New audit of Hanford requested

YAKIMA – U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell has asked the federal government to review the workers’ compensation benefits available to former weapons workers at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

A recent audit at the south-central Washington site found insufficient data about workers’ radiation exposure between 1944 and 1968, Cantwell said. That lack of data could lead federal officials to underestimate workers’ exposure, thereby making them ineligible for workers’ compensation benefits.

In a letter sent Monday, Cantwell urged the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health advisory board to expedite a review of the Hanford audit.

That letter was sent to advisory board Chairman Paul Ziemer and Institute Director John Howard.

“Underestimating radiation exposure levels could wrongly deny worker’s compensation to thousands of deserving individuals,” Cantwell said in a statement Tuesday.

“We need to review the situation and make sure we give former Hanford employees the benefits they deserve.”

An institute spokesman did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment.

The occupational safety and health institute has been struggling for months to gather data on the amount of radiation that Cold War-era nuclear weapons plant workers may have been exposed to at Energy Department sites nationwide.

Under a 2000 law, the agency must determine possible radiation exposure levels for each worker’s compensation claim.

Thousands of claims have been filed nationally, but worker records are missing at some sites and incomplete at others.

In 2004, the institute credited the Hanford site for providing information needed to begin estimating worker exposure.

However, the audit released June 10 noted several problems in data collection at the site.

The audit cited the use of inappropriate, incomplete or insufficient data, among other things, that could be unfavorable to workers’ compensation claimants.

The audit was done by S. Cohen and Associates.

The findings raise the possibility that former workers could be automatically eligible for workers’ compensation, Cantwell said. That has been the case at nuclear sites in Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee and Alaska. In many of those cases, workers contracted certain kinds of cancer, worked at specific sites, weren’t carefully monitored or their records were lost.

According to the NIOSH Web site, a previous petition for such status at Hanford was denied.

The 586-square-mile Hanford site was created in the 1940s as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb.

Today, about 10,000 people are working to clean up the highly contaminated site.