An Overdue Mea Culpa to Nuclear Workers

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It took several decades and thousands of lives, but the federal government is finally poised to compensate the most unsung of the Cold War-wounded — thousands of workers who suffered radiation poisoning while assembling America's nuclear arsenal. The settlement offered by the Clinton administration Wednesday to atomic factory workers battling cancer and the lung disease berylliosis is the inevitable follow-up to Energy Secretary Bill Richardson's January admission that the government had long misrepresented the risks the workers faced and had wrongfully denied the link between working in the plants and heightened rates of cancer. With that confession on the table, if the government fails to pony up some dough (the White House proposal still needs to pass through Congress), the feds are sure to be open to troves of lawsuits, and could wind up finding the administration's plan a bargain.

For years this issue has been the domain of congressmen, mostly Republican, with constituencies surrounding major nuclear plants. Following legislation proposed by Republican Rep. Ed Whitfield of Kentucky and Republican Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio, Congress heard testimony from cancer-stricken former and current factory workers and pressed the Energy Department to reverse its decades-long stance of denying culpability. Among other things, the hearings revealed that the bomb factories routinely falsified records of the level of radiation workers were exposed to.

The administration's plan calls for either an individualized package that includes medical benefits and compensation for pain and suffering or a $100,000 lump sum to be paid to thousands of affected workers, or their survivors. The cost: about $400 million over the first five years, which falls considerably short of some of the proposals floating through Congress — the Whitfield-Voinovich measure, for example, would offer $200,000 compensation packages. But for the thousands of workers who've faced years, if not decades, of government denials, the administration's move should be a welcome step toward ensuring that some compensation is on the way.