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U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES

CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL

NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR OCCUPATIONAL

SAFETY AND HEALTH 

+ + + + +

ADVISORY BOARD ON RADIATION AND

WORKER HEALTH 

+ + + + +

FERNALD WORK GROUP

+ + + + +

FRIDAY

JULY 28, 2017

+ + + + +

The Work Group convened via 

teleconference at 10:00 a.m. Eastern Standard 

Time, Bradley P. Clawson, Chairman, presiding.

PRESENT:

BRADLEY P. CLAWSON, Chairman

PHILIP SCHOFIELD, Member

PAUL L. ZIEMER, Member
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ALSO PRESENT:

TED KATZ, Designated Federal Official

NANCY ADAMS, NIOSH Contractor

MATT ARNO, ORAU Team

BOB BARTON, SC&A

HANS BEHLING, SC&A

RON BUCHANAN, SC&A

DOUG FARVER, SC&A

STU HINNEFELD, DCAS

KAREN KENT, ORAU Team

MICHAEL RAFKY, HHS

MARK ROLFES, DCAS

MUTTY SHARFI, ORAU Team

JOHN STIVER, SC&A
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Contents

Welcome and Roll Call............................. 4

SC&A Review of DCAS Internal Dose TBD (ORAUT-..... 6

TKBS-0017-5, Revision 03, Feed Materials.......... 6

Production Center - Occupational Internal Dose;... 6

Resolution of SEC Petition Issues (1984-1989);.... 6

Resolution of Site Profile Issues; and Work Group. 6

Recommendation and/or Path Forward................ 6

Work Group Presentation to ABRWH for............ 183

August Meeting.................................. 183

Petitioner Questions/Comments................... 196

Adjourn......................................... 204
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P-R-O-C-E-E-D-I-N-G-S 

10:01 a.m.

Welcome and Roll Call 

MR. KATZ: So, it's time and we have 

our Board Members Brad Clawson, our Chair, the 

Fernald Work Group, and Phil Schofield and Paul 

Ziemer, our members.

So why don't we go on with roll call? 

And then we will get the meeting going.

(Roll call.)

MR. KATZ: Okay, that takes care of 

attendance.

Now, some preliminary. First thing 

please everybody -- everybody mute your phones, 

except when you are addressing the group. And if 

you don't have a mute button on your phone, press 

*6 to mute your phone. That way, we won't be 

hearing barking dogs and other things. Also, do 

not put this call on hold at any point. If you 

need to leave for a piece, hang up and dial back 

in. If you put it on hold, it will disrupt the 

call for everyone else. So, please don't do that.
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And then let me just note most of the 

material, all the major material for this 

meeting, the agenda and the materials are posted 

on the NIOSH website under this program's portion 

of the website, schedule of meetings, today's 

date. So you can follow along with the materials 

there as they are being spoken about.

There is one document that -- for 

posting that is not -- which deals with 

environmental -- the environmental TBD --

(Simultaneous speaking.)

MR. KATZ: Members of the public, 

please, there are people speaking on this line 

who shouldn't be speaking at all. Please mute 

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

button but we shouldn't be hearing a bunch of 

chatter. Please, I stress this, if we can't cut 

out the noise, we'll cut off your line and you 

won't be able to hear the call anymore.

Alright. With that, Mr. Chair, takes 

care of all of the preliminaries and, Brad, it's 

your meeting.
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CHAIR CLAWSON: Thank you, Ted. I 

would like to welcome everybody to the Fernald 

Work Group meeting. We'll try to finish up Site 

Profile issues that we have lingering out there 

and we hope that we can get that taken care of.

So, John, since you are SC&A's or --

have you --

SC&A Review of DCAS Internal Dose TBD (ORAUTTKBS-0017-5, Revision 03, Feed Materials 

Production Center - Occupational Internal Dose; 

Resolution of SEC Petition Issues (1984-1989); 

Resolution of Site Profile Issues; and Work Group 

Recommendation and/or Path Forward 

MR. STIVER: Yes, this is John Stiver. 

I'll go ahead and kind of set the stage here and 

then we can start getting into some of our 

reviews. 

As you all know, it's been a long time 

since Fernald was front and center. The last 

time we actually had a Work Group meeting was 

back in December of 2014. And some of the issues 

that we are going to be discussing today predate 
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that considerably. A lot of this work was from 

back around 2009 to 2012 time frame. So there is 

quite a lot of water under the bridge. And in 

addition, three classes have been added to the 

SEC in that period.

But there about, I believe, if I 

counted up right, there are still 11 items that 

are outstanding from the original issues matrix. 

And in addition to that, we had done some reviews 

after the last meeting from products that NIOSH 

had delivered. One was the thorium -- the thoron 

post-SEC. And there was an OTIB-78 review, which 

was basically the uranium coworker model and that 

has since been canceled and incorporated into 

TBD-5.

But the two big items on the schedule 

today are the TBD-5 Rev 3 review, which we just 

finished up and the TBD-4 Environmental Review 

that Doug Farver finished back last year in 2016.

And since Bob and Doug were pretty 

much the principles on those two reviews -- I 

have done some of it myself -- but I would like 
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to have Bob go ahead and lead out on the TBD-5 

review.

So, Bob, take the stage, if you want.

MR. BARTON: Sure. Thanks, John. 

This is Bob.

The first item that we're discussing 

here, as John mentioned, is the occupational 

internal dose TBD. Specifically, it is Revision 

3, as Ted mentioned, that has been posted on the 

website, along with our review.

What we decided to do this time around 

with our review, sort of for, I guess, ease of 

understanding, is really pull out those issues 

that were still I guess the word is actionable. 

And instead of we'll sometimes use a matrix 

format, which can get pretty cumbersome, 

especially when you have so many sort of 

responses and back and forth like we had at this 

site and we sort of set it up into more of a 

narrative form, which you will see in our report. 

And we kind of broke it out by the major areas of 

interest. I mean the real big ticket items here 
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are going to be, obviously, the uranium coworker 

model, which ties into not only just uranium but 

also recycled uranium contaminants and then, 

obviously, the thorium model.

The thorium model is actually 

discussed pretty extensively, initially, in 

September 2014 when we discussed and NIOSH 

presented what they were proposing as a method 

for basically the periods after the SEC period, 

which ends in 1978 on how they were going to 

reconstruct thorium doses and that also includes 

thoron, which is part of the thorium decay chain.

And then, as John mentioned, there is 

also OTIB-78, which deals with the uranium 

coworker model. And then as a spinoff of that, 

we also had several White Paper exchanges, as we 

outlined in our internal TBD review about 

recycled uranium and what the correct ratio 

should be for when you have a uranium intake to 

sort of map back to those contaminant dosimetric 

inserts, mainly plutonium, technetium and 

neptunium.
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So that's where we're at. I think, 

for those following along, I think probably the 

easiest way to go about this would be to open up 

SC&A's review, which is posted on the website and 

we can sort of go by the way the issues are laid 

out in that report. The first issue is in Section 

2.1 and this --

MR. STIVER: Hey, Bob, this is John. 

Are you going to put it on Skype so we can look 

at it?

MR. BARTON: Sure. Let me see if I 

can do that. You can pull them right off the 

website but let me see if I can throw them up 

here.

Bear with me folks a few minutes. 

Bear with me here and I'll pull these right up, 

as they appear on the website so we're all looking 

at the same thing.

MR. KATZ: Hello. While Bob is 

pulling this up, please, everyone else mute your 

phones. I can hear breathing and background 

noise. Press *6 to mute your phone.
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Thanks.

MR. BARTON: As I was saying, we 

really went for sort of a narrative form so that 

we could really get down to what the remaining 

issues were or, in certain cases, what the 

certain specific aspects of these issues are.

And looking at the original findings 

matrix, it can sometimes get muddy in what has 

been sort of resolved already and what has not.

Okay, can everybody see my desktop on 

Skype? Alright, can everybody hear me?

MR. HINNEFELD: This is Stu. I hear 

you but I cannot get Skype to show me what I think 

it should show me. I'm still working on it.

MR. KATZ: Yes, it's not showing 

anything to me either, Bob.

MR. BARTON: Alright.

MEMBER ZIEMER: I'm not on Skype. My 

Skype box is open but it's not showing anything 

for the Fernald meeting.

MR. KATZ: Yes, it just came up, Paul. 

It should be showing for you, too, now.
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MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, it just came up 

for me as well.

MR. BARTON: Okay, great.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Am I looking at 

something specific?

MR. KATZ: So he's showing his 

document. I believe it is a matrix document.

MR. BARTON: No, this is actually 

going to be the TBD-5 review.

MR. KATZ: Oh, the review itself. 

Okay. Okay.

MR. BARTON: Okay. So, hopefully, 

you'll see -- you should be looking at Section 

2.1 of that review, entitled Exposure to UraniumPoor Raffinate Material.

And essentially what this is --

(Simultaneous speaking.)

MR. KATZ: Folks on the phone, would 

you please mute your phones? You won't be able 

to see the pictures that we're talking about here 

but the documents that we're talking about here 

are the same documents that are on the NIOSH 
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website and you can get them there on Schedule of 

Meetings, today's date. You can look at them 

there, if you would like to but you won't be able 

to see what Bob Barton is discussing specifically 

because he has a separate system for showing 

this. It's the same document, though.

MR. BARTON: Okay, so, we're talking 

about, for those of you who can't see it but can 

pull it up off the website, we're talking about 

Section 2.1 of the SC&A review of the Internal 

TBD for Fernald. And this deals with the uranium 

and uranium-poor raffinate material.

The TBD covers three exposure 

scenarios for raffinate exposures. Those are the 

K-65 drum operation, which was from 1952 to 1956; 

there was also the processing of pitchblende 

ores, which occurred from 1954 to 1958; and then 

also the handling of yellowcake materials which 

up into 1961. And those three scenarios are 

reconstructed using either radon breath data or 

actually uranium urinalysis. And what you do is, 

in the case of radon breath data, use those radon 
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results to sort of back-calculate to a radium 

burden and then you can use that radium body 

burden to ratio the other contaminants of 

interest that you find in these raffinates. So 

that is for the K-65 operation.

Now, the other two use uranium 

urinalysis and basically, again, use a ratio 

technique to the contaminants in those particular 

source terms to calculate what the intakes were 

from those contaminants which weren't directly 

monitored before but since we have uranium and we 

assumed a reasonable ratio, we can back-calculate 

to get those intakes of other contaminants.

The issue becomes when you might be 

dealing with some material that is uranium- or 

radium-poor. And what I mean by that is the 

concentration of the uranium and radium are very, 

very low because they have essentially been 

stripped away from this particular waste stream.

I think what we're really talking 

about is the back end of Plant 2/3, when you 

basically strip off all the uranium product and 
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you are left with just the raffinate material. 

This becomes problematic simply because you can't 

really use, in that case, a ratio to any sort of 

uranium intake because the uranium is just simply 

not there. So, to apply a ratio to a uranium 

urinalysis result would really result in pretty 

unrealistically high models of the intake of all 

the other contaminants that would be present.

So we really discussed this mostly in 

December. That transcript is on the web. 

Discussion takes place mainly pages 128 to page 

150.

Specifically on page 146, it sort of 

-- NIOSH had laid out not a definite framework 

but some ideas on how such a source term might be 

able to be dealt with. And really, the 

contaminate of concern we're talking about here 

in the raffinate material is thorium-230. And 

what had been discussed at that last meeting was 

that well, there might be a possible way to use 

daily-weighted exposure reports, essentially 

their profiles contaminations breathed in, in 
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this case, alpha contaminations, which could be 

used and assumed to be thorium-230 for those 

workers who were potentially exposed to this 

raffinate material that is uranium- and radiumpoor. And a method could be developed to then 

assign those doses to thorium-230 without having 

to try to use uranium and radium as a surrogate 

for ratio.

Currently, that one is in the BRS. It 

is, I believe, still labeled as "in progress." 

So, where we have it in our report currently is 

that we didn't see this specific source term, 

that is the raffinate material that you can't 

really use uranium urinalysis or radium to backcalculate intake of contaminants. We didn't see 

that that was discussed or really dealt with.

So at this current juncture, we 

recommend that it really remain in progress. And 

I guess I would turn it over to NIOSH, if they 

would like to discuss where they are on that 

particular issue and whether they plan on 

developing models or what their plan is.
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Because like I said, we discussed it 

back in December and we left it in progress at 

that meeting, pending treatment by NIOSH but we 

didn't see that that was actually dealt with in 

the most recent revision.

So if NIOSH would like to sort of 

update everyone on where that stands or where 

they stand on that issue.

MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, this is Stu 

Hinnefeld and I'll take a shot at that.

We have in fact looked back to the 

information that was put together really as part 

of the report, Report-52, where we put together 

a lot of -- trying to address a lot of internal 

dosimetry issues and a number of the things 

proposed in Report-52 are no longer applicable. 

We have moved on past those.

But when we looked at the portion, 

this portion on this topic, what was done in the 

preparation of 52 was the daily weighted average 

data was actually evaluated in preparation of 

Report-52 to say okay, was there really much 
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potential airborne exposure in the portions of 

the plant where the raffinate existed because the 

raffinate was essentially either a liquid or a 

slurry and was kept as a slurry until it was 

disposed of.

And so is there really a particular 

internal dosimetry issue there? And there 

doesn't seem to be.

So in the Site Profile, while the 

section retains something -- I think the section 

even talks about raffinate doses and then it 

talks about the K-65 material, which recall that 

the K-65 material, much of that came from 

offsite. It was processed elsewhere. I think it 

was process at Mallinckrodt and drummed and then 

brought to Fernald and the K-65 material itself 

was dumped into silos, 1 in particular, and I 

think part of the outside material also went into 

silo 2.

And so you actually had people there 

who were exposed to the K-65 raffinate material 

as they were dumping it into the silos. That 
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kind of exposure method doesn't exist for the

raffinates that were generated at Fernald, which 

were slurry and disposed of. From K-65 they were 

disposed of in silo 2 and then for the later 

materials, usually ended up in waste pits. And 

so you don't have a potential exposure potential.

So from our standpoint, the materials 

that were important to address were the front end 

of Plant 2, the digestion where they dumped the 

materials into the digester in the refinery, 

where the uranium would still be there, hasn't 

been refined out. So, the uranium would still be 

present with these other contaminants that would 

be present either in the ore concentrates or the 

ores. And so that is the method that is included 

in the internal dosimetry Site Profile.

So, I guess that is our position on 

that. You know a further possibility here is 

that this exposure occurred within the existing 

SEC framework. And so we have already concluded 

that not all doses can be reconstructed during 

this time. And if there is a really a strongly-
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held opinion that there had to be some sort of 

raffinate exposure to thorium-230, that it falls 

within the category of something that we would 

leave out of the partial dose reconstruction.

MR. BARTON: Thanks, Stu. I guess 

I'll address that second part and that actually 

came up when we were discussing this issue is 

whether this particular source term was covered 

by the SEC. Now the SEC was for thorium but not 

necessarily thorium-23 because --

MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, I remember that 

and people have pointed out in the transcript and 

I have pointed out that it was thorium-230. And 

the thorium-230 was the logic for the class. I'm 

not arguing that. It had to do with the inability 

to interpret the in vivo counting for thorium232. However, you know I think we probably have 

the leeway to decide what doses are 

reconstructable or not within a period of an SEC 

class.

And in fact, the Secretary's 

designation just says thorium. It doesn't say 
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thorium-232.

MR. BARTON: Okay, so I guess it is 

NIOSH's position, though, that this issue 

essentially of this uranium/radium-poor 

raffinate material in the 230 is an exposure that 

is not reconstructable.

MR. HINNEFELD: Well, our first 

position is that there is no particular exposure 

to reconstruct because of the physical form of 

the material. Alternatively, if people don't 

believe that is sufficient evidence of that, then 

our alternative position would be that it would 

not be reconstructable.

MR. BARTON: I see. Okay and so I 

mean you discussed Report-52. Is this something 

that was planned -- I mean just so we can put 

this I guess to bed, would that be put into a 

formal response by NIOSH? I mean it seems like 

the first position is that, essentially, there is 

no exposure just because of the physical form of 

the material and whatnot. Does NIOSH plan to put 

that into a formal response so we can close it 
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out?

MR. HINNEFELD: That is in the 

document that I sent to the Work Group and to 

John either yesterday or the day before.

MR. BARTON: Oh, okay. So maybe we 

need to take a look at that and then --

MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, that document 

takes the form of the in-progress, the findings 

in the matrix in the document we're talking about 

now, Review of the Internal Site Profile, farther 

back there is a matrix of the findings. And we 

took the ones that were in-progress, the ones we 

thought we could make the most comment on and we 

copied those onto another piece of paper, 

essentially another table, and then added our 

response under each of the findings. And so that 

is the form that the document takes and I sent it 

to the Work Group, and Ted, and John, like I said, 

in the last day or two.

MR. BARTON: Okay, well then I guess 

the appropriate thing will be to ask the Work 

Group how they would like to proceed, whether
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they would like us to look closer, take a look at 

those responses that NIOSH has provided and, 

perhaps, be able to close these out or I don't 

know if the Work Group might have had a chance to 

look at that and want to close out this particular 

issue now. I'm not sure how --

CHAIR CLAWSON: Hey, Bob, this is 

Brad. I haven't had a chance to look at it. I'm 

trying to look it up right now. But what we need 

to be able to do, if they are sending you a formal 

response, I guess what I would like from you guys 

is your response from it and just send it out to 

the Work Group and go from there.

MR. STIVER: Brad, this is John 

Stiver. I haven't seen this at all. I'm going 

through my emails and I'm not seeing anything 

from Stu over the last couple of days. So, this

was something we haven't looked at.

MR. HINNEFELD: Okay, I apologize. 

Hang on a minute. Let me see what I can do here.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, Brad, I think 

probably in any case we just need a written 
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comment before we formally close it, probably.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Yes, that would be a 

good idea, Paul. Thank you.

That will be our path forward. I 

can't find it on mine either, Stu. So, we'll 

just --

MR. HINNEFELD: I don't think I 

dreamed it. Hang on a second.

CHAIR CLAWSON: I know I have sent out 

reports and forgot to hit that send button and 

that was pretty impressive.

MR. HINNEFELD: Well, that's a 

possibility.

MR. STIVER: Well, if SC&A hasn't seen 

it and we haven't seen it, let's have a chance to 

take a look at it before we formally close it. 

It sounds to me like we can readily close it but 

we should see the final wording before we do that.

MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I apologize. 

I'm not seeing it in my outbox right now either.

MR. BARTON: Okay, I just guess for 

the official transcript, we will leave this one 
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in-progress for the moment and note that NIOSH's 

position is that there is really no exposure to 

this sorts of raffinate materials due to the 

physical form. And I'm sure there the rationale 

is provided in the document we're talking about 

now and asking that it is likely not a 

reconstructable dose under the SEC in any case.

So, we'll take a look at that and I 

think the formal thing to do is to leave this inprogress now. Is that correct?

CHAIR CLAWSON: That would be correct. 

This is Brad.

MR. BARTON: Okay. So with that I 

think we can move on to the next section which 

deals with recycled uranium and the contaminant 

radionuclides ratios associated with that source 

term at Fernald.

I know John Stiver did a lot of that 

work and there has been a ton of White Paper 

exchanges, which we sort of summarized in our 

report here on the internal TBD review.

John, do you want to discuss that a 
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little bit on what we found with recycled 

uranium?

MR. STIVER: Yes, sure. Let me try 

to request control here. Okay, it doesn't seem 

to be working. Let's see. I'm trying to scroll 

down here. I'm having kind of a spotty connection 

today so, bear with me. Anyway, here okay. There 

we go.

Basically, this is another thing that 

there has been off the books or at least kind of 

in abeyance for a number of years. I believe we 

started talking about recycled uranium back in 

about 2009 time frame. And this went on until 

about 2012. The Work Group decided to put this 

issue into abeyance, pending NIOSH incorporating 

the values that they had put into Report-52 way 

back in 2011 into the TBD product revision.

