THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES 

PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE 

CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION 

NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH 

convenes the 

WORKING GROUP MEETING 

ADVISORY BOARD ON 

RADIATION AND WORKER HEALTH 

250 DAYS ISSUE
 

AND
 

8314 SEC PETITION
 

The verbatim transcript of the Working 

Group Meeting of the Advisory Board on Radiation and 

Worker Health held in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Nov. 29, 

2007. 

STEVEN RAY GREEN AND ASSOCIATES
 

NATIONALLY CERTIFIED COURT REPORTING 

404/733-6070 
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C O N T E N T S 

Nov. 29, 2007 

WELCOME AND OPENING COMMENTS 6 

DR. CHRISTINE BRANCHE, DFO 

INTRODUCTION BY CHAIR 8 

DR. JAMES MELIUS 

“Working Paper on Nevada Test Site Incidents Relating 

to Consideration of Employees with Less than 250 

Days” 13 

AMES REPORT 95 

ACTION ITEMS 155 

COURT REPORTER’S CERTIFICATE 162 
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TRANSCRIPT LEGEND 

The following transcript contains quoted material. Such 

material is reproduced as read or spoken. 

In the following transcript: a dash (--) indicates 

an unintentional or purposeful interruption of a 

sentence. An ellipsis (. . .) indicates halting speech 

or an unfinished sentence in dialogue or omission(s) of 

word(s) when reading written material. 

-- (sic) denotes an incorrect usage or pronunciation 

of a word which is transcribed in its original form as 

reported. 

-- (phonetically) indicates a phonetic spelling of 

the word if no confirmation of the correct spelling is 

available. 

-- "uh-huh" represents an affirmative response, and 

"uh-uh" represents a negative response. 

-- "*" denotes a spelling based on phonetics, 

without reference available. 

-- (inaudible)/ (unintelligible) signifies speaker 

failure, usually failure to use a microphone. 

-- ^ denotes telephonic interruption or another 

speaker’s interruption. 
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P A R T I C I P A N T S 

(By Group, in Alphabetical Order) 

DESIGNATED FEDERAL OFFICIAL 

BRANCHE, Christine, Ph.D.

Principal Associate Director

National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 

Washington, DC 

BOARD MEMBERSHIP 

BEACH, Josie

Nuclear Chemical Operator

Hanford Reservation 

Richland, Washington 

GRIFFON, Mark A.

President 

Creative Pollution Solutions, Inc.

Salem, New Hampshire 

MELIUS, James Malcom, M.D., Ph.D. 

Director 

New York State Laborers' Health and Safety Trust Fund 

Albany, New York 

ROESSLER, Genevieve S., Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus 

University of Florida

Elysian, Minnesota 

ZIEMER, Paul L., Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus 

School of Health Sciences 

Purdue University

Lafayette, Indiana 
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IDENTIFIED PARTICIPANTS
 

BEHLING, HANS, SC&A

BROCK, DENISE, NIOSH

ELLIOTT, LARRY, NIOSH

HOMOKI-TITUS, LIZ, HHS

HOWELL, EMILY, HHS

MAKHIJANI, ARJUN, SC&A

MAURO, JOHN, SC&A

NETON, JIM, NIOSH

ROSNER*, KATHLEEN, SEN. REID

WADE, LEW, NIOSH 
 

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P R O C E E D I N G S

 (10:00 a.m.) 

WELCOME AND OPENING COMMENTS 

DR. CHRISTINE BRANCHE, DFO 

DR. BRANCHE: This is a workgroup meeting of 

the SEC issues group including 250-day issue 

and preliminary review of 8314-SEC petition. 

I’m Christine Branche, and I’m going to go 

through the roll for the Board members who are 

on the work group. 

Dr. Melius. 

DR. MELIUS: I’m here. 

DR. BRANCHE: Dr. Ziemer. 

DR. ZIEMER: Yes, on the line. 

DR. BRANCHE: Josie Beach. 

MS. BEACH: I’m here. 

DR. BRANCHE: Mark Griffon. 

MR. GRIFFON: Here. 

DR. BRANCHE: Gen Roessler. 

DR. ROESSLER: Here. 

DR. BRANCHE: The work group members are on 

the line. Are there any other Board members 

who are participating? 
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 (no response) 

DR. BRANCHE: Okay, we do not have a quorum 

of the Board so we can proceed. 

Are there any other, who are the 

federal officials, please, starting in the 

room? 

MR. ELLIOTT: I’m Larry Elliott, NIOSH. 

MS. HOWELL: Emily Howell, HHS. 

DR. NETON: Jim Neton, NIOSH. 

DR. BRANCHE: Are there any other federal 

government agency participants on the line? 

 DR. WADE: This is Lew Wade on the line. 

MS. HOMOKI-TITUS: This is Liz Homoki-Titus 

with HHS. 

DR. BRANCHE: Are there any other members of 

other federal agencies who are on the line? 

 (no response) 

DR. BRANCHE: Okay, SC&A or ORAU? 

DR. MAURO: John Mauro, SC&A. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Arjun Makhijani, SC&A. 

DR. BEHLING: Hans Behling, SC&A. 

DR. BRANCHE: Okay, anyone else? 

MS. BROCK: Denise Brock. 

DR. BRANCHE: Thank you. 

Is there anyone from the federal --
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I’m sorry. Are there any petitioners or their 

representatives on the line; workers or their 

representatives on the line who would like to 

identify themselves? 

 (no response) 

DR. BRANCHE: Are there any members of 

Congress or their representatives on the line? 

MS. ROSNER*: Kathleen Rosner from Senator 

Harry Reid’s office. 

DR. BRANCHE: Thank you. 

Are there others on the line who would 

like to mention their names? 

 (no response) 

DR. BRANCHE: Okay, just one more item 

before I give it to Dr. Melius. For those of 

you who are participating by phone, if you 

could please conduct yourselves according to 

telephone etiquette. That means if when 

you’re speaking you can certainly keep your 

line open, but if you could please mute your 

phone if you are not speaking that will allow 

all of us to hear all of the discussion that’s 

going on. 

And so, Dr. Melius. 

INTRODUCTION BY CHAIR 
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DR. MELIUS: Thank you. 

This is a meeting of the 250-day work 

group or whatever we’re calling ourselves, the 

SEC Review Work Group also. And we have two 

reports that we’re going to be discussing 

today. One is a report dated October 2007 

called “Working Paper on Nevada Test Site 

Incidents Relating to Consideration of 

Employees with Less than 250 Days”. And the 

second one is a report dated June 2007, again 

another SC&A report called “The Relevance of 

the 250-Workday Requirement to Potential 

Exposures Associated with a Single Blowout”. 

It relates to the Ames Lab issue, working 

draft, I’m sorry. Larry was pointing out this 

is a working draft so it’s --

MR. ELLIOTT: The work’s in progress, and I 

know that there’s interest perhaps our 

participants on the phone to know what these 

documents are, given that they’re not on our 

website. They’re not accessible. They’re not 

publicly distributed at this time. 

They contain Privacy Act-related 

information. They have not been reviewed or 

redacted for release at this point in time. 
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They’re pre-decisional documents used in this 

working group study. Just wanted to make sure 

people understood the constraints we’re all 

operating under. 

DR. MELIUS: It’s particularly important I 

think especially with an NTS document because 

the way --

DR. ZIEMER: Dr. Melius, this is Ziemer. I 

have a question as we discuss the first 

document dealing with the NTS cases. I notice 

there’s a number of claimant numbers listed in 

the table of contents. Are those Privacyprotected numbers? I’m worried about as we 

discuss things today what we, how we can 

identify things. 

MR. ELLIOTT: Yes, Dr. Ziemer, those are 

Privacy Act protected information. So you 

cannot use those, you cannot reference those 

in your speech. 

MS. HOWELL: Dr. Ziemer, if I could make a 

recommendation -- this is Emily. If you’ll 

look at the table of contents there, 

identified in numeric order is 3.1.1. 

DR. ZIEMER: Right, that’s what I was 

getting at. As long as we use that reference 
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we’re okay, right? 

MS. HOWELL: Yes. 

MR. ELLIOTT: Yes. 

DR. ZIEMER: I just wanted to double check 

on what we can say and what we can’t. Thank 

you. 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah, I was actually going to 

suggest page numbers, but then at least my 

copy doesn’t have page numbers. 

DR. ZIEMER: Well, mine has the same 

problem. There are page numbers referenced 

but the pages don’t actually contain them. 

DR. MELIUS: I think that’s the original, 

the way the document was, not the way we 

printed it, Paul. 

MR. ELLIOTT: I apologize for that. It was 

my fault. 

DR. MELIUS: I don’t actually remember the 

timing on this, but I believe the last meeting 

we had of this work group was last spring 

sometime, and I don’t think anybody remembers, 

but where we mostly talked about sort of a 

general concept of how we would try to 

approach this 250-day issue; what were some of 

the problems doing so, and then I think 
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actually briefly talked about an earlier draft 

of the Ames report to that. 

At that meeting we decided that our 

procedure to be able to address the NTS site 

issues which was by looking at, necessitated 

looking at individual claimant records, and 

then Arjun and Jim Neton, I think, have been 

working since that time to, I think at that 

time at that meeting, as I recall, we 

identified on a preliminary basis sort of the 

types of claims that would be useful to 

review. And then Arjun and Jim worked 

together on that, and Jim pulled these claims. 

I think I got the sequence right. And then 

that was the basis for Ajun’s and the SC&A 

review of those. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Actually, Bob Barton did it. 

DR. MELIUS: And what I had planned for the 

meeting today is to start with the NTS report 

because that’s the one that in some ways is 

newer, we would do that and talk about that. 

My plan is that we will take a break around 

11:30 or so. We will then decide do we work 

through lunch and then or do we break for 

lunch; how we’re going to do that. 
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My plan is to try to wrap up before 

two o’clock if feasible, frankly, because I 

don’t think we’ll, I’m not sure how well we’ll 

all think after two o’clock after talking 

about this stuff. But let’s see where we are 

in terms of making progress and so forth. 

So everybody agree with that approach 

on that? 

 (no response) 

“Working Paper on Nevada Test Site Incidents Relating to 

Consideration of Employees with Less than 250 Days” 

DR. MELIUS: Maybe we can start by Arjun, if 

you want to talk a little bit about what your, 

about the report. Sort of what you did in 

general. Then I think we’re going to have to 

probably just start talking about individual 

cases in order to be able to wrestle with 

this. But go ahead. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Well --

DR. BRANCHE: Arjun, before you start --

this is Christine Branche again. If you could 

please mute your phone if you’re not speaking. 

We’re hearing some jingle bells in the back. 

Thank you. 

Arjun. 
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DR. MAKHIJANI: Thank you, Dr. Branche. 

At the last meeting we decided that 

there were four categories of potential 

situations that might involve less than 250-

day SEC coverage so we would look at those 

workers who were involved in planned re-entry 

operations such as instrument retrieval. 

Workers were directly exposed to atmospheric 

fallout such as cloud sampling emissions, 

aerial photography, ground-based fallout 

measurements. 

Workers who were frontline witnesses 

to atmospheric test shots and workers who were 

involved in post-shot operations and 

experienced unplanned exposures due to some 

form of logistical problem. And those were 

the types of claims that Jim looked for, and 

he identified --

DR. NETON: Twenty-one or 22. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: -- yeah, 20-odd claims. And 

we looked at all those claims and we have the 

records from those claims and collected the 

information. We had 11 cases identified for 

planned re-entry, five exposures to 

atmospheric fallout, two frontline witnesses 
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to shots and four involved logistical mix-up. 

We had 22 cases. 

DR. MAURO: For those of you following this, 

it’s basically, rather than taking notes this 

is written up right in the introduction. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Yeah, and I was reading from 

Table 1 on page five. 

And we collected their dose records, 

and their dose records are summarized in the 

same table. So there are some external 

exposure records. And then we summarized the 

incidents and then have a detail on each case. 

So that’s what we did in preparation. 

What we did not do is try to make any 

analysis of how these types of situations 

would fit into a 250-day criteria which we 

presume would be the subject of a working 

group discussion. 

DR. NETON: I might just add to that that 

when we pulled these cases, we looked with 

people who had exposure during the SEC period, 

and we made no attempt to triage these into 

the ones that might be relevant to the 250-day 

criteria. These were just examples of people 

who would fall into those categories and may 
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have some unique exposure scenarios that could 

be discussed today or the relevance and the 

ability to have a large amount of exposure in 

a short period of time. 

DR. MELIUS: And the issues, the focus is 

the scenario not the, you know --

DR. NETON: None of these cases may or may 

not be relevant to the 250-day requirement. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: We took it as such and we 

pulled the records. And this is essentially a 

data summarization exercise without analysis. 

We tried the analysis route and interpretation 

route for us and it didn’t work too well. 

DR. NETON: You almost have to do a dose 

reconstruction to get there. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: So we didn’t go there again. 

DR. NETON: I think these are 22 cases out 

of something on the order of six-to 700 total 

cases that were in that timeframe. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: So I don’t know exactly how 

you want to proceed in a case-by-case 

examination. Do you want me to go over the --

you have the report. 

DR. MELIUS: Why don’t you go through what 

you think is a good case to discuss. 
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DR. ZIEMER: Could I ask a question first? 

DR. MELIUS: Sure. 

DR. ZIEMER: This is Ziemer. I just want to 

clarify the dose values in here, in the 

report. These are the doses of record versus 

any reconstructed doses. Is that correct? 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes, these are the --

Bob, are you on the phone? 

 (no response) 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes, as I said I didn’t do 

the data compilation, but these are the doses 

of record. 

DR. NETON: I’ve got a couple questions, I 

guess, maybe before we start. I think if I 

could I’d maybe just focus a little bit on 

Table 1 first because that’s about the only 

place where we have some summary information. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, Table 2 also. 

DR. NETON: Well, Table 2. But the idea was 

to start looking at these case as to maximum 

exposures that were similar in criticality or 

something in that effect. I think there’s a 

pretty good summary of what was in the cases. 

I guess, I have a question as to what 

represents the 95th percentile. What is that 
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value? 

DR. MAKHIJANI: You know, I was looking at 

that, and I thought I’d talk to Bob about it 

before this meeting. If I might call him at 

the break and get back to you about that. I’m 

sorry. 

DR. NETON: I don’t know if this is the 95th 

percentile of a coworker model that we could 

use or --

DR. MAKHIJANI: It must be something like 

that. It’s obviously not the dose of record. 

DR. NETON: I don’t know because maybe you 

constructed a 95th percentile. I’m reading --

DR. ZIEMER: Well, that was the follow-up 

question. Did they take the dose of record 

and just assume, for example, a lognormal 

distribution to give an idea of what a 95th 

percentile might look like? 

DR. NETON: Yeah, it appears that way, Dr. 

Ziemer, because I’m reading a sentence here in 

the first paragraph. “Only the employment 

years before ’63 which had non-zero dose were 

used in calculating the 95th percentile.” So 

somehow all the doses that were available 

were, yeah, fit into a lognormal distribution 
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and summarized that way. 

DR. ZIEMER: And then the maximum versus the 

95th then would be what? Like the 99th? 

DR. NETON: Well, this maximum, whatever 

that is, I think whatever the highest dose 

that was --

DR. ZIEMER: That is the maximum record. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: It’s the maximum among the 

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DR. ZIEMER: I got it. I got it. 

DR. NETON: Say for the first one, and 

obviously 18,500 is the highest for the --

DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes, this is the 95th 

percentile of the group, but I don’t know how 

he did 95th percentile of two. 

DR. NETON: As long as I understand it. 

This is based on the data that were available 

in the case files. I kind of have a feel for 

what was done then. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes. I’m pretty sure that 

data on the case files. 

DR. ROESSLER: So that doesn’t refer to the 

six- or 700. 

DR. NETON: No, no. 

DR. ROESSLER: It’s the smaller groups, 
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specific groups. 

DR. NETON: This is the, apparently some 

lognormal distribution was constructed out of 

the 22 cases that had external dosimetry --

DR. MAKHIJANI: In each of these categories. 

DR. NETON: For each category, yeah, which 

is interesting to these categories, two 

categories. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: I actually didn’t catch that 

when I was compiling. 

DR. NETON: I guess one thing that did 

strike me though is the doses, although 

they’re quite large, are not huge, you know, 

at the level that we were expecting maybe to 

see for some of these cases. 

DR. ZIEMER: Well, yes, they don’t begin to 

approach the kind of doses you see in 

criticality accidents. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, except maybe for the ^ 

mix up. 

DR. NETON: And that’s at the low end, and 

that’s the one that I think that’s attached 

the entire evaluation report, incident report 

attached to the back of this document that 

discusses what happened there. And that was 
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actually measured I think on his personal 

dosimeter. 

I guess with the NTS if we’re using 

this as an example, there’s two things to 

consider. One is that we’ve believed that we 

can reconstruct external doses for these 

workers because we have a fair amount of 

monitoring data. And I think frankly this 

table sort of bears some of that out. And 

then secondly is that the internal exposures 

were the basis for adding the class, right? 

So then when you look at that in that context, 

I suppose, this 250-day requirement. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: You know, one of the 

questions that arose sort of in an overview 

out of the compilation is these people were 

involved in some unusual situations and the 

external doses may have been all over the map 

from relatively low in relation to the 

criteria to somewhat significant anyway. 

But in most cases there are no 

internal dose records. We don’t know what the 

internal dose would be. So the question of, 

which relates to what we’re going to discuss 

with Ames, the question of what other criteria 
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for internal dose for less than 250-day, I 

think becomes kind of acute. 

DR. NETON: Well, right. I think that’s 

what I was trying to flesh out here early 

going is that I’m not sure the external is 

really an issue here. Maybe it is, but in my 

mind external is somewhat bounded by the 

amount of monitoring data that we have. And 

I’ve seen nothing so far that would indicate 

that would approach a level of a criticality 

incident or something like that from an 

external perspective. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Does the less than 250-day 

inclusion include whether you were monitored 

or not? Or is it if you are in the class and 

somehow in a situation defined by the rule 

that it doesn’t matter whether you were 

monitored or not? 

