ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, March 29, 1997 TAG: 9703310044
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
Settlement was reached with families of 4 more people secretly injected with plutonium in the '40s.
The Clinton administration will ask Congress for $50 million and changes in the law to compensate hundreds of uranium miners exposed to cancer-causing radiation in the government's nuclear weapon program.
The request to broaden the current compensation program for uranium miners was part of a series of responses the White House announced Friday to a report issued more than a year ago by a presidential commission that investigated human radiation experiments during the Cold War years.
The Energy Department, which manages the nuclear weapon program, said the miners' exposure was ``a tragedy created by the government's failure to use available resources'' to adequately ventilate the mine shafts and reduce the risks of exposure to lung cancer.
The miners worked in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming between 1947 and 1991 and many of them are believed to be dead, officials acknowledged. Compensation would go to their families if Congress agrees.
A 1990 law already provides compensation for some miners, but the administration wants the criteria eased to cover about 600 additional miners.
The White House also said it had reached a cash settlement with four additional families of individuals who, unknown to them, had been injected with plutonium in the 1940s as part of secret research.
The department previously had announced a settlement with 12 of the families and the family of another person injected with uranium. The cost of the settlement for the 17 families was put at $6.5 million.
The cases of two additional victims from the plutonium experiments are still outstanding - one person has yet to be found and another of the families has told the government it wanted no compensation, officials said. The victims have not been identified.
The announcement brought criticism from a group representing some survivors and families of victims of human radiation exposures.
The Task Force on Radiation and Human Rights, a coalition of families who are seeking compensation for what they maintain were past radiation exposures, accused the Energy Department of not doing enough to identify research subjects.
``The administration continues to hide behind passive outreach and notification programs ... under the pretense that few if any were harmed by the experiments,'' said Cooper Brown, a spokesman for the group. ``No one should be fooled for a moment.''
He maintained that there were thousands of victims whose families deserve to be notified and compensated. The presidential advisory group acknowledged thousands of experiments but said that except for a few cases, it could not find evidence of medical harm, nor reason for compensation.
Among the exceptions were the plutonium cases.
They prompted Hazel O'Leary, the former energy secretary, to order a detailed investigation into human radiation experiments. It also led to the president's appointment of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, which issued its report in October 1995.
The committee urged that the plutonium victims be compensated along with 52 other individuals who were subjects of various unethical experiments in the 1940s and 1950s. Little is known about the 52 research subjects and officials said Friday their identities remained unknown.
The actions, responding to the 18 recommendations made by the presidential advisory panel, are ``designed to increase public trust ... and make our government accountable to the American people,'' said Energy Secretary Federico Pena, who succeeded O'Leary.
Pena said an interagency task force has found no evidence of any secret human research projects under way at this time. But he said neither the advisory panel nor the administration would rule out such projects in the future as long as they are conducted ethically.
He said Clinton has taken steps to protect participants in future radiation, biological or other research involving humans to assure they are fully informed about the projects and risks.
Under a new presidential directive, agencies must develop new rules that clearly require scientists to obtain informed consent from all potential subjects of secret experiments. Currently, such consent may be waived under some circumstances.
LENGTH: Medium: 83 linesby CNB