JOE HARDING'S DEATH LIST
Moore, Taylor G. III
Joe Harding's death list The growing toll of workers in the uranium enrichment industry Taylor G. Moore III Ioe Harding took another long drag on his cigarette and read the next entry from the...
...He taught himself to eat five or six light meals a day so that the small pouch of intestine that was left after surgery could stretch into a respectable pseudo-stomach...
...But we were then and still are within the acceptable limits...
...The union has struck the Portsmouth plant three times in the last five years...
...He is convinced that it is no coincidence...
...In the last two years he has developed a faint palsy...
...You're going to lose your job if you don't go along with it...
...The things that are wrong with him could not be proven on any other organic basis...
...Despite the implications of such statistics, and despite the union's efforts to hold the company to a higher health and safety standard, Goodyear Atomic takes refuge in the knowledge that the standard is in the hands of sympathetic regulators in the Department of Energy, which owns the Portsmouth operation...
...The list goes on...
...If they were ever to give out my complete file it would hang them and they know it...
...These facilities are known as GOCO companies...
...So I don't ever really expect that they'll come through with all of it...
...When I'd ask them what it was, they'd just say, 'Well, it's real different...
...soldiers who took part in tests of nuclear weapons explosions in the Nevada desert in 1957...
...Nothing is ever in a static state...
...Joe Harding's death list The growing toll of workers in the uranium enrichment industry Taylor G. Moore III Ioe Harding took another long drag on his cigarette and read the next entry from the Death List: "Here's Wade McNabb, died in 1972 at age fifty-five...
...That was unusual in itself—state and Federal health and occupational safety agencies have no authority over the enrichment facilities because of the plants' connection to the nuclear weapons program...
...But Jennings says it is unlikely that an incontrovertible medical diagnosis will ever be made...
...Same story...
...One who was not so lucky so long was Arvil Bean, who died on January 24, 1978, of leukemia and asbestos-filled lungs...
...Eight hundred pounds of highly corrosive, toxic uranium hexafluoride gas were accidentally released during a 114-day walkout in 1976...
...We don't have near the degree of sophistication needed to make truly factual conclusions...
...At other times, he worked in the Product Withdrawal Room, where the pressurized uranium gas is drawn off, analyzed for its isotopic assay, and pumped into fourteen-ton cylinders for shipment to Oak Ridge or Portsmouth for further enrichment...
...Some of those guys were breathing as much asbestos fiber as they were uranium particles—and that was enough...
...I called back and told them, 'I just can't ship it, it's just too hot.' So the shift supervisor said, 'Listen, we've got these cylinders in the sequence that they were withdrawn and that's the wa" we want to ship them...
...Government's massive uranium enrichment plant at Paducah, Kentucky...
...He first came down with it in 1958...
...We've al-rea , got this cylinder reported to go on this truck...
...The big shots could rear back and say, 'Hey, we changed one in nineteen minutes, we set a record.' "But who's really guilty...
...He had to do it because everybody else was doing it and if he didn't do it he'd get his ass fired...
...He is gone longer this time...
...We had these film badges we wore to indicate exposure...
...Union Carbide's not stupid...
...There's at least between five and six thousand people who worked at one time or another in one of these plants with uranium," says Harding...
...But there's so much fear...
...Sometimes it still shakes me a little when I hear about somebody else, especially when it was somebody 1 really knew pretty well...
...That would be very difficult, if not impossible, to determine without an extensive, full-scale epidemiological study of worker-exposure at the plant," says Dr...
...If there was no danger to the surrounding area of the plant, why would this guide be produced and why would the guide say, 'If relocation becomes necessary, it is assumed that one to three hours will allow you enough time to reach your care center...
...Sometimes we didn't even wait for a dark night...
...Department of Energy...
...Dave Wilson, stomach cancer, 1978...
...And Joe Harding's lengthening Death List is part of it...
...For the last nine years, fingernaillike growths of cartilage have been penetrating the skin over Harding's knuckles, finger joints, wrists, ankles, and toes...
...Purdue was still alive in early September...
...It was too hot to meet acceptable levels for shipment...
...An evacuation guide for towns in the area was published last spring on the front page of the Columbus Citizen-Journal...