And so I just thought I would go 

through we listed kind of a history here of all 

the different chances since then. And it's all 

in the paper so I'm not going to review it -- I'm 

not going to read all of that.
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But the endpoint we changed here was 

that we had determined that there were literally 

three time periods involved in recycled uranium 

and the associated contaminants, which are 

plutonium, neptunium-237, fission product in 

technetium-99 and also in americium-241.

And I believe the first period, if my 

memory serves, was from about the early 1950s, I 

think it was like '58 up to '61 and the material 

which we see at Fernald but, in this process that 

took place. So, the exposure potential during 

that time frame was really quite minimal. And 

then in 1961, Fernald started processing these 

materials.

And after a lot of discussion, we had 

settled on a series or a set of presumed 

concentrations to these constituents in parts per 

billion in relation to uranium. And moving down 

here to the tables, if I can find them, and after 

a lot of discussion about being claimantfavorable and some of the mechanisms that were 

divulged there, these materials would actually be 
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concentrated in certain operations. This would 

have been the Plant 5 metal production where the 

material, the tetrafluoride and magnesium 

shavings were put into these big what they called 

"bombs," basically reduction containers. And 

then through a thermite process, the uranium 

metal was produced.

And about from some of the reports I 

read back five years' back, I believe about half 

of these constituents would report into magnesium 

fluoride. And that material would then be 

recycled back in Plant 1. And so we would have 

this kind of a exchanging process where this 

material would be concentrated.

And so we felt that the actual levels 

coming in in the feed material might not be 

representative about this subclass of workers in 

the Plant 1 or dealing with material and also the 

people who work even in Plant 5, who were flooding 

out these --

(Simultaneous speaking.)

CHAIR CLAWSON: Somebody needs to 
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please mute their phones so that the rest of us 

can hear this conversation.

MR. KATZ: Yes, Zaida, are you on the 

line? Okay, I'm going to have Zaida cut that 

line because it keeps giving us problems. But 

thanks.

Go on, John.

MR. STIVER: Okay. Anyway, we had 

finally settled on what we felt were bounding 

values. These values were 100 parts per billion 

for plutonium, 3,500 parts per billion for 

neptunium, and 9,000 parts per billion for 

technetium-99. This was for the period 1961 to 

1972, I believe.

And then beyond that, Fernald started 

receiving materials that were more highly 

enriched -- well not really enriched but had 

higher concentrations of these constituents from 

the gaseous diffusion plants. So, beyond that, 

we had a situation where we felt that that 100 

parts per billion plutonium probably really might 

not be adequate to bound the exposures to some of 
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these groups, including the very same groups that 

we were talking about before because now they are 

dealing with much higher concentrations coming 

into the feed stock. And so we kind of have an 

amplification of that concentration process.

And also this other group, as well, of 

workers who were the down-blenders, who broke up 

this material that came in in I believe 16 

hoppers, I believe. Actually, that was just the

one that came back in 1980, which would have the 

highest concentration.

But they break this stuff up and --

there was much higher potentials. So, after a 

lot of back and forth discussions and paper 

exchanges and compilations, we determined that 

400 parts per billion was probably would be 

bounding and reasonable for that time period from 

1973 on.

And so I'm going to go down here a 

bit, if I can find -- okay, here we go. You can 

all see this is Table 2.1 and these were the 

values that were actually included --
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(Simultaneous speaking.)

MR. KATZ: Hello? Excuse me, John. I 

apologize John. Someone else is on this line and 

is speaking. Please mute your phones. Your line 

is going to be cut, ultimately, anyway. But 

please mute your phone. You are interfering with 

the call. Press * and then 6 to mute your phone, 

please. Thank you.

Go on, John.

MR. STIVER: Okay but anyway, this 

table here people that want to -- it was taken 

right out of Table 18a of our Report-52 from 2011. 

And these are the values that were agreed upon, 

100 parts per billion of uranium mass 

concentration addition; 3,500 for neptunium; and 

9,000 for technetium-99. And those other 

radionuclides listed were little in 

concentration. It was just these big three, 

plutonium, neptunium, and technetium.

And then in Table 2.2, this is from 

Table 18b of Report-52 -- oh, this is really to 

concentrate with the phone noises.
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MEMBER ZIEMER: John, what is the 

technetium-pp in Table 2?

MR. STIVER: Excuse me?

MEMBER ZIEMER: My Table 2 shows 

technetium-pp as a contaminant. What is that?

MR. STIVER: I'm not seeing 

technetium-pp in the -- oh, wait.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Table 2.

MR. STIVER: That's a typo. That 

should be techntium-99.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Oh, you are using the 

p's as 9s there. Okay.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Good catch, Paul.

MR. STIVER: So, anyway, these are the 

values that we did agree on in the Work Group 

discussions. Okay? So, we are in Report-52.

And then if we move down here and --

I'm having a hard time. Okay, here we go. Now 

we overshot. Okay. We have a really bad lag 

here. Okay, we're getting close.

It looks like my connection is not 

working so well. I'm trying to pull that table. 
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It's just above where we are here. We're getting 

there. Alright.

(Simultaneous speaking.)

MR. KATZ: Again, the fellow who just 

spoke, please mute your phone. Please press *6 

and mute your phone.

MR. STIVER: Okay, here we are. 

(Simultaneous speaking.)

MR. KATZ: Okay, sir, you're speaking 

into a line you are not supposed to be speaking 

into. Please mute your phone. Press *6 and mute 

your phone or hang up and leave this call.

MR. STIVER: Okay, let me try again 

here. This is from Table 5-10 of the TBD-5 

Revision 3, which we just reviewed. And these 

are the contaminant levels that we looked for. 

And as you can see from '61 to '72, these are not 

the levels that were agreed upon. Plutonium was 

a factor of ten lower, ten parts per billion; 

neptunium is at 400, which is 3,500; and 

technetium at 6,000 versus 9,000 that we had 

agreed on.
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And from '73 to the present, these are 

the correct values here. So, that part is fine.

And so we were just a little perplexed 

by this because these discretions went on for 

several years and there was a lot of back and 

forth and a lot of the Board's resources were 

expended in this process. And so we are just 

kind of wondering why these values came in the 

way they did and if this is maybe just an 

oversight or NIOSH had some reason for changing 

this up. So maybe Stu, if you could kind of jump 

in now.

MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, I can provide our 

background on that.

MR. STIVER: Okay.

MR. HINNEFELD: We have looked back 

over at 52 again, and Report-52 is where this 100 

parts per billion number appears.

And what you read in 52, it says I 

think 52 was where we adopted the 400 parts per 

billion for '73 and forward. And it says that 

we'll retain 100 for the earlier years because 
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that is the way dose reconstructions are being 

done now is essentially what it says at the time 

that Report-52 was published.

So when you look at the actual data 

that is available for recycled uranium prior to 

the receipt of the gaseous diffusion plant, 

mainly the Paducah materials, there is really 

very little transuranic contamination there.

Consistently, the plutonium is below 

ten parts per billion, usually well below ten 

parts per billion. So there's really not much 

there to speak of.

John's point is correct that there 

were certain activities where the contaminants 

would preferentially go to a byproduct of 

reactions and the metal production step is 

certainly one of those. And the byproducts 

tended to move more toward the mag fluoride than 

toward the uranium and was in fact treated so 

that the uranium that was contaminating the mag 

fluoride was leached out so it could be recycled.

So that is true. So you have that 
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particular material, where you would have a 

higher contaminant ratio than you would have had 

in the feeds that came in. 

But the thing to recall here, though, 

is that that particular strain, you know leaching 

uranium out of mag fluoride is a very small 

contributor to any given year's production.

And into the 1980s, at least, our 

position is that workers at Fernald were 

essentially chronically exposed to uranium in a 

variety of forms. And so you have this blended 

exposure and that we're pretty confident that ten 

parts per billion would bound the exposure up 

until the materials started arriving from the 

feed plant. You know the materials that arrived 

from Paducah really in 1973 were things called 

Paducah scrap and that was higher contaminant 

values than what had typically been seen before 

then but it was nearly as high as the real high 

numbers that arrived in the '80s in what's called 

the feed plant ash.

So we have taken those numbers, I mean 
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so from '73 on and adopted the 400 that we've 

kept. But the earlier values we've developed 

from the data that are available before -- from 

'61 to '72.

So explaining the difference between 

the hundred and the ten from '61 to '72 really 

has more to do with the reason the 100 was in 

Report-52, which was well, that is the way dose 

reconstructions were being done at the time. And 

so we're not going to change that.

Today, we've done a lot as a result of 

the discussions over the past two years to change 

the way dose reconstructions are being done. So 

the whole process is going to be reworked. And 

so since we're reworking the whole process 

anyway, we thought it might be time to take a 

more realistic look at what the numbers probably 

were before 1973.

MR. STIVER: Okay, well thanks for the 

explanation. I guess we get back to the paper 

that we produced back in 2011, the second White 

Paper. I think we have made some pretty 
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compelling arguments.

First of all, I think that the data 

that are available are limited in scope. They 

don't really -- this came out of the DOE from 

2000 and we actually have one of our associates 

who was heavily involved in preparing that report 

and they did a great job and they did it at nine 

months. But they never really followed up and 

run these things to ground and found other data. 

Some of the data we did find, I think there was 

one particular batch of the uranium tetrahydrate 

nitric tetrahydrate in from Hanford that had 

valuable or quite bit of that ten parts per 

billion specifications. And I think they are in 

the range of 20 to 30. 

And we also went to considerable 

effort to show that ten parts per billion is 

generally really not uniformly enforced since 

about 1985 or so. So we have this kind of a 

situation where we are not really sure that the 

database that we quoted are complete and really 

representative of what was actually experienced.
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In addition to that, we found a lot of 

reports that have indicated that the people who 

were, you know that subgroup you were talking 

about, there are a small number of guys for sure 

but, again, we don't know who they are just like 

we didn't know who the downblenders were that 

form the basis of that 400 parts per billion 

agreement.

And so the selections in some of the 

reports from the time period is guys using broom 

handles with steel wool to scrub out these 

crucibles for the casking by the thousands; guys 

that have gotten their heads down into the 

reduction pot to scrape out the mag fluoride. It 

was a really dirty operation. And there is not 

necessarily respiratory protection being worn at 

the time.

Stu, you make a good point that this 

material isn't exclusively what is being used. I 

mean it's going to be what's inside of the 

contaminant, the non-toxic variety -- you are 

going to knock out some of those with a tremendous 
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amount of stuff. We're saying maybe the 

concentration was slightly off.

There is a larger concern with the 

amount of spots but you know just I would just as 

soon combine this. You know we don't know that 

ten parts per billion is really capturing or that 

the data is really representative. I mean there 

those really dirty jobs that workers were 

involved in in the subset who have much larger 

exposures than say some of the others. They did 

all the recycling and they just washed up. Well 

you know, there is really no way to tell at this 

point.

So based on those arguments, we really 

felt that the 100 would be bounding, you know 

certainly it is going to be bounding. So we 

didn't think the ten would necessarily get it 

there.

And so at this point, I mean I'm 

really not feeling comfortable in buying off on 

these new values without maybe going back and 

taking a look at the review that you did earlier 
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and maybe having another call or exchange or 

something. I know nobody wants to open this back 

up again. So I just, after seeing those, I just 

am feeling not comfortable in the tracking of it.

MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. This is Stu 

again. I would like to propose this now. I think 

from our side, we should put together something 

that says, that describes in detail the data we 

looked at because I think we're all looking at 

the same data. I think we're all looking at the 

Ohio Field Office Recycled Uranium Report --

MR. STIVER: Yes.

MR. HINNEFELD: -- because there is a 

pretty large compendium of data in there.

And so we should go look at the data 

that led us to our conclusions that this should 

be ten and in light of your earlier report, and 

provide a more full write-up of that because the 

document I put together, which maybe I didn't 

send, I'm in agreement about the work I guess 

now, the document that we put together that has 

some responses on it does not go into detail about 
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that.

So it sounds like if we feel like 

there is sufficient data to support the position 

we've taken, that we should prepare that and get 

that to you guys and to the Work Group. And so 

at the time, then that we can have a -- and then 

it gives you guys the opportunity also to look 

back at the data that led you to your opinions. 

And so then we can have a more meaningful 

discussion at another time.

MR. STIVER: Yes, I would agree to 

that. I think that probably would be a good way 

to proceed. You know it's hard to bring up the 

time period we're talking about is assumed to be 

within the SEC. So you know we'd be looking at 

non-presumptive cancers and then the for less 

than 250-day employees. So that may not, at this 

point be that big of an exposure that we think 

people would include. But however, the fact that 

your plutonium dose would be going down by a 

factor of ten, that is something that does kind 

of concern us.
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So yes, I think maybe give us just a 

little bit of time to go back and delve back into 

it because the data and the reasons behind the 

decisions that we've came to and for you to 

provide a more detailed description of your 

position would be a good way to go.

MR. HINNEFELD: Okay, we'll proceed 

with preparing something then and we will get it 

to everybody and then the Work Group can decide 

if they want to discuss that in a meeting or if 

we can do it in a technical call.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Okay, Brad, just for 

the record, I think that's a good idea since as 

it currently stands it seems to be we are not in 

agreement on this. We need to understand more 

fully NIOSH's rationale here.

CHAIR CLAWSON: I understand, Paul. I 

agree with that. And you're good with that, too, 

Phil?

MEMBER SCHOFIELD: Yes, I am.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay. So, we'll do 

that and once we get those papers --
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MEMBER ZIEMER: This will remain inprogress, then?

CHAIR CLAWSON: Yes, it will.

MEMBER ZIEMER: What's the timetable 

on that?

CHAIR CLAWSON: I guess that one's for 

you, kind of. What would we be looking at for a 

timetable?

MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I have to insert 

this into our project schedule and get with our 

contractor and find out when the resources will 

be available to work on this.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay.

MR. HINNEFELD: It is my intent, 

though, that having gotten to this point, that we 

try to maintain this momentum and get this -- to 

move everything over quickly and while we are 

thinking about it, and get this wrapped up.

So, it's my intent to put some urgency 

on this.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay, I understand.

MR. STIVER: Okay there was just one 
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other aspect of the RUs that I wanted to bring 

out there. And this is in our report that's Table 

2-5 on page 14. And this is taken from the 533 

and 534 that show changes of the intakes of 

plutonium-239. And we noticed that from '73 on, 

assuming these intakes at 400 parts per billion, 

we noticed that the concentration, the becquerels 

per gram of uranium is decreasing during these 

three time periods. I think we can agree that in 

1975 it is 1170; '76 to '85 it's 1160; and then 

'86-on it's 1150. So it's not a big decrease but 

we are just kind of curious as to what the basis 

for that reduction was.

MR. HINNEFELD: This is Stu and I'm 

going to have to look back at this. We have a 

pretty extensive spreadsheet that was put 

together to explain how we arrived at our 

americium-241 numbers and consequently, the 

plutonium numbers as well, the various plutonium 

isotopes.

So, I'm going to have to go back and 

look at this exactly.
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It has to do with the aging of the 

plutonium and the adjustment from the relative 

abundance of isotopes. But I don't -- you 

wouldn't think that 239 would decay even by a 

percent in --

MR. STIVER: In that short time 

period.

MR. HINNEFELD: Right. So, I'll have 

to go back and look at exactly how that was done 

to see why that number came out that way.

And recall that we will have to think 

about this very carefully because really the data 

we are relying on is all like 1985 urine data. 

That is when they did all the analyses of those 

transuranics and determined how much transuranics 

was in there.

So in realty, between the time this 

material was first generated or you know I guess, 

quote, generated by probably Hanford PUREX, where 

they were taking out plutonium and recycling the 

uranium, that would be sort of the creation date. 

And then kind of the relevant abundance of the 
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plutonium alpha emitters might change a little 

bit over time and, in fact, we do, in our 

spreadsheet, show like 10-year, 20-year, and 30-

year weapons-grade plutonium, you know the 

components of it. And of course the 241 changes 

during that time and that allows for the 

americium to grown in.

So I'll have to go back and look at 

this. I'm having a little trouble explaining why 

this happened and I didn't even notice it until 

I saw it in your report.

MR. STIVER: Yes, okay. Yes, I 

thought it was probably something along those 

lines that we just didn't have any technical 

details.

MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, I apologize. I 

apparently dreamed that I sent that because I 

can't find in my outbox that I sent that email I 

thought I sent with two files attached. One was 

our written responses to each of the findings and 

the second was the spreadsheet that supports the 

americium. But I apparently thought I had --
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intended to send it but I didn't.

And this may be, this declining 239 

may be an artifact of how we generated the numbers 

and, of course, the plutonium isotopes.

MR. STIVER: Okay, I look forward to 

seeing that.

The next part I guess dealt with, as 

far as recycled uranium was Finding 10, which is 

the inclusion of americium-241. And I had Doug 

Farver look into that.

Doug, if you would like to say a few 

words about what you found and the basis for that.

MR. FARVER: Okay, the basis for 

Finding 10 on the americium-241?

MR. STIVER: Yes.

MR. FARVER: It was pretty much stated 

there in the italics from Section 5.3.3.4 of the 

TBD that the assumption is that the RU came from 

Hanford. It was a six percent weapons-grade in 

'61. And then it was aged from thereon down, 

10-, 20-, and 30-year aged intervals. 

And I went back and looked through 
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Hanford document and that is consistent with the 

Hanford documentation. So that's included in the 

TBD per the findings. That was the reason for 

recommending closure to that one. I thought it 

was very reasonable and consistent with the 

Hanford TBD.

So, any questions?

MR. STIVER: Alright, I guess we can 

go ahead and recommend closing Finding 10 out 

then, since everybody is in agreement with the 

method.

MR. FARVER: Right and apparently that 

was part of the SEC-P 3 finding.

MR. STIVER: Yes, there was a little 

cross-pollination there between the SEC findings 

that were subsequently moved over to Site 

Profile. And they are kind of interrelated 

anyway. So yes, there is some crosscommunication there.

MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, this is Stu. I 

just want to make clear that -- my understand, 

make sure my understanding is clear. When this 
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finding is identified as SEC-P 3, that means it 

came up, it surfaced in the review of the SEC 

Evaluation Report. Now it is a Site Profile 

issue. Is that right?

MR. STIVER: Yes, I was just retained 

for this historic --

MR. HINNEFELD: Oh, yes, I understand 

retaining it. I just want to make sure we all 

are in agreement that it is now a Site Profile 

issue.

MR. STIVER: Yes, that's correct. It 

is no longer an SEC issue.

MR. HINNEFELD: Alright.

CHAIR CLAWSON: That being said, I 

guess I would recommend closing it. Paul?

MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, I agree, it 

should be closed.

MEMBER SCHOFIELD: I agree with that.

MR. STIVER: Okay. Well, Bob, you 

want to move on to thorium and thoron then?

MR. BARTON: Sure. Well, there is a 

couple of quick items. I'm just going to go in 
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order.

The next section is the Section 2.3, 

which is just below the discussion of recycled 

uranium, it is titled Ingestion Intakes from 

Thorium. This really is one of the findings from 

way back in the original TBD that was reviewed, 

which was the original TBD back in 2004. And 

back then, it was proposed to use air 

concentration data to reconstruct thorium doses.

Now, obviously, a lot has happened 

since then. We looked at two SECs. So really, 

and this is originally Finding 15 related to 

ingestion intakes specifically for thorium. Now, 

this finding really only relates to the use of 

breathing zone data and also to the period in 

which we're using a fraction of the derived air 

concentration. So those two periods are 

essentially 1990 through 1994 for use of derived 

air concentration and then 1995 through 2006, 

when breathing zone samples are used.

And this one is pretty easy. There is 

a TIB, TIB-9 out there that instructs on how to 
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assign ingestion intakes when using such data to 

reconstruct internal doses. TIB-9 is referenced 

correctly in the TBD. In fact, if you look at 

our -- we have a quote here under Section 2.3 

that calls out the sections where it talks about 

estimating the ingestion intakes using TIB-9. 

