Dec. 4, 2009
When a Secret is Partly No Longer A Secret, What Can Be Done
Exposure to Nickel Powder Deemed Toxic; Some Plants Vented Dusting into Air at Midnight
By Tony Rutherford
Huntingtonnews.net Reporter
Huntington, WV (HNN) – Researching potential contamination at the Huntington Pilot (Reduction) Plant resembles peeking into a mine field knowing where some of the mines are buried but not others. No one doubts the veracity of national security issues from the Cold War that still have application to the present and future. One certainly bristles, though, when the ‘secrecy’ becomes part of an allegation to disable liability compensation for patriotic workers who have maintained their vow.
Ironically, this story will see print one day and 25 years after the worst industrial disaster in history. That’s when a leak of methyl isocyanate -- MIC -- killed thousands of people who lived near a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India. Following a fire in 2008, Bayer CropScience the current owner of a former Carbide plant in Institute, WV that still produces and stores MIC announced under extreme political and public pressure agreed to inventory reduction.
That consent did not come without the veil of secrecy, however. The plant owners cited a Port Security issue in a fruitless attempt to stop release of a report by the Chemical Safety Board.
A 2001 Herald-Dispatch article examined the nickel carbonyl producing Pilot Plant and it’s legacy of secrecy and sickness. Employees (and their survivors) of the facility at 3200 Riverside Drive (near the railroad and sewage treatment plant) are eligible for compensation from having worked in a nuclear weapon production activity.
At that time, INCO, Ltd. Spokesperson Steve Mitchell asserted, “There was no exposure to nickel that had been contaminated by radiation. What it was, was a raw material.”
However, Clifford Honicker’s study for the American Environmental Health Studies Project details that nickel carbonyl (nickel tetracarbonyl) is highly toxic and linked to cancer. The HD article and others explain that it is used to “produce high purity nickel and to deposit nickel coatings on other materials.”
Jim Ross, the HD writer, quoted retiree Ray Adkins in 2001 as stating all the guys he worked with at the Pilot Plant had passed away. “All the people were under FBI clearance,” Adkins told Ross, adding, “they used a lot of air compressors and a lot of water. I always thought they cleansed some radioactive waste… I heard from a truck driver that they pass uranium through nickel.”
A union meeting in 2006 suggested that possibly contaminated portions of the secret plant were removed prior to its actual decommissioning and demolition in 1979, where trucks took remains to a classified Piketon burial site (where the trucks themselves were entombed), and the location capped several years later.
The H-D quoted Richard Barbour as a worker who for six years sealed, tagged and shipped nickel powder containers and vacuumed trucks “returning from deliveries to the uranium enrichment plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.”
Based on the H-D interview, the former Pilot/Reduction plant had two stories. Nearly pure powder came down from an upper floor through a tube which then filled a 20-gallon container. Nickel arrived at the plant in clumps “the size of gravel or cinders… at some point in the production process, it was a liquid but not a molten liquid,” Barbour told the HD in 2001.
Despite the classified nature, items from the “pilot” plant made their way outside and on to non-secret portions of INCO’s complex. A retired laborer told the H-D, “I was a laborer and drove a truck. I’d go up there, back in, they’d put it in the truck. I’d go back to the melt shop and they’d put it in the furnaces.”
Actually, the first known public admission of the existence of the Pilot Plant occurred when it was listed in January 2001 by the DOE as a location from which workers/survivors were eligible for $150,000 cash and continued medical monitoring.
The HD story quoted one Altizer Avenue resident as saying that her mom died of cancer and many residents within a two block radius of the plant had cancer in 2001 or had died from it.
Ironically, for the workers, it wasn’t the uranium that made them sick. Clifford Honicker’s study showed the highly dangerous aspects of nickel and nickel powder when used in connection with uranium enrichment. The report repudiates government methodology for determining employee dosages and other aspects of residual radiation.
Based on “Nickel Powder/Nuclear Weapons, The Untold Story” prepared by Cliff Honicker, director, American Environmental Health Studies Project, Inc. (with assistance ), for which we await permission from which to directly quote, the author alleges that the DOE in 1976 created a predetermined nickel powder health study that stated falsities concerning the health of workers who came in contact with the element.
What’s the most horrific determination? The constructed “lie” by the federal agencies? Not necessarily. Instead, referring back to the union meeting where workers spoke of objects and materials from the PILOT plant making their way into non-contaminated portions of the non-classified main plant, workers at the union hall spoke of a catwalk in the Cold Draw area, nickel butts setting the Geiger counter off like a machine gun, sending items to the normal scrapyard, and open hearth furnace burning.
Honicker’s report and other input alarmingly indicates that nickel powder notoriously accumulated at diffusion plants and sites similar to the one in Huntington. Gently worded, a standard operating procedure would be to vent the atmosphere when nickel thickness turned the air into a type of fog. So, where did the powder go? One worker called dissemination of the built up dust a “midnight venting.” In other words, they opened the roof and turned on fans, sending the powder out into the surrounding atmosphere/community.
(Editor’s Note: The roof venting procedure has not yet been absolutely confirmed for the Huntington plant; however, the data has indicated that several other plants followed said pattern.)