...One day a few of us men laid our badges on a smoking chunk of uranium for eight hours and turned it in...
...So we are in no position to comment further on his charges...
...They'd tell you, 'Clean 'em up.' And if you cleaned 'em up, 'That's a good job, bud, you're a fine man.' Well, they knew what was being done with it— that was the way they designed it...
...Purdue was a maintenance man, one of those who sometimes entered a process stage still seething with uranium gas in order to change a leaking seal or replace a faulty valve...
...He walks despite his crippled knee...
...There's really no way you can run a plant like that without having releases all the time...
...I was on the midnight shift and I called over to the Roundhouse [the control room] and I said to the shift supervisor, 'Hey buddy, I've got a cylinder over here in No...
...Over the last eight or nine years he has tried to keep track of the growing roster, but he worries how long it will be before he becomes the next entry, and whether anyone will care to add his name to the list...
...In addition, the age at which each of the men died is an important factor...
...Thomas Najarian of the Boston VA Hospital...
...The telephone rings again and Harding leaves the room...
...And now I think, they're all out there in the graveyard and I'm still living and they were subjected to even less radiation than I was...
...And I'd bet what's left of my life that 50 per cent of them are dead or damaged by it...
...He said, 'Well, you know what you've got and where you got it...
...He estimates that as many as 1,200 people have worked in radiation areas of the Paducah plant since it began operation...
...The same parallel can be drawn with Goodyear and DOE...
...A third study, still under way, examines the apparent high cancer death rate of some 3,000 U.S...
...Carroll Groves, 1974...
...But as Winkelstein pointed out, there are too many unknowns to draw definite conclusions in this case...
...Harding returns to the room with a scrap of paper and another entry for the Death List...
...Each of the parties has an out in responsibility...
...If the people who developed this technology had given as much thought to the medical effects as was given to the destructive power or whatever, perhaps we wouldn't have this situation...
...Collins says a major impediment to improving working conditions at the enrichment plants is the special relationship between the Government and its contractors...
...said Wayne Range, the Department's public information 1 We categorically deny all those charges....' officer at Oak Ridge who handles all press inquiries for the three-plant enrichment complex...
...we are in no position to comment....' "So he's the boss and it then dawns on you that he means just what he said...
...Carbide and its management contractor, the Department of Energy, portray people like Joe Harding as misinformed crackpots...
...The doctors have told me I should have been dead ten years ago, fifteen years ago...
...The workers lay on asbestos heat blankets to shield themselves from the heat and gas...
...So let's get a good reading and get it on the truck.' c...
...Now, Harding estimates that as many as fifty of these men are dead of leukemia, cancer, or some unidentified ailment that may be related to radiation...
...But for the last nine months production has continued around the clock, with quickly trained non-union replacements running the shop...
...Louis, Louisville, Nashville...
...But for more than half the time he worked for Union Carbide, Harding says, he was "just like everyone else who believed the company when they said we would be exposed to no more radiation than we'd get from wearing a luminous-dial wristwatch...
...After an occasional two or three instances like that and some talking around you find out everybody is doing the same thing...
...So Harding plods on with his gruesome hobby...
...Sometimes these heels could make the cylinders pretty hot, and when we'd get near them with our meters, the meters would go off-scale...
...And the exposure limits were somewhat more lenient years ago...
...We'd just find some place to sit down, brush away the dust, and eat lunch...
...The demand for millions of tons of enriched fuel to feed the nation's appetite for nuclear weapons and nuclear power requires enrichment plants covering hundreds of acres, the size of small towns in themselves, at Paducah, Oak Ridge, and Portsmouth, Ohio...
...I expect it will be a long haul trying to pry all that loose from Union Carbide and the Department of Energy," Honicker told me recently...
...It is not known, for example, how many of the men who died were cigarette smokers, where a strong link to cancer is firmly established...
...A still-employed former co-worker had just informed him about two men he knew who are both hospitalized with terminal illness...
...A telephone call here, another name there, he amasses bits of information he hopes will someday be useful in calling Union Carbide to account...
...It never dawned on us that we were zeroing all this out and only showing additional radiation, which we did find...
...With each pass through the barrier material, the gaseous uranium is isotopically enriched...
...After examining Harding's pockmarked hide, a Memphis dermatologist would say only, "You know what's wrong with you," when asked what caused the skin sores...
