The lawsuit, filed by Centennial-based WildEarth Guardians and Denver-based Rocky Mountain Wild, claims the Fish and Wildlife Service never analyzed the impacts of the parkway when in December it elected to sell a 300-foot strip of land that stretches nearly three miles along the eastern edge of the Rocky Flats Wildlife Refuge to the Jefferson Parkway Public Highway Authority.

Rocky Flats Wildlife Refuge

The Jefferson Parkway Public Highway Authority, a private entity, intends to turn Indiana Street, which skirts the east side of the former nuclear-trigger factory into a four-lane tolled highway to link to Denver.

Critics say the proposed route would destroy hundreds of acres of wildlife habitat, open the door for hundreds more acres of suburban development next to one of the Denver metro area’s last largest blocks of undeveloped open space, and fuel the region’s air quality problems.

The lawsuit raises many of the same concerns listed in legal complaints the municipalities of Golden and Superior have already filed against the Fish and Wildlife Service. But the WildEarth Guardians and Rocky Mountain Wild complaint strives to achieve broader environmental protection in and around Rocky Flats and it specifically challenges the Fish and Wildlife Service failure to comply with the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.

More than 600 different plant species have been documented on the refuge, including the rare xeric tall prairie grasses that exist in fewer than 20 places on earth. The refuge is also home to bald eagles, the rare and threatened Preble’s meadow jumping mouse and 1,300 animal species.

Additionally, the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center has warned that construction of the highway would likely stir up clouds of plutonium-laden dust, making it available to be inhaled, endangering construction workers, nearby residents, commuters and others.

The sale of the disputed land is expected by Sept. 1.

The U.S. government manufactured plutonium triggers at Rocky Flats for 40 years. During that time, the windy plateau between Boulder and Golden weathered radioactive waste spills, fires, and water and soil contamination before the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the facility in 1989 over multiple pollution violations. Rocky Flats was subsequently shut down and has since been designated as a national wildlife refuge. The inspector general overseeing the U.S. Interior Department, however, issued a report over the summer warning that the 4,880-acre former nuclear-trigger factory is overrun with invasive weeds that could destroy the unique biology that served as the reason for establishing the refuge in the first place. Invasive weeds raise the specter of nuclear contaminants spreading to surface water, according to the inspector general, who called for funds to clean up the land.

The Fish and Wildlife Service said the inspector general’s concerns were overblown.

Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge is in the weeds.

The inspector general overseeing the U.S. Interior Department issued a report (below) late last month warning that the 4,880-acre former nuclear-trigger factory is overrun with invasive weeds that could destroy the unique biology that served as the reason for establishing the refuge in the first place.

The invasive species raise the specter of nuclear contaminants spreading to surface water, the report says. But there isn’t enough money to eradicate the weeds, and even if there was, the contaminated ground may prove too dangerous for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to restore, the report cautions.

The inspector general’s report is the latest bad news for Rocky Flats, where plutonium triggers, also called nuclear pits, were manufactured on the windy plateau between Boulder and Golden for 40 years. Like the nuclear bomb triggers Rocky Flats made, the controversies surrounding it were explosive. There were serious leaks of radioactive waste in the 1950s and 1960s along with fires that resulted in the most costly industrial incidents of their time. Water and soil contaminations surfaced in the 1970s. The 1980s were no better for the U.S. Department of Energy facility, culminating in a Federal Bureau of Investigation raid in 1989 that shut it down for multiple violations of U.S. anti-pollution laws.

Happier days were on the horizon for Rocky Flats in 2001 when the U.S. Congress passed the Rocky Mountain National Wildlife Refuge Act, preserving 6,400 acres for the plateau’s unique biology. Three years later, an environmental impact study documented more than 600 different plant species on the refuge, including the rare xeric tall prairie grasses that exist in fewer than 20 places on earth. The refuge is also home to bald eagles, the Preble’s meadow jumping mouse and 1,300 animal species.

