The report also said Y-12s mercury workers could have exposed their mily members to toxic material during the project in the 1950s and 60s by bringing mercury home with them on their clothes or other means.
The epidemiologic studies of Y-12 workers do not necessarily reflect how many people have been able to collect from the governments compensation program for sick workers. Thats been shown in Part B of the program, where workers at the Oak Ridge plants including K-25 and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have collected hundreds of millions of dollars for radiation-induced cancers even though most of the past health studies have not shown statistically significant increases in cancer rates at the plants.
In the 1980s and 90s, the Department of Energy paid for a number of studies of Y-12 mercury workers. The studies were based on employment records and/or exposure data obtained from urinalysis records at the Oak Ridge plant.
Phil Wallace remembers when his ther started getting sick in the 1960s.
Lerew said there seems to be growing knowledge within the compensation program about the tie between exposure to mercury and other toxic metals and some of the medical issues.
However, the report identified a number of past exposure scenarios such as children playing in East Fork and contaminated floodplains during the mid-1950s, when mercury discharges were at their highest that could have caused health-harming effects, such as kidney problems. In evaluating other scenarios, such as people eating contaminated creek fish in the 1950s, 60s and 70s or breathing elemental mercury at off-site locations, the studys authors concluded there was not enough information to determine health impacts.
The Labor Department official said she had talked with an industrial hygienist in the compensation program who works with some of the claims. Leiton said he told her that mercury exposure claims from Y-12 workers were kind of rare compared to some other toxic exposures.
ATSDR based much of its work on multiple studies done previously, as well as records on discharges or estimates of mercury lost at Y-12 during the 1950s and 60s, when the plant used millions of pounds of mercury to process lithium for hydrogen bombs.
The report concluded that current-day exposures to mercury discharged from Y-12 do not pose a threat to public health.
All I can say is were seeing them in increasing numbers, he said. Theres a learning curve for these type of claims.
If there are those who were affected by the mercury exposures from East Fork Poplar Creek, its mostly anecdotal or lost in statistical averages for potential health risks. Its all but impossible to cite individual cases of health impacts from off-site mercury exposures, according to government reports.
Part E of the program was set up to compensate workers or their survivors for illnesses associated with chemical exposures, such as mercury. According to statistics maintained by the Department of Labor, former Y-12 workers or their survivors have filed 12,289 claims, and a total of 4,206 have been approved. So r, there have been 3,188 payments totaling more than $334 million.
In a telephone interview, Rachel Leiton, director of the Labor Departments Division of Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation, said the agency did not keep specific records on how many claims have been filed for mercury exposorau mercury studyures at Y-12 or how many compensation payments have been made on those claims.
His death came before the Department of Energy dMercurys health effects on workers, OR public still under scrutiny orau mercury studyeclassified documents and publicly revealed the extent of mercury use at Y-12 and before the agency began studies of the work force, as well as the environment.
For years decades, in ct the government operations at Y-12 released tons of mercury into East Fork Poplar Creek without telling people who lived alongside the creek or who may have played in the creek or eaten fish or turtles from it.
Phil Wallace said his mother took a six-week crash course as a medical technician so she could help give him medical treatments three days a week. One of the bedrooms in their home in Oak Ridges Woodland community basically became a hospital ward, he said.
A 1983 mortality study by Oak Ridge Associated Universities did not find any significant difference in the death rates of Y-12 workers and the U.S. population as a whole. Nor did it find a notable difference between Y-12s mercury workers and other Y-12 employees.
Cold War secrecy undoubtedly complicated the medical care of workers and may have masked the ability to diagnose problems.
In October, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry released a long-delayed health assessment of mercury pollution in Oak Ridge.
Her surprise in finally getting compensation for Wayne Wallaces death was because shed seen firsthand how his health problems had been impacted by the secrecy of the work at Y-12.
Wallace rarely complained and never discussed the work that was the root of his medical problems, his son said.
He said his ther was on dialysis for 4 ½ years before receiving a kidney transplant. Ultimately, Wayne Wallaces death was caused by a reaction between an anti-rejection drug he was taking for his kidney transplant and a parasite he had picked up in the Pacific during World War II, his son said.
The 300-page study looked at different types of potential exposures, including breathing mercury vapors in the air, drinking or ingesting mercury-contaminated water or soils, and eating mercury-contaminated fish from East Fork Poplar Creek, which originates inside Y-12 boundaries and winds throughout much of Oak Ridge before joining Poplar Creek and the Clinch River downstream.
STUDIES and claims
off-site impacts
An estimated 73,000 pounds was released into the air from Y-12 operations during the lithium-enrichment program (1953-1962). Those airborne emissions were partly due to large ns used to reduce the indoor mercury concentrations in the process buildings.
During the early days of the Cold War lithium work, when the mercury discharges were highest, there were potential health effects further downstream in Poplar Creek and the Watts Bar Reservoir.