...At the end of a day you could look back behind you and see your tracks in the uranium dust that had settled that day...
...Harding worked for Union Carbide from 1952 to 1971, first in the huge factory rooms where an endless line of giant steel barrels carry a stream of hot uranium gas through a series of secret filter-barriers made of nickel...
...But nobody ever told you what to do, they just didn't question it...
...When he returns, he carries a scrap of paper with more notes, apparently more names to add to the Death List...
...2 position, and we can't ship it, it's too hot...
...Union Carbide "categorically denies" that any worker has ever received more than the permissible dose of radiation on the job (the limit is now five rems per year), says Harvey Cobert, the company's press officer in Oak Ridge...
...The walkout of more than 1,500 specialized workers has cut plant personnel by about half...
...Warren Winkelstein Jr., a physician and dean of the School of Public Health at the University of California at Berkeley...
...And even with such a study, a lot would depend on what subjects you chose for a control group to compare with...
...And nobody gave a damn who got hurt or what...
...Every few days they'd take up the badges and send them off to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (also run for the Government by Union Carbide) for analysis...
...I'm not surprised in the least," says Harding...
...Nothing else was found to indicate any other cause...
...And he has learned to block out the pain...
...One night he laid down and went into a coma...
...Leukemia...
...According to Harding's list, Union Carbide terminated him in 1976 after several years of treatment for lung and blood problems...
...And if we had tanks of contaminated liquid or gases that had to be disposed of, we'd just wait till a dark night when there was no moon and just shoot it right up the stack...
...Harding says it was a common practice, encouraged by supervisors, for workers to falsify records relating to radioactive contamination...
...exposure limits are based on a linear application theory which assumes that minimal exposure will yield minimal health effects...
...In August, Harding wrote a seven-page letter to Kentucky Governor Julian Carroll detailing his work experiences and claims of dangerous worker exposure...
...On the basis of an examination of the deaths of 1,222 former nuclear workers at the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Naval Shipyard, Najarian found that the nuclear workers there had almost twice as many cancer deaths and about five times as many leukemia deaths as the general U.S...
...Uranium for lunch While Joe Harding mounts his one-man campaign to bring reform to the Union Carbide gaseous diffusion plant at Paducah, Kentucky, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Local 3-689 is trying, with more traditional tactics, to raise a similar issue at the Goodyear Atomic Corporation's enrichment plant near Portsmouth, Ohio...
...Two years ago, a study by Dr...
...Most of what I know about him is from the few press accounts he has generated with his tales...
...Joe Harding's whole medical history certainly smacks of radiation damage," he concludes...
...And it is constantly expanding...
...Union Carbide insists that it runs "clean" operations at its Paducah and Oak Ridge enrichment plants...
...His report of the inspection, made to Harding and distributed to the local news media by Union Carbide, found no unusually high levels of exposure in Harding's medical file...
...He was in his thirties, so young...
...After years of trouble with Goodyear and the Department of Energy, the union may be giving its unquestioning support of nuclear fission another look...
...They said they'd protect us and let us know if we ever got too much and we all believed them...
...In 1953, Harding's right knee was shattered by a fifteen-foot fall from a truck bound for a uranium enrichment plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee...
...And if we could ever get some momentum going—get something positive to happen—they'd all jump and say, Me, too...
...These are just names to you," he says as he ticks off the names from his list, "but these are guys that I went through training school with and worked alongside for more than fifteen years...
...Of course, we have improved our operations over the years...
...Ohio mortality statistics show that Pike County, where the Goodyear plant is virtually the only industry, leads the state in cancer and heart disease...
...Harding's entry for Purdue, based on the report of a relative, says he was treated by the plant physician and five Paducah-area doctors for seven or eight years and was finally told his condition could not be relieved...
...Goodyear is using salary employes with less than five months on the payroll to perform jobs which normally require sixty-five weeks of training...
...Joe Harding has really become something of a local folk hero down there, hasn't he...
...Jack Owens died in 1956 with cancer...
...During the current strike, plant management seems anxious to calm fears about public safety...
...Joe Harding's list would seem to suggest a cancer death rate of 25 per cent or more among his former co-workers...