DR. NETON: Well, I think it depends on what 

the class definition is. I think the class, I 

don’t have the class definition for NTS in 

front of me, but I suspect that it’s got that 

standard language were monitored or should 

have been monitored for exposure. 

DR. ROESSLER: It’s got it here. That’s 
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what it says. 

DR. NETON: So that anyone who was in the 

class, anyone who should have been monitored, 

and by definition the Department of Labor has 

accepted that to mean exposure greater than 

100 millirem per year, would be a member of 

the class. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Internal exposure. 

DR. NETON: Yeah, internal, because I think 

the basis of the SEC was for our inability to 

reconstruct the internal dose. As you 

observed in these individual case files, we 

have very little internal monitoring data. So 

we believe that we can reconstruct external 

dose. We sort of indicated that all along. 

And in some ways this is borne out by Table 1. 

Then you get into the external, and if 

one looks through these incidents, I think 

that the issue is do any of these incidents, 

any descriptions in here, relate to internal 

exposures that would be exceptionally high, 

similar, whatever the words are in the rule, 

to a criticality incident. I think that’s 

what needs to be, that’s what to me is the 

relevant issue. 
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I looked through these cases. I 

didn’t go back to the original case files, but 

I didn’t see much in here that would give me 

that sense that there was internal exposures 

that were exceedingly high. There certainly 

were exposures by some of these folks who flew 

through the clouds and that sort of thing. 

They’re primarily fission products that sort 

of thing, and their duration of exposure was 

pretty short. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Yeah, I think the question 

that does emerge is what are the internal 

exposure criteria because the records aren’t 

there. And they were clearly involved in 

unusual situations of the types that we’ve 

identified. And since we don’t have a way to 

characterize internal exposure potential 

according to SEC definition, and by the nature 

of the work they were involved in incidents 

that had significant internal -- at least some 

of them were involved in incidents that had 

significant internal exposure potential --

that factor a question of what are the 

criteria for --

DR. MELIUS: And if you remember from our 
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other meeting was that when we looked at 

criticality -- I forget the exact wording --

it was not a very informative criteria. And 

so, I mean, we’re going, how do we struggle 

with coming up with a criteria. I mean that’s 

what it comes down to. Remember from the 

other meeting we talked a little bit, well, 

maybe it’s on the endangerment side, the 

criteria, but that doesn’t, we don’t have a 

very --

DR. NETON: You can’t get there --

DR. MELIUS: -- there’s not enough criteria 

on the endangerment side either. 

DR. MAURO: I remember there are two 

strategies when you encounter a problem like 

that. One is you try to front-end it and say, 

well, what criteria would you use? And we’ve 

made a run at that, and it caused a certain 

degree of frustration in trying to do that. 

Then the other approach is, well, 

let’s not try to come up with a front-end 

criteria. Let’s create a compendium of 

information. What do we know? What are the 

scenarios? What are the kind of exposures 

people might have gotten? And I think that, 
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and then you maybe iterate back and forth. 

So in effect this report is like 

making a run at the compendium idea. This is 

a good way to start. But, of course, now we 

know that the compendium approach served us to 

a limited extent because really we only know 

something about the external, and we’re 

struggling with, well, how do we get a handle 

on internal. 

Now we did discuss at one time a 

strategy which may be worth discussing again 

in terms of the compendium strategy. That is, 

internal exposures, though we all recognize 

it, the NIOSH’s position is you really can’t 

do it, and that’s why we have the SEC. But at 

the same time, internal exposures have been 

developed using methods that perhaps are not 

entirely acceptable to -- bear with me for a 

minute -- to NIOSH but have been used by DTRA 

for military personnel. So bear with me for a 

minute. I’m putting this on the table to keep 

the pot stirring. 

In theory one could say, okay, what 

type of internal exposures have been 

reconstructed under the DTRA program for 
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people who were involved in these kinds of 

programs. Granted that these are military 

people as opposed to civilians, but what it 

does it says, okay, we recognize there are 

certain limitations to the DTRA strategy for 

doing internal exposures. And we all 

understand what they are. 

But nevertheless, could they serve us 

in a different capacity in terms of saying 

starting to put, create some sensibility of 

the magnitude of the exposures that we’re 

talking about? Not that we represent them as 

reliable or accurate, but at least it’s one 

handle to say, okay, here’s what DTRA is 

reporting to be the kinds of exposures people 

may have experienced internally that were 

involved in these different categories of 

activities. 

I only put this on the table because 

we’re looking for a handle, and I don’t think 

we, right now I don’t see a handle. 

DR. NETON: I think that’s an interesting 

perspective, but I think where you’re going to 

end up is you’ll end up with some doses, and 

then what do you do with them? Now, well, 
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let’s say you come up with a compendium of 

doses for people, and they are in the ten, 20, 

50 rem, I don’t know what they are. I’m 

guessing, probably not that high, but let’s 

say they were. What did that mean? 

The way the SEC is structured you have 

no way of bouncing those against IREP. You 

can’t really go to IREP because you don’t know 

what the upper limit dose is to do the litmus 

test, and that’s frankly why the rule is 

written the way it is because you can’t do 

that. I mean, if you could do that, then you 

can reconstruct the dose. 

DR. MAURO: In other words the fact that, 

let’s say we walk away with a sense that, hmm, 

let’s talk about doses, ever get about ten, 

dose, dose commitment, whatever you want to 

use. And I know that when we looked into the 

criticality question, we know there was a 

range of numbers. 

They did, it seemed that there was a 

general sense, if I recall, that when you’re 

getting above ten and moving into 100, we’re 

starting to get into the range that people 

said now you’re talking about numbers that all 
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would generally agree starting to move into 

the realm where people are thinking in terms 

of a criticality if I remember that’s where --

I know five rem came up because that’s when 

you start to see blood changes. Twenty-five 

rem came up as a number you see blood changes. 

Certainly, a hundred rem came up, and then you 

start to see --

DR. NETON: Deterministic effects. 

DR. MAURO: -- we’re talking deterministic 

effects. So I’m not saying that we found the 

Holy Grail by any means, but I’m saying that 

there was certainly a general consensus that 

when you’re moving above ten and moving to a 

hundred, that’s the world where -- now whether 

or not, and another issue that came up, 

whether or not it’s external that we’re really 

talking about delivered acutely or dose 

commitment delivered over 50 years, I believe 

we still have not engaged that issue. 

DR. NETON: Well, see, that’s a separate 

issue, and that kind of gets into, I looked at 

Hans’ analysis. I didn’t want to jump into 

that, but I think internal is going to be the 

sticky wicket here. And in my opinion 
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internal doses are not, to a specific organ 

are not comparable to an external whole body 

acute radiation exposure. 

It’s well established that different 

organs have different radio-sensitivities. 

So, for example, if one calculates a 200 rem 

dose to bone delivered over 50 years, that 

sounds like a very high dose equivalent to a 

criticality. If one would apply the current 

ICRP weighting factor for bone surfaces of 

0.01, you have the equivalent whole body dose 

as a direct exposure of two rem. All of a 

sudden that brings it down into this range 

which is not even exceeding the regulatory 

guidelines for exposures today. 

So you can’t make these very large 

calculations, say, see, it’s 200 rem to bone. 

It’s 60 rem to lung. It’s not comparable to 

an external whole body acute shot of gamma 

radiation. So we’ve got to be careful. 

That’s all I’m saying. 

DR. MAURO: I agree. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Part of the issues that came 

out here is a lot of the information that 

there were incidents is based on the 
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interviews alone. There are no incident 

records. It’s what the workers said happened 

when we look at 3.1.2 for example. The 

internal dose, we can agree, is quite low and 

not part of the criteria so we have a very 

easy case. 

And so the focus would be exclusively 

on -- this is on page nine and ten of the 

report. There are no investigation reports, 

and the claimant said he was exposed to 

radioactive iodine. Monitors went off in a 

certain area, and he was told to evacuate. 

And he said that he had enough contamination 

to be told to get off his clothes at a certain 

point, and that he was burned out a few times, 

but that doesn’t appear to be related to 

external dose because his external doses --

DR. NETON: Well, burned out --

DR. MAKHIJANI: -- don’t correspond to that 

definition of what would have been regarded as 

burned out. 

DR. NETON: Very rarely would they be 

restricted from an internal exposure for 

iodine or something like that. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Right, so all I’m saying is 
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I’m just giving you information of what is not 

an atypical compilation in this list. 

Generally, there are no investigation reports. 

A lot of the information goes to internal 

exposure type of situations, heavily 

contaminated clothes, being subjected to 

fallout, contaminated with radioactive iodine. 

And the question arises how did he know that 

it was radioactive iodine. I don’t know that. 

Or you can take the next claimant, 

3.1.3, where the external doses is somewhat 

higher. One year --

DR. ZIEMER: Which one is this, Arjun? 

DR. MAKHIJANI: 3.1.3, Dr. Ziemer. The next 

one down. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: One year external dose are 

missing. Again there are no investigation 

reports that we identified. Remembers giving 

urine and blood specimens and received a high 

dose from balloon shot. His clothes and truck 

were confiscated. Had to take several 

showers. 

I’m not arguing the case for inclusion 

or exclusion. I’m just telling you what’s in 
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the record, that what we have typically in 

these cases in the record is no investigation 

report and a description by a claimant of what 

they went through which we’ve then identified 

as belonging in one of the criteria that we 

set. 

DR. NETON: Hand selected out of 600 cases. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Right. 

DR. NETON: But these are the ones that we 

could find. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: That’s right. Only the ones 

that we could find. We all agree what we have 

here. 

DR. ZIEMER: This is Ziemer if I could add a 

comment. Sometimes the terminology -- and I 

don’t know how common it is, but certainly at 

Oak Ridge if someone exceeded the 300 millirem 

for the week, which was a, you know, in the 15 

rem per year -- they called it Roentgens in 

those days -- per year people would say they 

were burned out at 300 millirem. That really 

meant that they were at their limit. And that 

was really an administrative limit. The term 

burned out, which a worker might hear and be 

very alarmed, was simply an administrative 
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limit, which from sort of a biological point 

of view, is fairly low. 

The other point I would make is 

confiscating of clothes typically occurred 

when things were contaminated at even a couple 

millirem per hour level or even less. I mean, 

you didn’t let people take their clothing 

home. So the fact that clothes were 

confiscated doesn’t necessarily imply 

extremely high dose rates as far as exposing 

the person. 

You know, from a contamination point 

of view, usually you’re talking about counts 

per minute that you just don’t want people 

taking that home. And obviously to a worker 

that’s very alarming, but from a biological 

point of view it could be very low. So all 

I’m pointing out is that we have to be 

cautious in assuming that because clothes were 

confiscated that there was a really sort of a 

catastrophic level of something. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: I was just reading from 

what’s there. 

DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, I agree. I just wanted 

to point that out as a sort of a --
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DR. MAKHIJANI: It could be low or high. 

DR. ZIEMER: -- caution when you interpret 

those things. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: And the problem is that we 

don’t know. 

DR. ZIEMER: I agree. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: And that is a typical 

situation here. And in the case of 3.1.2 

where he said he was burned out a few times, 

in fact, his annual dose of record does not 

exceed 300 milligram in any of the years 

recorded. So let alone weekly exposure, the 

annual dose didn’t add up to that, but he did 

say he was told he was burned out. 

And in the next claimant he doesn’t 

claim that, but it could have been --

DR. ZIEMER: Sort of makes you wonder if the 

external was even accurate then I suppose. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes. 

DR. NETON: I think John had a good 

suggestion on the potential relevance of the 

DTRA approach to bounding things anyways 

because if you can, under some worst-case 

scenarios come up with some pretty small 

internal doses, then maybe the job that we 
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find on a site-specific basis is not. I think 

we would all probably agree if these internal 

doses were potentially less than ten rem or 

something of that magnitude, then you could at 

least say for one case, site case, site that 

it’s --

DR. MAURO: It’s out there for the, just 

pick them right off the database. 

DR. NETON: The DTRA database. Given all 

the uncertainties and everything, still, you 

would have somewhat of a sense that the 

internal exposures don’t reach some level of 

magnitude. 

DR. MAURO: Along those lines let’s say, 

we’ll try to grab that thread. 

DR. ROESSLER: Before we follow that thread, 

as I recall, the DTRA approach was to use the 

external measured doses and estimate some 

internal exposures. Could you just summarize 

very briefly how that’s done? 

DR. MAURO: Well, it was complicated. No, I 

can give you conceptually though. In some 

cases it was fairly straightforward. That is, 

if you know what’s on the ground, you know the 

time after the test, and you actually have an 
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external reading in MR per hour, there’s ways 

to back out from that what’s on the ground. 

DR. ROESSLER: So this is rather situationspecific. That’s really all I needed to know. 

DR. MAURO: It’s situation-specific. Now, a 

simpler situation is someone goes in after the 

shot. You know at a certain time period after 

a shot. I guess this is one of your 

scenarios. And you do know from survey 

readings what the MR per hour is at that 

location at that time after the shot. On that 

basis there are ways to back out, called the 

Hicks’ Tables, what’s on the ground in 

Becquerels per meter squared for 126 

radionuclides. 

Then they apply a resuspension factor, 

and they have a range. They have the very 

high end ones depending on the activities, and 

low end ones depending on what they were 

doing. And they come up with a way to 

approximate what might have been the airborne 

dust loading that this person may have 

experienced for the time period it was there. 

That’s the simplest. 

We can go up to much more complex ones 
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than that. So all I’m saying is that, and 

there are lots of limitations with that for 

the very reasons you expressed concern. But 

it’s a way to say, you know, we wouldn’t have 

to do those calculations. We may want to 

understand it, but they’re out there. Here 

are the results. 

Now the degree to which we believe 

those records of reconstructed doses have 

relevance here, you know, we’d have to make 

that judgment. I’m not saying this is what 

we, but it’s a handle. I’m always looking for 

a handle. But right now what I’m seeing is 

that from this report that we issued as a 

compendium where we were hoping that it would 

help to inform us of what magnitude internal 

exposures, it’s not informing us of that. I 

mean, that’s the reality of it. We do know --

DR. NETON: If these occurred or --

DR. MAURO: -- they’ve occurred --

DR. NETON: -- incidents --

DR. MAURO: It’s hard to say what the 

magnitude of, you know, you really can’t do 

much with it. 

DR. ZIEMER: Well, John, were some of those 
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also based on an infinite cloud where if you 

know the external dose rate in the infinite 

cloud, you also know the concentration of 

materials that are breathed during that 

period? 

DR. MAURO: That’s part of it, too, yeah. 

So there are many layers of how you come at 

the internal exposure. They even have ones 

related to flying through clouds. They have 

ones where individuals were doing certain 

activities, for example, cleaning off these 

planes that landed, and you had to clean them 

off because they were contaminated. 

I mean, there are many, many, many 

scenarios that the military personnel 

experienced. The degree to which that 

experience has applicability to civilians is 

certainly another question. But if we could 

put that in the parking lot for one second. 

To go back to the concern you raised, 

a very legitimate concern. Even if we get 

some numbers what are we going to do with 

them? In a funny sort of way, if we go to the 

Ames report, there’s the table on page ten, 

there’s Table 1. Now I only draw your 
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attention to that because here we have a case 

where we do have some estimates of what the 

dose commitment to various organs might have 

been from the scenarios that Hans modeled. 

And he did the best he could to 

reconstruct it. The whole story is told 

there. But in the end for a very serious 

scenario, we’re talking about these explosions 

of thorium and uranium where the dust loading 

in theory could have been pretty high --

DR. NETON: I’m not sure I buy it. We can 

talk about the technical aspect of --

DR. MAURO: Yeah, that’s up there, 

absolutely. But for some short period of time 

there are circumstances where a few grams per 

cubic meter occur, but you can’t stay there 

very long. 

DR. NETON: Not for five minutes. 

DR. MAURO: I’m not, disagree with you. 

DR. NETON: Well, let’s say these numbers 

are correct. 

DR. MAURO: That’s where I’m headed. 

DR. NETON: I’m not saying they are, but 

let’s --

DR. MAURO: Let’s say I’m headed. Right now 
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you look at Table 1, and just for the moment 

let’s postulate that it was possible that an 

individual experienced the bone surface dose 

of 12.7 rem dose commitment over one year. 

I’m looking at Table 1 right now as being, 

okay, because this person was involved in a 

thorium blowout, we’re saying here it’s not 

out of the question that he could have 

experienced an internal dose commitment from 

inhaling thorium as high as 12.7 rem in the 

one year period following that acute exposure. 

Now here’s the tough question. What about it? 

DR. NETON: Again, I brought this up. This 

is an equivalent dose to bone surfaces. It 

cannot be directly compared to an acute whole 

body exposure to gamma radiation such as in a 

criticality because these organs, you have 

different risk factors depending on which 

organs are irradiated. 

And as you well know, the internal 

dosimetry models allow for effective dose 

equivalent calculations. Then you can compare 

an internal dose to an external dose as far as 

its risk. I’m not saying relative risk. I 

don’t want to get into risk numbers. 
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The weighting factor for bone 

regulatorily today is 0.03. The current ICRP 

model is 0.01. So all of a sudden that dose 

becomes 1.2 or three or something like that. 

Or not --

DR. MAURO: Is it possible that that 

exposure could have resulted in, let’s say 

this exposure was not delivered over a short 

period of time or was delivered over 250 days 

instead. Is it possible if you were to run 

IREP, you would come up with a positive 

compensation? 

DR. NETON: For that one year? 

DR. MAURO: In other words if a person 

experienced 12.7 rem over a 250 day period --

DR. NETON: No, probably not, and that’s in 

a one year period. But I think we should 

avoid trying to do IREP runs because the whole 

point is you can’t estimate the upper limit, 

and now you’re bracketing upper limits using 

risk models. The reason that the 250 day was 

there and then we allowed for the criticality 

is because in a criticality incident, at least 

the thinking at the time -- and Ted’s not on 

the phone but he can correct me later if I’m 
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wrong -- was that that, in our mind at that 

time, be an unambiguous event that would 

unambiguously cause health endangerment if you 

got into sort of deterministic effects from 

that type of exposure. And that’s what we had 

in mind. 