In 2007, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment deemed 4,880 acres at Rocky Flats clean enough for non-residential, restricted uses to be managed by the Fish and Wildlife Service. The Department of Energy retained 1,500 acres where the land contains too many nuclear contaminants, which officials say must be “institutionally controlled.”

“The Refuge has sat idle since its establishment as the operation and maintenance of the Refuge remain unfunded,” the general inspector’s July 21 report reads. “The maintenance that does occur at the Refuge is mainly performed by FWS staff from the nearby Rocky Mountain Arsenal unit. Because the Refuge is not staffed, noxious weeds continue to spread and destroy the Refuge’s unique, native species. …

“Plowing – a preferred method for extirpating an invasive weed infestation of this extent – would likely be restricted on the Refuge due to the concern that major soil disturbances could cause elevated levels of remaining radioactive materials to migrate into surface water. The invasive weeds could potentially destroy the unique biological diversity that is the very reason for establishing this Refuge.”

Finding funding for Rocky Flats should be a priority, according to the inspector general.

In its report and attached memorandum, the Office of the Inspector General urges U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Daniel Ashe to “weigh the unique ecosystem and pressing circumstances of the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge against the needs of other refuges, and promptly determine whether funds should be allocated to remediate the problem while corrective action is still possible.”

It won’t be easy. The report noted that of the 84 projects the Fish and Wildlife Service’s local office prioritized, only seven of them were funded in fiscal year 2010. There are 888 local projects in all.

Initial estimates are that it would take five years and almost $600,000 to control weeds in just the worst areas, which consists of about 1,100 acres, or one-fourth, of the refuge. Delaying action will result in even more weed invasion that will cause costs to spike and more years needed to get the job done.

David Lucas, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s chief of refuge planning, disputed the inspector general’s characterization that management of Rocky Flats is “idle.” In a phone interview this week, he said the Fish and Wildlife Service is managing the refuge, along with the arsenal and two ponds in the area.

“Our position is that it is being managed,” he said.

Pressed for specifics, Lucas said management of the refuge primarily consists of providing security to enforce laws within its borders, the monitoring of wildlife and adhering to a comprehensive plan issued in 2005. Restoration goals are in the comprehensive plan, including one objective to reduce invasive weeds by 15 percent in five years. The inspector general’s report would suggest that goal was not met.

“I can’t say at this moment with any certainty” whether any of the plan’s objectives have been met, Lucas said. “We’re still trying to work our way through that management plan now that we have it.”

He further contends the situation may not be as dire as the inspector general’s report suggests.

Plutonium levels are below those the Environmental Protection Agency and Colorado Department of Public Health outlined in letters from 2003 that clearly spell out restricted management activities at the refuge, Lucas said. He also cited drill seeding, herbicides and other alternatives to plowing that land managers can try to rid the wildlife refuge of invasive weeds and promote its native species.

“Invasive weeds are an issue across the West and in refuges across the nation,” he said.

Complicating the future of Rocky Flats is a stipulation that the Fish and Wildlife Service sell or trade a 300-foot-wide strip of property on the refuge’s eastern edge for transportation services. Two bids came in by the July 29 deadline and they are not without controversy themselves. One is to fold the land into the proposed Jefferson Parkway — a 10-mile toll road linking Colorado 128 with Colorado 93 to complete a beltway around the Denver metro area. The other bid is from Golden — a Jefferson Parkway opponent — that would build a bike path through the property. The Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center is against both ideas, pointing to a sampling it has done that found breathable particles of plutonium on a site near Rocky Flats they believe blew over from the defunct plant.

“Plutonium remains dangerously radioactive for a quarter of a million years,” the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center website states. “Construction of either the highway or the bikeway along Indiana St. would almost certainly stir up clouds of plutonium-laden dust, making it available to be inhaled, endangering construction workers, nearby residents, commuters and others.”

