December 8, 1999
Energy Dept. Will Cut Standard for Its Workers' Exposure to a Metal Tied to Lung Disease
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By MATTHEW L. WALD
ASHINGTON -- The
standard set by government nuclear
bomb makers 50 years ago for exposure to beryllium, a metal once used
almost exclusively in nuclear weapons but now common in golf clubs
and cars, has made scores of workers sick with a chronic lung disease,
and the Energy Department will announce a rule on Wednesday sharply
cutting the exposure for workers in
its plants.
Because the new standard will apply only to government plants, workers in civilian factories will still fall
under the old, higher level. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration alerted workers in September that its current standard, borrowed from the nuclear weapons industry in 1971, "now appears to be
too high to prevent chronic beryllium
disease," an auto-immune disorder
resulting from inhaling particles of
the metal. But the agency has not
changed its standard. The action by
the Energy Department puts it in the
unusual role of being stricter than its
civilian counterparts in health and
safety regulations.
The Energy Secretary, Bill Richardson, said, "We know some of our
workers are getting sick from beryllium, and we now have in place the
toughest and most comprehensive
protections in the world to prevent
future cases of this terrible disease."
Beryllium has found a variety of
specialty uses in electronics and other fields, because it is light, stiff and
transparent to X-rays, and conducts
heat well. It is not a hazard to users
of products like golf clubs, said Dr.
Milton D. Rossman, a pulmonary
specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, unless the golfer decides
"to sand them down."
Beryllium is a unique case in the
annals of nuclear weapons manufacture because it is the only substance
that the government has acknowledged caused injury and death at
levels allowed under its regulations.
The Energy Department has used
little beryllium recently because it
has built only a few nuclear weapons,
but the decontamination of old bomb
plants is expected to increase the
potential for beryllium exposure.
C. Rick Jones, director of the Office of Worker Protection Programs
and Hazards Management in the department, said, "There is a whole
new work force that potentially is
going to be exposed during this
cleanup activity."
Dr. David Michaels, the assistant
secretary for environmental safety
and health, said, "We think this is a
long way toward eliminating chronic
berylium disease."
But among people susceptible to
chronic beryllium disease, Dr. Michaels and other experts said, even
brief exposures to small quantities
may be sufficient to cause the disease.
The disease can cause shortness of
breath, chest pain, fevers, night
sweats and other symptoms, and can
be debilitating or fatal.
The old standard, set by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1949, was
adopted in 1971 by the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration
for civilian plants, but among weapons workers has caused at least 146
people to develop a disease, according to the Energy Department. Hundreds more show a condition that is
likely to progress into the disease,
according to the new regulation,
which will be published in the Federal Register on Wednesday. The
Clinton administration recently proposed legislation that would compensate people who worked for companies that supplied the government
with beryllium.
The new rule requires worker protection measures, like respirators, at
0.2 of a microgram per cubic meter
of air, while the 50-year-old standard
set worker exposure levels at 10
times as much.
The new rule is unusual because it
states explicitly that the government
simply does not know what level, if
any, is safe. The strategy to minimize exposure mimics the regulatory scheme for radiation, in which
the government sets ceilings but also
demands that exposures be kept as
low as reasonably achievable.
Even the old standard limited exposures to small quantities. In its
warning, the Occupational Safety
and Health Administration pointed
out that two micrograms per cubic
meter was equivalent to "a marble-sized piece of material that is pulverized and dispersed" into an area 1
mile by 1 mile by 6 feet.
At the major American maker of
beryllium, Brush Wellman Inc., of
Cleveland, Marc Kolanz, the director
of environmental health and safety,
said action levels should be set specific to each place where beryllium
was used, because in a laboratory,
for example, the 0.2 microgram level
was probably too high. He said his
company already tried to minimize
exposures even below the standard.
