, 34,858 final decisions for 

12 approval and 24,362 final decisions for 

13 denial, and you see the breakdown beyond that 

14 as far as whether it is a PoC less than 50, 

15 eligibility or survivors or medical 

16 information which was insufficient to support 

17 the claim.

18 This is just the running bar chart 

19 by month for new Part B cases received by 

20 Labor. Running in the early part of that year 

21 around 400 per month, and down slightly but 

22 still probably averaging either in the high 
 

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1 300s or low 400s, fairly steady still.

2 The next slide is just the 

3 referrals to NIOSH over the past year, maybe a 

4 slightly downward trend, but still running 

5 probably in the mid-200s to upper 200s per 

6 month. Again, the difference is the ones that 

7 we take off the top as far as automatic SEC --

8 existing SEC Classes or chronic relief for 

9 silicosis, things like that.

10 This slide is the top four work 

11 sites generating new Part B cases. We just 

12 took this data for the first quarter of this 

13 fiscal year, which is October 2011 through 

14 December of 2011.

15 So the four that we are showing is 

16 Sandia National Lab, 139 new claims; Hanford, 

17 107 new ones; Y-12 plant, 102; and Savannah 

18 River, 90 new claims.

19 As far as -- Jim had asked for an 

20 outreach update. In response to the new SECs, 

21 during fiscal year 2012 and to date, we have 

22 had three town hall meetings, and traveling 
 

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1 resource centers were conducted for Sandia 

2 National Labs. That was November 1st of last 

3 year, GE Evendale in Ohio. That was November 

4 2nd, and the Y-12 plant on January 18th of 

5 this year.

6 The upcoming SEC town hall 

7 meetings and traveling resource centers that 

8 are scheduled for Pantex Plant for March 14th, 

9 or tentatively for Linde Ceramics in April of 

10 2012, and Savannah River in either April or 

11 May 2012. I gave the website there, DOL's 

12 website for the address, if you want to check 

13 upcoming events.

14 In the case of smaller SECs, press 

15 releases are issued. I don't have specific 

16 sites, but I know that October 13th of last 

17 year they sent out press releases in Wisconsin 

18 and Ohio, and February 1st of this year they 

19 sent out press releases in New Jersey and 

20 California. I don't know the specific sites, 

21 though. That was related to this slide, 

22 actually, outreach to covered facilities with 
 

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1 50 or less claims, where they have identified, 

2 focusing on some of the effort of sites where 

3 there are 50 or less fewer claimants. Those 

4 two press releases I talked about were 

5 focusing on those, primarily. The bulk of 

6 those are AWE sites.

7 Efforts are concentrated to notify 

8 individuals who worked at these facilities, 

9 and present them information as far as 

10 potential benefits of the Act through the 

11 issuance of press releases, reaching out to 

12 unions, local government, other key 

13 stakeholders, and utilizing as much as 

14 possible the staffs of our resource centers.

15 I don't know if Stu mentioned it, 

16 but I know Greg usually mentions the Joint 

17 Outreach Task Group. There you see the 

18 membership. It is Labor with our Ombudsman, 

19 NIOSH with their Ombudsman, and the DOE Former 

20 Workers Medical Screening Program. 

21 This is just a summary of the 2011 

22 town hall meetings that they had at Kansas 
 

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1 City Plant in October of last year, Oak Ridge 

2 in April -- I'm sorry, October of 2010 -- Oak 

3 Ridge in April of 2011, Savannah River in May 

4 of 2011, and Fermi National Accelerator Lab 

5 and Argonne East on June 7th. I think they 

6 are still working on finalizing the schedule 

7 for this year. 

8 These are just the standard slides 

9 we put together for statistics for either 

10 local facilities or facilities that are on the 

11 agenda during the two-day meeting. I am just 

12 going to the last slide, the three local one 

13 is Lawrence Berkeley. You see 713 Part B and 

14 E cases or claims. We have had 150 Part B 

15 approvals, 148 Part E approvals for a total of 

16 $34.2 million for total compensation and 

17 medical bill payments. Stanford Linear 

18 Accelerator had 121 Part B and E claims. 

19 There were 10 Part B approvals and 13 E 

20 approvals, for $2.9 million. Then Lawrence 

21 Livermore National Lab, 2,937 Part B and E 

22 claims, 745 approvals for Part B, 661 for Part 
 

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1 E, for a total of $160.3 million.

2 Then like I said, beyond that for 

3 the handout there are some other statistics. 

4 There is some other background. Are there any 

5 questions? 

6 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes. Dave?

7 MEMBER RICHARDSON: I had a couple 

8 of questions, I guess, about the outreach 

9 issues. One was: This is partly spurred by 

10 my continued surprise by the number of 

11 facilities, particularly these early 

12 facilities, when I feel like I have made kind 

13 of a considered effort to try and understand 

14 the complex, and yet I clearly don't. I was 

15 surprised, kind of, to come across an 

16 announcement that there were over a dozen new 

17 facilities added to the list over the last 

18 month or so, if I am correct, several of them 

19 here in California.

20 It made me realize, if I can't 

21 keep track of who potentially is a claimant or 

22 what is considered a covered facility, how 
 

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1 difficult it would be for many people who are 

2 former workers, and particularly people who 

3 are not employees of private contractors. 

4 So it seems like the work that you 

5 are doing with the Joint Task Group is very 

6 important for people to understand their 

7 eligibility for the program. So that gets at 

8 a starting point as background.

9 It looks like Labor is not 

10 represented on the Task Group right now. Is 

11 that correct? 

12 MR. KOTSCH: No, Labor is there. 

13 Is it not included on the slide? DEEOIC --

14 that is our division.

15 MEMBER RICHARDSON: Oh, I don't 

16 mean Department of Labor. I mean organized 

17 labor.

18 MR. LEWIS: I would say, 

19 indirectly, yes, our Former Worker Programs 

20 are involved, depending on what area we are in 

21 and what particular Former Worker Program is 

22 involved.
 

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1 MEMBER RICHARDSON: I guess I have 

2 been -- I have had some conversations lately 

3 that have led me to think, although I know 

4 there is a lot of effort being done to kind of 

5 publicize the program, it still seems that 

6 there are lots of opportunities for people not 

7 to recognize. I was wondering if there are 

8 other thoughts about ways to kind of spur 

9 that. That was one question. Does this group 

10 have to be -- you know, is there a restriction 

11 in some sense on who sits at the table at 

12 those kind of --

13 MR. KOTSCH: I have to admit, I am 

14 not that familiar with the Task Group as far 

15 as its -- I don't know exactly how it is 

16 structured. I know it is structured with 

17 federal constituents, but I don't know what 

18 else it entails as far as who it can include.

19 MEMBER RICHARDSON: Its mission, 

20 though, is to -- or you could help me to 

21 understand its mission. Is it to kind of 

22 stimulate new ideas for how outreach can be 
 

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1 done most effectively?

2 MR. KOTSCH; Yes, I think that is 

3 probably part of it. Part of it was just the 

4 coordination effort between the three agencies 

5 to make sure that they were somewhat 

6 coordinated in their efforts for outreach and, 

7 certainly, yes, they would look at that.

8 I know they are always looking for 

9 -- again, I am not that intimately familiar 

10 with the actual group itself, but I assume 

11 they are always looking for ways to get out 

12 there, because we know there are some -- I 

13 know there were a couple of facilities in New 

14 Jersey that were so small, they were literally 

15 -- there were just a couple of claimants. It 

16 was really hard to just even find anybody else 

17 that worked for those old companies that even 

18 -- It is just no longer there.

19 MEMBER RICHARDSON: Right. 

20 MS. LIN: Can I just ask a 

21 question. Dr. Richardson, are you asking for 

22 membership to the Joint Outreach Task Force, 
 

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1 individuals or entity outside of the federal 

2 government?

3 MEMBER RICHARDSON: Yes. One of 

4 the questions was: Was there representation 

5 there? Might they bring ideas, contacts, 

6 resources for other ways of identifying people 

7 who might not be -- I mean, it wouldn't be 

8 obvious to me right now sitting at the table 

9 what those would be, but --

10 MS. LIN: As of now, this is an 

11 interagency task force. If we are inviting 

12 outside entity outside the federal government, 

13 they change the characteristic of that group. 

14 It might actually be -- it might actually 

15 become a federal advisory committee.

16 There is actually different 

17 ramifications that might involve or implicate. 

18 So, obviously, it is something that we 

19 consider, but we will definitely take it.

20 MEMBER RICHARDSON: Clearly, I 

21 don't appreciate how bizarre the workings of 

22 the government are that you can't elicit 
 

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1 information.

2 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Henry?

3 MEMBER ANDERSON: I was interested 

4 in there's over 6,200 where the medical claim 

5 could be substantiated. What are the problems 

6 there? 

7 MR. KOTSCH: I think the general 

8 issues there are just that there is not 

9 specific medical information, a pathology 

10 report or a medical report or just anything. 

11 There is just the claim of a particular 

12 illness or cancer, but it is not substantiated 

13 in any particular way.

14 We have fairly generous 

15 requirements as far as what we require for 

16 medical information, but some of the main 

17 things are pathology reports for the cancers 

18 and things like that. We will take other 

19 things in lieu of that as far as medical.

20 MEMBER ANDERSON; It just seemed 

21 to be a substantial number.

22 MR. KOTSCH: Well, considering the 
 

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1 small number, it is still significant. 

2 Likewise, we sometimes have an issue with 

3 employment, too. They may just allege 

4 employment but nothing else.

5 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Just a lot of 

6 medical records get destroyed now, with 

7 hospital mergers and medical offices going 

8 out, and some of these cases go back so far.

9 MR. KOTSCH: Yes. The 

10 requirements for records retention, obviously, 

11 varies by state, and it is not very lengthy, 

12 and I think sometimes it is only like 20 or 30 

13 years.

14 MEMBER ANDERSON: I know the 

15 medical record. Just knowing pathologists, 

16 they never throw anything away. So the 

17 written report may be gone, but if you know 

18 where it was -- I mean, how one goes about 

19 searching for those records. Frequently, the 

20 slides of the tissues, if such were ever made 

21 -- some people will die or, if you don't 

22 accept the death certificate as saying, you 
 

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1 know, it is the cancer. 

2 I am just curious as to -- I can 

3 see the frustration in the families, that you 

4 know what Dad died of or where he was 

5 hospitalized, and all of a sudden you can't 

6 get it.

7 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: And the hospital 

8 is gone. That is probably the -- I think you 

9 are right. If the hospital is intact, so to 

10 speak, then there is usually some record 

11 someplace that you can track down, but it is 

12 when they have disappeared that it is hard, or 

13 when it is, you know, so and so went in the 

14 hospital, and they thought -- they weren't 

15 sure what was wrong, might have been cancer, 

16 then died. Yes. It is difficult for a 

17 survivor who may live on the other side of the 

18 country and so forth. It is really -- it can 

19 be quite difficult.

20 Paul?

21 MEMBER ZIEMER: Jeff, on the CLL 

22 cases now that will be reopened, my question 
 

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1 is: does the Department of Labor notify those 

2 claimants that their case is going to be 

3 reopened and thereby raise their hopes of a 

4 settlement or do you go ahead and relook at it 

5 and, if it is positive, let them know? What 

6 is the process?

7 MR. KOTSCH: By the actual process 

8 of reopening, they have to be notified. They 

9 get a formal piece of paper that says, you 

10 know, Department of Labor is reopening your 

11 claim, and then whatever we are doing. In 

12 this case, we are --

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: And you explain

14 why.

15 MR. KOTSCH: Yes.

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: Thank you.

17 MR. KOTSCH: Anytime we reopen a 

18 case, whether it is for a rework or something 

19 else, if it has to be reopened, there is 

20 obviously in the claimant's interest whether -

21 - I don't know. We never know the outcome of 

22 those things until they are done. I can't 
 

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1 remember if there is language in there as far 

2 as -- there may not be. I am not sure, but as 

3 far as what they -- I mean, we are not going 

4 to presuppose what the outcome is.

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: Thank you. Now 

6 one unrelated question. The Worker Outreach 

7 Programs -- you did one at GE Evandale in 

8 Cincinnati, I noticed, a site for which we had 

9 concerns about the size of the claimant 

10 population. Can you give us some idea or do 

11 you know what kind of turnout there was for 

12 that worker outreach meeting?

13 MR. KOTSCH: I don't know. Was 

14 there anybody from -- Stu may have been there, 

15 or somebody there.

16 MR. HINNEFELD: I happened to 

17 attend those, since they were in town. So I 

18 am speaking from memory now. There were two 

19 sessions. There was a difference between the 

20 two. In fact, I think at one -- I think that 

21 was the place where nobody showed up for the 

22 second one. It was just like one person, and 
 

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1 was mainly interested in her particular claim, 

2 and so she was dealt with by other people. I 

3 don't think the second session even occurred.

4 The first one, I want to say, is 

5 30 to 50 people were in the room for that one, 

6 if I remember correctly.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: It is kind of an 

8 interesting phenomenon, to follow up on Dr. 

9 Richardson's comment. Here is a site where 

10 you had a particular effort, I guess, to 

11 announce the program and the availability of 

12 compensation, and you got a lot of no-shows, 

13 it sounds like, because I think we estimated 

14 that that was a pretty large Work Group that 

15 could be impacted.

16 MR. HINNEFELD: Certainly, a large 

17 employer, a large set of employees. I don't 

18 know, other than to say that the advertisement 

19 was about this particular work. Air Force 

20 Plant 36, whatever it was called, and people 

21 may have read the -- I don't know how the 

22 publication went.
 

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1 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, see, that 

2 makes me wonder how -- are we doing something 

3 like -- a lot of legal notices are just that. 

4 They meet legal requirements, but the people 

5 you want to reach don't see them.

6 MR. HINNEFELD: I really don't 

7 know. We go attend these -- or this was an 

8 SEC essentially announcement.

9 MEMBER ZIEMER: But that would be 

10 an issue for the Joint Task Group, that kind 

11 of thing, to discuss as to how you go about 

12 that.

13 MR. LEWIS: And I think there is a 

14 little bit of a difference for the outreach 

15 meetings on how we are able to connect with 

16 these folks, because with a place like GE 

17 Evandale, when it is a private company, it was 

18 more on the AWE side, we don't have the list; 

19 whereas, with -- you know, if at all possible, 

20 and I was going to mention, at one of the 

21 Joint Outreach Task Group meetings we are 

22 working on for this coming year is for this 
 

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1 area, for the Bay area, and what we are 

2 working on right now is getting updated roster 

3 lists from the sites, SLAC, Berkeley, and 

4 Livermore.

5 So we are hoping to get -- we get 

6 big lists of former workers. We try to mail 

7 to as many -- You know, we get the ZIP Codes 

8 and try to mail to as many local folks as we 

9 can. So that tends to generate a bigger 

10 attendance; whereas, if we don't have those 

11 lists and have to go with an ad in the paper, 

12 a press release, something like that, that 

13 depends on what gets picked up, when it comes 

14 out, who is paying attention that day, how big 

15 the market is, all those kind of things.

16 We try to -- in the Joint Outreach 

17 Task Group meetings, we try to tailor our 

18 outreach given those realities to try to get 

19 as many people there as many people there as 

20 possible. 

21 Now with the SEC meetings, you 

22 have to do it for that site, and you are only 
 

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1 able to kind of come up with whatever tools we 

2 have. I don't want to speak for DOL, of 

3 course, but there is a bit of a difference, 

4 depending on the site.

5 MR. KOTSCH: Yes, that is a 

6 general summary. If we have union contacts at 

7 a particular site, we will use them. I know 

8 our outreach people try to take any avenue 

9 that they are aware of as far as getting the 

10 word out.

11 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Wanda?

12 MEMBER MUNN: The discussion 

13 surprises me a little bit, probably because it 

14 is contrary to my personal observation and 

15 personal experience. I have not encountered 

16 any of these outreach activities that have not 

17 been, certainly, heavily involved in the 

18 notification process with organized labor, and 

19 the advertisements that I have seen have not 

20 been in legal sections at all. The 

21 advertisements that I have seen in a number of 

22 newspapers across the United States are always 
 

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1 very colorful, very clear, and occupy a pretty 

2 good space. They are not just a tiny little 

3 ad. They are good-sized ads, and they occur 

4 more than once in localized newspapers.

5 So I haven't attended very many of 

6 those outreach meetings, but many that I have 

7 been aware of were held in union halls, and 

8 many informational meetings were arranged by 

9 organized labor, and then operated as sort of 

10 a joint activity with DOL.

11 So it surprises me that this 

12 discussion occurs because, for from some 

13 perspectives, the heaviest of all 

14 representation at these meetings is a union 

15 person, and a couple that I have attended have 

16 been essentially led jointly by DOL people and 

17 by organized labor people.

18 So I guess I can understand your 

19 concern, David, but I just felt it was 

20 necessary to comment that I cannot imagine, 

21 for example, in a place like GE that the 

22 organization was not involved in distributing 
 

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1 information. It just doesn't jibe with the 

2 experience that has been observed elsewhere.

3 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Brad?

4 MEMBER CLAWSON: Well, after 

5 listening to Wanda's comment, I just wanted to 

6 make sure. The Department of Labor, I am 

7 sure, sees this, too, that in many cases, many 

8 places it is the DOL outreach person or -- you 

9 know, you can go to different cities, and some 

10 of them, there are so many they are really 

11 advertised very well, and other ones it isn't. 

12 It is a lot the point of contact and so

13 forth.

14 One of the sites is Pantex where 

15 you have people that are really involved and 

16 have a good communication, and this is, I 

17 think, what Mr. Richardson was referring to, 

18 the communication between the organized labors 

19 that are there in some places are different 

20 than in others.

21 In my personal opinion of going to 

22 several of them, some of them were really well 
 

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1 done, like you said, but other ones, the 

2 information didn't get out there. It wasn't 

3 as well informed as other ones. They are 

4 polar opposites in some places on it. 

5 This is where, I think, Mr. 

6 Richardson was talking about using organized 

7 labor, but a lot of these sites didn't. Their 

8 organized labor department has gone away. It 

9 is basically falling onto retired people, and 

10 many of those do wonderful, wonderful jobs and 

11 they have a good communication, but also the 

12 outreach people that are involved in it is a 

13 big tool that sometimes really works well and 

14 sometimes doesn't.

15 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Jeff, I have one 

16 question. I think that, for the people with 

17 claimants with CLL you have in the system, you 

18 can notify them, but is there going to be an 

19 effort this year to try to do a more general 

20 outreach for those that may have gone to one 

21 of these public meetings or talked to people 

22 in your centers or whatever about filing a 
 

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1 claim and been told, well, no, you are not 

2 eligible, CLL isn't covered. 

3 I think it would be helpful if 

4 there was some effort to do that. I think 

5 that may be one of the problems also, I think, 

6 with some of these sites. People don't think 

7 that they are covered or they have been 

8 informed they are not covered or there is not 

9 -- or whatever. Something had not happened at 

10 that site yet, or whatever, only covered 

11 certain people.

12 These are the people that are hard 

13 to reach. The ones that have filed claims, 

14 you can go back to, and that is good. But I 

15 think some emphasis this year on at least 

16 clarifying for the people that may have not 

17 thought they were eligible and are now 

18 eligible.

19 MR. KOTSCH: That is a good point, 

20 and I think that will done. I am not sure of 

21 the form, but you are right. After 10 years 

22 of saying you are not covered, you are right, 
 

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1 we need to inform them that now you are, there 

2 has been a change.

3 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: David?

4 MEMBER RICHARDSON: Just to wrap 

5 this up, and I don't do this as a labor -- 

6 organized labor versus other people, balance 

7 or anything. I was coming at this from the 

8 perspective of imagining a disease which 

9 arises in a population, and what we are seeing 

10 are a subset of those which become claims, and 

11 the government has kind of offered a service 

12 program to all those people who are affected 

13 by a given disease, and we want to think about 

14 how best to serve all those people who have 

15 experienced this disease.

16 What is driving some people to end 

17 up in the pool which are those which have 

18 filed claims versus, which I think we would 

19 all acknowledge, there are other instances of 

20 disease which have occurred where those people 

21 have not filed claims.

22 There, obviously, are a number of 
 

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1 barriers somehow to people getting entered 

2 into a government system which is there to 

3 assist them. So this may be communication. 

4 It may be a changing message. It may be lots 

5 of different social, psychosocial processes 

6 which leads some people to end up in a program 

7 and some people not.

8 That is what I was trying to think 

9 about. What are those? How do you lower 

10 those barriers so that people understand the 

11 resources available to them and are well 

12 served by the program?

13 I don't know what that is. One of 

14 my suggestions was to involve more of the 

15 people who are potential claimants and get 

16 their perspective on what they perceive as the 

17 barriers to entering into the program, and 

18 there may be other ideas and expertise about 

19 how to do that, but all I'm saying is I think 

20 that is a very important issue.

21 I have some suspicion that there 

22 remain obstacles to people entering into the 
 

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1 program and finding the assistance that they 

2 are entitled to. So I would just like to keep 

3 it on the burner.

4 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Thanks, Dave. 

5 Any other comments or questions? If not, 

6 thank you, Jeff, for the update.

7 MR. KOTSCH: Thank you.

8 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Our next update 

9 is from the, last but not least, Department of 

10 Energy.

11 MR. LEWIS: This took a little 

12 while to load earlier. I don't really know 

13 why, but I did want to address a couple of 

14 things while this is loading that I want to 

15 address. 

16 I know you mentioned briefly, Dr. 

17 Melius, LANL, and I have a slide later on, and 

18 I would be glad to talk about that and answer 

19 questions.

20 The other thing you mentioned, I 

21 think it showed something like 40-something of 

22 the late claims, and as Stu said, those kind 
 

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1 of come and go, depending on circumstances, 

2 and usually they are associated with a few 

3 specific sites. I am going to check with 

4 NIOSH afterward and see exactly where those 

5 are, but the one site that immediately popped 

6 into my head is Sandia.

7 I think you saw in Jeff's slide, 

8 Sandia had something like 139, and they were 

9 the highest number of recently received claims 

10 at DOL and, typically, the other three on that 

11 list are kind of always there. I think it was 

12 Savannah River, Y-12, and maybe Hanford. 

13 Those three are -- they are always in the top 

14 five in terms of number of claims. Sandia 

15 typically is not.

16 So 139 claims for Sandia is 

17 probably five to six times what they typically 

18 get, and in addition, they are also still 

19 supporting ongoing -- even though that initial 

20 period of SEC was granted, there has still 

21 been ongoing research into the remainder of 

22 the period. 
 

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1 So they are kind of getting hit

2 both with additional claims as well as this 

3 ongoing research. So I think that they have 

4 staffed up or brought in some additional kind 

5 of temporary people to help handle that, but 

6 that is the one claimant. 

7 I would also believe -- and I 

8 don't know how it factors in number-wise, but 

9 similarly, Kansas City got -- over the last 

10 year they got probably three to four times the 

11 claims that they typically get. So I think 

12 that they had also hired an additional person 

13 or brought on kind of a part-time staffer to

14 help eliminate the backlog. 

15 So those are the two sites that 

16 pop into my head, and a lot of times it is 

17 because of something like that, either --

18 well, unfortunately, sometimes it can be due 

19 to funding. I don't believe we have any of 

20 that even through the CR this year, but the 

21 other major driver on that is the SECs and 

22 large influx of claims.
 

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1 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I think that 

2 Kansas City was an outreach. Wasn't that on 

3 Jeff's list, I thought?

4 MR. LEWIS: Yes.

5 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: They probably do 

6 that. Actually, I think Sam Glover was out at 

7 Sandia handing out claim forms as he wandered 

8 around down there or something. 

9 MR. LEWIS: Yes. 

10 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: It accounts for 

11 about 120 of the 139 or something.

12 MR. LEWIS: Then just one more 

13 thing, before I get started, as far as the 

14 outreach. Maybe I should have been stronger, 

15 but with the former worker programs, 

16 typically, at least for the Joint Outreach 

17 Task Group -- I know both NIOSH and DOL also 

18 do their own reach, but for the Joint Outreach 

19 Task Group, we have, I think, monthly or every 

20 couple of months we have conference calls with 

21 the Joint Outreach Task Group, and on almost 

22 every one of those calls, there is typically a 
 

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1 representative from USW, United Steelworkers, 

2 as well as the building trades, CPWR, and I 

3 think occasionally some others as well, but I 

4 know at least those two are on almost every 

5 single call, and then attend the meetings that 

6 have to do with their specific programs. They 

7 don't necessarily attend all of them, but 

8 usually one of those two is typically there.

9 All right. I will go ahead with 

10 my slide show. I am Greg Lewis. I am the 

11 Director of the Office of Worker Screening and 

12 Compensation Support at the Department of 

13 Energy.

14 Our core mandate is to work on 

15 behalf of program claimants to ensure that all 

16 available worker and facility records are 

17 provided to DOL, NIOSH and the Advisory Board. 

18 We have three main 

19 responsibilities. We respond to individual 

20 requests for information from DOL and NIOSH 

21 for employment verification, dose 

22 reconstruction and other exposure records. 
 

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1 The second thing is to provide support and 

2 assistance on large-scale records research 

3 projects like the NIOSH SEC projects, TBD 

4 updates, the Department of Labor site exposure 

5 matrix, things like that.

6 Then the third, which is somewhat 

7 smaller but equally important, is to conduct 

8 research on issues related to their covered 

9 facility designation. So the puncture sites, 

10 the uranium mining and milling sites that were 

11 just added, we were involved with that review, 

12 and I think are still providing some 

13 background information on those sites.

14 Before I talk about each of those 

15 three responsibilities in more detail, I just 

16 want to kind of talk about how we do business 

17 at DOE with respect to the EEOICPA program. 

18 Everything in terms of providing records and 

19 information runs through our sites, and in 

20 each one of these sites we have a designated 

21 point of contact for the EEOICPA program, and 

22 these PoCs are vital for our program. They 
 

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1 are the backbone of our program, and they are 

2 really what allows us to get you all the 

3 information you need.

4 So these PoCs conduct the research 

5 activities. They set up visits, interviews, 

6 make sure that the clearances and access are 

7 there to get on site. They work to identify 

8 the right subject matter experts, and also 

9 kind of manage the day to day process of 

10 responding to these claims in a timely 

11 fashion.

12 For the individual records 

13 requests, we do three types of requests, again 

14 the employment verifications, the dose records 

15 or dose requests for NIOSH, and what we call a 

16 document acquisition request or DAR, which is 

17 a request from DOL for basically all other 

18 exposure information, medical records, 

19 industrial hygiene, anything related to 

20 exposures that an individual might have 

21 experienced on site.

22 Then if you look at the numbers, 
 

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1 we have actually recently revised our numbers. 

2 We went back. So I think, if you look at 

3 previous presentations that I have done, the 

4 FY 2011 number and even 2010 here are both 

5 lower than what we have said in the past. I 

6 think we were up around 17 or 18 in the past.

7 What we realize -- we were going 

8 back through our numbers and realized that at 

9 the Oak Ridge facility -- and I guess my next 

10 slides speaks to this as well, but our numbers 

11 typically don't match DOL and NIOSH, because 

12 often workers worked at multiple sites. They 

13 might have gone to visit sites, workers, for 

14 example, in this area at Livermore, many of 

15 which would have gone to the Nevada Test Site 

16 for a period of time while they were working 

17 on a particular shot, things like that.

