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 

THIRTY-SECOND MEETING 

ADVISORY BOARD ON 

RADIATION AND WORKER HEALTH 

VOL. II 

DAY TWO 

The verbatim transcript of the Meeting of the 

Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health held 

at the Westin Hotel, St. Louis, Missouri, on August 

25, 2005. 
 

2 

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C O N T E N T S 

August 25, 2005 

WELCOME AND OPENING COMMENTS 

DR. PAUL ZIEMER, CHAIR

DR. LEW WADE, EXECUTIVE SECRETARY 

REPORTS FROM SUBCOMMITTEE: 11 

SELECTION OF 4TH ROUND OF 20 DOSE RECONSTRUCTIONS 11 

DISCUSSION OF CANDIDATE SITE PROFILES FOR 

REVIEW BY SC&A 41 

BETHLEHEM SITE PROFILE 59 

REPORT FROM SUBCOMMITTEE: 

MALLINCKRODT SITE PROFILE REVIEW 67, 130 

CLOSED SESSION REPORT 127 

TASK FOUR SCOPE DISCUSSION 150 

GENERAL PUBLIC COMMENT 199 

COURT REPORTER’S CERTIFICATE 235 
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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. 

In the following transcript “off microphone” 

refers to microphone malfunction or speaker's neglect 

to depress "on" button. 
 

 

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 P A R T I C I P A N T S 

(By Group, in Alphabetical Order) 

BOARD MEMBERS 

CHAIR 

ZIEMER, Paul L., Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus 

School of Health Sciences 

Purdue University

Lafayette, Indiana 

EXECUTIVE SECRETARY 

WADE, Lewis, Ph.D.

Senior Science Advisor 

National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 

Washington, DC 

MEMBERSHIP 

ANDERSON, Henry A., M.D.

Chief Medical Officer 

Occupational and Environmental Health

Wisconsin Division of Public Health 

Madison, Wisconsin 

ESPINOSA, Richard Lee

Sheet Metal Workers Union Local #49 

Johnson Controls 

Los Alamos National Laboratory

Espanola, New Mexico 

GIBSON, Michael H.

President 

Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical, and Energy Union

Local 5-4200 

Miamisburg, Ohio 
 

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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 

MUNN, Wanda I.

Senior Nuclear Engineer (Retired)

Richland, Washington 

OWENS, Charles Leon

President 

Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical, and Energy Union

Local 5-550 

Paducah, Kentucky 

PRESLEY, Robert W.

Special Projects Engineer

BWXT Y12 National Security Complex

Clinton, Tennessee 

ROESSLER, Genevieve S., Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus 

University of Florida

Elysian, Minnesota 

STAFF/VENDORS 

LASHAWN SHIELDS, Committee Management Specialist, NIOSH

STEVEN RAY GREEN, Certified Merit Court Reporter 
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AUDIENCE PARTICIPANTS 

BEHLING, HANS, SC&A

BERRY, CHARLENE, MALLINCKRODT

BLOSSER, FRED, NIOSH

BROCK, DENISE, UNWW/MALLINCKRODT

CASE, DIANE L., DEPT. OF LABOR

COFFELT, EVELYN

CURTISS, RICK & JOANN

DOWNS, DEB, TITAN

DREY, KAY

DUGAN, PAUL, MALLINCKRODT

DUISEN, MARIE

ELLISON, CHRIS, NIOSH OCAS

FITZGERALD, JOSEPH, SC&A

GROVES, KEN, VBDR

HINNEFELD, STUART, NIOSH

HOMOKI-TITUS, LIZ, HHS

HOWELL, EMILY, HHS

IRWIN, MAMIE S.

KATZ, TED, NIOSH

KIMPAN, KATE, DADE MOELLER & ASSOC.

KOENEMANN, GEORGE J.

KOENIG, PHYLLIS, MCW

LIPSZTEIN, JOYCE, SC&A

LEISAR, KEN, ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

LYNCH, HELEN

MAKHIJANI, ARJUN, SC&A

MAURO, JOHN, SC&A

MCKEEL, DAN & LOUISE, VILLAGE IMAGE NEWS

MILLER, RICHARD, GAP

MITAS, JIM, OFFICE OF CONGRESSMAN AKIN

MITULSKI, JIM

MOSS, JOAN & GIL

NUGENT, MARY, GAO

OLSEN, DOROTHY, MALLINCKRODT

PRESLEY, LOUISE S., WIFE OF ROBERT PRESLEY

RANSPOTT, CHRISTINE

RANSPOTT, JOHN

ROSENTHAL, JAMES, MALLINCKRODT

SAMPSON, BOB, GAO

SCHWENNESEN, CLARENCE, UNWW 
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SCHAEFFER, D. MICHAEL, SAIC

STOPP, CARL

TENFORDE, THOMAS, NCRP

TOOHEY, RICHARD, ORAU

WILDHABER, SANDRA, MALLINCKRODT

YOUNG, OBIE

ZIEMER, MARILYN 
 

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 (8:45 a.m.) 

WELCOME AND OPENING COMMENTS 

 DR. ZIEMER: I'd like to call the meeting to 

order. Welcome to the 32nd meeting of the 

Advisory Board on Radiation Worker Health here 

in St. Louis, a town that seems to have become 

a second home for this Advisory Board. I would 

like to make a couple of the normal regular 

announcements and that is, first of all, to ask 

you to register your attendance in the 

registration book out in the foyer, if you've 

not already done so. Also, those members of 

the public who wish to address the Board in the 

public comment session later today, please sign 

up in the public comment book there in the 

foyer, as well. 

There's a table that includes many of today's 

handouts, plus other related materials. It's 

out in the foyer. Please avail yourselves of 

those materials. Also for members of the 

public, I'd like to tell you that there are 

NIOSH personnel here to assist individuals who 

may have specific problems with individual 

claims. Those individuals are at one of the 

tables out here in the foyer. They will be 
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here all day today and through noon tomorrow. 

At our last meeting Board member Mike Gibson 

was unable to be with us. He was here by phone 

but was not able to be here because of serious 

illness of his father. And I'm sorry to report 

to the Board that subsequent to that meeting 

Mike's father passed away. And we extend our 

sympathy to Mike Gibson and his family. 

 For today's meeting Larry Elliott -- who heads 

the OCAS program at NIOSH -- is unable to be 

here due to a health problem. Roy DeHart -- 

Board member Roy DeHart is traveling overseas 

and not able to be with us. 

Let me add one other footnote sort of to get us 

up-to-date on people sitting around the table 

here. Our court reporter, Ray Green, over here 

on my right, recently went to Vienna where he 

competed in what I will call the world Olympics 

of court reporting, competing with hundreds of 

people from all over the world, actually, and 

we're pleased to tell you that Ray came away 

with the silver medal -- top two in the world. 

Now Ray, if you're second, you've got to try 

harder. But we're very pleased and proud of 

Ray's accomplishments. 
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Now let me ask our Designated Federal Official, 

Lew Wade, if he has any additional comments as 

we get under way. 

 DR. WADE: Just some general comments. First a 

note to Ray, just because he has the silver 

medal, we won't pay him more in terms of his 

services to us. 

 MR. PRESLEY: And where are the minutes for the 

last meeting? 

 DR. WADE: But I bring you welcome -- Certainly 

I bring you welcome from Secretary Leavitt and 

the Director of CDC, Dr. Gerberding, and 

particularly John Howard. I thank you for your 

service and your coming here. 

I bring to mind -- to your mind the fact that 

this was sort of a special meeting we called to 

deal with the issue of the Mallinckrodt 

petition. We have expanded the agenda for some 

other issues, but that really is the business 

we've come here to do and to complete. I'll 

speak to a little bit more about that on Friday 

when we begin our deliberations on the SEC 

petition. 

But again I thank the Board members for their 

service and I thank all of you for coming and 
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participating in the people's business. 

REPORTS FROM SUBCOMMITTEE

 DR. ZIEMER: The first item on today's agenda 

deals with the outcomes of the subcommittee 

work from yesterday, and so I'd like to turn to 

that here initially. I'll take them a little 

bit out of order. 

SELECTION OF 4TH ROUND OF 20 DOSE RECONSTRUCTIONS 

I want to begin with the selection of the 

fourth round of 20 dose reconstructions. If 

you have in your booklet today -- and many of 

you were here for the subcommittee meeting 

yesterday. Not all of you were, but in the tab 

that's labeled 20 dose reconstructions there 

are a couple of tables, the first of which is 

the next set of 100 random cases that were 

provided to us to select from. And then there 

is a separate list which is a list of all 

completed cases that involve full dose 

estimations as opposed to overestimates or 

underestimates that come through the efficiency 

process. That list of all completed cases with 

full dose estimates may in fact include some of 

the random cases that are on the first list. 

The subcommittee is recommending that in the 
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next 20 cases the Board predominantly weight 

the selection in favor of cases that require 

full dose estimates and, where possible, cases 

where the probability of causation was in the 

range of 45 to 50 percent. Based on that, the 

subcommittee is recommending actually 16 cases 

from the full dose estimate list, and I'll 

identify those momentarily, plus four 

additional cases from the random selection 

list. 

Now let me identify the cases for the Board and 

then we'll have -- and this -- this comes as a 

recommendation from the subcommittee so it 

constitutes a motion before the Board, and we 

have the opportunity either to modify the 

recommendation or to accept it as given. Here 

than are the recommendations of the 

subcommittee, and I'm beginning -- to help you 

identify these, I'm beginning on the list 

called all completed cases with full dose 

estimates, the first page of that. Everybody 

have that? Okay, here are the cases. And I'll 

use the digits on the right under the ID 

number. All the IDs begin with 2005-08, and 

then a number beginning from 101 on forward. 
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The first case is case 105, a probability of 

causation listed as 44.56. It's a liver cancer 

from Savannah River. I'm just going to pause 

on each one here and make sure that everyone 

has a chance to record those. If I go too 

fast, slow me down. 

The second case is number 108, probability of 

causation 63.25 percent, a colon cancer from 

Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation -- 

or sometimes called NUMEC. 

The third case is 110, 48.16 percent 

probability of causation, a colon cancer from 

Savannah River site. 

Next, number 130 with 19.64 percent probability 

of causation, pancreatic cancer from Hanford. 

 Number 138, with 53.26 percent probability of 

causation, a colon cancer from Bridgeport 

Brass. 

Proceeding to the second page, number 155 with 

a probability of causation of 47.33, male 

genitalia, case is from Savannah River. 

Number 159, with a 29.52 percent POC, stomach 

cancer from Chapman Valve. 

 Number 176, 50.29 POC, respiratory, West Valley 

Demonstration Project. 
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On page three, number 201, a 50.81 POC, bladder 

cancer from Oak Ridge National Laboratory X-10. 

 Number 204, 23.02 POC, colon cancer from Y-12, 

Oak Ridge. 

 Number 216, 44.74 percent, thyroid cancer from 

Hanford. 

On page four, number 234, 19.65 POC, bladder 

cancer from Mound. 

 Number 253, 33.80 POC, esophagus, Jessop Steel. 

Number 256, a 50.00 POC, melanoma, skin, basal 

cell, Hanford. 

On page five, number 262, a 39.19 POC, acute 

myeloid leukemia, Heppenstall Company. 

And number 264, male genitalia, 27.85 percent, 

from the Y-12 plant, Oak Ridge. 

Now that should be 16 cases from that list, and 

now going back to the straight random list, the 

following additional four cases. On the first 

page of the random list, number 010, 38.16 POC, 

non-melanoma skin, squamous cell, from 

Pinellas. 

 Number 011, 32.78, pancreas, from Feed 

Materials Production Center. 

 Number 017, with 50.55 POC, non-melanoma skin, 

basal cell, Nevada Test Site. 
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 And finally number 035, with 26.62 POC, breast 

cancer, Los Alamos. 

 Those then constitute the 20 cases recommended 

by the subcommittee for dose reconstruction 

review by our contractor as the next 20 cases. 

Now let me ask if there's any discussion or 

questions from members to this motion. 

Yes, Leon Owens. 

 MR. OWENS: Dr. Ziemer, I was unable to attend 

the subcommittee meeting yesterday, but I 

notice that Lawrence Livermore -- you know, we 

met -- the Advisory Board met in that area and 

had very good attendance at our meetings and 

there was a lot of interest in that area. I'm 

just wondering, was there any thought to 

including a dose reconstruction from that 

facility? 

 DR. ZIEMER: I don't think it was intentionally 

excluded, it just -- I'm actually looking to 

see. We were trying to spread the things 

around a bit. I'm looking on the full dose 

estimation list to see if there were any -- and 

particularly in the range of interest up in -- 

where we could, up in the 45 -- 

 DR. ANDERSON: I don't see any. 
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 MR. GRIFFON: Yeah, there weren't any. 

DR. ANDERSON: There aren't any. 

 DR. TOOHEY: Dr. Ziemer, can I comment on that? 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yes, Rich. 

 DR. TOOHEY: We don't have final approval on 

Livermore site profile yet, so the only 

Livermore cases that have been done, as best I 

know, are the complex-wide maximum dose 

estimates, which they've already looked at 

plenty of, so I think the feeling was stay away 

from too many more of those. 

 DR. ZIEMER: On the random list -- I don't know 

if any showed up even on the random list, 

'cause there aren't that many Livermore ones 

done yet and that -- but they will. There 

certainly will be opportunity beyond 

(unintelligible), it's certainly a valid 

question and at some point as we proceed and 

start to fill in our matrix, we have to look at 

those that have not been sampled and pick them 

up. So -- and Mark, you have a comment on 

that? 

 MR. GRIFFON: I just wanted to say, Leon, we 

did -- out of the first 60 we did have two 

cases from Lawrence Livermore that were 
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overestimates, so I didn't think we wanted to -

- you know, that would argue to wait for the 

best-estimate technique to review another case, 

yeah. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Any other comments, 

questions? 

 (No responses) 

Let me ask then if -- is the Board ready to 

vote on this motion to affirm the 

recommendation of the subcommittee? 

 MS. MUNN: Yes. 

 DR. ZIEMER: It appears that we're ready to 

vote. I'll then call the question. 

All in favor of this recommendation, say aye? 

 (Affirmative responses) 

 Any opposed? 

 (No responses) 

 Any abstentions? 

 (No responses) 

Just for clarification, Dr. Wade, individuals 

are not required to abstain because there are 

individuals from the facility they're 

associated with on this list. Is that not 

correct? 

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decisions. They don't need to talk about 

specific assignment. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. The motion carries, 

and thank you. That takes care of that action. 

Then we had a discussion on future candidate 

site profiles. 

 DR. WADE: Do we want to assign Board members 

to these particular cases that we've just -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: Oh, yes, we do have to do that. 

But let us complete the subcommittee 

recommendations, then we'll have to come back 

and we'll have teams for these 20 cases. So 

keep -- keep that before you there. 

The next item was the discussion on candidate 

site profiles. There is a tab in your booklet 

called candidate site profiles, if you will 

turn to that. And here the subcommittee is 

making a recommendation that we identify for 

the contractor the next group of site profiles 

to be addressed. This presumably would be in 

the next year, and we -- we were proceeding on 

the basis that we would try to identify, for 

example, the next six. It turned out that we 

had the six, and then we added a couple of 

additional ones that are sort of in the queue, 
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as it were. Let me identify those for you. 

They are as follows -- well, let me also 

indicate, just for the record, site profiles 

that our contractor has completed. They are 

Hanford, INEL, NTS, Rocky Flats -- or almost 

completed. They're either completed or well 

along, let me use -- put it in those terms. 

Hanford, INEL, NTS, Rocky Flats, Savannah 

River, Y-12 --

 DR. WADE: Bethlehem. 

 DR. ZIEMER: -- Bethlehem Steel, Mallinckrodt, 

Iowa Ammunition Plant and -- is that it? 

 MR. GRIFFON: Is that nine? 

 DR. WADE: I believe that was. 

 DR. ZIEMER: That's nine. Right, that's it. 

Okay, here are the recommendations for the next 

group. We have -- just take them in the order 

they are on the list. This is not necessarily 

the order in which they would be done, nor is 

it a priority order for the Board. It's simply 

the group. Fernald, Los Alamos National Lab -- 

LANL, Mound, X-10 Oak Ridge, Argonne West, 

Pinellas -- hang on a minute -- let me just 

backtrack a minute. The first four -- Fernald, 

Los Alamos, Mound and X-10 -- are in the first 
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group of six. Also in that group was 

Bridgeport Brass and -- I have Combustion 

Engineering. Is that --

 MS. MUNN: I have Pinellas. 

 DR. WADE: I think it was Pinellas. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Oh, it was Pinellas, yes, yes. 

did -- yes, Pinellas was six. Okay, my notes 

are... Then the two additional ones, I believe 

 DR. WADE: Argonne West. 

 MS. MUNN: Argonne and LLNL. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Argonne West and -- 

 MS. MUNN: Livermore. 

 DR. WADE: Livermore. 

 DR. ZIEMER: -- Lawrence Livermore. I had 

Combustion, then crossed it out. So to make 

sure the Chair has it correctly, Fernald, Los 

Alamos, Mound, X-10, Bridgeport and Pinellas 

are the six, and then the additional ones from 

the queue are Argonne West and Lawrence 

Livermore. That is the motion before the Board 

then, to confirm those six. Jim. 

 DR. MELIUS: Yeah, I wasn't at that part of the 

meeting. What is meant by the additional ones? 

I guess --

I 
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 DR. ZIEMER: Well, we -- we said we were going 

to identify six. And for example, the 

contractor, after our -- after we determined 

what the workload is next year, there may be 

six. If there are more, or even if there 

aren't, the other two are sort of the next two 

in the queue. 

 DR. MELIUS: Okay. I understand. 

 DR. ZIEMER: And in that sense, there is a 

priority. Those first six are the first set -- 

the priority. The next two are in the queue on 

down the road as we get to it. 

 DR. WADE: Right, now in the closed -- it'll be 

a closed session today where the Board will 

decide upon the work for the contractor next 

year. We had asked the contractor for a 

proposal for six, and we have that in hand. 

You have that in your files. It's quite 

possible when you look at the totality of that, 

you might want to fund more or less site 

profile work. This way we would at least have 

an opportunity to look at another two, should 

the Board decide to go in that direction. 

 DR. MELIUS: Can someone explain to me just -- 

some of these appear to still be underway at 
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ORAU, or large sections of them are, and I'm 

trying to understand now how that affects their 

placement on this list. For example, Pinellas 

-- there seems to be large sections of that 

that are still under -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah. Well, we heard from Rich 

yesterday that Pinellas is very close to 

completion, I believe. Is that correct, Rich -

- Rich Toohey. 

 MS. MUNN: That's what he said. 

 DR. TOOHEY: Let me check my list. We have the 

X-ray and the environmental sections approved. 

The site description and internal and external 

dosimetry sections are in comment resolution. 

So yeah, it's reasonably close. 

 DR. MELIUS: How about LANL? Well, excuse me, 

not LANL, Lawrence Livermore? 

 DR. TOOHEY: Livermore? The site description 

is approved. X-ray, environmental, internal 

and external dose are in comment resolution, 

and the two asterisks mean we have provided our 

responses to OCAS -- comments back to OCAS, so 

they're doing the final review and approval on 

those. And may be another round of comments, 

which is not unusual. 
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 DR. ZIEMER: I think our feeling, though -- 

 DR. TOOHEY: They're close. 

 DR. ZIEMER: These are both pretty far along, 

and since they are in the trailing group, 

certainly by the time the first six were done, 

these two would certainly be ready. 

 DR. MELIUS: Yeah, but some of my concern is 

related to do we have them -- the placement in 

the trailing group versus the first six, since 

I didn't have the benefit of some of this 

information. Before you sit down, Dick, could 

you just brief me on the Bridgeport Brass and 

Combustion Engineering? According to the 

information I have, all of the Bridgeport Brass 

is -- you're working on, and nothing's being 

done on Combustion Engineering, according to 

this table. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Combustion is not on the list. 

 DR. MELIUS: Oh, okay. 

 DR. TOOHEY: Bridgeport Brass, again, is in 

final comment resolution. I think it's very 

close. We've given a revised copy back to OCAS 

for their approval. And yeah, you're right, 

Combustion Engineering isn't -- isn't on the 

current list. 
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 DR. MELIUS: Okay. Does anybody have 

information on the number of active -- pending 

cases at these various facilities? 

 DR. TOOHEY: Unfortunately, not with me. I can 

get it for you via Blackberry if you want -- 

 DR. MELIUS: Did the subcommittee consider that 

in terms of -- I mean it would seem to me that 

-- Lawrence Livermore, since we have a lot -- a 

lot pending. I don't know off the top of my 

head about Pinellas. 

 DR. WADE: There's an attach--

 DR. TOOHEY: We've got Livermore. 

 DR. WADE: I think your -- is -- we have that 

material. I don't know if it's in the booklet, 

however. Stu? 

 DR. ZIEMER: While they're looking for that, a 

couple of these are on the list because of 

concerns about getting the work done while 

there are still people around, such as Mound. 

One of them, Pinellas, is very different from 

the other sites and that's the reason it shows 

up on this list. 

 DR. TOOHEY: Okay, we have 537 active cases 

from Livermore. And what were the other sites? 

I can get them and --
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 DR. MELIUS: Well, Pinellas. 

 DR. TOOHEY: Pinellas is on the order of 300, 

but I don't remember the exact number. 

 DR. MELIUS: Bridgeport? 

 DR. TOOHEY: Okay. 

 DR. MELIUS: There actually is a list of cases 

as of the end of December of '04 that in the 

attach-- the next tabs over under our site 

profile -- yeah. 

 DR. WADE: This material is in here. 

 DR. MELIUS: Yeah, okay. I mean I think that 

would reflect pretty closely -- at least 

relatively -- where we stand, so... 

 DR. TOOHEY: And if you -- okay, from December 

'04, which we were at about 18,000 cases at 

that point, we're pretty close to 20,000 now, 

so just --

 DR. MELIUS: Yes. 

 DR. TOOHEY: -- I'd say roughly at ten percent. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Bridgeport is listed at 74 cases. 

 DR. MELIUS: Right. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Any additional questions, 

comments, amendments? 

 MR. MILLER: Dr. Ziemer? 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yes. 
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 MR. MILLER: I realize that your comment period 

is going to follow after this discussion, but I 

just wondered if I could offer one comment on 

the AWE selection? 

 DR. ZIEMER: Please proceed. 

 MR. MILLER: This is Richard Miller. The 

Bridgeport Brass facility, which was one of the 

first extrusion facilities -- they had a giant 

press there and they basically extruded uranium 

and it's a straight natural uranium facility, 

and I -- I just -- in the course of looking 

over what's been approved, at least, and what's 

in the queue in terms of volume of cases, the 

Linde Ceramics plant, which is about 160 cases 

pending, is a very interesting and complex 

plant. It's not a traditional uranium 

extrusion or rolling processing plant like 

we've seen with Bethlehem and -- and some of 

the others. It actually resembles more of the 

complex issues we have at Mallinckrodt. They 

processed the African ores, as well, there, 

dealt with the pitchblendes. And -- and I just 

would suggest if, in terms of complexity and 

interest -- also 'cause there's some 

significant interest in that part of the state 
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at this facility -- it might be worth taking a 

look at it in lieu of Bridgeport Brass since 

Bridgeport Brass has had -- you know, it's -- 

it's a straight natural uranium plant and -- 

enough said. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you, Richard. Jim? 

 DR. MELIUS: Yeah, I would also -- I would 

suggest that -- I mean that we move Lawrence 

Livermore up in the queue, so to speak, and 

move Pinellas down. Again, Lawrence Livermore 

I think -- there's more cases there, more 

pending cases there, more complicated facility, 

I think would be much more helpful to have a 

site profile review of that than -- I think 

that the Pinellas site is much more 

straightforward, but... 

 DR. ZIEMER: I think you're offering a motion 

to amend, that we in essence exchange the order 

of Pinellas and Lawrence Livermore, which would 

move Lawrence up into the first six and 

Pinellas into the next two. 

 DR. MELIUS: Uh-huh, yeah. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Is there a second to that? 

 (No responses) 

 No second? 
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 MR. OWENS: I'll second it. 

 DR. ZIEMER: There is a second. Discussion on 

that move. I don't know whether it's friendly 

or not friendly, but just to make it. You've 

got some questions, Wanda? 

 MS. MUNN: My memory from our discussion 

yesterday is that Pinellas was chosen 

specifically because it was one of the two 

sites that's being rapidly closed down and will 

have very few knowledgeable personnel -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: That was one of the reasons that 

Pinellas was -- that, plus it's a very 

different site -- primarily a tritium site. 

 MR. PRESLEY: Right. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Robert Presley. 

 MR. PRESLEY: That's exactly right, plus the 

fact that it's -- if we don't get it now it's 

going to be hard to find some people down there 

to even talk to about what went on down there. 

Livermore --

 DR. ZIEMER: I guess you're speaking against 

the motion. 

 MR. PRESLEY: I'm speaking against the motion. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Any others? 

 DR. MELIUS: I would offer a -- well, let's 
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deal with this one first. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Any other comments? Let's vote on 

this amendment. If you vote yes, you're voting 

to move on Lawrence Livermore up and Pinellas 

back into that last group of two. 

All in favor, aye? 

 (Affirmative responses) 

 Any opposed? 

 (Negative responses) 

I'll declare that the -- opposed, no. I'll 

declare the no’s have it and that the motion 

fails. 

Okay, Jim, you have another comment? 

 DR. MELIUS: Yeah, I would like to offer 

another motion which is that we move the Linde 

-- replace Bridgeport Brass with Linde site. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Motion to replace Bridgeport with 

Linde. Is there a second to that? 

 MR. GRIFFON: Second. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Now discussion. 

 DR. MELIUS: Yeah. I would just like to point 

out in some of the meetings we've had out in -- 

to deal with -- actually to deal with the 

Bethlehem site, there have been representatives 

there from Linde and there is a lot of concern 
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about the site. As Richard Miller pointed out, 

it's a complex site and I think it's going to 

be controversial when we deal with it and I 

think it would be helpful to have a site 

profile review conducted, the sooner the better 

-- number of cases and also given the 

complexity of the site. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Other comments, pro or 

con? Anyone wish to speak against the motion? 

 (No responses) 

If not, we're ready to vote. Wanda? 

 MS. MUNN: I guess I would speak against the 

motion simply because this was the discussion -

- not this specific discussion and of course we 

didn't have the benefit of Mr. Miller's input, 

but this was the discussion that took place in 

our subcommittee, and I feel that if we are 

going to make these decisions -- obviously it's 

the full Board's prerogative to do so, but the 

purpose in our subcommittee meeting is to try 

to iron these things out and we did discuss 

this matter earlier. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Anyone else wish to 

speak for the motion or against? Jim. 