Otherwise, in between you have these 

gradations that you can just never come to 

some definitive conclusion one way or the 

other. There are just too many gray areas 

here. Again, you get into this I want to run 

IREP. Well, could bone surfaces of 12.7 rem 

cause, you know, a PC of greater than 50 

percent? 

DR. MELIUS: I think what John’s trying to 

get at is is there some way that we can use 

some of these estimates in a way to decide is 

it appropriate to consider. I mean, to me the 

DTRA data would be more if it’s all very low, 

but then it would tell us, you know, let’s not 

pursue now. Again, the devil’s in the 

details. 

DR. NETON: The problem you run into is 

there are an infinite number of combinations 

that one can run in IREP. You could never 
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cover all of them. So let’s take a scenario 

where you have the exact latency period that’s 

required, the exact age, early age at onset. 

I mean, you could postulate in some instance 

that, yes, maybe this could have endangered 

just one example scenario’s health because you 

can get an IREP number over 90, over 50 

percent. 

I don’t know if you could run all 

those scenarios, if it would be possible to do 

that. It wouldn’t be defensible. Someone 

could always come up with another scenario. 

You couldn’t run them all. All the central 

organs, I mean, leukemia comes to mind for 

bone doses. I don’t know what the bone marrow 

dose would be here, but that would be relevant 

for leukemia. That happens to be one of the 

lowest cancers, the lowest dose rate cancer 

here. 

DR. MAURO: I hear the challenges. What I 

do is I put myself, if I were a worker at 

Ames. I was involved in the explosion and 

ten, 20 years later I do develop whether it’s 

a bone cancer or a lung cancer. And I would 

say right now, me, as a health physicist, what 
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I know I say is it realistic to think that 

it’s possible that the exposure could have 

caused that cancer. 

And I would sit down, and I do dose 

reconstruction for myself. And I’d try to 

answer the question is this a plausible 

scenario. And right now I haven’t done the 

calculation. In other words I think that the 

fact that a person was there for less than 250 

days, it’s troubling to me that if he was 

there for a longer period of time and got the 

same dose that we just calculated right here, 

he might have been compensated. But because 

he was there for less, he’s not. 

DR. NETON: Well, I don’t think this 

particular number, the 12.7 number, would get 

the person compensated. 

DR. MAURO: Okay, well, that’s important to 

know. Because I know the assumptions Hans 

made here. What he did is he made some --

DR. NETON: Three and a half grams of 

uranium and thorium per cubic meter, by our 

Bethlehem Steel analysis is not appropriate. 

DR. MAURO: Remember the explosion scenario 

he went through. 
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DR. NETON: The explosion --

DR. MAURO: He went back to the numbers from 

Fernald. 

 DR. MELIUS: Well, let’s do Ames as a 

separate report. 

DR. NETON: No, what I’m saying is we did an 

entire analysis at Bethlehem Steel, and by Wes 

Van Pelt’s analysis, 300 milligrams per cubic 

meter is as high as you could get a 

sustainable cloud for a short duration, and 

that’s five or ten minutes. And I don’t think 

you could see through 300 grams per cubic --

you wouldn’t see. My opinion is that they 

would allow at least the stuff to settle 

before they run them back in there. 

DR. MAURO: In effect there would be an 

explosion --

DR. NETON: If there would be an explosion, 

and say, okay --

DR. MAURO: And you’re going to have that --

DR. NETON: -- for the record. 

DR. MAURO: -- for some short period of 

time, and then it’s going to settle in this 

mess. 

DR. NETON: But they’re not going to rush 
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right in when it’s three and a half grams per 

cubic meter if they can’t even see their nose 

or hand in front of their face. 

DR. MAURO: So you’re basically taking issue 

with it being more than five minutes. Maybe 

it was 30 seconds. 

DR. NETON: No, I think that these exposures 

are probably ten times too high. I think they 

wouldn’t be working in scenarios, maybe three, 

500 milligrams per cubic meter, maybe, for 

five minutes. And so you’re 10 times too high 

for half of the dose. I think it may be 

different equipment, but it doesn’t happen 

this way. 

DR. MAURO: So what we’re saying around the 

table right now is that there may be a way for 

us to agree on a scenario, dust loading, 

associated with transients such as in 

explosions, that we could all agree, yeah, 

that seems to be a reasonable number. 

DR. NETON: I mean, you’ve done a great job 

here of suggesting that we can do dose 

reconstructions, right? I mean, this is a 

bounding dose reconstruction that you’ve got. 

And I would suggest that if a person came into 
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our shop with a less than 250-day exposure and 

said, hey, I’ve been involved with ^, we’d 

probably reconstruct it. If there was 

convincing evidence --

DR. MAURO: It’s a paradox. 

DR. NETON: I mean, if a guy comes in and 

says I was exposed to an incident, we say 

you’re right. We can’t reconstruct chronic 

doses. We’ve already admitted that, but 

you’re right. There is this unique situation. 

You were there for ten days, and we have the 

data. Hans has done an excellent job 

demonstrating that you can put some kind of 

upper bound on this person’s dose which is the 

criteria for SEC. 

DR. MAURO: Does that mean by definition 

unless there’s a criticality accident, these 

people can’t be compensated for that if --

DR. NETON: No, I think in the internal 

world it’s going to be pretty hard to show 

that you can’t do something with it. 

MR. ELLIOTT: Well, we bound it. We have 

the data from Y-12. We could bound that dose. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Hans has bounded the dose. 

Hans has done a hypothetical calculation --
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DR. NETON: That’s what I’m saying. It 

could be bounded given these -- I mean, it’s 

possible. It’s possible to reconstruct a dose 

from an incident like that. 

DR. MAURO: Let me counter that. What Hans 

said, listen, we don’t know how often these 

occurred so he picked one of them per month. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: He found a lot. 

DR. MAURO: And then he said, okay, and on 

that basis we’re going to assume a certain 

percentage of them becomes air -- , but in 

other words it’s very, very hypothetical. 

DR. NETON: The problem with that analysis 

is that it’s not consistent with the 

urinalysis data that was collected by the ^. 

I mean, we’ve got data on a bunch of workers, 

and if this one-a-month scenario did occur --

DR. MAURO: Some of the would have the --

DR. NETON: -- the intakes are massive. I 

mean, you’re talking -- I don’t know what it 

was, gram quantities, 12 grams per year or 

something like that, huge amounts. It’s not 

consistent with what you would observe in the 

urine samples. That’s a different issue. I 

think we need to decide not whether this 
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happened at Ames, but if you had data like 

this, what does it mean. And again I’m 

suggesting that internal exposures to a 

specific organ are not comparable to an 

external whole body dose. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: How about lung dose? 

DR. NETON: A lung dose weighting factor is 

0.12. So it’s bigger, but the doses are 

small, say, 69 rem to the lung over 30 years 

in this particular scenario. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: It’s irrelevant in this 

concept. I mean I --

DR. NETON: Because that was, well, as I 

mentioned, the intent of having a criticality 

incident as sort of the poster child for this 

was that it would be unambiguous in almost 

anyone’s mind that health was endangered 

because there would be more than likely 

deterministic effects that would show up. So 

the dose exceeds some thresholds. 

In an acute shot you’ve got 

deterministic effects. We don’t know how high 

that criticality could have occurred, but you 

start to see deterministic effects. So it’s 

sort of an unambiguous end point, a litmus 
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test, if you will. When you get into internal 

doses, these doses are delivered over a 30-to50 year period. It’s an individual organ not 

an external whole body, so the risk of 

developing a health endangered situation is 

much lower if you only irradiate only one or 

two organs versus the entire body. 

And that’s the whole fundamental basis 

of the ICRP-30 internal dose limitation 

system. If an individual organ when it’s 

irradiated chronically over 50 years has a 

much different level of health endangerment 

than an acute shot of gamma to every organ in 

the body. 

DR. BEHLING: Can I interrupt for a second 

here since we’re already talking about doses 

that I expressed in my report? And I do want 

to make a comment. I was going to wait until 

we came to the Ames report, but since we are 

discussing I’d like to make some comments 

here. 

DR. MELIUS: Okay, Hans. You’re on, Hans. 

DR. BEHLING: Jim Neton’s trying to 

obviously establish parity. And no one is 

saying that a criticality accident that 
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delivers an instantaneous dose, external, that 

more or less uniformly irradiates all tissues 

is the same as an internal dose that 

selectively targets specific tissues. 

On the other hand the common 

denominator in an instantaneous exposure from 

a criticality accident is that ultimately you 

would end up having a potential risk of a 

cancer. And on the basis of dose to that 

tissue, you would say the criticality accident 

would have contributed a 50 percent or greater 

probability of causation. 

In my case where I did develop certain 

estimates of exposure dose from thorium or 

uranium blowouts, I calculated a dose that was 

contributed in the first five minutes as 

opposed to the next 30 days from residual 

activity -- and you can look at the numbers --

and for a five-year period of time-integrated 

exposure to select tissues -- and I selected 

bone surface and lung -- and you end up with 

significant doses to those tissues. 

Now if a person, a claimant, were to 

come to you and say I was exposed for five 

minutes during a blowout, and my lung dose 
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was, let’s say, 60 rem. And you do a POC 

calculation, it turns out to be greater than 

50 percent. What are you going to tell him? 

That you don’t qualify? I mean, you can now 

establish that in five minutes of exposure 

time to the lung that particular dose 

contributed to a probability causation that is 

compensable. 

And that is the area of parity. I 

don’t care. I don’t want to necessarily 

assign similarity or parity between a 

criticality accident and an internal exposure 

during which the dose is a long-term issue. 

But what I want to show is parity between the 

end point when a cancer does occur to either a 

lung from an internal exposure or to an 

external criticality accident that dose was, 

in fact, a contributing factor greater than 50 

percent, and thereby, establishes 

compensability. That’s the whole issue of 

concern here. 

DR. NETON: But I think you’re missing the 

point in the regulation that talks about 

examples of what would constitute a class, 

what would constitute granting a class of less 
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than 250 days, and the criticality example is 

the one that’s out there. 

DR. BEHLING: Well, it’s an example, but it 

shouldn’t be the only one. And I don’t think 

the regulations -- and I’m going to be 

stepping on somebody’s toe here by 

interpreting regulations, but I will express 

my opinion on that issue. I don’t believe 

that that example is necessarily one that says 

anything else other than a criticality 

accident will not be considered. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: I’ll agree. I mean, it 

doesn’t say that, the regulation itself 

doesn’t say that exposure has to be acute. It 

says exceptionally high level --

DR. NETON: We agree with that. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: -- such as nuclear 

criticality accidents or other events 

involving similarly high levels of exposure. 

And if the whole program is about cancer risk 

to organs, and that’s how the whole program 

was constructed. It’s not constructed on the 

regulatory idea that you’ve got to limit total 

dose to five rem by making organ equivalents. 

It’s a different scheme of thinking. 
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DR. NETON: Well, not necessarily, Arjun. 

But I still think you need to look at the, at 

what you’ve done. You’ve done a calculation 

for an incident here which I think is way too 

high to begin with. But let’s assume that 

these numbers are valid for some scenario --

DR. BEHLING: Can we postpone that 

discussion until we get to the Ames issue? I 

just really intervened here in behalf of this 

particular issue that tries to establish 

parity between a criticality accident and 

internal exposure. But I think let’s try to 

postpone the discussion for the Ames issue 

until we get past the NTS issue. 

DR. NETON: Okay, that’s fine. But what 

you’re saying though is these high doses, 

you’ve done a calculation that gives you a 

high dose, and now you’re suggesting that we 

need to do an IREP run to say if it’s greater 

than 50 percent or not to establish a class 

which by definition it says we can do the dose 

reconstruction. 

DR. BEHLING: Well, you can or you can’t 

because we don’t really have full 

documentation for these events. And as I 
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said, I think we’re stepping, we’re going 

beyond the issue here because I think that’ll 

be part of my presentation when the Ames issue 

becomes the topic. Right now I believe we’re 

still talking NTS. So if we could, I would 

prefer to postponing this discussion. 

DR. MAURO: Maybe we could craft the 

question in a different way. What we’re 

really, to go back to where we began with NTS 

was really do we believe, sitting around the 

table, from looking at the compendium of 

information that is before us that there could 

have been some scenarios that took place at 

NTS where, and we’ve identified four or five 

different scenarios where we felt as health 

physicists that those scenarios could have 

been associated with relatively high internal 

exposures. 

And then we ask ourselves the 

question, well, how do we get a handle on what 

the scale of exposure that was. Was that a 

rem? Was that ten rem? Was that a hundred 

rem? And unfortunately, the answer is we 

don’t know from what we’ve done so far. And I 

guess the question then becomes let’s say we 
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were able to get a handle on that. 

The fact that we could somehow get a 

handle on the order of magnitude, a 

sensibility -- let’s call it a sensibility --

on the scale of the exposures to various 

organs that could have occurred from internal 

exposure for NTS, does that mean by definition 

that we can reconstruct the doses? I would 

argue no. I would say that all we could do 

with that is to get a sense of the scale of 

exposures. 

And then I would say once we 

understand this plausible scale that we would 

all agree to it. Yeah, this is a plausible 

range that some individuals might have 

experienced, realistic scenarios, and given 

that we agree that that was the scale of the 

exposure, do we feel -- again collectively, 

the Board feels -- that that type of exposure 

is of such a, a potential exposure might have 

occurred from those scenarios, is of such a 

magnitude that it would only be fair to 

compensate those people even though that 

exposure may have only occurred under a one 

day --
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DR. NETON: How do you make that 

determination? 

DR. MAURO: Well, that’s where we’re trying 

to get to. 

DR. MELIUS: But when you said we -- first 

meeting or we decided we couldn’t come up with 

criteria. You know, we started thinking this 

sort of hypothetically. So let’s look at some 

examples. And I think what John’s proposing 

is let’s, you know, here’s another way of 

estimating these exposures, what we’re going 

to do. Call that and would it be useful to do 

that? To me it would be useful to do. 

DR. NETON: I still say you need to come up 

with a dose. What you’re saying is you want 

to come up with a dose at which health was 

endangered, and I don’t know that you can do 

that. 

DR. MAURO: Let’s say right now that I -- a 

hypothetical -- let’s say I come up with a 

hypothetical that says, you know, I could 

postulate a scenario where the dose to some 

organ is on the order of 20, 30 rem, a dose 

commitment, 50-year dose commitment, on that 

order, from plausible scenarios that we went 
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over. That is a plausible scenario. 

At that point from the work we did on 

criticality, we’re starting to fall in the 

range that from looking at the experience with 

criticality, if you remember, there was a 

distribution that went to a fraction of a rem 

to hundreds of rem. But there was also a 

general sensibility that once you start to 

move above ten rem and moving to a hundred 

rem, we’re getting into the realm where I 

think there’s general consensus, yeah, that’s 

the scale of exposures that one would start 

thinking about as being within the realm of 

what a criticality would be notwithstanding 

whether it’s internal or external. That’s 

another debate. 

But those kinds of doses, so I’m 

saying that we did make some progress on 

coming up with a general sense of where we are 

when things start to get serious. So I think 

with regard to criteria, I think there’s been 

a general sense. I get that feeling. 

DR. ZIEMER: John, when you’re using those 

numbers for criticality, you’re also talking 

about acute exposure. A 25 rem, you know, the 
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blood changes or something like that, the 

deterministic effects, very hard to compare 

that with a 25 rem exposure or committed dose 

to internal for any organ. 

DR. MAURO: I agree. I agree. 

DR. ZIEMER: So I’m not sure how you make 

that comparison. Even if we agree on a number 

like what’s a biologically effective number 

that we could use. If you’re comparing acute 

doses associated with criticalities, it is 

very difficult. 

DR. MAURO: Let me say what I thought I just 

had. If a person’s exposed acutely to 

external radiation to, let’s say, ten rem from 

a criticality event, or let’s say 50 rem, to a 

criticality event, and the exposure is whole 

body. But the cancer that you’re about to 

compensate him for is the cancer to his liver. 

So in effect you’re reconstructing the dose to 

the liver and then predicting the probability 

of causation. How does that change anything? 

DR. NETON: One is an a priori. One is an a 

posteriori calculation. 

DR. MAURO: Given that the cancer existed. 

DR. NETON: What the chance, even if the 
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cancer exists, what’s his chance versus what 

the chance the cancer would develop given this 

exposure. 

DR. MAURO: Let’s say we have a person that 

has the liver cancer, and he applies, he 

claims that my liver cancer’s due to the 

exposure I experienced while working at this 

facility. Now we see this very same person. 

Now in one scenario that person was exposed 

chronically to external uniform exposure for 

ten years, and you do his dose reconstruction. 

Then I say, but wait a minute, that’s 

from external exposure but is the dose 

delivered to the liver over that time period? 

And you do the calculation and you compensate. 

I’m just using that hypothetical. 

Now the very same person but his 

scenario’s different. His dose to the liver 

that was delivered to him over that same time 

period was not from a chronic uniform whole 

body exposure. It was from a one shot intake 

that deposited a certain amount of 

radioactivity in his liver that delivered a 

dose to the liver internally from that 

radionuclide over a ten year period. To me --
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DR. NETON: The risk is going to be 

different. 

DR. MAURO: Oh, I agree the risk will be 

different, but --

DR. NETON: The risk is proportional to 

where it occurred --

DR. MAURO: Right, where --

DR. NETON: -- period and the age and 

everything. 

DR. MAURO: And now it may turn out that 

that, the way in which the dose was delivered 

in the case of the acute exposure given the 

latency may actually be worse for the acute 

short term because of the latency. 

DR. NETON: The longer the latency the 

better. 

DR. MAURO: No, no, remember, there’s a 

period where there’s dead time. In other 

words here’s the diagnosis. There’s a certain 

number of years before that where that dose 

doesn’t contribute to that. 