...The stated medical reason for termination was heart trouble...
...And Eugene Ragland, forty-seven years old, died in 1978 of stomach cancer and leukemia...
...When he gets up each morning he spends two hours digging the spurlike growths out of his feet and hands with a knifeblade...
...There are about 10,000 uranium workers in the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, according to Frank Collins, the union's Washington, D.C., lobbyist...
...Harding and his fellow workers would occasionally test the company's monitoring of radiation exposure...
...The organ was displayed in formaldehyde at a hospital for several years, so unique was its state of deterioration...
...When we took radiation surveys of the Product Withdrawal Room and the cylinders [of enriched uranium gas] we zeroed the meters right there in the room, right where all the radiation was to begin with...
...We all thought, why fight it...
...The mounting evidence Does Joe Harding's Death List indicate what it seems to indicate...
...They've looked at my lungs with every kind of probe and x-ray you can imagine...
...We are approaching an era of increased reliance on nuclear power...
...We had to log all the readings—ten feet above a cylinder, ten feet to the side—and my first experience in this was with a cylinder that had a high heel in it...
...Now you try to tell me that I didn't eat a lot of uranium during all those years...
...Thomas F. Mancuso found significantly higher radiation exposure among workers at the Government's plutonium production facility on the Hanford Reservation in Washington who had died of cancer compared with those who died of other causes...
...Present U.S...
...In 1963 or 1964, Purdue's lungs began to give out...
...In 1961, after a seven-year series of violent vomiting attacks and weight loss, his stomach was removed...
...And we ate our lunch in all this, every day, eight hours a day...
...With his top-secret security clearance, Harding was assigned work as a process operator in a building the size of five football stadiums...
...Stressing that his conclusions were "strictly without pathological documentation," Jennings says "the obvious anatomical findings" and the lack of any other apparent cause leads him to believe that Harding's entire set of physical ailments "probably were caused by radiation exposure...
...One doctor looked at me for my skin sores and said, 'Where do you work, anyway?' I said at the Union Carbide atomic plant in Paducah...
...Maybe if I can just keep rattling my jaws and gathering information and trying to get it out—maybe some way enough of it will surface that somebody in authority or power will get inquisitive and try to see for themselves...
...Carbide will not address specific questions regarding incidents Harding cites as proof of disregard for worker safety, but when asked about Harding's charges that workers were permitted and encouraged to falsify radiation readings, and that "dirty" files on workers are "sanitized" before being made public, Cobert said: "We categorically deny all those charges, period...
...What Joe Harding has not been able to accept is that years of inquiry and legal action have brought not a dime's compensation for radiation-related disabilities from his employer, Union Carbide Corporation, which operates the uranium enrichment plants at Paducah and Oak Ridge for the U.S...
...This is not to say there is not already incontrovertible evidence that radiation causes cancer—that much is known from studies of victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, radiologists who work closely with nuclear material, and persons who have undergone x-ray therapy...
...By cutting corners and disregarding the level of exposure to workers from the radioactive gases contained in the stages, the procedure for pulling a stage off the process stream, breaking it down, making the repairs, reassembling and returning it to the feed line was over a period of years reduced from a one-and-a-half-hour task to a trim nineteen minutes...
...which runs the Portsmouth enrichment plant] is not quite as good as Union Carbide when it comes to worker health and safety matters, but it's a problem everywhere in the uranium industry...
...I can't help you.' " A Paducah stomach specialist who first diagnosed Harding's intestinal malaise as the result of extended ingestion of uranium dust refused to sign a statement to that effect, saying he did not want to become involved in a long court fight with such a powerful corporation as Union Carbide...
...But somebody better start thinking about how to protect workers, and what the long-range radiation effects are...
...Because I know what things ought to be in those files, and I'll be able to tell by looking at them whether they're accurate or not Honicker has also filed FOI requests for files and other information related to many of the workers Harding says are now dead of cancer, leukemia, or other causes that may be radiation-related...
...As we talk, the telephone rings...
...We began to realize that the radiation surveys were useless because we were zeroing the meters right in the area and we were told to ignore the heels...
...But Harding is not optimistic that his "real files" will ever see the light of day...
...Died a few days later...
...The radiation meters sat over in the corner and got cobwebs on them...