 DR. MELIUS: Yeah, I would just point out that 
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-- again, not all of us were at the 

subcommittee meeting and I'm trying to -- I'm 

also looking for the rationale. And in the 

case of Lawrence Livermore and Pinellas, you 

know, Bob provided a rationale which I hadn't -

- hadn't heard before and understand and -- do 

that. I -- again, in the case of Linde, I'm 

somewhat -- I mean I think I would prefer -- I 

am obviously supporting my motion, but at the 

same time if there's a strong count reason to 

it other than procedural, then I'm willing to 

listen to that. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Mark. 

 MR. GRIFFON: I mean I think, having been the 

one to offer Bridgeport in the subcommittee -- 

I mean it was really based on my -- I didn't 

have the numbers in front of me and I was -- I 

was under the belief that there were quite a 

few cases there. That was part of my 

rationale. But I'm persuaded by the additional 

information that Linde's probably, you know, 

just as good to do. And I don't think we 

should skip Bridgeport Brass, but I think Linde 

can move up in the queue. I don't have a 

problem with it is what I'm saying. 
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 DR. ZIEMER: I would point out that Linde has 

more than twice as many cases as Bridgeport, if 

that's of interest to the -- to the Board. Are 

you ready to vote on this amendment? If you 

vote yes you are -- you are voting to replace 

Bridgeport on the list with Linde Ceramics. 

All in favor, say yes. 

 (Affirmative responses) 

Okay -- caught you off guard, didn't I? Any 

no’s? 

 (No responses) 

Okay, the motion carries, so the amendment -- 

or the motion before us now is the original 

list, except for the replacement of Bridgeport 

by Linde. 

Is there any further discussion? 

 (No responses) 

Are you ready to vote then on the main motion? 

It appears that we're ready to vote on the main 

motion. 

All in favor say aye. 

 (Affirmative responses) 

 Any opposed, no. 

 (No responses) 

 Any abstentions? 
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 (No responses) 

Motion carries. Thank you very much. 

 DR. WADE: Just again to put on our list of 

things to do before we finish, we would need 

some order to -- of these so we can get the 

contractor working on several immediately, so 

that's something we need to do. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Do we need to do that here now? 

 DR. MELIUS: I would think it would be better 

to do in the session when we talk about the 

actual contract, I think -- because the order 

may change, depending on the scope of the... 

 DR. ZIEMER: Well, what I'm really asking -- 

let me rephrase it. I'm asking whether we 

shouldn't -- it seems to me we should do it in 

open session once we establish how many cases -

- is there any reason we have to do -- it seems 

to me we're almost obligated to make that 

selection in open session so that there's a 

public record of why we chose different sites. 

 DR. WADE: We can do it after the closed 

session, if that's your preference. We could 

do it --

 DR. ZIEMER: Or -- or we can -- we can order 

these and then once the priority's established 
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on however many we select and the work order 

establishes it. It doesn't seem to me it's a 

closed-door issue. 

 DR. MELIUS: I agree with that part of it. I 

would just -- I think I'd feel a little bit 

more comfortable doing it after understood the 

scope of our contract and -- the order might be 

different depending on how many we could fit 

in. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Right, exactly, and we can wait 

until tomorrow to do that. 

 DR. MELIUS: Yeah, yeah. 

 DR. WADE: I just wanted to get it on the... 

 DR. ZIEMER: We do need to give the contractor 

the priority order or the rank. 

 DR. MELIUS: And just that -- I think we also -

- there may be some personnel issues with the 

contractor that would also affect the order in 

terms of who they have available in terms of 

skill sets and so forth. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Right, and they may have input for 

us on that, as well. 

 DR. WADE: We might ask John Mauro to begin to 

think about that and inform our discussion 

possibly today or tomorrow. 
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 DR. ZIEMER: We had a discussion on the path 

forward on the Bethlehem site profile. I think 

-- I know that Dr. Melius has a -- I think has 

a phone call at 9:30 and he also has the 

motion. Perhaps what we can do in the meantime 

is to go ahead and we can do our team 

assignments for the 20 cases. Now going to 

propose that insofar as possible we maintain 

the same teams that we had before, and we'll 

just move in order down through these and if 

there's any conflicts then we will just skip 

that team and move on ahead. So we have 20 

cases --

 DR. WADE: Team assignments. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, we're going to do the 20 

team assignments on the cases. Do you remember 

who your team members are? 

 DR. ANDERSON: Absolutely. 

 MR. PRESLEY: Yes, sir. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Do you remember your team num-- 

DR. ANDERSON: This is the barbecue team. 

 DR. ZIEMER: -- your team number? 

 DR. ANDERSON: I don't know. 

 DR. ZIEMER: We have a team of Presley and 

Anderson, which today will be team one. Mark, 
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who are you with? 

 MR. GRIFFON: With Tony. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay, we need a new person for 

Mark. Let me get the other ones here first. 

Okay, let's see, Mike, you and I are on a team, 

so let's -- team two will be Gibson and Ziemer. 

Gen Roessler? 

 DR. ROESSLER: And Roy DeHart. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Huh? 

DR. ROESSLER: Roy. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Roy DeHart, Roessler and DeHart. 

Okay. And Leon, you and Wanda, that'll be team 

four, Owens and Munn. 

Was Melius with Espinosa, do we know? 

 DR. ROESSLER: That should be it. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Melius/Espinosa. Do any of you 

want to also be on the group with Mark? Well, 

that's not a good way -- who is willing to 

sacrifice? 

DR. ROESSLER: I'll be with Mark. 

 MR. OWENS: We will. 

DR. ROESSLER: Yeah. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Both of you? 

MR. OWENS: It doesn't matter. He can be with 

us -- our group. 
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 DR. ROESSLER: Yes. 

 DR. WADE: I think -- I think Paul is just 

thinking of a sixth team. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, team six. One of you -- you 

want to do it, Gen, or Leon? 

 DR. WADE: This is double duty. 

MR. OWENS: Yeah, I'll -- I'll do it with Mark. 

 DR. ZIEMER: So you'll have an extra couple of 

cases. 

We'll start with the full dose estimation cases 

 DR. WADE: Keep in mind your conflicts as we go 

through this. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Now each group is going to end up 

with three cases and one group will have an 

extra one. Team one, Anderson and Presley. 

DR. ANDERSON: Should we take the first three? 

 MR. PRESLEY: We'll take the first three. 

 DR. ZIEMER: You can take the first three? 

 MR. PRESLEY: I don't see any problems there. 

 DR. ZIEMER: If you have no problems, let's do 

-- that's 105, 108, and 111. 

 MR. PRESLEY: 111 or 110? 

 DR. ZIEMER: I'm sorry, 110. Okay, team two, 

Gibson and Ziemer, will be 130, 138, and 145. 
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Okay, Mike? 

 MS. MUNN: 155. 

 DR. ZIEMER: I'm sorry, 155, thank you -- 130, 

138 and 155 for Gibson/Ziemer. 

Okay, Roessler and DeHart, 159, 176 and 201. 

 DR. ROESSLER: That looks okay. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Owens/Munn, 204 -- I'm 

sorry -- yes, 204 --

 MS. MUNN: I can't do 216. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay, skip 216 and look at 234 and 

253. 

 MS. MUNN: Fine. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Then Melius/Espinosa will pick up 

216, 256 and 262. 

 Griffon/Owens -- 

 MS. MUNN: 264. 

 DR. ZIEMER: -- 264. I would like to have Mark 

involved in a full slate of these. Can a 

couple of you offer to -- I'm going to ask team 

one, will you lend Mark one of yours? 

 DR. ANDERSON: Sure. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay, I'm going to move 110 over 

and we'll pick up another one. 

 MS. MUNN: Are you going on to the other four? 

 DR. ZIEMER: We will in a moment. I'm making -
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- I'm just moving one here. I'm moving 110 

from Anderson/Presley to Griffon/Owens. I want 

to give Mark the opportunity to review three of 

the full dose cases. And then -- I don't know, 

how about -- let me pick up 262 from 

Melius/Owen (sic) and move that over there, if 

that's agreeable. 

 MR. GRIFFON: That's fine with me. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Now let's go back to the 

other cases. 

 MR. PRESLEY: Henry and I have no problem with 

110 -- or 010. 

(Whereupon, Mr. Espinosa joined the Board at 

the table.) 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Then 0110 will go to 

Anderson/Presley. We'll put -- 105 we'll give 

to Melius/Espinosa. 

UNIDENTIFIED: (Off microphone) 0105? 

 DR. ZIEMER: It's just -- I'm sorry. How many 

zeroes -- I'm looking at the wrong page here. 

 DR. WADE: The first one was just 10. 

 DR. ZIEMER: 0010. Then 011 we'll give to 

Melius/Espinosa. 

Now we have two additional cases. I don't want 

to give those to Owens 'cause he's already got 
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six. 

DR. ROESSLER: We'll take one. We'll take 10--

017. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay, Roessler will take 17 -- 

017? 

DR. ROESSLER: Uh-huh, and DeHart. 

 DR. ZIEMER: That's Roessler/DeHart. And then 

 DR. ANDERSON: We'll take the next one. I 

think --

 MR. PRESLEY: I can't take (unintelligible). 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay, then Anders--

DR. ANDERSON: You can't? Okay -- no, he 

can't. 

 MR. PRESLEY: No, I can't. 

 DR. ZIEMER: No, he can't. We have 035, maybe 

we can give that to Munn. 

DR. ROESSLER: Yeah. But then that gives it to 

Leon, too, and he's -- he's on -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: Oh, I'm sorry. Okay. Yeah, let's 

-- let's give that to Mike and Ziemer, 

Gibson/Ziemer, 035. 

Now that covers our cases. Did you get those 

to --

 DR. WADE: I did. 
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 DR. ZIEMER: -- make sure we have those? And 

it looks like, John -- you guys are keeping 

track of this, too, so --

DR. MAURO: (Off microphone) (Unintelligible) 

 DR. ZIEMER: -- yeah, so you know who the 

principals are in this. 

 DR. WADE: For the record, I'll have legal 

counsel look at the conflict statements and 

this decision just to -- in a calm moment and 

make sure we're okay. I think we are, but for 

the record, we'll do that. 

(Pause)

DISCUSSION OF CANDIDATE SITE PROFILES FOR 

REVIEW BY SC&A 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Another item from the 

subcommittee had to do with dealing with the 

path forward on the procedures review. We had 

a motion basically asking that our -- asking 

that NIOSH proceed to respond to the SC&A 

report to identify those procedures which are 

still in effect -- 'cause some are no longer 

used -- and in any event to begin to develop 

their responses to the SC&A report procedures. 

I don't have the exact wording of the motion. 

In fact -- Mark, was it your -- did you make 

the motion? I think we would have to go back 
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to the recorded minutes to get the exact 

wording, but the sense of the motion is to ask 

NIOSH to proceed with their comments on the 

SC&A report on the procedures review. 

 MR. GRIFFON: In the normal resolution process. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Right, and then there would be a 

comment resolution opportunity. So that is the 

sense of the motion, if the Board is willing to 

take action. That comes as a motion before us. 

 DR. WADE: Could I add to that? 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yes. 

 DR. WADE: I do think that first there was this 

bifurcation that you wanted to take place, and 

that was to look at the items that were on the 

matrix and look at those that were still 

procedures to be used -- 

 MS. MUNN: Yes. 

 DR. WADE: -- and then proceed with the 

resolution for those procedures. For those 

procedures that have now been superseded by 

workbooks, I don't think you were recommending 

that NIOSH respond to those procedures. 

 MR. GRIFFON: Right --

 DR. ZIEMER: Well --

 MR. GRIFFON: -- just to indicate that, right. 
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 DR. ZIEMER: To indicate which of those, and 

then we would be able to determine in fact 

whether we wanted them to go back, because 

there were dose reconstructions that may have 

been done under those procedures, and insofar 

as that might have affected previous actions, 

the Board may wish to have something done. But 

at least you make the determination which 

procedures are still in effect and then do the 

resolution on those. So that is the sense of 

the motion. 

 Are you willing to take formal action now based 

on the sense of that motion? Okay. Any 

discussion? 

 Okay, then I'll call the question. 

All in favor of that process for moving forward 

on the procedures review process, please say 

aye. 

 (Affirmative responses) 

 Any opposed? 

 (No responses) 

 Any abstentions? 

 (No responses) 

The motion carries. 

 DR. WADE: I would like to just have a brief 
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clarifying discussion so we're sure that our 

instructions are clear to NIOSH. So my 

understanding is NIOSH is to take the entire 

array of items that have been raised that -- 

all the items in that matrix -- and identify 

those that are still in place and then identify 

those that are not in place. For those that 

are in place, to proceed with their comments. 

For those not in place, to bring that back to 

the Board and the Board will then decide how to 

proceed. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah. 

 MR. GRIFFON: Yeah, that's exactly it except 

for one -- first step I think is that SC&A has 

to complete the matrix. What we've been 

provided, as I said, was a partial -- they 

didn't quite get through the whole -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, that (unintelligible) -- 

 MR. GRIFFON: They're basically --

 DR. ZIEMER: -- (unintelligible) the motion. 

It was just understood that SC&A will give the 

full matrix to NIOSH to work with. 

 MR. GRIFFON: Right. 

 DR. ZIEMER: That's almost done, I think. We 

had most of the items on the matrix already. 
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 MR. GRIFFON: And the matrix represents -- I 

mean it's going to represent all the findings 

in the binder -- task three that we got. 

They're just trying to slow it down to make it 

easier for discussion. 

 DR. WADE: Okay, could we have a brief 

discussion of time and timing, just so that we 

-- we -- we have expectations and we can see 

the people meet those expectations. So I guess 

the first step is SC&A's completion of the 

elements. 

 DR. MAURO: We're probably about two weeks away 

of having the complete matrix in your hands for 

you to work with. Bear in mind the matrix will 

have a walk-back to the report, so it really 

represents a tool to facilitate the process, 

notwithstanding reading the report itself. The 

same information is there, except in an 

abbreviated form in the matrix. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, the matrix is just a tool to 

help track the issues. 

 DR. WADE: Okay, and then once that's done and 

in NIOSH's hands, then NIOSH needs to undertake 

its activity, which is to identify those that 

are still in place and used, identify those are 
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not in place, and then respond for those that 

are in place. Dr. Hinnefeld, what say you? 

 MR. HINNEFELD: Dr. Hinnefeld is my brother and 

my sister. I'm Stu. Probably some four weeks' 

worth of effort, I would think, to provide some 

response to all this, given the fact that we 

don't have to wait two weeks to start. You 

know, we have --

 DR. ZIEMER: Right, you have the report -- 

 MR. HINNEFELD: -- a pretty long list -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

 MR. HINNEFELD: We have the report. We have a 

pretty long list of findings already nicely 

summarized. The matrix is very helpful. 

 DR. ZIEMER: It may be just a matter of 

plugging it into the matrix. 

 MR. HINNEFELD: Right. I would suspect that it 

may be on the order of about four weeks. 

 DR. WADE: Four weeks from now. 

 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Which puts us in the 

situation to have this brought to our next 

Board meeting. 

 MR. HINNEFELD: Now we won't have gone through 

-- I don't think we'll be through that six-step 
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process at that point. Our normal -- normal 

process is for us to provide our initial 

response back in writing, and then to have 

these convergence meetings in terms of making 

sure we both are understanding what the other 

one is saying. And then our response might be 

changed in some fashion based on -- on that 

discussion. So if we're talking about being at 

a sort of a convergent -- you know, having a 

convergent opinion of responding to a -- a full 

understanding of what the comment was, I think 

we're going to go some period beyond that. And 

then that will depend upon our respective 

schedules and being able to -- to get together 

and either talk in person or a conference call 

or whatever. 

 DR. WADE: I'd like to get the sense of the 

Board as to -- I mean we're looking at a 

meeting in mid-October, which is six weeks from 

now. And you've heard the two weeks and the 

four weeks. So what would be your pleasure? 

 DR. ZIEMER: Mark? 

 MR. GRIFFON: I mean I think that we should -- 

I think we have another workgroup item that we 

talked about yesterday, potentially, and I 
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think we should try to schedule a workgroup 

meeting in four or four and a half or five 

weeks, you know, to have them bring it back to 

that. It's much easier to go through this 

laundry list of findings in a workgroup setting 

and iron out the details, and then come back to 

the full Board meeting in October. I'd propose 

that we do that. 

 DR. WADE: Okay, so the expectation would be 

SC&A completes its matrix in two weeks. In 

four weeks from now NIOSH has made its first 

response. Soon after that there'll be a 

workgroup meeting --

 DR. ZIEMER: It'll have to be a workgroup with 

the two -- with NIOSH and SC&A to resolve 

issues. 

 DR. WADE: And then do you have expectations of 

what the full Board would see in mid-October 

and when they would see it before that meeting, 

or do you just want to leave that to the 

workgroup process at this point? 

 DR. ZIEMER: Appears to me it's going to depend 

on where the workgroup ends up at that meeting. 

They may or may not have -- 

 MR. GRIFFON: Yeah. 
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 DR. ZIEMER: I don't -- I don't think we want 

to end up with something that's sort of halfbaked that the Board can't deal with, so if 

we're not pretty much at closure, then we need 

to extend it. 

 MR. GRIFFON: Yeah, it might -- you know, if we 

come to resolution on everything, we might have 

a full report back, but I kind of doubt it. It 

might just be an update -- a progress update 

and -- and we'll (unintelligible) -- 

 DR. WADE: So we're looking at a progress 

update at the next Board meeting -- or more, 

depending upon the workgroup action, that 

workgroup action likely to take place in early 

October. The only thing left now is who is the 

workgroup or who are the workgroup members. 

 DR. ZIEMER: And one thing about the -- this 

process is little different from the others in 

that it's pretty much internal -- that is, as 

we come to closure on -- item by item. For 

example, if -- let's say NIOSH says yeah, that 

was a good comment; we need to change this 

procedure. They can do that. We don't -- even 

without the Board saying anything. Or the 

Board may take specific action, but it's -- 
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it's not like a site profile where we are 

trying to meet some deadline in terms of 

particular cases. We -- procedures are going 

to continue to be developed and modified and so 

on. And as we look forward, we have a similar 

process as we come to the workbooks that 

probably need to be reviewed. John, you have 

additional comments? 

 DR. MAURO: Yes. As we recall, when we went 

through this closeout process on the task four 

cases, which was a very effective process, the 

relationsh-- the exchange between NIOSH and 

SC&A was very mature, to the point where -- as 

you recall -- it was really a matter of 

assigning a number, and this -- but that was an 

important point. In other words, it became 

clear that it's not just yes/no, 

resolved/unresolved. There are a lot of 

different categories that we placed each 

finding into. It may have been -- I think 

numbers one through seven -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yes. 

DR. MAURO: -- on that order, which was very 

well tailored to the audits of the cases. Now 

we're dealing with the procedures, which is a 
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different frame of reference, so to speak. I 

believe I would -- I would suggest that as we 

work through the comment resolution process we 

take advantage of that process to also begin to 

construct a scorecard. In other words, a 

closeout assignment number that will serve the 

purpose of the Board so that when we do come 

before the full Board to go through the 

closeout session, we'll have a clear vision of 

what -- the scoring system that we'll use for 

(unintelligible). 

 DR. ZIEMER: Right, and this may be similar to 

the one we had before, you know, where NIOSH 

agrees and has made this change; SC&A agrees 

and withdraws the comment; you agree to 

disagree -- whatever it may be, there would be 

a number of those. That's a good point. Thank 

you. Any other --

 DR. WADE: At some point I'll need to know who 

the workgroup members are, and -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: I think we can go ahead and 

appoint a workgroup right away. One thing is 

if we have the same workgroup every time, it 

starts no longer looking like a workgroup. It 

looks more like a permanent subcommittee. But 
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nonetheless, the Chair is willing to ask for 

volunteers for this workgroup. I would like to 

have four individuals involved -- 

 MR. GRIFFON: Well, I --

 DR. ZIEMER: -- and Mark, if you're agreeable, 

I'd like you to chair it. 

 MR. GRIFFON: I wonder should be a 

subcommittee, though. That's another question. 

 DR. ZIEMER: It may be that we would have it 

become a more permanent subcommittee with this 

specified membership. And in fact, frankly, 

I'm finding the current subcommittee structure 

a little bit awkward where everybody is a 

member of the subcommittee. 

 DR. WADE: Just considerations, if it's a 

subcommittee, then it's a public meeting. 

We'll need a task and a charter for the 

subcommittee. 

 MS. MUNN: It was a public meeting the last 

time. 

 MR. GRIFFON: Yeah, it was public, and the 

workgroup meetings are -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: The workgroup is ad hoc to do a 

specific job at a specific time and that's it. 

And what I'm saying is if it's always the same 
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group of people it starts to look like it's a 

permanent group, so -- but nonetheless, the 

Chair -- Mark, if you're willing to chair it, I 

would like to ask you to be chair and I'd like 

three other volunteers. 

 MS. MUNN: I'd like to follow up, as long as 

they don't get --

 DR. ZIEMER: Wanda, Bob Presley and Mike. And 

an alternate, Rich Espinosa. Is that 

agreeable? Any objections to that? The Chair 

has the prerogative but certainly if others 

object, I'd be willing to change that. Okay, 

that will constitute the workgroup then. 

Probably will meet in Cincinnati in 

approximately a month, but the date will be 

worked out between the staff as they reach the 

point of being able to handle -- or the point 

where the comment materials are ready. 

 DR. WADE: Right. Now again, by FACA rule, a 

workgroup does not have to be a public meeting. 

The last time we decided to hold the workgroup 

as a public meeting because of the interest 

surrounding the Mallinckrodt issue. Does the 

Board have instruction for me as to whether or 

not they'd like to see this workgroup meeting 
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be a public meeting or follow the more 

traditional approach which would be it would 

not be a public meeting? 

 DR. ZIEMER: Any Board members have comments? 

Yes, Wanda. 

 MS. MUNN: I guess my sense is that may vary 

depending upon the topics that are being 

addressed. These topics seemed to me to be 

primarily internal procedural issues and highly 

technical and would not be, it seems to me, of 

the same kind of interest as the previous 

working group might have been. 

 MR. GRIFFON: Yeah, I -- I agree with that. 

think it's on an item by item basis. But for 

this one -- I think that for all of them we 

should transcribe them still and I think that 

would be the intent. But I don't think this 

one would -- I think we would be more 

successful getting the work done -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: Leon? 

 MR. GRIFFON: -- to keep it small and not 

public. 

MR. OWENS: Dr. Ziemer, I appreciate the 

comments that were made, but I think that 

having the meetings open would continue to 

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allow the public, those that are interested, to 

have access and also ensure that our overall 

process is transparent. 

 DR. ZIEMER: It is also possible to allow the 

meeting to be open without having the formal 

subcommittee structure, that -- that in fact 

the meeting is open; anyone is welcome to 

attend. And we could make it -- the 

information available to sort of the 

constituents. There is sort of a master list, 

I guess, of people we notify -- sort of aside 

from the Federal Register process, those that 

we know have ongoing interest, but that -- 

Richard, you have a comment? 

 MR. ESPINOSA: Kind of, just (unintelligible) 

all of what you're saying. Does -- if it's 

going to be public does the same structure have 

to be done, notifications and what-not? 

 DR. WADE: Well, technically if it's a working 

group meeting we could go about three ways of 

letting people know. We could do a Federal 

Register notice, which is required of 

subcommittee and Board meetings, not of working 

group meetings. We could post it on the NIOSH 

web site. We could send a notice to that 
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mailing list we have of concerned and 

interested people. We could do any combination 

of those. 

MR. ESPINOSA: I would like to see the meeting 

go public. And if it does, I don't see the -- 

why (unintelligible) should go into a 

subcommittee rather than a working group if 

it's going to be public, but -- split hairs one 

way or another. 

 DR. ZIEMER: One of the sort of practical 

issues with doing formal subcommittee is that 

we do have to develop and approve a charter. 

That has to go up through the NIOSH and HHS 

process and it gets a little extended. We can 

have a workgroup and still have it fully open. 

And Leon, in terms of your suggestion, I know, 

don't know if -- are you thinking Federal 

Register notice or that -- just the less 

extensive but probably as effective list of 

notifications? 

 MR. OWENS: I'm thinking the less extensive but 

probably just as effective list, and possibly a 

note on the NIOSH web page. I think that would 

suffice. 

 MS. MUNN: I think so, too. 
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 DR. ZIEMER: Do you agree with that, Rich? 

Rich says he agrees with that. 

So Board members, if that's agreeable, we will 

identify a meeting as being open to any 

interested parties, even though it is not a 

regular Federal Register type of subcommittee. 

Okay? And --

 DR. ANDERSON: Would that -- would that mean 

you'd have a dial-in that people would be able 

to call in to listen, or not? 

 DR. ZIEMER: This is not a full meeting of the 

Board at all. 

 DR. WADE: It is not. I wouldn't do that 

normally. 

 DR. ANDERSON: No, I was just thinking that 

from the public perspective to say they can 

attend in person --

 MR. GRIFFON: Right. 

DR. ANDERSON: -- the likelihood of people 

coming much less than if somebody's curious and 

interested, to sit on a phone call. If you're 

not going to have it --

 DR. ZIEMER: That's very difficult, though, in 

a workgroup where you -- 

DR. ANDERSON: No, I wasn't -- the workgroup 
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would be there. I'm just raising the question 

 DR. ZIEMER: It's very difficult for somebody 

to track along -- 'cause they'll have papers 

and so on that they're working from. 

Robert? 

 MR. PRESLEY: Like to speak against a phone 

call, and the reason being if you all remember 

the last two or three that we've had, we've had 

problems on the telephone calls with people 

with a -- I hate to say it -- with babies and 

dogs and flushing commodes and stuff like that, 

and it's really hard to get any work done when 

you've got stuff like that going on. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Leon? 

 MR. OWENS: Dr. Ziemer and Dr. Wade, I would 

ask, could the minutes -- or could the meeting 

have minutes that were transcribed and also be 

available at our upcoming Board meetings? 

 DR. WADE: Could I repeat what I think my 

instructions are? 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yes. 

 DR. WADE: We'll have a workgroup meeting. The 

work group will be chaired by Mark, consisting 

of Wanda, Mike, Robert, with Richard as an 
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alternate. We're aiming for early in October. 

The purpose of the workgroup is to look at the 

process of comment resolution and closure 

between NIOSH and SC&A on the procedures 

review, the task three report. The workgroup 

meeting will be open to the public. It will be 

noticed on the NIOSH web site. We will send 

out information about the meeting to our 

mailing list of interested people. We will 

keep a transcript of the meeting. We will not 

have a public comment period at the meeting, 

but the public will be invited. That's the 

model we followed before. Is that the sense of 

the Board? 

 MS. MUNN: Uh-huh, yes. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Is that -- everybody agree? Thank 

you very much. 

Okay, we're going to take a brief recess. It's 

close to 10:00 o'clock. Take a 15-minute 

recess and then we'll reconvene and we can 

continue our discussions. 

 (Whereupon, a recess was taken from 9:55 a.m. 

to 10:20 a.m.) 

BETHLEHEM SITE PROFILE

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one additional item that comes out of the 

subcommittee work from yesterday, and that item 

has to do with the Bethlehem Steel profile. 