DR. NETON: So for an acute exposure you get 

the maximum effect because you’ve got a ten 

year latency. 

DR. MAURO: You’ve got it. 
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DR. NETON: For the chronic exposure half of 

the dose isn’t even going to count because of 

that minimum five year window. 

DR. MAURO: You see what I’m getting at is 

that, the point I was trying to make with 

regard to what Paul has just said was that 

we’re still dealing with ultimately the dose 

to an organ. So it’s --

DR. NETON: But the instantaneous delivery 

of the dose is going to be your maximum risk 

because let’s say the cancer occurred ten 

years, the maximum risk is conferred in ten 

years. 

DR. MAURO: I agree with that. 

DR. NETON: If you’ve got a dose, let’s say, 

uniformly delivered over ten years, almost 50 

percent of the dose is going to be assigned a 

risk of almost zero. It’s not a zero, but it 

approaches zero. It approaches zero. 

DR. MAURO: So there’s a window of time 

before the diagnosis that the --

DR. NETON: The count essentially. 

DR. MAURO: -- it’s really not going to 

contribute. So I agree with that. 

DR. BEHLING: John, can I interrupt here? I 
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mean, this is again a discussion that leads 

nowhere. And I don’t want to say that a timeintegrated dose is equal to an acute single 

dose, but what if the time-integrated dose is 

three, four times the acute dose but in the 

end based on IREP calculations, ends up with a 

same probability of causation that exceeds 50 

percent? 

DR. NETON: You’re right, Hans, but where, 

the question I’ve been raising is where do you 

draw that line? What is that dose? 

DR. BEHLING: You let IREP do that 

calculation for you. That’s what we use when 

we do IREP calculation, and it involves an 

internal exposure. I mean, that’s currently 

part of our scheme for doing dose 

reconstruction. We integrate internal 

exposure along with acute external exposure --

DR. NETON: Hans, wait. From what scenario 

though? See, you’ve got a calculation here 

where you’ve done this. But now let’s take 

another scenario where, I could tell you what 

the smallest amount of dose is going to be. 

It’s going to be a likely leukemia that 

occurred like two-to-three years after 
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exposure. You can get down into the sub-rem 

range. People have been compensated in this 

program for 750 millirem exposure for leukemia 

that occurred just at the right time. 

So now you’re in a situation where you 

say, well, gee, there’s a scenario. So then 

by definition almost everybody is in for 

presence. I would suggest that 750 millirem 

which is -- I know we’re not supposed to talk 

regulatorily though -- which is a very small 

fraction of the current regulatory limit, is 

not the appropriate metric. And you can do 

that. 

You can come up -- so you’re always 

going to be challenged. You can come up with 

these scenarios and say, yes, this is good, 

but then every other scenario, if you have to 

evaluate it on the same, through the same 

lens, is going to be challenged because you 

can always come up with a lower dose scenario 

that should, say, be based on presence. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, part of the problem I 

think is with, we have to decide, the Board 

has to decide in considering this is whether 

health endangerment has something to do with 
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cancer risk. 

DR. BEHLING: Can I also add, give you one 

more tidbit to think about, and let’s just get 

away from the notion of criticality versus 

internal exposure that has a chronic 

integrated dose associated with it. Let me go 

give you one example. Let’s assume, let’s go 

back, and I really didn’t want to discuss it, 

but we’re on this discussion and so let me 

give you an example to think about. 

You have two people at Ames working 

there. One person who ends up being exposed 

to a blowout for which we can document the 

exposure, and he worked there for 251 days. 

And on the basis of that one single blowout 

exposure we calculated dose to his lung or the 

bone that ultimately translates to a dose that 

is compensable. 

The second person was there for one 

day, same dose, same exposure, but he was 

there for one day only. Are you going to tell 

that guy who was there during the blowout for 

one day that he has no business filing a 

claim, and the other guy does get compensated 

because he happens to spend 250 additional 
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days with no additional exposure? Is that 

what we’re talking about? 

DR. NETON: You acknowledge that we can’t 

estimate the dose for the guy that worked 

there 251 days. That was the whole point of 

the SEC. 

DR. BEHLING: Well, that’s exactly right, 

but we also realize that a single exposure can 

translate to a dose that would otherwise be 

compensable had we monitored these 

individuals. And the truth is at Ames we know 

blowouts occurred routinely, and we also know 

that they were not documented, and there was 

no monitoring data. 

And that’s the whole concept here for 

discussing these doses. They’re hypothetical, 

but they are obviously in a situation where we 

have no documentation when they occurred and 

who was there. And it’s clear that a single 

exposure to one of these events would, over a 

very short period of time of exposure, the 

first five minutes, translate to a dose that 

if that particular tissue was the cancer of 

concern, the bone or the lung, would translate 

into compensable dose and a claim. 
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DR. NETON: If you believe you can get 3.5 

grams of uranium and thorium in the air. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Apart from that. 

DR. NETON: Well, that’s what you’re saying, 

that these doses are not --

DR. MELIUS: Let’s go back because we’re 

going around in this, and I don’t think we’re 

moving forward here at all. And I think we’ve 

already decided, my premise is we’ve already 

decided that we’re not going to be able to 

just develop a criteria and then go back. We 

need to work through some examples and 

determine, in some actual situations to 

determine if this is something, you know, 

that’s appropriate to address in some way and 

then how to do that. 

And then admittedly we then have to 

come up with some criteria at some point. But 

I think we decided last time that those 

criteria would be easy to develop if we had 

particular situations that we needed to 

address with this. And I’d like to go back to 

the NTS report because I think that’s where we 

need to decide how to move forward and because 

we’re going to be in Nevada in about six 
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weeks. So we’re going to be asked about this 

issue. 

And I guess I was intrigued by John’s 

suggestion of DTRA. And I realize that we’re 

also in this funny situation because we sort 

of rejected the DTRA approach as a basis for 

going forward originally with the SEC because 

it wasn’t ready to review at the time. I’m 

not even sure what the status is of their 

methodology. 

Is that correct? Is my recollection -

-

MR. ELLIOTT: It hasn’t been validated yet. 

We haven’t seen a report of validation. 

DR. NETON: I’m not sure the resuspension 

stuff is done. 

DR. MELIUS: Okay, okay, I’m just saying 

it’s another issue. But to me to move forward 

what John was suggesting would be useful in 

the sense of if it comes out low then will we 

be in a position then for some reasonable 

number of scenarios or whatever to dismiss the 

internal as a significant issue we have to 

worry about for the less than 250 days? 

DR. MAURO: The benefit of that is we’re not 
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forced to come up with criteria. Or we can 

agree this dose is relatively low, and we’re 

not saying what the criteria is. All we know 

is to say this is low. Otherwise because try 

to find a bright line. 

DR. NETON: What’s low? 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, that’s the problem I 

think. You know I think if you take, Jim, 

description at his word that people that have 

been compensated for leukemia, then I think 

the basic question, Jim, is are we discussing 

a criterion that’s related to cancer risk or 

not? Is health endangerment to be linked to 

cancer risk? Because otherwise you can 

compile a lot of examples, and you won’t be 

able to draw a conclusion from it given Jim’s 

description of what has to be compensated in 

this program. 

DR. MELIUS: I mean, I think we can make 

some judgment that it’s not near --

DR. NETON: Criticality. 

DR. MELIUS: -- criticality. It’s a lower 

level that we’re considering, and we’d have 

some more ^. Now if it turns out that it’s 

higher, then I think we then have to wrestle 
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with the issue of where’s the line, but that’s 

it. The problem is that the way we’ve 

constructed this law, the program, the 

regulations this doesn’t give us that bright 

line and it makes it difficult. And I think 

the question that we’re trying to get at is 

there are going to be situations where we’re 

going to have to go forward and address that 

line in some way and come up with a criteria. 

And so far I think for the most part we’re 

saying no, but let’s satisfy ourselves to 

that. To me on Nevada Test Site there’s a 

sort of two issues. One, is there any 

significant internal dose in these situations? 

And to me the DTRA model would provide us with 

some information that would be useful. I 

think the second issue that we really haven’t 

discussed here, maybe we have in the past, is 

are we confident that the external doses for 

these people can be reconstructed. And I 

think, Jim, you’ve made some statements that -

- in fact, I don’t have any basis for doubting 

you or not doubting you about -- but I think 

that’s the second --

MR. ELLIOTT: The class was added because we 
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couldn’t do internal. 

DR. MELIUS: Right. 

DR. NETON: We made statements that we could 

reconstruct external. 

DR. MELIUS: So I guess my question to 

people, do we need to re-examine that issue at 

all for any of these cases or any scenarios. 

MR. ELLIOTT: Well, it goes to why the class 

was established. If there’s an instance where 

we say we can’t reconstruct external dose for 

the class and 250 days comes to play, then 

it’s the external dose that’s at issue. 

DR. NETON: Or we could always add 

additional classes because I think that’s what 

this effort tried to flesh out. Are there 

classes out there that should be added based 

on presence that we can identify and say, yes, 

there are these pockets of workers that, you 

know, let’s take Hans’ example at Ames. I’m 

not saying it should be done, but blowout, for 

people of all the blowouts at Ames. I mean, I 

don’t know. 

If that were to be added that would 

have to be evaluated as a separate class for 

instantaneous presence, not part of the class 
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for these chronic 250-day exposures that we 

all agree we can’t reconstruct. Now we’ve got 

another pocket of workers that we’re looking 

at, and we’re saying, well, maybe there are 

these isolated pockets. And unfortunately, I 

think those do have to be evaluated one by 

one. 

DR. MELIUS: Then the question is how do we 

evaluate them one by one? I mean, it’s as 

difficult as if there were thousands of them 

in that situation --

DR. NETON: It’s essentially another SEC 

evaluation for each site. If someone wants to 

suggest and file a petition and say I think 

blowout workers or NIOSH could self identify 

through the 8314 process. But I’m saying some 

class of workers who were involved in these 

high exposures, it would be another SEC 

evaluation, evaluation reports and be 

evaluated in that light. 

DR. MAURO: Isn’t that what we’ve been 

doing? 

DR. NETON: Well, no, not formally. I mean, 

this is what we’re trying to do is establish 

what the mechanism is --
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DR. MAURO: The science we’ve been doing 

though is going toward that question. 

DR. NETON: True, true, that’s true. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Yeah, initially we tried to 

establish a general bright line criterion, and 

the working group decided that that was not 

going to go places which is what we found out 

in these examples. I mean, I understood that 

the idea of these examples was along the lines 

that Jim was just talking about which was you 

have to establish some class of people who 

were exposed to discrete incidents. 

But when you strip everything else 

aside, what we’re talking about is a discrete 

incidence piece of the regulation, forgetting 

the high, the low, the risk. Were there 

things that you can identify as discrete 

incidents that people were exposed to? And 

then you’ll be, maybe the simplest way to 

think about it might be were there situations 

in which people were exposed to discrete 

incidents and just identify that. 

DR. NETON: Through the SEC process can you 

bound that dose, yes or no, and if you can’t, 

was health endangered? See there’s two tests 
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to be applied here then. And so now that 

you’ve identified the discrete incident 

population then the SEC evaluation would have 

to say can I do a dose reconstruction for 

these incidents, yes or no. Can I bound this? 

And if you can’t, then you end up at this test 

of, well, was it a degree of exceptionally 

high exposure. That seems to me the way to 

process this. 

DR. MAURO: I think we’re going that road, 

but it’s been difficult. On NTS we did 

identify what we believe to be conceptually 

discrete incidents. These early entry people 

are a perfect example. But then we run into 

this brick wall. What kind of exposures? Can 

we reconstruct it? And the answer is, well, 

not really. 

We really are not in a position to be 

able to do a good job in reconstructing those 

people that might have been exposed to the 

early entry internal exposure. But then we 

have to ask ourselves, well, okay, so can we 

say something about whether or not health was 

endangered. 

And we’re agreed that, well, we don’t 
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really know. We don’t know the magnitude of 

the exposures. And even if we did have some 

sense of the magnitude of exposure, not that 

we can reconstruct it for that person, but add 

some sense to the magnitude of the exposure by 

some handle. 

Then we’re at the dilemma, well, okay, 

now we know the magnitude that might be 

plausible. Is that compensable under these 

criteria or comparable to criticality? So I 

mean, we’ve got all these hurdles in front of 

us. 

DR. NETON: But see, unfortunately, that 

last piece, you almost have to do a dose 

reconstruction to know that. 

DR. MAURO: But see, that’s where I 

disagree. I mean, what I’m saying is I’m not 

saying we’re doing a dose reconstruction. I’m 

just saying that what are the scenarios where 

people could have been exposed for short 

periods of time to relatively high internal 

exposures. And I think the answer is perhaps, 

yeah, because we understand the helicopter 

taking off or a truck driving a couple, few 

hours after a fallout incident at Nevada Test 
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Site. Yeah, you know, we can visualize this. 

But then what we really don’t know is 

what kind of magnitude of exposure. Now for 

any individual I would argue that you really 

can’t predict a dose to any individual because 

you don’t know exactly what puff he was 

exposed to. But for that kind of scenario I 

would say that, well, we probably could start 

a place, get a sense of what that exposure 

might have been. Does that serve us well to 

have an appreciation of what that might be? 

Does that mean we could place an upper bound? 

I would say I’m not quite sure. 

I think if we can get a sense, and if 

it comes out to be ten rem, 20 rem, 30 rem to 

some organ, it’s very similar to what Hans 

did. What in effect happens here if you think 

about is Hans went ahead and did such a 

scenario. He said, yes, there were scenarios. 

We did do reconstruction, and this is what he 

came up with. 

Now we’re really discussing right now 

could we do something similar to that only at 

the Nevada Test Site by somehow taking 

advantage of DTRA work. Not that we’re 
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reconstructing the dose to an individual just 

like Hans would be the first to admit he’s not 

doing a dose to an individual. He’s just 

saying what kind of doses could have occurred. 

DR. NETON: See, I think that’s where we 

could use the DTRA stuff. I do agree with 

that. And we said we couldn’t use the DTRA 

stuff to do, an accurate dose reconstruction 

to a person with sufficient accuracy. 

DR. MAURO: I will agree. 

DR. NETON: It doesn’t mean it couldn’t be 

used to establish some -- I don’t want to say 

bounding -- some --

DR. MAURO: Sensibility. 

DR. NETON: -- order of magnitude level --

DR. MAURO: Just millirem or rem? 

DR. NETON: I think that has some merit. 

I’m still not sure where you go once you come 

to the ^. 

DR. MELIUS: I think we may be back in the 

same thing, but I don’t see any other way --

MR. ELLIOTT: Actually, I think you will be. 

What dose triggers health endangerment? 

DR. MELIUS: Well, it may be able to either 

say --
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DR. ZIEMER: Jim, could I add a comment 

here? 

DR. MELIUS: Sure, go ahead, Paul. 

DR. ZIEMER: This is Ziemer. In part I 

think we have to return to the 250 day itself. 

I think everyone would agree that it’s 

entirely possible even once you establish an 

SEC class that there could have been someone 

there 249 days, just like someone who was 

there 250 days, who in a sense could have been 

endangered. 

And if you say, okay, 249 days, that’s 

probably true. What about 248, 247? I think 

what we’re, we end up living with a somewhat 

arbitrary division line which got established 

through the original process and had some 

basis in congressional intent I would think. 

That although it appears arbitrary, it sort of 

speaks to the probability that the longer the 

person worked there, the more probable it is 

that there was health endangerment. 

And somewhere along the line someone 

had to say, well, okay, does that occur after 

a month, after a year, after five years. 

We’re living with one working year essentially 
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I think is what the 250 days is. And I think 

you can always think of a scenario where 

someone could have had a combination of 

exposures and the right cancer and so on where 

they were endangered, and it’s not going to be 

covered. 

But the probability of that occurring 

is not so high as long as you select that 

line. The 250 days is one of those lines. 

It’s just a criteria. It’s not going to take 

care of every person, but perhaps the majority 

of them. 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah, but, Paul, that’s not --

DR. ZIEMER: That’s sort of a framework that 

I’m saying that I don’t think we can ever 

think of a situation where we’re going to 

cover all of these. Any criteria we come up 

with someone can think of some event that will 

give you a condition where perhaps someone 

should have been compensated, but they won’t 

be. 

DR. MELIUS: We understand, Paul, but I 

think our focus has never been should 250 days 

be changed to --

DR. ZIEMER: Oh, no, no, I’m not suggesting 
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that at all. I’m simply stating that I don’t 

think it’s beneficial to try to think of 

particular events where someone, in fact, you 

know, they were there the one day when 

something could have occurred. It does help I 

think to inform us. You know, for example, if 

the external really is minute compared to the, 

or the internal compared to the external at 

NTS that’s helpful, but at some point you 

still have to say what are you going to do 

with this all. 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah, but our focus is on acute 

incidents. 

DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

DR. MELIUS: And so the one day, I would say 

if you were there the day of the incident -- I 

know there’s a sort of a factual issue there -

- but that’s I think the focus, and that’s 

something that was, quote, remember evolved 

from the original legislation, the Amchitka, 

so forth. And it also I think evolved from 

the regulations that were put in place that, 

yeah, have some vagueness and arbitrariness to 

them also. 

But the problem is they didn’t say you 
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got to be there for 60 minutes or whatever 

because that wouldn’t have worked. So the 

focus is on the acute incident, and 

criticality as we discussed is sort of a broad 

range of exposures and so forth. So we’ve got 

to try to figure out is it appropriate to 

compensate some of these people. And Hans 

related these acute incidents. 

And to me I think the best way forward 

I can see on the Nevada Test Site issue is 

looking at the DTRA thing. And I don’t see 

any downside to that other than that we don’t 

have a line to measure it against, but we’re 

never going to have that. At least we haven’t 

been able to come up with it so far. 

