Seventy Nine Truckloads from Huntington’s Nickel Plant Buried > Alliance for Nuclear Accountability

Seventy Nine Truckloads from Huntington’s Nickel Plant Buried

published Monday, November 09, 2009

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Seventy Nine Truckloads from Huntington’s Nickel Plant Buried

Once Radioactivity Released, You Can’t Put This 'Genie' Back in Bottle; Former Worker Alleges Plutonium Contamination

By Tony Rutherford
Huntingtonnews.net Reporter

Editor’s Note: Vina Colley, a former worker at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, has been one of the most outspoken workers suffering cancer and other illnesses from their years working at the facility near Portsmouth, Ohio. Although the interview is in a Q and A format, it should be noted that Ms. Colley often had to stop speaking to get her breath. Occasionally, her thoughts were completed by a member of the clean up panel.

HNN: You worked as an electrician at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant?

VINA COLLEY: As a Second Class Electrician I worked in every building on the plant site and many of the buildings off site.

HNN: Right now, like other employees , you suffer from multiple aliments attributed to your years at the plant.

VINA COLLEY: I have 57% lung impairment due to the chronic bronchitis. A low immune system where I had to take gamma glammas? Before. Memory lapses. Home oxygen. Three tumors, a total hysterectomy and skin cancer.

HNN: And, at present, they do not provide testing of reproductive systems of former female workers?

VINA COLLEY: I’ve been working on [compensation] for 30 some years. In 2000, they brought in a compensation bill and on purpose left out the women’s issues on their ovaries, hysterectomies, and thyroid problems.

HNN: There was a group of women who worked together and five out of six….

VINA COLLEY: One group of women who testified in 1999 about their department. Out of those women, Anita George said five of six women had total hysterectomies. I’ve talked to a lot of men and they are not being paid for prostate cancer. If the Charlie Wolf bill passes, then, it will open up to more cancers.

Now, Piketon has a special [classification] . That means if you have one of 21 cancers , beryllium disease, or siliceous disease you don’t have to prove your cancer came from [the plant]. They have never tested us. The records were destroyed or falsified for testing that was done… so they cannot prove how much exposure we had. If you have one of the 21 cancers, they are supposed to pay $150,000.

PLUTONIUM RECYCLING NOT ACKNOWLEDGED FOR PIKETON PLANT

HNN: You made uranium and plutonium?

VINA COLLEY: Piketon recycled reactor fuel from West Valley , New York. West Valley had a plutonium retraction plant. I don’t know if they reprocessed or recycled it, but it gummed up [Piketon’s ] system. When you go into a nuclear plant every things is closed in confinement, but once you do maintenance on it, and I was an electrician, you open it to the atmosphere… you let this genie [radioactivity] out and you cannot put it back in the bottle.

HNN: Some nuclear waste buried at Piketon came from Huntington’s Nickel plant?

VINA COLLEY: There are 79 truckloads of Huntington, WV Nickel Plant that Piketon contaminated. They had to disassemble the plant. They brought it out here in 1979 and buried it. I’m not sure what was contaminated [in Huntington], but Piketon has been recycling reactor fuels since 1954.

HNN: Did the product go from Huntington to Piketon or vice versa?

VINA COLLEY: They must have brought the stuff FROM Piketon to Huntington, and they contaminated the [Huntington] plant, and had to disassemble the whole [Huntington] plant , brought it here and buried it.

Plutonium was not supposed to be at Piketon because we [were] a uranium enrichment facility… almost ninety percent. When I found these documents, I could not get the story out, so the story broke in Lexington, Ky. I got a call from Paducah (Ky.) workers who were getting ready to break the [plutonium] story. I said, what do you have on Paducah? “We’re got plutonium down here.” “We do too,” [Colley said.]

The story broke simultaneously between Paducah and Piketon about the plutonium. When the story broke, Piketon was covered up. Even today, they do not recognize the plutonium contamination [here], how serious it is at Piketon. We recycled it from West Valley , New York. It did not come diluted from Paducah ; it came straight from West Valley, New York.

HNN: How many of the former workers are sick, dying or have passed?

