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Nuclear workers to get help, at last
Monday, April 17, 2000
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD
Congress should act swiftly on the Clinton administration's proposal to compensate nuclear workers at installations such as Hanford for radiation-induced illnesses.
It's an unconscionably tardy but welcome reversal of a morally bankrupt policy.
Even though the government publicly has denied that workers were made ill by radiation exposure, government-funded studies as long ago as 1960 have been showing higher rates of at least one type of cancer at most of the major bomb facilities, The Washington Post reported.
Government officials simply chose to ignore the facts.
Last January a White House panel finally concluded that there's credible evidence that nuclear workers have become ill with lung cancer and other illnesses because of exposure to radiation or toxic chemicals. They suffered higher than normal rates of cancers, the panel said.
Congress now must act quickly to right this enduring wrong because time is of the essence for many sick workers who need help with medical bills.
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson announced, "The government is done fighting workers and now we're going to help them. We're reversing the decades-old practice of opposing worker claims and moving forward to do the right thing."
We hope that turns out to be true.
The administration's plan is to offer lump-sum payments of at least $100,000 to workers or their survivors or to allow them to negotiate a package to cover medical costs, lost wages and job retraining, according to Associated Press reports.
Making amends for the harm done to nuclear workers in their name is likely to cost taxpayers about $400 million a year in the early years of the program. The cost will decline as the number of eligible workers declines.
Some 600,000 workers were employed at the government's bomb factories during the decades when workers were exposed to harmful amounts of radiation. But only 3,000 of them are likely to be eligible for the payments, according to DOE estimates.
In a radical reversal, the government even proposes to give sick workers the benefit of the doubt if their radiation exposure records are incomplete. Given the sorry state of record keeping in the bomb complexes, that's entirely appropriate.
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