The Bethlehem Steel site profile was acted on 

by this Board in February. There has been a 

revision and we have a motion dealing with the 

action to be taken by our contractor relative 

to the revision and to the issues that were 

outstanding. Jim Melius made the motion at the 

subcommittee meeting. And since I don't have 

the wording here, I would ask Jim if he could 

somewhat reproduce the words of his motion. 

They may not be exactly as they appear on the 

transcript, but they will at least be the 

motion in principle. So Jim, if you can, give 

us today's version of yesterday's motion. 

 DR. MELIUS: Okay. The motion would be that we 

ask our subcontractor -- excuse me, our 

contractor, SC&A, to review the draft revised 

site profile from -- that NIOSH has recently 

produced, paying particular attention to the 

items that we had highlighted in our original 

comments to NIOSH based on SC&A's review of the 

earlier site profile. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. That is the motion, and the 
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intent would be that there would be a report 

back to us from SC&A on their findings -- 

 DR. MELIUS: At our next meeting, correct. 

 DR. ZIEMER: -- at our next meeting. 

MR. ESPINOSA: Second the motion. 

 DR. ZIEMER: And the motion actually doesn't 

require a second, although the record can show 

that. It does come as a recommendation from 

the subcommittee. 

Let me ask if there are any comments now, or 

questions on that. 

 (No responses) 

Okay. You're ready to vote then? 

 MS. MUNN: Uh-huh. 

 DR. ZIEMER: All in favor of the motion, say 

aye? 

 (Affirmative responses) 

Are there any opposed? 

 (No responses) 

 Are there any abstentions? 

 (No responses) 

Okay, the motion carries and we will proceed 

then to have the revision of the Bethlehem site 

profile reviewed by SC&A and a subsequent 

report will come to us on that. 
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Again, we need to get some information on 

timing. What is the expectation -- John, can 

you comment as to what you think might be the 

timing on that? 

DR. MAURO: We will start immediately, and I 

expect we will have a letter report in your 

hands and NIOSH's hands probably three weeks 

from now. 

 DR. ZIEMER: In possibly three weeks we'll have 

comments. If there are issues -- I don't know 

if the motion included proceeding with the 

resolution process. Was that part of the 

intent of the motion? 

 DR. MELIUS: I -- yes, it was, if necessary. 

 DR. ZIEMER: If necessary -- if there were 

issues raised where we needed to get feedback 

from NIOSH, we would feed that -- those 

comments to them and might proceed with the 

resolution process. The only thing promised at 

this point is the report. 

DR. MAURO: Yeah, and right now the way I look 

at it is in three weeks you all will have our 

letter report, and then the extended review 

process would begin from there, which I 

suspect, given the limited number of issues 
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that are on the table, would be something that 

would be able to be accomplished relatively 

quickly. And we will either be in agreement or 

agree to disagree. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yes. 

DR. MAURO: And we will be at that point very 

quickly. 

 DR. ZIEMER: So there's a good chance that we 

would have something to act on at the next 

Board meeting. 

DR. MAURO: Correct. 

 DR. WADE: Could I just explore a little bit 

what happens after three weeks, just so we have 

the wherewithal to do what we need to do. So 

if there are issues then that need to be 

discussed between SC&A and NIOSH after we 

receive the letter report, is it the sense of 

the Board that there would be discussions that 

would take place between the parties, notifying 

Board members of those discussions, allowing 

Board members to participate in those 

discussions? How do we want to see that next 

possible step take place? 

DR. ZIEMER: It would be my understanding that 

that is exactly what would happen. If there 
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are -- particularly substantive issues, that 

they would have a resolution process similar to 

what we used before. Although it didn't appear 

that there was much -- many of the big issues 

on Bethlehem have already been resolved, and 

those were enumerated and identified in our 

February action where we -- we had the five 

specific motions where we dealt with those. So 

-- but in the event that there are major issues 

or differences, we would have to have that 

resolution process. 

 DR. WADE: I think the way we worded it before, 

there could be discussion between the two 

parties clarifying issues. But if there was 

anything substantive to be discussed, then we 

would notify Board members -- Board members 

could participate. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Jim. 

 DR. MELIUS: And could we also have a process 

similar that we had with Mallinckrodt where we 

also notify some of the key interested 

citizens, particularly Mr. Walker and his 

group? I think that would sort of facilitate 

communications rather than have them find out 

about it all at -- you know, at a later point 
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in time. 

 DR. WADE: So as I understand the discussion, 

if there -- if there were to be simply 

clarifying discussions between the parties 

after we receive the letter report from SC&A, 

we would allow those to take place between 

NIOSH and SC&A. Anything substantial that 

needs to be discussed would be discussed in a 

call where we would notify the Board members 

and notify and allow participation of Mr. 

Walker and others or --

 DR. ZIEMER: That would be analogous to what we 

did with Mallinckrodt -- 

 DR. MELIUS: Yeah, yeah. 

 DR. ZIEMER: -- so it seems to -- it seems to 

me it would be fair to keep Mr. Walker -- 

 DR. MELIUS: Yeah. 

 DR. ZIEMER: -- apprised and he kind of heads 

up that group, I think. 

 DR. MELIUS: Yeah. 

 DR. WADE: We would contact him, and that would 

be --

 DR. MELIUS: I think contact him -- now if he 

wants another individual be on the call, I 

don't think that's an issue. Again, those are 
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not -- we don't need casts of hundreds, but... 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah. John? 

DR. MAURO: One additional question. During 

the three-week period as we read through -- 

it's not a large document, I think it's about 

37 pages -- we may have certain clarification 

points where we're going to need a little help 

to understand exactly what NIOSH's position is 

on a given matter. To what degree are we free 

to call Jim and get clarification on do we 

properly understand this? 

 DR. ZIEMER: I would suggest this, and Board 

members can comment, that you do something 

similar to what was done with Jim and Arjun 

where -- keep us abreast of any exchanges. You 

can keep me abreast. I will pass any of that 

along to the Board so if -- if there's an 

ongoing commentary, let's say by e-mail, that 

we're simply kept apprised of that. Would that 

be agreeable, Board members? 

 MS. MUNN: Yes. 

 DR. MELIUS: Yeah. 

 DR. WADE: And if there are substantial issues 

to be addressed on a call, we'll transcribe 

that call and make the materials available. 
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 DR. ZIEMER: Jim, did you have an additional 

comment? 

 DR. MELIUS: No, I'm -- I'm sorry. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay, any further comments on the 

-- any of those issues? 

 (No responses) 

REPORT FROM SUBCOMMITTEE: 

MALLINCKRODT SITE PROFILE REVIEW 

Okay. The only other thing that we dealt with 

in the subcommittee session yesterday was a 

review of the six priority issues dealing with 

the Mallinckrodt site profile. We have 

scheduled that discussion for this afternoon, 

but it appears to me, if there's no objection, 

we can begin to receive that information. What 

we will have in that regard, we'll have -- 

we'll have a presentation by NIOSH on their 

approach to those six priority issues, a 

presentation by SC&A on their review of those 

same six items, and then further discussion on 

those. We would not be discussing -- the 

petition itself does not come under our 

schedule till tomorrow, but this is discussion 

of the six priority issues dealing with the 

site profile, Mallinckrodt site profile. And 

it appears to me that we do have time to begin 
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that discussion yet this morning. Is there any 

objection to proceeding with that? 

 DR. WADE: I mean I have no objection to that, 

but I would like to again put on our agenda to 

follow up -- that flowing out of our 

subcommittee discussions there were issues 

regarding, for example, the timing of the 

review of the Savannah River site profile. All 

of that leads to the need for this Board to 

start to look at sequencing and scheduling of 

things, and I think we need to reserve some 

time to talk about that. It doesn't have to be 

now. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Right. And as far as scheduling 

and prioritizing the site profiles, I think 

there was expressed a desire to do that after 

we have looked at -- with the contractor in 

closed session, looked at the workload for the 

upcoming year. 

 DR. MELIUS: Yeah, just to that point, I think 

I understood you, Paul, that we would -- that 

would -- that following our closed work session 

today might be a -- sort of timely to talk 

about sort of the scheduling -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: Prioritizing --
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 DR. MELIUS: -- and priority issues -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: -- for example --

 DR. MELIUS: -- and so forth. 

 DR. ZIEMER: -- what's the next site profile 

that we want to deal with -- 

 DR. MELIUS: Deal with, right. 

 DR. ZIEMER: -- in terms of resolution of 

issues and so on. 

 DR. MELIUS: Yeah, so for 3:00 o'clock and -- 

 DR. WADE: I just want to say on the record 

that that discussion will flown out -- flowed 

from the subcommittee discussions. 

 DR. MELIUS: Right. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yes. 

 DR. MELIUS: Yeah. 

 DR. ZIEMER: So we -- we had an informal 

presentation yesterday by both Jim Neton and by 

Arjun Makhijani on the six priority items 

relating to the site profile. Now -- and 

basically there was no specific recommendation 

that came out of that. There was one motion 

dealing with the Mallinckrodt-related issues, 

but that motion did not pass, so we had no 

specific recommendation, but we do need to now 

address the six items and hear from both NIOSH 
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and SC&A. So let us begin with NIOSH and, Dr. 

Neton, if you're prepared to present your 

material, we will proceed. 

Yes, and --

MS. BROCK: Hi, I'm sorry --

 DR. ZIEMER: Denise Brock, you have a comment? 

MS. BROCK: I do, I have a question. I'm so 

sorry to interrupt. I was just curious. I 

know that we -- that you vote tomorrow on the 

SEC -- excuse me, I have a Tic Tac in my mouth 

-- you vote on the approval or not of the SEC 

petition, and I'm wondering if I could somehow 

get clarification from the Department of Labor 

in reference to the non-SEC cancers such as 

skin. I know at the Adams Mark I had brought 

that up in reference to the petition going 

through for '42 to '48, and there were some 

skin cancers and other non-SEC cancers. I 

wanted to make sure that they were still going 

to be dose reconstructed, and the -- I know Dr. 

Neton said yes, and I believe Shelby Hallmark 

had agreed. But I wanted to make sure I got 

clarification on that that if this is approved 

that the non-SEC cancers will still be able to 

have remedy, that they will be able to be dose 
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reconstructed. And I thought perhaps if 

somebody from Labor could get ahold of whoever 

they need to maybe to get clarification on 

that. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. We will try to get that 

answered yet --

MS. BROCK: Great, thank you. 

 DR. ZIEMER: -- this week. 

 DR. WADE: Before you step back, Denise -- so 

your question is specifically regarding this 

petition that we're looking at, and if this 

petition is approved, what will happen to the 

non-SEC-covered cancers. You're not asking 

anything to do with the earlier petition at 

this point? 

MS. BROCK: No, I know the earlier petition was 

covered. I -- and that was okay. They are 

going to be dose reconstructed. I just wanted 

to make sure -- just to cover all my bases, 

that in fact the non-SEC cancers would still be 

able to be dose reconstructed. 

 DR. WADE: I can only promise that we'll raise 

the question. 

MS. BROCK: Thank you very much. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay, here's Jim Neton. Jim, 
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welcome back to the podium. And let's see, 

does everyone have a copy of these handouts? 

These were not in the book, right, Jim? Didn't 

we distribute these yesterday? 

DR. NETON: That's correct, these were -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: I'll make sure the Board members 

who were not here yesterday have a copy. 

 DR. MELIUS: I don't believe I got a copy. 

 DR. ZIEMER: We'll get copies here. 

DR. NETON: I'm sorry, I thought they had been 

distributed. Apparently --

 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, I think they were yesterday, 

but not everybody was here yesterday. 

DR. NETON: Yeah. There were plenty of copies 

so there shouldn't be a problem. 

I wasn't quite sure where this presentation was 

going to fit into the meeting. I didn't know 

whether it was today or tomorrow's session, but 

I'm always willing and able to go whenever 

asked to -- to present. 

We were asked to remind everyone -- NIOSH was 

asked at the last meeting to evaluate what was 

called high -- or not high priority, but six 

priority issues that were a result of SC&A's 

review -- I think it's the third supplemental 
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review, I forget where we're at now, of the 

Mallinckrodt site profile. So I've got a few 

slides here that -- I've attempted to summarize 

where I believe we're at. Of course you've all 

been on the distribution list of the large 

volume of documents that have been generated in 

the last month or so, trying to come to some 

resolution on these issues. And honestly, it's 

been a very technically interesting and 

rewarding process. I think it's just -- it's a 

very good, transparent scientific process, and 

I think SC&A would agree as well that we've all 

learned things going through this. 

Just -- just to -- the first priority issue was 

the handling of raffinates. That sort of 

surfaced as possibly the key issue that was 

looming on the horizon for how we would do 

these dose reconstructions. 

And just to remind everyone what we mean by the 

raffinate ratios, this is reproduced from one 

of the reports that we've generated. It's a 

general outline of the process, and you see 

when you're taking pitchblende ore that is in 

equilibrium -- presumed to be in equilibrium -- 

down the chain and you start doing a chemical 
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process on it, you end up modifying that ratio 

to some extent to where in the very first 

process you end up with this what's called K-65 

residue. And that's the material that is very 

highly enriched in radium 226. 

The way the chemistry is, they precipitate out 

as a sulfate and you get lead sulfate -- it's 

called lead cake, as well, but lead sulfate, 

radium sulfate. So that has a very large 

concentration of radium in it, as well as other 

daughters -- progeny, such as thorium and 

actinium and protactinium. But by and large, 

there's a huge concentration of radium. 

The second step is a very similar process, the 

barium sulfate cake, not that different than 

the radium. It's just a sort of clean-up 

phase. When you get down here, we have Sperry 

cake, which is a precipitate out of the ether 

extraction column in the aqueous phase, which 

was known to be a very good source of 

protactinium. 

And then at the very end of the process you 

have essentially the true raffinate, the junk 

that's left over that was not usable. It's 

known as airport cake or AM-7. This is the 
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material after the radium's been taken out that 

is fairly enriched in thorium 230. You'll see 

as we go through the discussion, thorium 230 is 

somewhere around 70,000 picocuries per gram in 

this material. 

So you have -- what I'll be talking about is 

radium-bearing ore and thorium-bearing ore, and 

what I'm really referring to here is K-65, 

which is enriched in radium, and airport cake, 

which is highly enri-- it's not -- it's highly 

-- it has mostly thorium 230 as the 

consideration, so that's what I'm talking 

about. 

How do we reconstruct dose to workers? 

Raffinate workers who worked in Plant 6 in the 

chemical extraction process. Once all of this 

stuff is gone and the airport cake is shipped 

out and the K-65 is shipped out, then you go 

into uranium metal fabrication, and you really 

have none of these problems -- for example, 

operations in Plant 4 where they're working 

with metals. 

So -- so what have we done here to address this 

raffinate issue? We have developed processdependent ratios. In other words, we could not 
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always tell if a worker was working with the 

radium end of the business or the thorium end 

of the business, so we bifurcated the process 

and developed a technique or a process for 

looking at exposure to radium-bearing residues 

and exposure to the airport cake residues. 

 And those two processes are the radon breath 

analyses that we have can be used to determine 

the radium intakes for those workers and then 

assign a radium intake with appropriate ratios. 

And for the airport cake, that technique is not 

useful for assaying thorium, so we're going to 

use the thorium air concentra-- or the air 

concentration in the plants and take the 95th 

percentile of the time-weighted average and 

apply those to determine the intake for 

thorium-bearing ores. We will compare the dose 

from those two scenarios and pick the highest 

dose -- if we don't know, if you can't tell 

where the worker worked -- and assign that as 

their intake. 

Kind of going through this, the radium-bearing 

residues are based on radon breath. We'll use 

the actual radon breath data if it's available. 

If not, we've developed a -- a distribution. 
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We'll pick the 95th percentile of that 

distribution for unmonitored workers who were 

residue workers and, like I said, use the 

coworker distribution. And then the thorium is 

based on the 95th percentile for residue 

workers. 

If they did not appear to be a residue worker, 

we'll use the full distribution. The best 

estimate would be the 50th percentile, but they 

would also be assigned the uncertainty about 

that value. And as we discussed yesterday in 

the subcommittee meeting, this would be very -- 

we'd have to have conclusive evidence that they 

were not residue workers in order to apply this 

distribution. This would be a pretty -- a 

pretty tight standard here. If we couldn't 

tell otherwise, we're going to assign the 95th 

percentile. 

Okay. Here are the ratios that we proposed to 

use, and I handed out yesterday at the 

subcommittee -- it was available -- a little 

write-up that describes how we arrived at these 

ratios. So for what we call radium enriched, 

this would be the K-65, we're proposing to use 

the ratios that were -- that -- determined from 
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the K-65 residues that are at the -- in the 

Fernald silos. That -- those residues came 

from Mallinckrodt originally. We believe them 

to be fairly representative of the ratios. 

For the thorium enriched residues we're 

proposing these ratios, and those are based on 

some analyses that we've obtained. There's a 

few -- few publications on this. We believe 

the best for this -- I think it's the Figgins 

reference. We're using -- there are a couple 

of analytical results that indicate that this 

ratio -- the thori-- the protactinium is about 

13 percent of the alpha activity. 

 The actinium 227, there's indications that it's 

lower than the protactinium, but we couldn't 

conclusively determine it, so we're going to 

assume that the actinium 227 is in equilibrium 

with the protactinium. 

 Okay, just continuing on a little bit more with 

the ratios, the uranium intakes are going to be 

calculated independently of the raffinate 

source terms now. In looking at the original 

data and doing some dose reconstructions, it 

became fairly obvious that workers rotated 

through jobs. They weren't always raffinate 
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workers and uranium workers. They worked 

around the plant. So the uranium intakes were 

highly inflated -- not inflated, but were -- 

were not representative of raffinate intakes 

necessarily. For example, I can show you later 

on -- we -- we had proposed earlier, remember, 

taking a ratio of uranium to radium and 

multiplying it times 100 and I think we even 

got as high as 400. If you do that, you end up 

with some very large intakes that are 

inconsistent with the air concentration data 

itself. So we ended up just independently 

calculating the uran-- the dose to the workers 

from the uranium intake, isolating that and 

then using the radon breath and the air 

concentration data for the raffinates. 

There were some questions raised about the 

reliability of the radon breath analyses. 

We've looked into this a fair amount, and in 

our opinion -- there were some missing 

analyses. Up to about 25 percent of the data 

were listed as either lost or not analyzed. 

We've talked to Dr. Naomi Harley at EML, who 

was there during this time period. She was 

aware of no selective censoring. It was more 
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likely, in her opinion, that the missing 

analyses, particularly where a set wasn't 

analyzed, had more to do with the availability 

of the analyst or the timeliness of the 

shipping of the samples since radon has a short 

half-life -- and Federal Express wasn't around 

during those days. It could have sat too long 

to be of use -- of use in the analysis. So 

we've looked at this. We don't see there to be 

any indication of selective censoring. 

The distribution of the worker types appears to 

be consistent with broad sampling of the work 

force, as you'd expect. 

And the analytical techniques that were used 

are -- are, to our knowledge, prone to 

overestimating intakes than anything. That is, 

there were some issues with people having their 

breath sampled in areas that had high radon in 

the air. That would tend to over-inflate the 

value. This postprandial effect, where after 

eating people tend to ventilate more radon, 

would also tend to overestimate. So there's a 

number of areas that are prone to make these 

values overestimates. 

I just have a couple of graphs here looking at 
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the distribution. About 60 percent of the 

sampled workers came out of the operations -- 

and these are all based on the job titles 

assigned to the radon breath numbers in the 

database -- 13 percent trades and crafts, 

laboratory workers about 10 percent. There was 

a laboratory right there in Plant 6, I think, 

which was doing a lot of these analyses. Some 

warehouse workers and some miscellaneous 

categories -- engineering, administrative. But 

in general it looks to be like a reasonable 

sampling of the workers who were likely to have 

been exposed to radium. 

This just breaks it down a little further by 

year to show that the sampling distribution 

didn't appear to change substantially through 

the years of those different categories. 

 And then finally the issue of the lost or notanalyzed samples we looked at. There was a 

period of time in August of -- I can't exactly 

remember which year now, '53 or '54, one of the 

years in August -- one of the months -- August 

of one of the middle years that had a high 

percentage of missing samples, the lost -- lost 

samples or not analyzed. We went back and 
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said well, of the samples that were missing or 

lost in that time period -- and there was a 

total of 40 -- we went back and looked and said 

did -- do we have additional data for any of 

those samples. And the answer is, within a 

year, we have some sample for 98 percent of 

those people. So it's not like those samples 

were lost -- those people were lost from the 

database. The radon breath tends to be an 

integrating measurement because we're assuming 

that it's an integrating measurement of the 

amount of radium in your skeleton. That's not 

going anywhere very fast, so a sample within a 

few months or a year later is not much of a 

changing picture. So in essence, what this 

really, I think, depicts is that even though 

the samples weren't analyzed, we have some way 

of looking at the intakes for those workers, as 

well. 

Okay, issue two, the handling of radon 

exposures. If you remember at the -- at the 

last Board meeting the issue was raised, does -

- first of all, do we have enough radon samples 

to reconstruct radon exposures to the workers. 

And secondly, if -- given that there are large 
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radon exposures, is there not some contribution 

of radon inhalation to systemic organs other 

than the lung. That was raised in the SC&A 

report. 

 So we took a look at this and we actually 

analyzed and fit lognormal distributions to 

about 5,000 radon measurements that were taken 

over the period of time between '49 and '57, 

got some very nice fits to that, and I think 

it's all in -- in the sheets -- in the reports 

that were provided to the Board. So we believe 

the radon fits a pretty good distribution. The 

fact is that almost all the lung cancers have 

been paid thus far, so radon dose to lungs is 

really not an issue at this point. 

But the dose to systemic organs still is out 

there. What we've done there is looked at 

SC&A's analysis and determined that -- their 

analysis had some technical issues related to 

this half-life of these radon progeny in the 

lung. We've re-evaluated it using our own 

models and came to the conclusion that there is 

some dose. Most of the dose is due to the 

inhalation of -- the dissolution of radon gas 

in the body. So we needed to account for it. 
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I mean we agreed that we needed some way to 

account for it, but when we looked at the radon 

breath monitoring techniques -- in other words, 

we're assuming that everyone in the process 

area at a minimum had the 50th percentile of 

the radon breath values -- then that analysis 

will bound the dose from -- the systemic organ 

dose from radon. And there's about a five or 

six-page write-up that we provided the Board, 

and I believe SC&A has looked at this and they 

-- they are in agreement with that. So we 

think that we have a way to address the radon 

issue. 

 The external dose correction factor, we talked 

about this yesterday some. There were -- there 

was -- SC&A's opinion that there were certain 

job categories where a badge worn on the lapel 

on the upper torso would not adequately sample 

the exposure from a worker who had what we 

would call a near-field exposure scenario, 

someone working near a pot of uranium or 

milling or grinding an ingot, or cleaning up a 

spill, so we modeled those. We have this 

software program called Attila that does nice 

modeling of external dose fields for us. And 
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based on those analyses, we agree that there 

are some exposure geometries -- such as 

pitchblende clean-up, ingot machining and 

people working close to de-nitration pots -- 

where the film badge itself could possibly 

underestimate the dose by about a factor of 

two. 

So we've written a Technical Information 

Bulletin on this. It's in draft form. I think 

SC&A has looked at this and they agree that 

this value is appropriate, so we will be 

multiplying doses for workers in these exposure 

geometries by a factor of 2.1. It looks like, 

based on our -- looking at the claims that we 

have in-house right now, it will be applicable 

to about 57 percent of the current cases, and 

that's based on an analysis of where these 

people were working and what they were doing. 

Essentially what we're saying is people in the 

administrative area and engineering areas were 

probably not doing these type of activities, so 

these would have to be people working directly 

in the plants. 

This is just a nice little picture -- I like to 

show colored pictures -- of one of the Attila 
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runs with a de-nitration pot, and the nifty 

color is just to sort of show the differences 

of the exposure rates near the badge. So the 

pot here is a higher dose. Here's the dose 

where the badge is, and these different 

gradations, you can see the doses down here to 

the lower torso tend to be a little bit higher 

than the doses that would be measured up near 

the badge. 

Okay, the assessment of intermittent exposures. 

SC&A was concerned that the chronic exposure 

model that we would normally default to when we 

had bioassay data would not sufficiently bound 

the exposure scenarios of these workers. And 

we went through a number of scenarios. We've 

developed a few graphics and discussed this at 

some length in our face-to-face meeting that we 

had in Cincinnati at the Hilton Hotel. 

And I won't go through all the details of 

these, but just to point out that -- this is an 

actual exposure scenario for a worker from '47 

to '58, the bioassay samples. If we fit a 

chronic exposure model through all those data 

points, you end up with the highest intake for 

the worker than if you start inferring certain 
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acute intakes, whether it happened shortly 

after employment, the first day of employment, 

several intakes -- the bottom line here is that 

the more refined you make your analysis, the 

lower the intake goes. It's just the way that 

works. And in fact at one point we just said 

let's assume one of these values we didn't even 

know about, you end up right in about the same 

ball park as -- as with the chronic exposure 

model. So it's fairly insensitive to these -- 

these perturbations. And I think SC&A has -- 

has looked at this and I think they're at least 

convinced in general that this is true, 

although there may be certain exposure -- 

unique incidents, exposure scenarios that we 

need to be sensitive to and aware of and make 

corrections as appropriate. 

Okay, issue five, dose reconstructions for 

unmonitored workers. The question is, you have 

administrative workers assigned -- who have no 

-- no exposure. What about environmental doses 

to these folks? 

What we ended up agreeing to is unmonitored 

administrative workers would be assigned the 

full distribution of the monitored workers' 
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exposures. We believe that to be appropriate. 

We've looked at some of the environmental 

monitoring data available, and I certainly 

believe that, from a routine exposure scenario, 

this is a claimant-favorable approach. So all 

administrative workers will be assigned the 

same dose as if they were working in the plant. 

The issue of unmonitored workers in the Plant 

One and Two decommissioning area and the 

airport storage site, we're going to assign 

those workers the 95th percentile of the 

monitored worker exposure. 

Okay. And then the final issue was, given what 

you're doing, could you give us a couple of 

examples of how this comes out? And I have 

some examples I'm just going to step through 

real quickly just to give you a sense of what 

the doses look like, and I'll just have to 

switch gears here quickly. 

 The first scenario was a residue worker where 

we had uranium bioassay and we also had radon 

breath. So here is someone who started 

employment in 1951, finished in 1958. We had 

dosimetry data. He was listed in NOCTS as a 

chemical operator, but the dosimetry records 
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indicate that he worked in the pot room, the 

ore room, clean-up -- a wide variety of 

different job functions. 

Summarize, we have external exposure data, 

internal exposure data. We have no thorium 

data for this person. We ended up with -- here 

are the urine samples that we have between 1951 

and '56, and then these are the radon breath 

samples, which are percent of tolerance. That 

is, one picocurie per liter was the tolerance 

level in those days, so something indicated as 

20 percent of tolerance would be really .2 

picocuries per liter radon breath. 