VINA COLLEY: Almost everybody there that I worked with are sick. Most of them have lung cancer, colon cancer, and chronic illnesses. I had three tumors removed before they turned in to cancer.

HNN: You’ve been outspoken on compensation for workers and you have alleged retaliation?

VINA COLLEY: My [medical] records have been locked up twice. They [admitted again] all my illnesses in 2004 and fired by Washington, D.C. caseworker. She Fed-Ex’d the papers and I Fed-Ex’d them back. They are now working on my wages lost… but it has taken me NINE years (and a compensation bill) to prove they made me sick. They know they made us sick; they admitted it. Our [Congressional] representatives were in a Piketon meeting and they said, ‘We made you sick and we are going to help you.’ Workers records have been destroyed. Many cannot prove they worked [at the plant]. Some have a cancer not on the list. Unless you can prove you worked there at least a year, they will not pay you.

HNN: You said some records are at union halls, but they are not available either.

VINA COLLEY: From what I understand, they do not have any help. Labor unions have records inside their buildings. The Department of Labor, The Department of Energy, and Social Security has records of workers, but they are having a hard time getting access to these records.

HNN: Don’t they have, for instance, pay stubs?

VINA COLLEY: They can get affidavits from other workers, if they can find any of them alive. Most are sick and dying.

HNN: How were these people exposed?

VINA COLLEY: To me the main exposure was the Uranium Hexafluoride. As an electrician, I worked in confined spaces with trichlorine and PCB oil cleaning. The oil was radioactive with plutonium, neptunium , radium and all the daughters of uranium products.

GAS RELEASE OF URANIUM HEXAFLUORIDE AND SUPERVISOR’S ALLEGED INTENTIONAL EXPOSURE

HNN: They did not tell you or prepare you for the radioactive danger(s) ahead of time?

VINA COLLEY: They would tell me I was better than their equipment because I could pick up this [radioactive] oil faster than their equipment. I asked them to suit me up. They suited me in rubber gloves, coveralls, and paper shoes. I thought I was protected. But, I wasn’t, you can’t see radiation.

The last day I worked before I became really, really sick, my supervisor took me up on the top floor of the 333 building in an electrical cart. He had been told to watch me. They took me up on this floor and there was a big release of Uranium Hexafluoride in a gas form. The whole building was covered with this gas. My boss didn’t tell me nothing. We went in for a radiation alarm. When we got up there it was a release. He turned around in the electrical cart and took us off the floor and told me nothing. Two days later I was so sick I couldn’t hold my head up. I went to a lung doctor. He said I looked like another worker he saw and he advised me to go to Cincinnati for more testing. Cincinnati Occupational Health and Safety found fluorides in my urine (2.12) almost a week and a half after I left the facility. The company said I had Uranium 235 in my lungs. Someday, today, tomorrow, or when ever, it could be decaying and I would not know it.

I’m angry because they did not tell me what I was working in. They said I’d get more radiation riding in an airplane or having an X-ray, than what I would get at the plant.

1978 RELEASE COMPARABLE TO THREE MILE ISLAND

HNN: You have spoken of a release of radiation comparable to Three Mile Island?

VINA COLLEY: In 1978 there was a heated cylinder that had over 21,000 pounds of uranium hexafluoride in it. They had a shuttle carrier transporting them. They knew the carrier was defective yet they still put the cylinders… this cylinder dropped and busted losing 21,000 pounds to the atmosphere. They don’t want to talk about the fluorides.

CLEAN UP WORKERS NOT TOLD OF SUPERFUND PRECAUTIONS, STILL NOT PROPERLY SUITED

HNN: Why?

VINA COLLEY: It’s a thyroid seeker and the thyroid is the regulator for the whole body including the brain. The hexafluoride is the most damaging to the body. It’ll cause everything else to go wrong. They are doing beryllium testing because I found the document at the union hall. They also have siliceous at the plant. None of us workers have ever been tested for siliceous.

At one time, they would not [test] contractors, and I had a sick friend and co-worker who asked to be tested. They said, ‘we’re not doing contractors.’ I told him to go back out and tell them ‘Vina Colley said they are doing contractors and you want tested, they tested him, he had cancer, he died, but his family did get compensated.

