BY FRANK EVANS
PADUCAH, Kentucky - "They would put [contaminated uranium] in a hopper -the stuff was scattered all over," said Al Puckett outside the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant on August 18. Puckett, a former worker and shop steward of the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW), now retired, told the Militant he is one of around 80 residents of the area who are waging a suit against the plant's operators. "They were blowing that plutonium into the atmosphere," he said angrily.

Puckett and other residents had treated water lines extended to them by the Department of Energy in the early 1990s, after studies they commissioned showed the presence of plutonium and uranium in local wells.

Three plant employees, along with the Natural Resources Defense Council, have filed another suit against Lockheed Martin and Martin Marietta, which operated the Paducah plant for the Department of Energy (DOE) during the 1980s and 1990s. The worst contamination reportedly occurred during the previous 32 years, when Union Carbide operated the plant, but that company is shielded from court action by the statute of limitations. Filed in June, the suit received increased publicity after the scandal was covered by the Washington Post during August.

Testimony from current and former workers at the plant, and other accumulating evidence, provide a hair-raising glimpse of operations at this major nuclear facility, which employs around 1,800 people. "They told us you could eat this stuff and it wouldn't hurt you," said Puckett in an interview published in the Cincinnati Enquirer. Supervisors would "salt" their bread with green uranium dust to drive the point home, he said. Puckett was employed during the period of Union Carbide's management.

Contamination spread through work areas, locker rooms, and cafeterias. From drainage ditches it seeped into creeks, private wells, and a nearby wildlife area. For the plant's employees, safety clothing comprised cotton gloves and coveralls, with respiratory protection optional and of dubious effectiveness. This, it was claimed, provided protection against uranium dust. But unknown to workers, the uranium the plant processed for reactors and bombs was also laced with the more radioactive plutonium, which can cause cancer if ingested in quantities as small as a millionth of an ounce.

"I never heard the word plutonium used in my 31 years at the plant," said David Fuller, a plant employee and president of Local 5-550 of the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers union (PACE) to the Associated Press.

On August 18 a team of Militant supporters stopped by the Paducah plant to introduce the paper to workers driving out, and to hear their thoughts on the unfolding controversy. Many were reluctant to comment. One worker said he "didn't think [the radioactive material] was enough to cause these kinds of problems."

One veteran worker who escorts visitors to the plant said that "during the '40s, '50s, and '60s they didn't monitor anything. Although it's better now," he said, "the company tells us nothing." This worker, who did not give his name, said he and other escorts voted recently to join PACE, which was formed from a merger of the OCAW and Paperworkers union.

Danny Beeler pulled over in his car and told the Militant sellers he had worked on the site for several years in the 1990s. "They told us there was no bomb-grade uranium or plutonium in this plant," he said. "They're trying to shove it under the carpet."

Puckett told the Militant of his friend Joe Harding who, before his own death, assembled a list of 50 cancers among 200 people who began working with him at the plant in the early 1950s.

The Washington Post reported that in 1979, one year before his death from cancer, Harding recorded conditions in the industry, noting, "Brainwashing started in training school: `Don't talk to anyone. Never mention radiation.' " Inside the plant, he wrote, "You could taste [the uranium dust] coated on your teeth and in your throat and lungs."

After his discharge from the plant in 1971, Harding was denied a disability pension and lost his medical insurance. Attempts by his widow, Clare Harding, to reclaim the pension were opposed by Union Carbide and the DOE. The case was settled out of court for $12,000.

A 1981 DOE study "attributed Harding's death to a combination of smoking and eating country ham," reported the Post. Clare Harding arranged the exhumation of her husband's body in 1983. The results of tests on his bones indicated uranium levels as much as 133 times higher than normal.

DOE officials have responded to the charges around the Paducah facility by claiming that workers' exposure was minimal, contamination is being cleaned up, and there is no data pointing to a "health concern." One official put the secret introduction of plutonium into the plant down to a "communication problem."

Under pressure from the exposures, Energy Secretary William Richardson called Harding a "hero of the Cold War" and said August 10 that the government owed him and others who had worked in the plant an investigation. The DOE has now sanctioned a survey of the health of former Paducah workers, as well as former workers at another active plant at Portsmouth in Ohio, and at a closed plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Other reports indicate that gold, nickel, and other valuable metals were recycled from nuclear warheads in a long-lasting DOE program. "It is my belief that these recycled metals were injected into commerce in a contaminated form," one Paducah technician stated in a court document.

Nor is the contamination at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant a thing of the past. James Miller, the executive vice president of U.S. Enrichment Corp., the operator that assumed management of the plant this year, said, "It was acknowledged by all sides that contaminated conditions existed ... but USEC wasn't responsible for them." Richardson said that a preliminary examination of the plant in June had reportedly found no imminent hazards at the site.

But hundreds of "hot spots" are cordoned off around the 750-acre site. Al Puckett and others point out the large amounts of radioactive waste still stored there. "They stuck tailings in a pit," Puckett told the Militant; "When they started digging it up there were barrels over the area of a football field three stories deep."  
 
 
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