18 So for one individual, we may have 

19 to go to two or three sites to gather the 

20 requests. So we count that as two or three 

21 separate requests, because the sites has to 

22 pull the information.
 

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1 Well, at Oak Ridge, what we call 

2 Oak Ridge really consisted of five sites, the 

3 three gaseous diffusion plants, and then Y-12 

4 and Oak Ridge National Lab. So if someone 

5 worked at all five of those, it would count as 

6 five requests.

7 Well, we were also counting -- 

8 there was a separate records center there in 

9 the Oak Ridge Operations Office. So for many 

10 individuals, especially for those that worked 

11 in the older period of time, the request will 

12 go to that Oak Ridge Records Center. 

13 So I didn't realize it at first, 

14 but we were counting that as a separate 

15 request, because it was going to a separate 

16 place. But when we looked at that type of 

17 request, it was in its own site, and it was 

18 also a much lower level of effort. So we kind 

19 of felt like we were double-counting.

20 So we went back and took that out 

21 of what we counted. Actually, it makes our 

22 numbers -- it makes a little bit more sense, 
 

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1 actually, because when you look at it, over 

2 the past two years we have been very close. I 

3 didn't put the exact number. We are still 

4 finishing this data scrub, but it is very 

5 close to 16,000 per year, and then this year 

6 we are still on target for about 16,000. So 

7 the numbers have actually been very consistent 

8 over the last couple of years.

9 Then I mentioned this before, but 

10 for multiple sites, we -- For one individual, 

11 we may go to multiple sites, and then within a 

12 site we often go to multiple divisions or 

13 areas within the site, and resulting in 

14 records packages that can be hundreds of pages 

15 long for one individual. So it can be a 

16 complicated process out of these sites.

17 The second main function that we 

18 have at the DOE is to support the large-scale 

19 records research projects. These are driven 

20 by NIOSH and DOL. So it does keep us on our 

21 toes, trying to react and make sure that, when 

22 these projects start or as they come up, that 
 

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1 we make sure that the site has the resources 

2 and manpower in place and that there is 

3 funding that enables them to support these 

4 efforts. 

5 These projects can take years and 

6 cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. So it 

7 is sometimes difficult logistically to 

8 support.

9 We also do have to review -- not 

10 everything, but at certain sites and for 

11 certain records, we do have to review 

12 documents for classification. This is also a 

13 time-consuming process. We have reviewed 

14 millions of pages so far, and we do everything 

15 we can to get these back in a timely manner.

16 This is a list of some of the 

17 projects that we have been supporting 

18 recently. There is more than that, but I just 

19 kind of picked six of the ones that we have 

20 been recently working on.

21 At Sandia, as I had mentioned 

22 earlier, in addition to getting a large influx 
 

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1 of claims, we also supported five site visits 

2 in 2011 for records review, worker interviews 

3 and data capture. 

4 While they are working on the 

5 Sandia SEC, there has also been request for 

6 Ross Aviation information and also for Medina 

7 and Clarksville records, because Sandia, along 

8 with Pantex, ended up with the majority of the 

9 Medina and Clarksville information, once those 

10 two facilities were closed. 

11 We also just recently held a 

12 meeting or facilitated a meeting at DOE 

13 Headquarters in Germantown to look into the 

14 Sandia documents, as well as a few other 

15 subjects.

16 So Los Alamos. I know that a 

17 question had been raised earlier with Los 

18 Alamos, and recently, just in the last month, 

19 I have been fairly involved working with both 

20 the site as well as NIOSH and their 

21 contractor, trying to resolve issues as far as 

22 getting the right information and targeting 
 

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1 the right information.

2 I will say, it has been somewhat 

3 slow, but being involved in the process, LANL 

4 has been responsive. It hasn't been an issue 

5 where they are not responding or refusing to 

6 respond. It has been an issue of a lot of 

7 back and forth trying to identify the right 

8 information.

9 There had been requests made. 

10 Then the site came back and said, well, this 

11 is too broad; we don't know what they are 

12 asking for, we can't provide this. So then 

13 NIOSH or the contractor would either have to 

14 make a more targeted request or talk to the 

15 site to make sure to explain exactly what they 

16 were looking for more clearly, so the site 

17 could actually pull the records and facilitate 

18 the visit.

19 I am happy to say that, as of 

20 yesterday, there are three researchers on site 

21 down at Los Alamos reviewing documents, and I 

22 did exchange emails with Cheryl Kirkwood at 
 

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1 ORAU just today, and she said that it does 

2 seem like they are getting what they needed, 

3 and the documents that they wanted to see are 

4 there. 

5 So I believe, hopefully, at the 

6 end of the week, it will have been a 

7 successful visit, and I am hoping that that 

8 will resolve most of the concern with Los 

9 Alamos, but if that is not the case, there is 

10 still more work to be done, I would be glad to 

11 get that going as soon as possible.

12 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Because I think, 

13 as you know, we have our next meeting -- in14 person meeting of the Board out that way in 

15 June, and we have an active SEC evaluation out 

16 there, and we now have congressional 

17 representatives inquiring what is taking so 

18 long. 

19 MR. LEWIS: Like I said, I 

20 believe, based on my conversations with the 

21 NIOSH team lead, if they are able to get what 

22 they think they can get during this visit, 
 

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1 they think that that is going to be the last 

2 visit that they need to pull together the 

3 report. Of course, these things are always 

4 kind of in flux. Depending on what they find 

5 this week, they may need to pull that string a 

6 little bit further, but yes, we will do 

7 everything we can to make sure that they have 

8 the information by the next -- well in advance 

9 of the next meeting.

10 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: No, we 

11 appreciate that, and we will keep after NIOSH 

12 and whoever we need to keep after.

13 MR. LEWIS: Then just the last one 

14 that I was going to talk about is the Pinellas 

15 Plant. At the last Advisory Board meeting in 

16 Tampa -- I think that was in December -- there

17 had been a request to facilitate some 

18 interviews with former Pinellas workers.

19 We really tried to get that -- to 

20 secure a venue to do that in December. Again, 

21 because of the nature of these interviews, it 

22 needed to be a classified location. Because 
 

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1 the site is closed, DOE doesn't have a 

2 suitable location in the area. 

3 So I think, initially, we were 

4 working with the -- there is a big military 

5 base near there, a number of commands, and 

6 that had been -- we just weren't able to do 

7 that. There were a number of issues in terms 

8 of getting the right venue, and also getting 

9 access to the base was very difficult.

10 So after that meeting, we went 

11 back and were able to work with the FBI and 

12 get a venue, and the interview was held in 

13 January. So I think that we can cross that 

14 one off the list.

15 Then as far as document reviews, 

16 again with --

17 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Phil, do you 

18 want to comment on that? I don't mean to 

19 interrupt you, but it is easier if we do --

20 MR. LEWIS: Yes, go right ahead.

21 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: On those 

22 Pinellas interviews, I want to compliment DOE. 
 

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1 You guys really pulled together a good job, 

2 and it really was a help to us, and we were 

3 able to get a lot done, and I appreciate it.

4 MR. LEWIS: Glad we were able to 

5 support. I wish we could have done it for 

6 December, but we did the best we could.

7 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Well, that was 

8 hard, and short notice, especially when the 

9 facility is not there. I don't know how you 

10 got people to go to the FBI office.

11 MR. LEWIS: Quickly, with document 

12 reviews: many of the final documents that go 

13 up on the web or that are published in a 

14 public venue, we review it at DOE For Official 

15 Use Only in classifications, data-sensitivity 

16 concerns.

17 We do this -- our security plan is 

18 really what provides us the -- it sets forth 

19 the things that we follow, so that is at the 

20 link there, and it is on our website. Then 

21 since the last Board meeting in December, 34 

22 documents have been submitted to DOE 
 

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1 Headquarters for review. The average 

2 turnaround time was eight working days, and I 

3 think in certain cases we are able to do it 

4 faster when necessary.

5 Then the third main responsibility 

6 the DOE has under the Act is to research and 

7 maintain the covered facilities database, of 

8 course, along with DOL and NIOSH. We all put 

9 together the information we have and, when we 

10 realize that there may be an issue with 

11 facility coverage, we attempt to make that as 

12 accurate as possible.

13 Then we are always working on 

14 initiatives to identify additional records 

15 collections or records that either may not be 

16 organized in a fashion where we can quickly 

17 get them to respond to requests or we may not 

18 have realized that they were responsive to 

19 these type of EEOICPA records requests.

20 So one example right now is we are 

21 working with our Brookhaven National Lab on 

22 developing a more comprehensive list of 
 

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1 subcontractor companies. We identified some -

2 - I believe these are engineering project 

3 files type of records, and we are going to be 

4 going through those project files to identify 

5 the companies, the subcontractor companies, 

6 that were listed as working on those projects, 

7 and we are going to create a list.

8 So again, it won't identify 

9 subcontractor employees, but at least we will 

10 identify the additional subcontractor 

11 companies that were on site.

12 Then we have also recently 

13 completed our third review of the Department 

14 of Labor Site Exposure Matrix database, or 

15 matrices -- excuse me. Originally, there was 

16 both an internal version of the SEM at DOL and 

17 then a public version that had more limited 

18 information. 

19 In 2008, DOL came to us and asked 

20 us to review the full version of the SEM so 

21 they could post it on their website. The 

22 initial effort took about a year, and since 
 

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1 then we have done two follow-on efforts for 

2 additional information that they wanted to add 

3 to the database, and the most recent review 

4 was completed about a month ago, and the new 

5 version is up on DOL's website.

6 Then I just wanted to talk about 

7 the Former Worker Medical Screening Program, 

8 which is the other program that is managed out 

9 of my office. The mission of the Former 

10 Worker Program is to identify and notify 

11 former workers at risk for occupational 

12 disease and offer them medical screening that 

13 can lead to treatment.

14 The program serves all former 

15 workers at all DOE sites. We work with a

16 network of local clinics to make sure that the 

17 exam can be made available close to the 

18 individual's residence. I think that we have 

19 conducted screenings, I believe, in all 50 

20 states and, I think, Canada as well.

21 The local screening programs for 

22 Livermore, Berkeley, and Sandia-Livermore --
 

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1 the principal investigator is Dr. Lewis 

2 Pepper, and he is with Queens College, and I 

3 have provided a number there, and it is also 

4 on our handout in back.

5 Then to finish, I wanted to talk 

6 about a recent initiative we have just 

7 completed. I think you all should have a 

8 wallet-size or slightly bigger than wallet9 size card that we gave you all.

10 This is a project related to 

11 beryllium and chronic beryllium disease. 

12 About a year, some of our stakeholders came to 

13 us and felt like it would be helpful to have 

14 more information about beryllium and chronic 

15 beryllium disease and sensitivity, both for 

16 workers and for their physicians. 

17 So just to give a little bit of 

18 background, beryllium is a metal that is used 

19 in a number of industries, defense, aerospace, 

20 medical, obviously in the weapons complex as 

21 well. It has exceptional strength and 

22 stability under high heat.
 

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1 It also has some unique hazards. 

2 So it has been recognized as posing an 

3 occupational hazard for quite some time, and 

4 that it does result in beryllium sensitivity, 

5 chronic beryllium disease and lung cancer.

6 So again, we wanted to put 

7 together -- initially, we were working on just 

8 putting together a card that an individual 

9 could have that both would talk about some of 

10 the symptoms they might experience. So if 

11 they worked with beryllium and they have a 

12 cough or there is some kind of issue that they 

13 have been having, and they are wondering maybe 

14 this is connected with beryllium, this might 

15 give them some idea of whether it is related 

16 to beryllium.

17 Also, if they were diagnosed with 

18 beryllium sensitivity and were having some 

19 additional issues, this might give them an 

20 idea of whether they should go back and get 

21 tested again or maybe that their disease has 

22 moved to a chronic beryllium disease. Then 
 

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1 also, for those with chronic beryllium 

2 disease, it provides some information on some 

3 of the consequential conditions and illnesses 

4 that might result from their CBD or from the 

5 treatment of CBD, which is often steroids.

6 So for this process, we asked six 

7 physicians if they would assist us, provide 

8 some guidance and background information. The 

9 six physicians are Drs. John Balmes, Laurence 

10 Fuortes, John McInerney, Lisa Maier, Lee 

11 Newman, and Milton Rossman. We believe they 

12 are all renowned experts in the field and very 

13 qualified and capable.

14 They also provided us guidance. 

15 It was individual guidance. This wasn't a 

16 panel or they didn't come to a consensus. 

17 There was no voting on what to include. We 

18 did want to make sure it was just to assist 

19 and guide us and provide some information.

20 They reviewed available scientific 

21 literature and tried to put together some 

22 lists of symptoms of CBD, consequential 
 

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1 conditions of CBD and provide the information 

2 in a clear and concise format, something that 

3 could be accessed and understood by workers, 

4 but it would also be valuable to their 

5 physicians; because again, one of the key --

6 I probably should have mentioned 

7 this to start. One of the key reasons that we 

8 put this together is we have been hearing that 

9 many of the physicians, even in heavily DOE 

10 areas where there might be more workers 

11 involved with beryllium than others, but 

12 especially in areas with no DOE facility, we 

13 have heard that many workers will go in and 

14 talk to their physician about beryllium, and 

15 their physician never heard of beryllium, have 

16 no idea what it is, what it can do, what is 

17 CBD. 

18 So we wanted to be able to provide 

19 workers with this card so they could bring 

20 that card to their physician, and their 

21 physician would kind of get that basic 

22 information and have a good idea of where they 
 

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1 might go to get more information because, 

2 again, with this program a proper diagnosis is 

3 key for the Department of Labor to be able to 

4 adjudicate these claims.

5 So the end result is not only the 

6 card that you have sitting in front of you, 

7 but also a website. Again, our stakeholders 

8 approached us about putting together a card, 

9 but when we started working with these 

10 physicians and gathering information, to put 

11 all that on a card, it would have been 

12 microfilm. 

13 So what we ended up doing is 

14 creating a website to go along with the card, 

15 and I think there is a link to the website on 

16 that card, although it is not live right now. 

17 It should be live within the week. We are 

18 making our final preparations, and it is going 

19 to be up on our website.

20 So again, this doesn't directly 

21 have impact to this Board or to dose 

22 reconstruction, but we know many of you are 
 

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1 involved out there with workers and are 

2 involved with the EEOICPA program, and we 

3 think this will be a great resource for 

4 workers and their physicians. So if you do 

5 check it out in about a week, the website, if 

6 you have any feedback for us or suggestions, 

7 we would be glad to hear them.

8 There is a copy of the card that 

9 you have sitting in front of you. And that is 

10 it.

11 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Dave, go ahead.

12 MEMBER RICHARDSON: I wanted to 

13 start with the card and beryllium issue, which 

14 I think is great and is really useful. I had 

15 one question about the list of consequential 

16 illnesses that may result from chronic 

17 beryllium disease. I guess I would pose it as 

18 a question and whether there was discussion 

19 about it.

20 Lung cancer is not on there, and 

21 yet at least some organizations consider 

22 beryllium a carcinogen. I don't know if you 
 

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1 consider that beryllium is an established risk 

2 factor for beryllium diseases, and beryllium 

3 is an established risk factor for certain 

4 cancers. I guess the question is, did you 

5 think about lung cancer as being something 

6 which a physician might want to consider among 

7 the consequences?

8 MR. LEWIS: I am going to turn it 

9 over to Isaf Al-Nabulsi. She is also of my 

10 office, and she really is the one who 

11 captained this project.

12 DR. AL-NABULSI: We didn't include 

13 it in the card, but it is in our website, and 

14 we all know that lung cancer from beryllium 

15 exposure depends on the duration of exposure, 

16 as well as level of exposure. If we point it 

17 out in the card, it will be misleading. So we 

18 have it in our website.

19 MEMBER LOCKEY: You almost have to 

20 have the fibrosis to be at risk.

21 MEMBER RICHARDSON: Thanks. Could 

22 I ask a different question?
 

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1 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Sure.

2 MEMBER RICHARDSON: This goes to 

3 the very, very start of the material that you 

4 are presenting. DOE has got this huge task in 

5 front of them of responding to requests which, 

6 I imagine, becomes tiresome, to provide 

7 information, and you describe that -- I mean, 

8 this is a huge amount of work that you are 

9 doing, and it is going to continue for quite a 

10 period of time.

11 You have kind of described the 

12 reactive component of what your office is 

13 doing, how you are handling these requests. I 

14 am wondering if there is a proactive or kind 

15 of strategic planning aspect of this which we 

16 have not been kind of exposed to, which I 

17 could imagine there might be, when you start 

18 to think about, well, if you have to keep 

19 doing this, are there ways that it could be 

20 done simpler.

21 One of the things that I have been 

22 thinking about is, as we have gone to these 
 

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1 sites, some of the sites, I think, have 

2 undertaken incredible efforts, like INEL, to 

3 really kind of aggregate their information, 

4 index it, and make it much more usable.

5 DOE in some situations has kind of 

6 created the REMS system, which is useful. But 

7 it all looks, to me, kind of like a 

8 decentralized or federal sort of system in

9 which DOE has responsibility yet there is kind 

10 of this kind of heterogeneity between the 

11 sites and what they are putting in, the 

12 completeness of it, the time periods that it 

13 is covering.

14 We are going to be talking about 

15 Sandia, which seems to me one of the extremes 

16 where right now NIOSH -- if I am understanding 

17 this, there is records in caves which they 

18 can't get, which is the opposite end of the 

19 spectrum from this. Is there a strategic plan 

20 for it about some way of you beginning to 

21 centralize more of the information to make 

22 these responses easier?
 

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1 MR. LEWIS: That is a big 

2 question. That encompasses a lot, but I will 

3 do my best to answer it. I would say, to some 

4 extent, yes and no. We are always doing 

5 things to try to make the process more 

6 efficient, to improve the records collections 

7 when we can. 

8 I had mention that Brookhaven 

9 example. That is a very small one, but we try 

10 to -- I have gone out to the sites numerous 

11 times over the years trying to get ideas. If 

12 there is some investment we can put in that 

13 will pay off in a number of claims down the 

14 road, we have tried to do that wherever 

15 possible. So efforts like scanning or 

16 digitization or indexing records.

17 We try to do a lot of that out at 

18 the sites. You are correct. There is a 

19 tremendous of heterogeneity within the sites, 

20 and that is kind of by design. That, I think, 

21 could be said about anything within DOE 

22 because of the nature of the M&O contracts and 
 

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1 the different sites. There's different 

2 contracts. There's different 

3 responsibilities. So it is very difficult to 

4 make one uniform way of doing things 

5 throughout the sites.

6 There is also a tremendous 

7 difference in the records at the sites, both 

8 the records management throughout the years 

9 and what was kept, so to some extent were -- I 

10 always say, we do the best we can to find a 

11 record, if it still exists at the site. If it 

12 is not there, we are not going to be able to 

13 dig it up now, but we do the best we can to 

14 find the records that still exist.

15 Having said that, we also -- my 

16 office doesn't manage records throughout the 

17 complex. So any sort of effort to centralize 

18 all the records or something, that would fall 

19 within DOE records management, and I don't 

20 know that there is a tremendous interest in 

21 centralizing the records, because the sites

22 each have their own responsibilities.
 

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1 Again, we try to make it --

2 MEMBER RICHARDSON: To the extent 

3 that that is true, it means that, for the 

4 foreseeable future, you are going to go on as 

5 you are going on

6 MR. LEWIS: Well, yes, and I think 

7 whether or not the records were centralized, I 

8 don't think that that would really address --

9 the major problems are sort of the historical, 

10 how the records were kept, and again are they 

11 paper, boxes of records, were they indexed to 

12 put in a database, do we have them? So some 

13 sites have better records than others, and 

14 those where we have issues with, it is hard to 

15 find them or it is hard to -- you know, we 

16 don't necessarily have good confidence.

17 We do the best we can. Again, the 

18 major options are indexing records or scanning 

19 them and putting them into some sort of 

20 electronic database. Oftentimes, especially 

21 with older records, indexing them is really 

22 the way to go. 
 

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1 When you do the return on 

2 investment in terms of putting the time in to 

3 scan and make them electronic, you end up 

4 being able to access them much quicker, but it 

5 is a tremendous cost. Whereas, indexing, 

6 instead of accessing them in minutes, it might 

7 take you a couple of days, but as long as they 

8 are indexed and we can find them, for the 

9 purposes of this program, I think it meets the 

10 need. So if there are gaps in our records or 

11 if there are things that we know there is a 

12 set of records out there that could be 

13 responsive to this program, yet they are not 

14 indexed or they are not in a mode that is 

15 accessible, we address those.

16 So at this point, I don't believe 

17 there are any obvious records collections that 

18 we are aware of that would provide a benefit 

19 to this program, to these claimants, that we 

20 haven't indexed, if we are aware. 

21 Again, it is hard to know. We 

22 oftentimes -- we will find collections of 
 

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1 records where it was labeled in a way that we 

2 didn't realize it would be responsive, and 

3 then when someone goes in there, they go, oh, 

4 look at this, this is a treasure trove of 

5 information. 

6 When we find stuff like that, we 

7 get it right in the system, and then we also, 

8 once we are able to index it and get it into 

9 our EEOICPA system, we will go back and check 

10 versus old claims to make sure that it is not 

11 just the claims going forward, and we will 

12 provide that information to NIOSH or DOL. 

13 They can reopen those claims as they see fit.

14 So we are always working on that. 

15 I don't know if that fully answered the 

16 question. If you have suggestions or would 

17 like to sit down, I would be glad to really 

18 get into the details of what we have done and 

19 what some of the various sites have.

20 DR. RICHARDSON: My experience has 

21 been, with the passage of time, the ability to 

22 retrieve information from some types of 
 

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1 records gets worse and worse. It becomes 

2 harder to locate them. They have become 

3 shifted off. The quality of the records 

4 themselves begins to degrade.

5 So at some point I think it might 

6 be worth -- if you imagine that this program 

7 is going to go on for two decades, it may be 

8 worth thinking about doing something other 

9 than trusting kind of in a decentralized 

10 manner, who would be the various contractors 

11 and changing agencies who bear responsibility 

12 for maintenance of the records to do more to 

13 preserve them.

14 It is both for this program and it 

15 is for --I mean on the individual basis, it 

16 makes lots of other things easier. Co-worker 

17 models become much easier the more information 

18 there is kind of universally that is collected 

19 about a site and radiation exposures.

20 MR. LEWIS: I will say, the POCs 

21 at our site are really kind of vital in that 

22 regard. When you said records degrade, I 
 

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1 think in general that is true of records 

2 collections. They kind of move on or you 

3 retire them. You dispose of them, things like 

4 that. But for EEOICPA purposes, the records 

5 that come into the fold under EEOICPA and are 

6 used to respond to requests, those are both 

7 covered under our epi moratorium -- you know, 

8 epidemiological records moratorium that was 

9 intended originally for studies, but then has 

10 also been used to preserve the EEOICPA 

11 records.

12 Then again, as soon as it is in a 

13 collection that is used to respond to 

14 requests, our POC makes sure that those 

15 records are certainly not touched if they are 

16 degraded in any way. We have actually had 

17 that where the records were kind of falling 

18 apart, and in that case we scan. So we will 

19 do projects, if necessary, but again records 

20 do -- the boxed records, if kept in the right 

21 way, will last for quite a long time. Some of 

22 them are still going since the --
 

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1 MR. RICHARDSON: Things like 

2 microfiche -- it is tricky.

3 MR. LEWIS: It is tricky with 

4 microfiche. Where we have had a few issues is 

5 databases. A lot of the early -- when 

6 computerized stuff first started, and 

7 databases, I think technology was changing so 

8 quickly. It was evolving, and we have run 

9 into a couple of cases where we had 

10 information on reels or tapes or cartridges or 

11 something and they didn't have a reader at the 

12 site. 

13 I think in at least a few cases we 

14 were able to dig one up at some other site --

15 you know, had a reader in the basement. We 

16 kind of used our network of EEOICPA and POCs 

17 and all their records contacts and were able 

18 to find it, but we have had a few where there 

19 just wasn't the technology to read that, but 

20 microfilm and microfiche -- I have not heard 

21 any issues. 

22 Most of the time, they will have 
 

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1 multiple copies. They will have a silver 

2 copy, and I'm not sure all the records persons 

3 could really get into it, but they will have 

4 multiple copies, and a lot of those, they 

5 microfilm has then been scanned as well. They 

6 may still use the microfilm copy, but 

7 sometimes they will scan it in. It doesn't 

8 make it any easier to find. You still have to 

9 scroll through, but it does preserve it.

10 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I think Hewlett 

11 Packard and other companies made lots of money 

12 by changing their formats and back-up systems 

13 every year, without any backwards 

14 compatibility. 

15 If this is a -- I mean it is an 

16 issue, I think, that we are sort of 

17 encountering, and especially as we start 

18 thinking about co-worker models and about more 

19 detail and so forth. It sort of does become a 

20 limitation, if only a resource limitation of 

21 sort of practical what is available 

22 limitation. So it might be something that we 
 

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1 should think about and maybe spend a little 

2 bit more time on, if you would be willing, 

3 Greg, at one of our next upcoming meetings to 

4 talk about and think about.

5 MR. LEWIS: Yes, I think that 

6 would be -- and I would probably want to talk 

7 before then to get some more details and 

8 exactly, really kind of hash out the issue.

9 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Okay. Good. 

10 Thank you. I have one question, which --

11 David piqued my curiosity.

12 The covered facilities database --

13 has that been updated recently? When I go to 

14 your website, it is hard to tell.

15 MR. LEWIS: You know, we don't 

16 have a last update, some easy way to get to a 

17 list of what is updated. That information 

18 would be in the Federal Register notice. Our 

19 covered facility list is kind of an informal -

20 - it is an easy way to find all the 

21 information, but actual -- the law, so to 

22 speak, in terms of what is covered is on the 
 

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1 Federal Register notice. I think most of 

2 those are posted on the DOL website, I 

3 believe.

4 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Interagency 

5 confusion -- make us jump from website to 

6 website. Okay. I had missed it. When I went 

7 to look it up on here on the DOE, I couldn't 

8 find it. Okay. Thank you.

9 Any other questions from Board 

10 Members?

11 (No response.)

12 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Okay, thank you 

13 very much, Greg.

14 This is a very short and sweet 

15 presentation. This is more of a reminder than 

16 anything. I went over our transcript from our 

17 last meeting and Stu's presentation from the 

18 last meeting on the 10-year review priority 

19 items that NIOSH is under way to implement. 

20 I think what we said -- at least I 

21 said at the last meeting was, given between 

22 the holidays and the relatively short time 
 

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1 between our last Board meeting and this Board 

2 meeting and sort of Work Group meetings were 

3 set, I didn't think we would have much time in 

4 that time period to start to address these, 

5 but I do think we have a number of issues from 

6 the 10-year review that we ought to be -- the 

7 Work Groups ought to be following up on.

8 I think there is timeliness and 

9 some other issues for the Worker Outreach Work 

10 Group, and I think what I would suggest we do 

11 -- and this goes for the other Work Groups 

12 involved also -- is that they should at their 

13 next scheduled meeting at least put aside some 

14 time for some discussion with NIOSH, and to at 

15 least figure out the schedule for NIOSH's 

16 efforts in the area, and sort of how do they 

17 coordinate for review or input from the 

18 particular Work Group.

