If exposure to toxic waste was happening on a semi-regular basis at a federally-ran nuclear disposal site in the U.S., don’t you think it would be newsworthy enough for national coverage? Workers at the Hanford Site in Washington State no doubt wish it were. At that site and others across the country, thousands of workers have filed claims for illnesses and injuries, and the federal government is doling out billions in compensation.
The Hanford site is a repository for spent nuclear power plant fuel rods; it’s where nuclear waste goes to die. But the maintenance of this and other facilities like it rests with workers employed by the Department of Energy and contractors, organizations that should know a thing or two about nuclear safety and workers’ rights.
One summer day in 2007, truck driver Lonnie Poteet came to the Hanford Site with a delivery. Officials at the site had contacted him earlier in the day and advised him to make his drop as late in the day as possible, though they didn’t say why.
Poteet pulled up around 10 a.m. and immediately began experiencing odd symptoms.
“I was already burning from my glove line to my t-shirt line and the side of my face and I was already starting to lose a little bit of vision in my right eye,” said Poteet according to a local NBC affiliate.
Read: Fukushima Employee Files Lawsuit over Radiation Exposure
What officials hadn’t told Poteet when he spoke with them earlier was that a spill had occurred at 2 am, and they were still working on containment and clean-up.
Now, Poteet has vision loss in his right eye, is sensitive to light, and deals with constant head pain due to nerve damage. He is one of thousands who has been rewarded compensation for injuries caused at the site.
In 2001, the feds set up the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act, or EEOICPA, to compensate workers who become ill after working with radiation and toxic substances. Since then, the EEOICPA has awarded more than $1 billion to workers from the Hanford site alone.
Nationwide, the EEOICPA has awarded about $10 billion to energy workers nationwide.
But despite this hefty price tag, not everyone who is harmed at these facilities is paid. While 15,000 have filed claims, less than half have been compensated.
Even the workers who are awarded compensation under the EEOICPA may not receive money from the Department of Energy or the Department of Labor. The DOE, who oversees all of the nuclear sites, repeatedly denies claims of long-term health effects from workers, sending them to the line of EEOICPA applicants rather than admitting their oversight and safety may be lacking.
One worker said, “Oh DOE, DOE denies everything. DOE has always denied everything. And that’s not going to change.”
Just another reason to get rid of nuclear power plants altogether. They are not safe. They never clean up their waste on a timely fashion. And any major catastrophe can change the world as we know it. Fukushima, Chernobyl, are good examples. Both of these disasters also show you how governments will lie to you to cover up their mistakes, even if it means you and your families health.
Many in the US are on fault lines, and others in the central US are in flood zones and susceptible to tornadoes. The ones in Florida are susceptible to hurricaines.
They are of ancient technology, that should have never been built in the first place. They are just too dangerous and open for terriost attacks.
High-level nuke waste has a half-life of a thousand years or more, so we are all doomed anyway! We have Fukushima to thank for that! The Pacific Ocean has huge dead zones now and will just get worse, as they lied about how much of the contaminated water leaked into the ocean!
Because the global nuclear industry has the money it needs to fund all the peer reviewed studies it wants, they all end up saying whatever they want them to, or they simply will not publish them…
We also know that about three years ago today, all the Japanese nuclear Experts (along with most other nuclear Experts in the World) that said that “modern” nuclear power plants were safe and had so many safety features that they would not meltdown because they were so well designed, were proven terribly wrong by Fukushima’s triple meltdowns and that it will take decades if not about 100 years to deal with its on-going pollution of the Pacific Ocean, that is, if nothing BIG goes BAD before then.
Also in all fairness, mankind will have to employ NEW types of equipment that have never ever been built, in order to deal with the new problems Fukushima has created. Also, until fully decommissioned, the Japanese will continue to contaminate massive amounts of sea water with radioactivity daily, that will all end up in the Pacific Ocean unless the UN sanctions the Japanese with penalties which should be used to finance Solar (of all flavors) R&D and it’s installation in developing Countries, if they will agree to not use nuclear. This will enable mankind to begin the transition to Solar while at the same time reduce the need for our Earth’s limited resources.
I also will be the first to point out that the Coal Industry has many health problems associated with it, which the Nuclear industry is all too eager to point out; but the SAME THING COULD BE SAID ABOUT THE NUCLEAR INDUSTRY; since it also mines radioactive Uranium ore which is then processed into highly radioactive fuel rods of several different types. Once this radioactive fuel is used in a reactor, it then produces huge amounts of additional radioactive waste that will have as yet unknown effects on mankind over the enormous timespan that it will take to render all of it harmless! Because this radioactive timespan dwarfs anything currently affecting mankind, it is completely unscientific to say today, what the harmful effect of our using nuclear power plants in the twentieth and twenty-first century will be generations, from now!
For example, should highly radioactive “dirty” material from Fukushima be used in a terrorist weapon at some point in the future, its affect on man must be placed directly upon the nuclear industry that created it, because without building the nuclear power plants it would have never existed to cause harm to man’s health. This is yet another potential “future” health problem that cannot be discounted since there is so much radioactive waste material unaccounted for at Fukushima and many other locations globally!
It is no longer fair for the nuclear industries spokespersons, the IAEA and/or Regulators like the NRC to try to limit Energy discussions to only the positive points that favor using nuclear while at the same time shrugging off all other negative points as not being relevant!