Health fears have workers at Hanford seeking answers

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2001922204_hanfordworkers7m.html


Friday, May 07, 2004 - Page updated at 12:00 A.M.

Health fears have workers at Hanford seeking answers

By Hal Bernton
Seattle Times staff reporter

RICHLAND — Rocky Fandrich first noticed the smells in March. A rank rotten-egg odor that occasionally wafted in on the spring breeze. Then there were metalliclike tastes in his mouth, nose bleeds and, some days, a feeling of profound fatigue as he ended a 10-hour shift helping to build a $5.78 billion plant to treat Hanford's chemical and radioactive wastes.
A half-dozen other workers at the 68-acre Hanford job site managed by Bechtel National also told The Seattle Times of odors and medical problems. They join an expanding number of Hanford workers who fear that vapors vented from 177 tanks containing more than 50 million gallons of radioactive and chemical wastes may be posing short-term and long-term health risks that include cancer.

These wastes, a fraction of which already have leaked into the ground, are the toxic legacy of the U.S. Cold War effort to build nuclear weapons. Contract officials say they have yet to detect harmful levels of vapors and have made worker safety a top priority.

But at the tank farms, dozens of workers in the past two years have sought medical care because of exposure from vapors. And the contractor, CH2M Hill, last month decided to invest in expanded chemical monitoring and to require use of respirators with supplied air for close-in duty.

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This wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that the EPA has set the "harmful" level threshold too low now would it?

The toxic effects of the creation, testing and storage of WMD's in the US has only just begun to come to light.

And just wait until they start trucking all that waste around the country to Yucca Mountain.

And I'll bet my butt there are dozens if not hundreds of non-regulated toxic waste sites around the US that just haven't started to leak yet.

But they will.