...Carbide terminated him in 1971 with no pay, and the stated medical reason was a bad back, which he did have...
...Some of the work at all the plants involves high-radiation work, but the plant at Portsmouth is really the sore spot with us...
...William Jennings, a neurologist now on the staff of the Western State Mental Institution in Bolivar, Tennessee, who examined Harding last June...
...But the contractors never do anything without authorization from the DOE, so you're really dealing with a man you can't see...
...Given the wide range of informed medical opinion that can be found on almost any epidemiological controversy, it may take years to render a verdict...
...Releases of moderate and sometimes large amounts of the radioactive gas were routine, Harding recalls...
...He was just in a predicament where he had to get it done and he knew how to do it...
...There is the story of Ernest J. Purdue, one of Harding's contemporaries at the Paducah enrichment plant...
...Nearly every one of them has relatives working at Carbide...
...We haven't seen anything like it before.' " Since 1953, small skin sores have been working their way up Harding's emaciated body...
...But we were not his employer and we have no official allegations before us...
...Ill Jennings adds, "Someone should see the writing on the wall, however, and really make some effort in this area...
...I don't see how I'm living now," he says, rubbing his leathered, lined face...
...The workers wore yellow leather shoes, white coveralls, gloves, white skull caps, and dust respirators like those worn by spray painters and sandblasters...
...Winkelstein should know when it comes to the complexities of disease statistics...
...About half of those work at one of the three enrichment plants...
...And these have usually been prompted by after-the-fact reports of deaths and terminal illnesses...
...See if you can't get me a better reading.' So I was just learning, but I thought, 'Hey, I've read this thing once.' So I read it again with two or three different meters...
...Gradually, Harding came to take more seriously the opinions of doctors he had consulted about his various ailments, though none would say for certain that job-related radiation exposure was the cause of his stomach condition, his skin sores, his diseased lungs, or the ugly growths on his hands and feet...
...The evidence just keeps mounting," says Harding...
...That's exactly what I expected he would find...
...There, he and other workers kept constant watch on some of the 4,000 process stages, plugging leaks and frequently pulling equipment off the process line for repairs...
...As he approaches fifty-nine and increasingly uncertain health in his remaining years, Harding grows more obsessed with knowing what happened to each of the 200 or so men who began work with him in 1952 at the Federal Taylor G. Moore III, a free-lance reporter who has written before for The Progressive on nuclear matters, is now studying with the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley...
...Says Bloomfield: "Would you leave a drunk to guard a bar...
...I have seen a machinist stand with a complete fresh-air suit on, cutting on a contaminated piece of metal—and five feet away, at the lunch table, were people sitting down," says local president Dennis Bloomfield...
...For years it was assumed that the health effects of such exposure were minimal, but some recent studies on other types of nuclear workers contradict this long-held belief...
...Union Carbide didn't really order that to be done deliberately...
...Similar growths have developed from the ends of his lower ribs, curling into hard knots beneath the flesh...
...Any individual who thinks that the plant presents no threat to the surrounding area is just being naive...
...Of course, we were dumping it around on all these farms, but that was okay as long as nobody knew, and after a while we stopped using this elaborate pumpdown procedure altogether...
...There's no need in your coming back to see me...
...But the asbestos sheeting was frequently ragged and torn...
...Once somebody dropped a small chunk of uranium in the urine sample...
...Through the 1950s and 1960s, Harding's generation of enrichment workers handled tons of radioactive uranium in steel cylinders, guiding the precious ore through the complex,, painstaking process of gaseous diffusion, making it rich enough in fissionable isotopes to be useful as the fuel for nuclear bombs and nuclear reactors...
...But none of these illnesses has broken Joe Harding...
...The management-contractor relationship between Union Carbide and the Department of Energy works both ways in a mutually beneficial arrangement—part of the overall cloak of military secrecy that thwarts attempts, even by workers or relatives of deceased workers, to get medical records...
...About 20 per cent of all deaths are cancer-related...
...They all told me a million things that it's not, but not one of them would sign a statement saying it was definitely radiation damage...
...Neither did any one foreman...
...The gas must pass through miles of the "cascades" to make the uranium rich enough for power reactors, and thousands of more miles to make it suitable for nuclear bombs...
