Weapon Workers Who Fell Ill Deserve Aid, U.S. Says

For five decades, the U.S. government steadfastly denied that workers in its nuclear facilities were putting their health and even their lives in peril as they helped develop the arsenal that protected the nation during the Cold War.

On Thursday, the Clinton administration conceded that workers exposed to beryllium, a metal used in producing nuclear weapons, deserve compensation for the debilitating and potentially deadly lung disease that hundreds of them have developed.

President Clinton asked Congress to pass legislation providing benefits to cover medical costs and lost wages to the workers or their survivors.

“Many of the men and women who helped us win the Cold War worked in hazardous conditions and were exposed to extremely hazardous substances,” Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said. “It’s time to stop spending money litigating against these workers and focus our efforts on getting them the help they need.”

There is bipartisan support for the legislation, which is expected to cost only $13 million per year over the next 10 years, and it could pass as early as this year.

The workers, who were employed by government contractors that ran the facilities or by government vendors, are not eligible for federal benefits under the federal workers’ compensation program. Many fail to qualify for state workers’ compensation benefits because chronic beryllium disease often develops 10 to 15 years after exposure--long after the deadline for filing claims. Moreover, when workers have tried to press the government for compensation in court, the government has routinely fought ferociously against them, and won.

The administration had considered adding compensation for workers who have radiation-induced cancer or lung disease caused by asbestos or silica dust to the proposal. But a decision on those diseases was delayed until March.

Richardson said he believes that the administration will support similar legislation for those diseases, even though it is more difficult to prove the link between them and exposure to hazardous materials in the Department of Energy facilities.

“My view is that the answer will be yes,” Richardson said.

Although the workers who suffer from beryllium disease and their advocates appreciate the flip in the government’s approach toward their plight, they are dismayed that the turnabout took so long and that they were lied to for so long.

When Glenn Bell, who suffers from the extreme asthma-like symptoms caused by beryllium, started working at the Oak Ridge nuclear weapon site in Tennessee in 1968, he felt he was doing his patriotic duty and that his government would protect him from the dangers posed by the hazardous materials in the facility.

“We felt proud of what we were doing; we were saving the free world,” he said. “We still feel a sense of pride of what we’re doing. But we wish we had known more about the dangers and that more had been done to protect us from the dangers.”

Bell, a machinist who still works at Oak Ridge, suffers frequent attacks that leave him wheezing and gasping. Sometimes he has to go to a hospital emergency room. The attacks leave him exhausted, sometimes too tired to make it to work the next day.

“I do feel anger. I feel more anger because there has been so much stalling up until today,” Bell added.

Most of the workers with chronic beryllium disease were employed at Rocky Flats in Colorado, the Oak Ridge complex, the Hanford reservation in Washington state, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Argonne laboratory in Chicago, according to the Energy Department. Many of them also worked for private vendors in Pennsylvania and Ohio.