1985 Advice on Paducah Plant Not Followed

A recommendation 14 years ago that workers at a uranium processing plant be studied for exposure to highly radioactive plutonium was apparently never followed, a U.S. Department of Energy spokesman says.

A department task force in 1985 reported that plutonium contamination in the uranium ash shipped from the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant--then run by the DOE--far exceeded levels allowed by law, spokesman Steven Wyatt told the Louisville Courier-Journal in its Saturday editions.

He said the task force called for a study, but the “exposure assessment” was never done on the workers who actually processed the contaminated uranium.

Wyatt said the agency did a study assessing worker exposure to plutonium and other highly radioactive isotopes in 1992, but it did not include workers who processed the contaminated uranium.

The two-year study, by IT Corp. of Washington, D.C., analyzed urine samples from 16 longtime employees who worked in various production areas and concluded “the overall exposure potential . . . for Paducah workers is not significant.”

The Energy Department recently acknowledged, in response to a whistle-blower lawsuit filed in June by three Paducah employees, that workers were not adequately informed about the plutonium--which can be lethal if even microscopic amounts are inhaled--and were not properly trained to protect themselves from radiation exposure.

The Energy Department has known for more than a decade that plutonium in ash, the residue left from preparing uranium for processing into fuel for nuclear bombs and power plants, generated at Paducah from the 1950s until 1977 was hundreds of times above government safety standards.

The 1985 report found that ash from Paducah had plutonium levels up to 700 times higher than the Energy Department considered safe for handling without protection and training.