And so the approach here was let's use the 

uranium intake from uranium bioassay samples, 

take the radium intake using -- estimate the 

radium intake from the breath radon, and 

determine what this person's internal dose was. 

And you've got the fits here, I won't go 

through them. But when we get to the dose, 

you'll see here -- these are the projected 

doses to the highest non-metabolic organ, which 

would be indicative of the prostate gland or 

other glands that don't concentrate uranium or 

aren't explicitly modeled in the ICRP, and the 
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colon dose, which is the two cancers here. And 

so you see we end up with about 21 rem and 13.6 

rem in this exposure scenario. Projected PC's 

in the 20 percent range. 

 Now this doesn't include external dose at all. 

This is just -- yeah, Mark. 

 MR. GRIFFON: As someone who's followed this 

pretty intimately, I'm wondering now, with the 

addition of the AM-7 in this question about -- 

I mean in general you're saying -- and this may 

only apply for coworkers, but the radium source 

term versus the thorium source term, you're 

saying you'll take the higher of the two. 

Would that apply if an individual had their own 

individual radon breath data, you backcalculate your radium intake, would you still 

look at the possibility of applying the thorium 

from the other -- the thorium source term table 

in your document? 

DR. NETON: That's what we're doing. 

 MR. GRIFFON: So these num-- so these numbers -

- these doses don't apply now, or did you do 

that already in this model? 

DR. NETON: Well, this is just the one example 

where we have radon breath. We're going to do 
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a thorium intake and then compare the two 

calculations and pick the highest of the two 

for assignment. 

 MR. GRIFFON: Okay. But you only show the 

doses as calculated from the radon breath 

there. You didn't -- 

DR. NETON: This is just -- just -- this will 

be the first part. I've got the third one. 

I'll be getting to that. This would be -- 

okay, so the first thing we do is say we have 

radon breath. This is the worker's dose. 

And then we were also asked to look at 

alternative organs, and you can see that the 

doses to -- you know, those were -- those are 

non-metabolic type organs. Here's the organs 

that have some concentration of radionuclides, 

and you can see these doses are fairly large -- 

3,000, 21,000 rem -- these are all well over 50 

percent for what we would call metabolic 

organs, organs that concentrate the activity. 

So that is the first analysis. We have radon 

breath. 

Now let's -- let's assume that we don't have 

radon breath. Let's say this worker -- we just 

didn't have those seven radon breath samples, 
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and so this would use the -- it's the same 

case, we're just pretending we don't have the 

radon breath, and so what we're doing here is -

- again, calculate the uranium intake from the 

uranium bioassay data. The radium intake would 

now be calculated from the 95th percentile of 

the radon breath data. So now let's go down 

and look what happens. You end up with higher 

doses -- not tremendously higher because this 

guy had some pretty positive radon breath -- 

but you end up with 40 rem for the highest nonmetabolic and 25 rem to the colon, and your PCs 

are in the 30 and 40 range here -- without any 

external dose added, remember, so that's not 

really representative of what this case would 

come out. Medical's not in here or external. 

And then the --

 MR. GRIFFON: But the -- the -- the fractions 

on that one for actinium, protactinium, thorium 

DR. NETON: Uh-huh. 

 MR. GRIFFON: -- were based on the radium 

source term? 

DR. NETON: Still. Still we're looking at -- 

we're looking at the radium portion of the 
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source term. 

 MR. GRIFFON: Right. 

DR. NETON: This would just be assuming we had 

no radon breath. I think that's what we were 

instructed to look at. And then the nonmetabolics -- or the metabolics, same -- 

similar pattern, very high doses to the nonmetabolic organs, all well over 50 percent. 

Okay, now let's take the same worker again, and 

the analysis would be what if -- let's look at 

-- forget the radon breath now. We're going to 

assume that he was breathing this -- what the -

- the 95th percentile of the air concentration 

was and using the ratios derived for that 

source term, the thorium-bearing ores. Again, 

same worker, same uranium intake -- 'cause the 

uranium is de-coupled now from this analysis. 

But we're going to take the uranium intake from 

the uranium bioassay; the thorium 230, actinium 

and protactinium are from the 95th percentile 

of the air data, which we determined to be 607 

dpm per cubic meter. So what happens here -- 

and apply it -- now I have to -- this -- this 

number has changed slightly. The data that I 

handed you yesterday indicated that this value 
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here is now I think 13.3 -- .133. It's gone up 

a little bit, based on our most recent analysis 

of the literature, but it's not going to be too 

far off. 

What you end up seeing here is the person ends 

up with about a 1,580 picocurie per day intake 

of thorium 230. So again, going through all 

these calculations, same worker, you end up 

with not that different of a dose, actually. 

You end up with 24 rem to the non-metabolics 

and 18 rem to the colon. And you're in the 30 

percent range for the colon, 23 percent for the 

highest non-metabolic. And again, as typical 

here, the non-metabolic -- the metabolic organs 

-- liver, bone surfaces -- are showing very, 

very high doses. 

So under any of these scenarios, the metabolic 

organs are well over 50 percent. The nonmetabolics will depend upon the individual 

scenarios, but they can be very large. 

We still have this discrepancy that we're 

trying to iron out. I've had some discussions 

with Arjun and Joyce Lipsztein and others at 

SC&A this morning, and we got some feedback 

from Keith Eckerman yesterday. There's a 
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disconnect between the dose conversion factor 

for protactinium in the literature. The ICRP 

document we have indicates -- it's similar to -

- you'd end up with dose similar to this. The 

Federal Guidance Report ends up where your 

protactinium dose would probably end up being 

similar to your actinium dose. So if anything, 

these non-metabolic values are going to go -- 

go higher. And in fact, these values will 

probably be -- will be driven higher, as well, 

if -- once we can iron out that -- that 

discrepancy. It's -- it's not related to our 

program, fortunately. It's -- it's a 

difference between the ICRP and what's in the 

Federal Guidance Report, and we certainly need 

to get to the bottom of that. I mean this is a 

-- an issue that needs to be resolved. But I 

think in general the patterns would hold where 

your metabolics are going to be easily over 50 

percent and non-metabolics are going to be high 

and, depending on the individual scenarios in 

the external dose, they can go over. 

Okay. That -- and then the last scenario was -

- we were asked to look at a worker who may 

have been in the ionium extraction area. We 
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had one bioassay sample for this person, which 

we modeled. He started in 1949. He finished 

in '58. He did have a break in employment in 

1953, had various job categories but did work 

in Plant 7-E at one point, which is where the 

ionium extraction occurred. And as I 

mentioned, we had -- we have uranium in urine 

like we do for almost all these folks, some 

radon breath, and a thorium in urine taken in -

- April 8th of '55, which was right during the 

March/April processing time -- of 1.4 dpm per 

liter. We know it was a very short processing 

time, so we believe it's sort of in the middle 

of that. We've modeled that with a chronic 

intake and come up with a fairly high thorium 

intake. Just to give you the representative 

doses here, the dose to the pancreas ended up 

being about 110 rem, which put the PC at over 

50 percent without even inclusion of any 

external dose at all. Pancreas is a nonmetabolic organ for these models, by the way -- 

I think. I'm pretty sure. 

If you look at the alternative doses, of 

course, they're huge. The bone surface is 2.3 

times ten to the fifth rem; liver dose ten to 
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the fourth; kidneys 1,600. So again, metabolic 

dose is extremely large, and -- and I can't -- 

you know, most of these folks with any positive 

bioassay working in the thorium/ionium area 

more than likely for metabolic cancers are 

going to be well over 50 percent. 

Okay, I think that's all the prepared remarks I 

had. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you very much, Jim. Now 

I'll open the floor for questions from the 

Board. 

 MR. GRIFFON: Jim, I guess what I was trying to 

clarify was -- was the -- I -- I understand the 

cases, and that is what we asked for. Now I'm 

looking at the August 12th document that -- 

that sort of has the table one with the 

fractions that you just talked about, and then 

there's a table two that shows example intake 

scenarios, and you have your choice of your 

uranium source, thorium source, radium source. 

I guess my question is now -- I thought I 

understood this before, but now -- if an 

individual has radon breath data -- I'm trying 

to think of a circumstance where that would be 

the driver for the overall intakes of thorium, 
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actinium and protactinium. It seems like 

that's going to generally give you a lower 

number so you're going to default to the 

thorium source. 

DR. NETON: No, I think if you look at the 

examples I just showed, the 95th percentile of 

the radon breath gives you -- with these 

current dose conversion factors -- a higher 

dose. 

 MR. GRIFFON: The 95th percentile --

DR. NETON: Of the radon breath. 

 MR. GRIFFON: I'm saying if the individual has 

his own personal radon breath data -- 

DR. NETON: Right. 

 MR. GRIFFON: -- will that ever be the driver? 

It doesn't -- it seems unlikely to me. 

DR. NETON: Unlikely, unless you're at the 95th 

percentile of the radon --

 MR. GRIFFON: Right. 

DR. NETON: -- intakes, yeah. 

 MR. GRIFFON: Unless you had a -- yeah, you had 

a personal result always out there at the edge 

of your (unintelligible). 

DR. NETON: Correct. 

 MR. GRIFFON: Right. 
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DR. NETON: Right. 

 MR. GRIFFON: So really you're not going to -- 

I mean I don't see a circumstance where you're 

often going to rely on an individual's bioassay 

data. You're going to use distribution data. 

I mean is that fair to say for most of the 

cases? It seems like it to me. 

DR. NETON: For the radon breath? It's hard --

it's hard to -- it's hard to unilaterally make 

that decision. I don't know. Depends on -- I 

think 1949 -- well --

 MR. GRIFFON: Well, let me -- let me rephrase 

the question. If a person has their individual 

radon breath data from which you back-calculate 

a radium intake, you apply fractions as in your 

table one of this document -- 

DR. NETON: Right. 

 MR. GRIFFON: -- you would then still compare 

that to that thorium source term to see which 

one's going to result in a higher dose. Right? 

DR. NETON: Right, right, right, yeah. 

 MR. GRIFFON: So you wouldn't -- just 'cause 

they -- they have their own personal data, 

they're not going to be -- 

DR. NETON: That's correct. 
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 MR. GRIFFON: -- in any way --

DR. NETON: Yeah. 

 MR. GRIFFON: Right. 

DR. NETON: Right, so -- you're right. If a 

person's individual bioassay results in a lower 

dose than the 95th percentile of the air 

concentration data --

 MR. GRIFFON: For the --

DR. NETON: -- source term, thorium source term 

 MR. GRIFFON: -- thorium model source term. 

DR. NETON: -- then we're going to use the -- 

 MR. GRIFFON: Then you go to that --

DR. NETON: -- highest value. 

 MR. GRIFFON: -- model anyway. Okay, it's not 

just for coworkers that that applies. 

DR. NETON: No. It's everybody. In fact --

you're right, mayb-- for radon breath, most 

cases I can envision using the thorium air 

concentration data as a bounding value if we 

don't know where the worker -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: But you would always check it. 

DR. NETON: We're going to do both, yeah. 

We're going to do both every single time. I 

was trying to indicate that here. Case one, 
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case -- case one and the third one are the -- 

 MR. GRIFFON: Right, right. 

DR. NETON: -- two examples. 

 MR. GRIFFON: I mean this just fur-- I mean 

just to further point out what I was mentioning 

yesterday that -- that we have a lot of 

individual radon breath data and -- or a fair 

amount. I think maybe for 20 percent of the 

claimants. Is that --

DR. NETON: Yeah, that's fair, 20, 25 maybe. 

 MR. GRIFFON: And we have, you know, probably 

close to -- maybe not 100 percent, but a lot of 

people have the uranium urinalysis data. But 

as far as the drivers of the dose, neither one 

of those are going to play much of a role -- 

DR. NETON: Well, I --

 MR. GRIFFON: -- I don't think. 

DR. NETON: I think they do. I think you need 

to look at the claimant-favorable nature of 

these calculations that we're doing. 

 MR. GRIFFON: Yeah. 

DR. NETON: I mean we're saying -- I think 

probably the radon breath is probably 

reasonable, but we can't tell, so you know, in 

our program we've always taken the policy that, 
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given two scenarios and we can't conclusively 

determine one way or the other, we're going to 

go with the higher driver. And if that happens 

to be the source term that was unmonitored 

because it was not real high, maybe, we're 

going to do that. 

 MR. GRIFFON: (Off microphone) No, I 

understand, but -- but you can't tell. As you 

said, you can't tell, that's why your default 

(unintelligible). 

DR. NETON: We can't definitively tell, that's 

correct. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Other comments? Dr. 

Melius. 

 DR. MELIUS: Yeah, I have a few questions. I'm 

trying to mainly clarify some things that you -

- came up at the subcommittee meeting, and just 

understand some of the documentation. You 

handed out yesterday this two-page table 

references to Sperry cake and so forth. Have 

those references and so forth been shared with 

SC&A, have they had opportunity to review any 

of this information prior to the meeting? 

DR. NETON: They have not. 

 DR. MELIUS: Okay. And then there was some 
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discussion I think yesterday about sharing some 

of the back-up calculations with this, I think 

with Mark and so forth. Has that taken place 

or is that --

DR. NETON: Well, Mark has picked off our 

computer the air monitoring data that we have 

for the Plant 7-E, but I was not able to get 

the spreadsheet electronically last night. My 

computer just won't -- won't work with the CDC 

computer here. I am having FAXed that spread-- 

a FAX -- the spreadsheet is being FAXed here, 

hopefully as we speak, as well as some of the 

reference materials that were used for those 

calculations. 

 DR. MELIUS: Okay. 

DR. NETON: I will say that SC&A has had access 

to those documents because they're on our site 

research database, but we're going to make them 

available to them. 

 MR. GRIFFON: There -- there's no way to get 

that spreadsheet electronically? I'm worried 

about -- FAXed version is -- it's a lot easier 

if I --

DR. NETON: Yeah, I understand, I -- I just 

can't get my computer to hook up with CDC. We 
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changed systems and it's -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: Any follow-up --

 DR. MELIUS: Yeah, I have some other questions, 

at least one more here. In regarding to the 

issue of -- I think I asked you about it 

yesterday -- selectively censoring the data, I 

guess I have -- have two questions. The table 

you showed which was related to the missing 

August data, has there been any analysis other 

than that --

DR. NETON: No. 

 DR. MELIUS: -- for -- so, okay, just --

DR. NETON: We took the section of the data 

where we believed there was the highest -- the 

highest percentage of missing data, and it was 

August of that year, so we just felt -- 

 DR. MELIUS: So it's just that -- that's the 

only example that you've -- 

DR. NETON: Correct. 

 DR. MELIUS: -- pursued. Okay, that's fine, 

trying to understand it -- and do that. And is 

there any documentation -- I guess I'm -- I'm a 

little -- as I understand it, and this may be a 

time issue, but the site profile has only had a 

very minor or modest change since the last 
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time, at least in terms of documentation, so -- 

which is the one paragraph of a note that Larry 

sent us. Is that --

DR. NETON: No, there's more than that. What 

we've done is taken out all the prescriptive 

language that was in section six related to the 

internal dose. 

 DR. MELIUS: Okay. 

DR. NETON: There were some -- some statements 

in there to say you should do this and do that. 

We believe that these approaches that we have -

- that we've evolved in -- and I -- in a sense 

are becoming the workbook for Mallinckrodt -- 

which is what we've really done, we've created 

the Mallinckrodt workbook here -- were not 

necessarily consistent with some of the 

language that was in that site profile, so you 

know -- but the -- the actual data that are 

tabulated in those 250 pages, by and large 

there's nothing changed there. I mean the 

information contained in the site profile is -- 

is essentially intact. I mean there's no -- 

we've refined it and developed more -- further 

analyses of data, but the information in there 

is not necessarily incorrect. It was a couple 
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of prescriptive items in there -- are 

inconsistent with what we're proposing here. 

 DR. MELIUS: But -- but you've made I think 

pretty significant procedural changes in terms 

of how you're handling some of this data. 

DR. NETON: Well, yes, I think that would have 

evolved over time as we're doing dose 

reconstructions. As SC&A is seeing, you have a 

site profile that tells you a lot of 

information. Now what you end up doing with 

that at the end of the day when you're -- when 

you're doing these dose reconstructions does 

evolve over time, that's true. 

 DR. MELIUS: That's all I was asking. I think 

that's all the questions I have. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Additional -- yes, Mark has a 

question. 

 MR. GRIFFON: More of a minor point on the -- 

our question on the thorium data that you 

provided yesterday. Was there any -- I mean 

I'm trying to understand why they had a twomonth urinalysis program and then after that 

did they -- was there -- maybe you don't have 

documentation to support this, but why all of a 

sudden was it air sampling and no urinalysis, 
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or is it just that you can't -- 

DR. NETON: I don't know. 

 MR. GRIFFON: That's all you could find -- 

DR. NETON: That's all we found, right. 

 MR. GRIFFON: -- (unintelligible) data, right? 

DR. NETON: There may be urinalysis. If it 

was, it might have not been done by the HASL 

laboratory in 1956/'57. There was a sort of 

diminution of HASL's role later on in the 

process, so I -- I really can't speak to that 

other than we have what we have. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Further questions? 

 (No responses) 

Okay, thank you, Jim. We can -- I'm checking 

the time here. We -- we can perhaps -- Arjun 

Makhijani, how -- how much time do you need for 

your presentation? 

 DR. MAKHIJANI: (Off microphone) I think I can 

do it (unintelligible). 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay, why don't we do that. We 

may have to extend the question period till 

afternoon after we reconvene, but let's proceed 

with Dr. Makhijani's presentation from SC&A, 

then see how far we get. We're scheduled for 

lunch at 11:30. We might run over a little 
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bit, but we have a -- we have a closed session 

at 1:00 o'clock dealing with our contract, so 

we -- we need to allow enough time for folks to 

eat lunch. 

 DR. MELIUS: No one will know if we don't come 

back, though, so -- or if we're late. 

 DR. ZIEMER: We'll have a problem. Okay, Dr. 

Makhijani. 

 DR. MELIUS: You'll keep track of me, though, I 

know. 

 DR. MAKHIJANI: I prepared this -- you'll have 

a copy of a report. The Board directed SC&A to 

essentially review, as Jim said, in real time 

as NIOSH was responding to these priority 

issues. I just -- my team is formally 

mentioned at the end of the slide, but I just 

wanted to give you maybe a little bit more 

detailed idea of who did what and how -- how 

significant an effort this was. 

 I coordinated the effort, but -- and did the 

work on the residues. John Mauro and I did the 

work on the environmental side of this review. 

I had Mike Thorne do the memorandum on radon 

breath as to whether it was a suitable method. 

And Joyce Lipsztein, who's here, and Dunstana 
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Melo, her colleague, reviewed that. Hans 

Behling covered the external dose. Bob 

Anigstein and Joyce Lipsztein and Dunstana Melo 

covered the radon issues, and all of us looked 

at the dose reconstruction. So this has been a 

very significant effort on the part of a lot of 

different people. 

This is the third supplemental review of 

Mallinckrodt, as you know. And mainly, as Jim 

has described, the question of all of these 

trace radionuclides that do go together with 

uranium 238 and U-235 were seen to be 

significant and have -- have been the focus of 

the effort. 

As a process matter, the Board directed us to 

keep track of how all of this was done. And 

really it's been a very fruitful and very open 

collaboration with NIOSH. We kept a record of 

the communications, including all the e-mail 

record, which is there in Attachment 5. The 

petitioner participated in the August 4 

Cincinnati meeting. There's a -- there is a 

transcript of that meeting, I understand now, 

that is available. Jim and I cooperatively 

prepared a summary of the conference call, 
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which is there in the report. And all of the 

documents that were sent to SC&A, up to August 

14th, are in the attachments from 2 through 7. 

They should have been labeled actually NIOSH 

documents, but they're -- they're so described 

in the report, and they clearly are documents 

produced by NIOSH. Jim -- Jim has shown you 

the slides. So it was -- it's been a very, 

very open interchange with the full 

participation and communication with the 

petitioner, and it's been very fruitful for us. 

And as Jim said, we -- we certainly have also 

learned a lot in this process. 

Our objectives were to track the six priority 

areas. I just -- just as a reminder, we -- our 

emphasis was on methodology. We did not verify 

all of the calculations. We tried to verify 

some of the work on the ratios and the radon 

breath and the radon dose issues which were 

very critical. Specifically we did not re-run 

IMBA and do all of that work. And also, 

obviously this is not a full SEC petition 

evaluation. This is in the context of a TBD 

report, and an SEC petition evaluation review 

is sort of obviously beyond the scope of what 
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we were asked to do. 

So I won't repeat the six priority issues. 

You've already seen that with -- with Dr. 

Neton. 

 Our overall conclusion is that NIOSH has 

developed an approach that can be applied to 

estimate maximum doses with plausible worstcase estimates. But there's a proviso that 

defensible values still need to be developed 

for certain critical parameters. 

Our conclusions are as of August 16th. You 

have my slides, but just now as I was sitting 

there, some new information has come to light, 

obviously, which Dr. Neton has described, and 

I've added a slide as to some of that new 

information, which I'll discuss at the end. So 

I'll go through the critical issues that still 

need to be completed. There is a table -- a 

sort of a checklist table in the report which 

goes sub-issue by sub-issue as to the status of 

it. 

 Our specific recommendations on the major 

issues are, in terms of the ratios associated 

with the radon breath data -- which I haven't 

specifically mentioned -- those -- the use of 
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the K-65 ratios for those areas, for the K-65 

areas in Plant 6 and associated areas, seem to 

be appropriate to us. They're well 

established, there's some good measurements, 

the measurements are internally consistent. 

I've personally gone to the Fernald document 

database and reviewed some of that information, 

and that seems appropriate to us. 

The question of the non-equilibrium 

radionuclide exposures in regard to the thorium 

230-dominated areas, the AM-7 areas in that 

chart that Jim put up, which is also in your 

attachments, are a little more difficult 

because there is a much thinner volume of 

information, at least as of August 16th. And 

this morning I've been reviewing this new 

information -- which is quite significant; I'll 

talk about that -- but from a broad point of 

view there's the question of job types. The 

Board did say to whom does this information 

apply. And NIOSH has proposed that general -- 

to most workers, these non-equilibrium ratios 

which produce the high doses, high thorium, 

high protactinium, would be applied to most 

workers, and that equilibrium ratios which 
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produce lower doses would be applied only when 

it is clear that it's a uranium worker in areas 

that did not involve these raffinates and K-65 

residues and so on. And we're in agreement 

with that, al-- I'll -- we would like to 

emphasize that because of the very large 

difference in doses and potential outcome, that 

this assumption of equilibrium exposure should 

be very carefully made and documented because 

it needs to be very defensible 'cause there's 

going to be a very significant difference in 

dose. And reviewing the radon breath data -- 

raw data, it's not -- it's not clear that it's 

-- it's not clear-cut that certain workers in 

certain places can be excluded from this higher 

values. 

Now one area of significant kind of outstanding 

issue and detail is this 95 percentile of air 

concentrations for -- for the high thorium 

areas, the AM-7 areas. NIOSH has proposed to 

compare this radon breath with air 

concentration results for the thorium areas. 

And the question is what air concentration 

should be used? In the calculations that NIOSH 

has presented, they have taken the 95 
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percentile of the daily weighted averages for 

all of Plant 6 where the uranium processing 

went on. And of course that doesn't appear to 

us to be representative of the AM-7 areas. 

It's is a 95 percentile of the daily weighted 

averages, but -- and that is -- that has been 

said by NIOSH, and I have not reviewed the data 

myself, but accepting at face value that it is 

double the daily weighted average of the 

thorium, it doesn't tell us what is the 

relation of the proposed number to the 95 

percentile value of the air concentration in 

the AM-7 areas. I just wanted to be very clear 

about this, that -- that the air concentrations 

in the areas where thorium was dominant need to 

be the reference point for doing the dose 

calculation for those areas, and the 95 

percentile of the value of the air 

concentration needs to be developed for that. 

This is -- in the April report that we 

presented to you, the first supplemental 

report, we -- SC&A presented some calculations 

about how one might go about this. This is a 

non-- non-trivial issue where some work needs 

to be done, and presumably the data are there 
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and it can be done, but this is not a resolved 

issue of detail as yet. We believe some work 

needs to be done here. 

I won't dwell too much on the radon breath 

data. I think there's been quite a lot of 

discussion about illegible data and so on. The 

only point I'd like to make here is that there 

are workers with -- the way the calculations 

are now set up, the -- the workers with radon 

breath data may be at some disadvantage because 

the full distribution is being used. That's in 

the nature of the process, we understand. But 

the measurement uncertainties, as well as how 

to fill the gaps in the data in a claimantfavorable way should -- should be assessed 

somewhat -- somewhat differently and -- and 

perhaps some -- some method to -- to have 95 

percentile values for missing data points 

should be developed to make it appropriately 

claimant-favorable for workers, 'specially who 

have just a few radon breath data points. 

So that's -- that's the major recommendation we 

have regarding completion of the dose 

reconstruction procedure. 

And there is the question of Plant 7-E, which 
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Jim discussed, where thorium was extracted for 

part of '55 and '56 and '57. At the time that 

we prepared the report it wasn't clear how much 

bioassay data was available. We understand now 

there's quite a bit available for the two 

months, and at the time we wrote the report 

there wasn't -- it wasn't clear how much -- at 

one -- the air concentration data that was in 

the TBD and associated documents was clearly 

inadequate. And as an indicator -- I can point 

out to you that the indicated annual intake 

from the TBD-derived values and the case study 

presented by NIOSH -- in the case study the 

intake is about 100 times bigger than was 

suggested as an intake in the TBD. So we're 

talking about very significant differences. 

And the new information that's been presented 

would -- would help of course carry this 

forward, but it is new information. 

There are two external dose -- there are three 

external dose issues. NIOSH was asked to 

address one of them, but we did raise three 

issues in our last review. We agree with NIOSH 

regarding how they have handled the organ 

geometry versus the badge geometry. And we've 
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reviewed the Attila results and are in 

agreement with them. 

But there are these two issues regarding dose 

conversion factors, which Dr. Behling talked 

about yesterday afternoon, which are the angle 

of incidence on the badge because the shielding 

absorbs some of the radiation, and the dose 

conversion factors need to be corrected. These 

are complex-wide issues, but they do need to be 

resolved to do Mallinckrodt dose 

reconstruction, and we did raise them in this 

context because if there's going to be some 

resolution to this, these are part of the 

issues that need to be resolved. That could be 

very critical, especially for the non-metabolic 

organs which -- for which external dose may be 

the most important, or at least one important 

factor. 

 The correction factors for lower torso organs 

could be as much as a factor of six to eight. 

That is, you'd have to multiply the dose of 

record by six times to eight times. And they 

would be higher for lower photon energies and 

lower for higher photon energies. 