19 So we have some timeliness and 

20 outreach efforts for our Worker Outreach Work 

21 Group. We have some dose reconstruction 

22 issues for the Dose Reconstruction 
 

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1 Subcommittee that we already talked a little 

2 bit about. Some of them are the QA/QC issues, 

3 but there are some other issues there. So, 

4 Mark, when you meet at the end of March for 

5 that Work Group, it would be good.

6 Then the third issue that I had 

7 down, the third Work Group, was the SEC 

8 Evaluation Work Group, which has to do with 

9 the relatively minor problem of what is 

10 sufficient accuracy, and how do we deal with 

11 that. 

12 Then one that I think cuts across 

13 a number of -- eventually across a number of 

14 Work Groups, which is issues related to co15 worker models and so forth, which we sort of 

16 left open a little bit, and I think we may 

17 have to sort of augment the SEC Evaluation 

18 Group, work between the Procedures Work Group 

19 and the SEC Evaluation Work Group -- excuse 

20 me, the Procedures Subcommittee and the SEC 

21 Evaluation Work Group to address that. 

22 Some of that, I think, will depend 
 

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1 on exactly what NIOSH is doing, since they are 

2 actually -- as I recall from the last meeting, 

3 the initial effort looking at sort of co4 worker issues and so forth, it was going to be 

5 focused on the Savannah River Site. Is that 

6 still the plan?

7 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, that is still 

8 the plan.

9 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Okay. So we may 

10 sort of figure out who is involved with 

11 Savannah River. That is going to be the 

12 example, bringing in people from there. But 

13 again, I think, between now and our Board work 

14 call in April or our next meeting in June, the 

15 Work Groups involved could meet and at least 

16 get a schedule and a sense from Stu and NIOSH 

17 what their follow-up plans are, what the 

18 schedule will be for producing some of the 

19 products and reports that they've talked 

20 about. I think then we can be able to have a 

21 better idea of how to work with NIOSH on those 

22 10-year implementation items.
 

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1 Then I think we will plan for each 

2 of our meetings coming up at least for the 

3 full Board to get a report on these efforts, 

4 and I think a number, if not all, of these 

5 issues should come back to the full Board for 

6 discussion, since these are items that will 

7 really impact the overall program.

8 Again, the Work Groups and the 

9 Subcommittees deal with the issues initially, 

10 and then bring them back to the full Board. 

11 So is that making sense to everybody? Yes, 

12 Paul.

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: That certainly 

14 makes sense. It did occur to me that, if we 

15 have a responsibility as a Board to follow up 

16 on NIOSH's implementation of the 10-year plan, 

17 and I guess that, in a sense, is what we are 

18 talking about, that there is a sense in which, 

19 if we have a lot of different Work Groups 

20 picking up little pieces of this, it gets a 

21 little fragmented, and things could fall 

22 through the cracks as well.
 

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1 It just occurred to me that it 

2 might be worth thinking about having a Work 

3 Group that would focus on the follow-up. That 

4 is, not that I am advocating more Work Groups; 

5 we have plenty. But it is something to think 

6 about. It is sort of the question: should 

7 there be a group whose job it is to sort of 

8 coordinate our follow-up in some way? That is 

9 sort of the question that pops into my mind.

10 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I would like to 

11 respond. I think that is a legitimate 

12 question I think we talked a little bit about 

13 at the last meeting. NIOSH, I think, was of 

14 the sense that they felt, at least at the 

15 initial stages of their efforts, it was better 

16 to work with the Work Groups. That seemed to 

17 be where there is ongoing activity related to 

18 these issues, and we really do want to 

19 integrate it with what the ongoing activity of 

20 both the Subcommittees and the Work Groups, 

21 but I think -- let's see how this goes and 

22 what the schedule is and how it will work out, 
 

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1 and then see whether a separate Work Group --

2 and I think, whether -- I am still wrestling a 

3 little bit with whether an overriding issue 

4 like sufficient accuracy is something -- how 

5 to best deal with that in terms of Work Group 

6 or Board or a separate Work Group to deal with 

7 that issue, because that really does cut 

8 across a lot of issues.

9 So we will keep that in mind and, 

10 as we come to the next meetings, decide how we 

11 want to handle that.

12 Anybody else have comments or 

13 questions?

14 (No response.)

15 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: We have some 

16 time left, and I will use it mostly to -- I 

17 don't think we need to start Work Group or 

18 Subcommittee reports yet, but a couple of 

19 things to remind people of for work sessions.

20 We have comments from the August 

21 meeting that we need to do that Ted emailed 

22 out to everybody, if you can all take a look 
 

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1 at that, and we will get to that either this 

2 afternoon or tomorrow sometime. When I looked 

3 them over, they all looked relatively 

4 straightforward. So I don't think it is a lot 

5 of effort, unless you have a question or 

6 concern about one of the comments or how we 

7 handle that.

8 We do have also -- Mark, maybe 

9 when you do your talk later about Rocky Flats, 

10 but the DOL implementation issue that we put 

11 on for last time, we will talk about and do 

12 that.

13 I think those are the main 

14 activities. We have some location for 

15 meetings and dates for meetings that we will 

16 need to start addressing, and we will at least 

17 start that this afternoon when we have a Board 

18 work session, because there are Board Members 

19 that aren't here, and we have potentially new 

20 Board Members coming on, but I think we need 

21 to sort of give people time to maybe double22 check calendars or email some people and see 
 

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1 if we can get some -- try to pin down timing 

2 for some of those meetings, and then we have 

3 location issues.

4 Anybody have anything that is not 

5 on the agenda that they would like to make 

6 sure gets on the agenda for this meeting?

7 (No response.)

8 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Okay. Now why 

9 don't we break a little bit early and rejoin 

10 at 1:30 back here. Thank you.

11 (Whereupon, the above-entitled 

12 matter went off the record at 11:41 a.m. and 

13 resumed at 1:34 p.m.) 

14 

15 

16 

17 

18 

19 

20 

21 

22 
 

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

2 (1:34 p.m.)

3 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: If everyone gets 

4 seated, we will get started. I think we have 

5 a full complement with all Board Members. Do 

6 you want to check on the phone?

7 MR. KATZ: Just let me check and 

8 see, Dr. Lemen, are you with us on the line, 

9 by any chance? The line is up, Mark? Okay, 

10 thank you. Let me remind everyone who is on 

11 the line, please to mute your phone. If you 

12 don't have a mute button, press * and then 6. 

13 That will mute your phone. Thank you.

14 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: For Board 

15 Members, just to remind you, we have two 

16 petitions we will be discussing this 

17 afternoon, Electro Metallurgical now, and then 

18 we will have a Board Work Session, and then we 

19 will need to start promptly at 3:30 with 

20 Hangar 481, because we also expect to have 

21 petitioners on the line for that one also. So 

22 we will handle our afternoon that way.
 

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1 We will start with a presentation 

2 on Electro Metallurgical from Sam Glover. 

3 Welcome, Sam.

4 DR. GLOVER: Thank you, Dr. 

5 Melius. If parts of this look familiar, it 

6 has been three years. Some of these slides 

7 were previously presented in 2009, Rev. 0.

8 I wanted to say that we carefully 

9 looked at it. SC&A did a report. We reviewed 

10 the data. We reviewed new data, and we looked 

11 at it and decided that NIOSH has concluded 

12 that you can't back-extrapolate the data that 

13 we have. So that is kind of the bottom line

14 as we walk through this. We changed our 

15 conclusion for the early years. 

16 So a brief history: Electro 

17 Metallurgical, Electro Met, was located in 

18 Niagara Falls, New York. It began operation 

19 in 1942 under contract with MED. From August 

20 13, 1942, through June '53, the plant 

21 intermittently produced uranium metal.

22 And by intermittently, it had long 
 

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1 periods of production. Then it was shut down, 

2 and then it would start up again. So they did 

3 have shutdown periods. It is a DOE facility.

4 Electro Met was subsequently 

5 acquired by Union Carbide, which was, in turn, 

6 acquired by Dow Chemical. From 1942 to '51 

7 operations were carried out with two standby 

8 periods. On June 30, '53, all AEC operations 

9 formally ceased, and the site was then 

10 purchased by Electro Met. Also, uranium was 

11 the only radioactive material present.

12 A brief summary of the petition: 

13 On November 7, 2008, it was received. In 

14 December 2008, an additional petition was 

15 received. On March 12, 2009, received in 

16 November -- Let's see. March 12, it qualified 

17 for evaluation and was merged with the 

18 petition previously received in December '08. 

19 By July 23, 2009, an Evaluation Report was 

20 issued, and SC&A issued a report subsequently. 

21 In October 2009, the Evaluation Report was 

22 presented to the Advisory Board.
 

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1 The Advisory Board has met several 

2 times regarding various issues associated with 

3 Electro Met. In November 2011, NIOSH, after 

4 careful consideration of various factors, 

5 notified the Working Group of its intent to 

6 propose that a portion of the covered period 

7 of Electro Met be added to the Class -- or as 

8 a Class.

9 On January 31, 2012, Revision 1 of 

10 the NIOSH Evaluation Report was issued, and 

11 February 21 SC&A issued a partial review of 

12 the Revised Report, which they will discuss 

13 subsequently.

14 Our proposed SEC Class: The 

15 Petitioners proposed a Class Definition of all 

16 workers who worked at any area at Electro Met 

17 from August 13, '42, through December 31, 

18 1953. August 13th, the date is sort of set. 

19 That is the earliest time that they recognize 

20 the Manhattan Engineering District as 

21 beginning. The Class evaluated by NIOSH was 

22 the same: August 13, 1942, through June 30, 
 

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1 1953.

2 We went through all the standard 

3 sources: DOE Legacy Management, our Technical 

4 Information Bulletins, Electro Met health

5 plans, all of the various -- we went to all 

6 the different Oak Ridge facilities, Hanford. 

7 We tried to -- everywhere we possibly could 

8 find records, we went.

9 As of February 16th, we had 104 

10 cases submitted to NIOSH. One hundred and two 

11 of those had dose reconstructions complete. 

12 One of those cases had internal dosimetry, one 

13 case with external. Claims completed with a 

14 PoC greater than 50 percent was 48.

15 Petition basis concerns were: few 

16 workers monitored for external exposure, and 

17 the effectiveness of the Worker Health 

18 Protection and Industrial Health Programs. 

19 These were the original petition concerns.

20 So a summary of monitoring: 

21 Volunteer workers were intermittently 

22 monitored to establish worker exposure levels. 
 

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1 We have some data regarding issued dosimeters 

2 to employees in 1944, a handful, and from '48 

3 to '49. We don't believe we have all the 

4 results. We have what is available.

5 Some urinalysis data are available 

6 for 1944-1949. SC&A -- we will both describe 

7 some different pieces of that. What I will 

8 point out is that major health improvements 

9 were done in 1947, and the predominance of the 

10 air data that you are going to look at was 

11 collected after that time frame. So we were 

12 asking you to believe that you could back13 extrapolate and use that data in the previous 

14 time frame.

15 Only a handful of the air sample 

16 data are either BZ or GA types -- actually, 

17 very few in the earliest time frame. We have 

18 very few samples, period. I really want to 

19 point out that the air data collected in this 

20 early period is completely at odds with the 

21 later data. They are much, much lower. It is 

22 thousands of times higher when you look at 
 

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1 those later time frames after the supposed 

2 improvements happened. So it doesn't make 

3 sense, and we have very few data.

4 There were some bioassay data 

5 collected, but again very short campaigns. So 

6 data monitoring programs after 1948 are much 

7 better documented. We are all very familiar 

8 with the Health and Safety Laboratory that 

9 began implementing at that time. We have much 

10 a better understanding of how their data was 

11 collected, what methods they used. None of 

12 that exists for the earlier time frame. 

13 We have a very brief description 

14 that they used Rochester, but very little 

15 other information to go on to say why we 

16 believe these early data would be good. 

17 Early urine data available to 

18 NIOSH collected from essentially a single 

19 campaign. It was about a couple of months 

20 time frame. So we do have some multiple data 

21 points for some people.

22 So, while a portion of the 
 

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1 population were monitored, it is not possible 

2 to determine if the highest exposed workers 

3 were monitored, nor is there a group which 

4 would constitute an appropriate surrogate data 

5 or coworker group.

6 So just to give you a feel, this 

7 is a graphical. You see the first campaign, 

8 we have just a handful of data points. Then 

9 you go to the second period with Health and 

10 Safety Laboratories doing measurements, and 

11 the data is tremendously higher. It doesn't 

12 make sense after you make health improvements, 

13 if you are monitoring the same places and 

14 having similar types. We do not have what 

15 methods they used. We do not know.

16 So if you look at that data and 

17 want to say that the health improvements and 

18 the back-extrapolate, that was what we were 

19 asking you to believe before, and we have 

20 looked at that more carefully, and we have 

21 come to a different conclusion.

22 Just to give you a feel for it, 
 

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1 you can see here you have in the early years, 

2 most of the early samples are general area 

3 types. You do have a couple of BZs. You have 

4 more of a mixture when you get into the '48-49 

5 time frame, typical for a Health and Safety 

6 Laboratory analysis.

7 Bioassay data: It looks like a 

8 single point. There is some dispersion there. 

9 You are looking at a couple of months time 

10 frame back in that mid-1944 time frame. Then 

11 you have another campaign in '48, and then 

12 another one at the very end of the period.

13 The little box shows inside that 

14 box is an active period when Electro Met was 

15 operating, so just trying to give you a feel 

16 for when things closed down. So inside the 

17 box you have got an operational period.

18 Something else I want to point out 

19 is: at this point in time I certainly don't 

20 have the ability -- I have not found all the 

21 records where I could say this much uranium 

22 was rolled at this time versus the early 
 

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1 years. I do believe that there are 

2 differences. 

3 So if we were to try to do this, I 

4 think we would have to be very careful 

5 understanding what the total amount was in 

6 both periods. So I think it would be very 

7 complicated. 

8 For external dosimetry, there 

9 certainly are -- this showed -- it is very 

10 complicated going through their dataset, and 

11 SC&A has pointed out we have some differences. 

12 Some of the data is rolled up into average 

13 summaries. So you have to extract from that 

14 individual results from air monitoring data 

15 and for this other.

16 We have thousands of measurements 

17 that were conducted in the late time frame, 

18 and we believe that, based on our experience 

19 with this type of operation, that we can do 

20 external dosimetry at Electro Met.

21 Medical dose: Typical for a DOE 

22 or AEC/AWE facility at this time. This is a 
 

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1 DOE facility. We have several references that 

2 we believe we can use to do the medical 

3 facility. We actually have descriptions of 

4 the pre-employment annual and termination X5 rays that they did, and so we believe we can 

6 do the medical dose.

7 So a summary of findings: NIOSH 

8 has determined that neither the bioassay nor 

9 the early limited air sampling data are 

10 sufficient to bound the dose for Electro Met 

11 for the period August 13, 1942 through 

12 December 31, 1947.

13 We are all familiar with the two14 prong test. So, in summary, we find that it 

15 is not feasible to estimate internal exposure 

16 with sufficient accuracy for all workers at 

17 the site from August 13, 1942 to December 31, 

18 1947. Internal monitoring data, work area 

19 radiological monitoring data, and source-term 

20 data are not sufficient to provide 

21 sufficiently accurate estimate of the bounding 

22 internal dose during this early period at 
 

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1 Electro Met.

2 Our proposed Class is: all 

3 employees of the Department of Energy, its 

4 predecessor agencies and their contractors and 

5 subcontractors who worked at the Electro 

6 Metallurgical site in Niagara Falls, New York, 

7 for the period August 13, 1942 through 

8 December 31, 1947, for a number of work days 

9 aggregating at least 250 work days occurring 

10 either solely under this employment or in 

11 combination with work days within the 

12 parameters established for one or more other 

13 Classes of employees in the Special Exposure 

14 Cohort.

15 I revised this slide to show that 

16 it is feasible after '47, so uranium. We 

17 believe that for external we can do all years, 

18 for gamma, beta, and occupational medical X19 rays, but of course, not feasible in the 

20 early time frame.

21 Thank you very much.

22 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Questions for
 

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1 Sam? I think we are going to hear from Henry 

2 next. What is the order going to be?

3 MEMBER ANDERSON: Well, I don't 

4 know. CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Well, it 

5 is not on your annotated agenda that I am 

6 reading from. You want John? John is fine. I 

7 just didn't know. Why don't we hold questions 

8 then? 

9 MEMBER ANDERSON: Okay. What I am 

10 going to quickly go through is what our Work 

11 Group did, and there has really been two main 

12 issues that we focused on. We began with the 

13 NIOSH Evaluation Report for the SEC-00136, and 

14 then there were also during that review some 

15 incidental Site Profile issues. Again, this 

16 is the former 6001, as you saw earlier became 

17 -- Appendix C was under 6001, and then became 

18 a separate issue and document for us to 

19 review, but the SEC petition has stayed pretty 

20 much the same.

21 Just to give you some sense of 

22 what went on, the dark -- you can see where it 
 

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1 is bolded. Our committee had three meetings 

2 where we discussed this. We were assigned 

3 this back in October of 2009 when the first 

4 SEC ER was presented to the Board. It then 

5 got assigned to us to review.

6 SC&A did their first initial 

7 report, reviewing the ER in April of 2010. We 

8 then met in July, where we began the 

9 discussion, went through the matrix. There 

10 were 18 items on the SEC review by SC&A, and 

11 we very quickly were able to go through and 

12 resolve many of those.

13 Then in May of 2011, May 16th, 

14 just before the Work Group meeting, we got an 

15 update report from NIOSH, and then in August 

16 of 2011 we had another meeting where, again, 

17 most of the issues were resolved, and NIOSH 

18 shortly thereafter indicated that they were 

19 going to revise the ER recommendations, and 

20 further discussions were largely put on hold.

21 We had, in our initial 

22 discussions, many of the issues that you saw, 
 

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1 really two different time periods, different 

2 monitoring results. We raised the issue about 

3 the adequacy of the earlier samples. We also 

4 saw that there had not been interview results, 

5 and we recommended that worker interviews be 

6 done, and those got added in.

7 The revised ER then came out 

8 February 7th. Our Work Group meeting was 

9 scheduled for the 21st. So there really 

10 wasn't much time for SC&A to comment on the 

11 revised ER, which, as you heard, reversed the 

12 initial impression by NIOSH or recommendation 

13 that they could do dose reconstructions, and 

14 they looked more closely at the data and our 

15 discussions. 

16 That earlier portion then was 

17 changed to make a recommendation that it 

18 become an SEC, and as I say, in February the 

19 21st we had some further discussion on that, 

20 and it was at that meeting where SC&A came 

21 forward and said on their initial kind of 

22 short, quick review they disagreed with NIOSH, 
 

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1 that they thought maybe dose reconstructions 

2 could be done and, of course, this meeting was 

3 then coming up quite quickly. 

4 So there wasn't time to try to 

5 resolve all these issues prior to this 

6 meeting. So after the initial discussion 

7 there, our Work Group -- Bill and I were on 

8 the phone at the time, and subsequently Mark 

9 got somewhat up to speed on the issue as well, 

10 and we decided to provisionally vote as a 

11 group that we would accept the NIOSH 

12 recommendation that there be an SEC, add an 

13 SEC for the early year through 1947, but that 

14 we would agree with NIOSH to deny the later 

15 year where there was considerably more data, 

16 and we felt, while it may not have been the 

17 strongest data, that it could lead to 

18 bounding and reasonable estimates of 

19 exposures.

20 So we haven't had a chance as a 

21 Work Group to meet and go over further. So 

22 what we have said is we wanted to move this 
 

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1 along, so we would bring the two parties here 

2 to discuss before the Board, but after the 

3 initial discussion and presentation at our 

4 meeting, I think we as a Work Group felt that 

5 NIOSH was correct in their assessment on the 

6 quality of the data and the ability to 

7 reconstruct these early year issues, that one 

8 could say it is possible or you might be able 

9 to, but we really felt it was a challenge to 

10 tell NIOSH that they could do something that 

11 they didn't think they could.

12 This is just further the Appendix 

13 review, Appendix C. Again, there are just a 

14 few issues in the TBD that need to be changed. 

15 They are mostly technical ones, not impacting 

16 the SEC evaluation at all.

17 The current status is -- and you 

18 will hear about the review that SC&A has done, 

19 and they really have -- there are two open 

20 issues out of the 18 we started with, and then 

21 dose reconstruction, not SEC, are six issues. 

22 Two really are not relevant to Electro Met, 
 

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1 and they have been addressed in the revised 

2 ER. 

3 So pretty much our issues have 

4 been resolved. The current status is really 

5 two issues: can you do sufficiently accurate 

6 assessments to do dose reconstruction in the 

7 early years? Then there was also -- and we 

8 have had this on numerous sites. It is a very 

9 large plant and area, a relatively small 

10 number of workers, and SC&A -- and we tended 

11 to agree with that -- felt that you probably 

12 could define who those workers were, but again 

13 NIOSH went to DOE and DOL to say: couldn't 

14 they define the Electro Met to be a specific 

15 building or an area, and they basically came 

16 back and said no. So it is a total worker 

17 issue again, and the early years is one of 

18 those issues that we have had come up at 

19 numerous sites.

20 At this point, it is really 

21 nothing that we can do about it or NIOSH. We 

22 have raised the issues and have had them 
 

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1 rejected. 

2 So with that, I will pass it on, 

3 and then what we would like to do is, if you 

4 have had a chance to look over the materials 

5 or you have specific questions, but at this 

6 point our feeling as a committee was that the 

7 modifications NIOSH made are appropriate, and 

8 we are supportive of granting the SEC in the 

9 early years and then doing dose reconstruction 

10 in the later years when we have a much more 

11 compact dataset that can be worked with.

12 So, questions? We have kind of 

13 moved back and forth. Again, just as a plea 

14 as we move forward on a lot of these, we got 

15 the information late before the meeting, and 

16 then SC&A got it late. So we all got backed 

17 up, and then this meeting was coming up. So 

18 it was a very rapid turnaround to try to bring

19 this to our attention, but we felt there 

20 wasn't much more that our Work Group could do 

21 at this point in time. So we wanted to bring 

22 it here. If you want to send it back to us to 
 

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1 do something further, we really weren't very 

2 directed. Recommendations for what you would 

3 like us to do?

4 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: No, I think this 

5 is fine, what you have done in terms of 

6 process and probably outcome. We will hold 

7 questions until -- let's do them all. Put the 

8 three of them up there, and take our shot. 

9 MR. STIVER: Good afternoon, Dr. 

10 Melius and Members of the Board. I am John 

11 Stiver with SC&A, and I am going to describe 

12 SC&A's position on the latest Evaluation 

13 Report that we had a relatively short 

14 turnaround time to review, and some other 

15 changes that we feel may be necessary since 

16 this presentation was put together.

17 Last Friday, we had a technical 

18 call moderated by Ted Katz with both SC&A 

19 principals as well as NIOSH where we tried to 

20 clarify some of the issues that we didn't 

21 fully understand. Based on that discussion, 

22 which was part of Dr. Glover's presentation 
 

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1 today, we have altered our stance, at least on 

2 the first issue here.

3 I am not going to go through too 

4 much detail on this, as it has already been 

5 covered in both Sam and Henry's slideshows, 

6 but I guess the most important aspect here is 

7 that May 16, 2011, was when this new 

8 information that NIOSH was able to gather 

9 allowed them to change their position on the 

10 ability to indeed reconstruct doses for that 

11 earlier time period from 1942 to December 31st 

12 of 1947.

13 This is just kind of a general 

14 overview of our position on this issue. We 

15 believe that all but two of our original 

16 findings based on our Evaluation Report 

17 reviews have been resolved. A number of them 

18 were moved to TBD discussions, because they 

19 really are pertinent to dose reconstruction 

20 and not SEC issues.

21 This last bullet may take a bit of 

22 explaining here. A process does not currently 
 

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1 exist to ensure that SC&A's findings related 

2 to dose reconstruction are addressed in the 

3 Site Profile.

4 Basically, we were never formally 

5 tasked to review either Appendix C from TBD6 6001 or the new standalone Site Profile. 

7 However, as part of our Evaluation Report 

8 reviews, we did kind of an informal review, 

9 but the findings related to the Site Profile 

10 are kind of in limbo at this point in terms of 

11 actually getting them implemented.

12 The two overarching issues that we 

13 felt were of concern here were, as Sam 

14 discussed, the ability to calculate bounding 

15 doses for the early operations from 1942 

16 through 1947, and the second which we believe 

17 is still quite pertinent is the ability to 

18 identify employees who worked in the area 

19 plant where the MED activities were conducted 

20 as compared to all employees who worked in 

21 separate commercial operations, which 

22 constitute several thousand employees.
 

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1 Let's take a look at the bounding 

2 doses for early operations. In the original 

3 Evaluation Report, NIOSH indicated that they 

4 did believe that they could calculate -- or 

5 they could reconstruct the doses for that 

6 early period by back-extrapolating this large 

7 quantity of air sampling data; and in Finding 

8 17 from our 2010 review, we did state that 

9 NIOSH needs to provide convincing arguments 

10 that the 95th percentile values based on the 

11 1948-49 data are indeed bounding for the 

12 period prior to December 1947.

13 In that review, our 2010 review, 

14 we provided arguments both for and against the 

15 proposition that this 95th percentile could 

16 indeed be used, and we noted, among other 

17 things, that while the basic process steps may 

18 have been unchanged, as also you saw earlier, 

19 1947, steps were taken to reduce the exposures 

20 based on recommendations by the AEC medical 

21 division.

22 In the Revised ER, NIOSH concluded 
 

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1 they could not bound these internal doses, 

2 arguing that they had determined that neither 

3 the bioassay nor the early limited air 

4 sampling data are sufficient to bound internal 

5 doses for the period under question.

6 While we indicate that the 

7 opposite position is taken, we did not receive 

8 the information in May of 2011 prior to the 

9 St. Louis meeting. So we were not aware of 

10 the details of the research that NIOSH had 

11 done on the bioassay data from 1944, and that 

12 will become evident in our subsequent 

13 discussions here.

14 Based on our knowledge from our 

15 reviews, we had accepted that NIOSH could 

16 construct internal doses for later operations 

17 based on air sampling data, and also our 2010 

18 review had demonstrated from a statistical 

19 standpoint, without knowledge of what these 

20 data really represented, that the bioassay 

21 data from 1944 and '49 were not statistically 

22 different.
 

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1 Ergo, you have bioassay data. If 

2 you believe that that data from 1944 is indeed 

3 representative of the exposure conditions that 

4 existed during the entire five-year period, 

5 and you believe that the later bioassay data 

6 are also representative, and you have a good 

7 set of data from the later period, then you 

8 should be able to back-extrapolate. 

9 That was our proposed alternate 

10 logic that had come out from this short-term 

11 review of the latest Evaluation Report that 

12 was published on February 7th of this year.

