June 25, 1998
Washington, DC
Prepared by Wm. Paul Robinson, Research Director
Southwest Research and Information Center
PO Box 4524
Albuquerque, NM 87106 USA
phone 505-262-1862/fax 505-262-1864/e-mail sricpaul@earthlink.net
SUMMARY
This Overview summarizes the basis for expansion of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990 to compensate sick or dying uranium workers, and dead uranium workers families in light of the expanded knowledge regarding the range of exposed populations and the range of hazards associated with uranium mines and mills in the US.
This Statement summarizes linkages between the groups of uranium miners covered by RECA, the underground and open pit uranium miners and uranium mill workers outside the current scope of that Act. The statement also identifies research confirming that health effects among Native Americans uranium miners have been systematically under counted and undercompensated as a result of limitations in the RECA program.
In addition, research is included which demonstrates that the current Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) standards for radon control in uranium mines allows exposures at rates which have been shown to significantly increase lung cancer risk. This research. compiled by National Institutes for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) Task Force in 1980 has never been acted on, perhaps as a result of the severe drop off in the uranium mining industry which also began in 1980.
The linkages between underground uranium miners, open pit uranium miners and uranium miller workers include:
recognition of exposures to a parallel mix of hazards a higher dose uranium workers;
recognition that these hazards were identified by US officials without providing effective protection of workers from those hazards;
recognition that mill workers health impacts, though identified as early as 1952 among US millers, did not result in an effective public health response and recognition that complex mix of hazards present a combination of health risks not effectively addressed by current health research or research methods.
The range of hazards presented by the uranium mine and mill environment extend well beyond the radon and radon decay products upon which the well recognized health effects among US uranium miners is based. The non-radon hazards associated with the uranium mine and mill workplace include contributions from three types of hazards materials:
radioactive materials associated with the uranium ore, and occurring at each mine and mill including:
uranium,uranium decay products such as thorium and radium, and emissions gamma and alpha radiation from uranium decay products other than radon;
heavy metals, occurring in varying concentrations in uranium ores including: vanadium, lead, arsenic, selenium and chromium; and workplace hazards, associated with mines and mills in varying concentrations including: diesel and gasoline engine exhaust and blasting residue in mines and sulfuric acid, kerosene and other reagents in mills.
As alarming, recent research on uranium miners in the Southwest has documented greater impairment per year of uranium mining for Native American miners than non-Native Americans. This same research effort has demonstrated that health assessment measures used in RECA program are not adequate to discern these difference.
This Report, "Ethnic Difference in the Prevalence of Nonmalignant Respiratory Disease among Uranium Miners", by Douglas Mapel, MD et. al. in the American Journal of Public Health, May 1995, p. 833-838, also documents the importance of a non-radon hazard, silica dust, to which miners were exposed in US uranium operations.
This overview has been written by Wm. Paul Robinson, Research Director at Southwest Research and Information Center, a non-profit scientific research and education organization based in Albuquerque, New Mexico since its founding in 1971. Mr. Robinson has been an environmental analyst at Southwest Research, where he has studied uranium mining and its environmental impacts for more than 20 years. He has taught in the Community and Regional Planning Program at the University of New Mexico where he earned his Masters Degree which included a professional project relating to planning for reclamation of uranium mine and mill sites in the Former East Germany.
Southwest Research staff have had the opportunity to closely with residents of many Native American communities affected by uranium operations including: Navajo residents of the Cove and Red Rock area during the 1980s in the first campaign for uranium workers compensation and the Crownpoint area to address current uranium development proposals as well as residents of Laguna and Acoma Pueblo to evaluate health impacts among uranium workers from those communities.
While this Overview is far too brief to fully address the issues identified in detail, it does summarize key background documents to support each of these points. Additional material to address these points are available from the author among many other sources. Appendices attached to this Overview provide documentation related to the key areas addressed.
INTRODUCTION - WHY RECA IS JUST THE FIRST STEP TOWARDS FULL AND FAIR COMPENSATION OF URANIUM WORKERS
The wealth and power which the huge uranium deposits of the western United States have provided the US Government and the uranium industry was built with the sweat and strength of thousands of workers who dug the rock and ran the mills which produced the yellowcake - the refined uranium which is the first step in nuclear weapons and nuclear power. Uranium workers have included miners and millers of all races since its first boom after World War II, though a significant number of miners and millers were Native American, from the great tribes of the Southwest such as the Navajo Nation, the Pueblo of Acoma and the Pueblo of Laguna.
