Have you ever touched something toxic??? FREE MONEY!
March 10th, 2009
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Yes, that’s right, if you’ve ever touched, seen, smelled, or just worked in the same room with something toxic then you can get free money. And if you ever suffered from cancer, all the better! Even if you didn’t work in such a setting, if your late relative did and died of cancer you can get the money too. Now, I know what you’re going to say. You’re probably thinking “Well, gee, that sounds great, but I only once worked in a location where something toxic was being used and that was fifty years ago.” No problem. And don’t worry if the condition you now have is one of the most common forms of cancer for your demographic, becasue it just doesn’t matter!
In the 1950s, Jane Wagner worked in the lab at the former Vitro Manufacturing Co. in Canonsburg.
Each day, wearing only a lab coat over her clothes, she would analyze samples brought in from the plant for various metals — including uranium. At least some of the material was radioactive, but she was unaware of that.
“We knew we were dealing with uranium, but nobody ever mentioned radiation. The bosses probably knew, but we didn’t know,” she said last week.
Seven years ago, the Washington, Pa. woman found out she had breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy. Even though she is cancer-free today, that experience may qualify her for at least $150,000 in compensation payments from the federal government.
The U.S. Department of Labor ruled recently that former Vitro employees would be treated as a “special exposure” group under the eight-year-old law that compensates employees at former nuclear weapons plants.
The designation entitles the Vitro workers or their surviving family members to the $150,000 lump sum payment and coverage of certain medical costs if they were employed at the plant for more than 250 days between 1942 and 1957 and if they later were diagnosed with one of 22 specified cancers.
The government has been adding these exposure groups rapidly in recent years. But many of the workers they are designed to compensate have died, and only family members are left to get benefits.
Jennie Senkinc’s husband, Max, worked at the plant for seven years before and after World War II and died of bladder cancer in 1995.
“I didn’t think there was anything wrong, because he was being monitored,” said Mrs. Senkinc, of Canonsburg.
But when government employees showed up 40 years later to inspect the site and they were “dressed head to toe in coveralls, that’s when I thought, ‘uh-oh.’ “
In all seriousness, it really bothers me a lot when people pander to the victim mentality to sap more money out of federal funds and play on ignorance in order to gain sympathy for what is without doubt unrelated to any exposure they may have had to a given material. Uranium is toxic, but even if ingested, it’s not proven to have any relationship to cancer, the health effects of uranium are well known and the system it most directly impacts is the kidneys and only in large amounts.
It is nearly inconceivable that a person could ingest or inhale enough uranium to produce chronic exposure effects years later yet produce no acute toxicity symptoms at the time of exposure. In the event that damage to the kidneys or other systems was so bad as to be unrepairable and cause problems decades later, it would have been impossible to miss at the time.
Being near uranium is no hazard at all. Working with it is generally not hazardous except in circumstances where girding or milling might result in airborne particles. In such a case, simple precautions like a respirator are all that is needed. The radiation levels are too low to generally be of concern. Even if cancer was caused by exposure to radiation due to government work, it would be unlikely to show up in the bladder or breast. These cancer types are extremely common and not strongly associated with radiation, the way leukemia and thyroid cancer are.
This is simply the government bleeding copious amounts of money to people who may be legitimately sick, but through no fault of their previous employer.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 at 1:11 am and is filed under Bad Science, Enviornment, Humor, Just LAME, Misc, Nuclear, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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March 10th, 2009 at 5:58 am
It’s a scam alright. I’m especially irritated by those claiming compensation for work exposure related deficits, like hearing-loss that did not take the precautions offered them at the time. “The ear defenders were too hot to keep on all the time,” is not an excuse for not using them, yet the workman’s compensation boards routinely buy it.
There are people with legitimate claims, no one is saying there isn’t, but as you point out it’s not a form of supplementary welfare for anyone that worked and got sick later.