13 The next two slides are just 

14 graphics that kind of illustrate the idea of 

15 how the bioassay data really are not 

16 statistically distinguishable from one 

17 another. The means, 95th percentiles, are 

18 very close, I believe. For the 1944 data, it 

19 was .05 micrograms per liter. In 1949, it was 

20 at .045; the 95th percentile for .19 and .175, 

21 and the GSD for the later period is a little 

22 bit broader. I think it was about 5.7 or 5.4, 
 

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1 and it was about 4.3 for the earlier period.

2 This plot here shows kind of a box 

3 representation of the 95th percent confidence 

4 regions for the regression coefficients from 

5 1944 and '49, and you see there is an overlap 

6 on both the slope and the intercept, and the 

7 broader range of the 1944 data has to do with 

8 more values being less than the actual limit.

9 We also felt that the fact that 

10 the earlier air sampling data, while sparse, 

11 was considerably lower in the later data, that 

12 that might also bolster the position that it 

13 may be possible to use that later data to 

14 back-extrapolate.

15 This is essentially the same slide 

16 that Sam had presented earlier. It just 

17 graphically represents the air sampling 

18 concentrations and units of micrograms of 

19 uranium per cubic meter of air for the period 

20 of '48 and '49, and also shows the kind of 

21 paucity of data in '43 and '44, but also the 

22 fact that there were very low-level samples.
 

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1 So I guess in summary, for that 

2 first issue, we believe that it may still be 

3 worthwhile looking into this or at least 

4 considering the possibility that these doses 

5 could be reconstructed. However, we felt that 

6 that 1944 data, bioassay data, was really the 

7 hook that would allow us to have some credible 

8 representation of the early dataset that would 

9 then allow back-extrapolation.

10 Based on the description of the 

11 activities that did take place that Jim Neton 

12 had provided, in the early forties there was a 

13 lot of hand shoveling of this material. We 

14 have basically one year of data over only 

15 about a two-month period. We have operations 

16 that are continuing over a five-year period, a 

17 very small set of data that would have to 

18 serve as a representative sample.

19 So we are really not really taking 

20 a rigid stance on this. We feel that a 

21 credible argument, weight of evidence 

22 argument, could be presented for or against 
 

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1 the SEC. So we are kind of backing off a bit 

2 on our position based on that initial review.

3 As far as the identification of 

4 the Area Plant workers, we believe this is 

5 something that the Board really should look 

6 into. The Class is currently defined as all 

7 workers at Electro Met during that period of 

8 1942 to 1947. However, we have a lot of 

9 information here that indicates that that 

10 Class could possibly be restricted.

11 Some of the information here is 

12 that the primary business of Electro Met was 

13 commercial. It was the manufacture of iron14 based alloys for the commercial markets. 

15 The Area Plant was built in '42 

16 under a MED contract, basically to reduce 

17 green salt to metal and then to remelt it into 

18 ingots for use in the AEC complex. The plant 

19 was a single building located in one corner of 

20 the existing Electro Met site, and it was 

21 fenced, guarded, and had pretty effective 

22 access control.
 

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1 The staff at the plant was fairly 

2 well-characterized. It was small. There were 

3 67 individuals. You can see the breakdown: 

4 supervisors, about [Identifying information 

5 redacted]; about [Identifying information 

6 redacted] operators; and then the other 

7 categories of guards, office workers, and so 

8 forth, and also the outside support. You 

9 didn't have a lot of janitors, support staff 

10 coming in who may have been exposed but were 

11 not monitored. 

12 Basically, you have got 

13 electricians that came in about two days a 

14 month, and pipe fitters for about two days a 

15 year. So we feel it is a pretty well defined 

16 Class of workers who had the exposure 

17 potential at the Area Plant.

18 Our first finding, in fact, from 

19 the April 2010 Evaluation Report was that 

20 NIOSH had discussed the issue of access 

21 controls explicitly in the Evaluation Report 

22 to justify the basis for including all workers 
 

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1 at Electro Met, rather than just those who 

2 worked in the Area Plant.

3 Evidently, NIOSH had contacted 

4 Labor and replied that they believed they 

5 could not place the workers in specific 

6 buildings. However, it is not clear to what 

7 extent DOL evaluated all the data that were 

8 available in the SRDB and other sources.

9 We believe that this is an issue 

10 that may justify further investigations of the 

11 available data for defining the SEC Class. We 

12 have included some examples of the data that 

13 are available in the SRDB: 8912 was 47 

14 workers, gives their names, job descriptions, 

15 start date in the plant, when they were 

16 transferred, laid off, when they were rehired 

17 or recalled. So it's a pretty comprehensive 

18 set of data for a lot of these workers.

19 There is also bioassay samples by 

20 worker name. There is a lot of film badge 

21 data available, some workers sampled more than 

22 once. Granted, this is external dosimetry, 
 

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1 but there is a lot of data available there, 

2 and there is also results for the '43 

3 urinalysis results by named workers with job 

4 descriptions.

5 So we believe that sufficient data 

6 do exist to review the conclusion that the 

7 Area Plant workers cannot be specifically 

8 identified.

9 That is pretty much the end of our 

10 presentation. I would like to entertain any 

11 questions at this point.

12 MS. LIN: Dr. Melius.

13 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes?

14 MS. LIN: This is Jenny with HHS. 

15 I ask the Board Members not to circulate the 

16 presentation from John Stiver. It does 

17 contain some Privacy-Act-protected 

18 information. Once I have a chance to redact 

19 some of those information, then I will let you 

20 guys know.

21 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I don't think it 

22 has been circulated.
 

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1 MS. LIN: Great. Thank you.

2 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Okay. Josie?

3 MEMBER BEACH: I just have a 

4 couple of questions. I noticed, Sam, in your 

5 presentation it said that there were major 

6 improvements from '47 -- starting in '47, and 

7 then in the ER it said "health improvements." 

8 Was that related to the sampling that you had 

9 mid-'48, the bio-sampling, or was there 

10 something other than that?

11 DR. GLOVER: It wasn't 

12 necessarily sampling. There is not a lot of 

13 description. They were not explicit. The 

14 Health and Safety Laboratory, when they came 

15 in in 1948, when AEC took control of all these 

16 sites, Electro Met was one of those seven 

17 facilities. 

18 There is that real thick report 

19 where they basically talked about Simonds Saw 

20 and Steel and Electro Met and all that. So 

21 that is when the Health and Safety Laboratory 

22 came in and said, what the heck is going on, 
 

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1 but we don't know what they did in '47 

2 completely to fix it. We know that they 

3 described it as major health improvements.

4 MEMBER BEACH: Well, I noticed 

5 when I read the interview notes they talked 

6 about it being very dusty. So I was curious 

7 if it was based on that or the results.

8 Then the other question I have is: 

9 can you give me a better description of the 

10 external -- before '48 when you say you can do 

11 all external, but I notice you don't have any 

12 data until about mid-'48. So how are you 

13 doing the earlier external?

14 DR. GLOVER: One of the things I 

15 apologize for, when I made the changes to the 

16 Evaluation Report, I tried to really focus on 

17 making the change only with respect to our 

18 deficiency. 

19 When TBD-6001 fell apart or was 

20 disbanded or however you want to say it --

21 MEMBER BEACH: Renamed?

22 DR. GLOVER: Renamed. Appendix C 
 

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1 was just changed to TBD-6001 to make this new 

2 Evaluation -- not an Evaluation, this new 

3 Technical Basis Document. We did not update 

4 it with the changes, and we didn't try to put 

5 that into -- I would have far exceeded my time 

6 in trying to get this to the Board and trying 

7 to do this, because a lot of my changes are 

8 based on getting this done.

9 So getting into the details of how 

10 I am going to go all of the -- I guess I 

11 didn't want to state every possible 

12 deficiency. I believe that we can do it based 

13 on all of the data we have done for TBD-6000 

14 type work, for the kind of metallurgical work 

15 and the ability to use those kind of 

16 descriptions to come back with the external 

17 dose.

18 MEMBER BEACH: Thank you.

19 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Sam, while you 

20 are up there, did I understand you correctly 

21 that we really don't have production 

22 information data over time for this facility, 
 

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1 at least in the early years?

2 DR. GLOVER: I have intermittent 

3 pieces, scraps and pieces. It is not 

4 complete.

5 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Because I would 

6 think that that would be key to sort of 

7 understanding were the two periods alike. To 

8 me, looking at the different data that was 

9 presented and so forth, it certainly doesn't 

10 make sort of logical sense, if someone came in 

11 and cleaned up the operation, so to speak, 

12 that exposures would increase rather than 

13 decrease.

14 Really, without sort of some good 

15 source or production data, whatever you want 

16 to call it, I think it is really hard to draw 

17 conclusions on that from what has been 

18 presented, one way or the other. I tend to 

19 agree with your conclusions based on the 

20 information you had, and not as much with what 

21 SC&A was claiming.

22 I think, if we had the production 
 

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1 data, then maybe we could make more sense out 

2 of it, but without that, I think it is 

3 difficult. It sort of doesn't seem logical, 

4 what happened.

5 Wanda. Then Paul.

6 MEMBER MUNN: Do your scraps of 

7 information regarding production include a 

8 scrap or two from 1944 and a scrap or two from 

9 the '48 and '49 era?

10 DR. GLOVER: I must admit that, 

11 yes, it certainly has. I don't have -- I did 

12 not evaluate them analytically, because it was 

13 so broken. I didn't feel it was going to be 

14 worthwhile for me to be able to pull that data 

15 together. We have some limited information 

16 from both periods.

17 I believe the earliest period 

18 would have been our largest series of 

19 production as they were driving to get that 

20 uranium out, but that is just my take on it. 

21 They certainly then shut down for a year, year 

22 and a half, then came back up and running for 
 

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1 a while, but I don't -- we don't have good 

2 numbers.

3 MEMBER MUNN: Yes, it would seem 

4 logical, but by the same token, if you have 

5 bioassays from both periods and there is no 

6 significant difference between what we see in 

7 the bioassays, then -- okay. No question in 

8 that, just ruminations.

9 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Again, just a 

10 quick comment. It is hard to get a coherent 

11 picture there without all the information. 

12 That is what -- you are sort of grasping at 

13 different pieces, and how does it fit 

14 together? You are right to bring that up, but 

15 I think -- 

16 MEMBER MUNN: Always, but the 

17 issue as SC&A has presented it, and which 

18 seems perfectly logical on the face of it is 

19 that: if there are not significant changes in 

20 the two groups of data that you have, then it 

21 should be boundable, especially in such a 

22 discretely identified group of workers as 
 

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1 this.

2 This is far more easy to define 

3 than most of the sites, especially the AWE 

4 sites that we have looked at. This one 

5 clearly is set aside, and the workers in that 

6 group are pretty well identified. 

7 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Well, I think 

8 that is open to question also. Jim?

9 DR. NETON: This is Jim Neton. I 

10 think we need to remember that this is a 

11 snapshot of a couple of campaigns of bioassay 

12 samples that we have had, and we are trying to 

13 reconstruct an acute -- I mean a chronic 

14 exposure scenario that occurred over a period 

15 of four or five years, and all you have are 

16 data in pretty much the middle of it that were 

17 taken on a couple of different instances, and 

18 how those data could be used to inform us as 

19 to what the chronic exposure condition was 

20 over the entire four-year period is not clear 

21 to me.

22 The other thing we need to 
 

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1 remember is what Sam pointed out, that the 

2 early air sample data -- I think there were 

3 primarily GA samples --

4 DR. GLOVER: That is correct.

5 DR. NETON: -- and we don't really 

6 know the pedigree of those samples at all. We 

7 do know that the later samples were taken by 

8 the Health and Safety Laboratory, which we 

9 know has a very good, excellent reputation for 

10 doing quality measurements.

11 So there are a lot of disconnects 

12 here that just don't add up or we are not 

13 comfortable in saying that we can put an upper 

14 bound on that early period, particularly 

15 since, if it were a higher production era, the 

16 numbers just -- the data that we have don't 

17 make sense in light of what we know about what 

18 was going on there.

19 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Paul?

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: Sam, I noticed 

21 that most of the claims submitted already have 

22 been processed. Do you have any notion as to 
 

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1 how those were distributed in time? There 

2 were 104 claims. One hundred and two have 

3 been completed, only two of which contained 

4 actual external or internal dosimetry data. 

5 So were these coworker model types 

6 of calculations, and do we know how these are 

7 distributed over those early years versus the 

8 later? It may not be a fair question at this 

9 point. I am trying to get a feel for whether 

10 what you have already done is mostly with 

11 later stuff that you could do easily or what 

12 did you do on the early ones if this is part 

13 of that?

14 DR. GLOVER: The TBD or the 

15 Appendix C that was used basically took that 

16 95th percentile approach, but it was 

17 distributed by if they thought it was a 

18 supervisor or a different kind of person, 

19 there may be some variance. The 95th 

20 percentile was used and 60,000 dpm per day 

21 intakes, but that is not applied to everybody, 

22 but a lot of workers, that is how we would 
 

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1 have done it, depending on the job title.

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: But you would have 

3 done it the same way over all the time period 

4 then. Is that what you are saying?

5 DR. GLOVER: We were using a 

6 uniform model, yes, sir.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: Got you. That was 

8 just one question for clarity, in my mind.

9 I also wonder if maybe John Stiver 

10 could comment based on what you just heard Jim 

11 Neton say. I got the feeling that SC&A maybe 

12 was hedging a little bit on your written 

13 conclusion that you believe dose can be 

14 reconstructed.

15 MR. STIVER: Yes. We did not have 

16 the detailed information regarding --

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: Those things that 

18 Jim talked about just now?

19 MR. STIVER: -- the things that 

20 Jim had talked about and what Sam had brought 

21 up about this being taken in a very short 

22 campaign. If you can accept the proposition 
 

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1 that that dataset is indeed representative of 

2 the entire period of operations, then you can 

3 make that logical extension and extrapolate 

4 that data.

5 I guess the question becomes just 

6 one of weight of evidence and making a 

7 judgment as to whether you have enough faith 

8 in that dataset and its pedigree to make that 

9 extrapolation.

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: But you didn't 

11 have that information at the time you that you 

12 reached that conclusion?

13 MR. STIVER: We did not really 

14 have that information. We had six months. We 

15 had made some preliminary observations. We 

16 didn't have that information that NIOSH had 

17 used, basically, about May of last year to 

18 make that change in their interpretation. So 

19 we were kind of scrambling to pull all that 

20 together.

21 MEMBER ZIEMER: Okay. I am just 

22 trying to get a feel for the extent to which 
 

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1 you two are -- you two being NIOSH and SC&A --

2 are far apart or together. It looks like you 

3 are closer than I thought you were.

4 MR. STIVER: I would say at this 

5 point we are probably closer together. This 

6 thing has been moving forward very rapidly.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: Then my final 

8 follow-up is: If we were to identify this as 

9 a -- well, whether we do an SEC Class or not, 

10 I think the question about restricting it to 

11 the full -- to the MED site versus the full 

12 facility, I am a little uncomfortable with 

13 where we are on that. The statement that DOL 

14 can't administer it -- do we know that? Is 

15 that really the case?

16 MR. STIVER: Maybe NIOSH can --

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: Sam, can you speak 

18 to that a little more? It looked like there 

19 is good restrictions there.

20 DR. GLOVER: This is a DOE site --

21 you know, this compound was built by the 

22 Department of Energy with DOE money. So now 
 

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1 this thing is built in the middle of the site. 

2 If they don't put the people in the site --

3 what's that, sir?

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: The fenced area

5 that you are talking about?

6 DR. GLOVER: Yes, sir. There's a 

7 DOE portion. So the Department of Labor nor 

8 the company, they won't put the people -- if 

9 they don't give them to us for dose 

10 reconstruction, then we wouldn't try to -- we 

11 wouldn't be forced to -- we do not have 

12 records for everyone. We don't know who those 

13 people are, and we had a lot of them, but the 

14 company won't help. The Department can't --

15 they don't believe they can be any more 

16 specific.

17 If they did find records and were 

18 able to administer it more closely, it by 

19 definition is already a Electro Met DOE 

20 facility, and they could -- but they company 

21 said they can't do it, and the Department of 

22 Labor in their answer to us, they said, you 
 

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1 know, we can't do any better than that 

2 information.

3 They are going to give us those 

4 people for dose reconstruction.

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: So I think SC&A 

6 was just raising the question at this point. 

7 You didn't have evidence, did you, John?

8 MR. STIVER: No, we didn't have 

9 evidence. We just felt that it was impossible 

10 to constrain that Class.

11 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I think the 

12 issue with all of these situations is not 

13 whether or not there are lists that indicate 

14 who worked there or who was monitored. It is: 

15 are those inclusive? And we run into this. I 

16 think do we have adequate records, personnel 

17 or otherwise, to say that, you know, and then 

18 know enough about the sampling program and so 

19 forth to know whether -- monitoring program --

20 to know whether everybody is included, that we 

21 could match these people up.

22 I guess I am just skeptical, both 
 

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1 on what I have heard and what has been 

2 presented, but also given the time period 

3 involved with the site, I think we continue to 

4 be surprised by how, even at some of the 

5 bigger, larger sites and ongoing sites, how 

6 often this is not the case when we try to 

7 isolate a part of a site.

8 Anybody else have any questions or 

9 comments? Yes?

10 MEMBER ANDERSON: I guess you have 

11 got our recommendation already. 

12 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: We have a 

13 motion?

14 MEMBER ANDERSON: Yes.

15 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: We have a motion 

16 from the Work Group essentially to approve the 

17 NIOSH report and so forth.

18 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: I second that.

19 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: We have a second 

20 from Phil. Any further discussion or comment? 

21 Okay. Do the roll?

22 MEMBER GRIFFON: The vote is to 
 

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1 accept the Class as proposed by NIOSH.

2 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: To accept the 

3 motion from the Work Group.

4 MEMBER GRIFFON: Which is a motion 

5 to add a Class.

6 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes. Do we have 

7 the letter, copies of the letter. We can do 

8 this through the --

9 MEMBER ANDERSON: Yes. From 

10 August 13, '42 to December 31, 1947. It is 

11 that time frame.

12 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I just want to 

13 make sure that Members of the Board have the 

14 letter. I think Nancy is going to check. We 

15 are trying to get copies. 

16 MEMBER MUNN: This is all employees 

17 of the whole site.

18 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes. Why don't 

19 we do the vote? 

20 MS. LIN: Dr. Melius?

21 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes.

22 MS. LIN: My understanding is that 
 

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1 the Work Group recommended to accept the 

2 earlier year which is '42 to '47 as the SEC 

3 time period, and then the later time period 

4 could be that dose reconstruction would be 

5 feasible.

6 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: That is not in 

7 the letter. Because that wasn't clear -- so 

8 we will just do the SEC.

9 MR. KATZ: Do you want me to 

10 proceed?

11 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Go ahead and 

12 proceed, yes. I want to get the letter.

13 MR. KATZ: Dr. Anderson?

14 MEMBER ANDERSON: Yes.

15 MR. KATZ: Ms. Beach?

16 MEMBER BEACH: Yes.

17 MR. KATZ: Mr. Clawson?

18 MEMBER CLAWSON: Yes.

19 MR. KATZ: Dr. Field?

20 MEMBER FIELD: Yes.

21 MR. KATZ: Mr. Gibson?

22 MEMBER GIBSON: Yes.
 

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1 MR. KATZ: Mr. Griffon?

2 MEMBER GRIFFON: Yes.

3 MR. KATZ: Dr. Lemen is absent. I 

4 will collect his vote after this meeting.

5 Dr. Lockey?

6 MEMBER LOCKEY: Yes.

7 MR. KATZ: Dr. Melius?

8 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes.

9 MR. KATZ: Ms. Munn?

10 MEMBER MUNN: I am abstaining.

11 MR. KATZ: Abstaining. Dr. Poston 

12 is absent. I will collect his vote.

13 Dr. Richardson?

14 MEMBER RICHARDSON: Yes.

15 MR. KATZ: Dr. Roessler?

16 MEMBER ROESSLER: Yes.

17 MR. KATZ: Mr. Schofield?

18 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: Yes.

19 MR. KATZ: And Dr. Ziemer?

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes.

21 MR. KATZ: So the motion passes 

22 with one abstention and two absentees to be 
 

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1 collected.

2 MR. CIVILETTO: Gentlemen?

3 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes? Oh, the 

4 petitioner. Go ahead.

5 MR. CIVILETTO: Hello? 

6 MR. KATZ: Yes, go ahead. We can 

7 hear you.

8 MR. CIVILETTO: Yes. I was just 

9 wondering, I would very much like to address 

10 the Board. Is there sufficient time to do 

11 that?

12 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes, there is. 

13 We apologize. We were informed that you were 

14 going to listen in, but not that you were 

15 going to address. But you are welcome to 

16 address the Board.

17 MR. CIVILETTO: And I will try to 

18 be quick, and I certainly appreciate the 

19 opportunity.

20 I really strongly urge the Board 

21 Members to accept the SEC Class that has been 

22 recommended by NIOSH, and to estimate 
 

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1 radiation dose with sufficient accuracy, the 

2 federal law does require NIOSH to establish it 

3 had access to sufficient information. 

4 Sufficient, obviously, is the key word.

5 I think Dr. Glover stated that, 

6 without hesitation, NIOSH is recommending this 

7 Class, because they really are unable to 

8 estimate dose reconstruction. I am not going 

9 to rehash. There obviously is limited data, 

10 air sample data, urinalysis data.

11 One of the points that I had 

12 contended in my petition was that -- and it 

13 has now been confirmed -- that there were 

14 records found that had Electro Met radiation 

15 dust exposure in those early years that NIOSH 

16 is addressing was 500 times greater than the 

17 tolerance levels of the day.

18 With respect to the issue of --

19 and I think it was important that both Electro 

20 Met and the DOL cannot with any degree of 

21 certainty place employees in certain buildings 

22 or even in the Area Plant. Before I filed the 
 

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1 petition on behalf of my father who worked at 

2 Carbide, I requested records of where he had 

3 worked. I was very young when he worked 

4 during the war years, but I was told that 

5 there were no records available.

6 My father worked at Electro Met 

7 from 1938 until his untimely death from colon 

8 cancer in 1965. He was 55 years of age. My 

9 family and I had no knowledge in 1965 or even 

10 in the later years that Electro Met was 

11 involved in the Manhattan Project.

12 The claim my sister and I, which 

13 was filed, I believe, in 2006, for survivor 

14 benefits was denied based upon dose 

15 reconstruction. I work. I am an attorney. I 

16 work with many other families that were 

17 involved, and really, what is of utmost 

18 concern to many family survivors is that 

19 employees in so many of the plants, including 

20 Electro Met, were unwittingly working in this 

21 Manhattan Project at tremendous risk to their 

22 lives. So many, many that I personally know 
 

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1 have died from cancer.

2 The U.S. government placed all of 

3 these employees in positions of high risk to 

4 their health and lives at a time when, really, 

5 little was known about the danger of exposure 

6 to radiation. There clearly was little 

7 monitoring.

8 I believe, and sincerely believe, 

9 that the question to be answered is: should 

10 employees of Electro Met or their family 

11 survivors be faced with an insurmountable

12 burden of proving exposure? I was just unable 

13 to do that on behalf of my father. I honestly 

14 think that that can't be done with that 

15 burden.

16 Your decision is, obviously, 

17 critical. The success or the failure of 

18 claims for a fair and just compensation hangs 

19 in the balance, and I respectfully ask that 

20 the Advisory Board Members accept NIOSH's 

21 recommendations, and I thank you for this 

22 opportunity.
 

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1 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Thank you. 

2 Again, I apologize. We didn't understand that 

3 you wanted to speak, but we appreciate your 

4 comments and taking the time.

5 MR. CIVILETTO: Thank you.

6 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: We are going to 

7 hold off on the letter. We are having some 

8 drafting issues at the moment. 

9 We have a Board work session now. 

10 The SEC is approved, and we will come back 

11 and do the letter a little bit later on that.

12 Ted, do you want to talk about 

13 future meetings? I want to get that 

14 information out.

15 MR. KATZ: Sure. We have to 

16 schedule out, because our next face-to-face 

17 meeting is June -- schedule out the next. We 

18 are scheduled for September 18-20 Board 

19 meeting. So I am scheduling beyond that, the 

20 next two meetings, the next teleconference and 

21 the next Board meeting.

22 MEMBER ROESSLER: Could you review
 

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1 the ones that are already scheduled?

2 MR. KATZ: Sure, sure. We have an 

3 April 26th teleconference, and then a June 19-

4 21 Board meeting in Santa Fe; August 15th 

5 teleconference; and then September 18-20 Board 

6 meeting, place to be determined, and we will 

7 talk about that in a moment.

8 MEMBER ROESSLER: Thank you.

9 MR. KATZ: Then we are scheduling 

10 out beyond that, the next two. The next 

11 teleconference: The right time frame is the 

12 week of November 5th-9th or, backing up, it is 

13 not quite as good timing but October 29th 

14 through 11/2. It just depends on whether 

15 either of those weeks is completely 

16 problematic.

17 So 11/5-9 is the better week in 

18 terms of timing, but if that doesn't work, we 

19 will back up. 

20 And this is -- we are only talking 

21 about a teleconference, right? So it is a 

22 sort of 11 to 1 proposition, 11:00 a.m. to 
 

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1 1:00 p.m.

2 MEMBER RICHARDSON: The 7th and 

3 8th are out for me. I've got a meeting.

4 MEMBER LOCKEY: The 6th is out for 

5 me.

6 MR. KATZ: So, 6, 7 and 8, I hear, 

7 are out. This is November. So the fifth or 

8 the ninth, are either of those a problem?

9 MEMBER ANDERSON: The fifth is 

10 good.

11 MR. KATZ: Does November 5th work 

12 for everyone? Okay. So for now, we will have 

13 11/5 teleconference. 

14 All right. Face-to-face then, 

15 December 10-14 or 17-21. Either of those a 

16 problem?

17 MEMBER ANDERSON: What date?

18 MR. KATZ: Well, whole weeks, it 

19 could be any point in the week, but the week 

20 of December 10-14 is one possibility.

21 MEMBER MUNN: Eleven, 12, 13?

22 MR. KATZ: Right. That is the 
 

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1 middle of the week, or the following week in 

2 December.

3 MEMBER RICHARDSON: The start of 

4 the week would be better, if possible.

5 MR. KATZ: You mean 10th through 

6 13th, David?

7 MEMBER RICHARDSON: Yes.

8 MEMBER LOCKEY: Tenth through the 

9 12th, right?

10 MR. KATZ: Tenth through 12th, 

11 right. Does that work for everyone? Okay.

12 So December 10th through 12th. All right.

13 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Is there a 

14 problem with the 13th? I am not suggesting, 

15 but I do think --

16 MEMBER BEACH: Traveling on Sunday.

17 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes, depending on 

18 where we locate it.

19 MR. KATZ: Someone suggested the 

20 beginning of the week, but does that work, 

21 David, December 11th, 12th, 13th? 

22 MEMBER RICHARDSON: It takes me 
 

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1 out of two days of teaching. 

2 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Let's keep it at 

3 10th through 12th, if we can. I just also 

4 think it would be good to consult our two 

5 absent and our two new full Board Members.

6 MR. KATZ: We don't know at this 

7 point whether it is a two-day or a three-day 

8 meeting as well.

9 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Right, which is 

10 the other issue also, and so forth. 