Read the report:
61250726-Rocky-Flats-Report
//

In a letter signed by Udall, Sen. Michael Bennet and Colorado Democratic Reps Diana DeGette, Jared Polis, Betsy Markey and Ed Perlmutter, the lawmakers asked that the compensation program already in place be made more “patient friendly.”

The members of Colorado’s Democratic delegation in DC are all co-sponsors of Senate and House bills named for Charlie Wolf, a contractor who died after contracting cancer from exposure to radiation while working at Rocky Flats, a weapons production facility near Denver. Wolf spent the last years of his life trying and failing to win compensation from the federal government.

According to a release, put out by Udall’s office today, the Charlie Wolf Nuclear Workers Compensation Act would “improve the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act by putting in place safeguards against workers like Wolf being denied help.”

Because the bill is currently waylaid in Congress, the lawmakers are asking that the Obama administration take action to cut back the red tape that has hobbled the program.

“Although we will continue to strongly promote this legislation, we are concerned that many claimants will continue to experience delays and denials of compensation until this legislation can be enacted and implemented,” the delegation wrote in its letter.

“While we are mindful of the need to review claims and make sure that compensation is due, we also believe that many deserving claimants are encountering significant obstacles in this process – obstacles that we believe result in the delay or even denial of legitimate claims.”

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Mark Udall

Carla McCabe spent a decade building nuclear bombs at the sprawling Rocky Flats complex near Denver. When she developed a brain tumor and asked for help, federal officials told her that none of the toxic substances used at the top-secret bomb factory could have caused her cancer.

Now, on the eighth anniversary of the federal program created to help sick nuclear weapons workers, the man who until recently was the program’s top doctor says that McCabe, now 55, and many others like her are being improperly rejected.

The doctor, Eugene Schwartz, recently resigned (PDF) and in his first interview since quitting, he said many of the complaints that workers, advocates and lawmakers have leveled at the controversial program are valid. For instance, Schwartz said he repeatedly warned the U.S. Department of Labor that it is ignoring established medical knowledge about the dangers of bomb work.

“I was muzzled,” said Schwartz, a Harvard-trained doctor with a master’s degree in nuclear engineering, whose job was overseeing medical decisions at the federal compensation program.

The Labor Department took charge of the program, the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program, at its creation on July 31, 2001. Today, it boasts that it has paid $5 billion in compensation and medical costs to more than 52,600 former workers or their survivors. That averages to $95,000 each.

But sick workers, who have banded together in multiple advocacy groups across the nation, point out that the Labor Department has denied nearly three out of four claims — 127,000 filed on behalf of sick nuclear weapons workers or their survivors in the past eight years.

The sick workers and their advocates say they feel vindicated that Schwartz confirms many of the complaints they’ve raised previously about waste, bias and bad science within the program.

“He is saying what we’ve been saying is true,” said Harry Williams, a sick worker from Oak Ridge, Tenn., who helped found the national Alliance for Nuclear Workers Advocacy Groups and has spent more than a decade trying to help others. “With his credentials, the people in power will definitely have to pay attention.”

Schwartz said Labor continues to incorrectly tell weapons workers with multiple diseases — including cancers of the brain, breast or bones — that radiation and other toxic substances that permeated the bomb factories could not have made them sick.

“That’s madness,” said Dr. Daniel Teitelbaum, a nationally recognized toxicologist who helped review cases when the federal government began compensating its sick nuclear weapons workers in 2001. In addition to working for the government, Teitlebaum also has testified on behalf of sick workers in other industries.

Teitelbaum and Schwartz said that multiple studies have found links between brain, breast and bone cancers and exposure to toxic substances such as plutonium, PCBs, and mixtures of chemicals and radiation — all key bomb ingredients.

Those studies were subjected to scrutiny by other experts, what is known as “peer review,” before they were published in scientific journals.

But it has not been enough for the Labor Department.

When an official punched McCabe’s diagnosis into the Labor Department’s $11 million database of nuclear-related illnesses, nothing came back, her records show.

