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In October 2000, the US Congress passed and President Clinton signed into law the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Act, a legislative package designed to provide health care and compensation to certain nuclear weapons workers who were injured from occupational exposure to radiation, beryllium, or silica.
This is a landmark federal compensation program. It provides help for many workers whose occupational illnesses were for so many years denied by the government. It also has amplified calls for a process to begin that will address the harm done to neighbors of nuclear weapons facilities. Nonetheless, the legislation is not perfect and it will not cover all the nuclear weapons workers who were harmed from workplace exposure to radiation and toxic substances.
Provisions of the program include:
- Compensation.
Eligible workers or their survivors will receive a lump sum payment of $150,000. Those eligible include certain Department of Energy (DOE), DOE contractor, and DOE vendor employees who were injured from exposure to radiation, beryllium, or silica while working in DOE nuclear weapons related programs. Survivors can make claims on behalf of covered employees.
- Medical benefits.
The federal government will provide medical benefits to eligible workers for their occupational illness.
- Benefit of doubt for a "special exposure cohort."
For a "special exposure cohort" of workers with a radiogenic cancer, it is presumed that their illness resulted from workplace exposure to radiation. The special exposure cohort includes certain gaseous diffusion plant workers in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio (the Oak Ridge, Paducah, and Portsmouth plants, respectively) and workers who were employed during nuclear testing at the Amchitka Island Test Site in Alaska. Additional classes of employees could be designated as members of the special exposure cohort if the US President, designated to implement the program, determines that "(1) it is not feasible to estimate with sufficient accuracy the radiation dose that the class received; and (2) there is a reasonable likelihood that the radiation dose may have endangered the health of members of the class."
- Determining eligibility.
Individuals with a radiogenic cancer who are not part of the "special exposure cohort" would be eligible only if the cancer was "at least as likely as not" related to their nuclear weapons related work. This means that there would have to be at least a doubling of the risk for that worker to be eligible (in other words, the worker would have to be twice as likely as an unexposed person to contract the particular cancer). This standard of proof may result in many exposed workers being excluded from compensation even though they are at risk of contracting a compensable disease as a result of their exposure and even though their exposures may have been higher than legally allowed. The effect of this test may be mitigated by the benefit-of-the-doubt provision discussed above, depending on the guidelines for its implementation (see below). According to the legislation, the risk of contracting a cancer due to a given radiation dose will be estimated using the "upper 99 percent confidence interval of the probability of causation in the radioepidemiological tables." This means that the probability of causation used for estimating the risk will be higher for a given dose than if the median estimate were used. This will also mitigate to some extent the effect of the high bar set for eligibility by the doubling of risk standard.
- Entitlement.
Funding for benefits is guaranteed through an entitlement spending program. This means that Congress will not decide year after year how much money to put in the fund, but that spending will be mandatory and immune from the annual appropriations process. (Another example of an entitlement program in the US is the Social Security program.)
- Uranium worker benefit enhancement.
Compensation to sick uranium miners, millers, and ore transporters -- who are covered under a separate law, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act -- will be increased from $100,000 to $150,000; plus the new legislation provides them health insurance.
- Implementation.
The legislation specifies that the President shall submit to Congress by March 15, 2001, a legislative proposal to implement the compensation program. The proposal would include the types of compensation to be provided, whether to expand the special exposure cohort to include new classes of employees, and whether to expand the program to include other illnesses associated with exposure to toxic substances. Congress will have until July 31, 2001, to act on the President's proposal. If the government does not act before that date, certain sections of the existing legislation will automatically take effect July 31, 2001, including those providing for compensation and medical benefits to certain nuclear workers and uranium workers.
- Indemnification.
If they accept the lump sum payment and medical benefits, workers or their families would not be allowed to sue the government or its contractors. The payment under this legislation would be regarded as a full settlement of claims against the United States, a DOE contractor or subcontractor, beryllium vendor, or atomic weapons employer for the covered illness.
The legislation does not address the issue of non-workers impacted by nuclear weapons production and testing. Nor does it include medical benefits for family members of workers who may have become ill as a result of exposure. As it stands, the legislation does not reimburse workers for lost wages due to occupational illness. Also, it is unclear if all workers -- including those who worked at private facilities like those described in the main article on page 1 -- will be eligible.
The government estimates that 4,000 former nuclear weapons workers nationwide will be eligible for the program. To start it off, Congress authorized $275 million to go toward the program in the coming year. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that under the program workers will receive $1.4 billion in benefits over the next 10 years, and uranium workers will receive an additional $450 million. The program was adopted as part of the defense authorization bill for fiscal year 2001.
For further information, visit the DOE's Web site on the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program at http://www.dol.gov/esa/regs/compliance/owcp/eeoicp/main.htm http://tis.eh.doe.gov/portal/feature/titlexxxvi.html, or call the DOE worker compensation helpline at 1-866-888-3322 1-877-447-9756. [The web address and phone number were updated because in October 2004 the U.S. Department of Labor took over responsibility from DOE.]
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