11 MR. KATZ: So for now we will keep 

12 it penciled in the 10th through 12th, but we 

13 will follow back with you all on that.

14 MEMBER ANDERSON: If you do it on 

15 the 10th, everybody has got to bring presents. 

16 It is my birthday.

17 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Smoked fish. We 

18 already heard.

19 MR. KATZ: Depending on where it 

20 is, too, we could do it the afternoon of the 

21 first day, if it is on that Monday.

22 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Locations?
 

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1 MR. KATZ: Location. So now we 

2 are talking about locations for the September 

3 meeting. That is September 18th through 20th. 

4 Just a few thoughts to throw out for your 

5 consideration: One, a lot of claims always 

6 from Tennessee. We haven't been there. We 

7 have intended to go there before, and it has 

8 fallen through. I am thinking of locations 

9 especially that are good while it is still 

10 relatively warm, so they are easier to get to.

11 Tennessee is one. Idaho is 

12 another possibility, and part of this depends 

13 on what work is lining up for the time period. 

14 Josie?

15 MEMBER BEACH: Were we not set to 

16 go to D.C. also?

17 MR. KATZ: We were, but there is 

18 no site in D.C. So we are not serving any of 

19 the workers, at least, if we want them 

20 present, but that is another location that we 

21 have been solicited to visit. Idaho --

22 MEMBER CLAWSON: December sounds 
 

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1 great to me.

2 MR. KATZ: For where, Brad? Well, 

3 Idaho -- September is still okay in Idaho, 

4 right? You're not snowed in? So the two other 

5 places on the East Coast -- well, there are 

6 three other possibilities. One, there is a 

7 AWE in Massachusetts that will have an SEC 

8 Evaluation ready in June. So plenty ripe for 

9 SC&A to look at that as well before the 

10 meeting occurs. That is in West Concord, 

11 Massachusetts, which is, I think, not too hard 

12 to get to. But it is small. It has 21 

13 claims. So it is a small site.

14 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: We are not going 

15 to have significant turnout there, I can 

16 imagine.

17 MR. KATZ: That may be. We 

18 haven't been in Tennessee in quite a while.

19 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Tennessee -- the 

20 only other question I have is the petition we 

21 don't know about yet, but my understanding is 

22 it is on its way to the Federal Register, 
 

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1 which is Rocky Flats.

2 MR. KATZ: Rocky Flats.

3 MR. RUTHERFORD: Yes, Rocky Flats 

4 is qualified. It is a qualified petition now, 

5 and we will have Rocky Flats done before that 

6 September Board meeting. In fact, we would be 

7 presenting it at that September Board meeting, 

8 but we will be presenting ORNL probably in 

9 June.

10 MR. KATZ: Okay. Well, in terms 

11 of timing then, it makes some sense to --

12 Colorado. If the ER is going to be ready, to 

13 present it locally would be great. Does 

14 anybody have any other thoughts about that?

15 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: And hold 

16 Tennessee for consideration for the December?

17 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: I have actually 

18 had some contacts requesting that we come to 

19 Tennessee, phone calls and emails. I know, 

20 since I came on the Board, we have not been to 

21 Tennessee. So it has been a long time.

22 MEMBER MUNN: Well, if our two 
 

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1 choices are Colorado and Tennessee, it seems

2 more logical to be in Colorado in September.

3 MR. KATZ: In terms of weather and 

4 travel, it makes more sense.

5 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: And the timing 

6 would be good in terms of the Evaluation 

7 Report also.

8 MEMBER MUNN: So Colorado in 

9 September?

10 MR. KATZ: And then Tennessee in 

11 December? Do we want to be in Oak Ridge? 

12 When we are talking about Tennessee, do we 

13 have -- yes? All right. That takes care of 

14 scheduling issues. 

15 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Okay. We can do 

16 the Electro Metallurgical letter. I have got

17 the editing straightened out, and I will start 

18 by first clarifying the editing, and then I 

19 will read through the whole letter so you 

20 don't get confused. 

21 There is a little problem in terms 

22 of getting this onto letterhead and 
 

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1 transmitting this, so a little confusion. But 

2 if you go down to the second paragraph where 

3 it starts, "The National Institute for 

4 Occupational Safety and Health," take out 

5 those whole two lines, that sentence, and it 

6 should be, "The Board respectfully recommends 

7 that SEC status be accorded to", colon, which 

8 is the usual style of these letters.

9 So I will start and read this into 

10 the record:

11 "The Advisory Board on Radiation 

12 and Worker Health (the Board) has evaluated 

13 Special Exposure Cohort (SEC) petition 00136 

14 concerning workers at the Electro 

15 Metallurgical Site in Niagara Falls, New York, 

16 under the statutory requirements established 

17 by the Energy Employees Occupational Illness 

18 Compensation Program Act of 2000 (EEOICPA) and 

19 incorporated into 42 CFR Section 83.13.

20 "The Board respectfully recommends 

21 that SEC status be accorded to, quote, 'all 

22 employees of the Department of Energy, its 
 

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1 predecessor agencies, and their contractors 

2 and subcontractors who worked at the Electro 

3 Metallurgical site in Niagara Falls, New York, 

4 from August 13, 1942 through December 31, 

5 1947, for a number of work days aggregating at 

6 least 250 work days occurring either solely 

7 under this employment or in combination with 

8 work days within the parameters established 

9 for one or more other Classes of employees 

10 included in the Special Exposure Cohort.' 

11 Close quote.

12 "This recommendation is based on 

13 the following factors: Individual's employ at 

14 the Electro Metallurgical site during the time 

15 period in question; worked on uranium metal 

16 fabrication and scrap recovery related to 

17 nuclear weapons production.

18 "Two, the National Institute for 

19 Occupational Safety and Health, NIOSH, review 

20 of available monitoring data as well as 

21 available process and source term information 

22 for this facility found that NIOSH lacked the 
 

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1 sufficient information to allow it to estimate 

2 with sufficient accuracy the potential 

3 internal exposures to uranium which employees 

4 at this facility may have been subjected 

5 during the time period from August 13, 1942, 

6 through December 31, 1947. The Board concurs 

7 with this determination.

8 "NIOSH determined that health may 

9 have been endangered for these Electro 

10 Metallurgical employees during the time period 

11 in question. The Board also concurs with this 

12 determination.

13 "Based on these considerations and 

14 the discussion at the February 28-29, 2012, 

15 Board meeting held in Oakland, California, the 

16 Board recommends that this Class be added to 

17 the SEC. Enclosed is the documentation from 

18 the Board meeting where this SEC Class was 

19 discussed. Documentation includes copies to 

20 the petition, NIOSH review thereof, and 

21 related materials. If any of these items are 

22 unavailable at this time, they will follow 
 

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1 shortly."

2 Comments, questions on that? 

3 Okay. Why don't we go on and start on our 

4 Board reports, Subcommittees and all? Mark, 

5 DR, top of the list.

6 MEMBER GRIFFON: We had a meeting. 

7 I forget the date, but we had a meeting 

8 between the last Board meeting and now. I 

9 guess several things we were looking at. 

10 There are several action items that came out 

11 of this related to either the 10-year 

12 recommendations or our previous questions 

13 about QA/QC, and we came out with several 

14 actions which SC&A and NIOSH hopefully 

15 remember these actions. If not, we are 

16 putting them on the record today.

17 One of them is for SC&A to look at 

18 the themes of findings in the 11 through 14 

19 sets of cases. Several of these actions that 

20 we looked at were to sort of get at this issue 

21 of we are well behind -- the Subcommittee is 

22 well behind the progress that SC&A is making, 
 

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1 and we are actually reviewing cases that are 

2 often much older than where NIOSH is currently 

3 working. So we are trying to sort of think of 

4 ways to triage the process.

5 We have several of these 

6 proposals. Maybe I don't have to go down all 

7 of them, but several of these proposals to 

8 look at to sort of get at that issue. Then I 

9 think, at our next Subcommittee meeting, we 

10 are going to go over some of those. I am not 

11 sure that we need to continue on the path with 

12 all of these, but we want to sort of see what 

13 they come up with.

14 One is to look at the themes. 

15 Another is for SC&A -- Stu reported earlier 

16 that NIOSH is doing a sort of duplicate 

17 analysis of some cases that come in with ORAU, 

18 and we have asked that, after they report that 

19 to our Subcommittee, then SC&A will -- we will 

20 assign those cases to SC&A, too, to review. 

21 So we will sort of have that set reviewed by 

22 three parties.
 

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1 A third one is: NIOSH is going to 

2 provide a report on what ORAU is doing with 

3 regard to their QA/QC program, and some of the 

4 questions we discussed there was sort of this 

5 question of it looked like in their 

6 presentation to us, to the Subcommittee, that 

7 they have made a lot of quote, "fixes" in the 

8 program over the years, but they never sort of 

9 had any benchmark to measure against, like how 

10 -- intuitively, it seems that several of these 

11 fixes would have reduced the number of sort of 

12 data entry errors and other sort of quality 

13 errors, but there is sort of no benchmark to 

14 measure against.

15 So we want to see how they are 

16 actually benchmarking and how they are 

17 measuring their performance going forward, 

18 what they have in terms of QA/QC. I think we 

19 really want to look at that closely, and then 

20 NIOSH said that they are going to give us what 

21 they can at the next Subcommittee meeting with 

22 regard to ORAU's process.
 

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1 The last one is that NIOSH is --

2 oh, another attempt to get at the more current 

3 issues was in the 12th set of cases, NIOSH 

4 took the five most recent cases, and they have 

5 reviewed those cases, and these were already 

6 done by SC&A, but they are going to come back 

7 with their analysis on those.

8 So we have been sort of plugging 

9 away. We are right now on the seventh, 

10 eighth, and ninth set in various stages of 

11 review on all those findings, but we thought, 

12 to get more at the current issues, we are 

13 going to try to do a triage process up to 

14 where SC&A -- SC&A is far ahead of us. We 

15 want to look at the more current cases, see if 

16 we are still finding the same kind of 

17 findings, same kind of issues. We want to 

18 sort of get a sense of that, and then maybe 

19 reassess our path forward on doing all the 

20 findings and going through that process.

21 The last item, I guess, is NIOSH -

22 - we did discuss at the last meeting some of 
 

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1 the recommendations from the 10-year plan, and 

2 NIOSH is going to provide us with an 

3 assessment on some of those items.

4 They said they were at various 

5 stages on some of these, such as timeliness. 

6 I think the least far developed of the issues 

7 is claimant-favorability, sort of getting a 

8 sense of the degree of claimant-favorability 

9 in the Dose Reconstruction Program.

10 Then the last one, which I think 

11 is the most mature -- Stu might be able to 

12 speak to this more directly as he walks in the 

13 room. The most maturely developed is the 

14 overestimation question.

15 Stu had mentioned the possibility 

16 of NIOSH sort of not doing overestimates 

17 anymore, and now I think they are 

18 reconsidering some options. For instance, one 

19 example which was brought up at the last 

20 Committee meeting was to possibly not do 

21 overestimates for skin cancer cases, because 

22 they often come back with multiple cancers.
 

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1 So I think they may have ruled out 

2 eliminating the overestimating process 

3 completely. In other words, they are going to 

4 use it sometimes, I think, but they are 

5 looking at different proposals of maybe 

6 cutting back on the extent to which they use 

7 the overestimating approach.

8 Apparently, eliminating the 

9 overestimating approach completely was going 

10 to be a cost issue. There was actually a lot 

11 of efficiencies gained as far as at least --

12 Stu maybe can expand on that, but that is what 

13 -- and we asked just to maybe develop this in 

14 writing, and come back to the Committee with 

15 sort of some proposals in between. I don't 

16 know if you want to --

17 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. There is a 

18 fairly high percentage of cases that use some 

19 sort of expedient approach, and the savings is 

20 at least -- I can't remember exactly, but it 

21 is at least half the time it takes -- it takes 

22 twice at least twice as long to do a full dose 
 

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1 reconstruction as it does, on average, an 

2 expedient one. So that is twice as much time 

3 and, therefore, twice as much money dedicated 

4 in order to keep the same level of production.

5 So that just doesn't seem to be 

6 feasible in light of all the other competing 

7 priorities, but we are pursuing some other 

8 possibilities. Like Mark was talking about, 

9 if we don't overestimate skin, what is the 

10 impact of that?

11 We are approaching some DOE sites 

12 that don't routinely give us medical exposure 

13 information when we ask for exposure 

14 histories, and saying: can you make this a 

15 part of your routine response to us when we 

16 ask these? Because a common overestimating 

17 approach is to use sort of the default values 

18 for number of annual X-rays, and then if it 

19 comes out using the default you're over the 50 

20 percent, then you don't get the actual 

21 exposure information which, of course, is not 

22 very helpful in a couple of ways.
 

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1 At some sites, that would be a 

2 terrifically larger burden. So some sites 

3 aren't going to be able to give us the 

4 exposure -- their medical X-ray exposure 

5 information with routine requests, but there 

6 are some sites we might be able to make some 

7 headway on it.

8 So we are kind of nibbling at some 

9 edges right now. Then any real large-scale 

10 change would involve the commitment of quite a 

11 large amount of resources that would then be 

12 distracted from other parts of the program or 

13 the other things we are trying to accomplish. 

14 So we are a little hesitant to go marching 

15 real aggressively down that path.

16 MEMBER GRIFFON: The other thing, 

17 I think, we had quite a bit of discussion on -

18 - and Stu mentioned earlier in his 

19 presentation the sampling of two per month. 

20 Actually, in the last year our Subcommittee 

21 transcripts, which I was reading this morning, 

22 it was saying two per week, but maybe that was 
 

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1 modified. I don't know.

2 MR. HINNEFELD: I believe it might 

3 be two per week. 

4 MEMBER GRIFFON; Okay. Anyway, 

5 that would have resulted in approximately two 

6 percent. That was sort of the idea, yes. But 

7 another part of our discussion was the concern 

8 of whatever sort of analysis we do but also 

9 what process ORAU has in place shouldn't be 

10 sort of this find and fix approach.

11 In other words, if NIOSH is doing 

12 these two per week or month or whatever, and 

13 the Committee reviews them and then we find a 

14 problem in a certain TBD and fix it, that is 

15 not getting at the higher level question of 

16 quality control of the entire program.

17 So we want to sort of step back 

18 and look at the overall are we getting a 

19 reduction in errors from the quality changes 

20 that have been made over time in the program? 

21 So that is something we are trying to grapple 

22 with, of what is the best way -- with these 
 

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1 different approaches, what is the best way for 

2 the Subcommittee to do that?

3 So at the next meeting, we are 

4 going to have a bunch of these updates and, 

5 hopefully, fine-tune where we are taking this 

6 to get a handle on the QA/QC questions, and 

7 other themes, I should say.

8 Some of the other themes that were 

9 brought up were -- just off the top of my 

10 head, it was: often we have the question of 

11 placement of workers. This comes up with 

12 neutron dose reconstructions a lot where, if 

13 neutrons were only on certain sites in certain 

14 buildings, then it comes down to NIOSH being 

15 able to assure the Work Group or the Board 

16 that the workers were only in certain 

17 buildings over the course of their career. So 

18 it is always a question of placement.

19 That is at least one example of 

20 another theme that we have seen running 

21 through a lot of our findings. I can't off 

22 the top of my head come up with others, but we 
 

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1 are going to look at that at the next meeting 

2 as well.

3 Otherwise, the Committee just 

4 continued on plugging through in our normal 

5 process, going through the findings of the 

6 seventh, eighth and ninth set. I don't know 

7 if we got to the ninth set, but at least 

8 seventh and eighth set of cases.

9 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Okay. I've got a 

10 couple of comments. One is, we have been 

11 doing this same plan -- we have been following 

12 this plan for 10 years in terms of -- I think 

13 it was the first year we set out the original 

14 plan, if my memory is correct, of how we would 

15 do dose reconstruction reviews. 

16 I don't think we followed it 

17 absolutely, but we have pretty much stuck to 

18 that plan, and to some extent, maybe it is 

19 time to sort of rethink that plan or, 

20 certainly, adjust it at this point in time.

21 I think there have been some 

22 changes to the program. NIOSH is stepping up 
 

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1 its QA/QC, sounds like, and working on that 

2 aspect of it, but I think there is also -- we 

3 are supposed to, as a Board, provide 

4 independent review on are dose reconstructions 

5 accurate and so forth, and I think that is 

6 more than just QA/QC. It is bigger. It 

7 includes the Site Profiles, the TBD --

8 everything that is associated with the program 

9 that goes into making a good dose 

10 reconstruction.

11 So we have not done a lot of 

12 blinded reviews. Other issues like that, I 

13 think, would be worth sort of rethinking going 

14 forward. I think the way you are talking 

15 about sounds fine, but I would encourage the 

16 Subcommittee to sort of take a broader look. 

17 Do we need to adjust the process, the mix, the 

18 numbers, whatever, to do this?

19 Certainly, I think, given that 

20 this is a charge to the Board from Congress in 

21 the original legislation, are we doing an 

22 adequate number of what we are doing, and do 
 

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1 we need more resources either from the Board 

2 level or from the NIOSH level in terms of 

3 responding to these reviews to get this job 

4 done in a way that it should be done.

5 I really think now, with the 10-

6 year review and some of the changes in place, 

7 now would be the time to start to look at some 

8 of those questions also. I don't think you 

9 would do it in your next meeting, necessarily, 

10 but certainly coming back, some Board 

11 discussion, and figure out how we approach 

12 this, and what is the best way?

13 MEMBER GRIFFON: I don't think, my 

14 intent wasn't to drop other issues. There has 

15 been a focus on this QA/QC thing, because we 

16 have seen a lot of those, and we do want to 

17 get a handle on that. But part of that 

18 question to SC&A to look at those other themes 

19 was just that, to look at some of the 

20 scientific findings that we may have seen over 

21 the years.

22 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Paul?
 

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1 MEMBER ZIEMER: I think Dr. 

2 Melius' points are well taken, and it would 

3 seem to me that it makes sense at this time to 

4 ask ourselves whether or not the process that 

5 we are using is, in fact, doing what we want 

6 it to do, and maybe even, in evaluating that, 

7 to report to the Secretary on that.

8 I think we probably are due for 

9 another report anyway. We are up to about 200 

10 completions now with the ninth set. I think 

11 it has been a little over 20 percent now, but 

12 it seems to me that we report not only what 

13 the findings have been, but whether or not our 

14 process is effective and how we might be 

15 changing it. 

16 We do owe the Secretary something. 

17 I don't know when the last report was, but it 

18 seems to me it has been several years, and 

19 dose reconstruction is our thing, in a sense, 

20 and we have to critique, as you have 

21 suggested, are we doing it the right way? Do 

22 we need to change it? And then, how effective 
 

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1 has it bee, and what can we do to make it more 

2 effective? 

3 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes. I agree, 

4 Paul. And I think that one of the problems we 

5 have gotten into is we have sort of dug a 

6 little hole here. We are always catching up. 

7 We keep assigning. We have SC&A doing these, 

8 and we are, what, six behind or six sets or 

9 five sets behind? I don't know.

10 So we always feel like we are not 

11 quite ready to report to the Secretary yet, 

12 because we are not sort of contemporary with 

13 the program, which is a dynamic program. 

14 There have been lots of changes in it, and I 

15 think we need to catch up, not saying we 

16 shouldn't report now or do that and make 

17 changes, but I think let's examine it in that 

18 context, that, yes, here is where we think we 

19 are. This is what the results have been. 

20 This is how we think we can do it better. 

21 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right, and if we 

22 are falling behind, we have to evaluate why is 
 

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1 that, and what can we do to improve that? The 

2 workload, is it realistic or do we need more 

3 resources or what do we need?

4 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes. Is it at 

5 the NIOSH end? Is it our end? Is it -- I 

6 think let's reexamine that and, as a Board, 

7 make a decision on what we should do. Yes, 

8 Bill?

9 MEMBER FIELD: Yes. I was just 

10 wondering. You have been doing this for 10 

11 years now. I was just wondering, during this 

12 whole process, has there been any substantial 

13 changes that resulted form these reviews as 

14 far as process or as far as review?

15 MEMBER GRIFFON: I think, along 

16 the way, there have, yes.

17 MEMBER FIELD: Because I guess 

18 that is part of it, is just, does this work or 

19 not? Are things being addressed that are 

20 deficiencies that are documented in the 

21 process?

22 I know, going through these, a lot 
 

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1 of the things I see as maybe limitations are 

2 not things that I found myself. It was SC&A 

3 pointing them out to me, and then it is 

4 whether or not you agree with what they say or 

5 not, but I am not sure on my own how many of 

6 these I would have seen. Probably few.

7 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I think it is a 

8 complicated program, and a lot of technical 

9 information that goes into each of these dose 

10 reconstructions, especially at the more 

11 complicated sites. It is daunting, and lots 

12 of issues to be dealt with there.

13 I think one of the hesitations we 

14 have -- not to repeat myself -- is that it has 

15 been dynamic in terms of the changes, and you 

16 have the SEC reviews, you have the procedure 

17 reviews going on. You have Site Profile 

18 reviews. All of those feed in different ways 

19 into the dose reconstruction process, and at 

20 the same time the actual dose reconstruction 

21 reviews are sort of trailing those by the 

22 nature of the way we select cases and so 
 

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1 forth.

2 So I am not sure we are always 

3 contemporary with that. That is why I think 

4 not only do we have to rethink how we do the 

5 dose reconstruction, but sort of how we pull 

6 all that information together.

7 MEMBER FIELD: I think what has 

8 really been helpful to me is just 

9 understanding the process better. That has 

10 been a big help.

11 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes, Brad?

12 MEMBER CLAWSON: I was just going 

13 to say, you know, from when I came in almost 

14 five years ago, what I have seen in changes in 

15 the dose reconstruction stuff -- it is real 

16 hard to be able to say, well, we change this 

17 and this and this. There's been lots of 

18 little things that have come up about it, like 

19 different Work Groups and so forth, tracking 

20 what has been done.

21 I think we have made really -- I 

22 think we have made a substantial difference, 
 

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1 and I think we have made it a lot better. But 

2 I also agree with Paul that we need to look at 

3 it as we have made these changes; now do we 

4 need maybe to look at it from a little bit of 

5 a different perspective?

6 To tell you the truth, I really 

7 feel personally that it has made a lot of 

8 difference, and it has been good for me to 

9 understand how the process actually really has 

10 worked.

11 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Any other 

12 comments? Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. 

13 Wanda, Procedures?

14 MEMBER MUNN: This will be a lot 

15 shorter and much less detailed than that, 

16 primarily because there has been no change at 

17 all in what has transpired since our 

18 teleconference, at which time I reported 

19 briefly on where we were.

20 Procedures is at an interesting 

21 point, because most of the Technical Basis 

22 Documents and most of the crucial procedures 
 

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1 that are necessary for the operations that we 

2 have, have already been done, published, and 

3 are well underway, with the action items that 

4 result from the scrutiny that is given them.

5 As a result, a large number of the 

6 action items that still remain in our database 

7 are attached to documents or activities which 

8 are no longer as pertinent as they once were. 

9 That is to say, the documents have been 

10 superseded or procedures have already been 

11 changed.

12 That being the case, we have the 

13 problem that has been discussed here quite 

14 extensively with regard to resource 

15 management, what we can do with what we have. 

16 The pressures on our resources have made it 

17 necessary for us to begin to extend the time 

18 between our meetings. 

19 We no longer meet on a very 

20 regular basis every six weeks or so. It just 

21 simply is necessary for us to have more time 

22 to allow both the agency and our contractor to 
 

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1 provide the materials that they need, because 

2 of the demands on their time. 

3 We are making significant 

4 advances, I believe, with respect to our 

5 electronic database. We will have, we hope, 

6 by our next meeting one or two additional 

7 items which we feel crucial for the operation 

8 of the Subcommittee itself incorporated into 

9 that database.

10 With any luck at all, in the next 

11 very few weeks, we will be issuing our draft 

12 agenda and action item for our upcoming 

13 meeting, the next one of which will be April 

14 11th. 

15 I have no further information to 

16 provide unless someone has questions. 

17 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Questions for 

18 Wanda? MEMBER MUNN: Thank you.

19 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Brookhaven?

20 MEMBER BEACH: You are going to be 

21 hearing from us tomorrow --

22 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: This is a 
 

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1 preview, yes.

2 MEMBER BEACH: -- on the 83.14. 

3 So I am not going to go over the Work Group 

4 recommendations or anything on that today. I 

5 am assuming we will address that tomorrow. 

6 However, we had a meeting on February 21st. 

7 Part of our discussion was on the 

8 83.14. The other part of it was on -- we met 

9 last year. I believe it was in January of 

10 2011. We had 13 open action items from the ER 

11 matrix. So we have asked NIOSH to look at 

12 those and send out a report to the Work Group 

13 on those open items to determine where they 

14 still fall within looking at the 83.14 that we 

15 are going to discuss tomorrow.

16 The other item we discussed is the 

17 Site Profile issues. We had a report, I 

18 believe, in 2009. We identified -- or SC&A 

19 identified 12 Site Profile issues, and so we 

20 have asked NIOSH to take a look at part of 

21 those.

22 Most of them actually fell to 
 

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1 NIOSH, and some of them to SC&A to actually 

2 review those and see again where they fall 

3 based on the 83.14, and that is where we are 

4 at now.

5 We are waiting for NIOSH to report 

6 back on their issues and decide when we can 

7 meet again in the future. So, hopefully, what 

8 did you say, Wanda, in the next six months?

9 MEMBER MUNN: I would think so, 

10 based on our expectations of the agency and 

11 the contractor.

12 MEMBER BEACH: So while we have an 

13 83.14 before us, we do have more work that the 

14 Work Group is still ready to complete.

15 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Questions for 

16 Josie? Thank you. Fernald? I guess, again, 

17 a preview.

18 MEMBER CLAWSON: We met on 

19 February 9th and, as many of you have seen, we 

20 have sent out numerous reading materials for 

21 you to review.

22 We are coming to an end with 
 

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1 Fernald, and this is why we have sent out --

2 we hope. Okay, we are trying to come to an end 

3 with Fernald. Part of the issue is it is a 

4 very difficult site, and we are working 

5 through it.

6 At the last meeting, some of the 

7 information really didn't get to the Work 

8 Group in time to be able to have either side 

9 to be able to review it again. That was on 

10 both sides, but those papers have been sent 

11 out to you for you to be able to review, and 

12 personally, I think you will enjoy it 

13 tomorrow, but it is -- in my sentiments, it is 

14 coming to an end. You'll enjoy it.

15 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: The end is near. 

16 The end of something is near.

17 Hanford is mine. I'll do that and 

18 I will probably ask Arjun to help me a little 

19 bit on this one. We are juggling -- there is 

20 some ongoing work that NIOSH is doing out at 

21 Hanford. We have sort of a 

22 combined SEC that we have been working on that 
 

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1 we have been in the process of updating 

2 information on, and then we have a new, 

3 relatively newer SEC that we have been working 

4 on, and recently completed some interviews out 

5 there. I don't know if they have been sort of 

6 cleared yet or where those stand, but we are 

7 expecting we will do a Work Group meeting 

8 coming up, I think, in the next month or two, 

9 certainly before the June meeting, and be able 

10 to report back then on where we are. It is 

11 juggling a lot of schedules here. 

