On September 21, 2000, IEER's outreach coordinator, Lisa Ledwidge, presented testimony at a US congressional hearing on nuclear worker compensation. It was held by the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims.

She discussed the findings of three IEER studies on nuclear worker exposures and off-site radiation releases. These included the USA Today study (see main article), the 1994 study on workers doses at the Fernald plant in Ohio, and the study on off-site releases from Fernald.

IEER has found that when worker exposures and off-site releases are carefully and independently studied, the results indicate that worker overexposure and environmental releases of radioactivity are larger than officially acknowledged.

In the testimony, IEER made three recommendations to Congress:

1. Because many are very sick and dying, health monitoring, treatment and where appropriate compensation of the affected workers is an urgent priority. Practical recognition of the role of the government and its contractors in their suffering is long overdue.
2. It is important to not force workers to prove their exposure to the last decimal point. The burden of proof should be on the government and its contractors, which failed to keep good records, failed to make sufficient measurements, and all too often assured workers of their safety when conditions were unsafe.
3. A process should be created for fairly and responsibly addressing the Cold War health legacy. Workers should be centrally involved in creating this process, because they were, on the whole, the most exposed group of people. But it should be acknowledged that non-workers were also exposed, including workers' family members, downwinders, those downstream, and other neighbors. The process for deciding how community exposures can be fairly and responsibly addressed should begin.

IEER's full testimony is available on-line at http://www.ieer.org/comments/hrg0900.html. The two Fernald studies are summarized in SDA vol. 5 no. 3, October 1996, which is also on-line, http://www.ieer.org/sdafiles/vol_5/v5n3_1.html.