TIB-9 has been thoroughly vetted in Procedures. 

So I mean this was really just a question of it 

was in abeyance because we agreed with the method 

and we just had to see that language and 

instruction added to the TBD.

So like I said, this one is pretty 

easy. That language was included. So we suggest 

changing this finding, which is currently in 

abeyance, I believe, to be closed.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Sorry, I was talking 

on mute. From I understand, you have evaluated 

this and SC&A's recommendation is closed. 

Correct?

MR. BARTON: That's correct.

CHAIR CLAWSON: I agree. Any 

discussion from the other Work Group members?
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MEMBER ZIEMER: I agree. Just for 

clarification, is the old Finding 29?

CHAIR CLAWSON: It's Finding 15, 

actually.

MR. STIVER: No, this was the old 

Finding 15. 29 relates to the K-65 radon 

exposure. That will be -- Hans is going to talk 

about that next.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Okay. Yes, I agree to 

close.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay, Phil?

MEMBER SCHOFIELD: Yes, I agree with 

that, then. I think we have pretty much beat 

that to death.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay, sounds good.

Okay, back to you Bob or John.

MR. BARTON: Well, the next section, 

if we are going in order to our review, is really

the Finding 29. This is the K-65 radon exposure. 

And I guess just to set the table a little bit, 

this was discussed last at the September meeting 

in 2014. The discussion really starts around 
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page 240 and this sort of ties into, at least a 

little bit, into that raffinate discussion we had 

earlier. This is the dumping of the drums of 

raffinate material into the K-65 silos. And I 

think what happened is, if you look at that 

discussion back in September, there was some 

confusion about whether external dose rates were 

going to be used as a controlling factor. But 

really what it turned out was that radon breath 

data was going to be used as it was shown in 

Report-52. 

I know Hans, if you are on the line, 

I know you were extensively involved in that 

discussion back in September and also the 

original issue. And I believe this is the dumping 

of those drums, not necessarily the sort of I 

guess ambient radon emanations from the silo that 

were extensively discussed in the following 

meeting in December.

So, I don't know if you want to sort 

of take the mike here, Hans.

DR. BEHLING: Okay, can you hear me? 
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Can you hear me?

CHAIR CLAWSON: Yes, we can.

DR. BEHLING: Oh, okay. As John just 

said, this goes back quite a ways. Initially, 

Finding 29 cited an issue here, where the 

original exposure to radon was based on two 

simple samples that were taken in '63 and that 

was considered inappropriate in the sense where 

that was a limited amount of data. But moreover, 

the issue was also compounded by the fact that 

NIOSH used external exposure dose limits to 

basically bracket for the internal exposure 

associated with radon exposure that were the 

result of people working with the transfer of 

13,000 drums into Silos 1 and 2. 

And my initial finding centered around 

the confining factor of using external exposure, 

which was based on an assumed exposure to workers 

who were engaged in that particular activity, 

whose exposure was estimated, on average, to be 

312 millirems per week. And as a result of that 

exposure and this is assumed to be an empirical 
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exposure measurement, but then the model was used 

to assume that, at the time, this was in the '50s, 

that the regulatory limits for exposure were to 

be five rems and that was further reduced to four 

rems, based on admin limit that was lower than 

the regulatory limit. And now it is upon that 

basis it was assumed that internal exposure, as 

well as the radon exposure, would be limited by 

that external dose limits, which was not the 

case.

When we looked at the data, we 

realized that in that time period the actual 

regulatory limit was 12 to 15 rem, depending on 

which of the years we were talking about. And 

therefore, this was the concern.

As a result of that, obviously, NIOSH 

had revised their approach to dealing with it by 

using actual radon breath analysis. And on the 

basis of more than 600 breath analyses data 

points, they were able to identify a total of I 

believe 449 breath analyses and then combine that 

with -- this was reported in Report-52 and also 
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the conversion of breath analysis into body 

burdens of radium-226, as was defined in OTIB25. And there, Tom is to incorporate that into 

the Revision 3 of the TBD. We agreed that that 

would be the appropriate approach to doing this 

and resolving it.

So as a result of those revisions, and 

we looked at the Revision 3 of Section 5 of the 

TBD, and concluded that the data that was 

identified in Report-52 in OTIB-25 accommodate 

our concerns with regard to the radon exposure, 

the internal exposure to radium-226. And SC&A, 

basically, has come to the conclusion that we 

would recommend the change from abeyance to a 

closed of that particular finding.

CHAIR CLAWSON: I understand you are 

recommending closure of this. Anymore discussion 

from NIOSH or are they good with that?

MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, we have nothing 

to offer.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay, so Paul or Phil, 

can we close this?
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MEMBER ZIEMER: I'm in agreement with 

that. I'm comfortable closing this one.

MEMBER SCHOFIELD: Yes, I agree with 

that, too. I mean there is a lot of data on that 

particular point.

CHAIR CLAWSON: We've knocked this one 

around quite a bit.

Anyway, okay, so we're going to close 

this one. Back to you, John.

MR. BARTON: This is Bob. I think I 

can take it from here. Next, again, if we are 

going in order, it is Section 2.5. And now we 

are sort of getting into the big ticket items, 

the uranium and the thorium and thoron.

The first one is going to be 

unmonitored doses to uranium, which would 

actually be uranium coworker model. And the 

coworker model was really developed in TIB-78, 

which the most recent revision was 3. However 

since, that document has essentially been merged 

with the TBD so there really isn't a TIB-78 

anymore but all that information now really found 
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in the TBD.

So we had originally reviewed Revision 

3 of TIB-78 and we had come up with two findings 

and six observations. The first finding and also 

Observation 3 is kind of tied into the first 

finding was how you deal with values that are 

negative or zero.

Now, the current methods on how you 

construct coworker models would be you take those 

negative values and you center them to zero. And 

it makes a lot of sense if you think about how we 

do these coworker calculations now with the timeweighted, one person-one sample approach, if you 

were to take a negative value at face value and 

apply the time-weighted OPOS calculation, you 

essentially would be including negative exposure 

into your coworker model, which is obviously not 

appropriate.

So current guidance has those values 

that are negative to be centered at zero.

NIOSH's response to this finding was 

well, that is correct but that method kind of 
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post-dates when this coworker model was 

calculated. So obviously, the newer calculated 

values are correctly at zero. My only comment 

here is that when OTIB-78 was merged into the 

TBD, it still included some language that 

indicated that negative and zero values were 

actually going to be centered at the lowest 

positive observed value in a given year. To be 

specific, the language reads: "For years with 

uncensored data, values less than or equal to 

zero were treated as being centered at the lowest 

positive value in that year for TWOPOS 

implementation." Now, that language could very 

well be just an artifact and should have been 

removed when TIB-78 was merged into the TBD.

I assume a lot of these coworker 

calculations are done using programming scripts, 

which I likely adopt those Report-53 methods, 

which would take those negative values and put 

them at zero. But I just -- because that language 

was in there, I wanted to sort of get confirmation 

from NIOSH that when you see -- when evaluating 
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the data which is contained in HIS-20, the HIS20 database, that those negative values were 

correctly treated as zero and that the language 

that I just quoted, I assume, is an artifact. Am 

I on the right track there, Stu?

MR. HINNEFELD: Well, this is Stu. 

Anybody from ORAU can correct me if I am wrong 

but I believe that it is not really an artifact, 

that the old centering method was retained. I 

think the reason for that is that it's not a real 

easy process. You're right, it is done by a 

script that you have to be relatively careful in 

the application of your data treatment. So you 

likely have to go back to the original uncensored 

data set and apply some new approach, you know 

your new censoring approach to that and then some 

careful checking. And so it's a fairly difficult 

and careful thing to do. I think most of the 

people are aware that our data handling people 

are relatively busy because we have large 

coworker work going on at Savannah River and 

Idaho. 
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And as was discussed previously, there 

are several in abeyance items that relate to this 

kind of thing about the coworker model. There 

is, everybody I believe agrees that the quote 

error is slight and it will be in a claimantfavorable direction.

So, at this time, I don't think we did 

the work in order to change that censoring level 

in order to -- we didn't do it so that we could 

come out more quickly and be ready more quickly.

So if anyone at ORAU wants to tell me 

I'm wrong, I would be glad to listen to that. 

But that is my understanding of the situation.

MR. ARNO: This is Matt Arno. That's 

correct. And one thing to also keep in mind is 

that if someone is sampled only annually, either 

censoring method gives you the same answer. So, 

there truly is only a slight variation.

MR. BARTON: This really dealt with 

how those negatives were dealt with. As Stu said, 

if that is not an artifact, then we are taking 

those values that were zero and negative and 
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assigning a positive result. Obviously, that is 

going to be claimant-favorable but it sounds like 

this would be sort of an item that is in the queue 

to be changed in any upcoming revision.

Do I have that correct?

MR. HINNEFELD: Sorry, I was on mute. 

We feel like in abeyance is the correct 

designation for this. You know we're not arguing 

the finding because the current guidance does say 

censor to zero. But based on just the 

availability of resources to fix this and the 

minor impact it would have in a favorable 

direction, we are really to proceed with dose 

reconstructions the way it is, until such time as 

we have resources available to make that slight 

modification.

MR. BARTON: This is Bob. I certainly 

don't have any issue with that. I agree that the 

issue is in abeyance. I was asking whether this 

would eventually be updated and it sounds like it 

will, as resources allow. And as the coworker 

model currently stands and how it treats those 
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zeros and negatives, it is claimant-favorable 

until such time as it would be updated for the 

current guidance.

So, I agree with you, Stu. I think 

that this is an item that can be put in abeyance 

because we agree on the method of how it should 

be calculated. And again, at such time as there 

are resources able to take care of that, it will 

be taken care of. So at least that is what I'm 

hearing.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay, so my 

understanding is that we are just going to put 

this into abeyance and that when time and 

resources become available, and if it comes up, 

that we will change this. Is that correct?

MR. HINNEFELD: That's right, Brad.

MR. STIVER: That's right, Brad.

MR. HINNEFELD: And I want to make 

sure that it is clear to the Work Group that our 

intention is to proceed with dose 

reconstructions, once we can achieve closure --

assuming we achieve closure on any remaining open 
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items after today's meeting and wrap those up. 

If we wrap those up before we get a chance to 

revise the internal to get rid of -- or revise 

the coworker in order to get rid of these in 

abeyance items, we intend to proceed with dose 

reconstructions with the coworker model in its 

current form. Because like I said, it's a minor 

effect and it is a positive in a claimantfavorable direction. 

So we intend to go ahead with dose 

reconstruction, even if we haven't cleared these 

in abeyance findings.

CHAIR CLAWSON: I understand, Stu.

MR. HINNEFELD: Okay.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Other Board Members, 

any questions?

MEMBER ZIEMER: That's a reasonable 

approach. Just for my understanding, Stu, what 

would be the effect, typically, on a dose 

reconstruction? Would it be moving a decimal 

point?

MR. HINNEFELD: Oh, I think it would 
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be hard to find. As I think about this, you are 

talking about we're building a coworker model so 

we're taking all of the monitored individuals in 

a given year and we're building the distribution 

of those, essentially of people because each 

person has a time-weighted statistic for their 

result.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Right.

MR. HINNEFELD: So, you'd be taking 

the low end of the distribution because these are 

censored. You know these are people who either 

don't have a detectable amount, these are the low 

end of the distribution --

MEMBER ZIEMER: Right.

MR. HINNEFELD: And you'd be changing 

it very slightly by censoring at a different 

value. 

And the distribution which is 

important for intake is the 50 percent amount, in 

most cases. And so you'd be having -- you know 

you are messing around with the bottom end of the 

distribution of where you are not -- like the 
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mid-point or 95th percentile is what is used for 

dose reconstruction.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Then I'm just 

wondering if it is even worth changing.

MR. HINNEFELD: Well, it's a question 

of having resources available and there are many 

other higher priority activities at the time.

MEMBER SCHOFIELD: When you're talking 

about the resources, I mean, are we talking about 

a large amount of time for a rather minor 

adjustment?

MR. HINNEFELD: We'll, we're talking 

about time for a minor adjustment. I don't know 

if we are talking -- it's not an inconsequential 

amount of time but I don't really know how much

time it would involve but it is a really minor 

adjustment. So this is not going to be really 

high on our hit list.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, I'm sort of 

asking if it is worth even adjusting at all. I 

mean if it ends up changing somebody's dose or 

their probability of causation by a fraction of 
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a decimal point, we don't have that kind of 

accuracy anyway.

MR. HINNEFELD: Right.

MEMBER ZIEMER: I mean we show these 

values to two decimal points which is, in my mind, 

two decimal points too many.

MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, that's another 

discussion.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, that's another 

discussion. But anyway, okay, at this point it 

should remain in abeyance. I'm good on that. I 

just wondered how much difference it is even 

going to ever make.

MR. HINNEFELD: Right.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Okay.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Are you good with it, 

Phil?

MEMBER SCHOFIELD: I'm good with that.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay. Back to you, 

Bob.

MR. BARTON: Okay, so Finding 1 will 

remain in abeyance and, as pointed out, it is not 
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going to have a great amount of consequence in 

the way the coworker model is constructed and the 

way it treats those values as claimant-favorable 

anyway. So, that's in abeyance.

And we can move on to the second 

finding related to uranium coworker model. And 

this had to do with what we observed and we called 

them paired bioassay measurements. And what we 

saw was that for an individual worker, 

occasionally, they would have two bioassay 

entries on the same date. And the two entries 

were most often off by an order or two orders of 

magnitude. That is, you would see an individual 

worker in the HIS-20 database who had one results 

that would say one microgram per liter and on 

that exact same day, a result that was 100 

micrograms per liter.

And so we brought that to NIOSH's 

attention and they provided a response to that. 

They did some extensive work looking into that 

phenomenon. I attempted to summarize the 

findings of their investigation but it is 
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probably going to be more informative to the Work 

Group to have NIOSH explain it about what they 

did about the issue, what they found, and how 

that is being dealt with, if they would like to 

take the floor now. Otherwise, I can kind of 

muddle my way through what they did and what the 

resolution of that was. 

I'll let NIOSH explain their 

investigation and what they found first.

MR. HINNEFELD: Boy, I don't know. Is 

somebody from ORAU, is that fresh in any of your 

minds? I guess not.

MR. ARNO: This is Matt Arno.

MR. HINNEFELD: Go ahead, Matt.

MR. ARNO: I guess I probably know the 

most about it but it is not fresh in my mind. We 

did discover that there was an issue and commonly 

things were off by a factor of a hundred, with 

occasional instances of it being off by a factor 

of ten or a thousand.

Our conclusion was that, generally 

speaking, the higher result was the correct 
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result in almost all instances. So we went 

through the data set and excluded results that 

were part of these order of magnitude different 

pairs to only use the higher results and then 

reran the coworker study.

MR. BARTON: So, in essence, what was 

found is that when you see those two pairs, 

evidence points to the fact that the higher 

result was the correct one and the low result was 

likely, when it was imported into HIS-20 --

MR. ARNO: Yes, and associated, I 

would cover that if the result had two decimal 

places in HIS-20, it was incorrectly imported, 

regardless of whether it was a paired result that 

was an order magnitude or more higher. We adjust 

to those as part of our period that there was a 

vetted import area and then for the rest of them, 

we just used the higher result when there was a 

pair.

MR. BARTON: Right, that was sort of 

a second part that wasn't actually part of SC&A's 

original finding but that's --
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MR. ARNO: No, that was our 

observation, as we investigated your finding.

MR. BARTON: Right. And you know SC&A 

has reviewed what NIOSH did to investigate the 

matter. We agree with their approach. 

Certainly, when you have those two questionable 

pairs and given the evidence, we are not just 

picking the higher value because it is the higher 

value; the evidence suggests that that is the 

correct value.

So, SC&A agrees with the investigation 

that NIOSH performed and agrees with the 

conclusions. And so certainly we would entertain 

any questions but, ultimately, we recommend that 

Finding 2 related to the uranium coworker model 

to be closed.

CHAIR CLAWSON: I understand. I 

concur with that. 

Paul or Phil?

MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes. Sorry, I was on 

mute. After listening to you, I agree with that.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Phil?
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MEMBER SCHOFIELD: Yes, this is Phil. 

I agree with that.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Well, that one is 

closed. Next one? 

MR. BARTON: Okay, so those were the 

two findings associated with the uranium coworker 

model. We also had six observations, which I 

think we can go through fairly quickly.

The first observation was that, for 

certain years, in particular the late '80s and 

early '90s, we at SC&A just couldn't recreate the 

time-weighted OPOS values and resulting 

calculations for certain years.

Now, we made this an observation, or 

I made it an observation, because I felt that I 

was probably missing something and using the 

wrong method. 

So what happened is we exchanged some 

calculation files with NIOSH, tried to resolve 

why our numbers weren't matching for just those 

particular years. The other years we were able 

to match up very well. And it turns out that we 
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were using Procedure-95, which was titled 

"Generating Summary Statistics for Coworker 

Bioassay Data." But because the years in 

question had such a high number of censored 

results, the Procedure-95 method for doing the 

calculation was not appropriate and that region 

of squares method that had been developed in 

Report-53 for just such occasions when you have 

data sets that have a very high number of censored 

results was the appropriate way to do the 

calculation. 

And NIOSH's response, once they saw 

our calculation file, they were able to use our 

OPOS results, along with the Report-53 method. 

And then everything sort of matched up very well. 

So, the original -- again, it's an observation. 

We couldn't match the values, as it turns out, 

because we were using a different procedure.

As I said, NIOSH looked at our 

calculation file and said, well, you have maybe 

the right OPOS statistics but not the correct 

interpretation of it when you go to fit it to 
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distributions and what not.

So we understand what the source of 

the discrepancy was for those years. Again, 

we're talking about late '80s and early '90s, 

when the data that we see is very heavily 

censored. We accept NIOSH's explanation and we 

recommend that Observation 1 be closed.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay, this is Brad. I 

understand. I agree, we'll close it. Any 

discussion from other Board Members?

MEMBER ZIEMER: No. This is Ziemer. 

I agree also.

MEMBER SCHOFIELD: This is Phil, I 

agree also.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay.

MR. BARTON: Very good. Moving on to 

Observation 2. This is really, this is a true 

observation because this is one of the very first 

coworker models that you used the time-weighted 

one person-one statistic approach to calculating 

the coworker distributions. 

We noted that the magnitude did not 
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actually change much at your median level but 

that the variability did decrease significantly 

by using that time-weighted one person-one 

statistic, as opposed to what's referred to as 

the pooled approach, where you essentially fit 

distributions for all the data as-is, rather than 

generating a value for each individual monitored 

worker in a given year.

So that's just an observation. I 

mean, it can be closed as an observation. It was 

to be expected that you probably wouldn't see 

that much of a change in magnitude at that 50th 

percentile level, but we felt it was worth noting 

simply because this was one of the first coworker 

models that was calculated using the timeweighted approach.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay, so noted and 

we'll proceed on.

MR. BARTON: Okay. As I said, 

Observation 3 was sort of tied in with Finding 1 

in that the HIS-20 itself, the database itself, 

didn't always deal with sort of the low numbers 
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down near the detection limit. What I mean is 

sometimes you will see in the comment column that 

the sample was noted as below the detection limit 

and the result was listed as zero. Sometimes it 

will say below the detection limit and the result 

was noted as the detection limit. And sometimes 

it was some value in between.

So that's the database inconsistently 

dealing with those lower end numbers. And, 

again, it's tied in with Finding 1, which we put 

in abeyance, and to deal with those values that 

are below the detection limit, zero, and 

negative.

So I think that is sort of tied at the 

hip with Finding 1. So I would say that that 

one, like Finding 1, would probably be in 

abeyance. Or we can close it and just simply 

leave Finding 1 open, however the Work Group 

would like to move forward with that.