A Labor Department document regarding her case reads: “The research did not identify any toxic substances at the Rocky Flats Plant which are linked to … any form of brain tumor.”

The database did not include several peer-reviewed studies that have linked glial brain tumors like McCabe’s to radiation and chemicals known to have been used at Rocky Flats. At least one of those studies, Teitelbaum said, was done on workers at the now-demolished Rocky Flats site itself. McCabe said she knows of at least eight coworkers who suffered similar brain tumors.

Program officials said they would send her case to another agency for analysis of her radiation exposures. But she’s not holding her breath. That process takes on average two years, and none of her coworkers with brain tumors — most of whom are now dead — have been compensated through that process either.

The Labor Department declined to answer questions about its database or make public the grounds on which it includes some diseases and excludes others. It could not be learned how much consideration the peer-reviewed studies of brain cancers received.

“Somebody needs to do something about this,” Teitelbaum said.

Schwartz said he tried but failed.

The McCabe case, he said, illustrates the flaws he tried to address. Schwartz said he began documenting his concerns shortly after he began work as medical director at the compensation program in March 2008.

A former epidemiologist for the World Health Organization, the physician and nuclear engineer from South Hadley, Mass., spent more than 30 years working in his field, which assesses the effects of industrial processes on workers. His research has focused on the causes and prevention of cancer and occupational diseases.

But Schwartz said his bosses at the Labor Department largely ignored the issues he raised, and then tried to silence him.

“The program needs scientific oversight,” Schwartz said. “I was told they’re not going to do that — repeatedly.”

U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, a freshman Democrat from Colorado, helped push for the program as a congressman in 2000. This year, he introduced legislation to reform it. He said Schwartz’s statements confirm what he and others have long believed.

“It is what I’ve suspected all along — an attempt by the agencies to delay and deny benefits to workers of nuclear facilities,” Udall said.

The most serious allegations Schwartz raised involve what are arguably the two most important steps on the path to compensation and medical care.

One involves the very first step: Determining whether a worker was exposed to toxic substances that could have caused the disease in question. The other involves what is often the last step: Seeing whether a government-hired doctor agrees that the worker’s exposures did, in fact, cause his or her disease.

In the first step, the Labor Department is supposed to use its database of diseases and exposures to screen which cases deserve further investigation. That initial screening is performed by a Labor Department employee, not a doctor.

Sick workers have previously complained that some cases are wrongly rejected for compensation because the database, created in 2006, is missing information about both exposures and their links to disease.

Schwartz said they have a point.

“Claims are being denied because of these problems,” Schwartz said.

Labor Department rules say the database should be used for guidance and that the claims examiners should dig deeper if they suspect an illness arose from work at a bomb factory.

Schwartz, however, said some claims examiners told him they had used the database to decide cases without further review.

“The issue is how it is used — or misused,” Schwartz said.

According to Schwartz, the disease-exposure links in the database were decided by one doctor: Jay Brown, an occupational medicine physician from Tacoma, Wash., who has a background in family medicine.

While the database has “this aura of scientific validity,” Schwartz said, it has never been peer reviewed and does not take into account the combined effects of low-level radiation and toxic chemicals.

When asked about Schwartz’s concerns, Brown replied via e-mail: “I don’t work on SEM,” the Labor Department’s acronym for the database, called the Site Exposure Matrix. He referred all further questions to the Labor Department.

Labor Department officials would comment only through a spokeswoman, who said in an e-mail that Schwartz’s concerns “were reviewed, discussed, and addressed appropriately.”

The agency spokeswoman added that Labor pays Brown to conduct “independent research to identify established chemical-disease links specifically focused on materials used in the Department of Energy complex.” Brown puts the links into a database he developed, called Haz-Map. He began compiling Haz-Map in 1991 as a way to identify and prevent occupational disease, according to his Web site. Haz-Map is published there and on the National Library of Medicine Web site.

The Labor Department says Haz-Map automatically feeds its information into the Labor database. Beyond that, Labor has released very little information about it. Officials there declined to release Brown’s contract or give details about it.