So it makes sense as a way of moving 

forward and understanding this and say that, 

look, anybody in these incidents we can 

reconstruct external exposures based on the 

information we have and that we have good 

evidence and a range of incidents that we’ve 

looked at that the risk for their internal 

exposures would be very, very low or whatever 

you want to say. Then I think we have a way 

of moving forward at least on that example 
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that won’t deal with the other situations, to 

that. And it may not be what we’ll find or 

maybe it narrows down the types of incidents 

or situations we look at in some way. 

So since I promised to break at 11:30, 

should we take a ten-minute break? And then 

we’ll come back and we’ll focus on the Ames 

report. 

DR. ZIEMER: Well, have we got everything we 

need out of this one? 

DR. MELIUS: Well, I’m going to give 

ourselves ten minutes to think about that, and 

then --

DR. MAKHIJANI: I might suggest that -- I’ve 

been kind of flipping through these claims to 

see if there’s another one that would be 

useful to consider. The case of the worker 

that has a very high external gamma dose, 18.5 

rem actually, from a single year and then 

there were doses in other years. And there’s 

quite a description of the activities at the 

test site as a coworker --

DR. MELIUS: Can you give us the number? 

DR. MAKHIJANI: It’s section number 3.4.3. 

It’s on page 31 of the report. 
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DR. MELIUS: We don’t have page numbers, 

Arjun. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: I’m sorry. I will change 

all that. 

DR. MAURO: About two-thirds of the way 

through the report. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: If you look at the dose 

table it seems that he had a quite a few 

significant exposures until 1956 at least. 

And then he describes being involved in 

working in a number of bomb tests in each 

operation. So he worked in five different 

operations. He worked in several bomb tests 

in each operation. And he had a coworker who 

received quite a high dose, a higher dose than 

what he says he received. And his coworker 

died three weeks after this incident. I’m not 

clear on which, this incident in 1956. 

DR. NETON: There’s a whole report on that 

at the very end here. The attachment details 

the entire incident ^ tables. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: And I agree. This is one of 

the cases where we actually have an incident 

report. So it’s worthwhile considering 

whether this would be -- the only reason I’m 
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calling attention to this is it’s worthwhile 

considering whether this might fit the 

definition of a discrete incident for a person 

just on the basis of external exposure and 

whether there might be internal exposures 

associated with it that might complicate it. 

I just wanted the group to consider it because 

it’s the extreme case in this site. 

DR. MAURO: But no handle on internal dose? 

DR. MAKHIJANI: No. 

DR. NETON: I don’t recall if that incident 

really involved much internal dose at all. It 

had to do with pulling a cable and retrieving 

some instrument package. I mean, there might 

have been some, but --

DR. ROESSLER: You have urinalysis. If I’m 

on the right page which is under 3.4.3 and 

there’s some urinalysis results. 

DR. NETON: Of course, we don’t know what. 

DPM of what? 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Yeah, actually I noticed 

that. 

DR. NETON: We probably can figure that out. 

DR. MAURO: No, it actually says in the text 

claimant had four plutonium urinalyses. 
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DR. NETON: Four plutonium. Those are not 

trivial numbers for plutonium. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: And then here we actually 

have a quantitative example to deal with as to 

whether he would qualify or not. Presumably 

if we calculated a lung dose for that person 

it would be quite high. 

DR. NETON: I guess this is an example of an 

incident where we know, we have the 

information. Then I guess the question is are 

there other incidents like this that we don’t 

have --

DR. MAKHIJANI: Right, there are a number of 

cases, this is interesting because we have a 

report, and there are a number of cases where 

people, where there are no reports and people 

have said there are incidents. And so there 

is the additional complication other than the 

bright lines and where you draw the line of 

what you do when you don’t have information 

other than the statements. 

DR. MELIUS: But what I was going to propose 

for going forward we do this DTRA exercise. 

The DTRA exercise ought to consider a number 

of these types of incidents. That would be 
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one, or scenarios. I guess we call them 

scenarios. And what I was going to suggest is 

that SC&A propose some, propose how you would 

approach that. What would be the scope and 

types of incidents that you would look at with 

the DTRA thing. Or it may be that you’ll have 

to look at what’s available from DTRA also. 

But we circulate that and come to some 

agreement that we think it will be useful to 

do. 

DR. ROESSLER: We still come down to, once 

we have that, what are the criteria for health 

endangerment. And I think we still get back 

into how do we evaluate it. Is that health 

endangerment determined by what we know 

scientifically, epidemiologically, or in 

equity is it compared to the people who are 

actually being compensated? And that’s what’s 

tossed around in my mind is how do we 

determine the health endangerment? 

DR. MAKHIJANI: That might be a useful 

criteria though. 

DR. ROESSLER: Which one though? 

DR. MAKHIJANI: How do these kind of 

situations, maybe it’s a situational analysis 
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that you want compared to people who would be 

compensated. I don’t know. 

DR. MAURO: In other SECs that question is 

answered all the time. In other words 

whenever a judgment is made, one of the 

criteria, two big ones, can you do it and the 

answer is no, if it’s no. Second, is there 

reason to believe there was health 

endangerment and then the answer is yes. And 

so some place along the line someone is making 

that judgment. 

DR. NETON: That judgment is made because 

you can’t bound the dose. But in fact that’s 

just a criteria right there. 

DR. MAURO: Isn’t that the first one? I 

guess I felt as if the first one was --

DR. NETON: There really is just one. 

DR. MELIUS: There really is just one, and 

it’s for the class, and it’s a distribution. 

And I think we recognize that if we could, if 

we try to look at it in the same way we’re 

talking about now that there’d be some that 

may be on the lower part of the curve and some 

people on the upper part. But we’re 

recognizing that there’s no way we can tell 
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where people go on that curve. And that’s the 

interpretive informational aspects of it. 

So it’s hard. I mean, I don’t think 

we’re trying sort of avoid the issue. It’s 

just a hard issue to get at, and we’re trying 

to be fair to people exposed in these acute 

incidents. I don’t have any, maybe not smart 

enough to think of another way of doing it 

other than let’s look at the way, may make it 

easier, we hope it makes it easier to figure 

out where a line is or what’s appropriate, but 

it may not. We don’t know, but I think at 

least it gives us some harder information, 

some better information to think about. 

DR. MAURO: We do have this one case, and 

I’d have to say I’m very glad you pointed this 

one out where you have some bioassay data 

which can readily be converted into what kind 

of dose --

DR. NETON: I was going to say we probably 

have a dose reconstruction but then I realized 

he’s in the SEC. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Most of these people are in 

the SEC because they didn’t work less than 250 

days. They’re just describing their incidents 
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just from the theoretical point of view of 

doing a situational analysis of why --

DR. NETON: Right. 

DR. MAURO: It’s a scale question. 

DR. NETON: Yeah, you get a feel. 

DR. MAURO: We’ll get a feel. This is the 

dose his lungs could have experienced. 

DR. NETON: I predict there’d be some pretty 

significant doses here. But were those doses 

accrued over an, if those were accrued over a 

four-year period so was that an incident or 

not? Those would probably be models of a 

chronic exposure scenario. I mean, that’s 

what we would do. If he got four years, 

actually, this is two years’ worth of doses. 

The other issue, and I know it’s 

probably not relevant because Arjun always 

says it isn’t, but the probable implications 

of this, I think -- I’ve forgotten this number 

exactly -- but there’s something like maybe 60 

people out of the eligible population are in 

the SEC to have less than 250 days. And then, 

I don’t know what that means --

DR. ZIEMER: At NTS? 

DR. NETON: Yeah, I think it’s, there was 
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something around 60. That’s my recollection. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, you could define it 

also as a discrete incident and add them. 

DR. MELIUS: But also even that’s sort of a 

biased number in the sense that people, I 

think everyone knows it’s 250 days the way DOL 

counsels people when they apply and so forth, 

we tell them it’s more likely if you work 

there longer. And I think our selection of 

NTS wasn’t based on the fact that it was 60, 

but it seemed to be the kind of incident we 

needed, the kind of scenarios that we needed 

to look at. 

DR. NETON: But would it not be more 

informative maybe to look at the types of 

exposures for people who were involved at the 

plant less than 250 days? If they were truly 

involved in these type of, because most of 

these people are not in the SEC as Arjun just 

pointed out. These are long-term workers who 

were doing some --

DR. MAURO: That’s a good point. 

DR. NETON: -- pretty routine work with many 

opportunities to get involved in incidents. 

Now you take these 60 people that were 
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probably short-term contractors doing specific 

things, and I recall looking at them building 

structures and doing things, coming in and off 

the site, are those people really likely to 

be, or are we biasing our results by looking 

at --

DR. MAURO: It was my understanding though 

that the short-term people were very often 

were the people that came in for particular 

tests. They may have actually come from other 

sites to come in to support a particular test 

for --

DR. NETON: But were they not the workers 

who were doing the actual chain pullings and, 

you know, I don’t know. 

DR. MELIUS: I don’t have any objection to 

doing that, but remember again, we just looked 

at these because we wanted the scenarios. 

DR. NETON: Right, and clearly this has 

demonstrated the potential here. 

DR. MELIUS: Would it hurt to do that, those 

60? I don’t think so, but I’m not sure. 

DR. NETON: I’m just concerned that if we 

came up, you know, this particular person was 

a long-term worker, are the people there less 
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than 250 days really involved in these type of 

activities? That’s the question. 

DR. MELIUS: Then let’s do it in parallel. 

Let’s do the DTRA effort and then do that at 

the same time because that may help us in 

saying, well, practically, we don’t have to --

DR. NETON: (Unintelligible)? 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, maybe NIOSH should 

pull those. 

DR. NETON: I already have. We had them on 

the O drive a long time ago. 

DR. MAURO: And you have this person’s story 

so we get a sense of whether --

DR. NETON: We could look at the, I mean, I 

don’t know if it’s exactly 60 -– don’t quote 

me on that number, but look at the population 

of workers with less than 250 days just to see 

if there’s some that stand out. 

MR. ELLIOTT: Are you applying this based on 

if they lived there though? 

DR. NETON: Actually, you’re right. It’s 83 

days, isn’t it? If they had lived, had, not 

permanent residence but continuous residence 

during their --
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MR. ELLIOTT: They would only have to spend 

83 days by definition. 

DR. NETON: But I think it would behoove us 

to look at those cases a little bit. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: So NIOSH is going to do 

that? 

DR. NETON: Yeah, I mean we’ll pull them 

out. I think I’ve already got them summarized 

at one point. In fact, I’m very sure I 

presented this at some point, but I’ll dust 

those off and see --

MR. ELLIOTT: In this scenario you’re still 

trying to answer the 250 day issue but only 

looking at 83 days. They kept those folks 

out. 

DR. MELIUS: We really are looking at the 

one day. Back to Paul’s point, we only really 

care about the one day. I mean, Jim’s point 

is that let’s look at the people 250 days and 

see how many of them have these one day --

DR. NETON: Yeah, are there stories like 

this permeating throughout these 60, and there 

may or may not be. I don’t really recall. 

DR. MAURO: And that would solve the NTS 

question. In other words it wouldn’t solve --
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DR. NETON: As we said our case is going to 

come in the door. We do have to solve it 

universally, but I still think the form is to 

look at what we have in our hands and say... 

DR. MELIUS: Now we will take the ten-minute 

break. 

DR. ZIEMER: How long is the break? 

DR. MELIUS: Ten minutes. We’ll reconvene I 

think about five of. 

DR. NETON: We won’t break the connection. 

We’ll just put this on mute so we won’t be 

able to talk to each other. 

DR. MELIUS: We’ll try to remember to take 

the mute off. 

(Whereupon, a ten-minute break was taken.) 

AMES REPORT 

DR. MELIUS: So, Hans, do you want to give a 

brief overview of the Ames Report? 

DR. BEHLING: Yes, I can, and let me first 

start out by saying is there anyone out there 

who doesn’t have access to the report. This 

was sent out back in June of this year. 

DR. ZIEMER: Let’s see, the electronic copy 

was called what on that one? Is this the Ames 

Blowout Analysis? 
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DR. BEHLING: Well, Paul, Kathy just sent 

out to all of the working group members the 

report in case, just in case you don’t have 

it. 

DR. ZIEMER: What’s the title of it? 

DR. NETON: It starts out, “The relevance of 

the 250-day workday requirement...” 

DR. ZIEMER: The title of the report? 

DR. NETON: Yeah, the relevance, there’s 

big, it says WORKING DRAFT in caps and 

underneath it says, “The relevance of the 250-

day workday requirement to potential exposures 

associated with a single blowout.” 

DR. ZIEMER: Oh, okay. 

DR. MAURO: June 2007. 

DR. BEHLING: And by the way, that report 

was PA reviewed so you can basically discuss 

it as it exists. 

MS. HOMOKI-TITUS: Actually, we’re not sure 

who did that Privacy Act review, and we want 

to go through it again before any names are 

mentioned. I think that was done before OGC 

was assisting with Privacy Act reviews. 

DR. NETON: Because it’s also stamped all 

over the front, “Do Not Distribute”. 
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MS. HOMOKI-TITUS: Yeah, I’m a little bit 

concerned until we receive that document and 

ensure that it was actually cleared, but you 

all probably shouldn’t use names. 

DR. BEHLING: Okay, if no one else has any 

questions, and if everyone has access to the 

report, I will make reference to it. But 

obviously (telephone failure) go into detail. 

But let me just talk in very brief terms. 

The Ames Laboratory operated for about 

a ten-year period, ’43 to ’53, thereabouts. 

And their principal function started out to be 

one of research involving the reduction of 

uranium to pure metal as well as thorium to 

pure metal. And as it turned out their 

success was such where they turned a 

laboratory into a production facility. 

And over the period of time the Ames 

Laboratory processed about two million pounds 

of uranium and 130 pounds of thorium. And the 

process that they developed was the reduction 

of uranium tetrafluoride and thorium 

tetrafluoride by various means that included 

the use of metallic calcium, zinc chloride and 

other means of reducing the fluorinated 
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version to pure metal. 

And most of these reduction processes 

occurred under different conditions and sizes, 

but I identified a standard value where a 

uranium biscuit of about 42 pounds was 

reduced, and a thorium biscuit of about 39 

pounds was the standard bomb dimensions that 

would define what potentially might have 

become an airborne issue. 

And as part of the reduction process 

when you reduce uranium or thorium 

tetrafluoride to pure metal, the reduction 

process is a highly exothermic reaction that 

raises the temperature into the thousands of 

degrees. And in the presence of moisture 

which frequently happened, you would get an 

explosion called a blowout. 

And so we know that these events 

occurred because even though there are no 

formal documentation to these events in terms 

of when they occurred, anecdotal accounts, as 

I cited in our report that reviewed the SEC 

for Ames, were a common occurrence. In fact, 

in one of the accounts that was mentioned 

there was six blowouts in a single day. And 
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we know that these occurred on a routine basis 

pretty much throughout that time period. 

Having said that, the blowout would 

create an airborne environment, but in the 

absence of any documentation that would assess 

the airborne concentrations or the actual 

monitoring of workers, we’re kind of left up 

in the air as to what the exposures might have 

been as a result of even a single blowout. 

And looking at the data we were basically 

looking at a model that was totally 

hypothetical until I came to review the 

Fernald site profile and realized that we had, 

in effect, a documented blowout at Fernald. 

And not surprisingly, the reduction of 

thorium metal was similar in terms of the 

methodology that was used at Ames. And so I 

looked at the particular situation that 

occurred in April 1954 at Fernald in which 100 

pounds of thorium tetrafluoride, ten pounds of 

zinc chloride and 35.9 pounds of calcium metal 

were being blended and resulted in a blowout. 

And as a result of that accident and 

the investigation that ensued, it was 

established that approximately 50 percent of 
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the thorium was unaccounted for, and therefore 

can be assumed to have been volatilized in the 

immediate area of the area where this took 

place. And using that particular data I went 

back and said, okay, let’s apply this to the 

bombs that were being reduced at Ames and 

assume 50 percent potentially of the material 

was volatilized. 

And on that basis I established a 

scenario that incorporated site-specific data 

including the facilities at Ames, which is 

known as Little Incani*. And looking at 

pictures and drawings I concluded certain 

aspects to the surface area and the interior 

volume during which this blowout might have 

distributed airborne concentrations of either 

uranium or thorium. 

And these were described in Section 6 

of the report that’s entitled “Section 6 

Assumptions Used for Modeling an Acute Intake 

Dose from a Blowout”. And you’ll see a number 

of assumptions that are lists of one through 

ten. I won’t go through all of them, but you 

can briefly scan through it and understand 

what assumptions were used. 
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And then I established an intake model 

that says, “Perhaps in the aftermath of such a 

blowout a person might have been exposed to a 

very high level of airborne concentration for 

a period of five minutes,” and stopped at that 

point, five minutes. Although the anecdotal 

accounts as given in some of the documents 

that are reviewed earlier, cited that 

oftentimes even after such a blowout, people 

would continue to work there so my stopping it 

at five minutes was rather arbitrary. 

But I sort of capped it and said, 

okay, let’s just look at the airborne 

concentration in the first five minutes, 

exposure in the first five minutes, and stop 

and then pick up again for the next 30 days 

involving once the dust settles and it’s now a 

surface contamination. It’s subject to being 

re-suspended and potentially being a source of 

internal exposure for a 30-day period, a onemonth period, for workers who might have 

continued in that environment. 

So the model incorporates a very, very 

short, five-minute acute exposure to the 

immediate aftermath of a blowout, and then 30 
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days of exposure involving working there with 

resuspension of this material. And for that I 

actually used empirical data as was available 

from the Ames Laboratory in ^ what might have 

been the airborne concentrations for that 

working period. 

And in the process I calculated doses 

that you’ll see as part of Table 1 and Table 2 

for thorium as well as for uranium. And our 

model is based on the assumption that Thorium232 and -228 were in equilibrium and our model 

is for two solubility classes. And I 

integrated the doses in behalf of the first 

year time-integrated dose of five year, ten 

year and 30 year for bone surfaces and lung. 

