Former NUMEC Workers Blame Company For Cancer (Apollo PA)

[struggle4progress]

APOLLO, Pa. -- ... The workers insist they've been exposed to nuclear waste that came from a company called the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp., which used to sit along the Kiski River in Apollo.

NUMEC made enriched uranium to fuel nuclear submarines and power plants ...

During a meeting on Wednesday, nearly every person in the Leechburg Union Hall suffered from cancer, beryllium disease or another serious illness ...

NUMEC has an intriguing past. According to recently declassified FBI documents, it was the subject of a 1960s CIA and FBI investigation after nearly 600 pounds of weapons grade uranium went missing ...

http://www.thepittsburghchannel.com/news/10890922/detail.html

[Massacure]

1. Our understanding of radiation has progressed greatly since the 50s and 60s.

It's such a shame that this countries nuclear industry is in the state it is in, paralyzed by an endless maze of regulations and public hysteria.

The United States should look to France and Japan as an example of how a nuclear industry SHOULD be run.

[NNadir]

2. The American nuclear industry runs pretty well.

It produces more energy than ever and at the lowest environmental cost overall of any of its competitors. This is not to say that it is harmless, but no energy industry is harmless, especially those to which Struggles is indifferent.

StrugglesforProgress would never dream of posting an popular article about people who claim to have been injured by black lung disease, or pollution in an oil refinery because basically he doesn't give a shit about these cases. He has a special radar for nuclear related cases because he is attempting to view the nuclear industry in isolation. This is weak thinking now and it was weak thinking every other time he posted news stories of this type. Note that the story offers no conclusions, only implications, and yet he is acting as if something were proved here. It is his opinion that the only energy industry that must be risk free is the nuclear industry, even though the nuclear industry is vastly safer than any of the options he insists upon, including doing nothing about air pollution.

I believe that the worker who has experienced kidney failure may have well been injured by his job, but the question we will never know, since one case is by definition anecdotal and not systematic. Uranium is a known nephrotoxin. Even so, because of its high energy density it is still of much lower risk to use uranium in a nuclear fission power plant than it is to distribute uranium in an aerosol form as a side product of coal burning. Whether Struggles knows about it or not, mercury is a known neurotoxin and carbon dioxide is a known greenhouse gas.

Those of us who support nuclear energy do not need to prove that nuclear power is harmless. We only need to prove that it is infinitely less harmful than its alternatives. This is relatively easy to do with many tens of thousands of reactor-years now having been evaluated.

[Massacure]

4. Infinitely less harmful? Isn't that the same as saying harmless?

I would say much less harmful but not infinitely, though I don't mean to split hairs over that.

I do question why you are saying the nuclear industry runs pretty well. Do you not see public opposition taking advantage of excessive litigation abilities for the lack of new reactors? Watts-Bar comes to mind as an example, and you yourself said you were partly responsible for closing another reactor, did you not?

[jpak]

3. Thanks for posting

This is what the assholes at the Nuclear Energy Institute don't want anyone to hear.

And it's not an isolated case.

The Radiation Exposure Compensation Exposure Program has paid over a billion dollars to more than 17,000 claims of illness and death due radiation exposure at uranium mines, US government research facilities and nuclear weapons test sites...

http://www.usdoj.gov/civil/torts/const/reca/about.htm

edit: not to forget this either...the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation program

http://www.dol.gov/esa/regs/compliance/owcp/eeoicp/main.htm

Thousands of enrichment plant and other federal uranium workers have been paid nearly a billion dollars too.

Nuclear power: Clean and Green!!!11111

(not)