Schwartz said that, before he resigned, he learned that the Labor Department was poised to remove from the database more than 100 toxic exposures it previously considered linked to disease.

“I asked about a half-dozen times to see the more than 100 links being removed,” Schwartz said. “I was rebuffed.” He added, sardonically: “Talk about scientific validity and transparency. Based on what science?”

More than half a million people have worked to build the nation’s nuclear arsenal since World War II. Less than 15 percent of them have filed claims for aid, but that’s still more than 180,000 former nuclear weapons workers — or their survivors — and they are from every state in the nation.

The compensation program was created after the federal government admitted that nuclear weapons workers had been exposed to dangerous levels of toxic substances at more than 300 weapons sites across the country.

But only 29 percent of those who applied have been approved for aid, and many of those received aid only after years of appealing.

The Labor Department, citing national security, has declined to provide the entire database to sick workers who’ve asked for it.

As for the government-contracted doctors who help decide who gets compensation, Schwartz said he examined the cases handled by doctors who review claims and found a pattern in the denials from some high-volume doctors. But he says Labor never investigated potential bias among these so-called “district medical consultants.”

Labor has never checked the credentials of these 80 or so medical consultants, Schwartz said. He also says Labor was overstating the expertise of some doctors.

“This is no small issue,” Schwartz said. “If a doctor were being hired by a hospital, his name would be checked through the National Practitioner Data Bank, state licensure and board certification would be checked, and he’d be asked to provide information on malpractice claims and Medicare sanctions.

“This program hasn’t done that.”

The compensation program divides sick workers into two groups. Scientists assess whether workers were exposed to high enough doses of radiation so that it was “at least as likely as not” the cause of their cancer.

The cases of workers who believe their cancer or other diseases were caused by chemical exposure — or a combination of chemicals and radiation — are weighed separately.

Schwartz said this second category is where he found most of the problems. According to Schwartz, the Labor Department has decided on its own that radiation exposures can be ignored if they weren’t high enough to be the sole cause of a cancer.

Labor’s rule book says “DOL has not found scientific evidence to date establishing a synergistic or additive effect” between exposure to radiation and other toxic chemicals.

Schwartz says this flies in the face of known science about how toxic chemicals and radiation can work together.

“It is generally accepted that the effect of combined exposure will likely be greater than either exposure separately,” he said.

Schwartz showed ProPublica a document he says Labor sent to a medical contractor who was reviewing the case of a worker with skin cancer that could not be traced to radiation exposure alone.

The Feb. 19, 2009, letter (PDF) said that in such an instance: “Radiation should not be considered a toxic substance for any cancer and should not be a part of the medical opinion that is being requested of you.”

Advocates for the sick workers say that instruction is illegal because the law requires the contribution of all toxic substances be considered — and that includes radiation.

“It is against the law,” said Terrie Barrie, who leads the national Alliance for Nuclear Workers Advocacy Groups, from her home in Craig, Colo. “Congress has told them that. But it’s like talking to a brick wall.”

The Obama administration’s new Labor secretary, Hilda Solis, received a detailed letter recently from Barrie’s group complaining about what they see as “woefully inaccurate” information being used to wrongly deny claims.

One such case was that of Melissa Webb, whose job at the Mound nuclear facility near Dayton, Ohio, involved taking samples from 55-gallon drums of nuclear weapons waste at a top-secret facility five stories underground.

Webb was 33 when she learned she had Parkinson’s disease. When she filed for compensation in 2007, she listed exposure to the solvent carbon disulfide as a possible cause. The Labor Department sent her a letter saying its records showed she was indeed exposed to carbon disulfide at her Ohio nuclear weapons site, but that there were no known links between the poisonous substance and Parkinson’s.

However, the Labor Department’s own Occupational Safety and Health Administration recognizes carbon disulfide’s link to Parkinson’s. And a bulletin issued by the same program that denied Webb’s claim lists carbon disulfide at the top of its list of toxic links to Parkinson’s.