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March 10th, 2009 at 10:31 am
I’m not sure which bothers me more…the government doing this, or the late-night ambulance-chaser commercials that pander to it.
I suppose the lawyers are just acting within their nature, and practicing free enterprise to boot, but I still feel like I need to bathe after viewing one.
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March 10th, 2009 at 11:11 am
Unfortunately, the legal systems seems to make it easy for “victims” to get away with this. When the companies, and the Government start thinking “cheaper to settle with these people, then go to court” the burden of proving negligence was removed from the plaintiff.
If the Government stopped tossing money at these idiots, and started requiring they provide some form of proof they were actually victimized, this entire ambulance chaser industry would dry up almost overnight.
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March 10th, 2009 at 11:34 am
Your graphic gave me quite a laugh.
I don’t know how much of this is a litigation issue, because the case is so weak I’m not sure it would even be worth going to court over. There is a DOE reperations program and it’s been expanded to cover anyone who even came in contact with uranium, I believe this is due to pressure from representatives. You know, people hear the word uranium and assume that those involved with it in the past must be horribly disfigured.
Of course, uranium is not that radioactive and nobody is likely to get cancer from having worked with it.
There are circumstances where the reparations program might be the fair thing to do. I’m talking about circumstances where government programs exposed individuals to enormous doses of radiation, enough to make them acutely ill. In that case, I think we can give them the benefit of the doubt that there’s a good chance that their exposure might come back to haunt them. It’s impossible to prove, but clearly it was negligent to expose anyone like that to begin with.
That kind of exposure, however, is rare, extremely rare. A few accidents and incidents did happen in the past and there were the infamous human plutonium experiments, but it’s not as though this happened very often. There were some first responders to the SL-1 accident, there were some containment accidents during the experiments done at the time of the Manhattan project. There were a few who were exposed to very high doses of radiation from Castle Bravo.
I’ve worked with uranium plenty of times. It’s pretty innocuous stuff. The only injuries or health damage that anyone in the uranium processing field would be likely to have is that uranium miners in some of the less well managed mines do have a legitimate claim to problems like silicosis. That’s not really uranium related, it’s related to drilling in rock without proper protection. Also they might have hearing loss or other problems related to that.
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March 10th, 2009 at 11:36 am
Unrelated but amusing…he starts off so sensible:
…and then…
Emphasis mine on that last bit.
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March 10th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
Stuffing lead, mercury and arsenic underground is not that difficult. Coal ash has been used to refill coal mines. The issue is that the ash might leach out substances into the water table in ways the original coal did not, but there are ways of dealing with it, like mixing it with cement or adding stabilizing agents etc. Material contaminated with heavy metals (in too large a volume and low a concentration to make separation feasible) is usually disposed of in special landfills and contained using various methods (plastic liners, cement concrete containers, cement or clay mixed into the material etc).
But comparatively speaking, dealing with heavy metals is much less of a technical challenge than enormous amounts of CO2. At least heavy metals don’t need to be refrigerated, compressed and injected into certain underground formations under high pressure.
The more I’ve learned about the carbon sequestration schemes the more they seem like fantasy. The only one that I think might work in large volumes is pumping it into the cold deep ocean where it should (in theory) stay weighted down by the water above it and remain saturated in a liquid form. The idea makes me very uneasy, though. We don’t actually know that it will stay in one place. We’re assuming that the currents down there won’t be significant enough to stir it up and that the pressure will be enough to stop it from going into semi-suspension and starting to defuse into the water column.
There have been some studies published which indicate that a small change in temperature, like what could happen during a major El Nino event could cause enough convection to start bringing close enough to the surface that it would start to evaporate.
Then there are other unknowns about how it might alter ocean chemistry in such high amounts.
The only other reasonable place to try to store it would be depleted natural gas fields, ideally some kind of geological dome that could keep a good cap on the field, but I don’t think we really have enough capacity in suitable gas fields.