12 Is that a fair assessment, Arjun?

13 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes, Dr. Melius, 

14 that is a fair assessment. We interviewed the 

15 petitioner and his representative on the SEC 

16 155, and the petitioner, as you know, asked us 

17 to review certain documents, some of which you 

18 forwarded to me.

19 In reviewing that and preparing 

20 for this meeting, I believe that we should try 

21 to contact one of the auditors who reviewed 

22 bioassay information, and I will try to find 
 

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1 out that contact information. I just did that 

2 in preparation for this meeting. So I haven't 

3 had time to do that. But I am reasonably 

4 confident that we should be able to have 

5 sufficient information for a Work Group 

6 meeting.

7 The report is pretty much done 

8 except for the integration of the interviews 

9 into the report.

10 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Okay, good. 

11 Yes?

12 MR. RUTHERFORD: Yes, Dr. Melius. 

13 I wanted to add, too, since you are on 

14 Hanford, we are going to be -- an 83.14 will 

15 be moving forward with Hanford as well for the 

16 June meeting.

17 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Okay. Do you 

18 know when that report will come out? I am 

19 just trying to think in terms of scheduling.

20 MR. RUTHERFORD: May.

21 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: May? Okay. For 

22 those of you who are on the Hanford Work Group 
 

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1 with me, we may plan on two meetings, 

2 depending on -- trying to figure out the 

3 workload and trying to keep some of these 

4 issues separated, because it is a fair amount 

5 of stuff to go over, I believe. Good. Okay. 

6 Idaho?

7 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: Idaho? There 

8 is some updates being worked on.

9 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: And when LANL 

10 comes up, I will look at you.

11 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: On some of the 

12 documents, the TBD documents, there has been 

13 some updating done. When that will be done is 

14 up in the air.

15 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Well, what do we 

16 have on the schedule for -- have you had a 

17 chance to look at the schedule that NIOSH put 

18 out?

19 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: Yes. It is the 

20 end of March.

21 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Okay, in March. 

22 So you think, if we get that in March -- what 
 

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1 is your thinking in terms of response to that?

2 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: Probably latter 

3 part of May or so.

4 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Okay, thanks. 

5 Any questions on Idaho? The K-25 Work Group?

6 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: Gaseous 

7 Diffusion Plants?

8 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I call it the K9 25. I'm sorry. 

10 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: Yes, we met, 

11 and we have actually closed quite a few of the 

12 items. So we do need to get back together and 

13 finish it out. We have made a lot of progress 

14 there.

15 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Okay. I think, 

16 for these which are -- again, it is their Site 

17 Profile reviews. I think when you are getting 

18 ready to close out or close to it, it probably 

19 would be good to have a presentation to the 

20 Board, because, really, it should be the Board 

21 closing out these issues, not just the Work 

22 Group, and we tend to focus so much on the SEC 
 

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1 portions of them that we don't -- we tend to 

2 put off Site Profile issues, but since you are 

3 making progress on these, I think it would be 

4 helpful if you can plan on that when you are 

5 ready. Thank you.

6 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: I'll make sure 

7 next time there's something to present.

8 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Well, no. Not 

9 here. I think we will set some time aside at a 

10 Board meeting between NIOSH, SC&A and the Work 

11 Group. We should spend some time on them, and 

12 make sure there aren't issues that people have 

13 questions about. I actually think it helps 

14 the other Work Groups also in terms of dealing 

15 with these.

16 Lawrence Berkeley -- I think we 

17 have a presentation coming up. So, Paul, I 

18 don't think we need to say much. Linde? 

19 MEMBER ROESSLER: The Linde Work 

20 Group has finished its SEC business, and now 

21 we are working on TBD issues. We have 

22 resolved everything except those that are 
 

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1 related to the utility tunnels at Linde.

2 Our big questions that we are 

3 trying to address is when were they built and 

4 what should the occupancy factors be for them. 

5 The Work Group looked at some construction 

6 drawings at our face to face meeting on 

7 January 30th, and then later these drawings 

8 were looked at in detail by SC&A and the 

9 claimant representative. Then we had a 

10 teleconference to discuss this on February 

11 15th.

12 We think these diagrams establish 

13 the dates as to what tunnels were there at 

14 certain times. However, we want to really 

15 make sure of this. So we are trying to gather 

16 some of the Linde workers for a meeting in 

17 Buffalo, and interested parties will be there, 

18 so that they can look at them, and we can have 

19 a discussion about the tunnels.

20 So we hope to have this set up. I 

21 don't think it is set up yet, but we hope to 

22 have this meeting with the workers in Buffalo.
 

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1 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: It has been a 

2 mild winter in Buffalo.

3 MEMBER ROESSLER: Yes, so far. It 

4 was so far in Minnesota, too, and now it is 

5 getting dumped on. 

6 MEMBER MUNN: Winter isn't over.

7 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: It is not quite 

8 over with. You are right. Good. Los Alamos? 

9 I think we talked a little bit about that 

10 earlier. I guess I am trying to understand 

11 the schedule now if NIOSH gets this additional 

12 information. You are nodding your head, Jim -

13 - or LaVon. I am not sure who is -- I am just 

14 concerned. We are going to be out there in 

15 June. We are going to be on the spot.

16 DR. NETON: Yes. I have an update 

17 from Greg Macievic, who is our point of 

18 contact for Los Alamos review. They are out 

19 there, as you know, right now doing a data 

20 capture effort. When they finish this data 

21 capture effort, they feel that they will be 

22 able to finish their review. It should answer 
 

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1 most of the questions they have.

2 They are tentatively looking at 

3 sometime around the third week of April for a 

4 Work Group meeting.

5 MEMBER GRIFFON: Okay. That is an 

6 update from what I had. I guess one concern 

7 we have is there was a long delay, and we 

8 heard about that earlier, with getting access 

9 to the documents. I think that the initial 

10 sort of request was viewed from the site 

11 standpoint as being too broad.

12 Apparently, they had a conference 

13 call, and might have come to terms on this. I 

14 am not sure SC&A was in that loop. I don't 

15 think they were. So I am not sure what they 

16 are going to come out of this data capture 

17 effort with and whether it is really going to 

18 answer all the questions, but we have the same 

19 concern, that we want to have a meeting far 

20 enough in advance of the June meeting to be 

21 able to say something in the June meeting.

22 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Is there -- on 
 

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1 the top of my head, but tell me if it is a bad 

2 idea. But is there some way we can put SC&A 

3 in touch with NIOSH sooner rather than later 

4 to make sure that the information we are 

5 getting is as complete for everybody as 

6 possible?

7 There is always -- you don't know 

8 until you have seen and interpreted. So I 

9 don't want to overdo it, but I just hate to 

10 get to the end of April or the report comes 

11 out, and say, well, we don't have this 

12 information.

13 DR. NETON: Right. I have a 

14 further note from Greg that says he has 

15 notified SC&A of these data capture efforts, 

16 and that he will send them responses to the 

17 action items as they finish them, and not to 

18 wait until just before the Work Group meeting 

19 to dump them on them.

20 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Okay. So 

21 essentially, the White Paper.

22 DR. NETON: As we complete them, 
 

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1 they will be trickled over, I guess, as 

2 opposed to having them dumped on in a whole 

3 series of things.

4 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Joe is behind 

5 you.

6 MR. FITZGERALD: I am right behind 

7 you. Greg and I have been in contact, and I 

8 certainly empathize with him in terms of 

9 trying to get anything quickly out at the lab, 

10 but what we are going to be doing -- and I 

11 have been there before. What we have been 

12 doing is, in real time, as he gets 

13 information, he is going to be in contact with 

14 me, and we are going to try to do this as much 

15 as possible in parallel.

16 So we are not going to do one of 

17 these serial things. So we are going to try 

18 to make up some time and push this thing 

19 along.

20 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Okay, excellent. 

21 Appreciate it. Joe, we noticed you smiling 

22 during the earlier discussions of DOE, when we 
 

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1 were talking about Los Alamos.

2 MR. FITZGERALD: I have been where 

3 Greg is now, and trying from a Headquarters 

4 standpoint to move a national lab is always 

5 interesting.

6 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: It is 

7 challenging, to put it politely. Good.

8 MEMBER GRIFFON: Third week in 

9 April, hopefully.

10 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes. Mound. 

11 Mound will be our last one.

12 MEMBER BEACH: Mound last met on 

13 November 7, 2011, for a Work Group meeting. 

14 We then met in Germantown on January 6th. 

15 There are three issues that we are 

16 still working on: radon; data adequacy and 

17 completeness; and tritides. The same three 

18 issues we have been working on for the past 

19 year. There are some small pieces of each one 

20 of those that the Work Group is waiting for 

21 White Papers from NIOSH and SC&A.

22 On the radon issue, we are looking 
 

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1 at drawings right now between R/SW. There are 

2 some parts within data adequacy and 

3 completeness that we are waiting for NIOSH. A 

4 thorium issue is one of them, and then some 

5 earlier time periods.

6 The other issue, the tritides, 

7 SC&A does have a White Paper that is due to 

8 the Work Group mid-March, and I understand 

9 from Joe that we should have that within the 

10 next couple of weeks.

11 Beyond that, our next Work Group 

12 meeting is scheduled for April 10th, and I do 

13 hope to have all those pieces put together so 

14 we can give a full report at our June face to 

15 face Board meeting. 

16 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Okay. And 

17 resolved?

18 MEMBER BEACH: Yes, and resolved. 

19 That is what we are shooting for.

20 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: You may convince 

21 us to spend three days in Santa Fe. 

22 We will come back to some further 
 

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1 Work Group and -- we have done our 

2 Subcommittee, so further Work Group reports 

3 tomorrow.

4 We have a presentation now. This 

5 is Sam Glover day, I guess, here. Hangar 481.

6 Don't worry, LaVon. We haven't 

7 forgotten about you. 

8 DR. GLOVER: Are we ready?

9 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: We are ready, if 

10 you are, yes.

11 DR. GLOVER: We have it up. I 

12 believe the petitioner has provided us also a 

13 presentation they would like to provide, and 

14 we have that on a memory stick that we will 

15 load when you guys are ready. 

16 I am going to present just a brief 

17 update. We have presented Hangar 481 several 

18 times, but just to kind of refresh everybody's 

19 memory, it has been a little while. 

20 This is Hangar 481. It was also 

21 known as Ross Aviation to some folks who were 

22 -- it was a company that did some of this 
 

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1 work. We are just going to very briefly walk 

2 through some of this, if it responds. I am 

3 afraid if I push the process, I will break 

4 something.

5 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Talk slow.

6 DR. GLOVER: Talk slowly. That, 

7 with the encrypted drive in at the same time 

8 is making it very slow. There we go. Okay.

9 Very briefly, Hangar 481 is 

10 located at Kirtland Air Force Base in 

11 Albuquerque. Ross Aviation operated Hangar 

12 481 during the covered period. They actually 

13 began around 1970 or even before that, and 

14 they continued much later, but I will say that 

15 the type of contract -- the covered period is 

16 determined to be a fairly narrow time frame --

17 provided air transportation of personnel and 

18 equipment as using government owned aircraft 

19 at government owned facilities, especially 

20 with Department of Energy operations at Sandia 

21 National Laboratories as well as others.

22 They transported equipment, 
 

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1 including packages, including radioactive 

2 materials associated with the atomic weapons 

3 program.

4 This petition was received 

5 February 27, 2009, and it is an 83.13. 

6 September 8, 2009, it qualified. December 18, 

7 2009, an Evaluation Report was issued. We 

8 presented at the February 2010 Advisory Board 

9 meeting. 

10 A delay was requested at that 

11 time, by the petitioner, until Freedom of 

12 Information Act material could be provided to 

13 him. By July 2010, that FOIA had been 

14 completed, both by DOE and NIOSH. September 

15 23, 2010, a revised Evaluation Report was 

16 issued. It was issued with a fairly minor 

17 change in that we had gotten a picture wrong. 

18 So we chose to go ahead and update it at that 

19 time.

20 We re-presented at that time to 

21 the Advisory Board meeting for the November 

22 2010. On November 3, 2010, the petitioner 
 

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1 submitted a FOIA request for information that 

2 was not in NIOSH's possession at the time. So 

3 we can't respond, obviously, to information 

4 that is not in our possession.

5 January 21, 2011, the FOIA Office 

6 responded to the November 3rd request, 

7 explaining the material will not be in our 

8 possession for some time as they are being 

9 reviewed by Department of Energy, and that a 

10 FOIA should be resubmitted in June of 2011.

11 In January 2011, NIOSH, 

12 petitioners, as well as other Members of the 

13 Board got a very nice tour of Hangar 481 by 

14 Department of Energy and Office of Secure 

15 Transport. They walked us through the entire 

16 facility. I think in other cases I have shown 

17 some photos, and certainly provided those to 

18 the Board.

19 June 2011 the Office of Secure 

20 Transport responded to questions provided by 

21 both NIOSH as well as the petitioner. In 

22 August 2011 an addendum to the Evaluation 
 

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1 Report was issued for Hangar 481, and we re2 presented again in August 2011 at the Advisory 

3 Board meeting.

4 The petitioner requested an 

5 extension of the matter from the Board, so the 

6 FOIA request should be submitted. October 

7 2011 the petitioner submits an official FOIA 

8 request, and in November withdrew that FOIA 

9 request.

10 In February 2012, we provided a 

11 brief summary to the Advisory Board for your 

12 consideration. We believe that all concerns 

13 expressed by the Advisory Board in these 

14 various meetings have been addressed. We know 

15 of no open issue that the Advisory Board has 

16 raised.

17 Summary of the external dose 

18 feasibility. External dose records exist for 

19 many Ross Aviation personnel, and the REIRS 

20 reported data had been verified using Eberline 

21 data from 1990 to 1994. 

22 Data from the 1994 REIRS report 
 

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1 was found to be incorrectly entered into the 

2 database -- we had a disparity; it didn't make 

3 sense -- in which they actually had entered 

4 the lifetime total instead of the annual dose. 

5 That has been corrected in this addendum, and 

6 the Department of Energy was notified as part 

7 of that.

8 Individual results from these 

9 records. We used the highest dose received to 

10 estimate dose for all personnel at Ross 

11 Aviation. I didn't show the graph in this and 

12 go back to that. The slides are available, 

13 but that is in the order of around 70 millirem 

14 a year, is the highest dose received in any 

15 one year, and that is irrespective of where 

16 they were or what activity. 

17 There are things that are done on 

18 the hot pads, and there are some different 

19 discussions that have occurred, but there was 

20 a fairly significant amount who were 

21 monitored, including people who had 

22 nondestructive testing analysis. We used 
 

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1 those results for everyone.

2 So we did not get data from 1996. 

3 There was like a one month or one and a half 

4 month period which was not covered. In that 

5 case, we are going to use the highest annual 

6 dose from previous years for that two-month 

7 period. So again, we are using the highest 

8 dose received in the entire year previously to 

9 bound any external dose for all employees.

10 The circumstances and locations 

11 related to a pilot's locker in radiographic 

12 activities which are done off-hours. There is 

13 a nondestructive testing of the planes that 

14 was done off-hours at Hangar 481. 

15 We believe that -- the subsequent 

16 discussion is that where the lockers are, it 

17 is near the plane. There was an elevated 

18 reading that was described, and that the pilot 

19 left the badge in the locker during the 

20 nondestructive testing analysis.

21 For this facility, we don't really 

22 see there is any credible potential for 
 

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1 neutron exposures. Potential doses from off2 hour radiographic testing would have been 

3 included in the reported personal monitoring 

4 data. 

5 The ambient environmental external 

6 doses are included by using the existing 

7 personal monitoring. So we don't have to --

8 since we are using that for everyone, there is 

9 no reason to have an environmental external 

10 dose model. X-ray examinations for personnel 

11 are not included because medical X-rays were 

12 not performed on site at Hangar 481.

13 Regarding internal dose 

14 feasibility, we believe no radioactivity was 

15 stored or handled at Hangar 481. Radioactive 

16 materials that were handled by workers at 

17 Hangar 481 were in sealed Department of 

18 Transportation compliant containers, and 

19 monitored in accordance with DOT regulations 

20 to verify radiation and contamination levels.

21 We have results, certainly not of

22 all of those, but of available radiological 
 

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1 surveys performed on these packages, and 

2 transport aircraft support this premise. So 

3 the records that are available to us support 

4 that it was under control. Whether that 

5 happened in the hangar or on a hot pad, it 

6 seems that the facility and the operations 

7 were controlled.

8 There was no bioassay. There is 

9 no bioassay program for these people. There 

10 was no wipe data taken, other than what Sandia 

11 -- or before it would have come on site, you 

12 know, the facility who would have done it. So 

13 we have no records other than what Sandia 

14 generated, but not -- there are records of the 

15 plane being surveyed annually or at some 

16 infrequent basis, but they also came up 

17 without any contamination.

18 So based on available information 

19 on the radiological program and potential for 

20 internal exposure sources, NIOSH concludes 

21 that internal radiological exposures to Ross 

22 Aviation employees resulting from services 
 

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1 rendered for the DOE at Hangar 481 are 

2 unlikely to have occurred.

3 Sandia National Laboratory, being 

4 an adjacent facility, was used to provide a 

5 bounding estimate of the dose from ambient 

6 environmental internal dose during this 

7 period. Sandia does not have a large ambient 

8 environmental dose. However, we felt that, it 

9 being co-located in the same area, it would be 

10 an appropriate bounding evaluation.

11 So the summary is that we believe 

12 internal and external for this time period, 

13 beta gamma, occupational medical X-rays as 

14 well as internal is feasible.

15 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Questions for 

16 Sam. Yes, Bill.

17 MEMBER FIELD: Sam, you mentioned 

18 there were surveys done in the containers on 

19 the outside for contamination.

20 DR. GLOVER: Yes, sir.

21 MEMBER FIELD: Were you able to 

22 see any of those reports? I'm just wondering 
 

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1 how they were done. Do you know if they were 

2 -- because you said there was no swipe data.

3 DR. GLOVER: It would have been, 

4 as they left Sandia, we have records showing 

5 what their wipes were as it was transported 

6 off site.

7 MEMBER FIELD: Okay. So you have 

8 wipes. Did you see any evidence of 

9 contamination?

10 DR. GLOVER: The results that I 

11 recall and have seen -- I haven't looked at 

12 them in the last -- very shortly, but 

13 everything seemed to be compliant. You know, 

14 it wouldn't have been able to get off site. 

15 Sandia had to meet the requirements to get it 

16 off the facility.

17 MEMBER FIELD: Just wanted to 

18 check. CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Any 

19 other? Yes, Brad?

20 MEMBER CLAWSON: I think Sam 

21 already knows what my issue is. It is because 

22 of the law that we can only claim Hangar 481. 
 

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1 Is that correct? Because it is a facility?

2 Here is my issue. These planes 

3 were owned by DOE. They flew for DOE, and we 

4 can't claim that because it is not a facility.

5 DR. GLOVER: And what you are 

6 talking about is when they are in the flights, 

7 if there were other exposures that occurred as 

8 they traveled to other countries or other 

9 activities. It is really when they are at 

10 Hangar 481 is when it is at the covered 

11 facility. Otherwise, they would be under the 

12 courier effect, like you had for Savannah 

13 River. So that is correct. But the pilots 

14 were badged, and their results are being used 

15 as part of our analysis. So we haven't tried 

16 to parse that.

17 MEMBER CLAWSON: Okay, because you 

18 said about the swipe data on the containers 

19 and so forth. Did they have a dose rate on 

20 those containers, too, along with that swipe 

21 information?

22 DR. GLOVER: It would have had an 
 

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1 external dose rate registered on it. That is 

2 correct.

3 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Paul?

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: Just a 

5 technicality. You say you can reconstruct 

6 internal dose -- yes, internal -- that you can 

7 reconstruct it. In reality, it is not 

8 applicable, I think, is more correct, because 

9 you are not going to reconstruct any, are you?

10 DR. GLOVER: We are assigning zero 

11 except that we are assigning ambient dose from 

12 the site.

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: I got you.

14 DR. GLOVER Yes, sir.

15 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Any other Board 

16 Member questions? I believe that we may have 

17 the petitioner or petitioner representative on 

18 the line.

19 MR. ARMIJO: Yes, that is correct. 

20 This is Roberto Armijo.

21 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Okay. Sir, we 

22 have received your written communication to 
 

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1 the Board, and that has been distributed to 

2 all of the Board Members. So if you wish to 

3 speak and summarize that or I don't know if 

4 there are other points that you would like to 

5 make, go ahead.

6 MR. ARMIJO: Yes, and I am here at 

7 my office location with the petitioner, 

8 [Identifying information redacted], and we did 

9 submit a letter to the Board on February 22nd 

10 after receipt of notification that this 

11 meeting would be held.

12 Earlier today I emailed a 

13 PowerPoint presentation to Dr. Glover and Mr. 

14 Kinman which, I understand, is on their 

15 computer, and they may have transferred that 

16 to the folks that are there in attendance.

17 I apologize that resources 

18 wouldn't allow me to be present, but if that 

19 presentation is available and could be somehow 

20 displayed, it may -- I would like to just 

21 simply walk through it, and maybe that would 

22 help to underscore the points that we tried to 
 

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1 make in the letter submission.

2 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: That would be 

3 fine, and that presentation is now up, but our 

4 computer here is a little slow, but I think it 

5 should -- do you want to move it forward? 

6 Okay, we are okay. So go ahead. We are on 

7 the title slide now.

8 MR. ARMIJO: Okay. What I will do 

9 then is I will just simply ask if we move to 

10 each slide, and I will try to move through the 

11 first several of these quickly because it 

12 pretty much duplicates what Dr. Glover just 

13 said. But I think it is important to keep 

14 some of the points in mind. So I would like 

15 to go through them in sequence.

16 So if we go to the second slide, 

17 the Hanger 481 site history, it is indeed 

18 located on Kirtland Air Force Base here in 

19 Albuquerque, and it has been located there 

20 since 1984. 

21 Dr. Glover pointed out that Ross 

22 Aviation had been in operation all the way 
 

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1 back to 1970 and possibly before, and indeed 

2 there are contracts with DOE or its 

3 predecessors all the way back to that time 

4 that Dr. Glover was good enough to locate and 

5 share with us early on.

6 The 1984 date, though, would be 

7 when the facility was moved to Kirtland Air 

8 Force Base, and although we don't know all the 

9 reasons for that, I believe that that was due, 

10 in part, to security concerns that might be 

11 better addressed on the Air Force Base than at 

12 the prior location which was located at the 

13 west end of the -- generally, the west end of 

14 the normal airport here in Albuquerque.

15 Ross Aviation actually conducted 

16 its operations and they were based out of this 

17 Hangar 481 during the entire period we are 

18 talking about and even before, and through 

19 this entire period, of course, as I think it 

20 is well understood, they had contractual 

21 agreements with DOE.

22 It served as the base of 
 

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1 operations for this air transportation of 

2 personnel, equipment, and radioactive 

3 materials associated with the atomic weapons 

4 program. 

5 If we can move to the third slide. 

6 Dr. Glover, I think, went ahead and 

7 summarized these dates. This SEC petition has 

8 been on file since February of 2009. It 

9 actually qualified for evaluation in September 

10 of 2009, and an Evaluation Report was issued 

11 fairly promptly after that in December of 

12 2009.

13 We did attend or participate in a 

14 hearing conducted on February 10th of 2010, 

15 and we did request the opportunity to present 

16 a FOIA request at that time to obtain 

17 information, as Dr. Glover indicated really 

18 wasn't available.

19 September 10th of 2010, there was 

20 a revised Evaluation Report issued with an 

21 updated photo, and that probably would be the 

22 photo of the hangar over on Hangar Air Force 
 

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1 Base 481. The Evaluation Report was 

2 presented, as shown on Slide 4, at a meeting 

3 in November 2010, and at that time it was 

4 noted that there was some information that 

5 still was not available and needed to be 

6 available to really fully review what was 

7 happening with this petition.

8 Moving to Slide 5, January 21st of 

9 2011, the FOIA Office of the Center for 

10 Disease Control reportedly responded that the 

11 November 3rd request for information made by 

12 NIOSH could not really be in their possession 

13 until the materials were reviewed by the 

14 Department of Energy, and at that time it was 

15 expected that those materials, as far as the 

16 review is concerned, would not be really 

17 available until June of 2011.

18 So in this instance, the 

19 petitioner has been trying to stay with the 

20 process, but this process has been ongoing 

21 and, as time has gone by, fairly significant 

22 volumes of documentation were located, and 
 

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1 then there needed to be time to digest the 

2 information and I think, as will be shown in 

3 my presentation, in spite of the information 

4 that has been located to date, there is still 

5 more to be done.

6 Now in January of 2011, NIOSH 

7 invited myself and [Identifying information 

8 redacted] to attend a tour of Hangar 481 that 

9 was sponsored, as Dr. Glover said. We were 

10 given the opportunity to view things, and Dr. 

11 Glover took numerous pictures, including 

12 pictures of the outbuildings that had warnings 

13 on them of various types of toxic materials 

14 that may be present or had been present in the 

15 past, and containing a significant amount of 

16 industrial type maintenance equipment that 

17 either was present or that there was evidence 

18 of its presence in the past.

19 Those photographs, I think, have 

20 been shared with the Board, and we were 

21 cautioned, although we would turn in 

22 questions, that the -- we were cautioned about 
 

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1 security concerns related to observations and 

2 information, which we fully respected, and 

3 appreciated the opportunity to see what was 

4 present.

5 Time passed, and in June, on Slide 

6 6, responses were reportedly provided by the 

7 Office of Secure Transport to NIOSH, which 

8 then precipitated in August of 2011 the 

9 addendum to the Evaluation Report for Hangar 

10 487.

11 It happened fairly close to the 

12 Advisory Board meeting scheduled in August, 

13 and we had access to that addendum in August, 

14 and the Evaluation Report was presented to the 

15 Advisory Board recommending basically to deny 

16 our petition at that time.

17 Turning to Slide 7, we did request 

18 an extension of the matter from the Board so 

19 that a FOIA request could be submitted, and it 

20 took us a while to kind of figure out what we 

21 were doing, but in October of 2011 we did 

22 submit an official FOIA request.
 

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1 Fairly promptly after that FOIA 

2 request, which basically went through the list 

3 of assertions and representations that were 

4 made in the August report, we were informed by 

5 the U.S. Department of Health and Human 

6 Services, Public Health Service, Centers of 

7 Disease Control, CDC, that the petitioner was 

8 and is being classified as a Category 1 

9 requester and was, or will -- was to be 

10 charged for duplication, search time, and 

11 review time.

12 As a result of discussions on page 

13 8, Slide 8, we were informed by a NIOSH 

14 representative that our FOIA requests were 

15 going to require extensive efforts to locate 

16 responsive information and may entail the 

17 compilation of documentation estimated to be 

18 in the range of 25,000 pages.

19 As noted in the letter that I 

20 turned in as an attachment to the submission 

21 we made on February 22nd, our resources and 

22 what is available to myself in representation 
 

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1 of the individual who happens to be the 

2 petitioner in this case simply did not include 

3 a budget for that type of a process. 