“You’d think mine would be an open and shut case,” said Webb, now 48, who first filed for compensation in 2004.

On Jan. 9 of this year, the same day the Labor Department sent Webb a letter saying it could find no toxic link to Parkinson’s, Schwartz penned a memo (PDF) to his bosses at the Labor Department. One of his top concerns was the “scientific integrity and validity” of the database because it failed to find well-known links between toxic exposure and multiple diseases.

In the memo, Schwartz also called for the Labor Department to submit the program to outside peer review, in which independent experts would validate the conclusions in the database.

Schwartz said none of his bosses, all longtime program employees, ever responded.

But after he sent the memo, Labor Department officials put new demands on his work schedule and, records show, planned to have a manager accompany Schwartz on training trips to make sure he didn’t raise issues about the scientific validity of the program.

Then, on April 16, Schwartz gave testimony about his allegations to the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, which has a continuing probe into problems with the compensation program.

The day after his GAO testimony, Schwartz got a memo from one of his bosses, policy chief Mike Chance, who had listened in on the GAO call. Chance told Schwartz that Labor was changing his previous work agreement, which had guaranteed he would not be sent on the road more than three times a month. The change was “non-negotiable,” Schwartz said he was told.

“My current situation is the response” to his memo, Schwartz said. “I believe I was forced out.”

When asked for a response, Rachel Leiton, director of the compensation program, sent this statement through a spokeswoman:

“While it is not our policy to discuss personnel matters, in this case we can emphatically state that Dr. Schwartz was not forced to resign. Rather, he submitted his letter of resignation on a completely voluntary basis.”

When asked for elaboration, the same spokeswoman did not reply. But she did send out a press release on the amount of money collected so far by claimants in Colorado, where a bipartisan group of Congress members has introduced legislation to reform the national program.

The payments — some $400 million — are a lot of money, said Carla McCabe, the former bomb builder from Rocky Flats suffering from a brain tumor she believes is linked to her work.

“But they’re denying people like crazy,” she said. “I don’t know how they keep denying us. I hope finally a whistleblower can help us get some answers.”

__
This post was produced by ProPublica.

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Rocky Flats nuclear facility worker Charlie Wolf, and wife Kathy, before his first brain tumor surgery in 2002. Wolf died Jan. 28, 2009. (Photo/Kathy Wolf)

The nuclear bombs Charlie Wolf built helped win the Cold War. But his toughest battles came afterward, when he applied to a troubled federal compensation program intended for those whose top-secret work made them sick.

Wolf wound up battling a bureaucratic morass for more than six years — all while fighting brain cancer that was supposed to have killed him in six months — trying to prove he qualified for financial and medical aid.

Earlier this year, the 50-year-old Wolf lost his fight against both cancer and the federal government. But next week Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., whose family has spent more than three decades trying to help stricken weapons workers, is planning to launch the next phase of the battle. He will introduce legislation to reform the program in Wolf’s name.

“Charlie Wolf was a hero,” Udall said. “He took on the government and the cancer. He didn’t give up. Charlie wasn’t just one individual. He represented all the workers.”

More than 175,000 of the nation’s Cold War-era nuclear bomb builders — or their survivors — have applied for the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program since it was created in 2000. But only 50,000 have received compensation.

An investigation published in July by the now-shuttered Rocky Mountain News showed that officials at the compensation program had built an adversarial system that created more hurdles than help for the sick workers nationwide. Program officials kept information secret, constantly changed rules and even considered spying on some workers who filed claims.

Officials at the U.S. Department of Labor, which administers the program, say it is operating smoothly and has paid more than $4.7 billion in compensation and medical bills.

Most of the Colorado congressional delegation supports the Charlie Wolf Act, Udall said. But he will need much more to pass the measure, which is expected to cost taxpayers at least several billion dollars.

(Compiled by The Colorado Independent)

“We’re going to march to the end of this,” he said. “We’re going to build an alliance with other senators and members of the House who have similar facilities in their states and similar stories.”