CHAIR CLAWSON: I think where it's 

tied up with Finding 1 and it's in abeyance right 

now, I don't -- well, I don't know. I don't see 
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any real benefit of that. We've already agreed 

to that.

So, I guess, other Board Members, if 

you've got any --

MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, it sort of 

doesn't matter what you do with it because you 

are going to handle it through the finding. But 

maybe we could just go ahead and keep it open 

since it ties together, or keep it in abeyance.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay, I agree with you 

on that, Paul. And I'm sure you agree with us, 

too, Phil. And we'll just proceed on.

MEMBER SCHOFIELD: Yeah, I mean, we'll 

just keep it there.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay, sounds good. 

Go ahead, Bob.

MR. BARTON: It's really just a 

bookkeeping thing. So, I guess we'll hold it in 

abeyance for now. Okay.

(Simultaneous speaking.)

CHAIR CLAWSON: Well, I still don't 

want to lose it, either, that's part of my thing.
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MR. BARTON: Okay, very good. 

Observations 4 and 5 both involve comments that 

are in the HIS-20 database associated with 

individual entries. In some of those cases, the 

column will contain an actual numerical -- the 

comment contains a numerical result; whereas, the 

result listed in the actual analysis column is 

the censoring level.

So, that was the subject of the 

Observation 4. We said, well, how are these 

comments possibly -- how could they possibly be 

incorporated into the calculation of coworker 

intakes? In the case of where you have a 

numerical result in the comments column, would 

that value be more appropriate to use than the 

censored value, which appears in the results 

column?

And then Observation 5 was similar. 

In the comments column sometimes samples would be 

labeled as pre-employment, re-employment, or 

actually labeled as invalid. And certainly those 

three types of samples are not included in a 
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coworker model because they're not really 

representative of intakes that occurred at the 

site. 

Obviously, if it's pre-employment, 

re-employment, that would be reflective of any 

intakes that occurred prior to working at 

Fernald. And then if a sample is labeled as 

invalid, then that probably shouldn't be 

included.

Now, in response, NIOSH stated that in 

future revisions of the coworker model that these 

types of comments would be taken into account.

When we looked at the TBD, which has 

OTIB-78 merged into it, it wasn't clear to us 

that at least those pre-employment or invalid 

samples had been taken out. And the reason I say 

this is that the total number of samples reported 

for any given year appear to be identical for the 

version of the report that we reviewed and also 

the version that appears in the TBD. 

So, I guess we had asked if NIOSH had 

gone through and removed those samples which are 
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inappropriate for coworker modeling, and also if, 

in this most recent revision, those other 

comments where you have numerical results in the 

comments but a censored value in the results, if 

there had been any adjustments made.

Based on the earlier discussion for 

Finding 1, perhaps that was not done at this 

juncture, but I'll turn it over to Stu and his 

team if they would like to comment on that.

MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I don't recall. 

I don't recall if this was done or not. Matt or 

anybody on the phone, do you recall if these were 

taken out in this version?

MR. ARNO: This is Matt Arno. This, 

I guess, observation was merged with the other 

two or other three issues there that were 

considered low priority and these have not been 

addressed.

MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. This, again, 

would be a relatively small population, maybe at 

the bottom end of the distribution. So we don't 

feel like it's enough -- there wouldn't be enough 
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data to really significantly skew the 50th or 

95th percentile results. So, we considered it a 

low priority item that would be taken care of in 

the future.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay. Well, I guess 

that's where we're going to leave it. So what 

would you suggest be the best, just leave it in 

abeyance, then?

MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, I think abeyance 

would be the right category.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay, any discussion? 

By the way, this is Brad. Any discussion from 

other Board Members?

MEMBER ZIEMER: I'm good with that. 

That should be both Observations 4 and 5, right? 

Isn't that what we're talking about or just 4?

MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, I believe we're 

talking about both 4 and 5.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Yeah, 4 and 5. Yeah, 

I'm good with that.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay, Phil?

MEMBER SCHOFIELD: I'm good with that, 
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also.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay, we'll leave this 

in abeyance then and proceed on.

MR. BARTON: Okay, this brings us to 

the last observation, Observation 6, related to 

the uranium coworker modeling. And this is 

related to what we saw in the HIS-20, where 

individual urinalysis results would often include 

a designation of the intake mode, either labeled 

as inhalation or ingestion, and also would 

sometimes include the solubility type, you know, 

days, weeks, years, that sort of thing.

And we asked, you know, is that 

information -- can that be used to more 

accurately calculate coworker intakes? And 

NIOSH's response is that we really don't know the 

source of that information and how we've 

calculated it, how they determined the solubility 

type, how they determined that the intake was an 

ingestion versus inhalation. 

And so it's pretty standard practice 

in the program that when you don't know that 
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information, or that information is potentially 

unreliable, you calculate the intakes assuming 

each of the solubility types and you use the most 

claimant-favorable in each individual case.

And so that's fine. It was something 

we wanted to point out, again, as an observation. 

There is some indication that the site had 

included the mode of intake, ingestion or 

inhalation, and the solubility type. But if we 

can't establish the credibility of that 

information, then we agree with NIOSH that it 

probably should not be used to make any 

adjustments or do any calculations based on the 

solubility type reported or the mode of 

inhalation. So we agree with NIOSH on that one 

and we feel that that can be closed.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay, I understand. I 

agree with you that it be closed. 

Any other Board Members?

MEMBER ZIEMER: Right, they're going 

to end up using most claimant-favorable approach. 

So I'm good with closing that.
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MEMBER SCHOFIELD: Sounds like the 

reasonable thing to do.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay, I agree, we'll 

close that one. Next?

MR. BARTON: Okay, so that is it for 

uranium. If it's amenable to the Work Group, we 

can move on to thorium, the coworker modeling --

.

PARTICIPANT: Hello?

CHAIR CLAWSON: Hello. Somebody 

wanted to make sure that we're on the line?

Okay, continue on. Sorry.

MR. BARTON: Okay. We can move on to 

thorium, which is not only thorium-232 

assignment, but also intakes of thoron, which is 

similar to radon except it is part of the thorium 

chain instead of uranium; and also the issue of 

potential unsupported radium doses. And that is 

Section 2.6 in SC&A's review.

So we had seven total findings relate 

to thorium, thoron, and unsupported radium. 

Findings 1 through 3 relate to -- well, let me 
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backtrack a little bit.

When we're talking about assignment of 

unmonitored thorium doses, what we're doing is 

we're using in vivo results for lead and 

actinium, basically the daughter product of 

thorium, and using those in vivo counts to backcalculate an intake of thorium-232. Now, the 

technical aspects of that have been thoroughly 

vetted at numerous meetings. We include 

assumptions such as the triple separation, 

corrections for bias, and that sort of thing.

So, what was left, and NIOSH had 

produced a report back in 2014 that dealt with 

basically all dose reconstruction topics related 

to thorium. And that was first discussed in 

September, and then SC&A issued a report, which 

we discussed in December. We came to pretty good 

agreement. We did have two findings that were 

discussed.

Findings 1 through 3 relate to the 

first period we're looking at, which is 1979 to 

1989. This was where the mobile in vivo counter 
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was used and we're using those daughter products 

of lead and actinium to reconstruct thorium.

And the three findings for that period 

were pretty much all related to implementation; 

not so much what the calculated values are but 

who is going to be assigned thorium intakes and

what level.

Finding 1 discussed that most of the 

activities are going to be related to re-drumming 

and repackaging, but we did find evidence that 

there might have been some small-scale handling 

and maybe a bit of processing. And the big 

problem is, at this site and many other sites, we 

can't really identify who those workers were. 

This is very similar to Finding 3 in 

which we noted that, when going through claimant 

files, and, in particular, the CATI reports, that 

there were a wide variety of job titles that could 

have been exposed. And, again, we don't really 

know who those thorium workers are. So, you know, 

how do we really go about assigning those doses?

This was discussed pretty 
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extensively. The original NIOSH White Paper on 

thorium had given some illustrative examples of 

what types of jobs would be assigned the thorium 

intake. And we discussed that, and we kind of 

came to the place where you really have to assume 

that the thorium exposure occurred, unless you 

really have convincing evidence that it just 

simply wasn't possible. And that convincing 

evidence would essentially be your administrative 

workers had never really entered these 

radiological areas and so would not come in 

contact with any thorium. And so it really 

wouldn't be appropriate to assign coworker doses 

to those people. But, I mean, if you were in a 

position where you could have entered those 

radiological areas, it would be appropriate to 

assign that dose.

And in the TBD, that language is 

pretty much in there. And I'll read this 

sentence. This is from Section 5.5.2.3.1, for 

the record. It says: "Thorium coworker doses are 

assigned to all monitored workers, unless there 
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is a reason why they should be excluded; for 

example, a secretary or administrative individual 

who worked only in non-radiological areas." 

And that's pretty much exactly the 

language we had talked about during December. We 

think that's the right way to go. And that was 

really the purpose for Findings 1 and 3, saying, 

on the question of who you do assign thorium 

exposures to, it's pretty much anyone that could 

be considered a radiological worker, and the 

assignment of coworker doses is only withheld if 

you had that type of job title where you just 

never really entered radiological areas and so 

it's inappropriate to be assigning any 

unmonitored thorium exposure.

So, that's Findings 1 and 3, which we 

recommend, based on that language in the TBD, 

that those be closed.

CHAIR CLAWSON: I understand and I 

agree with that. Any other Board Members?

MEMBER ZIEMER: I also agree with 

that.
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MEMBER SCHOFIELD: I have no 

disagreement with that. 

MR. BARTON: Okay, Finding 2 gets a 

little trickier. As I said, the first three 

findings are all related to who gets assigned 

intakes and then at what level. Who gets assigned 

intakes, we just talked about, is essentially 

anyone who can be considered a radiological 

worker.

Now, at what level do we assign these 

intakes? Normally, with coworker modeling, the 

way the program is sort of developed is, you know, 

you develop a distribution, you have a median and 

a geometric standard deviation, and then you also 

have the 95th percentile that can be applied as 

a constant for highly-exposed workers.

Finding 2 pointed out that the

monitoring program that we're using for this 

earlier period, the 1979 to 1989, is really a 

uranium monitoring period. They used the in vivo 

counter to monitor for uranium exposure, but as 

sort of a byproduct, they also listed out these 
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lead and actinium results. 

And so we felt that since, A, you 

don't know who was actually exposed to the 

thorium materials, and since the program was 

actually geared towards uranium and not focused 

on workers necessarily who were handling thorium, 

we felt that it might be appropriate and 

representative to apply the 95th percentile as a 

constant. Again, simply because you have so many 

samples that are geared towards these uranium 

operations that it might, I guess, for lack of a 

better term, dilute the sample of workers who 

actually handled thorium. Which, you know, if we 

had just a sample of in vivo records for thorium 

workers, then that could be considered 

representative. But since we really don't have 

that, we felt that using the upper end of the 

distribution and applying that as a constant 

might be appropriate here. 

Now, the question of at what level you 

assign coworker intakes obviously changes from 

site to site, and it is a matter of professional 
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judgment, I guess. But we wanted to bring that 

to the Work Group's attention for discussion 

again.

And I'm going to find the exact 

language that was in here. Okay. Here's where 

the TBD addresses the 95th percentile. It says: 

"The 95th percentile intake rate, with a constant 

distribution, is assigned to those with the 

highest potential for exposure. Workers with a 

baseline thorium fecal sample are included in 

this group, as well as subcontractors from IT 

Corporation working during 1988 and 1989. All 

others are assigned the 50th percentile intake 

rate within a log-normal distribution."

So there is the mechanism in there. 

It says -- it sort of appears that you had to 

have the fecal sample to be included in that 95th 

percentile group, or have worked for IT 

Corporation. I don't know if those two 

designations are simply illustrative or if those 

are the two groups that would get the 95th 

percentile. 
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As I said, SC&A felt that, given the 

fact that the monitoring data we're using is not 

targeting thorium work per se, but it is likely 

capturing it, and coupled with the fact that we 

don't know who the thorium workers are, that, in 

this case, for Fernald, it might be appropriate 

to assign that 95th percentile to all 

radiological workers.

And we wanted to bring that up for 

discussion, because obviously this is a matter of 

judgment, not necessarily technically right or 

wrong, but more a matter of policy.

MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, this is Stu. 

I'll explain a little bit the basis behind our 

judgment here. And the fecal sample and IT Corp 

is not -- those are not considered examples. 

Those are considered the people who would be 

getting the 95th percentile.

The reason for that, our basis for 

this reasoning, is that when you look at the '79 

to '89 period, they're really two pieces there. 

There is '79 through about 1987, when the thorium 
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was sitting in warehouses and occasionally there 

would be a short-term repackaging effort. There 

were some seriously degraded drums. They might 

do a repackaging. That would be a fairly short 

duration job by these people. 

And, occasionally, there were some job 

orders for thorium during that period, at least 

the first half of that period, but they generally 

appear to be providing 50 kilograms of thorium to 

GE, or a couple hundred kilograms of a particular 

thorium compound to so-and-so, which would have 

been retrievable. Some of this thorium was good, 

quality compound. Some of it was junk. Some of 

it was good, quality thorium. 

So, that would be the retrieval of 

those materials from the warehouse, probably the 

Plant 1 warehouse, and shipping it to those 

materials. So you don't really have a regularly 

-- and in either case, it is a short duration 

task. I mean, just like overpacking, it's a 

short-duration cask.

So you don't have anyone who is 
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regularly exposed to thorium. Our general 

guidance on coworker models is -- for a coworker 

model, if someone that is not monitored and is 

occasionally exposed, they get the 50th 

percentile. If someone is not monitored but it 

looks like they are probably regularly exposed, 

they get the 95th.

So, in our view, from this period of 

time, from here on top of the '79 through roughly 

'87, no one was regularly exposed to thorium. 

And so the 50th percentile is appropriate.

From that, and then, starting about 

'88-'89, there were some things that were being 

done to disposition thorium. The IT project was 

the removal of the thorium from the bins and silos 

in Plant 8. And then I think the '89 would have 

been Westinghouse also engaged in some more 

serious either repackaging or packaging of this. 

And so they were asking for fecal samples on these 

thorium projects.

So, those are the people who are 

likely to have more than just an occasional 
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periodic thorium exposure. So that's why we 

chose what we did, and that's why we think that 

what we've chosen here is appropriate.

MR. BARTON: Well, let me kind of 

respond to -- comment to that. As a general 

guidance, if you're occasionally exposed, you get 

the distribution. And if you're routinely 

exposed and not monitored, you get the 95th 

percentile, which I can agree with. But your 

coworker model is based on data for workers who 

were all occasionally exposed. There is no 

routine exposures. So since the coworker model 

itself, the distribution, is based on occasional 

exposure, I'm not sure it's the same thing.

I agree that, when you have a 

situation of a coworker model based on workers 

who were routinely exposed, then that sort of 

framework definitely holds. But if your coworker 

model is based on workers who are already only 

occasionally exposed, I'm not sure it applies, 

necessarily, here.

Again, it's certainly a matter of 
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policy, not necessarily a technical issue. And 

we wanted to bring it up. I don't know if I can 

offer anything else besides that.

MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I can only offer 

that I understand, I understand your point, but 

the coworker model gives an annual intake to 

everyone who is included in, you know, who gets 

the coworker approach. And it may be the thorium 

monitoring data is not very high, there may be 

missed dose in every year, but they get an annual 

intake.

And so, to me, I don't see how that 

doesn't bound the thorium exposures of the 

workers, given the very minimal activity of 

thorium that was going on during those years.

MR. BARTON: I mean, like I said, 

again, the coworker model is not geared towards 

those thorium workers, but you would expect that, 

even though they are occasionally exposed, if 

exposures did take place during that occasional 

work, they would be associated with the people 

who work with thorium and they'd be in the higher 
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end of the distribution.

Now, if everybody who was exposed at 

that higher end was monitored and we could prove 

that, then, you know, I would say case closed. 

But if you had workers who were possibly not 

monitored who did that occasional work, I think 

you would want to use -- to be representative, 

you'd want to assign them the coworker doses to 

the same workers who were doing the activities 

they were involved in.

I guess, to my mind, I would think 

those would be in the upper end of the 

distributions, even though it is probably quite 

low, near a missed dose. 

And, again, I brought this up as a 

matter of discussion to the Work Group, just as 

a matter of policy. We feel that 95th percentile 

may be appropriate here. It's clear that NIOSH 

believes that what's currently in place is 

bounding. I'm not sure I can offer up anything 

else by way of technical arguments one way or the 

other. I can certainly answer any questions the 
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Work Group has or if they'd like to discuss how 

they would like to move forward.

MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, I'd like to make 

one more comment about the monitored populations. 

And, granted, the vivo monitoring, at this time, 

'79 through '89, essentially all the work on the 

plant was uranium and the thorium was sitting in 

warehouses.

The monitored population was the 

people who worked with the uranium. And those 

same people would be the same who would do this 

occasional task with thorium. So, in all 

likelihood, the thorium workers are monitored, 

despite the fact that the thought process wasn't 

"we need to monitor these people because they are 

going into the thorium warehouse and getting this 

stuff." They were monitored because most of the 

time they were working with uranium.

So I think the people who actually did 

the work with the thorium are probably included. 

They have their own monitoring data. And so they 

won't be getting the coworker data.
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MR. BARTON: But you're not arguing 

that everyone who was monitored, or everyone who 

should have been monitored was monitored, 

certainly.

MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I'm not making 

that argument or we wouldn't have a coworker 

model.

MR. BARTON: Right. And I agree that 

the same people who did the uranium work would 

have likely done the thorium work. But all those 

records are mixed in with people who only did the 

uranium work. And to my mind, the people who 

actually did the thorium work would be in the 

upper tail of the distribution, which includes 

both, we'll call them the uranium-thorium workers 

and the uranium-only workers. And I guess that 

was our thinking.

MEMBER ZIEMER: This is Ziemer. Stu, 

can you remind me again, what's the database for 

the coworker model? What went into that?

MR. HINNEFELD: Okay, for the mobile 

in vivo counter, all the counts are available. 
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So, the database for '79 through '89 for thorium 

is based on the mobile in vivo counting data.

MEMBER ZIEMER: So it's not based on 

unmonitored workers.

MR. HINNEFELD: No, it's the monitored 

workers.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Yeah, I thought John 

was saying that the coworker model was based on 

unmonitored workers.

MR. HINNEFELD: Well, it's applied to 

unmonitored workers.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Yeah, I know, but it's 

not based on them. So the distribution is a high 

distribution to start with. It's a monitored 

worker distribution, right?

MR. HINNEFELD: Well, Bob's point was 

that the -- well, yeah, it is the monitored 

distribution.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Right. So that an 

occasional worker, short-term mechanical worker 

on that thorium work that you described, in 

short-term, I expect the 50 percent level finding 
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that would be appropriate.

MR. BARTON: Well, Dr. Ziemer, let me 

clarify, though. When we say it's a distribution 

based on monitored workers, it's a distribution 

based on workers monitored primarily for uranium. 

Now, that will include some workers who also did 

the thorium work. But lately, by and large, those 

are people who did uranium work. So there are 

going to be thorium workers in there. And by the 

nature of the mobile counter, in addition to the 

uranium results, it spits out the thorium data 

that we can use to reconstruct. That's only going 

to be some fraction of the total distribution 

that we're looking at, because, again, these are 

mostly uranium workers, uranium-only workers, 

with some fraction that are uranium workers who 

also did thorium work.

So, if we were talking strictly about 

uranium here, then, yes, you have a monitored 

worker population and occasional work with 

uranium would absolutely be appropriate to use 

the full distribution 50th percentile.
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But the point being that, even though 

you have thorium workers within this monitored 

uranium population, those people who did thorium 

work are more than likely going to be in the upper 

tail of the coworker doses calculated from that 

full distribution, which, again, is slightly 

diluted to some extent. We really don't know who 

were the workers that never did any of that 

overpacking activity.

