Chapter 2

Secret job, secret threats

In March 1948, when the first rail cars of uranium and thorium began arriving at the Simonds Saw and Steel Co. in Lockport, N.Y., Lewis Malcolm felt lucky to have a job on the plant's big steel rolling mills.

In the weeks before he died of kidney failure in June, Malcolm wasn't so sure.

At 79, his once-strapping frame was so withered that his wife had to help him to the car and then drive him 30 miles to a Niagara Falls hospital for the weekly dialysis treatments that kept him alive these past few years.

He wasn't bitter about his illness — one of several linked to the kind of uranium dust exposures he incurred during his years at Simonds. Just curious.

"I've wondered whether something like that could be a cause of this," he said in an interview before he died. "There was a lot of dust. We thought there might be problems. They took urine samples. Sometimes they sent us to the doctor (for exams). They always assured us there was no danger."

Malcolm started at the steel mill in the late 1930s, at age 18. He left to serve in the Army during World War II, returned in 1945 and stayed 30 years until he retired.

In 1948, workers were told they would be rolling a new metal, a government job they would work part time each month. The shipments arrived with armed guards who stayed until the metal billets all had been heated and milled into long rods of a precise diameter, often 1.45 inches.

"I told (a guard) one time that I stole a piece, and I really got chewed out, almost got fired," recalls Ed Cook, 84, another Simonds retiree. "I was just kidding. The billets weighed 200 pounds. What was I going to do, carry one out in my lunch bucket?"

The workers learned that this was serious — and secret — business. Many recall federal agents visiting their homes to do background checks and warn them not to discuss the plant's new activities.

By the time the contracting wrapped up at Simonds in the mid-1950s, the company had heated and milled 25 million to 30 million pounds of uranium and 30,000 to 40,000 pounds of thorium. Much of it was rolled into fuel rods for the government's plutonium-producing nuclear reactors in Hanford, Wash.

Federal officials suspected soon after the operation began that it was putting workers in danger.

In October 1948, the medical section of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) found "hazardous concentrations" of airborne uranium dust in a site study. The most highly exposed workers were, on average, breathing the dust at levels up to 190 times the "maximum allowable concentration" of the time.

"This operation results in profuse atmospheric contamination," AEC medical experts warned in another report in 1949. "To satisfy Hanford's urgent need for rolled metal, it was necessary to begin (the work) before suitable (safety) controls could be installed."

Over the next few years, the AEC medical section urged Simonds repeatedly to boost safety. The company implemented some orders, building new ventilation systems and issuing coveralls that were laundered each day. Others, such as demands that the plant install a vacuum system to clean radioactive dust, never were implemented.

In 1954, an AEC survey at Simonds found that levels of thorium dust, which poses far greater radiation hazards than uranium, reached 40 times the federal limit — "too high, even for intermittent operations."

AEC staff pointed out to Simonds' management in a follow-up letter that recommendations for safety upgrades, including mandatory respirator use, "were not followed." But a later memo reported that the mill superintendent resisted such ideas and "intimated that if it became necessary to install elaborate dust eliminating equipment, further work of this nature would have to be abandoned."

As was often the case, the AEC backed off, too dependent on Simonds to risk losing the company.

'Horrible' exposures

Based on the worker exposures documented in the old AEC reports, workers in the most dangerous jobs suffered annual lung doses of radiation well over 130 rem (a unit of radiation measurement), according to estimates by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, a think tank that specializes in assessing radiological risks. The doses ranged up to 10 times the federal safety standards of the day.

"These exposures are unconscionably high," says Arjun Makhijani, the institute's director, who has written several books on radiation risks and provided expert testimony for Congress. "At the high end of the (estimated) doses, workers' risk of dying from cancer was increased by more than 20%. Many of the workers would also be expected to have kidney damage."

Most of the surviving workers have no idea of the risks they faced: Neither the government nor Simonds' management ever informed them of their radiation exposures.

"They never told us any more than they had to," says Charles Leavitt, 71, a Simonds retiree with kidney trouble. "There were respirators around, but I don't ever remember seeing anyone wear one. They never gave us a reason, never said there was a health risk."

In fact, an AEC information sheet for workers at contracting sites stated that "there will be no danger to anyone's health." The 1947 memo told workers they might "hear the word radiation" mentioned on the job, but it assured them that the level would be "so slight that special instruments must be used to detect it."

Even extreme doses of radiation can't be detected without special instruments.

There's no way to know whether the health problems later suffered by some Simonds workers are the result of the uranium and thorium work. The sort of studies that might conclusively link illnesses to their exposures have never been done.

Congress and the Clinton administration are considering legislation to compensate people who did the same sort of work at government-owned weapons plants and later contracted certain cancers and other ailments tied to their jobs. But the bill makes no promises to compensate people who worked at Simonds or most other private facilities. It notes only that workers at commercial sites may be considered for eligibility in the future.

"It sure would help," Malcolm said of the idea in the interview before his death. He was spending about $550 a month on medication and private insurance he'd had to buy since his health benefits from Simonds disappeared with the company's demise 20 years ago. His monthly pension from the steel mill totaled about $580. A few years back, he and his wife, who also collected Social Security, sold the little farm where they ran a roadside produce stand and moved into a tidy mobile home.

"I asked my doctor whether my (lung and kidney) problems could be related to the work we did, and he said, 'Could be; you just can't know for sure.' You just have to go along with it."