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March 10th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
I don’t feel sorry for companies which were earning very well based on bad workplace safety standards. Maybe the knowledge that they could be held liable for such injuries will encourage them to be safer now.
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March 10th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
An Actual Scientist said:
What bothers me is the idea that the oceans can be used a goddamn toilet period. Land we can reclaim if we want to make an effort; once we’ve buggered up the atmosphere, or the oceans we are screwed.
Bruce said:
As usual, Bruce you are missing the point. Did you read the lead article this time? The issue is people that are claiming injury without due cause.
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March 10th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
One thing that pisses me off is that not only are people essentially cheating the government and/or their former private-sector employers out of money, they’re also making it harder for people with legitimate grievances to get compensation, both by draining the money pot and also by poisoning the well (so to speak).
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March 10th, 2009 at 6:45 pm
Something very similar has been going on for some time with asbestos. It’s so lucrative they run television ads for anyone who worked in any industry that may have used asbestos (ship building, plumbing, construction, demolition, industrial pipefitting etc) they ask to call if you have ever been in contact (or might have) in such industries to get money.
What is so sickening is they don’t limit it to people who actually were harmed by asbestos. If someone has mesothelioma and worked with asbestos then it’s understandable, because mesothelioma is pretty rare in those not exposed to asbestos and strongly linked to it. No, you don’t need to have mesothelioma, depending on the lawyer, you might just need any kind of cancer or respiratory ailment. I’ve even seen some that take it from perfectly healthy people because they claim that there is the danger of future health problems.
Someone might have smoked their whole damn life and when they get emphysema or something, it must be the asbestos, right? Oh yeah, asbestos has never even been linked to emphysema, but who cares, right?
Then there’s the “second hand exposure” argument which is that it can be brought home on clothes.
“Oh 70 year old wife has ovarian cancer? Well, obviously it’s because she was exposed to second hand asbestos from when you were a welder at the ship yard in 1955″
Makes me sick… (I guess I should sue)
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March 10th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
Bruce said:
If the plaintiff can demonstrate the company was negligent, then they most certainly deserve to be compensated.
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March 10th, 2009 at 6:51 pm
Calli Arcale said:
And, don’t forget driving up the insurance rates.
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March 10th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
Bruce said:
Well, Bruce, given the society we live in, there’s no problem getting compensation because there’s no shortage of litigation lawyers and plenty of legal costs to force big settlements. If you deserve compensation you generally get it. If you don’t deserve compensation, you generally get it too. For every worker who was screwed out of a legitimate claim there are dozens who got compensation on frivolous ones.
Incidentally, you know what the largest factor (by far) in work place accidents and injuries? It’s workers willfully disobeying safety procedures. It’s an enormous problem. You can give them all the training they need, you provide them with every piece of safety equipment, safety procedures and everything and then half the time you have to aduit and watch workers like little children because when they get lazy and decide not to bother with a safety harness or helmet or they decide not to bother checking their equipment or wearing ear or eye protection, then it’s commonly going to come down on their employer when their own idiocy does them or someone else in.
My biggest fear is that I’ll sign off on something and then when I’m not around some worker is going to disobey the procedure and it will come back to me when there is a major accident. I’ve had my close calls and I can’t always be there to babysit while some new guy decides he’s going to take a short cut and causes a disaster.
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March 10th, 2009 at 8:47 pm
Gordon said:
Mine too, it’s difficult to try and predict what sort of stupidity will show up after you left. That’s why I don’t do process introduction anymore, only troubleshooting when it comes to production. Not only is there a safety issue, but an outside contractor has no control over the quality of the workers you are expected to train, particularly when they are minimum wage types, and there is a language barrier.
Of course the other side of the coin is the ‘three-ring-binder’ mentality that can’t see beyond their programming, but they are not my problem anymore thank heaven, as they were when I was a production manager.