And you can obviously see from the 

table that even as little as five years 

following such an incident the doses to the 

bone surface would have been substantial and 

somewhere around 60-to-70 rem to the bone as 

well as to the lung. And similar exposures, 

well, reduced exposures would have occurred 

for the result of a uranium blowout. 

But for the thorium blowout obviously 

it’s clear that a single blowout involving the 
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model parameters that I defined would have 

resulted in a substantial dose both to the 

bone surface and the lung. If I look at the 

SEC criteria as defined in 40-65-83*, the 

issue is one of protecting all workers for all 

cancers. So these would obviously be the 

highest doses associated with an intake. 

And I did not go and proceed to 

establish any calculations for a POC, but 

obviously you can look at these numbers and 

come to the conclusion that for a single 

exposure the doses would be very high to the 

bone surface or lung from a thorium blowout. 

And on that basis I believe that a 250-day 

criteria may or may not be appropriate. 

Moreover, if we look at the breakdown 

between the doses that served for the first 

five minutes exposure versus the 30 day, you 

realize it’s really dominated by the first 

five minutes. So at that point I’ll leave it 

open and allow Jim or anyone from NIOSH to 

respond to these calculations. 

DR. MELIUS: You may want to reiterate --

DR. NETON: I can reiterate some of the 

points I’ve made. I see what you’ve done 
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here, Hans, and I think you’ve done a nice job 

at it, but I do have some reservations about 

some of the assumptions made. And one is that 

the dust loading could be as high as 3.5 grams 

per cubic meter and have these people be 

breathing that over a five-minute period. I 

just don’t know if that’s a credible or 

plausible exposure scenario in my mind. 

DR. BEHLING: Well, let me respond. I don’t 

either, and I’m not sure anyone would ever the 

means to measure such an event because it is 

an acute event, and it is transient. But I 

have witnessed a certain thing that I will 

share with you that just in visual terms may 

make some sense. 

I remember a couple years ago dragging 

up a ladder an 80-pound bag of Portland cement 

that at the ten-foot level dropped down to the 

ground and basically exploded. And I can tell 

you there was a huge, huge cloud of airborne 

cement dust that took a few minutes to settle 

out. And without having empirical data to 

measure what that airborne concentration was, 

it is certainly possible for a brief period of 

time to have such high airborne 
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concentrations. 

And I will also tell you that in the 

case of Fernald when I looked at some of the 

actual airborne concentrations that were 

measured at discrete locations, for extended 

periods of times they measured airborne 

concentrations of uranium that, I believe from 

one of the memoranda I even cited, was 

somewhere around 600 milligrams. And so --

DR. NETON: I can understand 600 maybe but 

not five times that. 

DR. BEHLING: Again --

DR. NETON: That’s a critical distinction in 

my mind though, Hans, because that brackets 

your doses here in directly proportional, and 

if you reduce your doses by five or ten, 

you’re down into some ranges that we were 

talking about earlier that --

DR. MAURO: Hold on though, remember --

DR. BEHLING: Let me respond to that. First 

of all I don’t know if it’s possible to have 

3.36 grams per cubic meter for any period of 

time. But also realize that I cut it off in 

five minutes. How do I know that it wasn’t 

half of that and the exposure was for ten 
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minutes? These are arbitrary decisions that 

you can --

DR. NETON: I know. These are theoretical 

calculations. I understand that, but I think 

that’s kind of high. Secondly, it makes the 

assumption that 100 percent of these particles 

are respirable which I don’t believe they are. 

And when you have an explosion, you’ve got a 

lot of large chunks going out. And you can’t 

convince me that it’s all 100 percent less 

than ten micron particulate. 

DR. BEHLING: Well, again --

DR. NETON: Again, that’s why I think this 

calculation is sort of borders on the 

implausible. I don’t deny that there were 

large exposures there, but I think these doses 

are inflated by quite a bit. 

DR. BEHLING: One thing is for certain when 

you talk about the exothermic reaction that 

took place that may have involved temperatures 

in the thousands of Fahrenheit may have 

certainly volatilized the metal into a state 

where at least a brief period of time before 

it condenses again onto particles. 

DR. NETON: Yeah, we’re getting into physics 
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of what happens here, but I still think the 

way it settles out, especially when I talk to 

people at Fernald that have witnessed these 

type of things, it just doesn’t go that way. 

But we’re not going to answer that here or 

there, but I’m just pointing out my 

reservations for some of these calculations. 

The other thing is I’m not sure that 

these multiple scenarios that you postulate, 

these ten times, that sort of becomes a 

chronic exposure scenario then over a long 

period of time which is what we’ve covered. 

DR. BEHLING: Wait a minute. I’m not sure I 

follow what --

DR. NETON: Well, you’re talking about ten 

blowouts, one blowout a month for ten -- I 

don’t know. What was it? 

DR. BEHLING: No, no, no. This is just to 

show you that there is a certain degree of 

periodicity that can be reasonably expected so 

that one could say any person who worked there 

for even one month period may have, within 

that ten-year timeframe, been exposed to at 

least one blowout. That’s all it was. I’m 

not saying that I want people to be exposed 
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for ten months for ten individual, discrete 

events. 

DR. NETON: Well, I thought that’s where you 

were going to head when I was saying these 

exposures are much smaller, I believe, than 

you’ve calculated. Then you would have to 

start speculating as to more blowouts to get 

it up to the point where you might have a 

higher dose. 

DR. BEHLING: No, no, what I intended to say 

here is that any worker who worked there for 

even, let’s say, a one-month period of time 

between ’43 and ’53, may have been subject to 

such a blowout. That’s all the point was 

here. The calculations that I intended to use 

here are strictly confined to a single blowout 

and nothing more. 

In other words if the issue was one 

of, oh, there was one kind of blowout at Ames. 

The next question is, well, who was there 

during that time who would have been affected 

by that. And the question is we don’t know 

that. 

But in this case we’re talking about 

the routine event so that any person, and I’ve 
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looked at some of, in fact, some of the 

documents that I looked at actually had the 

names of individuals. And during that period 

of time there were awards given to people who 

were there for one year, two year, five years 

or more, et cetera. 

And I remember seeing a list of names 

whose employment was less than one year. And 

again, this is relevant here to the discussion 

of the 250-day criteria because there was a 

substantial number of workers whose total 

employment was less than one year. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Just as a point of 

information about maximum dust loading that 

has been measured in a nuclear weapons 

complex. I’ve often mentioned a Fernald 

measurement of 97 ^ MAC. That comes out to 

four and a half grams per cubic meter. 

DR. NETON: Right, that was the sample, 

Arjun, we talked about that was taken inside a 

dust collector. I mean, you always --

DR. MAKHIJANI: I don’t believe that, that 

you haven’t read the document. That’s not 

correct. 

DR. NETON: You brought this up in a past 
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meeting. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: This is not correct. I have 

the document, and I can read it into the 

record. 

DR. ZIEMER: Can I ask you a question on 

that, Arjun or maybe Hans? At those dust 

loading levels, is that in terms of, for 

example, visibility and so on, how is the sort 

of atmosphere characterized around the person? 

Because typically people do, their avoidance 

mechanism, if the dust loading gets to a 

certain point, people try to get out of there 

regardless of what it is if they’re having 

trouble seeing or breathing. Do you know in 

this case physically what the sort of 

characteristics of that kind of dust loading 

are? 

DR. BEHLING: Let me point, Paul, to page 

five of the report. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. I know there’s some 

pressure on the people to sort of stay there 

and get certain things done, but there are 

also the avoidance mechanisms. 

DR. BEHLING: I cannot read to you the 

citation that I want you to read because --
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DR. ZIEMER: Okay, on page five, is it the 

first paragraph? 

DR. BEHLING: Yes. 

DR. ZIEMER: “Corridor filled with dust.” 

The person was, let’s see --

DR. BEHLING: Let me read it to you. 

DR. ZIEMER: No, I see what you, he was 

pacing up and down in the corridor that was 

filled with dust is what you’re saying, right? 

DR. BEHLING: I will quote that section 

which does not contain any names. And I 

quote, “Suddenly there was a terrific 

explosion which blew out several of the 

windows in the front of the chemistry 

building. When I came out of my office to see 

what happened, the corridor was filled with 

dust about six feet above the floor to the 

ceiling. I was relieved that the individual 

had not been injured, but he looked very dazed 

and was pacing up and down the corridor. As I 

passed him I heard him muttering,” and, of 

course, this anecdotal stuff. 

DR. NETON: I think the --

DR. ZIEMER: I was trying to relate though 

at the maximum loading used in the 
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calculations what would visibility be? 

DR. NETON: It depends on particle size, 

Paul. 

DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, of course. 

DR. NETON: This was done for the Bethlehem 

Steel analysis. Mike Thorne did a fairly indepth analysis of that. And it depends on how 

big the particles are. It could be a low as a 

couple tenths of a meter at those levels I 

think, and it could be a little further, but 

it would certainly, visibility would be 

impaired. 

DR. MAURO: As a ballpark I’ve been using 

from the work that Hans did, and others, when 

you’re at hundreds of milligrams per cubic 

meter of airborne dust, and generally in the 

respirable range because we were looking at 

that, visibility’s impaired and respiratory 

distress. You can’t stay in that type of 

setting very long. 

DR. ZIEMER: Well, yeah, because my concern 

is the five-minute issue is one that I was 

going to ask about. How realistic is it that 

someone would stay at that loading for five 

minutes just in terms of their own avoidance 
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mechanism? Now this guy was dazed so perhaps 

that is another factor. Well, you can 

consider it sort of a rhetorical question. 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah, and I think as Hans 

pointed out we have to sort of balance that 

with the limitation of five minutes. But to 

me that would argue for an additional 

calculation, maybe a, be more realistic about 

what, how long a person would be at this very 

high end or what the high end would be. But 

also be more realistic, assuming there was 

pressure for them to stay in the room, what 

would the exposure be for over that period of 

time? And it --

DR. NETON: As we talk a little bit more, 

that calculation aside, even if we have a 

number we can agree on, what’s the dose that 

constitutes health endangerment then? Because 

unless we have that value, we can do all the 

calculations we want and come to the 

conclusion and say, well, it’s not 200, it’s 

100 or 50 or ten, whatever. Unless we can, 

one has a number to fix on --

DR. MAURO: Well, I think it does bring us 

where we want to be right now. In other words 
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in Table 1 Hans puts forth the scale of 

exposure we’re talking about. And from what I 

heard, yeah, maybe three grams for five 

minutes, maybe 600 milligrams for three 

minutes or one minute. 

I mean, it’s really the integrated 

intake. How many picocuries did this person 

inhale over let’s say the week following that 

explosion, you know, after the explosion and 

continued to work there? I mean, what I would 

argue is that this is a pretty good starting 

point to say this is the scale we’re talking 

about within a factor of two, three, whatever. 

DR. NETON: Four, five. 

DR. MAURO: Okay, five. I’ll go with five. 

And we’re also talking about committed dose. 

You’ll notice we’re looking at one particular 

number, bone surface, 30-year committed dose, 

214 rem. Now, maybe it’s not 214. Maybe it’s 

closer to 50. The question becomes now we’re 

in the realm of committed dose to a particular 

organ that is not unlike the acute dose to a 

particular organ experienced in criticality 

accidents. 

Okay, that’s where we are right now. 
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So I think there’s a general conclusion that 

there are plausible scenarios associated with 

the explosions that occurred at Ames where the 

committed dose to particular organs are in the 

range of exposures that people have 

experienced from acute exposures from 

criticalities. 

DR. NETON: I don’t disagree, but I don’t 

know that you can compare a single exposure to 

the organ to a multi-organ exposure --

DR. MAURO: We’re talking about cancers to 

the organ -- remember, we’re talking about a -

-

DR. NETON: Hear me out. The intent of 

citing a criticality was that there would be 

an unambiguous agreement among health 

physicists that health could have been 

endangered. That that would have, the 

evidence of some deterministic effect would be 

so high that a reasonable health physicist 

would conclude that health could have been 

endangered, and that would be cancer risk 

because it’s most likely that cancer could 

have been caused by that high exposure related 

to a criticality. 
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That implies though that all the 

organs were irradiated, and then what is the 

chance that one of those organs might develop 

cancer down the line? This is different now 

in an after-the-fact test that we’re saying, 

okay, we’ve calculated this organ, this bone 

surfaces could have developed, let’s say, 50 

rem of exposure over 30 years. It’s not 

acute. And the fact is that that risk is not 

equivalent to that criticality exposure. And 

not in any way, shape or form is the risk of 

developing a cancer equivalent. 

DR. MAURO: But the exposure is. 

DR. ZIEMER: Well, there you don’t use, you 

probably don’t use all of the dose in the risk 

determination because of the latent period. 

DR. NETON: That’s true. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: You’re setting this up as an 

a priori versus a posteriori case, but I think 

the whole program is a posteriori. You’re 

dealing with only with -- no, wait a minute. 

You’re not asking whether the population of 

people who worked less than 250 days should be 

included in a less than 250-day category, 

you’re asking among the population those who 
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are known to have cancer should they be 

included. So I think the analogy that, you 

know, you have whole body and could they get 

cancer as an a priori analogy is not correct. 

DR. NETON: But remember -- let’s follow the 

line where Dr. Ziemer was going though. 

You’ve got a 250-day criteria that’s already 

in place. And it was our opinion, I believe, 

that to change that there would have to be 

some very credible, unambiguous exposure 

scenario to move it down to less than that. 

And it would not be based on doing an IREP run 

and looking at the percentiles because you 

can’t. You just don’t know what the doses 

exposures were. 

MR. ELLIOTT: Because we have admitted we 

can’t reconstruct this dose. 

DR. BEHLING: But let me make a point here 

on that issue. I fully agree with the 250-day 

criteria for a select circumstance that, for 

instance, is one where we have workers in on a 

routine basis exposed to a controlled 

environment -- and I underline controlled --

where we can reasonably conclude even if there 

was no monitoring, that exposures were less 
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than 300 millirem external a week and airborne 

concentrations were less than the maximum 

permissible air concentrations as defined in 

those days. 

And on the blanket assumption, the 

blind assumption, that these controlled 

environments exposed people for a period of 

250 days, that would amount to certain 

exposures where one could reasonably say, 

well, we don’t have any monitoring data. But 

on the assumption they complied with existing 

regulations for external and internal, the 

doses would have been too small for people 

exposed to less than 250 days or one work 

year. 

We’re not talking about a controlled 

environment here. And as Dr. Melius pointed 

out earlier, we’re talking about acute events, 

single events, a moment in time, and all I 

wanted to say here is that these exposures 

amount to significant, integrated, timeintegrated dose for an acute exposure 

internally. 

DR. NETON: And I agree with that, but and 

also as we’ve discussed before, these doses 
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are delivered over a protracted period of 

time. And so the risk of developing cancer is 

not equivalent even given the same unit dose. 

DR. BEHLING: Nobody said they are, and I 

hope you don’t think I’m arguing with the 

issue of parity between a time-integrated 

internal dose and a single moment in time 

external acute exposure. They’re not equal. 

You’d have to be something of an idiot not to 

understand that there are obviously 

differences. 

DR. NETON: Okay, Hans, let me ask you this 

simple question then. How would you conclude 

then that this 214 rem, 30-year bone dose 

endangered health? What would be your test? 

DR. BEHLING: How would one calculation say, 

let’s just --

DR. NETON: With what? 

DR. BEHLING: -- a guy was working there 

somewhere around 1945, and he came down with a 

cancer that was documented to the lung or the 

bone, let’s say 20, 30 years thereafter. Do 

an IREP and come to your own conclusion. If 

the POC was greater than 50 percent, you’d 

have to come to the some understanding as to 
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whether or not this person needs to be 

compensated even though the exposure was a 

moment in time exposure --

DR. NETON: But this is not a person. This 

is a class that you’re establishing so what 

you’re using is your criteria to establish the 

class. 

DR. BEHLING: Well, you know, we obviously 

have an understanding that there were people 

at Ames, and as I said I have documents in my 

box here that says there were a substantial 

number whose employment was less than a oneyear timeframe which means that we would 

exclude them from consideration based on 

employment period without regard to their 

internal exposures and without regard to the 

dose that they may have experienced to an 

organ that is their cancer. And I would have 

to say if I were one of those people, I would 

want to contest that 250-day criteria. 

DR. ZIEMER: If those people could establish 

that they were there during incidents, they 

could go through the very construction that 

you’re talking about --

DR. NETON: Exactly. 
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DR. ZIEMER: -- and establish, for example, 

that they got the 214 rem or whatever bounding 

assumption. Because this is kind of a 

bounding assumption here. 

DR. BEHLING: Well, Paul, that’s what I 

started out to say. There is no documentation 

that says on November 29th, 2007, there was an 

explosion here or blowout. There is not data, 

so the ability of a claimant to prove that he 

was there during even one event is basically 

difficult because of the lack of 

documentation. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Can we settle a factual 

point about dust concentrations? 

DR. NETON: Yeah, sure. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Okay, I’m reading from a 

December 7th, 1960, memo, subject: Cleaning 

Under Burned Out Oxide Conveyors. It’s in the 

Fernald SEC petition, Volume One, page 294, 

PDF, page 295. The number of air samples from 

the bottom of page one, the individual, quote, 

“The individual air dust samples and their 

respective air pump locations are on the 

attached table.” 

There’s a table on the next page which 
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reads, “Breathing zone sample results were, 

operator cleaning under burned out conveyor 

averaged 1.3 million disintegrations per 

minute per cubic meter or 18,000 times MAC.” 

And then it says, “Up to about one year ago an 

operator had to position himself,” anyway, the 

prior year’s results are cited, and it says, 

“Breathing zone samples of this operation were 

found to be in the prior year 97,000 times 

MAC.” It is not inside a stack. 

