WC Monitor
7/10/2015
A special exposure cohort that would cover some Hanford workers as recently as 1990 has been finalized under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Program. Previous special exposure cohorts cover most Hanford workers from Oct. 1, 1943, through 1983. The new special exposure cohort will ease compensation rules for the workers of construction contractors and all subcontractors from 1984-90. The Department of Labor does not know yet how many Hanford workers or their survivor may be eligible to have previously denied claims reconsidered under the eased rules. The Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program requires workers to have their radiation exposure estimated to show that it was high enough that it may have caused cancers they developed. But large groups of workers are having that requirement waived because data does not exist to adequately estimate radiation exposure. Those workers, who fall into groups called special exposure cohorts, are automatically compensated if they develop any of 22 cancers that have been linked to radiation exposure. Workers, or their survivors, are paid $150,000 and have medical expenses related to their exposure covered after a claim is approved.
In March the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health recommended that compensation rules for those workers be eased. But the rule took effect only after the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services accepted the rule and then Congress did not object during a 30-day period. The board concluded that J.A. Jones Construction Services, which was the Hanford construction contractor from 1984 through Feb. 28, 1987, did little monitoring of workers’ internal radiation. Kaiser Engineers Hanford, which held the construction contract next planned to improve worker monitoring, but that was delayed by a budget shortfall until 1991. Subcontractor employees are being included in the special exposure cohort because it is not clear which subcontractors, some of them single-person companies, performed construction work or who was responsible for their monitoring from 1984-90, according to presentations to the advisory board. The new special exposure cohort does not include Department of Energy workers or the workers for prime contractors. The excluded contractors include Battelle, Westinghouse and Hanford Environmental Health Foundation from 1984-90 and Rockwell Hanford Operations, UNC Nuclear Industries and Boeing Computer Services Richland from 1984 through June 28, 1987. The employees of the construction contractors were assigned a broad range of work to support research, fuel handling, plutonium processing, decontamination and decommissioning, and reactor outages at Hanford. They worked in N Reactor, the PUREX reprocessing facilities, laboratories and the Plutonium Finishing Plant. The program administered by the Department of Labor has paid nearly $1.4 billion in compensation and medical benefits to Hanford and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory employees or their survivors, under both Part B, which includes the special exposure cohorts, and Part E, which covers lost wages and impairment due to exposures to toxic materials.