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March 10th, 2009 at 10:25 pm
Bruce said:
Bruce,
You obviously haven’t actually worked in a place where workplace standards are required or used. In my experience workplace safety starts and end with the employees responsible. A company can all the workplace safety rules possible and still be a death trap because nobody pays attention or have no rules and be perfectly safe because everybody watches out. In the end you have to be responsible for yourself.
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March 10th, 2009 at 11:05 pm
Bruce said:
There is actually a simple way of dealing with this in a capitalist society, so thank your lucky stars that we still live in a society with at least some market freedom left. It works like this: You, the consumer, have the choice as to what companies to patronize. So, all you have to do is do some research and find what companies have workplace standards you don’t think are good enough. Then, you don’t buy from them! They can’t make any money if you do that.
I bet I know your response “But other people will.” This is actually the beauty of the system, because no one person can control things, but a society’s beliefs can. This way a company that has policies that are contrary to our society’s values will suffer and be forced to change their ways or they won’t make any money.
But what if society does not share your values, you ask? Well, then, you can go out and advocate them, but I’m sure you agree that **you** don’t want *your* idea of what is right and wrong imposed on everyone, whether they agree or not, because that would be tyranny, right? So we all have the opportunity to vote for what is right and wrong, voting with our dollar.
There’s one other issue though, and that is that this method requires something called “personal responsibility.” It means if you think something is wrong, you have to observe your morals and not buy from that company. Even if they offer their product cheaper than anyone else or even if it is more work for you to patronize someone else, you have to ask yourself whether or not it is worth it to you to not buy there.
There are a lot of people who have problems with this, because, there are towns which fight against a big store like a Walmart. People really seem to care about it being kept out of their community. They just don’t care enough not to shop there, because no matter how much they seem to say otherwise, they always do.
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March 11th, 2009 at 1:20 am
Q, I agree with that, if a company gets away with something then it’s by the tacit approval of society through the cotinued use of said company. I think the issue though is that it puts a lot of expectation on people and they can’t pass the blame. It’s really easy to say it’s the fault of the rich fatcats on the top or its the fault of government or the Republicans or something, because, lord knows, they should be making laws to stop us from doing bad things like supporting unjust companies. But if you go with your stand then you have nobody to blame and have to admit that it’s because people don’t care enough or don’t agree with you or whatever and that they don’t practice what they might preach.
What are you to do then? All you can do is try to convince the world and if you can’t get the company to change by losing customers then what does that mean? it means you and your cause didn’t do a good enough job convincing people or maybe they just don’t care about your cause. Tough.
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March 11th, 2009 at 8:35 am
I agree there is lot of freedom left. This is sure.
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March 11th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Q,
There is an additional factor in all this freedom. You and I and every other American all have the right to choose not to work at a company that disregards our safety. Ironically, the companies have far less control over employees who disregard their own safety. Nobody has ever been sued for ‘wrongful quiting,’ but most fired workers think they have some ‘right’ to continued employment regardless of their value, or lack thereof to the company so ‘wrongful termination’ suits are commonplace.
Here is a question for all you bio/nuke geeks: If someone wanted to give himself cancer, how difficult would it be and what would he have to do?
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March 11th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Chuck said:
I don’t actually know a whole lot about this subject, but there are chemicals and drugs which can reliably induce cancer. They have been used to cause cancer in lab rats, for example, in for research purposes.
Radiation can also cause cancer, assuming the dose is sufficient and applied to cancer sensitive tissues. If a population is exposed to something like iodine-131, in doses large enough to cause signifficant irradiation but small enough not to completely kill off thyroid tissue, then it would increase cancer incidents signifficantly. If a person were, for example, exposed to relatively small amounts of I-131 every day for a period of time, that kind of thing could signifficantly increase cancer risk.
