Oak Ridge Associated Universities 2006 Annual Report

Initial Dose Reconstruction Project
for Nuclear Weapons Industry
Workers Nearly Complete
The ORAU Team has nearly reached its goal
to eliminate the backlog of radiation dose
reconstructions for NIOSH. Dade Moeller &
Associates, Inc., and MJW Corp., Inc., teamed with
ORAU on the five-year contract.
With nearly 80 percent of the project
complete, the team is working toward an orderly
conclusion by September 11, 2007, when the
contract officially draws to a close, said Kate
Kimpan, ORAU’s director of the NIOSH dose
reconstruction project.
Dose reconstructions characterize the radiation
environment to which nuclear weapons industry
workers were exposed by using available monitoring
information. The Energy Employees Occupational
Illness Compensation Program Act provides
monetary compensation to workers (or their
survivors) who have died or become ill as a result
of such exposure.
About 360 sites are covered by the program, and
claims have been received from more than 200
sites. ORAU was initially provided about 22,400
cases for investigation. By the end of fiscal year
2006, 17,100 dose reconstructions had been
completed, about 2,000 cases had been added to
the Special Exposure Cohort (see highlight, next
page), and approximately 3,300 cases remained,
with about 50 new cases arriving per
week. The project also calls for the
ORAU Team to conduct personal
interviews with the claimants, retrieve
and validate individual and workplace
monitoring data, and develop site
profiles that describe the radiation exposure
conditions at various DOE and contractor facilities.
The team has completed 40 site profiles, which
cover almost 90 percent of the cases received.
The radiation dose reconstruction project managed
by ORAU for NIOSH is nearly complete. Four years
after the program began, more than 17,000 dose
reconstruction cases have been completed with only
about 3,300 remaining. The contract comes to a
close in September 2007.
Cumulative Dose Reconstruction Production
20,000
15,000
10,000
5,000
Month, FY03-06
Done
To do
Results of completed dose reconstructions are
provided by NIOSH to the workers and the U.S.
Department of Labor, which determines whether
a worker is to be compensated. The compensation
decision is based on the probability of the worker’s
cancer actually being caused by the worker’s
radiation exposure.
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