Such an alliance will be key to getting a new program approved, said Richard Miller, a former Government Accountability Project policy analyst who helped write the 2000 law and a reform law in 2004. Miller suggested that Udall and his group also might push for reforms in the current program, now that a new president is in office.

“The guy in the White House had 16 of these facilities in his state,” Miller said, referring to President Obama, who as an Illinois senator became personally involved in trying to help sick weapons workers. “It would be useful to try a two-pronged attack. One can be legislative, but the other needs to be administrative.”

At least half a million people worked to build the nation’s Cold War nuclear arsenal, laboring at more than 300 sites across the country. Some sites were top-secret, self-contained cities, such as Oak Ridge, Tenn., or Hanford, Wash. They were built just for the bomb work, with their own housing, health care and security force.

Other sites were unassuming factories in the middle of major cities, including St. Louis and Chicago, where unsuspecting neighbors were oblivious to the exotic and very toxic substances being used.

For half a century, the federal government’s official policy toward weapons workers who complained of health problems was to fight them in court. One of the first lawyers to represent workers was Mark Udall’s uncle, Stewart Udall, who had served in Congress and as Interior secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

In 1978, Stewart Udall represented sickened Navajo uranium miners in federal court. The U.S. government knew the radioactive ore could cause lung disease. But officials never warned the miners. Stewart Udall lost the case, but spent the next decade trying to help create a compensation program.

Finally, in 1990, Congress passed the Radiation Exposure and Compensation Act. But Stewart Udall thought it fell short, so he spent another decade trying to get the program reformed.

Now the same pattern is playing out again. In 2000, the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program was created to help not only uranium miners, but those workers who developed, built and tested the most powerful weapon on earth. Today, another generation of Udalls is trying to reform it.

Mark Udall is joined in the effort by Stewart Udall’s son, Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico. Both are former Democratic congressmen starting their first terms as senators. The cousins hope the Charlie Wolf Act can rip apart the troubled compensation program and rebuild it.

The bill would give automatic compensation to workers with specific illnesses, releasing them from a controversial portion of the program called “dose reconstruction.” This highly debated process involves seeking out historical records to estimate the chance that a specific person’s disease is work-related.

Click the chart to enlarge. (Graph/ProPublica.org)

Under the Charlie Wolf Act, workers would automatically be eligible for medical coverage and $150,000 in compensation if they had one of 34 diseases recognized as linked to radiation and toxic exposure. All of the listed diseases have previously been included in other federal compensation programs, such as a program for military veterans exposed to atomic testing.

Congressional staff members estimate the bill would cost taxpayers at least $2 billion. In 2005, Labor Department officials estimated it would cost $7 billion to do much of what the new act now proposes. Former congressional staffers who helped create the 2000 law estimate say the cost could rise to $20 billion.

The price tag has long been a stumbling block on the path to aid for Americans who sacrificed their health — and sometimes their lives — for the nation’s nuclear defense. But now, in an era where billions of dollars are being handed out routinely, advocates for the ill say the compensation program might finally have a chance to become what Congress intended in the first place.

“Twenty billion dollars is just a fraction of what’s been spent bailing out Wall Street,” said Terrie Barrie, who helped found the Alliance for Nuclear Workers Advocacy Groups, after her husband George, a former bomb builder at the Rocky Flats site near Denver, fell ill. “And $20 billion is just a few months in Iraq.”

The U.S. currently spends about $8 billion a month in Iraq.

Mark Udall said the proposed reforms would cost less than other federal compensation efforts, such as the program for coal miners who contract Black Lung disease. That program is funded by an excise tax on coal and has paid $42 billion to sick miners.

“Dollars are important,” Udall said. “But these are lives we’re talking about. These people protected our country and they should be treated like the veterans who fought in the hot wars.”

Charlie Wolf’s wife, Kathy, said her husband would have approved of the bill and would have done his best to fight for it, despite being unable to write and barely able to speak for the last few years of his life.