Okay, many priori-- in several priority areas 
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we arrived at agreement with NIOSH, on the 

radon exposures. We think on the unmonitored 

exposures NIOSH has a suitable approach. We 

don't have any new recommendations. On the 

incidents, generally NIOSH has devel-- has 

convinced us that the continuous intake 

approach is claimant favorable. However, there 

may be unusual incidents, like when the 

raffinates boiled over on a worker in 19-- in 

the ionium plant. That kind of incident has to 

be looked at particularly, but it's not a 

Technical Basis Document issue. It's a dose 

reconstruction issue, however. 

 The routine environmental dose approach, NIOSH 

has developed a satisfactory approach. They've 

not yet developed an accidental environmental 

dose approach, but looking at the documents 

that -- that Denise Brock gave me on August 

4th, it appears that the basis for doing that 

is there, but it has not yet been done. 

So these are the critical issues, other than 

the corrections to the radon database, just as 

a summary. The ratios in the thorium areas 

need to be developed -- this is as of August 

14th; the 95 percentile air concentrations need 
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to be developed for the AM-7 areas and we're 

not in accord that the 95 percentile that's 

being used is the correct one. The dose 

correction factor for external dose need to be 

completed. 

I'd like to say a little bit -- I'd like to go 

to my update slide. We've had some new 

information. I added this slide; it's not your 

handout. I just added it. Now the -- the 

analysis that we have of the residues I have 

not had -- I've read it, but I have -- it 

contains very significant new information about 

process chemistry. It could -- it's important 

new information. It's from complex-wide -- you 

know, I did re-- re-visit the database, but the 

database off NIOSH is exceedingly big, and so 

these are -- these are data from Argonne, from 

Mound, from -- from Oak Ridge and various parts 

of the complex. There's very significant new 

information. It could result in improved 

ratios, but we have not reviewed it. So we 

knew that NIOSH was continuing to work on this 

when we submitted the report. NIOSH did inform 

us, that's part of the e-mail record. But 

we've obviously not had a chance to review the 
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information -- the air concentration data, the 

underlying documents, the new production data -

- that has been presented at this meeting. I 

have read this and I agree that it is 

significant and important new technical 

information. 

Now in SC&A's -- between our submittal of the 

report and coming to this meeting, I did try to 

go over the IMBA calculations and cast an eye 

on them to see if -- if everything looked okay. 

And I picked up this discrepancy between the 

dose conversion factors for actinium and 

protactinium. There is some significant issue 

that remains to be resolved as to which is the 

appropriate one. There is a -- quite a big 

difference, order -- about three orders of 

magnitude, I think, between the ICRP published 

values and the Federal Guidance Report 

published values, and they're all supposed to 

be based on similar documents. But I think the 

Federal Guidance Report documents may be more 

recent. This is important because it goes to 

the fact as to how important protactinium is in 

-- in the thorium areas and whether you need to 

worry about the ratios or not. 
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This was the teams that prepared the report. 

Thank you. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you very much. We might 

have time for a couple of questions before we 

break, but it is past our break time. We will 

have extensive time after our closed session 

for discussion on this paper. 

Arjun, could you clarify, though, what is the 

discrepancy between the ICRP value and the 

Federal Guidance -- this was on what nuclide or 

nuclides? 

 DR. MAKHIJANI: Well, it was for protactinium 

231. That's the only one that kind of leapt 

out at me because the dose for protactinium 231 

-- it's not in my slides, but it'll be in 

attachment -- if you look at Attachment 3-A of 

your report -- if I might go and actually bring 

Attachment 3-A -- since I have a portable mike, 

I'll just do that. 

(Pause) 

 Attachment 3-A is NIOSH's first case study. 

This is a slightly older version of it. 

There's an updated version. It's on page -- it 

starts on page 69 of the report -- of the SC&A 

report. And let me see, if you go to page 72 
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and look at the alternative organ doses, the 

last table on page 72 -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yes. 

 DR. MAKHIJANI: -- and you look at the liver 

dose, for protactinium it's 1.64 time ten to 

the minus one rem. If you look at actinium, 

it's 2,000 rem. That's four orders of 

magnitude difference. And that doesn't 

correspond with the dose conversion factors 

that are in Federal Guidance Report 13, but it 

does correspond with what's in ICRP. So 

obviously the two documents are inconsistent 

and we stumbled upon this. And Jim has some 

recent information about it from his office, 

which he mentioned. 

DR. NETON: Well --

 DR. ZIEMER: Jim? 

DR. NETON: -- I'd just like to point out that, 

first off, the Federal Guidance Report 

documents are EPA documents that I believe only 

provide 50-year doses -- is that correct? 

 DR. MAKHIJANI: No, actually the Federal 

Guidance Report -- well -- 

DR. NETON: I think -- they're committed doses, 

and --
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 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes. 

DR. NETON: -- and so we are using the ICRP 

models that we have programmed to do annual 

dose increments for our program, so that's 

where we're at. Now this discrepancy -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: Right, you wouldn't use a 50-year 

dose in a given --

DR. NETON: No. 

 DR. ZIEMER: -- case in any event. 

DR. NETON: Now it doesn't mean that there's 

not a difference, though -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

DR. NETON: -- but that's indicative of a 

problem --

 DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

DR. NETON: -- or a disconnect. 

 DR. ZIEMER: 'Cause it's a dose conversion 

factor. 

DR. NETON: Right, but what we have done is 

IMBA has programmed the most recent ICRP models 

that are out there, and that's what we've done. 

Now the Federal Guidance Report was issued I 

think in 2002 time frame. They've clearly 

taken a different tack, and we need to look at 

this. Keith Eckerman I think was involved in 
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both, and it really comes down to which model 

they used to -- which metabolic model they used 

for actinium and protactinium. I think they 

used surrogate nuclide models, like thorium for 

one of them and americium for another, and I 

think that's where the issue is going to lie, 

but we can certainly -- you know, we certainly 

need to look at this and run this to ground. 

 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yeah, we have no disagreement 

here. I think Jim -- Jim and I have discussed 

this and Jim discussed it with Joyce -- 

DR. NETON: Right. 

 DR. MAKHIJANI: -- today, I mentioned the issue 

to her. I'm very glad she's here. And it 

won't make much difference in terms of -- 

because the doses for liver are very big. But 

it will make some difference to other organs. 

DR. NETON: Correct. 

 DR. MAKHIJANI: And the one that's highlighted 

here from the Federal Guidance Report -- maybe 

you can't see it very well -- is breast, where 

the dose conversion factor for Type M is 1.6 

time ten to the minus five sieverts for 

becquerel, and I think it's -- it's several 

orders of magnitude less in the ICRP. Which 
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let me see if I can bring up. I have it 

somewhere here. Well, maybe I'll get it ready 

after lunch if you actually want to see the -- 

ah, yes, here -- I can bring it up. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Basically, though, the issue is 

whether or not it's a true difference in the 

model versus some kind of an error that's been 

introduced into one or the other. Is that 

correct? 

 DR. MAKHIJANI: Doctor? 

DR. NETON: I think it's a -- I think it's 

selection of the appropriate model. I mean we 

committed to this program to use the current 

ICRP models and that's what we've used. 

Federal Guidance Report has taken a different 

tack and clearly they have a different approach 

to the dosimetry. And if that is the most 

reasonable approach, then we would certainly 

look into and adopt it. 

 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yeah. Yeah, it's about four 

orders of magnitude difference -- the breast. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. We do need to take our 

lunch break. We're going to reconvene at 1:00. 

Dr. Wade, if you will give us appropriate 

instructions and information for the public on 
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the nature of -- and limitations of that 

particular closed session. 

 DR. WADE: Right, I wanted to -- for the record 

now, and I will also do it at 1:00 o'clock -- 

state that -- let me read from the decision to 

close the meeting. 

 (Reading) The Advisory Board on Radiation and 

Worker Health will be meeting in closed session 

on August 25th, 2005 from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 

p.m. The closed portion of the meeting will 

involve a review and discussion of the 

finalization of contractor cost and scope of 

work issues for the following fiscal year. 

 Again, we're talking about SC&A issues for the 

next fiscal year. During that discussion 

company confidential information will be 

discussed, particularly labor rates used by 

SC&A in their proposals, and therefore, by 

statute, we closed that portion of the meeting. 

When we return at 3:00 o'clock either the Chair 

or I will make a public statement as to any 

action that took place, any motions or work 

that was done during that closed session, so 

that will go on the public record. And again 

I'll repeat the statement when we get back 
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together. 

 DR. ZIEMER: There is no other business that 

will be conducted during the closed session. 

That should be noted. 

Thank you. With that, we'll recess for lunch 

and try to be back by 1:00 o'clock. 

 (Whereupon, the public meeting was in recess 

from 11:43 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., during which a 

closed Executive Session was held from 1:07 

p.m. to 2:55 p.m.) 

CLOSED SESSION REPORT

 DR. ZIEMER: As we reconvene, I'd like to 

report to the assembly the results of the 

closed session. During the closed session the 

Board approved the following, relative to our 

contractor. We approved the scope and cost for 

task one, site profile reviews for the upcoming 

year, the -- and I am allowed to give you the 

bottom line figures, we -- and I'll do that. 

That's been approved in the amount of 

$1,204,948. 

 Procedures review, task three, approved in the 

amount of $416,224. 

Task four has not yet been approved. There 

will be additional discussions on the scope, 
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and we expect to have that resolved at the 

October meeting, so task four will continue 

through the next four to six week, roughly, on 

existing funds. 

Task five, Special Exposure Cohort, which is a 

new task, has been approved for -- that is the 

funding for the -- for the contractor to assist 

in the reviews of the Special Exposure Cohort 

petitions, funded in the amount of $917,341, 

and a new task for program management by the 

contractor in the amount of $217,891. 

 Issues relating to task four, the scope of task 

four, will be taken up in open session by the 

Board, probably at the next meeting. I expect 

it to be on the agenda for the next meeting. 

It has to do with the numbers of reviews of 

basic and advanced reviews. 

Now the other -- other quick issue I need to 

take care of is it's been discovered that in 

the assignment of our dose reconstruction teams 

we have assigned to the Roessler/DeHart team an 

X-10 Oak Ridge case where Dr. DeHart has 

conflict of interest. So we need to reassign 

that. It's case 201. I think an easy solution 

for that would be just to reassign that to a 
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different group. Why don't -- why don't we 

just move that to Owens/Munn, if that's 

agreeable? 

 MS. MUNN: Sure. Which one is it? 

 DR. ZIEMER: That's case 201. It's an Oak 

Ridge X-10 case. I believe that will solve the 

issue. I'm not aware of any other conflicts in 

 DR. MELIUS: I'm okay. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Oh, and -- okay, Melius is okay. 

He hadn't seen their list earlier. So with 

that change, if there's no objection to that, 

we'll make that change in the team assignments 

for dose reconstruction reviews. 

Prior to the lunch break we had just heard from 

Dr. Makhijani on -- oh, I'm sorry. 

 DR. WADE: Could I make just one quick comment 

on the work in the closed session, and now I've 

lost my point -- oh, you know, we -- we've done 

this action based upon an assumed action on the 

part of Congress. We don't know what action 

Congress will take in terms of, you know, 

budgets and appropriations and -- so what we've 

done is based upon assumed action on the part 

of Congress. We'll adjust accordingly. 
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 DR. ZIEMER: Right, I forgot to mention that, 

that those approved numbers are based on a 

Congressional request. If -- if the budget 

numbers are different, then we may have to 

adjust.

REPORT FROM SUBCOMMITTEE: 

MALLINCKRODT SITE PROFILE REVIEW 

(CONTINUED) 

Dr. Makhijani had just completed his 

presentation prior to our lunch break. We want 

to open that back up for discussion. And 

Arjun, if you're prepared, we'll just open the 

floor -- you can use the mike right there, I 

guess, unless you need to get your slides back 

out. But Board members, do you have questions 

-- go back to Dr. Makhijani's presentation. 

(Pause) 

 DR. ZIEMER: I want to clarify something on the 

illegible data issue. It was my understanding 

that now we are going back and getting better 

copies of that for both the contractor and the 

Board -- Jim? 

DR. NETON: That's correct, I forgot to mention 

that this morning, that we have gone back to 

Germantown to the Office of Worker Advocacy and 

recaptured the 451 pages of radon breath data 
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that are in their possession. 

 DR. ZIEMER: And was it correct that it appears 

that the main issue there was where the decimal 

points occurred on some of those, or were there 

some other --

DR. NETON: Well, there are other issues. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Other issues as well? 

DR. NETON: Just illegible entries, and there 

were some entries that appeared to be fairly 

high values, and it wasn't clear -- at least to 

me -- whether the decimal point was missing or 

they were actually high. We're going to, you 

know, zero in on those entries and make sure 

that we understand what they are. 

 DR. ZIEMER: The original sheets are in your 

possession or are they at Germantown? 

DR. NETON: They're in Germantown at the Office 

of Worker Advocacy. They were originally at 

the Health and Safety Laboratory, which was a 

DOE laboratory, but then they have since moved 

them to Homeland Security, so OWA assumed 

possession of them. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Do we have a fair amount of 

confidence that new copies of those will solve 

this problem or do -- does someone need to go 
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on site and verify or will you go on site and 

verify the numbers? 

DR. NETON: We are on site. I mean we've --

 DR. ZIEMER: You will --

DR. NETON: -- had a team there the last two 

days. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Okay. 

DR. NETON: And they are looking through every 

image and where, if the copy is not legible 

even under their best of circumstances, they -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: They will so identify it. 

DR. NETON: -- they will be working with a team 

to make sure that, you know, the page that is 

not -- can't be scanned properly is going to be 

-- the data will be captured in some form. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. And then you'll share these 

with the contractor? 

DR. NETON: Absolutely. 

 MR. GRIFFON: Just to clarify 'cause I think I 

initiated some of this, it's not only 

illegible. I mean I've -- and I -- you know, 

not to dispute completely, but I -- I pulled 

off from the raw records the ones that I could 

clearly see with discrepancies in '54, and if -

- if you still are concerned about that -- I 
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mean there's -- there's three or four dates in 

1955 where the whole day of data is missing, 

which includes about 15 data points. So it's 

not -- it's not simply -- 

DR. NETON: Well --

 MR. GRIFFON: -- an issue of illegibility. 

It's -- you know, there's some disconnect 

between the raw data sheets and the database. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Jim? 

DR. NETON: And that's -- I think we tried to 

address that this morning. When we looked at 

those dates, and I believe they were August 

mostly, where we actually had samples for those 

people at a later time -- 98 percent of the 

samples that were missing in the snapshot we 

took, anyways, in August -- we found additional 

data. And we need to remember that radon 

breath samples are integrating samples. I mean 

in the sense that you're looking at a 

cumulative body burden of radium, so it's not 

like you would have missed some large intake if 

you had to wait three to six months to 

recollect the sample. 

 DR. ZIEMER: So you are able to identify the 

individuals for whom those points were -- 
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 MR. GRIFFON: Yeah, that's --

DR. NETON: The names are in the data-- on the 

data sheets. 

 MR. GRIFFON: This is not -- I'm not talking 

about lost versus not analyzed ones. I'm 

talking about data points, and I -- 9/19/55, 

9/12/55, I got about 16, 17 data points on each 

of those days. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Those are September -- 

 MR. GRIFFON: That were not in the CER 

database, right. And --

DR. NETON: Right, right --

 MR. GRIFFON: -- I'm not disputing that the -- 

you're -- you're correct, Jim, in that 

assumption for an individual basis radon -- 

radium dose estimate off the -- off the radon 

breath, but we're looking at the distribution 

of this data and back-calculating intakes for 

the coworker evaluation. 

DR. NETON: Right, and I think -- I hope I got 

the message -- I gave the message properly, 

that we are going to re-code the entire 451 

pages and not leave -- leave -- you know, not 

just rely on the CER database. I mean this 

will be the HASL dataset that will be coded and 
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analyzed. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Okay. Other questions 

now for Dr. Makhijani? 

Yes, Wanda, uh-huh. 

 MS. MUNN: Do we have a hard copy yet of that 

last slide of yours, Arjun, that we didn't -- 

is it possible for us to get that? 

 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes, I haven't printed it out, 

but I will -- I will go to the business center 

-- will tomorrow be all right or should I do it 

right away? 

 MS. MUNN: Just -- even an electronic version, 

just as long as I can add it to the material we 

already have. 

 DR. MAKHIJANI: Sure, I'll get -- I'll get an 

electronic -- I'll send an electronic version 

to the Board by e-mail tonight. 

 DR. MELIUS: Yes. 

 MS. MUNN: That -- that would be most 

appreciated. It seemed there was some 

pertinent information there that we hadn't had 

before and I --

 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yeah, I just -- I wrote it up 

actually this morning, so -- 

 MS. MUNN: I'd appreciate it. Thank you. 
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 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. There are no other 

questions for Dr. Makhijani? Okay, thank you 

very much. 

 DR. MELIUS: Just --

 DR. ZIEMER: Oh, yes, there is. 

 DR. MELIUS: Wanted to know -- it's a 

logistical -- assumption is that you will be 

around tomorrow morning, Arjun, for the -- 

 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yes. 

 DR. MELIUS: Okay. 

 DR. MAKHIJANI: I'm scheduled to leave about -- 

I think 3:30 or 4:00 o'clock. 

 DR. MELIUS: Thanks. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Thank you. Board members, 

do you have any additional questions or 

comments relative to the site profile review, 

the Mallinckrodt site profile review? 

 (No responses) 

We will return to -- oh, Mark, are you -- 

 MR. GRIFFON: Are these questions for Jim or 

Arjun? 

 DR. ZIEMER: Jim or Arjun or just points you 

wish to raise. 

 DR. MELIUS: I just have one more logistical 

question regarding tomorrow morning. Is there 
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going to be a presentation by NIOSH relevant to 

the Special Exposure Cohort petition evaluation 

tomorrow? 

 DR. ZIEMER: My understanding is that NIOSH is 

planning a --

 DR. WADE: A very brief presentation. 

 DR. ZIEMER: -- presentation. The peti--

 DR. MELIUS: Is there a handout or something 

relevant to that? 

 DR. WADE: No. 

 DR. MELIUS: So -- okay. 

 DR. WADE: It'll just be some comments made. 

 DR. MELIUS: Okay. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. And the petitioners also 

will --

 DR. WADE: The petitioners have an opportunity 

 DR. ZIEMER: -- have a presentation. 

 DR. MELIUS: No, I -- yeah, that's just -- I'm 

trying to see if there's other -- follow up on 

Wanda's question, was there other material that 

it'd be nice to have tonight to look at and -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: Right. Thank you. Mark? 

 MR. GRIFFON: I just was wondering if -- if Jim 

might go in -- a little bit into the -- how the 
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air sampling data was used and how the 95th 

percentile was established. I believe it was -

- this -- the full set of data was the DWA data 

from the CER database -- 

DR. NETON: Correct. 

 MR. GRIFFON: -- as well? If you can just 

explain -- is it --

DR. NETON: Actually --

 MR. GRIFFON: -- using the same procedure as 

the radon breath? 'Cause I -- I actually spent 

a lot of time with the radon breath, with the 

assumption that that was the driver, and a few 

days ago I think that's kind of -- 

DR. NETON: Well --

 MR. GRIFFON: -- turned on me and now I want to 

look at the --

DR. NETON: Well, I'd like to correct -- I 

think that was a misconception. I think at the 

last Board meeting we clearly indicated that we 

would use the higher of the two values, which 

included the air sampling data. I mean the 

only thing that's really changed here is that 

rather than rely on the ratio of radium to 

uranium -- or the uranium to radium values, we 

decided to use the radon breath to bound the 
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radium intakes. And I think I indicated that 

at the last Board meeting, but we had -- we had 

committed, at least as of the last Board 

meeting, that we would rely on the higher of 

the two values. You -- in relying on air data. 

So we are doing that. 

Now the daily weighted averages, we do not use 

the information that was in the CER database. 

Those were individual daily weighted averages 

assigned to people. What we did was we went 

back to the dust study reports themselves. If 

you recall, on an annual basis for a while they 

-- they went through -- you know, during the 

operations, and would conduct a dust study 

campaign where -- for instance, in 1950 they 

took -- I didn't count it exactly, but I would 

say somewhere probably around 500 air samples 

over a period of time -- a month or whatever it 

was, I've forgotten the exact period -- and 

tried to describe in some detail the air 

concentration distribution, and then they 

collapsed those values into individual job -- 

occupation categories, so you have a ranking of 

occupational exposures by -- you know, by dust 

concentration. And so we took all that data -- 
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those data, analyzed them and we did look at 

the entire plant. 

 Now the reason we did that is it was somewhat 

difficult to decipher -- you know, it's a 

judgment call as to which was -- you know, when 

I say raffinate, I'm particularly speaking 

about a thorium-bearing area. It's hard to 

judge exactly what those are. Now keep in mind 

that the radium-bearing ores are at least a 

factor of ten higher in specific activity. I 

mean the radium concentration of those ores is 

at least ten times higher on a unit basis per 

milligram of material. So if you use the 

entire plant distribution, you're -- you're 

certainly going to bias your results higher 

than if you only looked at the raffinate areas. 

And the samples that we could find, we did 

determine that we're about a factor of two 

higher using the general plant description, and 

we just felt more comfortable that we had 

bounded and bracketed the exposures doing that. 

So I don't know if that --

 MR. GRIFFON: And these individual -- you went 

back to the -- the dust studies and handentered the data again? 
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DR. NETON: Yes. 

 MR. GRIFFON: Okay. And did -- did you guys 

look at that -- did SC&A look at that data? 

'Cause I didn't. 

 DR. MAKHIJANI: No, actually one of my 

questions for Jim that -- is how much data 

that's clearly identifiable as AM-7 air 

concentration data is there? Because I looked 

at the site profile and then I did a scattered 

search -- not systematic 'cause there wasn't 

the time -- for AM-7-specific air concentration 

data, and I don't have a good sense of what the 

raw databases is like, actually, on which this 

judgment was made that 607 dpm per cubic meter 

is double the daily weighted average of the 

thorium areas. I don't know what that database 

for the thorium areas is. 

DR. NETON: I don't have an exact number of 

individual air samples, but I do know that we 

were looking again at daily weighted averages 

by job code, or job category. So when you 

collapse 500 air samples into -- I'm -- I'm -- 

remembering, but something like 40 or 50 job 

categories in the plant, we only ended up with 

around 11 of those job categories that were, in 
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our judgment, uniquely tied to an AM-7 type 

area. And those values were the ones that came 

out about a factor of two lower than using the 

entire Plant 6 distribution, which included, 

you know, ore handlers and a lot of other areas 

where there certainly were more -- operations 

that were more inclined to have higher airborne 

activities. 

I will say we did exclude some areas that we 

thought would be lower job categories, like in 

the warehouse operation and that sort of thing. 

So you know, we tried to pick what we thought 

was a representative -- not representative, but 

a good indication of what the range of 

exposures were, but we did not truncate it to 

the AM-7 areas, and I think it's fairly 

reasonably bounding of the air concentrations. 

 MR. GRIFFON: I'm try-- Jim, one last on that. 

I'm trying to understand the difference for the 

CER database versus the dust studies in this 

case. And I think, if I'm correct, in the dust 

studies they did daily weighted averages for -- 

for say a maintenance mechanic in a certain 

area --

DR. NETON: Right. 
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 MR. GRIFFON: -- but then they might have 

assigned that to six or seven maintenance 

mechanics --

DR. NETON: Well, exactly, and that's why we 

didn't -- yeah, that's right. 

 MR. GRIFFON: Is that correct? 

DR. NETON: That's correct. 

 MR. GRIFFON: So you didn't want to use the CER 

database data because that would be weighting 

it, essentially, or --

DR. NETON: Yeah, it would weight it by -- you 

know, if there were five -- 90 percent of the 

samples were one -- you know, in one cate-- one 

work category, so this is truly a 

representation of the job category distribution 

in the plant. So in other words, if they -- if 

they over-sampled a lot of people that were of 

low categories, you would end up biasing your 

values low. But this is by occupation code, 

the distribution, so -- and I don't recall 

where -- it'd be interesting, I don't have this 

off the top of my head, but what -- what job 

category the 95th percentile ended up be-- you 

know, approximating. But again, you know, keep 

in mind that the K-65 areas are at least ten 
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times higher in specific activity than the AM-7 

areas. You have huge concentrations of radium 

in those ores. Or not in the ores, in the 

raffinates. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah. Thank you. Arjun, please. 

 DR. MAKHIJANI: Yeah, I -- you know, I think 

that as a general matter, in terms of expecting 

higher concentrations in certain areas, on 

average this would be okay. The thrust of our 

recommendation in terms of the work remaining 

in a proper -- I mean in a technical sense, it 

almost doesn't matter whether it's higher or 

lower. I know it matters to the dose result, 

but if you're doing -- if you're doing a dose 

reconstruction based on the AM-7 area or job 

descriptions, assuming that there's thoriumdominated material there, then -- and assuming 

that radium and so on doesn't exist, it appears 

to us not quite technically kosher, if I might 

say that, to use the plant-wide 95 percentile 

of the averages. It appears to us to be more 

technically sound to limit the air 

concentration study to the 95 percentile of the 

area values of the samples that were taken and 

-- and that -- that database we haven't studied 
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or tried to evaluate. We did illustrate the 

method to be applied, to some extent, in April. 

And that's -- that's one of the important 

recommendations we've made. 

 DR. ZIEMER: But you don't yet know the impact 

of doing that way, is that right? 

 DR. MAKHIJANI: No, we do not know whether that 

number will be bigger than 607 dpm per cubic 

meter or not. I think it -- there's a fair 

chance that it will be bigger, based on what 

NIOSH has told us, that -- that the average to 

be expected in the AM-7 areas is on the order 

of 300, because they said it's doub-- 607 is 

double. So --

DR. NETON: (Off microphone) (Unintelligible) 

 DR. MAKHIJANI: You've said that 607 is double 

of the AM-7 are average, so I would imagine 

then the AM-7 area average is on the order of 

300. 

DR. NETON: (Off microphone) (Unintelligible) 

 DR. MAKHIJANI: Right, it -- but the 90-- I 

don't know what the 95 percentile of the AM-7 

area would be. 

DR. NETON: (Off microphone) (Unintelligible) 

was the 95th percentile. 
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 DR. MAKHIJANI: That has not been my 

understanding. 

DR. NETON: I'm sorry, there's a 

misunderstanding here. The 95th percentile of 

the AM-7 area data is a factor of two lower 

than the 95th percentile of the K-65 area 

samples. 

 DR. MAKHIJANI: (Off microphone) 

(Unintelligible) was not what was said. 

DR. NETON: Well, I mis-spoke then, if that 

were true -- if that -- and I certainly would 

wish to correct that. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. While Arjun is checking 

that, let me see if there's any other questions 

or comments -- yes, Denise, would you like to 

add to this? 

MS. BROCK: If I could, and I think -- poor 

Arjun, I think this one may be directed at him. 

I was just wanting to ask -- according to 

NIOSH, the protactinium to the thorium and the 

actinium, the ratios of the protactinium to the 

thorium and the actinium to the thorium are 

approximate, and I was curious if -- if there 

is a one percent error in the protactinium to 

thorium ratio, what is the impact on the dose 
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to the organs, and how important is it to get 

this correct, the ratio correct, and could you 

give an example? 