4 In my mind, I felt that it 

5 wouldn't be fair to say, well, go ahead and do 

6 that, and then get a bill and say, well, we 

7 can't and won't pay that, and in honesty and 

8 in due respect of what may have been an over9 request, we withdrew the petition because of 

10 economic reasons, and I feel we were forced to 

11 do that.

12 We felt that there indeed was 

13 documentation we needed to review in order to 

14 verify the accuracy of the statements that 

15 were made by the OST to NIOSH, and we are not 

16 questioning the honesty of it, but I think, as 

17 some of the questions that have just been 

18 posed allude to, there is a need to know that 

19 indeed there were the different types of 

20 sweeps and information done to satisfy the 

21 concern that the information available was 

22 indeed genuine, accurate, and reliable to base 
 

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1 a decision on that there was sufficient 

2 evidence available to determine what the dose 

3 exposures may have been of the workers at 

4 Hangar 481.

5 Here, even though I think that the 

6 operations of Ross Aviation were broader than 

7 just the hangar building, and our site 

8 inspection indicated that the flight lines and 

9 outbuildings and so forth and the like 

10 contemplated a larger area, we are limited --

11 unfortunately, the way this was set up as far 

12 as a site -- to the building itself.

13 Moving to Slide Number 9, insofar 

14 as the petition overview is concerned, NIOSH 

15 provides now a brief summary to the Advisory 

16 Board for your consideration. Now they state 

17 that they believe that the concerns expressed 

18 by the Advisory Board have been addressed, but 

19 respectfully, the petitioner believes that the 

20 concerns expressed by the Advisory Board and 

21 the views held by the petitioner have not yet 

22 been addressed.
 

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1 Slide Number 10 then gets to the 

2 summary of the petitioner's concerns. I have 

3 tried to crystallize this down to some points 

4 that I think need to be made. There is other 

5 details, I think, that are also important.

6 The U.S. Department of Labor is 

7 the agency, as shown on Slide 10, that has the 

8 responsibility for the processing and 

9 adjudication, if you will, of claims under the 

10 Energy Employees Occupational Illness 

11 Compensation Program Act. It is a mouthful, 

12 and I will just call it the Act.

13 Those records reflect a total of 

14 nine unique individual workers at Hangar 481 

15 have actually filed 16 cases under the Act, 

16 and we believe that that is significant. 

17 The DOL statistics also show that 

18 one Hangar 481 worker has been compensated 

19 under Part B of the Act. Now we recognize 

20 that there may be plenty of people that work 

21 in different places, and in support of the 

22 letter dated February 21st we attached a DOL 
 

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1 summary sheet that shows the number of claims 

2 filed and that, in fact, one person at Hangar 

3 481 was able to establish eligibility under 

4 Part B.

5 As I believe most of the Advisory 

6 Board Members are aware, the Part B claims are 

7 primarily claims based upon radiation 

8 exposure. I would contend, and the petitioner 

9 would contend that the mere existence of nine 

10 cases, presumably of cancer -- I am 

11 specifically involved with three former 

12 employees of Ross Aviation where cancer is the 

13 condition -- suggests that certainly a 

14 suspicion that there would be radiation 

15 exposure in the workplace; and the fact that 

16 one of those claims has actually been 

17 adjudicated and compensated would seem to 

18 underscore the inference that we have that the 

19 existence of those claims would certainly 

20 suggest that there is an issue of potential 

21 exposure.

22 Turning to Slide Number 11 to 
 

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1 continue with the petitioner's concerns, the 

2 petitioner presented two statements of Hangar 

3 481 workers that deliveries of packages 

4 believed to contain radioactive materials were 

5 made to the flight line at Hangar 481 by 

6 guards and badged personnel from Sandia 

7 National Labs to be loaded and stowed on 

8 aircraft for transport, and these statements 

9 differ significantly with OST's statements to 

10 NIOSH that such deliveries were never made to 

11 the hangar location.

12 Turning to Slide 12. And we don't 

13 know who those persons are or what the basis 

14 for the OST assertions are that these packages 

15 were never delivered to the flight line. 

16 Given the insistence on the fact 

17 that the radioactive materials would have been 

18 always loaded and stowed at the hot pads, when 

19 there are two former workers who have provided

20 clear statements, and again copies of those 

21 are in the submission of February 22, 2012, 

22 seems to be an inconsistency by itself that 
 

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1 would mandate further investigations of what 

2 was going on at Hangar 481.

3 The petitioners question the OST 

4 position also that deliveries to the flight 

5 line adjacent to the Hangar 481, as opposed to 

6 the hot pads, would have been a security 

7 violation. Harkening back to the earlier 

8 history of Ross Aviation activities that were 

9 conducted out of that other place at the west 

10 end of the airport, these activities were 

11 moved to Hangar 481 in the year 1984, and from 

12 that time forward that was the base of 

13 operations on Kirtland Air Force Base.

14 I would question why there would 

15 be, quote, "a security violation," since all 

16 three areas, the two hot pads and the Air 

17 Force Base hangar, were all three on the Air 

18 Force Base.

19 One of the things that we asked 

20 for would be information to back up that 

21 statement that there would have been a 

22 security violation. If, as has been proposed 
 

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1 by OST, there was a security violation to have 

2 delivered these packages to the flight line at 

3 the hangar as opposed to the hot pads, then I 

4 think that it makes their position on exposure 

5 suspect, if there was indeed that security 

6 violation.

7 I don't say that there was and 

8 don't know one way or the other whether there 

9 was. All I know is that two former workers of 

10 Hangar 481 said that they did load and store 

11 guarded packages onto airplanes on the flight 

12 line adjacent to Hangar 481 and not at the hot 

13 pads. And one of the statements that we 

14 turned in indicated that, generally, 

15 explosives would be loaded at the hot pads, 

16 but that the radioactive packages would be 

17 delivered to the airplanes on the flight line.

18 Obviously, it can't be both ways, 

19 and if the people we talked to are correct, I 

20 think that that does raise a serious question 

21 that needs further inquiry before an adverse 

22 action would be taken concerning the 
 

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1 petitioner's concerns and petition.

2 Turning to the Slide 13. The 

3 petitioner also questions OST position that 

4 deliveries to the flight line never occurred 

5 because of the absence of Ross Aviation 

6 records or other disclosed records to support 

7 that position or assertion.

8 One of the documents that we 

9 attached to the letter of February 22nd was an 

10 oral interview, unsworn, of a former employee 

11 of Ross Aviation who reports, I believe, that 

12 in the year 2008 after Ross had lost its 

13 contract, he observed the Ross personnel 

14 shredding and destroying the records of Ross's 

15 operations. And when asked why they were 

16 doing that, in the statement obtained by NIOSH 

17 and provided to us in one of the earlier 

18 productions of documents, and before the Board 

19 is an attachment to my letter, that employee 

20 said that he was told to mind his own 

21 business.

22 Now some of the contracts and the 
 

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1 documentation for this is attached to the 

2 affidavit of the worker identified in our 

3 February 22nd letter. It is in the affidavit 

4 which is part of the file, and the full text 

5 of which has been previously submitted as one 

6 of the attachments indicates documentation for 

7 our position, and those statements are 

8 reflected in basically an excerpt from the 

9 contracts that declared that those records or 

10 portions of those records were DOE property 

11 that would need to be surrendered to DOE or 

12 otherwise given authorization for disposition.

13 It has never been established 

14 whether those records were destroyed and 

15 shredded with the consent of DOE or in 

16 compliance with the contract declaring those 

17 portions of the records to be DOE property.

18 Continuing with the petition's 

19 concerns on page 14 -- and this is something 

20 that may not necessarily be in the record, but 

21 I needed to state it because it came to my 

22 attention. A former worker whose dose records 
 

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1 were provided to DOL in connection with the 

2 worker's pending claim under the Act included 

3 reported dose measurements that included a 

4 couple of measurements at Paducah on two of 

5 the specific flights.

6 It turned out that these two dates 

7 fell outside of the worker's time in service, 

8 which caused them concern of the accuracy of 

9 the reported dose information. 

10 The first of those dose reports 

11 that I am referring to was for the date of May 

12 [Identifying information redacted] of 1996, 

13 which as to this specific worker fell during a 

14 term when the worker was furloughed. The 

15 dates of furlough were May [Identifying 

16 information redacted] to June [Identifying 

17 information redacted] of 1996. The worker was 

18 not flying, and yet the dose records for that 

19 worker reflected the worker had been at 

20 Paducah, and there was a measurement of May 

21 [Identifying information redacted] of 1996.

22 The second of those dates was 
 

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1 September [Identifying information redacted] 

2 of 1996, and again that fell outside of the 

3 term of this worker's work, because the last 

4 day that that worker had worked for Ross 

5 Aviation was August [Identifying information 

6 redacted] of 1996, several weeks before the 

7 date of the reported dosage noted at Paducah.

8 These dose records would be good 

9 for this person because they would show 

10 additional exposure that may ultimately allow 

11 the recognition of that claim. The problem is 

12 that both of them fell outside of the dates 

13 that the worker actually was employed by Ross 

14 or would have had any way to be at those 

15 locations.

16 The significance of that for the 

17 purpose of the Special Exposure Cohort 

18 petition is that that information, I think, 

19 causes the petitioner to express concern as to 

20 the validity of the data itself. Again, 

21 nothing that I am saying is to criticize or to 

22 accuse anyone of any wrongdoing, but instead 
 

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1 it raises questions about the validity of the 

2 data that is being presented to NIOSH and then 

3 reported to this Board as the grounds to deny 

4 this petition.

5 Now moving on to Slide 15, one of 

6 the concerns that we have is that SEC 

7 petitioners are given the burden of proof, 

8 notwithstanding that former workers complied 

9 with privacy concerns and, in most cases, are 

10 really not in possession of documentation to 

11 support claims.

12 So in a way, petitioners like 

13 [Identifying information redacted] whose wife 

14 worked at Hangar 481 and who died of cancer 

15 after that employment, are on the outside 

16 looking in and trying to locate information 

17 that would not necessarily have been known to 

18 them and would have been improper for the 

19 worker to have revealed to them.

20 In addition, SEC petitioners are 

21 normal citizens, basically. Now I suspect 

22 that there may be some labor organizations 
 

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1 that can sponsor this type of effort, but 

2 normal citizens, I would contend, would 

3 typically lack the resources necessary to 

4 pursue all documentation needed in order to be 

5 in a position to fully respond to positions 

6 taken in opposition to the acceptance of their 

7 SEC petition, and these are some weaknesses of 

8 the system that cause us concern in that we 

9 know that everyone, including Dr. Glover, 

10 NIOSH, including the Members of this Board, 

11 want to do the right thing and, if there 

12 should be an SEC petition, it should be 

13 granted and, if not, then not. But it is kind 

14 of an unlevel playing field for a petitioner 

15 like my client to match up with the 

16 governmental entities that are producing the 

17 information and, in our view, would have kind 

18 of a split loyalty.

19 On the one hand, I think we are 

20 all proud of what our government does. We are 

21 all proud of what our agencies that we work 

22 for do, and we don't like to be in a position 
 

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1 of having to disclose information that may be 

2 contrary to our beliefs that everything was 

3 done right, and may very well have been. But 

4 then we also need to get information that 

5 would allow us to do the job this Board needs 

6 to do, and that is to determine if Special 

7 Cohort status is needed.

8 Turning to Slide 16. Although the 

9 OST identified reasons why they felt that 

10 certain dose reconstruction was unnecessary, 

11 it is uncontroverted that no area dosimetry 

12 was performed at Hangar 481. 

13 Likewise, no bioassay program was 

14 ever implemented at Hangar 481. No Ross 

15 Aviation facilities were monitored for 

16 contamination, and no radiation monitoring was 

17 ever performed inside -- was performed inside 

18 Hangar 481. Those admissions appear in 

19 NIOSH's presentations to this Advisory Board, 

20 and those admissions are made in the 

21 statements made to NIOSH by the OST. 

22 Petitioner would submit that, sure, 
 

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1 there may be dose badges or other pieces of 

2 information like the ambient background at 

3 Sandia Base located several kilometers away 

4 from this site that one might look at and say, 

5 well, we will just go ahead and use that 

6 information to bound or to estimate the doses; 

7 we can do that just fine, and we don't need a 

8 Special Exposure Cohort to do that.

9 On the other hand, the fact that 

10 there wasn't any dose construction done, the 

11 badged people went back to Sandia or got on 

12 airplanes and left. The few workers there at 

13 the base were there, and it is at the base 

14 that these nine claims under the Act for 

15 compensation exist. It is at the base of 

16 operations where my client's wife worked and 

17 where the other two clients were located for 

18 significant periods of time.

19 I would like to point out that the 

20 two persons who provided information in 

21 support of what we are trying to accomplish 

22 are distinguished people. One, a pilot with a 
 

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1 distinguished career who was given the 

2 responsibility of piloting dangerous material 

3 around the skies of the United States, and 

4 piloting extremely important personnel from 

5 place to place. These flights certainly were 

6 done by Ross, which had a very good record of 

7 flying, and certainly was a first rate flying 

8 service.

9 The second of these persons was a 

10 20-year employee who received two 

11 commendations for work in helping to construct 

12 the destructive testing mechanisms inside the 

13 hangar and working on the hangar doors to 

14 assure successful completion.

15 It is not in the record, but at 

16 the beginning of his claim, the Labor 

17 Department said they didn't even think he 

18 worked there, and in spite of that 20-year 

19 commendation and in spite of those two 

20 specific recognitions of a job well done.

21 Those are the people who have 

22 given us statements that the radioactive 
 

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1 materials were actually loaded on the flight 

2 line and, although there probably may have 

3 been some at the other locations, too, I think 

4 that that is the quality of the information 

5 that is there.

6 Also on this slide, I needed to 

7 mention a couple of other points that I didn't 

8 have an opportunity to put into the slide. 

9 One of the things that Dr. Glover asked about 

10 -- and I hope I can -- this is not revealing 

11 anything that would be improper -- was whether 

12 or not thorium based welding rods would have 

13 been implemented and used for the maintenance 

14 of these aircraft in the hangar building.

15 The documentation that we have 

16 presented from NIOSH indicates that the 

17 airplanes were indeed maintained in Hangar 

18 481, and the outbuildings adjacent to the 

19 Hangar 481 building that we observed in 

20 January of 2011 clearly were buildings that 

21 contained significant types of industrial and 

22 mechanical machinery and equipment for the use 
 

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1 and utilizing to maintain airplanes.

2 It is our belief that the Ross 

3 Aviation that had a very good flight record 

4 would most likely have used the best 

5 techniques available for the maintenance of 

6 the aircraft that were doing those important 

7 functions of piloting important people and 

8 flying hazardous materials, and most likely 

9 thoriated rods, welding rods, which provide a 

10 better result and a stronger result would have 

11 been implemented, if and when necessary.

12 The petitioner and I cannot and do 

13 not have information that such rods were used, 

14 but the existence of the potential for their 

15 use and the awareness that they were used are 

16 factors that make us question then the mere 

17 assertion that that never happened in the 

18 building.

19 One of the things we wanted to 

20 find out was, well, what is the basis for 

21 OST's statement that thoriated rods were never 

22 stored or used at the hangar building. The 
 

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1 petitioner's wife was working in the office 

2 that handled the maintenance -- or the parts 

3 and so forth, and as I recall from viewing the 

4 building, the place where things would be 

5 stored was actually a room right behind where 

6 she worked.

7 If thorium based rods were there, 

8 those radioactive materials, even though we 

9 don't know how much would have been provided 

10 by that, would have then been present in the 

11 place where, as already stated, no area 

12 dosimetry was ever performed. No bioassay 

13 program was ever implemented. No Ross 

14 Aviation facilities were ever monitored for 

15 contamination, and no radiation monitoring was 

16 ever performed inside the hangar building.

17 So I think that there is a 

18 significant question, if nothing else, based 

19 upon the question of the thoriated rods that 

20 Dr. Glover asked about and received a terse 

21 answer that, no, they never were there and 

22 never were used, although we, the petitioner, 
 

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1 believe that there is more to that, and we 

2 believe that we should be having the 

3 opportunity to at least see the documents that 

4 might back up those type of questions.

5 So getting to Slide 17. Based on 

6 the number of claims generated by former 

7 Hangar 481 workers and the acceptance of one 

8 such claim, the potential exists that 

9 exposures to Ross Aviation employees resulting 

10 from services rendered for the DOE at Hangar 

11 481 may have occurred.

12 Also, if acceptance of this 

13 petition at this time is not warranted, 

14 further investigation is warranted before any 

15 final adverse action should be considered on 

16 the Hangar 481 SEC petition.

17 Summarizing and simplifying, we 

18 just needed supporting statements for some of 

19 the things OST said. We tried to get those 

20 things, but were told that it would be 25,000 

21 documents. It would take an extensive amount 

22 of investigation to find. If that is true, 
 

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1 then I just don't think that it is right to 

2 deny this petition at this point.

3 I would like to say, grant the 

4 petition, but I recognize that you may not be 

5 able to do that, even though it has been 

6 pending now for on to three years.

7 I thank you very much for giving 

8 me this opportunity to speak, and I will stand 

9 for questions if there are any.

10 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Thank you, sir. 

11 I think we actually will move on to Board 

12 deliberations now. Any Board Members have 

13 further questions for Sam? If not, do we have 

14 any recommendations, action? Wanda, go ahead.

15 MEMBER MUNN: I would like to 

16 recommend --

17 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Can you speak 

18 into the mic, I think, Wanda?

19 MEMBER MUNN: I recommend the 

20 Board accept the NIOSH recommendation with 

21 regard to SEC Petition 00139 covering all 

22 employees who worked at Hangar 481 at Kirtland 
 

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1 Air Force Base from March 1, 1989 through 

2 February 29, 1996, be not approved.

3 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Do I have a 

4 second for that? I'll take that as a motion.

5 MEMBER ROESSLER: Second.

6 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Second from Gen. 

7 Further discussion? Mark?

8 MEMBER GRIFFON: I just wanted to 

9 follow up on a couple of the things that were 

10 brought up by the petitioner. I am looking 

11 through the letter and the attachments, and 

12 there is one description of a delivery, and 

13 the person indicates that they wore TLDs on a 

14 regular basis, but when the Sandia people 

15 would deliver containers of radioactive 

16 material, they would be suited and masked with 

17 supplied oxygen.

18 That just caught my eye. I don't 

19 know if you have any information about that 

20 kind of thing occurring, Sam, or if NIOSH. I 

21 am sure you have seen this affidavit.

22 DR. GLOVER: Certainly, the issue 
 

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1 about them being badged. People were using 

2 the badge data for the people from Hangar 481 

3 to do everybody. We have got no indication 

4 that anything that would have been an exposure 

5 potential for internal -- they have got 

6 official reports saying that there is no 

7 possible exposure potential in everything from 

8 all of the data we have seen.

9 That is where that 25,000 pages 

10 are. We have thousands and thousands of 

11 things for NTS and Sandia that relate to swipe

12 data on these packages as they leave. Nothing 

13 -- it is like you would send a FedEx package. 

14 So I certainly can't say that it never 

15 happened, that somebody couldn't have had some 

16 kind of a -- but I don't see anything in the 

17 records that support it.

18 MEMBER GRIFFON: And the other 

19 thing that was brought up in the statement was 

20 -- and I am just curious about this one --

21 that there was one claim that was approved. 

22 If you can explain how.
 

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1 MR. HINNEFELD: We had to ask DOL 

2 about that because we didn't have it, and that 

3 claim was paid because that person, in 

4 addition to having employment at Hangar 481, 

5 had employment at Nevada Test Site during the 

6 SEC period and was paid via the Nevada Test 

7 Site. 

8 We didn't get the claim, 

9 presumably because the claim came in after the 

10 Class was added. So in that case, DOL doesn't 

11 send those claims to us. They just administer 

12 the claim.

13 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Paul?

14 MEMBER ZIEMER: I have a question 

15 for Sam. I was trying to get a feel for the 

16 difference between loading something on the 

17 flight line versus the pads. Is there any way 

18 that that would change -- the dosimetry data 

19 would be the same in either case. It is the 

20 pads, because they're covered. Right? That 

21 is the covered area? The flight lines 

22 wouldn't be covered. Is that --
 

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1 DR. GLOVER: The 481 Hangar itself 

2 and the immediate surrounding is the facility. 

3 So presumably the hot pads would be outside 

4 of that because they are like a mile away. 

5 But since the pilots and the people from 

6 Hangar 481 would have been present at the hot 

7 pad with dosimetry -- we are not trying to 

8 parse the data.

9 MEMBER ZIEMER: It wouldn't change 

10 anything?

11 DR. GLOVER: No, sir.

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes. That was my 

13 impression.

14 MR. ARMIJO: Can I say something?

15 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Briefly, please.

16 MR. ARMIJO: I am not aware that 

17 the dose information over at the hot pad was 

18 applied to the people in the hangar. Maybe it 

19 was.

20 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: I believe what 

21 he just said was that it is being -- or would 

22 be under dose reconstruction because we don't 
 

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1 have any -- NIOSH doesn't have any way of 

2 separating that dose from other doses. So 

3 even though it is outside the facility, in 

4 essence it is being -- or the officially 

5 designated facility, it is being taken into 

6 account, so to speak.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: And then just to 

8 clarify in my mind the points raised by the 

9 petitioner on those film badge dates that they 

10 were talking about, for example, a September 

11 5th date for someone who terminated August 

12 5th. Well, most film badges run, for example, 

13 for a month. So if I had a worker at my 

14 facility that terminated August 15th or August 

15 19th, whatever it is, but the badges were 

16 August 5th to September 5th, his reading would 

17 show up September 5th even though he hadn't 

18 been working there. It is that month. 

19 Is that what is going on here or 

20 had you looked at those dates, Sam?

21 DR. GLOVER: I certainly didn't 

22 look at that petitioner's particular issues, 
 

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1 but I think they said they were responses from 

2 Paducah. So apparently Department of Labor, 

3 as is many sites, they would have gotten --

4 they would have queried other places. So if 

5 they got a response back from a facility, even 

6 though he wouldn't necessarily have been a 

7 worker for Hangar 481, they may have gotten 

8 dose data. But this isn't Hangar 481 data.

9 MEMBER ZIEMER: So I guess this 

10 point -- maybe the petitioner can clarify --

11 was just raised because of questions about the 

12 validity of some of the data. Is that -- I 

13 got you.

14 MR. ARMIJO: Yes, that is true. 

15 If I could say one more thing, I would like, 

16 and then I will be quiet.

17 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Go ahead.

18 MR. ARMIJO: Very briefly. The 

19 dose reconstruction for my client's wife used 

20 only the ambient data from Sandia as the basis 

21 for the dose reconstruction. To my knowledge, 

22 the dose reconstruction that was done did not 
 

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1 take the data from the hot pads and use it as 

2 part of the calculation. 

3 I could be mistaken on that, 

4 because I didn't go back and check that before 

5 this hearing, but that is my recollection of 

6 how that dose reconstruction was done. That 

7 would be inconsistent with what has been said 

8 as far as the use of the data, applying it 

9 from a hot pad to the person at the base.

10 DR. GLOVER: It has been a long 

11 time now for me to recall if we -- the ER was 

12 done after the dose reconstruction was

13 complete, and once you do that, you don't 

14 necessarily -- after we are finished 

15 deliberating, then we would review our dose 

16 construction methodology and see if it needs 

17 to be revisited to previous cases.

18 Until we are done, and we have 

19 gone through the process, though, we don't --

20 until the process is resolved. Yes, sir.

21 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Any further 

22 questions from Board Members? Yes, Brad.
 

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1 MEMBER CLAWSON: I am just looking 

2 Sam on this, and you have an n/a for neutrons. 

3 So they didn't have any capabilities of any 

4 neutron exposure?

5 DR. GLOVER: We didn't see 

6 anything where there was a -- There was no 

7 neutron measurements conducted. Badges 

8 weren't set up for doing neutrons, and the 

9 source terms that went through there, Brad, on 

10 these planes and for this activities wouldn't 

11 have been neutron sources.

12 MEMBER CLAWSON: The reason I was 

13 wondering is because they brought up certain 

14 containers, and those containers were actually 

15 pit containers for Pantex, and those do have a 

16 neutron issue. That is why I was wondering 

17 why this isn't -- you know, this isn't being 

18 addressed. Is there -- A lot of those came 

19 from Sandia and so forth. I am just wondering 

20 why -- if there was some reason why this isn't 

21 being in consideration.

22 DR. GLOVER: The transport --
 

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1 sometimes those are via truck, and this is 

2 airplane transportation. So they wouldn't 

3 have -- I know the discussion that you and I 

4 had had, and so I know particularly what you 

5 are referring to regarding neutrons, but I 

6 don't think it is pertinent for this one, for 

7 this particular exposure scenario.

8 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Any other 

9 questions? If not, I think we will -- no 

10 further discussion, we will ask for a vote. 

11 Ted, you want to call the roll? The motion is 

12 to reject the SEC, accept the NIOSH Evaluation 

13 Report.

14 MR. KATZ: Dr. Anderson?

15 MEMBER ANDERSON: Yes.

16 MR. KATZ: Ms. Beach?

17 MEMBER BEACH: Yes.

18 MR. KATZ: Mr. Clawson?

19 MEMBER CLAWSON: No.

20 MR. KATZ: Dr. Field?

21 MEMBER FIELD: Yes.

22 MR. KATZ: Mr. Gibson?
 

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1 MEMBER GIBSON: No.

2 MR. KATZ: Mr. Griffon?

3 MEMBER GRIFFON: Yes.

4 MR. KATZ: I will collect Dr. 

5 Lemen's vote. He is absent. Dr. Lockey?

6 MEMBER LOCKEY: Yes.

7 MR. KATZ: Dr. Melius?

8 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes.

9 MR. KATZ: Ms. Munn?

10 MEMBER MUNN: Yes.

11 MR. KATZ: I will collect Dr. 

12 Poston's vote. Dr. Richardson?

13 MEMBER RICHARDSON: Yes.

14 MR. KATZ: Dr. Roessler?

15 MEMBER ROESSLER: Yes.

16 MR. KATZ: Mr. Schofield?

17 MEMBER SCHOFIELD: Yes.

18 MR. KATZ: Dr. Ziemer?

19 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes.

20 MR. KATZ: So the motion passes. 

21 Two nays, two absent Members. The rest are 

22 yeas.
 

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1 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Okay. We will 

2 take a break now. We'll have a letter to 

3 review -- we can probably do that tomorrow on 

4 this. We will take a break until 4:45, and 

5 then we will reconvene for the Ziemer report.

6 (Whereupon, the above-entitled 

7 matter went off the record at 4:29 p.m. and 

8 resumed at 4:52 p.m.)

9 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: If we can 

10 reconvene, and Board Members are here in 

11 attendance, and we will start. We have an 

12 update on activities with Lawrence Berkeley 

13 National Lab and the Stanford Linear 

14 Accelerator, and Paul Ziemer.

15 MEMBER ZIEMER: I am only doing 

16 the Lawrence Berkeley part of this report, and 

17 then Joe Fitzgerald will follow up with the 

18 SC&A activities on Lawrence Berkeley. Then I 

19 think Joe is also going to cover the SLAC 

20 Program. So let's begin with Lawrence 

21 Berkeley.

22 I just want to tell you who is 
 

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1 working on this Work Group. In addition to 

2 me, there is Dr. Richardson and Dr. Lemen are 

3 the Board Members. Dr. Hughes from NIOSH is 

4 the staff person, and then for SC&A Joe 

5 Fitzgerald is the contact person.

6 I have borrowed from Dr. Hughes 

7 several slides which were used in 2010 at the 

8 point when we had a petition, SEC petition for 

9 this site, and I will just quickly review 

10 these for the benefit of both the Board and 

11 others who are attending today.