Unfortunately, the shining pride in these workers' feel in roles in building the world's largest nuclear power had been tarnished by the growing evidence of the frighteningly wide array of health risks related to the hazardous properties of the uranium ore they worked with. The long-term health effects of the workers' chronic and continuous exposure have become more clear over time as research around the world has been conducted on uranium workers. Sadly, this health research is proceeding after many workers have gotten ill or passed away, and become the dead or sick bodies for epidemiologists to count.
And during the past twenty years, it has also become abundantly clear that the US government, which ran the uranium program when it began, failed to either: 1) inform the workers of the risks they faced or 2) effectively protect them from the hazardous materials in the mines and mills. The recent disclosures confirming AEC-era 'human radiation experiments' merely fills out the long record of ineffective education and protection of uranium mine and mill workers developed during RECA's Congressional consideration up to its 1990 passage. The extensive Internet site devoted to 'uranium miners' resources' through the DOE's Office of Human Radiation Experiment is a valuable resources on this subject which summarizes uranium miner's health research and the compensation programs since 1990.
The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990, through its establishment of a compensation program resulting from a clearly recognized US Government obligation to uranium workers and other radiation survivors, has been a precedent-setting and valuable first step by Congress. However, RECA has proven to be far too narrow in its scope of coverage and remuneration, inappropriately limiting the range and types of health problems for which uranium miners were eligible for compensation, and failing to provide coverage for the exposures visited upon a wide group of uncovered uranium miners and millers and their families. While this narrow scope may be a result of the process of political compromise, it has left an huge number of workers and their families outside its scope, in spite of the growing record of their personal or family health problems. Passage of the "Radiation Workers Justice Act of 1998" would fill the gaps left by RECA and establish a broader scope of compensations opportunities, in keeping with the broader scope of health risks to which workers were exposed.
The 'Uranium Miners Resources' web page compiled by the US DOE's Office of Human Radiation Experiments (OHRE) identifies a series of recommendations for expansion of RECA. These recommendations are included among the set of RECA amendments found in the proposed Radiation Workers Justice Act of 1998.
The fundamental basis for the passage of RECA in 1990 was recognition that US government controlled the uranium industry for more than 20 years and, driven by an urge for secrecy in an era of intense Cold War competition or a disregard for workers safety, failed to protect its uranium workers. The US government was also responsible for hiding documentation from those workers regarding the health risks associated with hazardous materials encountered during uranium operations, such as radon and its decay products.
Now, in 1998, it is clear that this secrecy went well beyond the failure to inform and protect workers regarding radon-related risks. The cover-up included then-existing and emerging documentation about the whole witch's brew of hazardous materials, both radioactive and non-radioactive, which bombarded the workers in the mines and mills, with every breath they took.
These hazards, whose risks are documented in Appendix B, include:
uranium - which presents chemically-derived risks to the renal system as well as radiological risks - its other decay products other than the radon daughters, heavy metals and other compounds regularly found in uranium ores - notably arsenic, lead, vanadium, selenium, silica, and chromium among others;
and the emissions from mining technology used to remove the uranium, including engine exhaust, hydrocarbon fumes and processing reagents.
A mixture of toxins from each of these groups of hazardous materials was found in the air at each and every mine and mill operated in the US. The poor ventilation conditions in the mines and mills, which improved very slowly and incrementally as a result of regulatory enforcement during a 30 years period. The slow pace of air pollution protection left these hazardous constituents in the working areas of the mines and mills, as surely as it left the excess levels of radon decay products in the mines. The health research community has been unable to fully document radon daughter-related effects among workers after more than forty years even as the dead bodies have mounted up, in part due to the limitation of statistical analysis to provided fully certain results. And it made only a very limited effort, relative to the radon-exposure work, to address the full combination of radioactive, metal and chemical hazards facing uranium miners and millers in addition to radon decay products.
Read more:
http://www.sric.org/mining/docs/RECA.html
