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Microcap & Penny Stocks : ARET (Formerly KLHE) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: okee-boy who wrote (4025)	4/29/1998 11:35:00 AM
From: James Lee Baldwin	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4594

Tomamhawk in the news last December...see last few paragraphs. This is first I've seen of this. James Outrage at Oak Ridge NINETEEN WORKERS WERE CONTAMINATED with radioactive waste in late December while working at a Department of Energy (DOE) laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The radioactive material, cesium-137, was first discovered at the end of the work day on December 29, 1992. A pipe at the worksite was found dripping radioactive waste. The pipe had been originally cut open during construction on December 23. "These people were exposed over a six-day period before it was detected," says Jackie Kittrell, a Knoxville attorney who represents whistleblowers at the Oak Ridge Laboratory. According to Kittrell, "Cesium has a half-life of about 30 years. It probably won’t get out of the body of an adult" within his or her lifetime. "The health effects probably won’t be known for another five or 10 years." Technicians from the Oak Ridge lab discovered that the leak had contaminated 19 of the 28 workers on the site. Cesium was found in the homes of three of the workers and in the clothing and cars of others. According to Kittrell, the contaminated employees are carpenters who were working in a trench when they were exposed to the pipe dripping cesium. Prior to working on the project, the employees were told the area was clean of radioactivity. Most of the workers were employed at Tomahawk Construction, a subcontractor employed on the site by M.K. Ferguson, the construction contractor working for DOE. The leak came from the Analytical Chemistry Division, a laboratory building run by Martin Marietta. "If they had a health physicist person or any kind of monitor they would have been able to detect that that was a hot pipe, but they didn’t because subcontractors operate under different safety rules than contractors," Kittrell says. "A lot of workers feel that this is a real problem because DOE can get the job done much cheaper and with less stringent safety precautions by hiring subcontractors." - Ben Lilliston