12 The site goes back to 1931 and, of 

13 course, in '41 Dr. Lawrence began his defense 

14 contract work, and then we have the Manhattan 

15 Engineering District activities beginning in 

16 August of 1942, and that is when the covered 

17 period starts for this facility.

18 In 1945 we have the time when 

19 migrations to the hill east of the Berkeley 

20 campus took pace, so an expansion there. 

21 There are numerous buildings on the campus and 

22 on what they call the hill that are involved 
 

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1 in the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab program 

2 and, of course, as you know, this facility is 

3 still operating today.

4 Some of the highlight operations 

5 that are going on. Again, this is primarily a 

6 research type facility. There is a lot of 

7 accelerators of various types, the cyclotrons, 

8 the synchrotron, Van de Graaff generators, 

9 Betatron, and the high energy linear 

10 accelerator as examples. 

11 A lot of radiochemistry has taken 

12 place there, of course, including the 

13 important plutonium work that started there; a 

14 lot of studies on fundamental particles, high 

15 energy physics. 

16 Uranium enrichment research began 

17 there with Calutron technology, which 

18 eventually was used in Oak Ridge at the Y-12 

19 facility, and radiation operations took place 

20 in virtually all of the laboratories that are 

21 associated with that facility. So it is 

22 pretty widespread throughout that facility in 
 

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1 terms of buildings.

2 We had a petition, Petition 00160, 

3 that was recommended by NIOSH, approval 

4 recommended by NIOSH in January of 2010, and

5 this Board accepted that recommendation on 

6 March 5th of 2010, and the Secretary of Health 

7 and Human Services on April 5th of 2010 

8 designated the Class for the period of 1942 to 

9 1961.

10 The formation of this Class was 

11 based largely on inability to reconstruct 

12 internal doses with sufficient accuracy, 

13 although some external doses caused 

14 difficulties for the early years as well.

15 I am not going to read this, but 

16 just as a reminder, here is the official 

17 definition of the Class that already exists, 

18 the SEC Class at Lawrence Berkeley National 

19 Lab. Again, I will emphasize the dates. it 

20 is August 13, '42, through December 31, 1961, 

21 and it is all contractors and subcontractors 

22 for the site for that period of time.
 

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1 Now what is the Work Group doing? 

2 We met last month and reviewed the findings 

3 of SC&A. Their findings were based on 

4 primarily an initial Site Profile and, to some 

5 extent, on a revision. The official Site 

6 Profile now is actually a revision dated May 

7 2010, and Joe Fitzgerald is going to present 

8 the summary of the findings in just a moment. 

9 

10 So I am not going to go over them 

11 here, but the findings of SC&A were largely 

12 based on the initial Site Profile, although 

13 SC&A did look at the revision and have 

14 adjusted things a little bit, but they are 

15 still looking at the revised Site Profile.

16 The Work Group, which met just a 

17 few weeks ago, reviewed the initial responses 

18 to the findings that were provided by NIOSH to 

19 the -- that is the SC&A matrix, basically. We 

20 have looked at the SC&A matrix findings. We 

21 have looked at the initial responses by NIOSH 

22 but, basically, simply to become aware of 
 

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1 what the issues were.

2 Those responses by NIOSH were 

3 basically new, both to the Work Group as well 

4 as to SC&A at the time of our meeting a few 

5 weeks ago. So at our next meeting, which we 

6 have planned for mid-September, and that date 

7 is based largely on the NIOSH schedule and 

8 priorities and when they can look at what 

9 SC&A's responses will be. Then we will be 

10 following up on the issues in the findings 

11 matrix.

12 So that is where we are as far as 

13 the Work Group, just really getting underway, 

14 and the focus is on the Site Profile. We do 

15 not have an additional petition before us at 

16 this time.

17 So with that, I will let Joe 

18 Fitzgerald from SC&A come. Joe is going to 

19 summarize. Joe, I am going to try to help 

20 pull your thing up here. I've found it, but 

21 it is a little slow in responding, but in any 

22 event, Joe will delineate the findings in a 
 

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1 little more detail. Again, we haven't 

2 resolved these. It is just to inform you 

3 briefly of what we are looking at.

4 MR. FITZGERALD: Thank you. Just 

5 picking up on where Paul left off, a couple 

6 things on this particular review. This Site 

7 Profile review, even though the Site Profile 

8 came out in 2007, we were tasked by the Board 

9 and actually completed this in 2010. Just as 

10 we completed the review, the Evaluation Report 

11 came out, and then shortly thereafter a 

12 Revised Site Profile came out.

13 So in a way, we reviewed last 

14 year's or we reviewed the Site Profile 

15 snapshots three years ago we reviewed. So it 

16 was a little outdated almost at the time it 

17 came out. Nonetheless, when the Work Group 

18 met we walked through this and put things in 

19 perspective against both the ER and the Site 

20 Profile review.

21 Essentially, what it breaks down 

22 to is SC&A's charge is to address the findings 
 

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1 in terms of the `61 cutoff in terms of what is 

2 still relevant, and also to take a hard look -

3 - this has been tasked by the Work Group -- to 

4 look at the second revision of the Site 

5 Profile to see what, in fact, has changed in 

6 terms of the findings.

7 I am not going to go through these 

8 in any real detail, but this is sort of a 

9 spectrum of very familiar type issues that we 

10 see in some of the Site Profiles, certainly 

11 the question of whether the historical 

12 operations are covered. 

13 I think, for Berkeley, given the 

14 rich history of the accelerators, we felt we 

15 could benefit from what was done with the 

16 Brookhaven Site Profile and some of the 

17 others, Argonne Site Profile, where they did 

18 go from machine to machine and actually 

19 provided a lot of good background information 

20 that would be helpful for the dose 

21 reconstructer.

22 We had an issue on MDAs, which may 
 

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1 actually be addressed in the revision. We are 

2 going to have to take a hard look at that and 

3 see whether or not some of the deficiencies 

4 might, in fact, have been addressed by the 

5 revision that came out in 2010. Very 

6 possibly, it has.

7 Tritium plutonium. We are talking 

8 about high-fired plutonium and tritides. 

9 Certainly, there was some handling of that. 

10 That wasn't fully addressed in the original 

11 Site Profile. We find in the revision, 

12 though, quite a bit of discussion on organic 

13 forms of tritium, tritides, and high-fired Pu.

14 So I am sort of optimistic that 

15 most of that issue will go away, but we are 

16 going to take a hard look at that. That is 

17 one of the tasking’s from the Work Group.

18 The adequacy and completeness of 

19 records, that is something that, I think, 

20 NIOSH is going to take a look at in terms of 

21 just looking at whether or not the adequacy 

22 and completeness is there through not only '61 
 

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1 but beyond '61. I think that is a good thing 

2 that will give us that validation.

3 The selection of energy range. 

4 There are a lot of machines, accelerators, at 

5 Berkeley that had a whole range of energies, 

6 and in terms of one calibrating that against 

7 the dose reconstruction of photon exposures, 

8 clearly, that needs to be done in order to 

9 come up with a representative assessment. In 

10 some cases, we were kind of concerned that 

11 that wasn't done as fully as it needs to be.

12 Neutron dosimetry, number 6. 

13 Again NTA film was used in the earlier years, 

14 a lot of the very familiar issues of whether 

15 or not the adjustment factors were, in fact, 

16 appropriate for the energy range of the 

17 neutrons. So again, that is something that --

18 we will take a hard look at the revision. 

19 Revision 2 of the Site Profile certainly has a 

20 lot more on neutrons than the first version 

21 did.

22 Shallow dose. Another issue that 
 

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1 we are going to take a look at. The rest of 

2 these issues, I think, are pretty familiar to 

3 the Board, medical X-rays and some of the 

4 questions on bioassay. Some of these issues 

5 went away in terms of the SEC. 

6 I think there was agreement that, 

7 prior to '61, the adequacy of the records was 

8 questionable, certainly not sufficient for 

9 dose reconstruction. So a lot of those 

10 issues, I think, are gone. 

11 What we are going to be looking at 

12 is the adequacy beyond '61, understanding that 

13 breakpoint a little better in terms of the 

14 Site Profile. So we will certainly cover that 

15 for the Board, and then, of course, 

16 occupational and environmental dose and some 

17 of the other issues that revolve around that.

18 Those issues are mostly whether or 

19 not the assumptions governing how 

20 environmental dose were estimated cover the 

21 gamut of what was operated on site. You had 

22 such a variety of activities, operations, over 
 

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1 those number of years. Can you envelope those 

2 with the assumptions that you are using for 

3 things like environmental?

4 I think, again, Dr. Ziemer covered 

5 this, but we have actions, certainly, to take 

6 a hard look at the revision and come back to 

7 the Work Group with our assessment of whether 

8 these issues are, in fact, fully addressed by 

9 this revision and, if not, what some remaining 

10 issues are. I think NIOSH has a number of 

11 issues along those lines, too.

12 More specifically, I just listed 

13 some of the to dos that we have prior to the 

14 next Work Group meeting.

15 Any questions on Berkeley as far 

16 as where we are going with SC&A? 

17 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Good. 

18 MR. FITZGERALD: In terms of 

19 Stanford Linear, this is a little bit of a 

20 different site. Instead of a multi-purpose 

21 site like Berkeley, Stanford Linear was 

22 essentially a single purpose particle 
 

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1 accelerator. So the issues certainly are a 

2 little more straightforward, shall I say.

3 We had -- and again, our review 

4 was just completed this past January, January 

5 2011, and I believe there is no Work Group 

6 formed for SLAC. So essentially, those 

7 standings are as is. Those are the pertinent 

8 dates.

9 We conducted a review May to 

10 August of 2011, and we issued a report just 

11 about two or three months ago, actually. 

12 Four primary findings -- the 

13 distinction between primary and secondary, 

14 primary findings certainly have the potential 

15 to have implications for dose reconstruction. 

16 So we are saying those are more significant, 

17 ones that have to be settled in terms of 

18 determining whether or not there is technical 

19 deficiencies.

20 Secondary findings certainly are 

21 ways to enhance dose reconstruction, but 

22 certainly, we found that the approach was 
 

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1 sound, and certainly would not impair dose 

2 reconstruction. These are improvements that 

3 one could make to the process, clarifying 

4 assumptions, clarifying the bases for the 

5 approach, but not certainly questioning the 

6 approach itself.

7 So on the primary findings, four 

8 basic findings in terms of neutron dose 

9 adjustments. This gets to the calibration 

10 factors, the adjustment factors that were used 

11 in the neutron dose assessments, and again we 

12 found that the correction factors recommended 

13 by NIOSH, we felt, were not adequately 

14 supported by the information that was in the 

15 Site Profile; not to say that they were 

16 necessarily wrong, but there was no way we 

17 could evaluate the correction factors without 

18 having a better and clearer understanding of 

19 the bases. 

20 So that is a question of probably 

21 more clarification, but this does get to a 

22 very fundamental point, because again there 
 

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1 were neutron exposures based on energy ranges 

2 from the accelerator, and those correction 

3 factors have a pretty significant bearing on 

4 what kind of dose can be calculated.

5 Extremity monitoring and low 

6 energy photon calibration. Again, components 

7 were handled where there would be, certainly, 

8 some extremity exposure involved, and this 

9 particular issue wasn't really addressed in 

10 the Site Profile. So that is a gap that we 

11 think needs to be looked at.

12 Internal dose from radon and 

13 thoron. Almost all the accelerator sites, the 

14 issue of potential radon or thoron issues in 

15 the confined spaces of the accelerator tunnels 

16 is addressed. From interviews, we found that 

17 apparently radon measurements were taken.

18 This issue is not really addressed 

19 in the Site Profile. We think it at least 

20 should be touched on as to whether there was 

21 any implications for exposure of workers in 

22 those tunnels.
 

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1 The final one, there are some gaps 

2 in terms of the data as far as internal 

3 radiological hazards. On this particular 

4 site, I think a judgment was made by NIOSH --

5 we don't necessarily disagree with it -- that 

6 there really wasn't much in the way of 

7 internal hazards because of the nature of the 

8 operation, but there were some campaigns where 

9 certain targets, radiological targets, were 

10 used. 

11 So one can't discount that there 

12 may have been episodic exposures, and that 

13 issue of potential episodic internal uptake is 

14 based on handling of targets or the actual -- 

15 I won't say destruction of targets, but the 

16 impingement of targets by the accelerator 

17 beam. Those issues, we felt, ought to at 

18 least be addressed and looked at and 

19 acknowledged in there. 

20 It may turn out again there 

21 wouldn't be any significant source-term that 

22 would be involved in the dose reconstruction 
 

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1 process, but for Site Profile it would be 

2 useful to at least have that addressed.

3 So those are the four primary 

4 findings. Again, we had -- I won't go through 

5 these, but these were areas in terms of

6 characterization, claimant medical records, 

7 incomplete bases. These were areas where we 

8 felt the Site Profile would benefit from 

9 clarification and a little bit more detail as 

10 to where some of these exposures came from and 

11 some of the assumptions were made, what the 

12 bases for the assumptions were.

13 Again, in terms of actual 

14 responses, we wouldn't expect any response in 

15 the course of the Work Group discussion, but 

16 again for the benefit of improving the Site 

17 Profile, these were made in the report.

18 MEMBER GRIFFON: Joe, that next to 

19 the last one, on site airborne releases, you 

20 mentioned.

21 MR. FITZGERALD: Right.

22 MEMBER GRIFFON: What type of on 
 

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1 site airborne releases?

2 MR. FITZGERALD: This would be 

3 where you would have -- using certain targets, 

4 and you would fire the accelerator, and you 

5 would get some off-gas, but very minor, and 

6 the assumptions for what would be the fence 

7 line dose. Some of those issues would be --

8 it would better to understand where those 

9 assumptions came from, and that wasn't very 

10 clear in the Site Profile.

11 Again, I don't think that is going 

12 to be any significant impact on dose 

13 reconstruction or the contribution of that to 

14 the Work Group, but that would be helpful to 

15 know that.

16 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Stu, you had a 

17 few comments, and I actually have a question 

18 for you also, but go ahead.

19 MR. HINNEFELD: I don't have a lot 

20 of substance to add except that in the 

21 Lawrence Berkeley case, things are a little 

22 farther along. We have identified the actions 
 

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1 we need to take to address the issues that are 

2 in our lap, and so some involve site research. 

3 So that is part of the scheduling.

4 With Stanford, we are not quite to 

5 that point where we form the plans, but we are 

6 essentially thinking about it. We have a 

7 point of contact on our side and a point of 

8 contact has been selected on our contractor's 

9 side, and they are formulating what needs to 

10 be investigated, but it is not quite as far 

11 along.

12 I think there is also not a Work 

13 Group yet for Stanford.

14 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: That was my 

15 question for you, was actually if we have some 

16 idea of the schedule on responding, we will 

17 form a Work Group.

18 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, just 

19 speaking off the cuff, I would say it would be 

20 no better than Berkeley. So you are looking 

21 at -- what did you say, a September meeting, 

22 for Berkeley. I would suggest that Stanford 
 

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1 would be no sooner than that.

2 It may not involve as much work. 

3 So it might be about the same, but I wouldn't 

4 think it would be any sooner.

5 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Okay, that is 

6 fair. That will help. I think we will form a 

7 Work Group then and have that ready and be 

8 able to meet sometime, hopefully, later in the 

9 fall or early winter. Good.

10 Thanks. Any questions from 

11 others? Okay.

12 We are now ready for our public 

13 comment period. Ted.

14 MR. KATZ: Yes. Just to explain 

15 for public commenters the ground rules for 

16 these. These Board meetings are all fully 

17 transcribed verbatim. So whatever comments 

18 you make will be transcribed and posted in the 

19 transcript of the Board meeting for all of the 

20 public to read on the NIOSH website.

21 So anything you say that is of a 

22 private matter, about yourself included, will 
 

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1 be posted and available for public 

2 consumption. 

3 The exception is whatever you 

4 might discuss about a third party, about 

5 someone else that is private, including their 

6 identity, will be redacted from the transcript 

7 that gets posted, so to protect their privacy. 

8 So you might be a close friend, whoever. 

9 That information will be redacted.

10 You can have full details about 

11 this redaction policy on the NIOSH website 

12 under the Board section of the website. Close 

13 to the top there, there is a full explanation 

14 of what we redact and what we don't redact in 

15 transcripts.

16 That's it. There is no one signed 

17 up here for public comments. We do have a 

18 request from Dr. McKeel to make comments, and 

19 that is the only request, I believe, that I 

20 have received.

21 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Okay. 

22 DR. McKEEL: Dr. Melius, this is 
 

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1 Dan McKeel.

2 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Go ahead, Dan.

3 DR. McKEEL: All right. I would 

4 like to say good afternoon to the Board. I am 

5 speaking as the -- can you hear me okay?

6 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Yes, we can.

7 DR. McKEEL: Okay. I am speaking 

8 as the co-petitioner for General Steel 

9 Industries, SEC-105, being handled by the TBD10 6000 Work Group. 

11 There is some striking new 

12 information that has emerged that I need to 

13 share with the Board. The findings I am 

14 reporting today emerged from a careful 

15 scrutiny of the NRC FOIA 2010-0012 material I 

16 first brought to the attention of the Board 

17 and NIOSH in December 2010.

18 NRC later posted these 1,016 pages 

19 of AEC cobalt-60 byproduct materials licensing 

20 information to GSI on their public website. 

21 The new findings also were verified and 

22 supported by re-interviewing a number of GSI 
 

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1 former workers who substantially corroborated 

2 the findings I am about to discuss.

3 Finding Number 1: The betatron 

4 exit tunnel doors were not double leaf and 

5 lead-shielded during the covered period of 

6 1953-1966, as is stated in the January 2012 

7 betatron White Paper by David Allen.

8 We have photographic and affidavit 

9 proof that the double leaf doors were 

10 installed in 1968 after the covered period at 

11 GSI had ended. Betatron workers, to a man, 

12 had always stated that the tunnel exit doors 

13 on both the old and new betatron buildings 

14 during 1963-66 were a, quote, "steel, red 

15 ribbon roll-up door."

16 The NIOSH evidence is that in the 

17 30-page January 2012 Allen White Paper, it 

18 showed drawings of the new betatron buildings 

19 from the GSI cobalt-60 AEC 1968 and '71 

20 license renewal applications. Again 1968 was 

21 two years after the covered period had ended.

22 The text noted the doors were 
 

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1 "double leaf with lead shielding," and that is 

2 a quote. Similar double leaf doors were 

3 described and shown in drawings in the ORNL 

4 DOE cleanup report for the GSI new betatron 

5 building in 1992. According to ORNL at the 

6 same time the old betatron tunnel had only a 

7 double leaf door with no lead shielding.

8 The McKeel and [Identifying 

9 information redacted] evidence was that there 

10 is both old and recent direct worker 

11 confirmation, eyewitness confirmation, that in 

12 the covered time period the old and new 

13 betatron tunnel exits were closed off by red, 

14 steel roll-up ribbon doors that could not be 

15 retrofitted with lead shielding, in their 

16 opinion.

17 [Identifying information redacted] 

18 and McKeel photographs and ones from the 

19 Department of Energy cleanup in 1992 show the 

20 tunnel exit doors have double leaf doors with 

21 vertical strips on the lower panel. There is 

22 no lead shielding. These doors bear no 
 

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1 resemblance to the red ribbon roll-up doors 

2 described by the workers for the GSI covered 

3 period.

4 In September 2006 Dan McKeel 

5 photographed the exact type of red steel roll6 up ribbon door that now enclosed the Building 

7 10 entry to the new betatron building break 

8 area and rail track tunnel. 

9 AEC documents said the break area 

10 tunnel at the entry to Building 10 was bounded 

11 by a chain mesh. Workers testified that in 

12 1963-66 the break area entry to Building 10 

13 and the new betatron was wide open, not 

14 enclosed at all.

15 These observations lead to several 

16 important conclusions. First, it is incorrect 

17 to reconstruct doses for the covered period 

18 based on the assumption there was a double 

19 leaf, lead shielded door to limit the dose to 

20 workers in Building 10 and in the new building 

21 new betatron break area. This section of the 

22 second Allen White Paper should be retracted, 
 

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1 and doses redone based on a roll-up unshielded 

2 steel door at the end of the two betatron 

3 tunnels.

4 Second, once again NIOSH and SC&A 

5 have given insufficient weight to worker 

6 testimony about the true nature of the 

7 betatron doors and shielding in the covered 

8 period. Instead, the paper uses information 

9 about the betatron facilities from the 

10 residual period that has no relevance to the 

11 covered period situation.

12 Finding number two: the January 

13 2012 Allen White Paper also perpetuates the 

14 incorrect statement that the nearest building 

15 to the betatron building during the covered 

16 period was 1,000 feet away. In fact, to the 

17 contrary, the old and new betatron buildings 

18 were only 300 feet apart.

19 The outside of the old betatron 

20 building contained a sign that McKeel 

21 photographed in 2006 which said, quote, "Do 

22 not approach this building within 100 feet." 
 

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1 We hold this sign meant that a significant 

2 radiation danger field existed around the old 

3 betatron building.

4 We can assume a similar danger 

5 zone also surrounded the new betatron 

6 facility. Those 100 foot radius zones would 

7 clearly involve persons in Building 6 -- in 

8 Building 10, excuse me, in the space between 

9 the two betatron buildings. 

10 This was a very busy area that 

11 many unbadged workers also used to bypass 

12 walking through the foundry. This was a main 

13 boulevard. These between-the-building 

14 betatron doses have not been modeled or 

15 measured accurately by NIOSH, nor have they 

16 been recognized or modeled by SC&A.

17 Finding three: the Building 6 

18 radiography facility at GSI has been 

19 incorrectly modeled for the period 1953-1962 

20 when radium-226 was being used for 

21 nondestructive testing. 

22 This is an SEC issue. The October 
 

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1 2011 Allen White Paper on GSI portable sources 

2 chose an August 1962 drawing of the Building 6 

3 roofless radiography facility. SC&A uses the 

4 same drawing in their review.

5 Packet 5 of 37 of the NRC FOIA 

6 2010-0012 material chose the same drawing, but 

7 in which "[Identifying information redacted]" 

8 -- and that is in quotes, capital [Identifying 

9 information redacted], period, [Identifying 

10 information redacted], end quote, has signed 

11 the drawings and annotated that the steel 

12 plates and second layer of concrete blocks 

13 were, quote, "added in June/July 1962."

14 [Identifying information redacted] 

15 name and the date annotation were omitted in 

16 both the SC&A review drawing and in the GSI 

17 1962 and subsequent AEC license applications 

18 for the .5 curie Co-60 sources.

19 Scientifically, this is a very 

20 troubling omission of key data, because it 

21 confirms worker testimony that no such steel 

22 plate shielding was in use prior to 1962 when 
 

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1 the same facility was used with radium-226 

2 sources in the fish pole technique. 

3 The AEC banned radium-226 in the 

4 fish pole NDT technique from use in the early 

5 1960s throughout the USA for safety reasons. 

6 Workers state that 300 unbadged workers 

7 labored near the Building 6 radiography 

8 facility, and this differs from the Allen SC&A 

9 analysis.

10 Finding 3 indicates that neither 

11 NIOSH nor SC&A thoroughly reviewed the McKeel 

12 NRC FOIA 2010-0012 material. Lack of a door 

13 in the inner radiography structure before 1962 

14 and walls that were a single concrete block 

15 thick had been revealed to NIOSH and SC&A by 

16 GSI workers previously, but was ignored in the 

17 recent Allen White Papers.

18 Radium-226 doses in and 

19 surrounding the Building 6 radiography 

20 facility from 1953 to 1962 of the covered 

21 period should be recalculated or modeled by 

22 NIOSH and SC&A. The issue is that no actual -
 

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1 - that is, real -- radiologic surveys had been 

2 made of this radiography facility prior to 

3 1962 when there was less steel and concrete 

4 shielding.

5 Again, the [Identifying 

6 information redacted] June/July 1962 

7 annotations prove the changes were applied to 

8 an existing facility and further confirm 

9 worker testimony to that effect.

10 Another overall conclusion that 

11 applies to the three findings is that GSI 

12 license applications to the AEC cannot be 

13 trusted without confirmation by readily 

14 obtainable worker testimony.

15 This company, GSI, was clearly 

16 self-serving to the detriment of workers. The 

17 [Identifying information redacted] June/July 

18 1962 annotations should have been incorporated 

19 into the 1962 GSI cobalt-60 license 

20 application to the AEC, but apparently someone 

21 removed them.

22 This removal of key data casts 
 

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1 doubt on the validity of the entire Nuclear 

2 Consultants Corporation radiologic survey and 

3 input to GSI's 1962 AEC license application. 

4 Correct scientific data appears to have been 

5 deliberately manipulated, according to the 

6 written record.

7 GSI petitioners, site experts, and 

8 former workers and claimants ask that the TBD9 6000 Work Group carefully consider these new 

10 findings when making a final recommendation on 

11 GSI SEC 50 to the full Board.

12 Finally, we remain concerned about 

13 the inordinate amount of time it has taken to 

14 revise GSI Appendix BB and for the Work Group 

15 to make its initial recommendation on SEC 105. 

16 Compare and contrast GSI with the two 

17 Brookhaven SECs at this meeting. BNL had 

18 multiple particle accelerators, as did GSI, 

19 and even had extensive film badge data on all 

20 workers, and had a known bioassay monitoring 

21 program. GSI, by contrast, has minimal film 

22 badge data from one job category on only three 
 

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1 percent of workers, and zero bioassay data.

2 The GSI SEC has been considered 

3 for three years and four months since the 

4 NIOSH Evaluation Report was issued, without 

5 the TBD-6000 Work Group taking a formal vote 

6 or making a firm recommendation.

7 There is a huge difference in 

8 processing times for both BNL SECs, which is 

9 only one to two months, with one being an 

10 83.14 SEC, compared to the GSI SEC time of 

11 three-plus years and, for Appendix BB to be 

12 revised, four-plus years.

13 The SEC and Appendix BB revision 

14 process at GSI, those two processes have 

15 dragged on for far too long to be considered 

16 at all reasonable. This lack of timeliness at 

17 GSI is decidedly not claimant favorable by 

18 anyone's estimate.

19 We again urge the TBD-6000 Work 

20 Group and full Board to approve the GSI SEC21 105 at its next Board meeting. If BNL 

22 deserves its SECs, then clearly, GSI does, 
 

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1 too.

2 Thank you very much.

3 CHAIRMAN MELIUS: Thank you, Dan. 

4 Anybody else on the call wish to make public 

5 comments? 

6 If not, then the public comment 

7 period is adjourned, and the meeting is 

8 adjourned for today. See everybody here 

9 tomorrow morning. 

10 (Whereupon, the above-entitled 

11 matter went off the record at 5:28 p.m.)

12