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When a Secret is Partly No Longer A Secret, What Can Be Done
Exposure to Nickel Powder Deemed Toxic; Some Plants Vented Dusting into Air at Midnight
By Tony Rutherford
Huntingtonnews.net Reporter
Huntington, WV (HNN) – Researching potential contamination at the Huntington Pilot (Reduction) Plant resembles peeking into a mine field knowing where some of the mines are buried but not others. No one doubts the veracity of national security issues from the Cold War that still have application to the present and future. One certainly bristles, though, when the ‘secrecy’ becomes part of an allegation to disable liability compensation for patriotic workers who have maintained their vow.
Ironically, this story will see print one day and 25 years after the worst industrial disaster in history. That’s when a leak of methyl isocyanate -- MIC -- killed thousands of people who lived near a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India. Following a fire in 2008, Bayer CropScience the current owner of a former Carbide plant in Institute, WV that still produces and stores MIC announced under extreme political and public pressure agreed to inventory reduction.
That consent did not come without the veil of secrecy, however. The plant owners cited a Port Security issue in a fruitless attempt to stop release of a report by the Chemical Safety Board.
A 2001 Herald-Dispatch article examined the nickel carbonyl producing Pilot Plant and it’s legacy of secrecy and sickness. Employees (and their survivors) of the facility at 3200 Riverside Drive (near the railroad and sewage treatment plant) are eligible for compensation from having worked in a nuclear weapon production activity.
At that time, INCO, Ltd. Spokesperson Steve Mitchell asserted, “There was no exposure to nickel that had been contaminated by radiation. What it was, was a raw material.”
However, Clifford Honicker’s study for the American Environmental Health Studies Project details that nickel carbonyl (nickel tetracarbonyl) is highly toxic and linked to cancer. The HD article and others explain that it is used to “produce high purity nickel and to deposit nickel coatings on other materials.”
Jim Ross, the HD writer, quoted retiree Ray Adkins in 2001 as stating all the guys he worked with at the Pilot Plant had passed away. “All the people were under FBI clearance,” Adkins told Ross, adding, “they used a lot of air compressors and a lot of water. I always thought they cleansed some radioactive waste… I heard from a truck driver that they pass uranium through nickel.”
A union meeting in 2006 suggested that possibly contaminated portions of the secret plant were removed prior to its actual decommissioning and demolition in 1979, where trucks took remains to a classified Piketon burial site (where the trucks themselves were entombed), and the location capped several years later.
The H-D quoted Richard Barbour as a worker who for six years sealed, tagged and shipped nickel powder containers and vacuumed trucks “returning from deliveries to the uranium enrichment plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.”
Based on the H-D interview, the former Pilot/Reduction plant had two stories. Nearly pure powder came down from an upper floor through a tube which then filled a 20-gallon container. Nickel arrived at the plant in clumps “the size of gravel or cinders… at some point in the production process, it was a liquid but not a molten liquid,” Barbour told the HD in 2001.
Despite the classified nature, items from the “pilot” plant made their way outside and on to non-secret portions of INCO’s complex. A retired laborer told the H-D, “I was a laborer and drove a truck. I’d go up there, back in, they’d put it in the truck. I’d go back to the melt shop and they’d put it in the furnaces.”
Actually, the first known public admission of the existence of the Pilot Plant occurred when it was listed in January 2001 by the DOE as a location from which workers/survivors were eligible for $150,000 cash and continued medical monitoring.
The HD story quoted one Altizer Avenue resident as saying that her mom died of cancer and many residents within a two block radius of the plant had cancer in 2001 or had died from it.
Ironically, for the workers, it wasn’t the uranium that made them sick. Clifford Honicker’s study showed the highly dangerous aspects of nickel and nickel powder when used in connection with uranium enrichment. The report repudiates government methodology for determining employee dosages and other aspects of residual radiation.
Based on “Nickel Powder/Nuclear Weapons, The Untold Story” prepared by Cliff Honicker, director, American Environmental Health Studies Project, Inc. (with assistance ), for which we await permission from which to directly quote, the author alleges that the DOE in 1976 created a predetermined nickel powder health study that stated falsities concerning the health of workers who came in contact with the element.
What’s the most horrific determination? The constructed “lie” by the federal agencies? Not necessarily. Instead, referring back to the union meeting where workers spoke of objects and materials from the PILOT plant making their way into non-contaminated portions of the non-classified main plant, workers at the union hall spoke of a catwalk in the Cold Draw area, nickel butts setting the Geiger counter off like a machine gun, sending items to the normal scrapyard, and open hearth furnace burning.
Honicker’s report and other input alarmingly indicates that nickel powder notoriously accumulated at diffusion plants and sites similar to the one in Huntington. Gently worded, a standard operating procedure would be to vent the atmosphere when nickel thickness turned the air into a type of fog. So, where did the powder go? One worker called dissemination of the built up dust a “midnight venting.” In other words, they opened the roof and turned on fans, sending the powder out into the surrounding atmosphere/community.
(Editor’s Note: The roof venting procedure has not yet been absolutely confirmed for the Huntington plant; however, the data has indicated that several other plants followed said pattern.)
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