DR. NETON: I remember using the same air 

samples that you raised, I don’t know which 

meeting it was, a long time ago, and we went 

back and looked at it. The operational key 

there is the guy was underneath the duct, and 

I think he was cleaning underneath it. And 

this was coming down from his cleaning 

operations, not being suspended into the air 

from a mechanical --

DR. MAKHIJANI: All I’m saying --

DR. NETON: -- very different, Arjun. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: There was a person who was 

working there who was exposed --

DR. NETON: No, but your implication was 

that you can generate sustainable 3.5 grams of 
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air from a mechanical operation --

DR. MAKHIJANI: -- than to say the 

documented air concentrations that are on the 

same order of magnitude as what Hans has in 

his report for more than five minutes. 

DR. NETON: For material coming down from 

above, not being generated. Big difference, 

Arjun. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, was a worker exposed 

to multi-gram per cubit meter --

DR. NETON: Can a worker be exposed from 

mechanical generation of air up into the air 

and sustained it at 3.5 grams per meter? 

That’s my point. 

DR. MAURO: Well, I would say that ^ extreme 

is this falling. In other words we are 

dealing with a very extreme scenario --

DR. NETON: ^. 

DR. MAURO: -- which I think Hans has made a 

very powerful case. Those scenarios are real, 

and they did occur, not --

DR. NETON: As long as it occurred we don’t 

disagree --

DR. MAURO: -- and the fact that that 

scenario is real also, it’s not an explosion, 
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but there are scenarios that can occur where 

perhaps as high as gram per cubic meter of 

dust loading occur for some short period of 

time. So I think that we have accomplished a 

certain amount here, and that we do know that 

gram per cubic meter levels are high, hundreds 

of milligram cubic meter --

DR. NETON: Hundreds of milligrams I’ll 

agree with, five-, 600 milligrams. 

DR. MAURO: -- but on that order because 

that’s well within a factor of five. And to 

me we’re in a factor of five. We’re doing 

pretty well. It can occur for some relatively 

short period of time, maybe minutes. So I 

mean the scenarios are real. I think there’s 

agreement that these kinds of exposures within 

a factor of five --

DR. NETON: Well, I think there’s a 

difference. 

DR. MAURO: Again now, remember, as Hans 

pointed out, it was, he just said this was a 

one-month thing. In other words this is the 

scenario. The event occurs, an exposure over 

a period of a month. So that’s one-twelfth of 

the time period, but it’s one of these 
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scenarios where these exposures apparently 

occurred multiple times. Does that mean that 

it’s possible that there are scenarios where 

the exposures were greater than this? 

So I would argue that within the realm 

of reasonability, someone could probably put a 

boundary on. It could be as low as this, but 

it could be as high as that. 

DR. BEHLING: John, just for your sake 

there’s reference to a single day where six 

blowouts occurred in a single day. 

DR. MAURO: Yeah, that’s the point I was 

making. I don’t think we can parse this very 

well. I think we put a, maybe place it in a 

box, and we can actually come to an agreement, 

yeah, probably it could very well have been 

higher than this but not very much higher than 

that. 

And I think that Hans’ number may fall 

toward the higher end, but it’s still within 

the box that I think reasonable people could 

say, yeah, that could have occurred. That 

intake, that intake could have occurred on 

this relatively short period of time, less 

than 250 workdays. 
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DR. NETON: I’m starting to look at this in 

terms of kidney effects and stuff. I mean, 

these things are ridiculously high. 

DR. MAURO: Well, but that would be another, 

the case could be made that such scenarios 

could not have occurred. 

DR. NETON: I have not looked at this in 

detail from the plausibility perspectives as 

far as kidney damage occurring and all that 

kind of stuff. But the point is even if we do 

decide what’s your cut point, Hans’ litmus 

test is to do an IREP run. And I would 

suggest that you can’t, it’s a difficult thing 

to do because you have to make up a 

hypothetical case. 

DR. MAURO: In other words is it more likely 

than not this will occur? I mean, let’s say 

you just picked an IREP run without even 

trying to --

DR. NETON: What’s your latency? What’s the 

age at exposure? What’s the age at diagnosis? 

Those all come into play in determining 

whether or not this exceeds 50 percent. 

DR. MAURO: Is it your sense that just about 

everyone, let’s say it was a ten-year latency. 
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The guy was in his 20s and ten years later or 

20 years later. Do you think in general 

you’ll come up with a positive --

DR. NETON: Was it a 200 rem dose to the 

bone over 30 years? I don’t know. 

DR. MAURO: Now the other side is I would 

say that there’s another test, and that has to 

go back to the criticality. I think there is 

an interpretation of the rule here that 

scientists really are not going to be able to 

help on, mainly we have agreed in general, I 

believe, that when you’re talking about 50 

rem, 100 rem. We’re in the realm of declines 

of doses that are associated with -- and we 

could show that. We have the records -- that 

say that it’s not unreasonable to say that’s 

the kind of dose people would associate with a 

criticality. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: The tables we didn’t have 

are conclusive --

DR. MAURO: Well, I, when I looked at the 

data, I said, my goodness, it goes from a 

fraction of a millirem up to hundreds of rem. 

And --

DR. NETON: So ^ is exceptionally high I 
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think is the words --

DR. MAURO: -- and there are numbers that 

are off ^ , of course, but I’ve added --

DR. NETON: -- Exceptionally high would 

imply first of all above some of the 

regulatory limits by some multiple. 

DR. MAURO: Okay, I’m taking a leap of faith 

right now. From looking at the data from the 

criticality I think back to -- I remember the 

number hit me right away, 100 rem. I said if 

anybody’s going to, if I was going to pick a 

number. Someone else would say, well, I’d go 

down to 50. Some others may say ten. I think 

anyone who would pick a number in that range 

would not be being unreasonable. I’ll try to 

argue that case now. That’s me speaking right 

now. 

Then we have the dilemma, okay, if 

somehow we could come to some agreement, even 

if it was a 100 rem, even if it was that high, 

that would be comparable to criticality. The 

question becomes the fact that it’s a 

committed dose as opposed to an acute wholebody dose, does that change the whole story or 

have we met that threshold as defined by the 
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law. The answer is I can’t answer that 

question. 

DR. NETON: I can tell you they’re not 

equivalent risk. Arjun may argue this, but if 

you say that you have 100 rem whole-body 

exposure, that’s what, 20 times a regulatory 

limit of five rem, right? One hundred rem 

exposure, 20 times the regulatory limit. This 

exposure is 214 rem. If I apply ICRP new 

weighting factor to bone surfaces wouldn’t 

exceed a five rem limit for exposure. So 

therefore they’re not equivalent risk. 

They’re not equivalent risk. If Arjun, if you 

insist the risk of developing cancer and the 

regulation has any bearing on the risk of 

exposure related to cancer which is they do, 

then you’ve got a factor of 20 difference 

between those two numbers. 

DR. MAURO: Do you realize what you just did 

though? You just drove yourself into IREP. 

There’s no escaping it then. If you’re going 

to start to make a risk-based argument --

DR. NETON: And I’ll saying you can’t do 

that --

DR. MAURO: -- I mean, if once you start to 
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make the risk-based argument to try to say 

that, no, it has to be risk equivalent to a 

criticality, you have no choice but then to 

start to do risk, do probability of causation 

and start to ask yourself the question are we 

talking about doses to organs that it’s not 

unreasonable to say, yeah, we could have a 

probability of causation greater than 50 

percent. 

Certainly, there are going to be, try 

to find the limiting. I’m not saying that. 

I’m saying that, listen, are we talking about 

doses that everyone would agree have the very 

real possibility of resulting in a POC of 

greater than 50 percent. And how you do that, 

but I think that’s where you’re headed. 

DR. NETON: I don’t know if that’s 

practical. I’m not heading that way because 

I’m just, the regulation essentially doesn’t 

address that issue because of that very 

reason. It had to be somewhat intuitively 

obvious to someone looking at this that this 

is a very high exposure. 

DR. MELIUS: Jim, see, I think that’s a very 

faulty interpretation. It’s your personal 
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interpretation. It may be what you intended. 

It’s not in the regulation, and I think when 

we went back and examined it, it’s open to 

other interpretation. So I think we have to 

think what’s fair to the claimants. How do we 

have equity in this program so that a person, 

so that invariably deals with some of the risk 

issues in terms of endangerment? 

DR. BEHLING: Can I make a comment here? 

DR. MELIUS: No, no, you can’t because I’m 

still talking, Hans. 

DR. BEHLING: Okay. Let me know when you’re 

finished. 

DR. MELIUS: And that so that we have this 

equity issue to deal with which invariably I 

think has considerations of risk with it and 

how are we treating people that have these 

acute exposures in this program? So where do 

these risk comparisons? Well, do we do it for 

someone exposed for 20 years or 250 days 

because that’s the lower limit on the other 

end. 

And I think we know there’s a 

distribution of this, and it gets into a very 

complicated scenario, but I really have 
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concerns about going to this area, well, it’s 

going to be the judgment of used of health 

physicists would just all agree unanimously 

that this must be endanger. I think we have 

to go back to what we’ve already decided in 

the program and base it on that and figure out 

how we approach it in that context. I’m not 

sure if it makes it easier or harder, but --

DR. NETON: I don’t know if what you’re 

suggesting is doable because we tried this 

four or five years ago. And what you’re going 

to have to do is then, if you’re going to run 

IREP, it’s not just these organs, it’s all 

potential organs because you can’t presume a 

priori that the highest organ, you know, 

exposure to ones that are going to go over 50 

percent. And then under what scenario, what 

latency -- there are a tremendous number, also 

an infinite number of combinations that one 

would have to do a test using IREP to make a 

conclusive determination that health was not 

endangered. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, I think it’s the other 

way around. If you’re looking at the cross, 

you have to do one calculation to show that 
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health was endangered and then it’s over. I 

mean, you’re talking about a class of people 

presumably. 

DR. NETON: Yeah, right. But there are 

classes that you, if you, let’s say, to be 

fair with equity across all the analyses and 

it intuitively didn’t look like that’s like 

anything, where do you stop your scenario 

analysis so you don’t top over 50 percent. 

You can’t envision doing that. 

DR. MELIUS: There’s an issue of how do you 

define equity. How do you calculate that 

equity? But I think that’s, you know, another 

and important consideration. The other 

scenario approach I was thinking of that you 

actually mentioned was, well, if you do the 

calculation, you can bound. So therefore, 

dose reconstruction is feasible. 

What if we made that assumption for 

this group of people. No reason to say that 

there isn’t some that for people with shortterm exposures that, or short durations of 

exposure who worked there, that we might be 

able to bound doses and not be able to do it 

for other groups. I mean, that’s, you’ve 
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never done it, but if we did that, what if we 

then presumably we’re convinced that this 

is... 

But then based on the fact that we 

then come up with what we think are plausible 

scenarios for that and there’s some effort 

doing that, but we probably have enough facts 

to figure out what would be the average 

incident or something like that or some --

DR. NETON: You know, some uncertain 

distribution. 

DR. MELIUS: -- distributions or whatever. 

And then we find in this instance -- and I’m 

not, again this is an assumption -- that these 

incidents were so frequent for these people 

with certain kinds of jobs, they’re working in 

certain parts of this civilian -- I’ve 

forgotten a lot about Ames. 

But that chances are that if you 

worked there for a day or a week or a month, 

you were likely to have been exposed in an 

incident. Because we know the records are 

not, we’re not going to have individual 

records. Is that an approach to think about? 

DR. NETON: Well, I think if we can put a 
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plausible upper bound, we would reconstruct 

the dose. But the difference there is you’re 

not doing a hypothetical dose reconstruction 

that you couldn’t bracket because you don’t 

know what the parameters are, you’re doing 

real dose reconstructions on people based on 

their --

DR. ZIEMER: Isn’t this already an option? 

DR. MAURO: Yeah, it’s in the matrices. 

DR. ZIEMER: Even though the documentation 

of the blowouts is not apparently on the 

records, just the fact of establishing that 

they occurred is by witness, right? 

DR. NETON: Right. 

DR. ZIEMER: Or affidavits? 

DR. MAKHIJANI: No, in the documents. 

DR. ZIEMER: I mean if you were to go the 

direction of saying, okay, there were these 

blowouts; and therefore, if people worked 

there, say, less than a year, they are 

eligible, you still have to establish that the 

blowouts occurred by affidavit or somehow. 

Well, if you can use that --

MR. ELLIOTT: Establish presence at a 

blowout by affidavit. 
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DR. MAURO: They’re presumed there. 

MR. ELLIOTT: What if you presume --

DR. ZIEMER: That’s what I’m getting at. 

Similar to what Jim is saying. If you can 

establish that the blowout occurred in 19-

something, and the person worked there that 

year, and they don’t know whether they were 

present at a blowout, could you not do a dose 

reconstruction and make that assumption? 

DR. NETON: That is an option. 

DR. ZIEMER: I’m saying isn’t that option 

already there? I mean, all right, the person 

maybe hasn’t established that they were at a 

blowout, but if they don’t know, if we don’t 

know when the blowouts occurred and the people 

are somewhat, maybe not everybody knows that 

they were there. 

DR. MELIUS: It’s not an option now, I 

think, because we’ve said it’s not feasible, 

but that lack of feasibility for dose 

reconstruction was based on chronic and not 

just blowouts. 

DR. NETON: I think you’re right, Doctor. I 

don’t think there’s anything to prevent us 

from doing a, we always do partial dose 
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reconstructions for people who are not in the 

class. And then we do a dose reconstruction 

to the best extent possible given the 

information we have at hand. If there’s an 

indication in the CATI or in the records 

somewhere that this guy was involved in 

blowouts, I don’t think there would be 

anything legally preventing us from attempting 

to reconstruct the dose. 

DR. ZIEMER: Just as was done in this 

example. 

DR. NETON: Yeah, or something similar. 

DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, yeah. 

DR. NETON: So to that extent, that 

approach, yeah. 

MR. ELLIOTT: But your starting point has to 

be there. You have to understand a source 

term. 

DR. NETON: Well, I think we’ve got a pretty 

good idea. These are 40 pound charges and 

they were furnaces --

DR. MELIUS: We’re worried about going, 

we’re struggling with going the other way of 

saying that we can’t and these are like a 

criticality or whatever you want. But what if 
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we go the opposite? Now I’m not saying 

that’s, this may be unique or situation, but, 

and I would argue you would have to have an 

affidavit. I think you’d have to define who’s 

in that class. Who you can do that with 

because I just don’t, my recollection is the 

records are so poor or the incidents were so 

frequent that you could presume that people in 

certain years or types of work or whatever. 

DR. NETON: On a practical basis I don’t, 

Hans seems to know better than I do, but I 

don’t know if there are that many people at 

Ames that had less than 250 days that were 

what I consider like chemical operator types 

or something to that effect. 

DR. BEHLING: I don’t know what their job 

complications were, but I do have a list. As 

I said it involves awards that were handed out 

by the director to people for periods of 

employment. And I remember seeing one page 

that says less than one year. And if there 

was something like in that particular 

document, 20-some people whose employment 

period was considered less than one year. 

DR. MELIUS: Dr. Fuortes corresponded with 
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us recently and I can’t remember the situation 

or the example exactly, but it was a two less 

than 250 days. And to me it was, my 

recollection is that it was plausible in terms 

of being exposed to incidents. Whether it was 

just his memory or what I don’t recall, but --

DR. NETON: In my opinion if we can bound 

the exposure it’s preferable to do this in 

this manner to apply the doses to the people 

who were receiving those exposures, and then 

also the doses to the cancers that were more 

likely to have developed as a result of those 

exposures. 

DR. ZIEMER: What I’m thinking about is the 

possibility of saying, okay, we don’t know 

exactly when these blowouts occurred, but 

based on affidavits we know that in this 

certain year there were multiple blowouts. 

And that therefore anyone who has a claim in 

that year we will assume that they may have 

been involved in the blowouts and whatever the 

bounding calculation is for that you give them 

credit for that. It would still be a dose 

reconstruction rather than an SEC, but it 

would take care of those kinds of situations 
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where there’s some ambiguity. 

DR. NETON: Personally I feel comfortable in 

looking at that although I don’t want to speak 

for Larry and/or our OGC folks who might want 

to look at the legality of the SEC and how all 

that plays out. But I --

MS. HOWELL: Can I just ask a question? I 

mean, if you -- I’m just trying to understand 

what you’re proposing here. It seems to me it 

would fall under the rubric of the dose 

constructions and not the SEC --

DR. MELIUS: Yeah. 

MS. HOWELL: -- because you’re having to 

look at a whole different set of parameters. 

DR. MELIUS: Well, it --

MR. ELLIOTT: You established the class. 

What you’re doing now is saying here’s a 

unique exposure scenario. Can we reconstruct 

it for that class and for the non-presumptive 

claims for that class? 

DR. MELIUS: Right now we go back, and we 

try to partly from dealing with the Department 

of Labor on some of these classes, we go back 

and we try to specify what we can, what NIOSH 

can construct --
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 DR. WADE: With sufficient accuracy. 

DR. MELIUS: -- with sufficient accuracy, 

blah, blah, blah. You know, do that, I’m not 

sure. I know we don’t try to be comprehensive 

about that because we don’t know everything at 

the time but there’s other stuff. But I think 

it helps in terms of when basically for DOL to 

recognize who’s in and who’s out and so forth. 

MR. ELLIOTT: We currently don’t reconstruct 

Ames’ doses this way I don’t think. 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah. 

MR. ELLIOTT: We don’t look at this 

exposure, this specific exposure --

DR. NETON: We’re not studying any internal 

exposure at all to anyone on a non-presumptive 

cancer at Ames for less than 250 days. But I 

don’t know if there’s anything that would 

prevent us from doing a partial dose 

reconstruction that --

MR. ELLIOTT: I don’t think there is. 

DR. NETON: -- for the people who it would 

make sense to do that. 

MR. ELLIOTT: If you have a plausible 

bounding approach. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, for partially you 
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don’t even need bounding. 

DR. NETON: Well, this would really be a, I 

guess it would be a partial, but --

DR. ZIEMER: It would be a kind of a 

bounding. 

DR. NETON: A bounding because you don’t 

want to, you have to be able to bound it in 

order to do that particular --

MR. ELLIOTT: Yeah, you have to come in with 

the maximum plausible. With anything less you 

run the risk of not achieving what you’re 

trying to accomplish. 