MR. HINNEFELD: Well, Bob, in order to 

take your position you would have to say that 

there were workers who did work on the thorium, 

who were exposed to a similar degree as the people 

who worked on the thorium, but never got in the 

in vivo counter for some reason.

MR. BARTON: That's correct. I mean, 

that's why we have the coworker model, isn't it?

MR. STIVER: Stu, this is John. Maybe 

--

MR. HINNEFELD: We have the coworker 

model because there are a lot of people who we 

wouldn't exclude from thorium dose because we're 
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applying it to such a broad population, that 

there will be people who don't have an in vivo 

count because we are applying it to such a broad 

population because we don't really know who's in 

and out.

I think it is a leap of faith to go 

from that point to say that there were people who 

were involved in these thorium overpacks or 

retrieving the thorium out of the warehouses for 

shipment that never got an in vivo count.

MR. STIVER: Stu, this is John. Can 

I ask you a question here?

MR. HINNEFELD: Yes.

MR. STIVER: The baseline fecal 

sampling, was that only for those workers who 

were intended to be doing the repacking, and that 

would not apply during the '79 to '89 timeframe?

MR. HINNEFELD: It would not apply 

during the early part. I don't think you'll find 

any of the fecal samples during part of that '79 

to '89. You'll find some, I think, toward the 

end. I think.
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MR. STIVER: I guess my concern 

regarding that criterion is that are we sure that

everybody who was doing the thorium activity, the 

thorium work, I guess, on a regular basis would 

in fact have a baseline fecal sample? We're kind 

of assuming that's 100 percent reliable and we're 

not going to miss anybody.

And so the problem we've had with 

Fernald is you never really know who's doing what 

activity. It looks like that's why we're using 

that hook to get back to, you know, who to give 

the 95th percentile. I'm just wondering how 

reliable all that data is in terms of capturing 

everybody who would have been in that high 

potential exposure group.

MR. HINNEFELD: Well, there was a 

qualification process for working on the thorium 

overpacking when they got started, toward the end 

of this period. People had to be qualified to go 

do it, and part of that was I think was the 

baseline fecal. I think there is documentation 

to that effect that in the records of some of the 
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stuff we looked at.

MR. STIVER: Okay, but in the '79 to 

'89 timeframe, what I'm hearing, then, is that 

everybody would essentially be getting the mean 

and not the 95th percentile because there was no 

--

MR. HINNEFELD: Well, everybody would 

be getting, yeah, the full distribution of --

MR. STIVER: Yeah, right.

MR. HINNEFELD: Except for the 

regularly exposed people during the last couple 

of years that we can identify based on fecal 

sampling or IT affiliation.

MR. STIVER: Oh, okay.

MEMBER SCHOFIELD: This is Phil. Is 

somebody list you guys ran across by any chance 

that has job codes for those who worked with the 

uranium?

MR. HINNEFELD: You mean job titles or 

--

MEMBER SCHOFIELD: Yeah, job title or 

maybe a code of some type that identifies people 
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strictly as uranium workers.

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

CHAIR CLAWSON: Phil, this is Brad. I 

believe that they were all considered uranium 

workers. The thing is, is that when these jobs 

would come in, they would just take the uranium 

workers and go out and do the thorium.

MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, for the early 

part of this period, '79 to say about '87, I think 

they would just take people, if they were getting 

stuff out of the warehouse to ship, that they 

would just take people to the warehouse and ship 

it. There wouldn't necessarily be a 

qualification for that.

Or if there were people who were --

since there was a small group of drums they felt 

we really need to repackage these, then they 

would go for a couple of days, or whatever the 

duration was, and repackage a few drums. They 

would just take people and do that. There wasn't 

a qualification step for that.

Toward the end of the period, when 
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they started getting serious about thorium 

remediation, retrieval, and disposal, you know, 

getting it off the site, then they started 

talking about thorium project, thorium -- in fact 

we sort of described this project, I think, in 

the Site Profile, or certainly in our thorium 

document. At that point, then, people had to be 

qualified to work on those projects. And so there 

was a specific activity to say, okay, these 

people are ready to go work on the thorium 

project, and that was where the fecal samples 

came from.

MEMBER SCHOFIELD: And we're basing 

that on their samples that we've got, correct, 

Stu?

MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. Yes.

CHAIR CLAWSON: But if I remember 

right -- this is Brad, I'm sorry. If I remember 

right, a lot of this sampling and stuff, at the 

very beginning of it, we found documentation that 

actually a lot of the workers weren't being 

sampled. It was the supervisor to show them that 
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this was working and so forth. 

And I'm just wondering how -- I 

understanding what your point is. We're giving 

50 percent of this to uranium workers and the 95 

percentile will go to the actual thorium workers, 

but I'm really wondering if we really have a good 

handle of who was actually the thorium workers. 

We do have some that have been sampled, but I do 

not know that we are capturing them all until, 

like you say, the last couple of years, possibly, 

when we were in the heavy process of removing the 

thorium from Fernald.

MR. HINNEFELD: Well, my point is that 

that was the only time when there was a really 

consistent significant thorium exposure, which 

was when they actually started getting into the 

removal of the thorium to get it off Fernald, 

just the last couple of years of this '79 to '89 

period. And so for that reason --

MR. STIVER: Hey, Stu, this is John 

again. You know, during that ten-year period 

from '79 to '89, or at least the eight years or 
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whatever before they started doing the repacking, 

you did mention, and I had read a lot about this, 

due to the corrosive nature of the thorium 

product that there would be a lot re-drumming and 

so forth going on. I guess it was part of the 

maintenance activities.

And I don't know, it kind of seems to 

me that there might be the potential for a 

significant intake to people who were working 

during that time, even though it would have been 

short-term. So I'm trying to reconcile whether 

the full distribution of the 95th percentile 

would really be appropriate. There's a 

possibility we could be missing people.

CHAIR CLAWSON: John, are you talking 

about -- excuse me, Stu, I'm sorry. You're 

talking about out there on the train cars and 

stuff, the re-drumming of the thorium?

MR. STIVER: No, Brad, not the redrumming, that was the later period where they 

actually did have qualifications and baseline 

fecals and so forth. I am talking about that 
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kind of interim period.

(Simultaneous speaking.)

CHAIR CLAWSON: When I say re-drumming 

--

MR. STIVER: -- there had to be 

drumming and so forth going on just as part of 

the routine stewardship, for lack of a better 

term.

CHAIR CLAWSON: So you're talking 

about while it was sitting there and it was 

corroding away.

MR. STIVER: Yeah, this would be the 

time that Stu is indicating that they would 

assign the full distribution because those people 

weren't documented as potentially highly exposed. 

I'm just wondering if some of those 

sporadic short-term activities could still result 

in significant exposure in a situation that you 

would think the 95th percentile would probably be 

more appropriate.

MR. HINNEFELD: Well, my view is that, 

no, there is not the opportunity for the kind of 
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exposure you would expect that would be so high 

that we might consider these people regularly or 

highly exposed.

My view is that, throughout the 

maintenance period, that sort of just, you know, 

keeping the inventory intact period, the 

exposures were few and far between.

MR. STIVER: Yeah, I understand that. 

I'm just thinking, for the guy who might have 

been in one of those short-term exposures, could 

he have gotten such an intake over a relatively 

short period of time that would still result in 

a high dose? In which case you might miss him, 

you know, by using the full distribution as 

opposed to the 95th percentile. I'm just trying 

to think --

MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, I understand 

what you're saying. I just don't envision it 

happening. I mean, the level of thorium activity 

-- I mean, I was there during this period and the 

level of thorium activity was like almost 

nonexistent.
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MR. STIVER: Since you were there, I 

mean, do you remember how often the material had 

to be repackaged and so forth just to keep it --

MR. HINNEFELD: I don't remember --

well, I don't really, personally, specifically, 

ever remember it happening. I know we have seen 

-- we have at least one reference we refer to, I 

think it's in our post-SEC thorium paper, of a 

report that was written about a particular 

overpacking job. You know, I haven't chased that 

down or tried to chase that reference down. But 

my understanding is it was a matter of a few days. 

So, it's just not -- and it was a special enough 

event that the coverage, it was covered by the 

industrial hygiene radiation department and 

report was written about it.

MR. STIVER: Yeah, I'm just thinking, 

we kind of worked on this under the 250-day issue, 

and I know Hans had been involved in that a number 

of years ago where I think we had demonstrated 

that one snoot-full in a certain instance can 

still be enough to result in a pretty high dose. 
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So, granted, those would be pretty small --

pretty unlikely events. but if you can't 

categorically show that those didn't happen, not 

to get you to prove a negative, but would be it 

possible and likely enough that that could have 

happened? And in such a situation, maybe the 

full distribution would not really cover that 

particular worker.

I know there's a lot of conjecture 

going on there.

MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, well, you're 

also conjecturing the big sudden intake from one 

of those overpackings and also that it happened 

to occur to a person who wasn't monitored. 

Because if a person was monitored, you've got it 

in his in vivo results.

MR. STIVER: Yeah, but for the guy who 

wasn't monitored who would be assigned the 

coworker dose, is it really such a remote 

possibility that it is not even worth 

considering?

MR. HINNEFELD: Well, see, the in vivo 
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monitoring schedule for in vivo, for the mobile 

counter, since it wasn't there all the time, it 

was based on your occupation. And so the 

production people were monitored, what, annually 

maybe, and sometimes more often if they had a 

detectable burden. And the people like 

maintenance and transportation, and probably some 

in health and safety, were monitored less 

frequently, like every two or three years, 

something like that. But there was probably 

frequency for monitoring all these people and 

they did what they could to try to get everybody 

through there. The mobile counter visited I 

think twice a year, usually. And so in that 

amount of time, you had the schedule them and try 

to get through everybody on their schedule.

So, to me, you're postulating a lot. 

You are theorizing a lot, that, A, there was this 

big exposure to somebody and that person, through 

one of these short-term projects, and that person 

also happened to be somebody who just got missed 

and never got counted in the in vivo schedule.
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MR. STIVER: Yeah --

(Simultaneous speaking.)

MR. HINNEFELD: So there's a lot of 

speculating going on to get you to the point where 

you feel like there should be a 95th percentile 

assignment on a coworker.

MR. STIVER: You know, I was reading 

through the transcripts the last couple of days 

and this issue came up about claustrophobes and 

people who just didn't want to get monitored.

MR. HINNEFELD: Right, the guy is 

assumed be a claustrophobe. So that is 

speculation, then, that a guy involving a shortterm repackaging was claustrophobic and wouldn't 

get in the monitor.

MR. STIVER: Yeah, you are taking very 

small probabilities and multiplying them 

together. That's pretty unlikely. I just wanted 

to put it out there.

MR. BARTON: This is Bob. I don't 

want to beat this thing to death here. So let me 

just try to posit it maybe another way.
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What we're really talking about is 

representativeness here. Now, thorium activities 

were intermittent, occasional, however you want 

to describe them, but there was some potential 

there for thorium exposure. Otherwise, we 

wouldn't be trying to reconstruct the thorium 

doses.

Now, when you look at this 

distribution, and those thorium workers -- some 

of those thorium workers are clearly going to be 

in there. And if they were, even though exposures 

were intermittent, it may have been low level, 

those people are probably going to be best 

represented in that upper tail of the 

distribution.

Now, what I'm hearing is, though, that 

NIOSH's position is that if you were involved in 

those activities which were intermittent, which 

involve workers who would be in those upper tail 

of the distribution, they all have monitoring 

records. In other words, there aren't any 

workers who were directly involved with those 
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thorium activities who went unmonitored, which is 

a pretty big assumption in itself. That's why we 

came up with the coworker model, is that we felt 

that there were workers who could have been 

involved in these activities who maybe didn't get 

monitored, or were only monitored for part of 

their employment.

So if it's NIOSH's position that 

really all the people who were involved in these 

intermittent thorium activities have records and 

those records cover their entire employment, 

well, then I almost question whether a coworker 

model is necessary, if that is, in fact, true, 

that we don't have unmonitored workers who could 

have potentially been side-by-side with those 

workers who occasionally handled thorium; which 

would be represented best by that upper tail of 

the distribution, given that this distribution 

contains a lot of workers who never touched 

thorium.

MR. STIVER: Yeah, Bob, you're right. 

It really gets to a policy decision, then. When 
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there is a reasonable degree of confidence 

whether an exposure did or didn't happen? And 

then how are you going to layer on some claimantfavorability to do that?

I think we pretty much have gone as 

far as possible from a technical standpoint, at 

least in my opinion.

MR. HINNEFELD: I'm just struggling 

with the thought. You know, what we have here 

is, does the TBD -- maybe ORAU can help me out. 

Does the TBD go so far as to list these are, say, 

the daily intakes for these years based on the 

coworker model? 

(Pause.)

MR. HINNEFELD: Maybe they can't help 

me out.

MR. STIVER: Hang on a second. I 

missed that. It cut out.

MR. HINNEFELD: I was wondering if 

someone from ORAU could help me out.

MR. STIVER: Oh, okay. I'm sorry, I 

thought you were talking to me. Sorry.
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MR. HINNEFELD: No, I'm wondering if 

the Site Profile -- or maybe an SC&A person who's 

read it, who's read it recently -- does the TBD 

focus get so specific as to lay out these are 

the, you know at the 50th percentile, this is the 

daily intake of thorium that the coworker would 

be assigned?

MS. KENT: Stu, this is Karen. We 

just have them specified from '79 to '89. They 

are not specific to each year.

MR. HINNEFELD: Right, but what's it 

say from '79 to '89?

MS. KENT: Well, we have thorium 

intakes of type M and S for 50th percentile and 

then 95th.

MR. HINNEFELD: So they are both in 

there?

MS. KENT: Yes.

MR. HINNEFELD: Because we were going 

to use the 95th for people who have fecal samples.

MS. KENT: Correct.

MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. Well, what is 
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the 50th?

MS. KENT: Well, they're specified for 

thorium-228 and -232. So, for example, the 50th 

percentile for type M thorium-228 is 6.71 

picocuries per day and thorium-232 is 35.3 

picocuries per day.

MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. So, we have a 

daily intake in this. You say those are the 50th 

percentile?

MS. KENT: Yes.

MR. HINNEFELD: Okay, so, 35 

picocuries per day. You know, to me, thinking of 

the thorium activities at the time, I don't 

understand how that's not bounding for everybody, 

at least through '87 when you start getting into 

the actual work on it, you know, when they are 

actually starting to retrieve and get rid of the 

thorium.

It is just hard for me to say in good 

faith that, you know thinking of all -- you know, 

we built this model because we don't want to leave 

anybody out, because there could be people who 
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were not monitored who wandered into the thorium 

warehouse or somehow got involved in that. So 

we've got this coworker model, but it's not 

sufficient because we want now to consider people 

as regularly exposed and more highly exposed 

when, in fact, I know that no one was regularly 

exposed.

MR. BARTON: Again, this is Bob, I 

think it's just the issue of what part of this 

distribution is actually representative of --

MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, I understand all 

that. I understand all that. I just -- I mean, 

we're dealing -- really, we're dealing with 

crumbs on a really favorable dose reconstruction.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Yeah, this is Ziemer. 

Let me add an additional thought. The coworker 

model is really a kind of summation of two 

distributions, that there's the thorium 

distribution from those thorium activities that 

basically are already monitored, plus the uranium 

distribution from those uranium workers. 

So it's hard to imagine someone who is 
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not monitored and therefore works only in that 

occasional thorium repackaging that would exceed 

or be up there with the upper end of the 

individuals who have both the thorium plus the 

uranium monitoring. You almost have to say the 

person with unusually high intake -- the 

likelihood is that most of the others were 

uranium workers who were in there and they're 

part of the distribution.

So it's hard to think of someone being 

in the upper tail of distribution as an 

occasional worker who only got that exposure 

compared to the distribution itself. So I think 

the 50th percentile is very, very generous, 

actually.

CHAIR CLAWSON: This is Brad. Stu, 

help me with something. And by the way, you guys 

have been able to give me a headache this early 

in the morning thinking about this. 

So, if you are a uranium worker, 

according to the process here, if you are a 

uranium worker, just a uranium worker, are they 
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going to get this 50 percentile for the thorium?

MR. HINNEFELD: Well, no one --

CHAIR CLAWSON: Because we're talking 

a coworker model here. I mean, we only would use 

a coworker model if we didn't have data. Correct?

MR. HINNEFELD: Right. I'm trying to 

answer your question. No one is clearly 

identified as just a thorium or just a uranium 

worker until you get to, say, '88 or '89, when 

they started qualifying people to work on the 

thorium packaging jobs. So, at that point, there 

are people who you could say are only uranium 

workers if they haven't been qualified to work on 

the thorium job. So, up until then, people were 

just radiation workers.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay. Now, as a 

radiation worker, if you have data -- what I'm 

trying to figure out is what this coworker model, 

the people that would get this 50th percentile 

for this thorium, of who they would be, if they 

are going to be the whole radiation worker group 

or if it is people that were just not monitored.
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MR. HINNEFELD: It would be people who 

were not monitored but likely could have been in 

the process area.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay.

MR. HINNEFELD: You know, you can't 

exclude them from the process area, and for some 

reason we don't have an in vivo monitoring for 

them.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay. Anyway, so 

here's what I'm looking at. We have got all these 

radiation workers out there that we've got 

different work for, and they are not going to get 

any of this thorium because we have data for that.

MR. HINNEFELD: If they have in vivo 

counting, we would use their in vivo data.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay, but if they did 

not have any in vivo, they would get the thorium, 

this 50 percent?

MR. HINNEFELD: They would get this 50 

percent coworker, yes.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay. You know, 

basically, then, Paul and Phil, this is one of 
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these that we're not -- I understand both sides 

of what they are saying. And I understand what 

SC&A is saying as this one person out here, but 

I do have to agree, on this one, on NIOSH's side, 

that during this time period, from everything 

that I've pulled out this, the thorium work was 

very low.

I guess what I would put out to the 

other Board Members -- and Bob, you have done a 

marvelous job of representing this and stuff, but 

I see this as being very generous, to be honest 

with you. And I think that it would incorporate 

anybody into it. 

If I'm wrong, let me know. I've been 

wrong before. But myself, I think, by using this 

50 percentile, I think we would cover everybody 

in there until we get to the later years where 

they were actually designating people as thorium 

workers, and then they would be going to the 95 

percentile.

So I guess I'm agreeing with NIOSH on 

this and I'd like you two to weigh in on it.
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MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, I just indicated 

I thought the 50th percentile is generous, 

considering the basis for this and the 

unlikelihood that someone would be up there with

the regular uranium and thorium workers who are 

at the upper end of the distribution.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Phil?

MEMBER SCHOFIELD: No, I agree. It's 

generous and it pretty well is going to cover 

everybody. I mean, there is that chance you've 

got an outlier somewhere that it doesn't reach 

out for, but that's something that there just 

isn't any data showing that.

CHAIR CLAWSON: And ultimately it 

comes down to us. So I would put out to the Work 

Group that we accept NIOSH's position on this.

MEMBER SCHOFIELD: I second that.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Yeah, and Stu, it's 

important that this application be in line with 

the other applications for which we use the 50th 

percentile. And it seems to me that it is. 

You're talking about a worker who is not 
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regularly doing radiation work and someone who's 

doing something that's almost a short-term, 

casual, not very different from someone who walks 

in is what it sounds like.

MR. HINNEFELD: In my view, from the 

start, is that people who are occasionally 

exposed, in a normal coworker setting, people who 

are occasionally exposed, get the 50th percentile 

of the full distribution.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Yeah, I'm saying 

that's the way you do it at other sites. So, 

there is some consistency with that.

MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, right. That's 

my view.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Which means there 

could also be the extreme example, such as John 

described, that you would miss, but it's highly, 

highly unlikely.

