Roots of federal compensation program began with sick workers at Paducah, Ky., uranium plant

The Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, located just across the Ohio River from Illinois, stands as a monument to America’s once insatiable hunger for enriched uranium — a key ingredient for nuclear weapons and civilian and military reactors.

The 3,500-acre plant, which closed two years ago, is important because it was the catalyst for the nation’s efforts to provide financial compensation to defense workers sickened or killed by exposure to radioactive materials.

A weeklong series by the McClatchy Washington Bureau and Belleville News Democrat has looked at the ill effects of seven decades of the nation’s nuclear industry, and the thousands of workers who have died or are still awaiting compensation.

A series of scathing national news stories in 1999 about thousands of Paducah workers who were dying from radiation exposure and other deadly illnesses, but whose claims were being stonewalled by the federal government, led Congress the next year to pass the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act.

The law covered all the American workers exposed to dangerous materials while working on nuclear weapons projects during the Cold War.

For more than 50 years, the Paducah plant provided its workers with steady jobs in a rural area plagued by high unemployment and poverty. But it is also where workers for decades unknowingly breathed in plutonium-laced dust and were exposed to other dangerous materials while working on a program to recycle used nuclear reactor fuel for weapons.

In the mid-1970s, the plant focused on producing fuel for commercial and Navy nuclear reactors.

At its peak the plant employed 1,800 workers. Today it remains at the center of controversies concerning the safety of employees who continue to work at the site as part of a cleanup operation.

The U.S. Department of Energy, Kentucky health officials and the companies that run the plant and oversee the environmental cleanup contend in documents the site is safe and getting safer. Areas that are suspected of contamination from radioactive materials are clearly marked and roped off, they say.

But for former workers at the plant and corporate whistle-blowers, the Paducah plant remains an ticking time bomb where workers were exposed to radioactive materials 500,000 times greater than acceptable safe levels, and where thousands of tons of dangerous substances are improperly stored — a legacy that will pose severe health risks for at least half a century into the future, according to critics.

“There is no safety,” said Gary Vander Boegh, a former staff engineer at the plant. “Workers know it.”

Contractors absolved of liability

A series of secondary roads heading west out of Paducah lead to gravel road that winds to a gate and guard shack blocking the main entrance to the plant. On a warm afternoon recently, the guard shack is empty. So Vander Boegh abruptly steers his SUV down a gravel road that encircles the Paducah plant.

Vander Boegh’s voice takes on a disgusted tone as he points to the drainage ditches on either side of the road. The ditches have been roped off, with signs warning of possible radioactive sediments.

“They’re doing what they’re calling cleanup,” he said. “You go into that ditch right there, and if your Cub Scout troop come down and can’t read, then go through that ditch, you’ve just contaminated the whole troop. ... They won’t let you go in there because it’s hotter than hell.”

The contractors who ran the Paducah plant, including Union Carbide, which oversaw it for 32 years when most of the contamination occurred, were essentially left off the hook for liability claims under the federal compensation program, according to Vander Boegh.

“And now we’re seeing the Department of Labor battle these claims just like they said they wouldn’t in the (agreement),” he said. “That’s absolutely atrocious, in my view.”

Efforts to reach company spokesmen for comment were unsuccessful.

So far, 42 percent of the nearly 11,000 claims filed by Paducah workers as of last summer, or 4,618, have received some form of compensation for a total of nearly $640 million, according to records obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act by the McClatchy Washington, D.C., bureau.

Mike Driver, who lives in Mayfield, Ky., about 30 miles south of Paducah, worked at the plant from 1984-98. He left because of a cluster of health problems, including weakening joints, the loss of balance and degenerative disk disease. On top of that, his memory started giving out, to the point he could barely remember how to do the operator’s job that he had once performed flawlessly.

A few weeks before he went on disability, Driver tried to read a control panel with more than 75 gauges. For the man who was always a quick study, the incident proved embarrassing, he recalled.

It wasn’t until years later that Driver found out he was experiencing the classic symptoms of exposure to heavy metals such as lead and arsenic.

When Driver went to Paducah physicians to get a medical diagnosis needed to qualify for compensation under the federal compensation program, they refused to believe him, he said.

“None of these doctors around here were giving anybody a diagnosis of heavy metals poisoning or anything related to that,” Driver said. “They just didn’t. So that was the hard part.”

Site cleanup could last another 55 years

This Cold War legacy has cast a pall over the plant that will endure for many decades to come, and at great cost to the taxpayer and the environment, according to Mark Donham, who sat on the Paducah citizens advisory board from 1996 to 2004.

After the expenditure of $2 billion in public funds for the cleanup, there is still a long way to go, according to Donham.

“They’re doing the easiest stuff, the stuff that’s most visible they can check off,” he said. “But they haven’t really addressed the most difficult and most expensive issues.”

The DOE estimates the cleanup could take until 2070 to complete with the final price tag exceeding $7 billion, according to a 2004 Government Accountability Office report. The plant has been designated a federal Superfund site.

Meanwhile, former Paducah plant workers like Mike Driver, who continues to seek compensation for all the years that he could not work because of his work-related illnesses, wonders who should be held responsible for the plant’s legacy of sickness and death.

“Who was the first person to say, ‘Hey, boy, there’s nothing out there to hurt you, so go out there and do your job?’” Driver said. “Who’s the first person to say that? I don’t know. I don’t know that anybody knows.

“But that idea, those words, those sentences, were passed on through plant management, and on down through the chain of command to your immediate supervisor and even throughout your co-workers. Your co-workers would say, ‘They told us, nothing’s going to hurt us. Just go on out there and do your job.’ We trusted them.”

This story was originally published December 16, 2015 at 1:39 PM with the headline "Roots of federal compensation program began with sick workers at Paducah, Ky., uranium plant."