 DR. ZIEMER: You're really asking about the 

sensitivity of the -- of the results to those 

particular ratios --

MS. BROCK: (Off microphone) The dose to the 

(unintelligible), right. 

 DR. ZIEMER: -- I think is the nature of the 

question. I don't know if -- Jim or Arjun, if 

you can address that. 

 DR. MAKHIJANI: I think --

 DR. ZIEMER: It's certainly a good question. 

DR. NETON: Well, it depends on which organ and 

-- and to have some clarification on the 

discrepancy in the ICRP versus the Federal 

Guidance Report, those conversion factors. But 

certainly for -- for metabolic organs where 

actinium and protactinium drive the dose right 

now, there'd be almost a corresponding 

difference. So you know, one percent change 

might change the dose by one percent. But I 

think one needs to consider that the ratio that 

we've developed has selected protactinium 

concentrations based on the Sperry cake, which 
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is known to have elevated concentrations, is a 

good source of protactinium, compared to the 

AM-7 ores. So we believe this 13.3 percent 

value that we've -- we've assigned is -- is a -

- in our opinion, a conservative limit on the 

value for protactinium. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. And Arjun? 

 DR. MAKHIJANI: I agree with Jim that -- my 

reference point -- I've been assuming that the 

ICRP and Federal Guidance Report were the same, 

and we seem to have stumbled upon this -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

 DR. MAKHIJANI: -- discrepancy kind of through 

a back door or backed into it, and it will 

depend on -- if you accept the Federal Guidance 

Report values as being the more recent, or 

apply those, it would make some difference. So 

I think Jim is entirely right. We're not in 

disagreement. 

Well, I think -- you know, I currently, looking 

at the state of the write-up in terms of -- 

NIOSH has found quite a lot of documentation 

about process chemistry, about where these 

various radionuclides went, that I have not had 

a chance to evaluate. I do think that a lot of 
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good work has been done in terms of 

establishing what these ratios are on the -- on 

first reading, but I -- I cannot tell you my 

own opinion of -- we recommended that this 

issue should be studied further, and they have 

studied it further, so I don't know whether -- 

you know, what my opinion would be if I 

reviewed it. 

DR. NETON: Just a brief follow-up on that 

remark. I do have the documents here so that 

they can be reviewed, if -- if wanted to. I 

think one of the references -- and it's 

important to point out, also, not only did we 

assume protactinium was there in the 

concentrations represented by the Sperry cake, 

which we believe to be an overestimate, but we 

also have assumed that the actinium -- which, 

as you may have seen earlier today, delivers a 

very large dose per unit intake -- is in 100 

percent equilibrium with the protactinium. And 

we have at least one publication that indicates 

that that is not -- not the case, an Argonne 

laboratory analysis indicated that it was from 

in equilibrium, but you know, one reference 

does not make a whole study and so we're -- you 
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know, we're willing to -- to, you know, take a 

-- make the assumption that it is in 100 

percent equilibrium. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Further comments or 

questions on... Okay. Thank you. Then we're 

going to leave that topic for now. We will of 

course be returning -- well, this evening of 

course we'll have public comment period from 

many local folks, and then tomorrow will be 

more of specifically addressing the petition. 

TASK FOUR SCOPE DISCUSSION 

One of the other kind of carry-forward issues 

that emerges from our closed session is an 

issue related to task four, and that is the 

scope discussion for task four in terms of 

basic and advanced reviews. And we began to 

talk about that in our session and realized 

that the scope discussions certainly are 

appropriate in the open session, so we reserved 

discussion of that to this time. And I'm going 

to suggest, if the Board wishes to open that 

issue now, discussion with our contractor, with 

the Board, as to what you might wish the 

contractor to do this next year with respect to 

the issue of advanced dose reconstructions 
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versus basic. 

And I might add that in the description of the 

task, as the contractor described it to us, the 

contractor indicated that many of -- many, 

perhaps all, of the dose reconstructions to 

date are probably more advanced than basic, but 

less advanced than advanced. In other words, 

they are somewhere in between the two. 

In any event, we have a kind of dilemma in 

terms of defining what next year's scope would 

be, so I'm going to open the floor if any of 

the Board members wish to have input on that, 

or our contractor -- and John is prepared to 

talk about this, too. 

 DR. WADE: If I might, in adding to the framing 

of the issue I'd also like to know from the 

Board what specifically we would like to see 

the contractor prepare for us and submit to us 

before the next meeting so that we could take 

our decision in light of that information. 

 DR. ZIEMER: 'Cause the -- this particular item 

-- we did not reach closure on the cost because 

we had not -- we really have not defined what 

we want the contractor to do in terms of scope 

now, vis-a-vis the so-called advanced dose 
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reconstructions. 

Okay, Wanda Munn. 

 MS. MUNN: Based on the discussion that we had 

and the comments of the contracting officer 

with respect to allowing some flexibility and 

such -- some judgment call on the part of the 

contractor, it might be wise for us to consider 

looking at the upcoming 20, 22 cases -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: Twenty. 

 MS. MUNN: -- that we have -- 20 that we have. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Oh, yes, we have 22 that are in 

process, yeah. Yes, you're correct. 

 MS. MUNN: Perhaps we could identify a range of 

percentage, from ten to 25 percent of those 

cases, at their discretion, to be identified as 

advanced cases since SC&A has indicated to us, 

and I think with some validity, that sometimes 

it's hard to identify what really should be 

considered an advanced case till you've had an 

opportunity to look at it. 

 DR. ZIEMER: And while you're pondering that, 

Board members, I also remind you that there was 

some concern that we sort of leave it up to the 

judgment of the contractors as to when to do an 

advanced case and when not, so there is that 
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issue, also -- as opposed to assigning a priori 

certain numbers or actual cases to be advanced 

and certain others to be unadvanced. 

Okay, Richard, you have a comment, and then 

Henry. 

MR. ESPINOSA: I'm afraid to tie the 

contractor's hands on this issue and would like 

them to have the ability to decide which ones 

are the advanced cases and which ones aren't 

the advanced cases, although I am afraid that 

the cost of this could also get out of hand. 

And I'm in agreement with Wanda, if we can 

stipulate a percentage of this, I would feel a 

lot more comfortable with that. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Henry? 

DR. ANDERSON: My question kind of is what -- 

what is the -- what is our purpose for doing 

the advanced? If what we wanted to do is do a 

sample of these and then select some to do an 

advanced on so that it would be a mix of kinds 

so we get a sense of is the current process 

that they're using catching all the 

information, we would use, you know, the review 

of the site profile here that (unintelligible) 

have been as much attention to the raffinates 
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if we hadn't raised that issue. I'm not sure 

when the contractor goes through and they say 

well, we'd like to pursue this more in depth, 

that may capture some of that, but I'm not sure 

that -- unless you necessarily look -- that you 

would know whether the underlying process -- 

that we probably want to do -- we may want to 

focus more of the in-depths on those that were 

done comprehensively versus those that went 

through either the overestimate or the 

underestimate. And I think we probably want to 

run the whole thing on some of those -- run the 

over and under and see what it would actually 

be. Now we may not need to do many of those, 

but I'm not sure those'd come up in their 

standard review if they look at it and it 

basically seems to be following their 

procedures if you didn't go and do the actual 

dose reconstruction on the whole thing, we 

wouldn't know what -- how effective it really 

is. That's my only question, it's kind of what 

-- what do we want from these reviews? If what 

we want to do is let them determine that when 

we look at it -- gee, you know, we're a little 

worried here, this seems to be a softness or a 
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-- that's one approach to it. But that isn't 

necessarily as systematic as I think our 

original intent is. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Robert, then Jim. 

 MR. PRESLEY: I think our original intent was 

to have an audit of cases. I would like to see 

us come back or -- or do the fir-- this 20 or 

22, whatever it is, and then let them come back 

with us. Do it on a basic, then y'all come 

back with us -- SC&A come back to us and say 

okay, here's two or here's 22 that we think 

need to be re-evaluated, and this is why we 

need to be re-evaluating these things. To me, 

that's the audit. And then we tell you which 

ones we want to be re-evaluated. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Jim. 

 DR. MELIUS: If you look at the page 6 of the 

proposal that we received from SC&A, they 

indicate that there are two elements of the 

advanced review that they have not pursued and 

they basically aren't -- not intending to 

pursue. The first one is to evaluate other 

relevant sources of data, and it lists a bunch 

of them, that are included in the site profile 

database. And so I mean it -- regarding that 
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particular site. And the second one is the 

issue of an adequate effort has been made to 

research co-located workers and other 

historical records to characterize the 

individual's work history. 

Now it seems to me that the first issue of 

identif-- evaluating other documents and so 

forth for a -- a site where a site profile 

review has been done, that it is appropriate 

that that be -- that task should be included in 

the site profile review. I -- I agree with 

that. 

However, in cases where a site profile has not 

been done or where a site profile review has 

not been done, then I think some level of 

effort ought to be made, in an advanced review, 

to -- to address that particul-- particular 

objective. I think we have to recognize, I 

think, that in the case of a -- where the site 

profile review is in the works or something, we 

may want to defer on that 'cause it just -- it 

would just be such a large scope and I think 

would be hard to manage. But -- but I would 

suggest we take some approach like that on that 

particular task. 
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On the second task, evaluate whether an 

adequate effort has been made to research colocated workers and other historical records to 

characterize the individual's work history, I 

think that still needs to be done on advanced 

reviews. It's a component of that, it's 

something we wanted done. We didn't want it 

done every time. And is there a -- I'm not 

sure that we want to triage that too much. Did 

-- should it only rely when there's some 

mention in the CATI interview of -- of you 

know, some hint that they should be looking at 

-- well, a lot of these are, you know, survivor 

interviews so they're not going to have that 

information. And some level of effort I think 

needs to be put into attempting to evaluate 

that. It's an important part. It's something 

we've raised concerns about. If you remember 

when we went through the -- lot of debate in 

this Advisory Board about the whole issue of 

going back and interview-- re-interviewing, and 

this was sort of the compromise proposal to 

that. Let's see if we can approach that 

without getting into the whole issue of reinterviewing that we can evaluate that issue. 
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So I would -- I think that's still an important 

part of advanced reviews and I would not like 

to see them drop that. They've not done them 

so we have no record of -- of effort to be able 

to evaluate it. Until we have some record for 

that, I would be reluctant to have them drop 

it. I think we -- we -- in our discussions of 

-- when we did the evaluation of the budgets 

and so forth on the initial scope, I believe we 

discussed the need to -- there needs to be some 

practical limit to that. I mean they can't go 

out and spend months at a -- you know, try -- 

talking to everybody at a particular site 

trying to see -- you know, do you know anything 

about so-and-so that might have worked there or 

about a particular area or -- or something like 

that. But I think there is an effort in terms 

of looking at the -- for information that might 

be -- be relevant and helpful to that. I think 

to a limited extent they already -- they are 

doing it with some of the site profile reviews 

where they go out to the sites and -- and talk 

to people familiar with the sites, but I don't 

believe that that's in enough depth to 

necessarily deal with individual cases and we 
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want to evaluate it relevant to individual 

cases. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Thank you. Let me also 

point out while we're talking about scope that 

the contractor did identify that they, the 

contractor, believe that they are doing dose 

reconstructions that are -- I think the term 

they used is comprehensive. That is perhaps 

more thorough and at more depth than what we 

originally defined the basic, although not at 

the depths of an advanced. And there's some 

question as to whether the Board wishes them to 

continue at that level. 

Now in a sense it -- they have kept us apprised 

all through the process of what they're doing, 

so although this is kind of a new term, the 

comprehensive, we were in a sense aware of how 

they were conducting these, and I think we 

became aware that they probably were a bit more 

thorough than we had originally defined a basic 

dose reconstruction. And in essence, either by 

tacit approval or whatever, we have continued 

along that path, so I don't want to fault the 

contractor for doing something that we 

basically accepted as we -- as we proceeded. 
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But nonetheless, if we do wish the contractor 

to do something less, we also need to define 

that, as well. I just want to put that before 

you. I'm not proposing that we do that, but I 

think if the Board is uneasy about the current 

level, which has some cost implications, then 

that also has to be considered if you want to 

have a sharp demarcation between these two 

because where we're at on the comprehensive -- 

I think to some and perhaps to me -- appears to 

be awfully close to an advanced review, with 

perhaps a few components missing. But again, I 

just throw that out and stimulate some 

additional thoughts. I guess, Jim, you're next 

and then Mark. 

 DR. MELIUS: Yeah, I think that's a good point, 

Paul. I would ask the contractor or whoever's 

familiar with this, that for -- what were we 

expecting to be able to do next year, in terms 

of numbers? They -- we've talked -- we're 

talking only about comprehensive, but I think 

we had some goals in terms of basic and 

advanced. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, I think -- I think the 

contractor was bidding on the basis of 60 
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comprehensives. 

 DR. MELIUS: Yeah. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay? That was what we got. We 

got -- we got a bid of 60 comprehensive 

reviews, and I'm simply pointing out -- we 

don't have a category called a comprehensive 

review, so this Board can decide that that's -- 

that's the kind of review we want, or we can go 

back and say well, back down and do basics and 

advanced and here's the numbers, but that's the 

nature -- that's really what the heart of the 

discussion is. And I think we need to help the 

contractor on that, too, and we need to decide 

what we need. If we like what they're doing, 

then we say good, that's -- you know, we'll 

continue with that and then we'll add to it 

with something -- you know, an advanced 

comprehensive review or whatever you wish to 

call it, more comprehensive. Okay. 

 DR. MELIUS: Before -- I guess my -- my 

question wasn't answered, which was -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: No. 

 DR. MELIUS: -- was -- I know it's the 60 

comprehensive, but originally were we thinking 

of 40 and 20 or what -- what was -- 
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 DR. WADE: Forty basic, 20 compre-- 20. 

 DR. MELIUS: Okay. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Oh, yes. Okay, yeah, that was the 

 DR. MELIUS: Yeah, okay, and my second sort of 

factual question is, of the ones that are 

currently underway, the reviews that are 

currently underway, what is the breakdown in 

terms of basic and advanced? Aren't they 

supposed to be doing advanced now? 

 DR. WADE: Right, these last 20 were to be 

advanced. 

 DR. BEHLING: The first two sets were all 

basics and the last, the third, which we are 

about to finish, are supposedly advanced. 

 DR. MELIUS: Uh-huh. 

 DR. BEHLING: So that's -- that was our 

charter. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah. And one of the problems is, 

they're all looking alike. 

 DR. MELIUS: I mean, frankly, they're not -- I 

mean when we -- we're going to have to make a 

judgment, but we tasked them doing advanced 

reviews and I think they're telling us now they 

don't intend to do them, which is a violation 
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of what we --

 DR. ZIEMER: Well --

 DR. MELIUS: -- we requested. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, yeah, I -- I --

 MR. GRIFFON: (Off microphone) (Unintelligible) 

scope items (unintelligible). 

 DR. ZIEMER: I'll go to bat, in a sense. I 

think they have told us what they're doing, but 

it does appear to be somewhat between our 

parameters, so we need to define this and, you 

know, help them with their task of -- Mark, go 

ahead. 

 MR. GRIFFON: I actually would like to hear 

what -- what the difference -- 'cause I 

actually think that what they've done is basic 

reviews, I thi-- and it doesn't mean I'm not 

happy with the product, but I think if we look 

down the scope items in basic reviews, I don't 

know that they have any additional scope items 

that they've added. I think one thing we've 

had in this first set of 60 now is -- 

especially in the first 20 -- there was a 

learning curve. You know, they -- a lot of the 

first 20 cases, the work involved to assess the 

case was going back to the hard copy procedures 
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and doing hand calculations in some cases by 

Hans. There were workbooks sitting out there 

that could have been used for that function and 

we could have been -- and on the other hand, 

when there were workbooks there that were there 

to support calculations, I'm pretty sure that 

we never went back and looked into the basis of 

those workbooks. That wasn't part of this 

basic review. So that we checked the 

calculations, we checked the numbers on that, 

but never said is this -- is this workbook set 

up correctly, what's it based on, are the 

assumptions in the workbook correct. That was 

beyond the scope of this basic review. So I 

don't -- I don't think we're out of line with 

the basic, but I agree with Jim that these are 

two critical items that we had a lot of 

discussion about, and I would -- I would at 

least think that we deserve to do some with 

this scope in mind and reserve judgment until 

we see how they come out. 

 DR. WADE: Right, looking at -- at the -- the 

amount of work that scheduled for last year, 

that first set of 62, there were to be 40 

basic, 20 advanced, two blinds. We've received 
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-- we've received the 40 basic. They are 

working on the next 20 -- 22. You can tell 

them now you expect those to be advanced 

reviews. You can talk to them about that. You 

can imagine, based upon what you know now, what 

you'd like to schedule for next year. All your 

options are open to you now, and it's a matter 

of just your deciding what you want to ask them 

to do. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, and it may be that in fact 

what you're calling comprehensive is -- is 

really a basic -- maybe a little more thorough 

than we had originally thought, but -- 

 MR. GRIFFON: But clearly these steps that 

they're indicating are not in there, so... 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yes. Hans and then Henry, you 

have a comment here. 

 DR. BEHLING: Yes. Is this mike on? 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yes. 

 DR. BEHLING: For instance, let me give you an 

example of the difficulty, and I'm trying to 

accommodate Dr. Melius on the issue here, but 

you'd mentioned the need, for instance, to deal 

with the coworker, but coworker data is really 

a last resort that comes into play when there's 
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an absence of primary data. If I have a case 

where I have full dosimetry data for external 

exposure and bioassay, why would I -- what 

would be the point in me pursuing coworker 

data? 

In the last 22, which is the only advanced 

cases that we've been asked to do, for 

instance, as another example of difficulty, we 

had a couple of mins -- minimum. In other 

words, they only did a -- the most simplistic 

of dose reconstruction because it was enough to 

take them over 50 percent value, and it 

involved only internal exposure at the expense 

of ignoring ambient dose, external dose, 

occupational medical dose, et cetera. My 

question again, what would you ask me to do in 

behalf of a case where even a partial dose 

reconstruction put the guy over 50 percent 

level? 

 DR. MELIUS: I think that, as with other 

elements of your reviews, if the particular 

element is not appropriate for that particular 

case, then you report it as such. And that's 

what you've bid on doing and that's what we -- 

we expect you to do. I mean I -- as before, I 
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guess I -- I'm just puzzled by why that 

suddenly generates a change in scope for the -- 

for what we're asking to do. I think -- you 

know, I guess... 

 DR. WADE: Yeah. I mean I --

 DR. MELIUS: I mean we're not expecting you to 

pursue something that can't be pursued or isn't 

appropriate or relevant, but it doesn't mean 

that it shouldn't be pursued in cases where, 

you know, coworker data might have been used, 

or something like that, that -- 

 DR. WADE: I think --

 DR. MELIUS: -- that's all. 

 DR. WADE: This could well be an issue of 

semantics, and I think you need to continue to 

pursue your discussion. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Mark, and then Wanda. 

 MR. GRIFFON: No, I was -- I'm sorry. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Wanda -- oh, Henry and then 

-- well, we'll catch -- 

DR. ANDERSON: Go ahead. 

 MS. MUNN: The only item that seems to be 

persistent that hasn't been addressed is the 

issue of pursuing data outside of the channels 

which we have already identified as being 
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appropriate between SC&A and NIOSH. We did 

indicate that we needed to discuss that item. 

If that's -- and it seems that is possibly the 

largest hurdle to defining precisely for our 

contractor exactly what we need to do. If 

there is a case where it is appropriate for him 

to be searching other records, then we have not 

identified that for them yet. And if that's 

going to be incorporated in our view of 

advanced audit, then we probably need to do 

that now. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Uh-huh. Thank you. Okay, Henry, 

then Mark. 

DR. ANDERSON: Yeah, I was going to say on that 

similar thing, I think we want, to a certain 

degree, a checklist. In other words, if 

they're doing a comprehensive, they would say 

it wasn't appropriate in this case to look for 

the coworker or whatever, and then we would 

either look for more cases -- and the other 

issue could be if their feeling is, or our 

feeling is, that what we've gotten to date is 

basic -- is more than basic, it could well be 

that now, or having been through it, that what 

we expect for basic costs more than was 
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initially thought. And so I'm not sure, of 

those that have been done, what we would leave 

out of being considered a basic. And that's, I 

guess, what I would ask them. What -- if 

they're saying this -- what we really got was -

- were more than we asked for, well, what was 

that extra that would not be part of a basic? 

Now -- I mean I would suggest that what we got 

that was the basic, that was very useful and 

that's probably the level for basics we'd want. 

We haven't yet seen -- and it may be many of 

these -- they'll say well, your advanced wasn't 

appropriate in this case, and -- you know, then 

it would be still considered a basic. And when 

it comes along that it was appropriate, I mean 

that may be something they'd come back to us 

and say well, this was a basic but we think 

this is a good case to do an advanced on, and 

then we would come back to them and say do we 

think that's right or wrong. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Mark? 

 MR. GRIFFON: I was just going to respond to 

Hans's example where you have a complete set of 

individual urinalysis data and badge data, you 

know, what -- what can you do with -- with 
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coworker data. And I mean I -- I guess I don't 

know what a complete, comprehensive set is. 

And -- and one thing I would do with coworker 

data, possibly -- and it may be inconclusive, 

too, but possibly is to look and say, you know, 

I've looked at four people this person 

mentioned as working with all the time, and 

you've -- and you look at their data and you 

find out that they've got exposures much lower 

or much higher than the individual in question 

in your DR review, and you say -- you say wait 

a second, you know -- and I'm not saying that 

coworker comparisons are the end-all, sure. 

But that may be one thing that -- that would be 

possible. Or that the coworkers were monitored 

for something that the individual wasn't even 

monitored for. They had whole body counts when 

the individual only had urinalysis. Why is 

that, were they doing a different job, were 

they really coworkers, or -- or they were on a 

monthly program and all the coworkers were 

being monitored weekly. I mean I there's a 

bunch of things I could think about to look at 

with coworkers. And it may be that it just 

supports the original argument, that that's 
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part of -- that's the randomness of it, I 

guess, you know. 

 DR. WADE: I mean if -- if I could even read 

the words -- I mean the -- the task was 

(reading) evaluate whether, for cases involving 

survivors, there has been an adequate effort to 

research co-located workers and other 

historical records to categorize the 

individual's work history. 

I think Hans is saying yes to that question in 

the case that he brings before us. The 

question is, does the Board agree with that, or 

does the Board want the effort made, regardless 

of whether Hans thinks the effort is 

appropriate, to check methodology. That's 

something you have to decide. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Well, and let me add to that, in 

the case that Mark mentioned, hopefully if you 

did what Mark described it would simply confirm 

that in fact everything is in order. If in 

fact you found those kind of discrepancies and 

there was a pattern for that, then you would 

say, you know, the dose reconstructors have to 

add this step when they do these things because 

we're finding too many cases where you can't 
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confirm the validity. But that I think is what 

you're getting at. It's an audit function that 

says yes, things do square, even if you check 

them independently. 

 Now, Jim. 

 DR. MELIUS: Yeah, what I -- hopefully this 

will -- I'd like to make a proposal that would 

allow us to go forward with this based on some 

-- some of this discussion, and I think it 

would also take into account that we will have 

an opportunity to evaluate advanced reviews and 

then maybe come up with some better decisions. 

As well as I think we're starting to get into 

some of the more complicated cases that we've 

chosen. Certainly the 20 this time I think 

will raise new issues and so forth, and we may 

have a better idea as we go along. 

But I think we should ask our contractor to 

develop a proposal -- the scoping would be 40 

basic cases and 20 advanced cases. And then as 

the rest of the scope would be what we asked 

them to do this time as they relate -- the two 

blind cases, et cetera, the issues with the -- 

the process to try to resolve any issues and 

reports to us and so forth, as they've -- 
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they've outlined -- do that. I think that they 

should -- the advanced reviews should continue 

all -- contain all the elements that we 

included in our original scope, with the 

proviso that the -- that if these other 

relevant sources of data have already been -- 

are being addressed in the site profile review 

that that -- they need not to be that -- step 

need not be repeated in a individual dose 

reconstruction review. 

And secondly, I think hopefully maybe we've 

clarified what we have meant by this issue of 

researching co-located workers and obtaining 

further information, where appropriate to that 

particular case. But they should prepare a 

proposal directed at that, come back to us. 

We may decide, as we evaluate the results from 

these next 20 advanced cases and what they will 

prepare for us early next year, we may want to 

modify scope or something. But I -- but I 

think we can do that in the course of next year 

and as we and they gain more experience with 

this process. And if we have to then modify 

the contract in some way, so be it, but at 

least we can do it with -- on the basis of more 
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information. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Jim, I'm going to ask -- I think 

you intend this to be a motion, and I'm going 

to suggest -- since perhaps it was a little 

wordy. That's not meant as criticism, but it 

might be helpful to the Board to have it 

delineated, and we could act on it tomorrow -- 

 DR. MELIUS: Okay. 

 DR. ZIEMER: -- in our session if we could get 

it worded. I also would raise the issue of -- 

did you intend to say anything about the scope 

of the basic reviews, or do we wish to 

understand the basic reviews to be what has 

been described as comprehensive? And if that's 

-- if that's an issue, we need to deal with 

that I think in the same motion. If we 

instruct them to do 40 basics and -- and 20 

advanced, and if the basics are different from 

what we currently are using, then we need to 

spell that out, as well. 

 DR. MELIUS: Yeah, okay --

 DR. ZIEMER: That's all I'm saying. 

 DR. MELIUS: I don't think they are, but the 

basic are basic, and I sort of reject the use 

of any sort of new terminology. Let's not -- 
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 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. 

 DR. MELIUS: Let's stay with what we've -- what 

we've been doing so far and -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: You're suggesting --

 DR. MELIUS: -- so forth. 

 DR. ZIEMER: -- that you're comfortable 

interpreting the basic as the comprehensive 

ones. 

 DR. MELIUS: I'm comfortable that what they've 

been doing so far --

 DR. ZIEMER: Is basic. 

 DR. MELIUS: -- is basic reviews, and I think 

that they've made an approp-- they will present 

to us what they think is an appropriate -- 

Yeah. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Michael, you have a comment 

-- is it agreeable with the group that we -- we 

won't interpret that as a formal motion yet, 

but the intent is to have a motion before us 

that will clarify scope so that when we -- and 

then the -- and then the contractor can come 

back with a refined or revised cost estimate, 

if necessary. 

 Yes, Michael. 

 MR. GIBSON: I'd just like think -- I think the 
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cases that they went over -- you know, we've -- 

regardless of how we wrote up our task, the 

work they've done, we've all been a part of the 

process --

 DR. ZIEMER: Yes. 