MR. HINNEFELD: There could be 

examples, I guess, where this would miss 

something in some fashion, but, again, I could 

never identify it. I don't think we could ever 
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identify what that would be. And I don't think 

that -- and like I said earlier, these Fernald 

dose reconstructions are going to be really quite 

claimant-favorable. And we're dealing with the 

edges, the crumbs here, of a really favorable 

dose reconstruction. I think we are easily 

bounding everyone's dose with this approach.

MR. STIVER: I'd have to say that, as 

a corollary to that, in this particular situation 

you can also pretty well be fairly confident that 

there wasn't a lot of exposure potential during 

this sort of kind of quiescent period from '79 to 

'87 or so.

Before that, we had a situation where 

we knew there was exposure potential that could 

be fairly high and we didn't have any way to get 

a handle on who those workers were, which is the 

basis of the two SEC periods.

Here, I think this is a pretty good 

understanding that production work had pretty 

much slowed down to a crawl. It was basically 

stewardship until the repacking and so forth. So 
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I guess that seems reasonable, what you guys are 

proposing.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Well, I'd say this one 

is closed.

MR. KATZ: Right. Brad, can I -- at 

this point, it is 12:30, which is fine. I just 

want to take a poll if your preference is that 

you guys need a break or do you want to keep 

plowing on?

CHAIR CLAWSON: I guess that I'm just 

still waking up. So, I don't know what --

MR. KATZ: Does anyone else need any 

kind of break, a comfort break, or is everybody 

fine?

MR. HINNEFELD: Ted, I could use at 

least a comfort break. If we're not doing a break 

for lunch, I could use a comfort break.

MR. KATZ: Yeah, why don't we just 

take a ten-minute comfort break. You don't need 

to cut off your line or anything.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay, sounds good.

MR. KATZ: And it's about 12:30. So 
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at about 12:40, let's agree to be back online.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay, sounds good.

MR. KATZ: Okay, thanks.

(Whereupon, the above-entitled matter 

went off the record at 12:27 p.m. and resumed at 

12:40 p.m.)

MR. KATZ: We're back at 12:40. And 

let me just check and make sure we have Phil. 

Are you back on the line, too?

MEMBER SCHOFIELD: I'm back on the 

line.

MR. KATZ: Oh, great. And then do we 

have you, Stu, back on?

MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, I'm here.

MR. KATZ: Okay, it looks like we can 

get going here.

MR. BARTON: Okay, so what we had just 

finished up was Finding 2. We had already 

discussed Findings 1 and 3, and all three of those 

were related to sort of an earlier period, from 

'79 to '89. 

The second period for which we had 
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findings related to coworker doses is the 1990 

through 1994 period, in which it is proposed to 

use ten percent of the derived air concentration.

And we had two findings related to 

that period. The first was the chosen derived 

air concentration. NIOSH has chosen to go with, 

I believe it's the Type W, or weak or medium 

solubility type, which is more restrictive in the 

sense that it would hold -- adhering to that 

derived air concentration would hold air 

concentrations lower than if you picked the 

solubility class of Y, or years, or Type S.

And the rationale that was given was 

that it is standard industry practice to use the 

more restrictive derived air concentrations when 

doing monitoring activities in any given 

location. And I guess we don't have, as I sit 

here we don't have any technical argument against 

that value, but I guess we usually don't see 

standard industry practice as the only 

justification. 

So we were asking if there was 
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actually site-specific information, whether that 

would be like a safety or planning procedure, 

that does say that the more restrictive Class W 

DAC would be used for monitoring in the planning 

purposes of these activities, to really justify 

use of that. Because if we use the less 

restrictive DAC, of course that's going to result 

in an increase in assigned intake values to the 

claimants. So, that was Finding 4.

And so I guess I'd pose it to NIOSH. 

Is there direct site evidence specific to Fernald 

that can let us say that, yeah, this is absolutely 

what was used at the site, and, therefore, it's 

the most appropriate scientifically to use in 

this context. Or if, absent such information, 

should we entertain possibly using the less 

restrictive DAC because we don't know which 

solubility class or which DAC they were actually 

using to monitor and limit exposure potentials?

MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, this is Stu. 

I'm not exactly sure where to go on this one. 

Certainly, I would think that if you were 
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designing, you know, drawing up your controls and 

your air monitoring boundaries for a project and 

you had a mixture of solubilities, you would use 

the lower solubility class as your posting level. 

And I think we may have looked for site-specific 

information about that and didn't find it. 

Somebody from ORAU, can you help me 

out on that one?

MS. KENT: Yes, Stu. This is Karen. 

We did look in the SRDB for references and the 

site reference, the internal dosimetry document 

at Fernald, in 2001, it does reference both Class 

W and Class Y material for thorium at the site.

So we based the ten percent of a DAC 

using absorption Class W because it was the most 

restrictive limit and it was used to limit the 

exposure in the workplace. But then to determine 

the dose, we will use the most claimant-favorable 

solubility. This provides the claimant-favorable 

approach. So both Class W and Y were assessed as 

solubility M and S now was present at Fernald.

MR. HINNEFELD: So but I think the 
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finding, though, would be the magnitude of the 

intake. So, certainly, once we do an intake, 

once we have an intake value, as a routine matter, 

we use the most soluble, or the most favorable 

solubility class in the dose reconstruction.

MS. KENT: Correct.

MR. HINNEFELD: The point of the SC&A 

finding would be that if in fact the site were 

controlling at the higher DAC value, at the Class 

Y DAC value, then you would have a larger intake.

That's the nature of the finding, 

right, Bob?

MR. BARTON: That's correct.

MR. HINNEFELD: So, I was surprised. 

I remember we looked for site-specific 

documentation about each class of what DAC was 

used for the posting level and we weren't able to 

come up with anything that said specifically 

"this is what we'll use."

Now, somebody refresh my memory. From 

'90 to '94, they weren't doing the large thorium 

overpack in Building 65 yet, right, during those 
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years? Wasn't that later?

MS. KENT: Yes, I believe that was 

later.

MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah. So, here, we 

would only have the thorium DAC. I don't know. 

Again, we're dealing with a favorable dose 

reconstruction and we are kind of at the crumbs 

of it. I'd hate to make a lot of changes anymore 

at this stage, but I don't know that this would 

be one to go to mat over.

I hate to really change position here 

on the phone but I will say that we'll reconsider 

and either provide additional evidence to support 

it or maybe propose a different -- and we'll 

provide a written product back to the Work Group. 

Otherwise, you know, there's just not a lot more 

to say, I don't think.

MR. SHARFI: Stu, wouldn't 5480.11 

require most restrictive DAC for posting? And 

that would have been in place at this time.

MR. HINNEFELD: Well, like I'm saying, 

I'm pretty sure, as a health physicist working 
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there, I'm pretty sure that's what you would do. 

When you have either an unknown solubility or a 

mixture of solubilities, you would establish your 

posting at the lower level. I'm trying to figure 

out what 5480.11 requirement would exactly apply 

to that.

MR. SHARFI: Well, I know for Grand 

Junction, which we do implement 5480.11, I think 

that's what they did there, to use most 

restrictive solubility.

MR. KATZ: Who's that speaking?

MR. HINNEFELD: That's Mutty.

MR. SHARFI: Mutty Sharfi.

MR. KATZ: Oh, okay, thank you, Mutty. 

MR. HINNEFELD: You know, we can -- I 

would like to have a consultation on our side, 

rather than actually take a position here today, 

and see what we can come up with as either other 

precedent or other things we can come up with 

besides standard issue practice to support this. 

Because, you know, my opinion is that, naturally, 

that's what we would do. If you're handling 
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either an unknown solubility or a mixture of 

solubilities, you would put up your posting 

boundaries based on the most restrictive of the 

available of the possible DACs. 

But in terms of having something 

specifically that the site wrote, I don't know 

that we have anything. So we may want to try to 

think about it and see what we can come up with 

in terms of additional arguments besides standard 

industry practice.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay, so I guess this 

one will -- 2.6, is that where we're at, Bob?

MR. BARTON: Yeah, this is in Section 

2.6.2, Reconstruction of Unmonitored Thorium 

Doses (1990-1994), and that was Finding 4. 

So it sounds like we'll leave that one 

in-progress to allow NIOSH to formulate a more 

concrete position on whether the current DAC is 

appropriate or possibly the less restrictive DAC 

is appropriate. So it looks like -- I'm not sure 

what else we can do now.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay.
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MR. BARTON: So I guess we'll leave 

that one in-progress for now.

CHAIR CLAWSON: That sounds good.

MR. BARTON: Okay. Moving on to 

Finding 5. Again, this is for that same 1990-

1994 period. And, again, it is who gets the 

assignment of the unmonitored dose.

Now, the original White Paper on 

thorium coworker doses had indicated that the 

fecal baseline sample was sort of a prerequisite 

to assign unmonitored dose. Now, that language 

has since been removed since that material has 

been incorporated into the TBD.

So, I guess this is really more for 

clarification. We assume that, since that 

language was removed, that the ten percent 

derived air concentrations will be applied in a 

similar manner to the previous period in which, 

unless specific information exists that the 

person simply couldn't have been exposed, such as 

a secretary or other administrative personnel, 

that the ten percent DAC will be applied as an 
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unmonitored dose. 

Again, unless you have that 

information that says, no, there is just no 

possible way that the person, due to the nature 

of their job, could have been exposed, which is 

how it's dealt with in the earlier period but 

that specific language wasn't in the section 

covering the ten percent DAC assignment.

So we're kind of assuming that but I 

wanted clarification from NIOSH if they intend to 

essentially assign that fraction of the derived 

air concentration to the radiological workers and 

obviously not assign any unmonitored dose if you 

fell into that not exposed category.

MR. HINNEFELD: Karen, can you help me 

out here? Karen, can you talk about our approach 

there, or somebody from NIOSH -- ORAU, I mean?

(Pause.)

MR. HINNEFELD: Is somebody from ORAU 

speaking on mute?

MS. KENT: Hello, this is Karen.

MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, Karen.
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MS. KENT: I'm sorry. I was speaking 

on mute.

MR. HINNEFELD: Okay.

MS. KENT: But, basically, it's the 

same criteria as before. So, if someone is in a 

radiological area or if we cannot exclude them, 

then they would get assigned that dose.

MR. BARTON: Okay, thank you. And 

that really satisfied SC&A's concerns with regard 

to that. So, I guess we would recommend closing 

that finding.

CHAIR CLAWSON: I understand. Board 

Members, I move we close it.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Is this just 6 or --

MR. KATZ: That's Finding 5.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Or 5, rather.

MR. KATZ: Yes.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Yes.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, I'm agreed with 

that.

MEMBER SCHOFIELD: I'm in agreement.

MR. BARTON: Okay, then we can close 
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that one out.

We have two items that are related to 

thorium, and that's the thoron exposures and 

unsupported radium. I'm going to start with the 

thoron exposures. And, actually, I have a couple 

of questions, looking at the internal TBD, before 

we kind of get started about what the findings 

were. Let me see, what page is that on? One 

moment, please.

So what I'm going to show you is the 

main body of the text where it describes 

assignment of thoron. We'll come down to this 

table here. And it provides thoron exposures. 

These are in working level months per year. And 

we have values beginning all the way starting in 

1954 all the way up through 2006.

Now, it wasn't clear to us. We were 

under the impression that this was sort of 

enveloped by the thorium SEC. So, I guess the 

first question is, are we planning to assign 

thoron doses, which are part of that thorium 

decay chain, during the SEC period?
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MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, this is Stu. 

I'll speak to that. The methods that we are 

proposing for thoron kind of are the same 

throughout the history. You know, the values are 

different, based on different quantities and 

assumptions, but the technique is largely the 

same. 

And so my view was that, well, look, 

if we have a technique that works, then it should 

work and it should be included. Despite the fact 

that thoron is part of the thorium chain, if we 

can reconstruct the dose, then we should. So 

that's why it goes back to '54.

MR. BARTON: Okay, I understand that, 

and you're right. The framework for those 

values, the 1.6 working level months per year, is 

pretty much based on the analysis that was done 

for the post-SEC period, and that was the 

bounding value based on that analysis.

So, again, it was just a question for 

clarification. Originally, I had thought we were 

only going to be assigning these things beginning 
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in 1979 but if we can assign earlier than that, 

then great.

MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, we had that 

discussion. We actually had that discussion 

internally and our view was, well, if the 

technique works, then let's use it for the 

entirety.

MR. BARTON: Okay. And also I don't 

know who has Live Meeting up in front of them, 

but, again, we're looking at Table 5-1 in the 

TBD. 

And the other thing I noticed is that, 

I mean, this breaks it down by year. And for 

1986 to 1987, which is the only -- well, there's 

no assignment of any thoron dose during those 

years. It says it was passive storage and there 

was no significant dose. 

That's new to us. That was not in the 

original White Paper concerning how the thoron 

doses were developed. And that White Paper got 

merged into Appendix B. And I will just skip 

ahead to that appendix. We see, in this table in 
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the main body of the report, no thoron dose is 

being assigned for '86 and '87.

And then if we go to sort of the 

underlying -- right here, these two last rows 

here, you said 1.6 and it is actually 1.5.5. But, 

as you can see, that was posited to be assigned 

all the way up to 1989.

So we have this two-year period where 

it appears it's being proposed that no thoron 

dose be assigned, which, again, is new compared 

to the last White Paper, which is actually now an 

appendix to the TBD. And we didn't see any 

discussion, necessarily, that justified no 

exposure for those two years during the 1980s.

MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I'm at a loss to 

explain that. ORAU, is there someone over there 

who can explain that?

MS. KENT: This is Karen. I think 

we're going to have to look into that.

MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, okay. So that's 

another thing we owe then back to the Work Group, 

is either an explanation or something about those 
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two years.

MR. BARTON: Okay. Alright, so now 

our original finding related to thoron was sort 

of a generic finding. We didn't necessarily find 

anything technically at fault, and what we're 

doing here with thoron is, it's a model. We were 

trying to model thoron exposures because we just 

don't have sufficient direct monitoring data to 

come up with something that is maybe a little bit 

better than a model.

And as with any model, it depends on 

what sort of parameters you really plug into it. 

So, as we kind of go through these, and NIOSH 

provided explanations in the Appendix B about a 

number of these, there are essentially five main 

parameters that go into the calculations.

And as we sort of go through them, 

there are two factors that you should keep in 

mind here. One is, what are really the 

appropriate parameters that you want to plug into 

this model to bound thoron exposure? But also, 

the second factor is, even if you're not picking 
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the bounding parameter estimate that's available 

in each case, does sort of the collective nature 

of all of them together provide an upper bound on 

the observed measurement? 

Which, my reading of NIOSH's response 

-- which again is contained in Appendix B of the 

TBD -- is that, well, you know there is some 

leeway here about what you can select for these 

various parameters; and we didn't always select 

the highest one but if you put them all together 

and compare them to what limited actual 

measurements we have, which are mostly in the 

late '80s and 1990s, it appears to provide a 

bounding approach as far as the working levels 

that workers could be exposed to.

So I want you to keep those two things 

in mind. One is, you know, what is the proper 

parameter to select? But also, collectively, 

when you put them all together, even if you didn't 

select the highest parameter in each case --

which, obviously, it's going to give you an 

extremely high dose that may be even implausible. 
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When you put them all together, what does that 

final value look like when you compare it to the 

limited values we have, measurements that we 

have, associated with actual thoron inhalation?

So, as I said, there are five main 

factors. And what we had asked in our finding, 

which is Finding 6 related to thoron, is that we 

saw the parameter values that were selected but 

we didn't really see the rationale for why that 

value was appropriate. And so what we asked NIOSH 

to do is to go and look at what values they 

selected and sort of provide that scientific 

justification so that we can say, yes, this model 

that's been created to bound thoron exposure is 

scientifically defensible.

In our report -- and actually it was 

part of a presentation we gave in December of 

2014 -- we kind of laid out those five parameters. 

The very first one is what is the actual tonnage 

of thorium that's going to be assumed to be the 

source term for the thoron? 

So, on page 96 -- and hold on, I'll 
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skip to that spot. Okay. So this is, again, 

"available thoron inventory for release" at the 

very top of the page here. And on that page, it 

says that long-term DOE storage could range from 

anywhere from 100 to 450 megatons at any given 

location. And it says -- well, not on this page 

but earlier in the document it says that 450 is 

assumed as the bounding number.

Now, in actuality, when the 

calculation was done 300 megaton thorium was 

assumed. And essentially the explanation we were 

given is that, well, 450 is bounding, it's the 

upper bound for any one location, but that the 

300 better represents the more typical storage 

quantity.

Now, in NIOSH's response, basically 

what they say is, well, if we were to assume the 

450, which is bounding, this would essentially 

increase the concentration of thoron by about 50 

percent. And what they state is that that 

increase, if it were to be adopted, is not going 

to affect the conclusion. And the conclusion is, 
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from NIOSH -- and please stop me; I don't want to 

put words in your mouth -- is that the model that 

has been put forth based on these parameters 

sufficiently bounds nearly all of the actual 

working level measurements that we have. Which, 

again, are limited because they are later in the 

period, the late '80s and '90s. But that even if 

you were to make that 50 percent increase to be 

bounding weight, it would increase by 50 percent, 

no doubt about it, but even using the assumption 

of 300 instead of 450, we're still in a place 

where the thoron exposure is bounding.

Now, at this point, I don't know if we 

want to talk about each of these parameters one 

by one, or I can go through all five and then we 

can have a discussion about the overall effect. 

I guess I would ask the Work Group how they would 

like to proceed, or if NIOSH wants to discuss 

these one by one, we could do it either way.

CHAIR CLAWSON: This is Brad. I would 

rather go one by one so I can try to keep track 

of which way we're going, if that's all right.
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MR. BARTON: Sure. As I said, I don't 

know if NIOSH wants to -- or ORAU wants to 

respond. I can put up their actual response to 

what we had come up with so that for everyone to 

see it.

So, here it is, SC&A Comment 1. This 

is about the thorium inventory, 450 megatons. 

This says millitons. That should be a big M.

In the intro, it had had actually 

quoted 2,000, but that was maybe not the amount 

in any one storage location. So that might not 

be appropriate. But as NIOSH states in their 

sort of technical basis for this, for storage, 

which is really what we're talking about in this 

latter period, and really the source term that 

produces the highest thoron exposure based on the 

modeling here, it could range anywhere from 100 

to 450 and 300 was chosen as appropriate.

And here I'm going to scroll and you 

can see what NIOSH's response is. I don't know 

if NIOSH or ORAU would like to comment at this 

point.
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MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I don't have 

much to offer other than what was in the response 

that's on the screen there. So, I think we're 

postulating here what might be present.

Now, this is talking about during the 

production years. Is that true? So we're talking 

about like '54 to roughly '78?

MR. BARTON: Well, like I said, we 

were operating under the assumption that we were 

really looking at that post-thorium period.

MR. HINNEFELD: Oh, okay.

MR. BARTON: And really the limiting 

working level calculated is for storage 

locations, basically due to sheer size of the 

source term and not necessarily the estimates of 

production, which produce a much lower working 

level.

MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, I mean, there 

would be material storage during the production 

time as well. I was thinking that our approach 

developed like sort of building-by-building, 

inventories by building, volume of buildings, 
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emanation rates, and then concentration by 

building. And then we kind of chose a limiting 

value for specific years depending upon which 

building. For different time periods, different 

buildings were sort of limiting.

MR. BARTON: Well, these are, as you 

can see what's on the screen here, what we are 

really talking about is these last two.

MR. HINNEFELD: Okay, the last several 

ones there. Okay.

MR. BARTON: Yeah, the last two here. 

These are the working levels. Really, we are 

just talking about this value right here that I'm 

circling. I don't know that everyone can see 

that. It's 5.3 working levels. And this gives 

the assumptions that went into it.

And so here, again, you have the total 

source term in megatons. You have this 1E to the 

7 is approximately the size of, I believe that's 

Building 65, I believe.