Now she will carry on the fight for compensation that he started.

After Wolf died in January, the Labor Department asked her to start over and re-file a survivor’s claim. Earlier this month, she received two letters on the same day from the Labor Department, both signed by the same official.

One letter said her claim couldn’t be opened until she submitted a copy of a marriage certificate and a death certificate. The other, paradoxically, said her claim had already been opened.

“Instead of spending money on the bureaucracy they’ve created,” Kathy Wolf said, “they should be spending the money on the people who served their country.”

ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. Our work focuses exclusively on truly important stories, stories with “moral force.” We do this by producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them.

Leavitt played the bad guy earlier this week when he refused to allow many ex-Rocky Flats workers into a group that automatically qualifies for compensation under the law.

But a subsequent telephone conversation between Leavitt and Salazar set the stage for what could be a solution to a shameful bureaucratic runaround.

“If Secretary Leavitt is true to his words on the phone,” said Salazar spokesman Cody Wertz, “he is open to working with us. He was hinting that it will take a legislative fix to get this done.”

The legislative fix may have the best chance to date of getting through the Congress.

“There’s a lot more interest in Congress about sick workers and what the (federal) agencies have done to corrupt the (existing) law,” said Terrie Barrie of Craig, whose husband worked at Rocky Flats, but hasn’t been compensated. “They want to get the program back on course to do what it was supposed to do: Compensate the victims.

“Congress is finally realizing that the agencies are not following the law.”

Bills to help Rocky Flats workers and others contaminated at Cold War weapons plants across the country have been introduced in the U.S. Senate and House before. None has gotten to a vote.

Salazar believes the bill he expects to introduce when Congress reconvenes in September will do better, said Wertz.

“We think it will do better based on the traction for Rocky Flats,” Wertz explained. “There’s been a lot of publicity about what those workers have not gotten. They’ve been denied and denied. The entire Colorado delegation is behind this (getting the Flats’ workers put into a special group).”

So far, that has made no difference to regulators from the Department of Labor and Department of Energy or the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).

The sticking point on many Rocky Flats cases is a bureaucratic Catch-22. Workers with cancers and other disabilities must prove their exposure to toxins and radiation. But the records that would prove their cases were either never kept or destroyed.

“NIOSH says they have enough evidence to create co-worker models,” said Barrie, who helped found the Alliance of Nuclear Worker Advocacy Groups. “We disagree. My husband worked at Rocky Flats. He remembers vividly two episodes of contamination for which there are no records. How is NIOSH to judge his exposure without records?”

Barrie’s husband is just one of hundreds of examples. Some of those people showed up for recent hearings on their inclusion in an automatic benefits group. They came in wheelchairs or carrying portable oxygen tanks. All told stories of unusual maladies.

NIOSH and Leavitt refused to budge.

Congress needs “to change some wording in the law,” Barrie said. “It needs to say ‘exposures,’ not ‘exposure.’ It needs to say ‘toxins,’ not ‘toxin.’ It needs to say ‘radiation.’ It needs to be specific enough so the Department of Labor can’t mistake what it is supposed to do.”

Here is what the labor department and all other agencies and boards involved in this tragedy are not supposed to do: They are not supposed to give civilian veterans of the Cold War the runaround until they die. That’s what has happened in too many cases. Payments for “wages lost and impairment” have been granted to only about 15 percent of applicants, Barrie charged.

Besides Salazar’s upcoming Rocky Flats’ legislation, at least three other new bills – two in the Senate and one in the House – seek to help ex-workers at nuclear plants in other parts of the country. Whether marrying those individual bills into a single piece of national legislation helps or hurts chances of passage is anyone’s guess.

For now, said Wertz, Salazar plans to stick with a bill that specifically qualifies Rocky Flats workers for automatic compensation.

“It’s a no-brainer,” Wertz said.

Sure it is. And there you have the problem.

It always has been.