 MR. GIBSON: -- in directing them, and you 

know, maybe it's just a matter of wordsmithing, 

using comprehensive. There's nothing basic 

about -- I mean we may call it basic. There's 

nothing basic about doing a dose reconstruction 

when you have to try to dig into all this 

information because let's face it, you know, 

that's why we're here, because of the problem 

we've had. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Good comment. 

 DR. MELIUS: And I also should think we should 

thank our contractor for being as specific as 

they were in laying our their -- their scope 

this time, and I think that was -- it's helpful 

to the process, I just... 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yes, we do thank you for that. 

 DR. WADE: And I would remind the Board again 

that as you looked at this issue of auditing 

individual dose reconstructions, you've set a 

certain goal for yourself, and I think it -- 
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which is two-and-a-half percent. I think at 

some point you need to step back and evaluate -

-

 DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

 DR. WADE: -- what you're likely to do on that. 

 DR. ZIEMER: So the agreement is that we will 

have a formal motion on this tomorrow to act 

on. John, you wish to... 

DR. MAURO: Yeah. As a more practical matter, 

you know, we're in the home stretch of the last 

22, which are -- according to our contract -- 

advanced reviews. We're in the process of 

doing what we've been doing on the others, this 

comprehensive review. 

Now as a practical matter, let's -- let's say 

for a moment -- it's a thought problem. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yes. 

DR. MAURO: Okay, we're in the middle of doing 

these, and right now let's say -- Hans, so far 

you've done about half of the 22. Let's say 

you've got 11 of them done. Are there any in 

there that, in your opinion, would -- where, 

you know, I'd like to chase this one around a 

little far or I'd like to call up the -- the 

person who did the dose reconstruction. I'd 
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like to perhaps go to another record center. 

I'd like to do a coworker interview. I'd like 

to interview the claimant, because I think it 

would add some value for this particular one. 

These other ones are min/max or they're -- 

there really won't be -- and -- well, they're 

all min/max -- oh, yeah -- but again, it's a 

thought problem. How it bears out in reality 

is another matter, but for this set of 22 right 

now, we're in this position where we have in 

mind what we're going to deliver, but now we 

have in mind maybe there are some of these 

that, in our opinion, we could -- if we went 

that extra yard, those two items that are 

identified in our proposal, might add some more 

value and we get a little bit more out of our 

understanding of the strengths or limitations 

of a given dose reconstruction. I guess I 

could use a little guidance from the Board now 

whether we should be looking at this last set a 

little bit more aggressively than we -- that we 

go over and above what we have been doing for 

the first set. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Well, as a starting point I think 

the instruction on this last set is that they 
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are advanced reviews. 

 DR. MELIUS: Advanced, yeah. 

 MR. GRIFFON: All 22. 

 DR. ZIEMER: All 22. 

DR. MAURO: You see, there's --

 DR. ZIEMER: So if you have the issue such as 

Hans raised, I think -- and Mark has suggested 

how one might think about those. You might 

think about what -- what does it mean to go 

into depth on something that looks 

straightforward. 

 MR. GRIFFON: But also I mean if -- if -- if 

you feel these -- these coup-- these items, in 

particular those two items, don't apply to a 

certain case -- I mean for now, not applicable 

and we'll bring it to the work-- we'll bring it 

to our process, and if Board mem-- if the Board 

team members feel like you should pursue a 

certain thing -- you know, it's in the scope. 

It's not like the Board members are giving new 

scope. 

 DR. MELIUS: Yeah. 

 MR. GRIFFON: That's just -- that's just part 

of that process, I think. So if you --

 DR. ZIEMER: At least you have to consider -- 
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 MR. GRIFFON: If you feel strongly there's 

nowhere to take it -- take it anymore on a 

certain case, that's all you can do, yeah. You 

put NA, I guess. You -- you're --

DR. MAURO: The change in paradigm is the idea 

that -- when we began this process that you 

could make your selection of 20 cases, another 

20 cases, and say okay these we want you to do 

an advanced review. I don't think that's the 

reality of the situation. I think the reality 

of the situation is here's a set of cases that 

-- that some of them make sense to do an 

advanced review and some of them -- you know, 

they really don't. I mean there's no -- in 

other words, all you could call it -- I don't 

know what -- it's almost a semantics problem. 

 DR. ZIEMER: But I think what -- I think 

conceptually we're saying that we -- we are not 

judging a priori whether or not you can do an 

advanced review, nor should you decide, if a 

thing looks simple, therefore it's not subject 

to an advanced review; that you at least think 

about okay, in this particular case, even 

though it looks very simple, are there some 

other things that I should look at to confirm 
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that the data is correct -- or whatever. I 

think that's what I -- what we're saying, that 

don't assume --

 MR. GRIFFON: I agree that the best-estimate 

cases lend themself better to these -- the 

advanced reviews. But for contract reasons -- 

I mean, you know, that's the cases we had 

available, so that -- you know. But you know, 

I would say that -- you know, if you really 

don't think a item is applicable, just put not 

applicable and move on. But I think -- I think 

you have to think about the scope. Even if it 

looks simple, there may be something there. 

 DR. BEHLING: A question I raised with Dr. Wade 

during the break is also one of what privileges 

are we given -- for instance, I'd mentioned to 

the Board earlier a case where a person had 

claimed an injury to his cheek that several 

years later turned into a melanoma. Now for me 

to resolve that issue -- there was nothing in 

the record that suggested he was ever injured, 

that there was a radiological incidence that 

was investigated by HP or anything like this. 

Now for me to go -- take the first step and say 

was there even such an injury on record with 
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the infirmary would require me to contact 

someone and ask for medical records, which I'm 

not entitled to get, any more than I may be 

even entitled to contact the claimant himself 

or his survivor. So at this point in time, 

with the one month remaining for the 

completion, for me to let's say turn all of 

these cases into advanced cases by looking at 

coworker data and things like that, I would 

have to first acknowledge to the Board that 

there are certain issues that have not been 

addressed yet, such as who am I entitled to 

contact. 

 DR. ZIEMER: And I don't know the answer to 

that and I don't know if we can address it 

here, but it may be that you will have to do 

this almost on a case-by-case basis. You 

identify the issue -- Lew, I don't know, but if 

-- if the contractor says in order to complete 

this case in depth, in an advanced way, we need 

to access the following information -- or at 

least we identify the steps to -- to achieve 

closure on it, maybe you won't achieve closure 

at that point, but is that -- is that the way 

it has to be approached? 
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 DR. WADE: That was my answer to Hans, that he 

needs to approach me then with the particular 

issues and -- and we'll have to deal with them 

on a case-by-case basis. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. And again, we can have 

further discussion on this tomorrow when the 

formal motion is before us, but I think you've 

heard at least the -- sort of the sense of the 

Board on these things, and we certainly want to 

work together to achieve what the -- what the 

intent here is. And it's -- it assumes that 

it's not just the complex cases where you may 

need to dig down. It may be a simple case that 

looks so clear that you don't have to do any 

more that may be the one that really needs the 

attention. I think the nature of an audit is 

you don't know a priori, a simple-looking thing 

-- innocent-looking thing may in fact be a case 

where there is something amiss. 

Okay. Now we -- we have another issue that 

emerged out of our -- really the scope 

discussions. One of the -- one part of the 

scope discussion -- and just put this in the 

public record -- our -- our contractor has been 

asked fairly regularly this year to meet with 
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various staffers on the Hill to review their 

work products and that sort of thing. The 

Chair has always objected, to some extent, on 

the basis that this costs money and it comes 

out of our funds for doing our job. As a 

result, we've -- but -- but nonetheless, we 

have instructed the contractor to proceed and 

to make such briefings on the Hill when -- when 

asked to do so. In some cases we've asked also 

that Board members be present. And as a 

minimum, for the contractor to make a record of 

such visits and the items discussed so that we 

have that on our record. 

In the scope of the work product budget for 

this year we have included, as part of the -- I 

think it's task six, which is the program 

management -- project management portion, we 

have budgeted for those visits on the Hill, so 

this request which goes to essentially the 

Congress, if they fund that, in fact they are 

covering the cost of doing that. It's not a 

big part of this budget. 

But one of the related issues are the ground 

rules under which the contractor makes that 

visit. The Board has -- has -- or some members 
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of the Board have expressed concern that 

perhaps a Board member should be present at 

such visits. The folks on the Hill don't 

always want Board members present at such 

visits. They may want what you might call just 

a candid discussion with the contractor. In 

any event, we -- we did want to get the sense 

of the Board, what the Board would feel should 

be the ground rules, keeping in mind that in 

the end the folks on the Hill are going to have 

the final say on this. 

 We may indicate, for example, the desire or the 

-- well, let's say the desire to have a Board 

member present when our contractor does such 

briefings, but whether or not we can demand 

that is certainly a question. But in any 

event, we do have a proposed motion, I believe 

from Wanda Munn, and I don't know if we fully 

have time to discuss that today, but we can at 

least get it on the floor and, if necessary, we 

can carry it over to -- till tomorrow. I want 

to ask, though, if -- if all the Board members 

received -- I think by e-mail -- a proposed 

policy on the issue of the contractor visits to 

the Hill and the Board involvement. Is there 
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anyone on the Board that did not receive 

Wanda's proposed motion? 

 DR. WADE: I would like to speak briefly to 

that. 

 DR. ZIEMER: And we will give Wanda the 

opportunity to formally make that motion, and -

- and Lew, do you wish to speak -- 

 DR. WADE: Yeah, I mean I --

 DR. ZIEMER: -- before the --

 DR. WADE: If I might, Wanda, I think I must 

speak before the discussion begins and -- and I 

mean I'll choose my words carefully. And the 

agency I work for, NIOSH, very much respects 

the Board and looks for the Board's advice. At 

this point the agency is not prepared to create 

the impression that it surrenders its right to 

make the decision as to Hill visits by a 

government contractor. We can certainly take 

guidance from the Board, but the agency will 

make the final decision as to how these Hill 

visits will take place, guided by the -- the 

information provided by the Board. To this 

point it's been the position of the agency that 

the Hill would have unfettered access to this 

contractor, and I would assume that would 
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remain the agency's position. Again, I don't 

want to -- to stop discussion by the Board, and 

we -- we welcome your advice, but I don't want 

to mislead you to the fact that the agency will 

a priori be guided by that advice. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. 

 MS. MUNN: Thank you for that, Lew. The 

concern was not quite that simple, I think. 

 DR. WADE: I understand. 

 MS. MUNN: The real concern here is not an 

interaction with our elected officials, nor 

even, for that matter, an interaction with the 

press and the public or other organizations. 

The concern is that the material being 

discussed might still be incomplete. That was 

the situation which triggered this concern last 

month when our contractor was asked to provide 

a briefing on documentation that was not yet 

complete in that it had not been through the 

vetting process, either through NIOSH nor 

through this Board. 

As a part of that request from Congressional 

staff, the request was also made that no member 

of this Board be present at that discussion. 

Because the topic was an unvetted and 
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incomplete document, there was reasonable 

concern that misunderstandings and 

misinformation could derive. The document was 

in draft form, was nothing that we had had an 

opportunity to see. 

With those thoughts in mind, this proposed 

policy -- statement of policy was drafted, with 

the expectation that we would anticipate any 

elected official would want to stay abreast of 

what was transpiring with anyone or any agency 

that affected their district. This is to be 

expected. The concern here is that the 

information provided to them not be partial or 

incomplete information, and that is the sense 

and the spirit in which this proposed statement 

of policy was written. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Thank you, Wanda. And as -

- although this is not formally a motion yet, 

but let me point out that probably in a 

majority of cases, the requests are going to 

involve documents that are in the status that 

you've described, in their -- they will be 

almost always, and have been almost always, 

draft documents. I can tell you that our 

contractor has I believe done a good job in the 
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past in making it clear on the Hill that these 

are draft documents. In all cases, it's my 

understanding, that in many cases the Board has 

not seem them yet so they're not -- they don't 

represent the position of the Board; they are 

working documents. I believe that's always 

been the case. 

And the other part of that is that the -- a 

Board member present cannot speak for the 

Board, so there is that issue in going to -- 

the Board member can be there and hear what 

transpires, but is not in the -- in a position 

to contradict, deny or other-- or say that the 

Board doesn't agree with this or does agree 

with this. So keep that in mind in terms of 

the context here in what we're talking about. 

 MS. MUNN: In most cases it has not been vetted 

by the Board, so the Board -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

 MS. MUNN: -- has not deliberated. 

 DR. ZIEMER: And even if it had, that would 

still be the case. So this comes as a motion. 

I would ask if there's a second, and we can get 

it on the floor. We are running sort of time. 

We may wish to -- if we get it on the floor, 
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you may wish to carry it over to tomorrow and 

have a chance to cogitate on it overnight, but 

the Chair will ask for a second on the motion. 

 MR. PRESLEY: I'll second. 

 DR. ZIEMER: And the motion's been seconded. 

 DR. WADE: I'm sorry -- It would be best to 

read it. 

 MS. MUNN: Be glad to. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yes, do we not have copies of 

this? 

 DR. MELIUS: But the audience doesn't. 

 DR. WADE: The audience. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay, I will read it and then we 

will make sure there are copies available for 

tomorrow, then we won't -- we will not act on 

it then tonight till everyone has a copy. 

Here's the motion. (Reading) As an appointed 

body mandated by the Energy Employees 

Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act, 

EEOICPA, the Advisory Board on Radiation and 

Worker Health (the Board) works with multiple 

Federal agencies to fulfill the requirements 

laid down by the statute. The business of the 

Board is conducted with full transparency under 

the Federal Sunshine laws requiring open 
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disclosure and public access to information. 

The Board routinely deals with matters that are 

complex, variable, frequently technical, and 

highly emotional. 

It is necessary that the Board contract for 

several technical or administrative services in 

order to completely address discrete issues 

within the Board's responsibilities. The 

resulting documents require extensive review, 

technical discussion and revision before the 

product can be released as properly vented 

(sic) and then authorized for distribution. 

Although draft documents are often widely 

distributed, they cannot be viewed as material 

yet ready for presentation or comment. 

Because of the incomplete and potentially 

misleading nature of information contained in 

draft documents, it is the policy of the Board 

to provide briefings, interviews or other 

informational exchanges from Board members, our 

subcontractor, affiliates and associates only 

when the final document has been accepted by 

the Board. It is our further policy that at 

least one member of the Board be present or in 

telephone contact at the time such a discussion 
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takes place. 

Adopted this 26th day of August, 2005; St. 

Louis, Missouri. 

That is the motion, and it has been seconded. 

 Now I'm suggesting -- and we don't need to 

table this. I'm suggesting that we simply 

defer action on this till tomorrow till we can 

get copies available for the public and the 

Board has a chance to think about it. We do 

have a few minutes if you want to begin 

discussion today, and then we can continue that 

tomorrow during our work session. And the work 

session would be really -- we have it on the 

schedule toward the end of the session. It's 

Capitol Hill's visits. Okay, Jim Melius then. 

 DR. MELIUS: I would -- I would point out one 

thing is that we have dealt with this issue in 

a slightly different form about release of 

draft reports -- the Board after what I found 

to be an embarrassing and difficult situation, 

I believe with the Bethlehem site profiles when 

it came up, and at that time the vote -- the 

Board voted to allow the release of draft 

reports --

 DR. ZIEMER: Yes. In fact on the Bethlehem 
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Steel we did delay the release of that to -- 

even to the Congressional folks till the time 

of our meeting, but then the Board took 

specific action that said in the future we 

would not withhold reports, they could be 

circulated to whoever, so that -- the Board has 

gone on record that draft reports are 

releasable in any event. 

 DR. WADE: With a suitable disclaimer. 

 DR. ZIEMER: And the disclaimer that we 

developed actually to go into the draft report. 

It was an -- it actually was the Andrade 

disclaimer, as modified. 

 DR. WADE: Okay. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Additional discussion today? Dr. 

Melius. 

 DR. MELIUS: I would just say I would 

vigorously oppose this motion. I think -- 

think there's major issues with the credibility 

of this program. I think having the -- our 

contractor go and brief Congressional staff on 

these sites, on our activities, is very 

helpful. They have high technical credibility, 

they have high credibility with Congressional 

staff, and I think it's been helpful to the 
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overall program. I think it's been helpful to 

the work of this Advisory Board to have them 

engage in these activities. Again, to my 

knowledge, they've behaved appropriately in 

terms of what they have said and how they've 

characterized what -- their activities and the 

status of their activities in relationship to 

this -- to the -- to the Board and so forth. 

And I -- I'm -- so I think we have everything 

to gain and I think there's a lot to lose by 

trying to prohibit this activity or limit it in 

some way. 

Secondly, I would remind the Board that, given 

our record in completing some of these 

documents, getting them from draft stage to the 

final stage, we're talking about delaying some 

of these meetings for years, and it only is 

going to decrease our credibility. It's not 

going to help the -- the process at -- at all. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Mr. Presley. 

 MR. PRESLEY: Well, I kind of disagree. I 

don't disagree that SC&A's doing a wonderful 

job. I do disagree that we need some 

participation on the Hill. Dealing with the 

Federal government for 36 years, sometimes it's 
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-- things don't get back exactly the way they 

do, and I think that we should have some 

participation any time that -- that there is a 

call for Board work on the Hill. I realize the 

Hill's going to do what they want to do, but if 

we do ask that we are allowed to participate in 

that, I think that it would be to our advantage 

to be able to -- to do that. We would have 

some participation on the Hill then in some of 

those discussions. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Henry Anderson, then 

Leon, then Jim. Henry. 

DR. ANDERSON: I guess I think once -- or what 

I object to in it is all draft documents. I 

mean -- so we don't distribute this 'cause it's 

a draft document -- I mean I think we just run 

into a technical issue of once we've adopted 

something, it's really too late for the public 

to comment because it's already been adopted. 

The only thing I would object to is I wouldn't 

want our contractor to go and share a document 

that's still an internal draft for them before 

they've vetted to share with us. Once they 

release public draft that's going to us at the 

same time, rather than -- I wouldn't want them 
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speculating on well, were they asked, what do 

you think about or how are you doing it, and 

they haven't really done it yet, and they 

wouldn't do that at this point. So internal to 

them before it's really a draft, that I don't 

think should be shared and I don't think 

they're doing that. On the other hand, once we 

have a draft comment on site profiles, I think 

that really has to be a public document and 

they have just as much a right to it as anybody 

else in the process. So if you go way back, 

early, you know, that's one issue. But once 

it's become a draft that's circulated to us for 

comment as part of the process, I just don't 

see how we could -- could not have that and -- 

you know, the other thing is they -- they can 

simply issue a subpoena for it and we don't 

really -- we want to avoid that kind of a 

thing. And trust me, they'll do that. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Leon. 

MR. OWENS: Due respect to -- to Wanda, we have 

visited this issue before and I would strongly 

agree with Dr. Melius. The Board's credibility 

is always on the line. I think -- once again 

we're in St. Louis having another discussion 
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about a SEC petition for Mallinckrodt, and this 

has been going on for -- for several months. 

We also all realize that we serve at the 

pleasure of the President, and we also know 

that this is a political process. And I think 

that the Congressional delegation -- any member 

of that delegation or their representatives 

have the right to request for any information 

at any time. I think that SC&A has done a 

outstanding job as the contractor to this 

Board. I have all the confidence in them to 

provide timely information when requested by 

the Congressional members. But I do think it 

would be very -- a tragic move on the part of 

the Board to adopt this language. I think it 

would send not only the incorrect message to 

Congress, but I also think it would send a very 

bad message to those who watch the workings of 

the Board and keep up with it on a regular 

basis. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Dr. Melius. 

 DR. MELIUS: Yeah. I would also -- response to 

Bob's comment -- I think at the last meeting we 

-- in terms of our -- we passed a motion in 

terms of our interactions with our contractor 
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that allowed us -- all of us to be informed 

about these Congressional visits and so forth, 

and that actually took place for the recent one 

with Senator Cantwell's staff. So that process 

is in place. I would have no objection to a 

policy that if Board members would like to 

participate in the visit, that that should be 

offered. However, I think we -- our policy 

shouldn't be that they will attend, because I 

think it is still the prerogative of the 

Congressional office that -- who they want to 

invite to their -- into -- into their offices. 

I -- but in terms of allowing someone to -- you 

know, offer. So if we had a process that was 

in place where we would be notified about 

these, that should people want to participate 

that that be offered, communicated to whoever's 

-- appropriate staff that's setting up that -- 

that meeting, and then it's up to them to 

decide whether or not they -- they would like 

that participation or not. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Thank you. Let me add as 

an observation, and then we're -- this is the 

last word for today -- as an observation, a 

policy that offered the opportunity for a Board 
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member to be present would clearly meet NIOSH's 

needs where it wasn't a requirement but an 

offer, and it would allow the Hill the 

prerogative to not make the offer, as well. 

However, we are going to postpone action until 

tomorrow, and I will declare us in recess until 

tomorrow morning -- no, not till tomorrow 

morning, till later this evening. We have -- a 

brief recess for dinner. We will reconvene for 

the public comment period at the appointed hour 

-- I believe is 7:00, is it? 

 DR. WADE: Wait a minute. 

 MS. MUNN: 7:00. 

DR. ROESSLER: 7:00. 

 DR. WADE: 7:00 p.m. 

 DR. ZIEMER: 7:00 p.m., and members of the 

public, if you wish to address the Board and 

you have not already signed up, please do so. 

We are in recess. 

 (Whereupon, a recess was taken from 6:00 p.m. 

to 7:03 p.m.) 

GENERAL PUBLIC COMMENT

 DR. ZIEMER: Well, good evening again, 

everyone, and we welcome you to the public 

comment session of the Advisory Board meeting 
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this evening. I have a number of folks that 

have asked to speak, and I'm simply going to 

take them in the order that they signed up. 

And then when we complete this list, we'll have 

another opportunity. If anyone else does wish 

to speak and somehow didn't get signed up, why 

we will add you at that point. 

So let's begin tonight with John Ranspott. 

John, are you here? Yes, please. And you can 

use the mike right here in the front if you 

wish, sir. 

MR. RANSPOTT: I will be brief, and I certainly 

appreciate the time to speak with you. I've 

been at a number of your meetings and you've 

made it very convenient. You seem to love St. 

Louis, you've been coming back and back and you 

surely know our airport now, so -- 

If I could, I'm going to read a statement, and 

it's -- actually involves another site, the 

Granite City site -- Granite City, Illinois -- 

and my comments have to deal with the Granite 

City site which was bought -- it was originally 

the General Steel Industries property, which is 

also known as General Steel Industries, General 

Steel Castings. It's located in Granite City, 
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Illinois. It is a covered facility. If you 

look at the list of properties, it's always 

referred to as Granite City Steel, so it's 

proven to be a little confusing for some of the 

people who look at the list and don't even 

realize that it's where they worked, which was 

actually General Steel Casting. It's just a 

friendly suggestion -- I know a lot of these 

sites have had different names, but it might be 

helpful if that were looked at. We see the 

a/k/a's, but there've been a number of people 

who have missed that. 

And when I found out about the site I actually 

went over to try and contact some of my fatherin-law's ex-friends who worked there. There 

was technically no one that I spoke with that 

knew anything about this program eight months 

ago. There are now 335 claimants. So there's 

a lot of people who obviously found out about 

it and it looks like it's going to possibly 

help them. 

What I'd really like to know and I -- is what 

possibly happened to my father-in-law, my 

wife's father, while he was employed at General 

Steel Industries for over 35 years. Were he 
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and other employees in fact exposed to 

radiation as a result of work done in defense 

of our country? Were they properly informed of 

the dangers due to various types and forms of 

radiation? As of today, approximately 265 

Granite City Steel/Granite City -- or General 

Steel Industries claims have been filed. It 

looks like 88 of the 89 processed so far have 

been denied. 

One can only wonder why. Would these employees 

or their families been denied because of the 

radiation doses have been seriously 

underestimated? 

 Here's some concerns that I have. Has a site 

profile been done? When, and how do I get a 

copy? Are all of the radiation source terms 

known to the dose reconstruction team? I have 

only read about uranium being present at the 

plant, and per employees that I've spoken with, 

visited with, there was also cobalt, iridium 

and General Steel Industries was also the 

location of two, and I quote, government-owned 

betatron particle accelerators. One was a 24 

million volt, the other one a 25 million volt, 

and that information comes directly from 
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employees and the FUSRAP report. So I've done 

a little homework on particle accelerators, so 

is that another radiation source? You know, 

and I -- I'm asking you folks 'cause you -- 

you're the experts, you know, I'm -- we're 

going to need your help to help identify all 

these sources. 

If a site profile or Technical Basis Document 

has not been done, is it possibly on the NIOSH 

site profile docket to start, and when can it 

be completed? Is there -- or are there any 

plans of this taking place? Just curious about 

that. 

Could the knowledge of site experts, 

specifically former employees which are 

available to provide input to the NIOSH 

outreach program and/or site profile authors -- 

would that be helpful, 'cause these people are 

available. And I've read about the site visits 

that are available I guess through NIOSH. 

These people would be willing to talk to NIOSH, 

contractors, come to the Board, go where you 

are, and I'll -- these people could use some 

help. I've watched what you have done and I 

really believe you're here to help, and you're 
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really trying to help some people. 

So I appreciate your time, but I'd just like to 

find out what happened to my father-in-law, get 

to the bottom of it and if it did happen 

because of something like that. 

We'll be -- we have some handouts for you -- 

and I know you guys love e-mail and mail that 

you get tons of, but we'll also send you a 

packet, wherever you direct us, so you have 

everything we have and these people definitely 

are available to talk with you. Thank you very 

much for the opportunity. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you, and I think probably we 

can get answers to some of those questions even 

yet perhaps today from staff in terms of status 

of any site profile information and so on. And 

Stu or one of them will try to get some of that 

information back to you. Other -- other issues 

may -- we may have to have those researched. 

Thank you, John. 

 And then Chris Ranspott. Chris, must be some 

relationship there. 

MS. RANSPOTT: My name is Christine Ranspott. 

John's my husband. My father and grandfather 

both worked for General Steel Industries in 
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Granite City, one of the covered facilities 

under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness 

Compensation Act, for a combined total of over 

70 years. As the authorized representative of 

my mother, a claimant, I am writing to request 

your help -- or speaking with you, of course, 

to request your help and expertise in solving a 

problem we have encountered. 

When filing the claim for my father, we 

requested and paid for a certified copy of his 

earnings and his place of employment. When 

this information was received, it certified 

that he worked for National Roll in Avonmore, 

Pennsylvania. This is not correct. 

In doing some investigating we were told that 

the EIN or employer identification number which 

was being used for National Roll was also the 

EIN being used for General Steel Industries of 

Granite City, Illinois. At one time National 

Roll was a division of General Steel 

Industries. 

We wrote to Social Security and asked for this 

error to be corrected in order to show the true 

place of employment for my father. After a 

period of approximately three months we 
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received a letter, and I have a copy attached 

to show you, which stated -- and I quote -- The 

Employer Identification Number was originally 

assigned to General Steel Industries, 

Incorporated. The company was bought out, 

merged or changed its name to National Roll in 

1994. As a result, Social Security changed the 

name and address electronically and is using 

the latest employer identification we have on 

record. End quote. 

