It examined the radiation in 13,000 urinalysis samples from a two-year period and in the feces of 16 longtime employees who worked in various production areas. Wyatt said he did not know why the 1992 study was done. On Tuesday, the Energy Department announced that it would begin a more comprehensive study of worker exposures, in response to new findings of a special investigation team that there have been shortcomings in the plant's worker health and environmental safeguards. U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson also announced this week that the agency would ask Congress to expand medical monitoring of past and current workers and to compensate those with cancers caused by exposure to plutonium-contaminated materials, which the agency said are still present in small quantities at the plant. It's still unclear what levels of plutonium the Paducah workers were and are exposed to.
Records are spotty.
But the Energy Department has known for more than a decade that plutonium in ash generated at Paducah from the 1950s until 1977 was hundreds of times above government safety standards. One former worker who spent time in the C-410 complex said he never heard plutonium discussed. THE 1985 findings were contained in a report from a panel that looked at the consequences of recycling fuel rods from nuclear weapons reactors. Until 1977, the uranium in the rods was reprocessed at Paducah and contaminants in the rods also ended up at gaseous diffusion plants in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Portsmouth, Ohio. The nickel acts as a molecular sieve, allowing fissionable uranium 235 to pass through to be collected while diverting the more inert uranium 238 as a waste.