...It was the same way with the purge rate [the amount of routine leakage of contaminated gases to the atmosphere surrounding the plant...
...You could look up at the lights and see a blue haze between you and the light...
...Government owned, contractor operated...
...I've talked to widows about their husbands or people about their fathers—and some women were involved, too— who've told me, 'We'd like to do something, but we don't want Johnny or Bill or Susan to lose their jobs.' Carbide has always liked to keep it in the family...
...The study of soldiers who took part in the "Smo-key" tests is being conducted by the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta...
...He asked for an investigation by the state of Kentucky and it is my understanding that investigation is completed...
...One preliminary conclusion seems obvious: Efforts to determine the impact of radiation exposure have generally originated from outside the nuclear power and nuclear weapons industry...
...There are only about 20 per cent of the necessary amount of qualified persons available currently operating the plant," Bloom-field says...
...as many more at Portsmouth, Ohio, and as many as 3,600 at the larger diffusion plant at Oak Ridge...
...So you just say to hell with what it reads and you put down an acceptable reading and you ship it...
...They took urine samples from us every ten days...
...That's the case with so many of these people," says Harding...
...And if you didn't go along with it you'd get yours fired...
...He has sought medical treatment at Memphis, St...
...Harding and Dolph Honicker, an editor of The Nashville Tennesseean who is interested in Harding's case, have filed a Freedom of Information Act request to see all of Harding's records, which Union Carbide has promised it will provide...
...The supervisor said, 'What do you mean you can't ship it...
...T.G.M...
...Harding returns to the list...
...The devices were hot and uncomfortable...
...The Portsmouth plant enriches uranium for nuclear weapons as well as nuclear power...
...The union has been striking since May for higher wages and safer working conditions...
...Some of the best minds in the country are focused on radiological medicine, but we're still lost...
...Not one of those guys had Carbide written on his cancer or leukemia...
...But the evidence to the contrary is mounting...
...Charles Hardin, was sent to the Paducah plant for a tour and brief inspection...
...In 1968, Harding came down with pneumonia, as he has done every year since...
...Nothing was ever said about it...
...The jury is still out on the health effects of low-level radiation exposure...
...Every day I hear about one or two more that's died...
...The list has become a gruesome hobby for Joe Harding...
...The blotter-paper respirator filters kept out the larger particles of suspended uranium, but no one wore his respirator all the time...
...What adds a compelling urgency to Harding's story is his claim that he is only one of dozens, perhaps hundreds of workers, mostly men, who are beginning to show the long-range effects of job-related radiation exposure in the uranium enrichment industry...
...Bean's son now works for the company...
...Goodyear [Atomic Corp., a subsidiary of Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co...
...The state's chief radiological health official, Dr...
...Recently he was appointed to head the National Institutes of Health Panel on Adverse Health Effects of Exposure to Radiation from Atmospheric Testing of Nuclear Weapons...
...There's just thousands of people around with stories like mine," he says...
...Chief among the new studies of the effects of extended low-level exposure was a report in 1978 by Dr...
...We never heard from it...
...And what bothers him even more is that Union Carbide has never awarded disability compensation to a single worker for radiation-related injury...
...mm nother common practice at the AM enrichment plants, Harding ¦ M recalls, was for shifts to compete with each other in setting records for the quick repair of a damaged process stage...
...Joe Harding has several unique organic problems that have never been explained," says Dr...
...Some of the cylinders would accumulate 'heels' of uranium metal coating the inside and adding as much as fifty pounds to their weight...
...Would you leave another drunk to guard that drunk that is guarding the bar...
...population of the same age distribution and as non-nuclear workers at the same facility...
...We finally did a check in the electrical room and [radiation] on the soles of the shoes of the employes was way above the plant allowable limits...
...Bloomfield asks...
...If a worker has got anything dirty in his file, a couple of months after he leaves, a new set of files shows up that's just as clean and pretty as can be...
...Hardin was also shown a copy of Harding's medical file...
...The gray area lies in chronic exposure to low-level radiation, the grouping into which Harding and his former co-workers would fall...
...Each of the plants is its state's largest single consumer of electrical power, needed to turn the massive motors and pressurizers that keep the uranium gas churning through the barrier material...
Vol. 44 • January 1980 • No. 1