The letter goes on to confirm that my father in 

fact was employed by General Steel Industries, 

Incorporated. Thankfully, our problem was 

solved and the people we dealt with at Social 

Security were most pleasant and efficient. The 

claim for my father is proceeding through the 

system. 

However, my grandfather's employment records 

also state that he worked for National Roll, 

which he didn't. And we've recently 

encountered three more former employees of 

General Steel which have had the same problem. 

This sincerely troubles me, since it's not 

necessary to request one's own records from 

Social Security in order to file a claim. I'm 
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concerned that many more employees may not be 

receiving news, that their claim is denied 

because they didn't work for General Steel 

Industries, according to Social Security 

records. 

Is it possible for you to review any claims 

which have been denied for this reason? Is it 

possible to get this problem solved with the 

Social Security Agency? Obviously the 

correction of my father's records had no 

influence in changing the way requests of this 

sort are handled. 

I also wonder if claimants from other covered 

sites which have had name changes, sometimes 

numerous, are experiencing the same 

difficulties. My concern is that this 

information gets passed along to the Department 

of Labor and others who process claims, and 

could result in many denials. Perhaps the full 

chain of ownership of all EEOICP-approved sites 

could be routinely researched in order to 

verify employment status by the Department of 

Labor prior to any claim being processed for 

approval or denial. Perhaps all denied claims 

should be reviewed with this information in 
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mind. 

I thank you for your time and your efforts. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you very much. This appears 

to be an issue that may be occurring at the 

front end of the process. I'm wondering if we 

can make sure that the folks at Labor are 

addressing this. And Stu, can somebody follow 

up on that? 

 MR. HINNEFELD: We'll address it with Labor. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, yeah, okay. Thank you very 

much for that input. 

Yes, a question here? 

 MR. PRESLEY: Yes, what were those employment 

dates? 

MS. RANSPOTT: I'm sorry? 

 DR. ZIEMER: The question is what were the 

employment dates involved? 

MS. RANSPOTT: (Off microphone) My father 

worked there from 1936 to approximately 

(unintelligible), and we only requested records 

from 1953 through '70. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay, thank you very much. 

MS. RANSPOTT: (Off microphone) But it was 

certified (unintelligible) everything. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Good, thanks. Next we have 
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Dan McKeel. Dan is a familiar face I think to 

the Board. Dan, welcome back. 

 DR. MCKEEL: Good evening to the Board. I am 

Dan McKeel. I'm a pathologist and a physician, 

as I think you know by now, and I'd like to 

briefly address six points about both the 

Mallinckrodt Destrehan people and also the 

Weldon Spring workers. 

Point number one was at the October 2003 

meeting of the Board in St. -- the first one in 

St. Louis concerning Mallinckrodt, I challenged 

Mr. (sic) Neton, head of the NIOSH dose 

reconstruction team, to provide us with the 

percentage of MCW workers that had complete 

radiation monitoring data. Until the 

transcript of the August 4th, 2005 meeting in 

Cincinnati, I had not gotten an answer to my 

question. But on page -- pages 24 and 25 of 

that transcript is the following exchange, 

which I quote. Ms. Brock -- Denise Brock says 

(reading) I believe the claimants' thought at 

the last meeting was that NIOSH was going to 

use the daily weighted average, and basically 

the proof is in the pudding. You can use the 

daily weighted average. And then I'm wondering 
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what caused you to eliminate that. I know you 

feel the breath radon is more reliable, but 

isn't there only minimal amounts of claimants 

that actually had breath radon? I mean how 

reliable is that? 

 Dr. Neton answered (reading) Well, we estimate 

around 20 percent of the cases that we have in 

our possession where people worked during the 

raffinate period have radon breath data. The 

number for breath data is around 20 percent. 

As I stated in October of 2003, a percentage as 

low as ten percent would not be sufficient for 

most scientists to accept that radiation 

exposure data could be accurately and reliably 

extrapolated to all workers, whereas if 90 

percent of MCW workers had relevant data, that 

probably would be sufficient. Thus from a 

scientific point of view, use of data that is 

only 20 percent complete is completely 

unacceptable. Nor is there any evidence to 

indicate that this small sample is a 

statistically-representative sampling of the 

whole at-risk worker population. Yet we see 

early -- that earlier in the same transcript 

NIOSH has abandoned using the daily weighted 
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average method in favor of the breath radon 

approach. Denise Brock correctly questions 

why. 

Furthermore, I learned at this meeting that the 

CER database, like the CEDR database, only 

contains data on the 2,542 Mallinckrodt 

Caucasian male workers, and that approximately 

1,000 more Mallinckrodt men in minority -- I'm 

sorry -- MCW women and minority workers were 

excluded from the data analysis. The DuPresEllis July 2000 American Journal of 

Epidemiology article dealing with Mallinckrodt 

also analyzed external exposure data only on 

that same group of 2,542 white male MCW 

workers. 

Thus the 20 percent sample proposed for use by 

NIOSH is even more inadequate and is extremely 

biased. There is still apparently 107 

Mallinckrodt claims still waiting for bestestimate dose reconstructions by NIOSH as we 

near a final Board decision on Ms. Brock's 

Mallinckrodt SEC 0012.2 petition. 

In short, the use of a limited 20 percent 

sample of breath radon data is not good 

science, for several compelling reasons. The 
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sample is not representative and it is far too 

small to extrapolate to the whole risk -- whole 

at-risk worker group. 

 The Board should reject the idea that NIOSH 

fulfills the 42 CFR Part 83 mandate in being 

able to accurately calculate radiation doses. 

This argues for approving SEC status for the 

1949-'57 Mallinckrodt cohort. 

Point two is that the Board has a goal of 

auditing two and a half percent of completed 

dose reconstructions, or about 550 cases. They 

have selected only 80 cases to be audited thus 

far, and even the first 20 are not 100 percent 

complete. Yesterday we learned that it would 

take about ten years to meet the projected two 

and a half percent audit goal. We also learned 

that the mandated target of 40 percent of cases 

with a probability of causation between 45 

percent and 49.9 percent was difficult to meet 

since most cases with complete dose 

reconstructions were outside that range on both 

of the completed and the randomized case lists. 

Of all dose reconstructed cases on the 

randomized list, most were min/max, referred to 

as low-hanging fruit cases, and not the best-
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estimate cases. 

John Mauro and SC&A have stated that bestestimate cases are the most important to audit. 

I note that in the list of 100 completed bestestimate cases presented yesterday, not a 

single one was from Mallinckrodt Destrehan 

Street. My comment is that two and a half 

percent is not sufficient for a statisticallyvalid quality assurance audit where usually at 

least ten percent of a sample must be 

reassessed. A ten percent sample was used, for 

example, as we further learned yesterday, when 

ORAU validated the CER database against Dr. 

Thomas Mancuso's original DOE worker data. So 

this latter precedent supports my point number 

two. 

Point number three, I believe there is an 

inherent error in the reasoning behind the 

concept of a bounding dose, which is the 

standard that NIOSH states the EEOICPA law 

mandates using and SC&A apparently accepts. 

Bounding dose strategy allows one to calculate 

a dose based on the highest concentration of 

radionucleide (sic) encountered among a mixture 

of radiation exposures. Yet from a biological 
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point of view, the total dose is the additive 

and cumulative effect of all the separate 

exposures. Each and every radionuclide and all 

of their progeny can contribute to radiation 

dose and biologically some to cause cancer. 

The BEIR VII 2005 report underscores this 

point, and even acknowledges the radiation risk 

posed by harmless -- and that's in quotes -- 

diagnostic X-ray procedures. The bounding dose 

concept, used largely for the sake of 

expediency, in the absence of real and complete 

and accurate exposure data, ignores these basic 

biologic facts. 

In accepting this principle -- that is, that 

bounding dose is sufficient -- the EEOICPA law 

perpetuates the myth that dose reconstruction 

is a sound, fair and scientifically-valid 

endeavor. It is not claimant-favorable. 

Rather, dose reconstruction, as now implemented 

for MCW workers by NIOSH, is decidedly 

claimant-adversarial in ignoring the lack of 

real data and missing data during the SEC 

petition process. 

The table on pages 49 and 50 of the SC&A third 

supplemental review of the MCW site profile 
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Rev. 1 is a specific example of this point. 

The page 49 table gives values for only eight 

of 31 named uranium progeny, and the table on 

page 50 for only nine of 30 K-65 residue 

progeny. No values are given for radon 219, 

for example, which is a biologically important 

radionuclide in human cancer biology. And as a 

citation, I would cite an article entitled "The 

Radiologic Impact of 219 Radon and Its Effect 

on 222 Radon Risk Assessment" which was in the 

Journal of Health Physics, Volume 41, Pages 165 

to 171 of 1981. 

Thus another uncertainty is introduced into 

NIOSH dose calculations that compounds other 

film badge measurement and radiologic 

uncertainties. 

In summary, on this point I believe that the 

EEOICPA SEC rule should be changed to a fairer 

statement based on actual rather than virtual 

computer model-based or assumed and bounded 

data. And I would again urge GAO to closely 

examine reasons for denials under this EEOICPA 

statute. 

Point four, I noticed yesterday that there was 

no discussion of tasking SC&A to review the 
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completed Weldon Spring site profile number 

053, which was approved fully on June 24th 

through 28th of this year. As documented at 

previous meetings of the Board, many 

Mallinckrodt uranium division workers were 

employed at both the MCW Destrehan Street and 

Weldon Spring sites, and dose reconstructions 

therefore necessarily will involve 

determinations of radiation data from both 

places. The Weldon Spring site profile review 

should be placed at the top of the next to-bereviewed list, ahead of the site profile 

reviews that were mentioned yesterday, in order 

for the Board to provide continuity with the 

Mallinckrodt SEC and the deliberations and TBD 

reviews for Mallinckrodt during February 

through August of 2005. 

Point five is that I'd like to stress that the 

truck drivers at MCW Destrehan and at the 

airport site and Latty Avenue sites who ferried 

uranium ores, including pitchblende and K-65 

residues, should be covered in the Mallinckrodt 

SEC and all revised Mallinckrodt TBDs. I 

remind the Board and NIOSH that a record of 

decision is pending by the Army Corps of 
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Engineers of the FUSRAP program on the north 

county and Latty Avenue and related vicinity 

properties. This rod addresses possible 

remediation of radiation waste underneath major 

highways, including McDonnell Boulevard and 

Pershall Road, along which the Mallinckrodt 

waste was transported, often without tarps 

covering the ore in the truck beds. So much 

waste was spilled that these roads are 

contaminated to a depth of at least 16 feet. 

Many of the truck drivers were not adequately 

monitored, and their radiation exposure risk 

was very high. 

Point six, and my final one, is an 

environmental justice commentary. Data on 

uranium releases into the atmosphere around the 

Destrehan Street facility between 1946 and '55 

is presented in a letter from Mr. W. J. Shelley 

of the Mallinckrodt uranium division to Mr. F. 

N. Belcher of the Atomic Energy Commission in 

SC&A's third supplemental report on the 

Mallinckrodt site profile Rev. 1 on pages 133 

and 134. Over those years, from '46 to '55, 

the total uranium discharged through unfiltered 

Destrehan Street stacks totaled 22,990 pounds, 
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or 11 and a half tons. EEOICPA addresses 

compensation for former Mallinckrodt workers. 

My comment is that there is an additional 

compelling need to consider compensating people 

who lived in the community surrounding the MCW 

Destrehan facility plants. 

As far as I am aware, there has never been a 

community radiological survey or any health 

status survey of residents living in the 

vicinity of Mallinckrodt Destrehan Street, 

which is in a densely-populated residential 

neighborhood. There was one report about 

psychological reactions of residents living 

near the Federal clean-up site, which was 

Mallinckrodt Destrehan Street. 

 Environmental justice concerns argue strongly 

that resident compensation should be revisited, 

even at this late date. I understand this is 

not in the direct purview of the Advisory 

Board, but the facts are relevant and the 

Advisory Board deliberation has been the 

vehicle that has brought this long-unaddressed 

major injustice to light. 

I once again appreciate the opportunity to 

present the Board with my concerns. Thank you. 
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 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you, Dan. Before you leave 

the microphone, could I ask a question on the 

truck drivers? 

 DR. MCKEEL: Yes, sir. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Could you clarify for me -- are 

these commercial drivers that were not really 

direct-- are they contractors to Mallinckrodt? 

 DR. MCKEEL: As I understand it, they are 

contractors under Mallinckrodt and -- and 

should be --

 DR. ZIEMER: Are -- on the Mallinckrodt payroll 

or not? Do --

 DR. MCKEEL: Probably not on their -- well, you 

know, I'm not sure -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: Or Denise, do you know --

 DR. MCKEEL: -- but I think not on their -- I 

think they were --

 DR. ZIEMER: I'm really asking is there -- 

 DR. MCKEEL: -- on the payroll as 

(unintelligible) contractors. 

 DR. ZIEMER: -- a group of Mallinckrodt workers 

called truck drivers that -- 

 DR. MCKEEL: No, I think --

 DR. ZIEMER: -- that were not --

 DR. MCKEEL: -- these were private contractors 
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that worked to just haul the Mallinckrodt 

waste. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay, that's what I was -- 

 DR. MCKEEL: Yes, sir. So --

 DR. ZIEMER: Is that an identifiable group? 

 DR. MCKEEL: Well, in the first TBD they 

mention this group and they said they were 

having difficulty finding the employer of 

record. And I think I made the suggestion back 

in 2003 that there's a lady who is still I 

think head of that program, the project 

manager, named Sharon Cottner*, who I am sure 

would be able to supply that information. And 

-- and I really think that would be a terrific 

thing to do. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Well, I'm kind of asking at this 

point --

 DR. MCKEEL: Yeah. 

 DR. ZIEMER: -- are these -- is this a group 

even covered by the current law? Perhaps not. 

Do we know that? I don't know if any -- 

 DR. MCKEEL: Well, it -- it --

MS. BROCK: (Off microphone) (Unintelligible) 

if I'm correct -- I'm sorry. 

If I'm correct, I believe it covers 
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contractors, subcontractors, and we know -- I 

think there were actual several maybe different 

trucking areas or companies that did that. 

There was also something called Arch Wrecking 

that was responsible for some -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: I see. 

MS. BROCK: -- of this, too, and I've tried to 

find them, as well. But as you well know, a 

lot of years pass --

 DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

MS. BROCK: -- and sometimes these companies 

just are gone. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

MS. BROCK: And so that's part of a -- but it's 

something that (unintelligible) -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: Currently we don't know exactly 

who they are, so it may be an issue for -- 

 DR. MCKEEL: I believe --

 DR. ZIEMER: -- the future to --

 DR. MCKEEL: -- they're covered under the law. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yes. 

 DR. MCKEEL: And I think Sharon Cottner, and 

there's a lady there who's their information 

officer called Jacqueline Mattingly, who's very 

knowledgeable and probably would try to help on 
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this, to identify. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Board members, if you 

have any other questions of any of the 

presenters, please indicate such. Okay. 

 Louise McKeel. 

 MS. MCKEEL: I'm the gal behind the camera. 

I'm just going to read this and then I can hand 

it off to you if you need. 

(Reading) Thank you for providing some 

opportunity for public comment during the 

series -- this series of meetings. I'm Louise 

McKeel, owner and editor of Village Image News, 

an independent news group that specializes in 

environmental news of concern in the 

Mississippi River Valley and the Ozark 

Mountains, with particular focus on the St. 

Louis region where my family has lived for over 

30 years. 

 I'm here representing citizens who are not 

likely to have the individual time, training or 

considerable personal resources it takes to 

research, to follow and to report coherently on 

developments of large governmental programs 

that have vital and multi-generational effects 

upon particular groups of workers and their 
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families in our region. 

Point one, I learned from a question I raised 

at a previous NIOSH meeting in St. Louis that 

the Government Accounting Office projected or 

scoped cost of the -- you can say it -- EEOI, 

but I'll say Energy Employees Occupational 

Illness Compensation Act. The entire program 

was to be somewhere around $2.8 billion. It is 

also my understanding that the total amount has 

been approved by Congress for distribution to 

rightful claimants. I would like to have these 

facts confirmed once again. I don't know if 

it's an easy answer that can be given right 

here, if everybody knows that, or if it's going 

to take time and then -- we'll have to take 

time, I guess. 

 DR. ZIEMER: I don't think the Board knows 

those numbers, but it may be possible to get 

them for you. I -- why don't you go ahead and 

give us the -- or raise your questions and 

we'll see if we can find information that... 

 MS. MCKEEL: And -- and then point two -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: I'm sorry, the $2.8 billion 

projection was the --

 MS. MCKEEL: Well, the $2.8 billion -- that was 
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the amount that was estimated that this program 

-- the entire program was going to cost, and it 

was an estimate of the General Accounting 

Office. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Oh, GAO, okay. 

 MS. MCKEEL: And -- and then that the total -- 

that that amount had been appropriated by 

Congress for dispersion to the rightful 

claimants. And I mean, as I stand behind the 

camera, I really see all this from a pretty 

different point of view because I'm more of a 

citizen. I don't really know that. You know, 

Dan researches and does it from a very 

different point of view, but I come more as a -

- just a citizen and representing the plain 

citizens taxpayers -- not even claimants, but 

just taxpayers -- and I'm interested in what 

the scale and scope of this program was, in a 

very general but accurate way. 

Then the second point was -- let's see, my 

question -- that was an old concern I had, and 

then my question today is how much has the 

EEOICPA program cost to date? And then I say 

as a taxpayer and an interested citizen of this 

region, I feel a need to be able to see this 
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cost broken down by year with respect to the 

total claims approved. And then the annual 

budget for the -- and then I have to -- well, 

let me read it -- for the Advisory Board on 

Radiation and Worker Health, or you know it as 

the ABRWH -- the annual budget for their 

operations. This is a breakdown that I would 

think I should be able to see, as a taxpayer. 

The annual budget for the NIOSH dose 

reconstruction program -- and I'll hand this to 

you if it would save you writing it down -- the 

annual budget for ORAU contracts, the annual 

budget for SC&A contracts, the annual budget 

for the Department of Labor portion of this 

program, and the annual budget for the 

Department of Energy portion of this program. 

That's just point two. 

And then point three is yesterday I heard it 

said that if the cases on the current agenda 

are audited it would take ten additional years. 

I'm asking for a rejection of the costs listed 

above for the next five years. 

And that's all I'm going to say from officially 

the questions. One other comment that just 

occurred to me today. Dan and I were up 
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I 

looking to see what the latest number of 

claimants -- I -- let's see, I guess I need to 

use your words, but those compensated and so 

forth -- and let me not try to analyze that. 

mean to me it's not simple. It's a little --

little hard, but one footnote that just 

astounds me after all I've heard is there are 

examples of cases withdrawn -- let's see how 

this is -- well, it says cases referred to 

NIOSH, and then there's a category of that, 

NIOSH star one, withdrawn from NIOSH -- and 

then due to no dose reconstruction, apparently. 

It says examples of reworked case. Case was 

returned from NIOSH with a dose reconstruction, 

but additional medical or employment evidence 

needs to be developed. Case is then returned 

to NIOSH. Well, I can somewhat understand 

that. It sounds as though they're going to be 

looking for more evidence. But I see from this 

that it could work against the claimants quite 

easily. 

But the second one is the one that concerns me. 

Examples of a case withdrawn. Case was sent to 

NIOSH and withdrawn without dose reconstruction 

due to claimant request, to claimant death, 
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insufficient employment evidence, or 

confirmation of SEC status. Claimant death and 

insufficient employment evidence, this sounds 

like things that the -- 

MS. RANSPOTT: Ranspott. 

 MS. MCKEEL: -- Ranspotts were saying, that 

they're just, you know, difficult statistics 

and inexactitudes that you all are able to use 

to just make a denial, and -- and it looks to 

me as though there are very, very few -- 

relatively few awards -- well, we did some 

percentages on that, but they were things like 

11 percent of the awards -- I mean this is not 

like 60 percent or 80 percent or anything, but 

like 11 percent where people -- of people were 

compensated -- of the cases that were 

developed. 

I'm not going to babble on through this, but it 

just doesn't seem to me that most people are 

getting rewarded, and that has nothing to do 

with just the -- the cases are a func-- a 

reduced function of the actual claims that are 

made. And I think a lot of people who were 

just here dropping in or citizens in general 

think that oh, well, there've been quite a few 
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claims, and in a way it's more like ten percent 

of the actual cases that are mentioned -- that 

are brought are -- have been paid to date, and 

I don't think that's a very high amount, 

considering all the expense that this program 

has cost so far. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Thank you. I think, 

Louise, that most of the information that 

you've asked about is public record information 

and I -- I don't know where all of it resides, 

but we certainly have the capability of getting 

that, one way or the other. I can tell you 

that the SCA part of the thing was announced 

today. There --

 MS. MCKEEL: (Off microphone) Well, 

(unintelligible) the web site. You know, here 

are the -- the statistics -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

 MS. MCKEEL: -- (unintelligible) you just read 

the kind of statistics that I'm interested in, 

it's 11 percent of those people who make claims 

at Mallinckrodt, program statistics, 11 percent 

were compensated. That's not very many. 

 DR. ZIEMER: I was referring to the budgetary 

things that you asked about, and I think, as 
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far as I know, all of that is public record and 

it should be available. I'm not sure how 

readily we can get some of these numbers right 

away. We know what the SCA number is 'cause we 

announced that earlier today. The -- the 

budget for this committee, we can certainly get 

that. It's the smallest part of all of these 

numbers, I think. But --

 MS. MCKEEL: (Off microphone) (Unintelligible) 

was curious --

 DR. ZIEMER: -- but --

 MS. MCKEEL: -- (unintelligible) the claimants, 

in a way, get --

 DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

 MS. MCKEEL: -- (unintelligible) fifty thousand 

dollars --

 DR. ZIEMER: Right, and --

 MS. MCKEEL: -- (unintelligible). 

 DR. ZIEMER: -- and the number of claims that 

NIOSH has processed and the number of awards 

that have been finalized, that information is 

available. I don't have it here, but I -- I 

think -- and you're going to give us the 

written version --

 MS. MCKEEL: (Off microphone) I think 
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(unintelligible) --

 DR. ZIEMER: -- or this -- is this it? This is 

it, yeah. 

 MS. MCKEEL: (Off microphone) (Unintelligible) 

 DR. ZIEMER: We will try to retrieve that for 

you, certainly can. 

 MS. MCKEEL: (Off microphone) I appreciate that 

very much. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Next I have Mel Makara? 

UNIDENTIFIED: (Off microphone) I inadvertently 

 DR. ZIEMER: Makara? 

UNIDENTIFIED: -- wrote my name. I thought 

that was (unintelligible). 

 DR. ZIEMER: Oh, okay. Thought you were -- 

thought you were registering attendance. Okay, 

Mel, we won't force you to come up here. 

Now let -- that -- that's the last name I have 

on the sign-up list, but let me again present 

the opportunity if there's any others here who 

do wish to comment to the Board. We'd be glad 

to have you do that at this time. 

 (No responses) 

Are there no other individuals -- now Denise, 

you're not twisting somebody's arm there, are 
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you? 

MS. BROCK: (Off microphone) (Unintelligible) 

to a priest. 

UNIDENTIFIED: (Off microphone) I think you 

just did. 

 DR. ZIEMER: It must have worked. Okay. 

 FATHER MITULSKI: No, I just --

 DR. ZIEMER: Please identify for the record -- 

 FATHER MITULSKI: Father Jim Mitulski. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Father Jim. 

 FATHER MITULSKI: M-i-t-u-l-s-k-i. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. 

 FATHER MITULSKI: My dad is a claimant. He has 

passed away. I was just concerned because I 

can't seem to get -- one of the things that I 

wrote for was a copy of his records, and I 

haven't been able to get them. The first time 

I wrote they said they lost the letter, and 

they asked me to FAX another, and I FAXed it 

and I still haven't gotten anything back. Last 

time I was in -- the last FAX, I just looked at 

it, was in May, so I would have thought that I 

should have gotten back a copy of his records 

by now. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah. We do have some folks here 
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from NIOSH that are helping on individual 

claims, and I don't know if you're -- if the 

records you're referring to are -- 

 FATHER MITULSKI: It's (unintelligible) -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: -- Labor Department --

 FATHER MITULSKI: -- (unintelligible) records, 

yeah. 

 DR. ZIEMER: -- records or --

 FATHER MITULSKI: Yeah. 

 DR. ZIEMER: If -- if they are Labor 

Department, we can get you directed to the 

right person, but we'll -- between Denise and 

some of the staffers here, I think we can at 

least figure out where help needs to come from 

in this case. 

MS. BROCK: (Off microphone) (Unintelligible) 

 DR. ZIEMER: So -- and who -- who's here from 

the NIOSH staff that can assist, if necessary? 

Okay, there's a whole crew of folks. I'll tell 

you, when you wear a clerical collar the help 

all comes pretty fast. Okay. 

 FATHER MITULSKI: And then Denise wanted me to 

sing a song before I leave. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Well, our time is up. 

Okay, Denise, you have some additional 
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comments? 

MS. BROCK: I think it was probably just the 

entire case file, and it usually works real 

well if you just put it in writing to the 

Department of Labor, they're usually real 

helpful. It looks like this letter went there. 

I can make a phone call. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Okay. 

MS. BROCK: And I wanted to make sure because 

when his father passed away -- it's really 

difficult for family members to then 

immediately send in a survivor -- you know how 

that works. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Well, between Denise and the 

staffers here, we'll make sure that there's 

some follow-up on this. 

MS. BROCK: (Off microphone) (Unintelligible) 

did all that. We'll do that. Thank you. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Any other comments -- 

yes, Richard Miller. 

 MR. MILLER: Very briefly, Richard Miller, 

Government Accountability Project. I'd just 

like to put a request on the record to NIOSH 

that they make a redacted transcript available 

of the closed session that was held today, 
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obviously redacted from the things that are, 

you know, business-sensitive. I think you did 

that once before with respect to -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: We'll try to do that as quickly as 

we can. 

 MR. MILLER: And it can (unintelligible) the 

web site. You don't have to -- 

 DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

 MR. MILLER: -- give it to me personally. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

 MR. MILLER: That'll be fine. Thank you. 

 DR. ZIEMER: Yeah. Okay, any other comments or 

questions for the public session? 

 (No responses) 

If not, I thank you again all, for being here 

in attendance tonight, and again, we will 

resume our session tomorrow morning at 8:30, at 

which time we will deal directly with the 

Mallinckrodt SEC petition. Thank you. 

Goodnight, everyone. 

(Whereupon, at 7:45 p.m. an adjournment was 

taken to August 26, 2005 at 8:30 a.m.) 
______________________________ 

235 

1 C E R T I F I C A T E 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 August 25, 

2005; 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 

7th day of October, 2005. 

STEVEN RAY GREEN, CCR 

CERTIFIED MERIT COURT REPORTER 

CERTIFICATE NUMBER: A-2102