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March 11th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
Bruce said:
There is plenty of liable litigation, too much actually. I really dislike the argument over work place safety issues and how this is somehow equivalent to exploiting employees. To me, being in a truely free society means that I can work in an unsafe enviornment if that is what I want and I think it’s worth the risk. There are plenty of people who are willing to take a calculated risk and work on North Atlantic or Alaskan fishing boats and they do know very well that they put their lives in danger doing this but that is why it pays extremely well. You can make close to six figures in a season and people will consider it an acceptable risk to do it for that kind of money.
Think that’s foolish? Okay, but who are you to tell them that?
What about deep sea divers? What about stuntmen for movies? What about race car drivers? There’s an element of risk in all those, depending on the situation. I mean, automobile racing is safer now, but in the past it used to be very risky and people did it, for both money and because they liked the thrill.
Here’s an idea:
Go to Alaska and find a private air services company and tell them you think they are horrible because they make their employees do dangerous things like fly airplanes to remote locations in the middle of winter. Then just wait there for about a dozen bush pilots to come and beat the snot out of you for trying to put them out of work.
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March 14th, 2009 at 2:31 am
That is a really funny graphic. I’m gona have to show that to a couple people. It really made me laugh!
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March 15th, 2009 at 3:28 am
Uranium is not very radioactive. It doesn’t produce nearly enough radiation to make it a cancer issue. The only possible damage would be to the lungs if you inhaled it but you’d need to inhale a lot.
Get a common kind of cancer decades later after working near regular old uranium? Guess what, it’s not caused by the uranium. I’d stake anything on it. 100%. If someone worked with highly radioactive stuff and years later got leukemia then okay, maybe, but breast or bladder cancer from uranium = not a chance.
They’re not looking for fair compensation. They want to blame it on someone and get a handout.
Disgusts me.
Companies do have unsafe conditions that hurt people sometimes. Sometimes government negligence does hurt workers or the public. When it does it is fair that they pay. These scumbags are just making it hard for the real victims by calling wolf and sucking up money in the process.
Normally I feel sympathy for anyone facing a disease like cancer, but not these freeloaders.
Our overly sue-happy society is getting out of hand. Too many entitlements. Somethings got to give. We really need tort reform. Frivolous claims of being a victim need to be considered a bigger issue and people need to be held accountable. We need to put a stop to this.
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March 16th, 2009 at 3:46 am
This page is full of bull****. The government did horrible things ti people with radiation and uranium is very very deadly. Ask any veteran coming back from the gulf about all their problems. Depleted uranium is killing our own and their families and children too but it’ll come back to haunt us when the terrorists can pick it up nad use it against everyone in the US. We use the ultimate dirty bomb on them and pretty soon they’ll use it on us. Nuke weapons like that are a war crime! I had hopes for Obama but he’s not banning the use of it so I guess he was just as much a liar as the one b4. o well.
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March 16th, 2009 at 4:19 am
Mr Wrong said:
Speaking of uranium and other radiation sources, does anyone here know how I can get hold of some? I recently purchased a Geiger counter so I could use it possibly for a youtube presentation on radiation and its relative dangers, or absence thereof. Here in Oz radiation regs are pretty strict, so I’m not sure of the best way to go about this.
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March 17th, 2009 at 10:10 am
Finrod,
I have a few rounds of DU 5.5mm ammunition, but I don’t think there is any good way to send it to you. If you happen to be in California and stop by, you would be welcome.
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March 31st, 2009 at 9:01 am
My family lived near that plant when my father was a child. All his brothers and sisters have died of cancer. (including my father) Their house was three house’s from the plant. The plant told them the nuclear waste wouldn’t go past the fence. Check out the facts, put out by the government. The ground water is still conamanated. My son has X link chrozone damage. (documented and mapped) His doctor asked if we lived near radiation? Our goverment lied to these people. Do the reseach!
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March 31st, 2009 at 12:15 pm
fran said:
What plant? Where? When? What was the house in question? For someone telling us to check out the facts, your story is very short of verifiable ones.
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