Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Yucca workers discuss safety lapses at hearing

Jeffrey Dean's pockets filled with dust each day he spent drilling the tunnel inside Yucca Mountain.

At the end of the week, he would blast his work clothes with an air hose to clean them. Yet they still were so dusty that his wife told him to take them elsewhere.

"So I started washing them myself at the Laundromat," Dean testified Monday. "Until the manager noticed all the dirt and asked me not to come back."

The problem, experts said Monday, was the dirt that Dean and others cleaned off their clothes and breathed in for years may have been toxic.

On Monday Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., held a congressional subcommittee hearing to talk about the 2,400 Yucca Mountain workers who were exposed to dust that potentially could cause silicosis, a chronic lung disease.

"They went grinding through that mountain, five miles," Reid said at the hearing. "They didn't even think about doing anything for the safety of those people until they were three miles in."

Gene Griego, a Los Alamos National Laboratory technician who started work in the Yucca Mountain tunnel in 1993, has since developed a lung disease. He has sued the Energy Department in a class action lawsuit over silica exposure.

On Monday he held up reports that noted there were potentially toxic levels of silica in the air -- reports he said the Energy Department covered up or ignored.

Contractors were running on a schedule, Griego said, and safety was not the priority.

"The Department of Energy and its contractors intentionally exposed its workers and the public to hazardous substances," he said.

He testified that, even when workers complained about the dust, managers told them to hurry up so they could meet government deadlines. As he talked about the situation, his voice sometimes faltered.

"I guess it just hit me that there were a lot of lives destroyed by this," he said after the hearing.

The inspector general's office is now investigating charges that the Energy Department covered up evidence that workers were being exposed to silica but did nothing about it.

At the hearing, Gene Runkle, a senior safety adviser for the Energy Department's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, admitted there were potentially dangerous levels of silica between 1993 and 1997.

And, Runkle said, workers did not consistently use respiratory masks between 1992 and 1996. But workers have worn masks since 1996, he said.

Typically, miners spray down dust with water, but scientists on the site wanted workers to limit water so it wouldn't affect their studies, Runkle said. Contractors tried to compensate for that by installing air filtration systems, he said.

Workers knew better than to file complaints, said Michael Taylor, an industrial hygiene and occupational safety technician who still works at the site.

"I don't know how many complaints project workers filed about dust levels in the tunnel, but I would bet there weren't many because you did not stick around long if you complained," he said.

Even when workers were initially given masks, they were the flimsy ones that people can buy at a hardware store, he said. Safe workers would need much more high-tech masks, he said, holding up a mask that looked similar to a gas mask.

The worst part about silicosis is that it is entirely preventable, said James Weeks, a certified industrial hygienist and consultant who has examined the project.

"Any case of silicosis in our time results from a failure somewhere," Weeks said.

All a worker needs is the proper respiratory mask, good ventilation and, potentially, some water to hose down dirt on a project, he said.

After the hearing Runkle said he hoped to convey that the Energy Department was taking the charges seriously and has striven to create safe working conditions now.

He said the Energy Department is waiting for the results of the inspector general's investigation. It also is looking at who made safety decisions, how they were made and ways to protect workers, he said.

Reid said he hoped to hold the Energy Department and its contractors accountable. The investigation might even lead to criminal charges, he said.

He also said this case is another reason he doesn't think the Energy Department can set up a safe nuclear waste depository at the Yucca Mountain site.

"How in the world can we trust these folks?" he asked.

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