MR. HINNEFELD: It's probably Building 

65.
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MR. BARTON: Yeah. So it's 300 

megaton thorium. You have the building size. 

You have the RF, which is the difference between 

how much thoron is able to escape the material. 

You have an equilibrium factor just like you 

would have radon, and then you have an occupancy 

factor.

So it's these last two rows that we're 

essentially assigning. And as you look at the 

table, in the main text, that's what's put there. 

It says 1.6 working level months, which is 

essentially three months at a working level of 

.53.

MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I don't have 

anything more to offer, I guess, other than what 

we wrote on the quantity right now.

MR. BARTON: Okay. And as we go 

through these, I don't know if the Work Group 

wants to ask any questions or have any discussion 

on individual ones.

Essentially, where we're coming on 

this is we don't have necessarily technical 
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arguments against any of the chosen parameters. 

What we did want to point out is that there's 

certainly room in there if you wanted to assign 

higher values. 

And the real proof test is when you 

start to look at what was calculated, which is 

this .53 working levels, compared to what working 

level measurements we do have, which are albeit 

a bit limited. But when you look at what was 

calculated, and then we can compare and I'll show 

the table that NIOSH provided of what 

measurements we do have, you can compare what was 

calculated versus what was measured and then sort 

of determine if that value, or the summation of 

the values that are currently being chosen, are 

appropriate.

So, like I said, I mean, this is 

directly from the technical basis. You all said 

that given storage location it could be anywhere 

from 100 to 450 and the 300 was chosen. And so 

it's certainly, obviously ,well within the range. 

It's a little over the -- well, a little under 
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the halfway point, I guess -- a little over the 

halfway point, I'm sorry.

But, again, this is a question of 

we're building a model here. What's appropriate? 

Obviously, it's probably not appropriate to pick 

the maximizing value in every single instance. 

That's not realistic. I guess it's a question 

of, again, what is that final value going to look 

like? How does it compare to what limited data 

we have? And is that acceptable in the end?

So unless there are questions directly 

related to the source term -- that is, the amount 

of thorium that we are talking about -- we could 

move on to the release fraction, which was the 

subject of Comment 2.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Go ahead.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Could you clarify, was 

SC&A comfortable with the 300 value? Or clarify 

what the issue was there.

MR. BARTON: Well, as we get to the 

end -- I guess maybe I'm being a little too 

cryptic. When we get to the end, I think you're 
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going to see that the bad actor is Building 65. 

That's where the higher working level 

measurements were shown to be, in general. And 

there were a number of measurements taken and I 

believe it was about 2.2 working levels.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Yeah, Building 65, you 

had a 267 picocurie per liter value, right?

MR. BARTON: I believe that value was 

used to calculate a potential release fraction.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes.

MR. BARTON: Building 65 itself has 

323 -- I believe 323 megatons thorium. So it's 

a little higher than the 300 that was assumed. 

And in fact, that actually comes up a little bit 

later, under Comment 5, where the calculation was 

actually made. In Comment 5, we were talking 

about the equilibrium between 228 and 232 and 

that some measurements were shown that in 

Building 65 the equilibrium was higher, which is 

going to give you more thoron.

And they actually calculated, under 

Comment 5, that using the 323, which is a 
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measurement of the amount of thorium in Building 

65, coupled with that equilibrium factor, you 

again get that 50 percent increase.

And I guess my comment there, I wonder 

if it wouldn't be --

MEMBER ZIEMER: On the 300, you were 

talking about the 300 tons? What was the 300 you 

were referring to? 

MR. BARTON: Well, the 300, if you 

have this table up in front of you, 300 was what 

was --

MEMBER ZIEMER: I don't. I don't have 

it up. I'm looking at the NIOSH Site Profile 

figures.

MR. BARTON: Right. So we're on --

if you look on page 98, Table B-5. Table B-5, 

the last two entries there really lay out the 

assumptions that went into calculating the 

working levels, which is .53 working levels.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Right. Right, I see 

that.

MR. BARTON: So if we were going to 
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look specifically at Building 65, the amounts of 

material is slightly higher. Not by much, but it 

is higher. And so I guess, in the end game, I'm 

wondering if it wouldn't be more appropriate --

because what we're trying to do is develop a range 

of different parameters and select ones that are 

appropriate sort of from different areas of the 

site, different locations. And I'm wondering, 

since when we get to it you will see that the bad 

actor is really that Building 65, if it wouldn't 

make more sense to pick parameters that are 

really geared towards Building 65, rather than 

more generic site parameters.

At the end of the day, I'm not saying 

300 megatons is inappropriate. It is certainly 

technically defensible. It could be higher, by 

NIOSH's own admission. And this becomes, again, 

a professional judgment. And then looking sort 

of at the end result of all these assumptions and 

can we live with that end result, knowing there 

is some leeway in there that would increase the 

value.
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MEMBER ZIEMER: I guess NIOSH may need 

to -- there' some difference there, too, right? 

NIOSH, what is the position on that, then?

MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I think we'll 

have a better idea of position when we hear Bob's 

discussion of the parameters in combination.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes.

MR. BARTON: And I would point out, 

just specific to the amount of the source term, 

that in that same appendix they did say that they 

were going to use 450, but then in the actual 

calculation, it uses 300.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Three hundred, yes.

MR. BARTON: Alright, I'll quickly go 

through these so that we can kind of get to more 

fruitful discussion.

MEMBER ZIEMER: These are going to 

have to remain in-progress then, right?

MR. BARTON: Well, the original 

comment -- the original finding was that we 

wanted justification for why certain parameters 

were provided. And I think what we got is an 
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explanation that says that the parameters are 

reasonable and NIOSH is -- again, I don't want to 

put words in anyone's mouth -- is that, in the 

end, we are left with a working level assignment 

that is reasonable and bounding for most of the 

actual measurements that we have that were taken 

in the late '80s and '90s. 

I believe that's what the conclusion, 

based on this finding, which again was we have 

all these parameters that are out there but we 

don't have really a justification why one's 

better than the other. That was the original 

finding.

MEMBER ZIEMER: So you're basically 

looking for the justification. Is that what I'm 

understanding?

MR. BARTON: Right. And the 

justification, the explanation, at least from my 

understanding, is none of the chosen variables 

are unreasonable or scientifically indefensible 

and the combination of them results in a working 

level that, when you compare it to the available 
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data, bounds a lot of it. Not all of it, but 

most of what we have. Or a lot of the working 

level measurements that we do have.

I believe that is NIOSH's position. 

Is that correct, Stu?

MR. HINNEFELD: I think that's 

characterized pretty well.

MR. BARTON: So, again, for the amount 

of material you have a range, 100 to 450. Three 

hundred was chosen in the actual calculation, 

though, earlier it said that they were going to 

assume 450 but that 450 was a maximizing 

assumption and a more realistic one was 300, 

which is, obviously, a professional judgment. I 

don't think it's necessarily based on any sort of 

specific analytical construct. These are the 

ranges that we see and that we can assume and we 

are going to pick one that is relatively in the 

middle.

For release fractions, which is the 

next parameter, NIOSH had put a couple of 

examples together, calculations of what the 
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release fraction would be; that is, how much 

thoron is actually coming out of the source term. 

And they found that the release fraction could be 

anywhere from ten-to-the-minus-three to ten-tothe-minus-four for temporary open storage or 

storage with compromised containers. The NIOSH 

analysis shows the lower of that range of tento- the-minus-four.

On page 94, their technical basis 

actually had a calculation for the release 

fraction for Building 65 and they came up with 

three-times-ten-to-the-minus-three. So that, 

again, is at the higher end of the release 

fraction. And if you have a larger release 

fraction, obviously, you, again, have more 

thoron. In this case, the lower end of the 

release fraction was chosen.

The next factor in here is the 

equilibrium factor; that is, the equilibrium of 

the daughters to the actual thoron. And we had 

found a reference that cited that that value 

could be between .02 and .1, but then there was 
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another reference that pretty unequivocally 

states that it is .02 and cannot exceed .04.

So, we had a range of .02 to .1, but 

probably the more defensible reference says it's 

.02 and can't be larger than .04. In this case, 

.02 was the number chosen. Though, actually, on 

page 105, they calculated the working level 

assuming .04 because that's the higher; it cannot 

exceed that value according to trusting the 

reference. And I think that they calculated that 

just to show it for a reference, but it's not 

used in developing the final number.

So, again, we have sort of a reference 

that says it's mostly .02 and can't get above .04 

and .02 was chosen.

The occupancy factor is a little bit 

different. Now, occupancy factor just basically 

says how long is someone exposed at that working 

level. And the occupancy factor was, at least in 

the technical basis, was three months, up until 

1989, and then one month after that.

And in the response provided in the 
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TBD this is not really addressed, on what the 

technical basis for three months and one month 

is. So that was still kind of hanging out there. 

You know, we don't know why three months was 

chosen. We don't know why three months was chosen 

for one period and one month for another period.

And then the final factor going in 

here is the equilibrium between thorium-228 and 

thorium-232. The higher the equilibrium, again, 

the more thoron you have.

And we found that, for Building 65, 

which, again, is sort of the bad factor according 

to the measurements we have, the equilibrium 

fraction should be about .95.

Now, in NIOSH's response to that, they 

said, well, if we use assume the Building 65 

equilibrium and also assume the amount of 

material in Building 65, that increases the 

working levels by 50 percent. And once again,

you know, it would increase 50 percent if we 

assume that, but it doesn't affect the conclusion 

of the appendix, which is that the currently 
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chosen values are still fairly high compared to 

what measurements we have.

So those are the five main factors 

that go into this calculation. Now, what does it 

all mean?

You put all these together and what 

you get is .53 working levels. Now, how does 

that compare to what measurements we have? And 

hold on a moment and I'll pull the table that 

summarizes it all very nicely in the TBD. There 

we go. 

So, remember, we're talking about 

working levels and the currently calculated value 

is .5. It's .53, but around .5. We can see these 

are all -- these are the number of samples that 

we have, the location, the time. In some cases, 

they were able to calculate a 95th percentile.

And I'm just going to scroll down 

here. This is the one that caught my eye. You 

have measurements from 1996 of Building 65 over 

eight days, and you have 191 measurements. And 

based on those measurements, you are left with a 
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working level of 2.20. So, approximately a 

factor of four higher. And, again, this is at 

the median -- or the mean, geometric mean. 2.20 

working level for Building 65, over 191 

measurements taken over eight days, and this is 

compared to the final value that is currently 

calculated of .53.

And that led me to question whether 

any thought had been given to, again, try to model 

Building 65 specifically, if that's truly the bad 

actor we are talking about here. And what I did 

was, as I stated before about the equilibrium 

fraction under Comment 5, NIOSH had said, well, 

alright, if we assume that Building 65 

equilibrium fraction and the Building 65 source 

term of 323 megatons versus 200 megatons, you get 

about a 50 percent increase.

And so, you know, your working level 

goes from .53 to somewhere about .8. So, that is 

an increase, but we're still far below what is 

measured here for Building 65 in 1996.

Well, let's think about we're talking 
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about Building 65, which is a storage location 

with potentially degrading containers. And as we 

said under the release fraction, NIOSH had 

calculated that could be anywhere from ten-tothe minus-three to ten-to-the-minus-four. Tento-the-minus-four was chosen but what happens if 

we had chosen the midpoint of that range, so fivetimes-ten-to-the-minus-four instead of one? 

Well, now you're doubling that working 

level value from .8 to somewhere in the 1.5 to 

1.6 working level range, and now we're starting 

to get into the same types of numbers that we are 

seeing in the actual measurements for Building 65 

in 1996. And, again, there are 191 measurements, 

which is the second column here listing. And as 

you can see, that's a pretty good number compared 

to the other measurements that we have.

So, at the end here, I don't have any 

technical objection to any of the numbers that 

NIOSH has chosen. I wanted to demonstrate that 

there is certainly some wiggle room, and, in some 

cases, leads me to believe that higher parameters 
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could have been chosen. And even just kind of a 

rough estimate of Building 65, based on those 

ranges of parameters, you get a number that can 

be pretty close to what was measured. 

And so I wondered if that had been 

entertained or how NIOSH feels about the 

parameters they have chosen, and how the Work 

Group feels about sort of the leeway in each of 

these parameter estimates that I just described.

MR. HINNEFELD: Bob, this is Stu. Can 

you scroll back up to the table before this one 

where we were looking at the various -- it showed 

various eras and time periods?

MR. BARTON: Okay. Is this the one?

MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, that table there 

down toward the bottom, which is what we are 

really interested in.

MR. BARTON: Right.

MR. HINNEFELD: Okay, the .53 -- okay 

I don't -- what are the headings on the last two 

columns?

MR. BARTON: That's working levels and 
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then working level months. 

MR. HINNEFELD: Okay, so working level 

is the concentration. I see what you're saying. 

Okay.

Okay, I think it would be worth 

looking at 65 just as a specific item, and maybe 

look into some of these items because -- and just 

to alert everyone, I think that we, on our side, 

may want to re-look at that ten-to-the-minusthree release fraction. My recollection was that 

I think there might have been an incorrect 

assumption in the generation of that number. 

The author assumed that the 260-some 

picocurie per liter number was extrapolated from 

a daughter product measurement. And there were 

instruments that measured radon and thoron gas 

directly. And so that might actually be a spawn 

measurement, as opposed to something extrapolated 

from a daughter product measurement.

But I think that your point, Bob, 

about let's look at 65 specifically might be 

worthwhile here.
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MR. BARTON: I agree with that, Stu. 

I think anytime you're trying build a model, I 

mean, as close as you can get to actual specific 

situations and site parameters, in this case, it 

seems apparent that Building 65 was, again, your 

bad actor. So to the extent that we could choose 

model parameters specific to that I think would 

benefit the scientific defensibility of the 

model. And, you know, we may get back to the 

same place. We might have a higher working level 

measurement; we might have a lower one.

MR. HINNEFELD: Right. And I think, 

if I'm not mistaken, 65 really didn't -- it only 

got full of thorium like from '72 on, was when 

the thorium was placed in 65. I think that was 

when Fernald was designated the repository for 

thorium and that stuff came. I think it got 

shipped down from Mound around 1972.

MR. BARTON: That might account for 

the higher equilibrium between thorium-228 and 

thorium-232.

MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, I mean, that 
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stuff had been sitting around, I don't know. 

Whatever processing they had done to it, it had 

been done long before, because it had been 

sitting at Mound long before it got sent to 

Fernald.

MR. BARTON: And I guess the only 

thing I would add is, in addition to maybe looking 

at Building 65, the parameter of the occupancy 

factor, which again was one month for a certain 

period of time and three months during another 

period of time.

MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah.

MR. BARTON: You need something behind 

that to really kind of justify that as correct. 

Because once you get to the working level, now 

it's just a question of what portion of the year 

are we assuming that the workers were exposed to 

that working level.

MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, I think -- I'm 

surprised it was left out here, but I'm thinking 

the justification for the really short occupancy 

in the latest years was, at some point, when we 
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got into actually remediating the thorium, all 

these thorium locations were sort of segmented 

off and you couldn't go in there unless you were 

on a thorium project and you were wearing a 

respirator when you went in there. And so I think 

that occupancy is actually a combination of 

protection factor and occupancy, but I'm not sure 

of that.

MR. BARTON: At this time, does the 

Work Group have any questions? Or it looks like 

the path forward might be for NIOSH to maybe take 

a look at Building 65 specific to thorium -- or 

thoron, rather, and provide justification for the 

occupancy times.

CHAIR CLAWSON: This is Brad. You 

brought up some very interesting points here. 

We've got to give NIOSH a chance to be able to 

take a look at these and see where we're at and 

what the best, most claimant-favorable direction 

is.

MEMBER ZIEMER: I think that's not a 

bad idea, Brad.
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CHAIR CLAWSON: Yeah, so I guess we'll 

just take and regroup on that and give them an 

opportunity to have a look at it.

MR. KATZ: Right. So, Bob, this would 

just show in-progress.

MR. BARTON: Okay. And, you know, I 

have some notes here that I was kind of going 

through that talk about the different parameters. 

It might be helpful for NIOSH, I could probably 

forward those to them just to show what I'm seeing 

as far as the ranges and kind of what's said in 

there and what options are out there.

MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, Bob, if you have 

those notes, that would be helpful if you could 

just send them to me and I'll send them over to 

the ORAU side.

MR. BARTON: Okay, great. Alright, 

moving on from thoron, there's only one thing 

left and that is unsupported radium. And what 

essentially this is, is when radium was stripped 

away, there was a potential for exposure to the 

unsupported radium. 
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Now, in the original White Paper, 

actually, the procedure calls for first you take 

these in vivo results and you evaluate the 

thorium. So it's the thorium-232 dose using the 

lead result. And then on top of that, you would 

take the actinium results and evaluate it as if 

it was radium-228.

Now, while that's certainly claimantfavorable, it's sort of double-counting because 

when we do our thorium dose assessment, we're 

assuming triple separation. So we're assuming 

that that in vivo result is representative of 

just thorium, which in the end game results in 

essentially a factor of five increase in the 

thorium results. So then taking the same sample 

and assuming it was all radium-228 would really 

be double-counting. And we kind of discussed 

this back in December.

Since then, that part of it has been 

removed and essentially what happens is, if you 

have an individual and see that their actinium 

result is a factor of 1.5 or higher than the lead 
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result, then the correct conclusion is that the 

exposure was not actually to thorium but rather 

to unsupported radium.

So it's sort of a threshold value. We 

discussed this with Joyce Lipsztein. 

Unfortunately, she couldn't be here today. She's 

visiting with her grandchildren. Well, I guess 

that's fortunate for her but unfortunate for us.

So, unsupported radium is dealt with 

for the probably rare case in which the in vivo 

results actually indicate that the exposure was 

likely to radium, unsupported radium, and not to 

thorium. And that is discussed on page 53 of the 

TBD.

And I guess the only comment I would 

have, and this isn't really a finding, what we 

had asked in the original finding was for NIOSH 

to investigate whether unsupported radium was 

possible and how to do that. And as I just 

described, again, there is that threshold value, 

where you have to have a factor of 1.5 between 

the two in vivo measurements to really conclude 
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that unsupported radium was there.

And page 54 of the TBD also states 

that any unsupported radium intake is not part of 

any coworker model and so would not be assigned, 

unless you had monitoring records which indicated 

that.

And I guess I'd just ask NIOSH to talk 

a little bit about that and why, because we are 

kind of admitting that an unsupported radium 

source could exist at Fernald but there's not 

going to be any unmonitored assignment of it, 

which may be reasonable but I kind of wanted to 

hear NIOSH's rationale on that.

MR. HINNEFELD: Well, this is Stu, and 

I'll give it a shot. Fundamentally, there was no 

-- the only unsupported radium-228 would be in a 

raffinate. And so while there may, in fact, be 

a potential for, say, a raffinate spill, or an 

individual may get into the raffinate at some 

point, it was certainly not a routine exposure at 

all. 

If I'm not mistaken, we have looked at 
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all of the in vivo data and I think there might 

be one person who meets that criteria of having 

actinium result more than 1.5 times the lead-212 

result. And so it just wasn't an exposure 

mechanism and there wasn't -- like there was no 

radium 228 inventory stored anywhere. It was 

disposed of out in the pits with all the other 

stuff.

And with thoron having like a, what, 

55-second, roughly, half-life, you know you don't 

get a lot of emanation once you bury that or stick 

it in the pit under with a bunch of other stuff. 

So, with respect to the thoron question around 

radium-228 storage areas, well, there weren't any 

radium-228 storage areas.

And then with respect to why no 

coworker for unsupported radium-228, it just 

wasn't an exposure that could be experienced by 

hardly anybody.

MR. BARTON: I mean, then there's 

really no objection from me. I guess I'd just 

ask that any of my other members at SC&A if they 
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have any thoughts otherwise. I think that 

explanation, it really does seem like a very 

remote possibility. As you said, even in the 

records we have, that indicator that there could 

have been an exposure only happened for, I guess, 

one instance among these.

