The Nation's Newest National Park ...
 

... includes the "nation’s most polluted nuclear weapons production site," the Hanford Reservation...The Manhattan Project National Historic Park, signed into existence in November, also includes sites at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Los Alamos, New Mexico. The Manhattan Project is the name for the U.S. effort to build an atomic bomb during World War II.

Having been to all three of these places more times than I can count, I can say that I won't go once more even though they're national parks.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...69a_story.html

So, what do they have against Rocky Flats? ;)

Los Alamos might be interesting because of the history and the individuals, including Soviet spies, who worked there. Plus, because of the nature and amount of the work that actually occurred there, it's probably not as "hot" as Hanford and Oak Ridge. Plus, the area around Los Alamos is beautiful.

Rocky Flats has been a wildlife refuge for ~15 years. The area around Los Alamos is indeed very beautiful (my brother is a researcher at the Lab and he and his family have lived there for over 20 years). It's sometimes called "the ugliest town in the prettiest place in the country."

All of the sites have some badly contaminated facilities at various stages of cleanup (as do Savannah River, the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory and others). The scale and complexity of some of the cleanup projects (Hanford's Tank Farms, Oak Ridge K-25) is almost impossible to conceive.

They allegedly cleaned up Mound where Florence worked but she said the same thing - that she would not go near the place. I have read the (no longer restricted) report on the clean-up. Monsanto was known as the operator of the nation's dirtiest nuclear lab.

They were all dirty, but Rocky Flats takes the cake for having been raided by the FBI and EPA.:eek:

So why has EEOIC refused so many claims?:confused:

Because causation of cancers that manifest themselves today is difficult to attribute exclusively to work within the Defense Nuclear Complex decades ago (i.e., lots of people get cancer who never set foot in a Defense Nuclear facility.) Moreover, many have worked in and around Defense Nuclear Facilities who have never once been exposed to radiation or other carcinogens. It's not as easy as it might seem.

I had a lot of friends at the Savannah River site - had - more than half of them dead early.

But, you are right - it is hard to prove causation.

NIOSH is currently reviewing Florence's case, will probably hear sometime in Jan or Feb.

At the risk of sounding a bit morbid, if half die early and half die late, they may collectively die at an average age. The whole causation thing with ionizing radiation is tough, unless we're talking massive acute doses. In fact, there's a theory, radiation hormesis, that low doses of ionizing radiation (within the region of and just above natural background levels) are beneficial, stimulating the activation of repair mechanisms that protect against disease, that are not activated in absence of ionizing radiation