DR. NETON: And, yeah, these people are not 

members of a class anyways, not members of an 

SEC class by definition. 

MR. ELLIOTT: You’re trying to give them the 

best dose you can. 

DR. NETON: Well, except I think we still 

wouldn’t be able to do the routine, we 

couldn’t assign them anything but the incident 

exposure. 

DR. MAURO: That’s the only way you could do 

it. It’s interesting that, we’re claiming 

that we can do exposures from explosions but 

not from chronic exposures. 
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DR. NETON: Well --

DR. MAURO: I’m not used to thinking that 

way. 

DR. NETON: I mean, it’s a very discrete 

bounding event where you know how it happened 

initially, how much can you generate in the 

air, and you’ve done --

MR. ELLIOTT: Let’s be honest here. NIOSH 

can come forward and say this is how we would 

treat that. We can reconstruct dose with 

sufficient accuracy because we can apply a 

plausible bound here, and so we’re not going 

to add that component or that group to the 

class. And you also could say, well, let’s 

think about that. We don’t know that we can 

bound that dose, so we’re back to square one. 

If we put forward a class, if a class comes 

out of this, and we have to evaluate it, we 

say we can reconstruct that dose scenario for 

that class. 

DR. NETON: Well, if we can’t --

MR. ELLIOTT: Then the question becomes is a 

bounding scenario appropriate. 

DR. NETON: And then that’s appropriate. 

Then it goes through the SEC process, and the 
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SEC litmus test would be mere presence. Can 

you bound it with sufficient accuracy, and the 

answer is no, and then --

MR. ELLIOTT: Isn’t this the circular 

discussion we had about five years ago? Just 

around and around. It all brings us back to 

the same dilemma. 

DR. MAURO: But we never talked about it 

with respect to explosions. We never asked 

ourselves the question can we -- see, Hans 

worked his calculations solely to show that, 

yeah, you get pretty high doses with these 

explosions. But now we’re at the point where 

we say wait a minute --

MR. ELLIOTT: We talked about different 

scenarios and saying first of all, meeting the 

first prong of the test, hey, we can’t 

reconstruct dose. Now how do we determine 

health endangerment? And how do, where is 

there an instance where a presence might lead 

us to say that’s enough. And we never could 

come up with any -- because we kept wanting to 

go back and we’re trying to reconstruct a dose 

so that we can understand the risk. 

DR. MELIUS: Exactly, exactly. No, we did 
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go round, and so then we sort of threw out the 

criticality thing as sort of a --

MR. ELLIOTT: We had public comment on this 

all over the place, trying to identify a 

bright blue line here. 

DR. MELIUS: Right, and we ended up with 

saying let’s just keep the 250 days. 

Criticality was our way of dealing with that 

acute incident thing, but we didn’t think it 

through because we didn’t have an example and 

now we’re dealing with it. But I would even, 

you know, we think this is --

MR. ELLIOTT: Well, we had examples. We 

were trying to wrestle with it. 

DR. MELIUS: No, no, I --

MR. ELLIOTT: We didn’t do that in the 

public forum, in the Board forum. 

DR. MELIUS: But I’d also say that I think 

that this approach is worth exploring. I 

think it gets us the same thing with NTS, you 

know, what John was talking about now. 

DR. MAURO: We’re further along here. We’re 

further along at Ames than we are at NTS. 

DR. MELIUS: And that’s the way I would 

suggest to go forward is let’s try to make the 
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exposure part of this more plausible. I mean, 

is that something NIOSH should do? You want 

SC&A to do? We do it together? I mean, I 

don’t know. 

DR. NETON: They’ve got --

MR. ELLIOTT: They’ve brought it up to us to 

react to what we see Hans has delivered here. 

And if it makes sense to us to take it one 

step farther to show what Jim has been trying 

to explain that, you know, how you look at the 

risk from this leads you to a different place 

maybe than what Hans was thinking about. 

DR. BEHLING: Can I make a comment at this 

point, Dr. Melius? 

DR. MELIUS: We cut off your comment there. 

I apologize. 

DR. BEHLING: Let me go back to the issue of 

the argument that Dr. Neton has thrown out on 

the table repeatedly. And that is the issue 

of parity between a criticality accident that 

instantaneously exposes all tissues of the 

body, and therefore, for SEC reasons and the 

250-day issue, we’ll use that as a reference 

point. 

But the fact remains as the following: 
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We are giving currently SEC status to Ames 

Laboratory people for 22 cancers if they’ve 

worked there for 250 days as an aggregate. 

And so the question now is where’s the parity 

between that and the criticality issue? 

Because I’m looking at the 22 types of 

cancers, and they include things such as 

obviously thyroid cancer, male or female 

breast, esophagus and so on and so on. 

And clearly it’s understood that the 

exposure at Ames was dominated by internal 

exposure to uranium and thorium. And there’s 

probably no way in which you can come up with 

an understanding that things as breast cancer 

or thyroid cancer would have resulted from 

inhalation or ingestion of uranium and 

thorium. And so what separates the issue of 

those people who are excluded on the basis of 

250 days has nothing to do with the issue of 

criticality. 

It has simply to do with the 

likelihood that their exposure was less than 

what would have been an exposure for people 

who had at least 250 days. And that’s really 

the only meaningful comparison that we have to 
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look at in coming to some kind of a conclusion 

as to whether or not a period of employment 

less than 250 days should be considered for 

compensation. 

DR. NETON: Okay, Hans, this is Jim. I have 

two comments on that. One is I didn’t write 

the act, and those cancers were not put in 

there by us, so you’re not going to win any 

points by citing --

DR. BEHLING: Well, I’m just pointing out a 

few things that simply don’t make sense on the 

technical --

MR. ELLIOTT: And that was our argument for, 

a scientific argument for cancer-specific 

classes which we lost. 

DR. NETON: And in the second place I’d just 

point out that unfortunately or fortunately, 

however you want to look at it, the 

exceptionally high exposures similar to a 

criticality incident is in the regulation, and 

we can’t ignore that. 

DR. BEHLING: And I realize that, but the 

issue is also one again, you repeatedly bring 

out the issue of a certain dose and the 

deterministic effects associated, but this act 
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is not there to compensate people for 

suffering a deterministic effect. It’s there 

for cancer and ^. 

DR. NETON: I agree, but --

DR. ZIEMER: Deterministic effects are only 

clear indicators that the high doses occurred. 

DR. BEHLING: Yes. And, of course, they 

weren’t monitored. Going back also to an 

earlier discussion by Jim Neton, they were 

people who were assessed, who were employed at 

Ames who were assessed for kidney damage. And 

there are documentation for the fact that 

there was proteinuria and other effects that 

seem to indicate that these people suffered 

kidney, renal failure. 

DR. NETON: Right. But not complete renal 

failure I suspect. 

DR. BEHLING: Well, again, that’s the 

question. 

DR. NETON: I think the kidneys might shut 

down with some of these exposures that 

occurred ten times in a month, but --

DR. MELIUS: But just going back to the 

issue of the organ-specific SECs, the Board 

didn’t like that because it was where to draw 
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the line issue. 

MR. ELLIOTT: For better or worse, where’s 

the line? 

DR. MELIUS: It’s the same issue. We’ve 

always been reluctant to do that because it’s 

hard in a lot of ways. 

MR. ELLIOTT: We would be, I guess, ready to 

take Hans’ piece of work here and react to it. 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah, because I think making 

this, let’s call it plausible, look at 

alternative assumptions, sort of call it that 

way. It would be a way, I mean, it would 

really move us forward on both fronts. And 

one is can we think we can bound, can we do 

dose reconstructions on these. Or secondarily 

it gets us to furtherance of discussion on, 

you know, where’s the line I guess. Where’s 

the line relative to this, you know, where’s A 

and B situations, people situations, relative 

to some line even though we can’t define the 

line. 

DR. NETON: I think what I’m hearing is we 

need to determine among ourselves at OCAS that 

we can, if we can or not bound Ames exposure 

scenarios to the NTS incidents. And if we 
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believe we can, put a straw man out there that 

either is similar or not to what SC&A has put 

together. If we determine that we can’t, 

we’re sort of back to square one. But that 

it’s worth pursuing in my book. 

DR. MELIUS: Well, we also would have been 

some of the issues of these scenarios for 

Ames. 

DR. NETON: I don’t want to predict that we 

say we can. I feel like we might be able to 

go back and scratch our heads and think about 

this as well. 

DR. MELIUS: I don’t think it’s futile. I 

don’t think you’re just doing it for the 

exercise. I think it’s --

DR. NETON: To the credit of SC&A they’ve 

gone a long way towards mapping out the 

parameters here and what needed to be 

included. Can we cover all the bases? 

DR. MAKHIJANI: Jim, how would you determine 

the number of blowouts? 

DR. NETON: Well, that was what was in the 

back of my mind.. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: I think what Hans has done 

is a good exercise for one blowout, but --
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DR. NETON: But then, you know, you need to 

look at, I was thinking about going back and 

looking at some of the cases that also are in 

the SEC. Admittedly, that doesn’t cover all 

sins because we still have to go, you know, 

there’s other cases could come in the door. 

But, yeah, I think there’s something 

constructive to be learned from looking at the 

cases we have. What their employment duration 

was. I think you come up with a credible 

number of blowouts I think based on production 

records, something to that effect. I mean, 

you should be able to bound that somehow. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: I don’t know. It’s an 

issue. ^ issue than a blowout calculation 

itself. 

DR. NETON: Yeah, I think that would be the 

toughest issue to overcome is the number of 

blowouts. I think we might be able to all 

agree at some point how high, you know, it 

can’t be higher than X. 

DR. MELIUS: But we normally do what we call 

claimant friendly, I mean, I agree that 

there’s work to do to it, but I don’t think 

that’s insurmountable. 
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DR. MAURO: And if this could work here, it 

could work at NTS, too. 

DR. NETON: Well, I don’t know. 

DR. MAKHIJANI: It’s less defined. 

DR. MAURO: What we’ve done here -- think 

about it -- we’ve defined a scenario for an 

explosion. Now the question is can we define 

scenarios or range of different classes of 

scenarios that occurred or might have occurred 

at NTS where we could similarly place a 

plausible upper bound. That’s what we’re 

asking ourselves. 

DR. NETON: The problem at NTS is you’re 

dealing with almost a periodic table. Here 

you’ve got two nuclides, uranium and thorium, 

and what are the doses? And that’s pretty 

well defined. We started at NTS, and we read 

a guy had an iodine exposure. We got another 

guy who was grossly contaminated going through 

a cloud. My thought was well maybe come up 

with an upper bound on the total dose and then 

just throw it all into one organ, you know, 

the organ that developed cancer, and you might 

be able to bound it that way. And I thought 

the worst internal dose you can come up with 
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for a scenario is, say, ten rem. Well, it’s 

bounded then if you just give the guy his 

liver dose -- I don’t know. I’m not sure --

DR. MELIUS: This gets us around the point 

Paul brought up which worries me in Ames. We 

don’t want to get in the thing, well, you had 

to be there 240 days or something like that 

or, you know, at least four months. I mean, 

that kind of calculations, and so by doing 

dose reconstruction we’re just doing it based 

on the records, whatever you have. And there 

are some assumptions that are claimant 

friendly and bounding and so forth. You work 

off of that and then so forth. I mean, I 

think it has the added advantage to the extent 

it helps some of the people with non-SEC 

cancers. 

MR. ELLIOTT: I mean, that’s the biggest 

thing I’m taking away from today’s 

discussions. Here’s an opportunity maybe to 

look at helping those folks out. 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah, yeah. 

MR. ELLIOTT: We hadn’t thought about can we 

reconstruct exposures. 

DR. MELIUS: So, it’s good, and I’m 
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intrigued with NTS, too, but let’s see where 

it is different and more complicated, but 

it’s, let’s see where we go with it. 

MR. ELLIOTT: The interesting piece here is 

that it wouldn’t change the class definition 

as we see it right now. It would just help 

those non-presumptive. 

DR. MAURO: That couldn’t be helped before. 

DR. MELIUS: And we don’t undermine them. 

Anything else? 

ACTION ITEMS 

DR. MAURO: Does SC&A have an action item? 

DR. MELIUS: You have an action item with 

DTRA. And I think the first step in that is 

to, I guess one would be to look at the -- I 

know nothing about what DTRA had. 

DR. MAURO: Wanted the proposal, so maybe we 

can work out the details. 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah, in the proposal let’s do 

a three-way thing that moves us forward. 

DR. NETON: I’m more concerned about SC&A 

would have to access the DTRA doses, right? 

And those are not public record. 

DR. MAURO: Well, that could be a, yeah --

DR. NETON: You’d probably have to work 
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through us because --

DR. MAURO: We’re not doing any of that. 

DR. NETON: So we could work out something, 

the proposal first, I guess we’re going to 

look at the cases less than 250 days. We’ll 

profile them at NTS, and then we’re also going 

to evaluate the plausibility of doing a 

bounding analysis for the blowouts and see 

what happens from there. 

DR. ROESSLER: What’s the timeline? 

DR. NETON: That’s always the last question. 

DR. MELIUS: We’ll have the reports next 

week. 

DR. NETON: Some of us have use or lose 

government leave, but I don’t know. 

DR. ROESSLER: ^ 

DR. NETON: I don’t have to be involved in 

this. These calculations can be done by 

others. 

MR. ELLIOTT: I don’t know that we’re 

prepared to commit to a timeline because I’m 

not sure what, how many cases we’re going to 

have to look at. 

Do you have a sense of how long it’s 

going to take to --
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DR. MELIUS: Look it over and then come 

back. The DTRA thing I think is going to take 

DR. MAURO: Well, the proposal’s easy. 

DR. MELIUS: The proposal’s easy. 

DR. MAURO: Once we agree on the proposal, 

then we’ll have to figure out how long it’s 

going to take. 

DR. MELIUS: Okay, and then do that. And I 

think we have progress to report for the 

January meeting. 

DR. ZIEMER: We’re showing some kind of 

progress. 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah, and I think that’s good. 

Paul or Mark or anybody, any other 

comments? 

MR. ELLIOTT: I think if there’s any paper 

that’s generated on either OCAS source or SC&A 

here, we want to make sure that we get it 

distributed to everybody. I feel that this 

last round of your two documents only went to 

a select group of people. I ended up sharing 

it with the lawyers so I’d ask us to be 

diligent in the distribution of this that we 

use here. 
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DR. MAKHIJANI: I thought it was distributed 

to the working group. 

DR. NETON: The last one came from Dr. 

Melius for some reason. I never got it except 

for Larry gave it to --

DR. MAKHIJANI: But we agreed that Dr. 

Melius would send you the --

DR. MELIUS: I thought I sent them to you, 

too, but I could --

DR. NETON: Yeah, it didn’t come out from 

SC&A like it normally does which is to the 

entire working group. 

MR. ELLIOTT: I’m not raising this to blame 

anybody. I’m just saying --

DR. MELIUS: No, I sent it to the working 

group. I sent it to the working group, and 

the reason I was trying to be very careful, 

because I actually sent it to the working 

group with a note saying be careful. This is 

Privacy Act, you know, this is individual 

records. 

DR. NETON: You’re right. I forgot about 

that. 

DR. MELIUS: That was why I think it was --

MR. ELLIOTT: Well, that’s okay. 
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DR. MELIUS: I also might have typed your 

address in wrong or it bounced back. It 

happens to me all the time. 

MS. BEACH: Hey, Jim, this is Josie. I have 

a quick question for you. I wasn’t involved 

in the discussions three-to-five years ago, 

but are there any other sites that are going 

to come up under this besides the two we’ve 

been discussing today? 

DR. MELIUS: First of all, it didn’t start 

three-to-five years ago. It was, we’ve 

probably been working on it almost a couple 

years. 

MR. ELLIOTT: When NIOSH says three-to-five 

years ago that was internal discussions we 

were having in the development of the 

regulations. 

MS. BEACH: Okay. 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah, the only other site for, 

I understand, this has been mentioned, and I’m 

conflicted in the site so I don’t know the 

specifics of it, is the Apollo. 

DR. ZIEMER: The Pacific Proving Grounds. 

DR. MELIUS: And Pacific, that was the other 

one, yeah. 
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MS. BEACH: Okay, so there may be a couple 

more. 

DR. ZIEMER: It’s not restricted. 

DR. MELIUS: No, it’s not restricted, and 

what we’re trying to do --

DR. ZIEMER: The sites were just good 

examples. 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah, exactly, yeah. 

MR. ELLIOTT: Certainly we understand 

Fernald had these kind of explosions that Ames 

had. We understand that the gaseous diffusion 

plants had a different kind of release going 

on. We understand that in certain instances 

like Rocky Flats there were fires. 

And we talked about fires maybe being 

one of those kind of events that just presence 

should be examined under. So it’s not 

restricted, Josie, just to the two examples 

we’re talked about here today. Hopefully, 

they will illuminate yet how we would handle 

some of the other examples we’re not talking 

about. 

MS. BEACH: Right, thank you. 

DR. MELIUS: With that we’ll close. Thank 

you all. 
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1 (Whereupon, the meeting was adjourned at 

2 1:11 p.m.) 
___________________________________ 

162 

1 CERTIFICATE OF COURT REPORTER 

STATE OF GEORGIA 

COUNTY OF FULTON 

 I, Steven Ray Green, Certified Merit Court 

Reporter, do hereby certify that I reported the 

above and foregoing on the day of Nov. 29, 

2007; I, Steven Ray Green, then transcribed the 

proceedings, and it is a true and accurate 

transcript of the testimony captioned herein. 

 I further certify that I am neither kin 

nor counsel to any of the parties herein, nor 

have any interest in the cause named herein. 

 WITNESS my hand and official seal this the 

5th day of Nov., 2008. 

STEVEN RAY GREEN, CCR, CVR-CM, PNSC 

CERTIFIED MERIT COURT REPORTER 

CERTIFICATE NUMBER: A-2102