Friday, January 30, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Yucca toxic dust afflicts workers

Some early drillers got lung ailments despite warnings, whistle-blower says

Gene Griego Former Yucca Mountain worker has chronic obstruction pulmonary disease December 1995 photo shows the portal that is the defining physical feature of the Yucca Mountain Project. REVIEW-JOURNAL FILE PHOTO

Workers drilling the exploratory tunnel into Yucca Mountain in the mid-1990s were exposed to toxic dusts for several years before the Department of Energy established effective health protections, according to several former employees who have contracted lung ailments they believe are connected to their work.

Whistle-blower Gene Griego said workers were at risk from the onset of tunnel operations in 1993 until at least several years later, when Yucca managers say they began enhancing ventilation and dust controls. A stop work order in August 1996 prompted DOE to strengthen safety enforcement, project officials said.

The Energy Department acknowledged this month that some workers may have been exposed to silica, a fibrous dust that can corrode lung capacity and lead to death.

Documents Griego gathered suggest DOE was warned early about airborne dangers from silica and other fibrous minerals disturbed during drilling of the portal. The defining physical feature of the Yucca Mountain Project, the portal is five miles long with a diameter of 25 feet.

After Griego began airing complaints, DOE announced on Jan. 15 it would offer free silicosis screenings for current and former workers at the proposed nuclear waste repository site.

Notifications are being sent to between 1,200 and 1,500 current and former Yucca Mountain miners, muckers, engineers, geologists, electricians and others who worked at the site 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

DOE spokesman Allen Benson said Thursday health protections "were always in place but unfortunately were not enforced to the full extent. There was a lapse in enforcement, and that's why we've started the screenings."

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., on Thursday demanded that Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham explain whether the department was aware of high levels of silica at the Yucca site before tunnel construction began and what steps were taken to protect workers.

"It seems the Department of Energy has once again risked health and safety to push through the Yucca Mountain project." Reid said. "They are trying to sell us a bill of goods that the project is safe, and meanwhile some of their own workers may have contracted a fatal illness from working at the site."

Griego said he has been contacting current and former tunnel workers, in part through the laborer's union local in Las Vegas. He has found 25 current or former workers who were diagnosed with silicosis or who have reported symptoms, such as coughing up blood. He said he believes two have died.

Barbara Harris of Las Vegas said Thursday her son, Robert, died in May 2002 of a cancer that started in a lung. She said Robert, 49, had worked at Yucca Mountain "for quite a while." She declined to discuss details.

"I know there's a lawsuit being looked into," she said.

Jeff Dean, 41, was a conveyer operator from June 1995 to October 1998. A drilling foreman at the Nevada Test Site, he was diagnosed with silicosis last March.

"I was on the swing shift, and it was the worst shift to be on," Dean recalled.

He said workers tried to keep the dust down during the day shift, when government officials and politicians from Washington would visit.

"It was mostly in the back shifts when they had the dust going," he said. "The workers were worried about the dust, but they assured us the dust was within lab limits and your body gets acclimated to it."

Before working at Yucca Mountain, Dean worked at the Nevada Test Site for Reynolds Electrical and Engineering, drilling cavities for underground weapons tests. Dean acknowledged it's possible his lung problems could be related to that work.

In an interview at his home in North Las Vegas, Griego, 52, a nonsmoker, said doctors have diagnosed his condition as chronic obstruction pulmonary disease.

He blames the condition on exposure to a mixture of airborne silica and components of a class of minerals, called zeolites, found inside the volcanic-rock ridge where the Department of Energy began tunneling in 1994.

At Yucca Mountain, he was a supervisor on the tunneling effort who assisted geologists as they rode behind the "Yucca Mucker," a tunnel-boring machine that maps the mountain's interior features. He said he would typically walk up to six miles on a shift, wearing a painters mask as protection against the dust laden with silica and zeolites.

"They knew that stuff was there years before they started mining," Griego said.

"The other thing is they limited the amount of water for dust control" at the request of scientists, who feared too much water in the tunnel would disrupt their experiments on how fluids travel through the cracks and pores.

A 1991 Los Alamos study warned that dry drilling at Yucca Mountain posed health concerns because of high silica content in the rock and an abundance of zeolites whose inhalation "may result in asbestos-like lung diseases."

From when the continuous tunneling effort began in October 1994 until June 1995, when the boring machine was equipped with a conveyor, the project crept along at about 30 feet per day.

It was after the conveyor went online, enabling the machine to carve 150 feet of tunnel per day, that Griego believes he and other workers received maximum exposure to the toxic dust mixture.

"That's a lot of dust," he said. "And when we complained about the dust, people were terminated."

It wasn't until June 1996 that workers in the tunnel were given respirators. But even then, Griego said, the gear didn't protect them from a type of zeolite, called erionite. At one point in the operation, the boring machine encountered a 10-foot-thick vein, one-third of which was erionite.

The tunnel was completed with breakthrough on April 25, 1997.

Griego has contacted Craig Depew, a Houston attorney who specializes in industrial injury cases. Depew confirmed Thursday he has sent investigators to interview Yucca Mountain workers.

Bill Robins, a Santa Fe, N.M., attorney who has handled silicosis lawsuits, said he also has been approached by Yucca workers.

"It seems pretty obvious to me there was some pretty clear knowledge of hazards these workers were exposed to," Robins said. "They were put in the hole without any real protections."

Margaret Chu, director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, said measures now in place are protecting Yucca workers. About 140 work at the site.

A memo written for the director of the Los Alamos lab in March 2003 by Wes Myers, an environmental safety official at Yucca during initial tunneling, described work at the site at the onset of tunnel-boring in the spring of 1994.

Myers said when operations became too dusty, tunnel workers were given painters masks, which cover the mouth and nostrils of a worker. "However, during the early course of the (tunnel boring) operations, geologists/mineralogists detected silica minerals and erionite in the tunnel, and they raised the issue ... of possible associated chronic respiratory problems," he wrote.

Myers said health professionals working with TRW argued that workers would need to be exposed to dusts over periods as long as 30 years to be at risk for silicosis.

"With considerable effort," Myers wrote, a dust hazard expert was assigned in 1994 to take samples on the boring equipment while in operation. He found dust levels inhaled "higher than acceptable levels with regard to long-term chronic exposure."

By then, Grieco said, workers were 2 1/2 miles into Yucca Mountain. "Obviously, it was too late to do any good," he said.