It got to the point where hed come home, eat a little bit, throw up, and get on the couch. Then hed get up and go back to work, the son said.
According to the heath evaluation, children who were born to or nursing from women who ate 12 fish meals a month from Poplar Creek in the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s had an increased risk of subtle neurodevelopment effects from exposure to methylmercury. The same would be true of children of women who ate 20 fish meals per month from Watts Bar in the 1980s and 90s or children who ate about 10 fish meals a month.
Wallace was an electrician who learned his trade after World War II, having served in the Pacific as a teenager. He came to Y-12 in 1952, just as the lithium-enrichment program was launched to provide materials for hydrogen bombs. The lithium processes required heavy use of mercury. The workplace, especially during the early years of operations, was often thick with mercury vapors.
Despite precautions, some workers were made sick by the mercury. But there are no statistics available on how many.
In the 1993 study, ORAU noted that the population should probably not be studied again because the mean age of surviving workers was then older than 70 years. The report also noted that the prior death or disablement of workers most heavily exposed to mercury could have biased the study results. There also were questions about comparing health effects between mercury workers at Y-12 and other employees at the plant because nonmercury workers were potentially exposed to other chemicals and hazardous materials.
The ATSDR report indicated that previous estimates on environmental releases may have been understated.
He was part of that generation that didnt talk about what they did, Phil Wallace said. They were going to do what they did to get the job done, proud of their country. They took an oath of secrecy, and he didnt break that oath.
Tim Lerew of Professional Case Management, a company that provides home health care to sick nuclear workers in the compensation program, offered a different picture. He said in the past two or three years there have been many, many more cases involving peripheral neuropathy or other neurological issues because of mercury exposures at Y-12.
There are still significant variances in the estimates of how much mercury was lost to the environment, which a health study in the late 1990s investigation placed at about 795,000 pounds, and the total amount of mercury that cant be accounted for.
Mercurys health effects on workers, OR public still under scrutiny orau mercury study,He was 51 years old.
Studies by the University of Michigan in 1983 and a decade later by ORAU in conjunction with Emory University used neurological tests to identify tremors, memory loss or other effects among the mercury workers 30 or more years after exposure. But they were generally categorized as mild.
The federal study also evaluated the possible effects at different time periods, with the more hazardous times generally being in the 1950s and 1960s when the Y-12 mercury-related work on bombs was still classified and the public was unaware of mercury releases from the Oak Ridge plant.
In an interview at the 2005 event, Case said the first time she ever heard of her husbands connection to mercury was after hed become too sick to work and was hospitalized in Nashville in the early 1970s.
Case was among the first to collect under Part E, a revised part of the governments sick nuclear workers compensation program, known officially as the Energy Employees Occupational Illness and Compensation Program. Part E allows workers or their survivors to collect payments for exposures to hazardous chemicals not just radioactive materials during the production of nuclear weapons.
OAK RIDGE Wayne Wallace, his kidneys destroyed by mercury exposures at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant, died in 1977.
cold war secrecy
If the picture is unclear about the health impact on Y-12 workers exposed to mercury, its even murkier when evaluating the effects on off-site populations.
Wallaces mercury poisoning became public in 2005, when his widow, 80-year-old Christine Case, belatedly received a $125,000 check during a ceremony co-hosted by Sen. Lamar Alexander and Victoria Lipnic, an assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Labor.
The occupational hazards of mercury were known, even in the 1950s and 60s. Y-12 reports from that era indicate the air was monitored in the plants lithium operations. Work shifts were apparently rotated to limit mercury exposures, especially individuals whose urine tests showed signs of trouble.
According to her, doctors said they could actually see mercury in his blood. When Wallace was asked about the mercury, he told the doctors, I cant talk about that.
In subsequent years, the health assessment took into account that warning signs posted along the creek since late 1982 probably kept people from eating many fish from the creek. Also the creek is not considered a fertile fishing site.
Eating nine fish meals per year is a worst-case assumption for this nonproductive fishing area, the report said.
The compensation records are private.
Those health effects would have been greatest among young children, the report concluded.
I just can hardly comprehend that Ive got it. Thank you, thank you, Case, who had since remarried and become a widow again, said at the 2005 ceremony. She died in 2008.
After doctors determined that Wayne Wallaces kidneys were iling, they made the decision to put him on dialysis.
ATSDR has ample anecdotal information presented in public meetings that in the past Y-12 workers intentionally brought metallic mercury home with them (e.g., to show their children), the report said. Or they unintentionally brought mercury home on their work boots or clothing. In either case, it is very possible mercury was lost or dispersed in homes and therefore posed an indoor air hazard.
The health agency said it could not conclude whether residents in Scarboro, the community closest to Y-12, could have been harmed by breathing mercury vapors in that time period.
We cant search by the type of substance in our database, Leiton said.