MR. HINNEFELD: My recollection was 

there was on in vivo count, one person. He may 

have been counted more than once, but there was 

one person who showed evidence of where the 

actinium-228 was more than 1.5 times the lead212. I was a little surprised there was anybody, 

myself.

MR. BARTON: And the original finding 

was sort of geared towards -- because unsupported 

radium had been discussed in that White Paper 

back in 2014, the thorium White Paper, so we 

brought it up. Well, you know, I guess we need 

to flesh that out a little bit and how that's 

going to be dealt. You know, it would be 

inappropriate, as it was laid out in that White 

Paper, to sort of double-count both the thorium 
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exposure and say there was no radium present for 

the thorium, but then with the same results say 

oh, well, the rest of it is -- it also represents 

unsupported radium. 

And that language isn't in there. And 

I think we have no technical objection to what's 

being done there. And I don't have any objection 

to the explanation as to why a coworker model is 

probably not appropriate for this highly unlikely 

source term.

So if anyone has any questions or 

wants to comment --

CHAIR CLAWSON: Bob, this is Brad. 

So, I have just a clarification. So, what NIOSH 

and SC&A is saying is that for the radium the 

possibilities are very remote, and also, too, the 

half-life on it was how many, 30 seconds or --

MR. HINNEFELD: Well, what I was 

talking about, the radon-220 half-life is about 

55 seconds. And so it doesn't emanate out of 

materials even as well as radon-222 does. You 

know, and so once you stick it in the waste pits, 
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it's not really going to be a particular source 

of radon or thoron emanation.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay.

MR. BARTON: And thoron doses would be 

bounded essentially by these -- well, the topics 

we just discussed with the model and how we're 

going to do thoron.

MR. HINNEFELD: Right.

MR. BARTON: So, again, it was in the 

original White Paper. There were some concerns 

that adding in the radium body burden -- we're 

talking about radium-228 here -- would be 

unrealistic, especially because that same data is 

being used for thorium. If you have a thoron 

model, you know some of the parameters might be 

tweaked. So we just kind of wanted to see that 

fleshed out a little bit. And we're satisfied 

with NIOSH's position on that.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Can we close this one?

MR. BARTON: That's what I would 

recommend, yes.

MR. STIVER: Yeah, this is Stiver. I 
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agree with you, Bob.

CHAIR CLAWSON: I guess that one is 

closed, then.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Good.

MR. BARTON: Well, that's it for me. 

That gets us to the end of our review of the 

internal TBD. Obviously, there are some action 

items going forward, but I don't have anything 

else. It took a little while to get it done but 

that's sort of it for me, unless anyone has any 

questions.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Quick question. This 

is Ziemer. Where did we end up in Finding 2, 

which we discussed for a long time but I don't 

recall us ever finalizing that. Where did we end 

up?

MR. KATZ: We did. Finding 2 we 

closed.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Did we close it? 

Okay, that's what I was asking.

MR. BARTON: Yeah, it was decided that 

the 50th percentile is claimant-favorable and 
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appropriate.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Okay, got you. Thank 

you.

Work Group Presentation to ABRWH for 

August Meeting 

MR. STIVER: Okay, this is John. I 

guess the next thing that we were going to look 

at that kind of impinges on us in findings was 

the TBD-4 review that Doug Farver did last year.

Doug, are you on the line now, still?

MR. FARVER: I'm on the line but I'm 

not on Skype.

MR. STIVER: Okay, you can probably 

just kind of read on through and people can follow 

along.

MR. FARVER: Okay. This was a memo 

that was sent back in May of 2016 upon review of 

a Revision 3 to the environmental TBD.

And if we just go down to Table 1, in 

summary, what I did is I looked through the matrix 

and I found 12 findings that mentioned or 

referred to the environmental TBD. Of those 12, 
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four were closed; four also related to the TBD5, which we just talked about; and three of them 

were specifically for TBD-4, the environmental 

TBD.

And if you go down to the bottom of 

page 4, the first one that was open is Finding 

25. And it's "NIOSH modeling of radon dose is 

not claimant-favorable and does not take actual 

working conditions into account." And at the 

December 2014 Work Group meeting, it was decided 

that they should use the 95th percentile of the 

modeled dose, as they did in their Report-52.

And so I reviewed the revised TBD and 

they do now use the 95th percentile instead of 

the median dose. So we can recommend that you 

close Finding 25.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay, any discussion 

on that?

MR. STIVER: The only thing I was 

going to say is that, yeah, this is that radon 

emanation issue that Hans had spent a great deal 

of time on. And it was in abeyance, pending the 
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revision of the TBD, and it has been addressed. 

The 95th percentile is being used and so we can 

go ahead and close that out.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay, we'll close it. 

Any -- Phil?

MEMBER SCHOFIELD: I agree with it. 

Close it out.

MR. FARVER: Okay, the next one is on 

the top of page 5, Finding 26, which is very 

similar. It also has to do with radon. And it 

was decided at the previous meeting that the 95th 

percentile doses will be used. And this would 

close out this finding.

As I said before, the TBD has been 

updated to include the 95th percentile instead of 

the median doses. So 26 is very much like 25 and 

we recommend it be closed also.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Anything else?

MR. STIVER: I have nothing to say, 

other than -- this is Stiver -- we agree it can 

be closed.

MEMBER ZIEMER: I agree. Agreed.
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CHAIR CLAWSON: Close it?

MEMBER SCHOFIELD: I agree with that.

MR. FARVER: Okay, the next one is 

Finding 27, "the TBD does not consider outdoor 

diffuse emissions in production areas as a source 

of external environmental dose."

It was discussed at the September 2014 

Work Group meeting and it was agreed that the 

finding could be closed if NIOSH would add 

specific language about OTIB-17, dose on the 

skin.

So they included that in the updated 

revision in Section 4.1.2. It says, "Exposures 

to the skin, including localized doses from 

direct deposition should be reconstructed in 

accordance with OTIB-17."

So, since it was included, we 

recommend that we could close this finding.

CHAIR CLAWSON: No objection. Let's 

close it.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Agreed.

MEMBER SCHOFIELD: Agreed.
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MR. FARVER: Okay, those were the 

three that were specific to OTIB-4. Other ones 

have been previously closed, like 28, which you 

see on that page.

If we go up, I will mention that, 

under the section in Findings 9 and 11, this has 

to do with the recycled uranium which was 

discussed in the TBD-5 review, previously. 

There's little misstatement in here. It says 

that SC&A verified that the RU constituents 

contained in the table contained the agreed-upon 

RU constituent concentrations.

Well, as we talked about earlier 

today, there was a little difference in 

agreement. So, this really doesn't impact 

anything, other than when we get that nailed down 

with the RU constituents, we just have to make 

sure they're consistent between the environmental 

and the internal dosimetry documents. But it 

didn't change the status for this report.

And that was the same for SEC, the 

last one, SEC-3 that had to do with the RU 
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constituents.

CHAIR CLAWSON: So are you saying 

we're good on this or still needs something?

MR. FARVER: Well, I guess we probably 

should keep this open since we're keeping the one 

from the internal dosimetry one open.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay.

MR. STIVER: Yeah, this is John. I 

think you're going to have the same source term, 

it's just your looking at it as occupational 

exposure versus an environmental exposure. So 

those assumptions and values have got to be 

consistent with one another for each of the two 

TBDs. Until we reach consensus on 9 and 11, from 

an occupational internal standpoint, we have to 

leave these open as well.

MR. KATZ: Well, are they open or are 

they in abeyance?

MR. STIVER: They're I think open 

because we thought that we had reached agreement, 

like I said earlier, back in 2012. And it turns 

out that NIOSH changed those values based on the 
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discussion we had today about the dose 

reconstruction methodology.

MR. KATZ: So they're in-progress?

MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, they're inprogress, John.

MR. STIVER: Yeah, that's the long way 

of saying, yeah, they're in-progress.

MR. FARVER: And that's pretty much 

the gist of the environmental memo.

CHAIR CLAWSON: So, we'll just leave 

these open until we get that taken care of.

MR. FARVER: Correct. So the only 

three we would be able to close specifically for 

the environmental TBD would be 25, 26, and 27, 

which you closed.

CHAIR CLAWSON: I understand. Thank 

you, Doug.

MR. STIVER: Okay, there are only two 

other items that we haven't looked at that are

still on the docket, and have been for quite some 

time. And these are TBD Findings 17 and 19 that 

relate to extremity dose calculations with 
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regards to primarily beta exposure.

And I'm looking at the issues matrix, 

on page 25 of 51, looking at TBD Issue 19. And 

this is a situation where you have a person that 

might have extremity dosimetry, either from a 

film badge or some badge of some sort, on the 

limbs or wrist. And we tried to modify the 

reading on that dosimeter to account for 

geometric changes in relation to the exposure 

that might be received in one location based on 

a dosimeter but would be in a slightly different 

location.

And in their response, NIOSH 

references DCAS-TIB-13, "Selected Geometric 

Exposure Scenario Considerations for External 

Dose Reconstruction at Uranium Facilities."

And this was kind of left dangling 

because that particular TIB still has an open 

finding and Procedures Review Subcommittee, and 

also it doesn't really address beta exposure. It 

addresses gamma exposure.

And since you were mostly in 
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concurrence with NIOSH on the photon adjustment 

factors, there's still left this method of 

dealing with the beta exposure. What are you 

getting on the open window, the film badge versus 

what was the skin of the extremity experiencing?

And so that is still open. Much 

related to that is Finding 17. And this was 

discussed, I believe, back in September of 2014, 

if I'm not mistaken. And John Mauro, at the time, 

had been looking into this and he wanted to look 

-- I guess at the time we were doing a TBD review, 

a part of the TBD review for Idaho National 

Laboratory. And as part of that study, we were 

looking at the NOCTS claims for skin cancer and 

extremity skin cancer. And I believe we 

discovered 52 claimants.

And John had indicated at the time 

that we were closer to finalizing that paper and 

that we'd be able to get back to that. And that 

was kind of -- I looked at that paper and 

basically it kind of makes some generalized 

recommendations, that we feel NIOSH needs to look 
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at developing a methodology to do this for some 

of the claims. Some of the doses that typically 

we thought would be higher than what would be 

derived and was actually done in a dose 

reconstruction. But there has been no 

development of any particular methodology to do 

that. And it wasn't much longer after that the 

SEC Evaluation Report for Idaho came along. And 

everything since then has been related to the SEC 

and all the Site Profile issues have kind of been 

tabled.

So, at this point, the only thing I 

would say is that we should probably keep those 

in-progress until such time as we can get back to 

that particular issue.

MR. KATZ: John, this is Ted. These 

are sounding like Procedures business, not really 

Fernald business.

MR. STIVER: Well, yeah, it does kind 

of have its origins in Fernald but it really has 

broader applicability. So, you know, it may be 

something that we consider moving over to 
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Procedures, or at least keep track of it in that 

environment.

MR. KATZ: Paul, I don't know what you 

think, but this sounds like it belongs with 

Procedures, really, to generic issues you are 

talking about.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, certainly, 17, 

the extremities dose one is a procedure. What 

was the other one? Was that 19?

MR. STIVER: Yeah, 19 had its origin 

and exposure to organ -- let's see, basically the 

geometry of the source relative to the exposed 

organ and dosimeter and thorium-handling in 

production. But, you know, it kind of evolved 

into more of a generic discussion. So I think 

those two are kind of two sides of the same issue.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Yeah. Yeah, I think 

it would probably be appropriate to have 

Procedures look at those, unless there's 

something very exclusively specific to Fernald 

that you don't have at other sites. It looks 

generic to me.
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MR. STIVER: Yeah, like I said, it has 

origin in Fernald but it really is more of a 

generic issue.

MEMBER ZIEMER: right.

MR. KATZ: It was stimulated by 

Fernald issue. But so let's, if we may, why don't 

you, John, just as part of this closing up this 

process, why don't you just send a brief memo, 

address it to Wanda, since she's the Chair of 

Procedures, and identify these two findings. And 

then that could be taken off there. Because the 

Procedures Subcommittee dealt a lot with the 

issue of extremities and all that.

MR. STIVER: Yeah, this is something 

that we've seen before in different venues.

MR. KATZ: Yeah, and Jim Neton 

certainly sort of has most of this under his hat.

MR. STIVER: Okay.

MR. KATZ: Yeah, that would be great, 

and I think you could probably close it out, in 

terms of it being an issue for this Work Group.

MR. STIVER: Yeah, it would be good to 
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get those off the docket.

MR. KATZ: Brad, is that okay by you?

CHAIR CLAWSON: Yeah, that's fine. I 

just -- if we move it over to Procedures, how are 

we going to take care of this for the Fernald?

MR. KATZ: So, you can. What we've 

done is we can close it here, since it's a generic 

matter. And then however that gets resolved in 

Procedures, like other things that get resolved 

at Procedures, that would be addressed for dose 

reconstruction, not just in Fernald, but 

everywhere else where it might apply.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay, that's all I 

wanted to make sure.

MR. KATZ: Yeah, that's what the 

follow-up would be.

MR. STIVER: Yeah, also keep in mind 

that all of this is going to go into the BRS and 

it is much easier to kind of cross-link things 

there, than trying to keep track of these huge 

gigantic issues.

MR. KATZ: That's true. John, copy 
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Brad and me when you send that email just so --

 MR. STIVER: Okay, will do.

MR. KATZ: Yeah, thanks.

CHAIR CLAWSON: I appreciate that.

MR. KATZ: Does that take us to the 

end?

MR. STIVER: Yeah, that's pretty much 

the end for SC&A's presentation.

MR. KATZ: So then it's time to talk 

about the upcoming Board meeting?

MR. STIVER: Yeah, that's pretty much 

it.

Petitioner Questions/Comments 

MR. KATZ: Let me just check. Do we 

have the Fernald petitioner on the line? We don't 

expect her, but is she on the line?

(Pause.)

MR. KATZ: Okay, we didn't expect her, 

so it's not surprising.

But, okay, so to talk about the Board 

meeting, I'd ask John to address it and start 

preparing for a presentation, since that Board 
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meeting is coming pretty soon and this a lot of 

material that we've covered.

My question to the Work Group is, how 

do you want to handle things? You've gotten 

through a lot of the Site Profile review. We're 

completed with, I believe, unless I have misheard

something, the SEC petition review for the last 

period of years.

I have it on the draft agenda as 

potentially addressing the SEC and the Site 

Profile, although they're not completely 

finished. So my thought was that we could, the 

Work Group could come up with a recommendation 

for the Fernald SEC, and it could also provide a 

pretty substantial update, depending on how much 

time all this takes, on the Site Profile work. 

Because, given how much work has been done on the 

Site Profile, it's pretty good to spend more than 

one meeting sort of bringing the Board up to snuff 

anyway. 

So the fact that there are some 

matters still that have to be put to bed, it seems 
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like an awful lot of the matters have been put to 

bed and you could be reporting out partially on 

that and that would get the Board back in Fernald 

territory, at least.

But what's the Work Group's thinking 

first about the SEC and then about Site Profile 

matters?

CHAIR CLAWSON: You're right, we have 

gone through a lot of it but we need to bring the 

rest of the Board up to speed up of where we are 

at on that.

As far as the SEC, I think we're 

pretty well there, aren't we?

MR. KATZ: I believe we are there.

MR. STIVER: Yeah, this is John. We 

have, essentially, closed out all of the SEC 

issues. The only thing that was left hanging was 

the post-SEC period for thorium, and as you've 

heard, there really are no SEC issues there.

MR. KATZ: Now, let me just note, 

Brad, I mean, in past issues, I mean, I think 

we're all familiar at this point, where there is 
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major Site Profile matters that are left in black 

boxes, the Board hasn't really wanted to act on 

the SEC while those black boxes remain 

unresolved. But in this case, it seems to me 

that most of the matters that DCAS has followed 

up with are relatively minor, peripheral things. 

And I'm not sure that the Board, necessarily, 

would have the same concerns here.

CHAIR CLAWSON: I can't speak for the 

rest of the Board Members but the one that only 

gives me a little bit of trouble is that Building 

65 that we discussed about. But, that being said, 

that, to me, is more of a Site Profile issue. 

It's not that it can't be done. It's what is the 

best way to be able to do it?

MEMBER ZIEMER: That's right, because 

we have the numbers, the issue is which ones to 

use.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Well, right, and also, 

too, if we actually single out Building 65 on 

this, because that one's kind of a special 

problem, myself, personally, I don't see a 
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problem proceeding on with that with the -- oh, 

my goodness, it's been a long day.

MR. KATZ: The recommendation.

CHAIR CLAWSON: The recommendation, 

yes, and take care of these other ones. I don't 

see anything that would really affect that. But 

that's just my opinion.

MR. STIVER: Yeah, Brad, I would have 

to second that. I mean, there's no area that we 

found where dose reconstruction appears to be 

infeasible.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Right.

MR. STIVER: It's just a matter of 

picking the right parameters.

MEMBER ZIEMER: So we could have a 

recommendation on the SEC and then a -- well, I 

think, probably for the update, you want to just 

update on the ones that we've recently reviewed, 

which is the ones today. And that's fairly 

extensive. And I think we have to recognize that 

you can't get into complete depth with the Board 

on the updates, other than to give an overall 
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description of the issue and what we did with it. 

But we don't want to spend two or three hours on 

the updates.

MR. KATZ: For sure. What I was 

thinking, Paul, I think what would be good for 

the Board to know is just have a brief summary of 

the major issues that there were.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Right. Almost a 

heading of the description, a few sentences on 

it, and what we did with it.

MR. KATZ: Yeah, and then just an 

indication of the remaining issues so that they 

understand that those are basically fairly minor 

and well in hand.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Right. Plus, on all 

of these, they can go to the main document. Now, 

all of these things have been put on the Board

what-do-you-call-it, right?

MR. KATZ: Yeah, and all these things 

are available to the Board Members, but you know 

there's always a lot of us. You know, this Board 

meeting, by the way, coming up, there's a lot of 
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material to cover. So it would be hard for them 

to do a lot of background reading on this.

CHAIR CLAWSON: I would like to 

highlight some of it, though. We can all go onto 

the Board's area and be able to review any of the 

documents we get in there, but I would like them 

see what we've gone over, just the highlights of 

what you said and go from there.

MR. KATZ: John, is that clear enough 

direction for you?

MR. STIVER: Yes.

MEMBER ZIEMER: I think if you go more 

than half an hour you're going to lose people.

MR. STIVER: We won't go that far.

MR. KATZ: So we would have, really, 

in a sense, we'd have two presentations. We would 

have the SEC 1 and 2.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Right.

MR. KATZ: We would remind them a 

little bit about that. And then after we're done 

with all that, we would have this presentation on 

the --
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MEMBER ZIEMER: Right.

MR. STIVER: Yeah, just lead off with 

the SEC and then go into Site Profiles.

MR. KATZ: Yeah.

MR. STIVER: Alright, sounds good.

MR. KATZ: Okay, well, thank you, 

everybody. I mean, I think we're -- right, Brad, 

are we ready to adjourn?

CHAIR CLAWSON: Yes, I have nothing to 

keep us here. But, John, you will keep me in the 

loop on this as we process this forward?

MR. STIVER: Oh, absolutely, yeah.

CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay. You always do. 

I just wanted to make sure.

MR. KATZ: Yeah, we'll have to be 

looking at a presentation about a week and a half 

before the Board meeting, at least, to get it 

posted.

MR. STIVER: I'll be sure to circulate 

it with the Work Group and NIOSH to make sure 

that everybody's on the same page.

MR. KATZ: Thank you, John.
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MR. HINNEFELD: Thanks, John.

MEMBER ZIEMER: Okay, thank you.

Adjourn 

MR. KATZ: Okay, folks on the line, 

have a good day.

(Whereupon, the above-entitled matter 

went off the record at 2:04 p.m.)