They have affected all the workers, not just at Piketon, but at Rocky Flats , Hanford, and all of these facilities.

Piketon was not declared a super fund site. It is the first or second worst facility in the United States. But there is some kind of consent decree between the State of Ohio and Piketon to where they did not put us on the Super Fund list. Today, workers are NOT being told, they are [cleaning up] a super fund site. They are not being suited properly.

The last board meeting they told us they were taking PCB oil from the site to Oak Ridge [Tennessee] to an incinerator. They didn’t tell the oil is radioactive. So the community in Tennessee is going to burn this radioactive PCB oil. It gets into the air.

An article says that Portsmouth has particulate matter , well that concerns me. Piketon does not have a lot of industrial competition. They have a high rate of particulate matter. I think the matter has radioactive particles in it. The matter lodges in your throat and causes asthma, bronchitis and cancer. They tell people to stay in their homes. We can’t be scared of something we can’t see, but it is killing us.

HNN: You’ve spoken previously about contaminated waste water.

VINA COLLEY: They [take the water] from the laundry of washing contaminated clothes and the [water] from washing off contaminated equipment [and it runs] into the creek, which feeds into the Scioto River, empties into the Ohio River, and down to the Mississippi. This whole world is being affected by what nuclear facilities are producing and releasing into the environment.

NO SAFE NUCLEAR PLANTS

HNN: During the meeting it was discussed that newer plants are safe.

VINA COLLEY: I don’t believe that. I don’t think nuclear will ever be safe. If you have a new facility, once you start the maintenance and you open up that facility, you let the Genie out of the bottle. You can’t put him back in. It’s cleaner, newer, safer looking , but in the long run 30 years down the road…. TERRI SMITH: I’m getting tired of these how safe it is going to be predictions, when it has never been [safe]. I’m open minded about a safe nuclear power plant, but the fact is there never has been one. How can people so naively say we’re going to have a safe one? [Electrical power from ] nuclear is quick, convenient and cheap. But , if there is a contractor that can run a safe, nuclear power plant, no one has seen it. There’s no record of it. You can look at their claims, then, find EPA [reports], find independent research reports [concerning] the flumes and plumes that come off the plant.

Editor’s Notes:

In 2007, a capsule of radium was reported missing from the plant. In a Portsmouth Daily Times interview with Ms. Colley, former PDT reporter Jeff Barron, quoted Calley: “They claim they didn’t have radium at the site. So here we go again. They’re covering it up. In 1992 a valve came off a depleted uranium cylinder. I notified a reporter in Columbus and they told him the valve came from a propane tank. They had a leak for four hours. They’ve never notified the public anytime they’ve had a leak.” (Note: Only a small portion of Barron’s interview remains on line; he was fired shortly after the Columbia Music Hall arson.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x415235

In 2003, a Russian physicist conducted testing at Portsmouth/Piketon and found radiation levels 100 times higher than normal in water and soil samples around the plant.

http://www.energyjustice.net/pipermail/nukenet_energyjustice.net/2003-November/000050.html

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

VIDEO INTERVIEW LINK: http://vids.eu.org/view-id-1441421.html

GOOGLE VIDEO LINKS TO: The Exposed: Vina Colley Sick Uranium Worker

http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&q=vina+colley&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=o9T0StPZN9XN8QaNx6HzCQ&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CBYQqwQwAw#

HER WRITTEN TESTIMONY: http://www.downwinders.org/colley.htm

ADDITIONAL LINKS, STORIES ON THE PLANT AND COLLEY:

http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/news2007/pdf/press071201.pdf

http://blogs.knoxnews.com/munger/2008/05/memorial_service_for_cold_war.html

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/radiation/dir/mstreet/commeet/pm01/pl1rpt.txt

http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/OCAS/pdfs/abrwh/min8222.pdf

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=vina+colley&start=10&sa=N

http://www.daytondailynews.com/n/content/oh/story/news/special-reports/piketon/2006/11/11/ddn111206pkcleanup.html