Advisory Board Agenda – December 2019 Meeting

The Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health held a teleconference on October 16, 2019 to hear updates from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and plan for the December 11, 2019 in-person meeting in the Oakland, CA area.

NIOSH reported that they will not have any new Special Exposure Cohort petitions ready to present to the Board in December.   They do have two SEC petitions in their possession, however.  They just received one for Argonne National Laboratory – East and have not had a chance to evaluate it.  The other petition is for Reduction Pilot Plant located in Huntington, WV.  NIOSH is waiting for the Department of Labor’s decision on whether the years requested in the petition qualify as a covered period.

The Chair of the Dose Reconstruction Review Subcommittee reported that the draft to the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) will be ready for the Board to discuss and hopefully approve in December.

There will be a joint meeting in Cincinnati, OH with the SEC Issues and the Savannah River Site (SRS) Work Groups before the December meeting.  Their responsibilities overlap somewhat when it comes to the co-worker model guidelines.  The Board wanted a demonstration on how the model could be applied. SRS was chosen to see if the model will be applicable to that site especially with dose reconstruction for subcontractor employees.  The Work Groups will provide a summary of their discussion during the in-person meeting.  The Board doesn’t anticipate a possible vote on the SRS petition until the board meeting in April 2020.

The Metal and Controls Work Group will meet late in January 2020.  The Work Group for Lawrence-Berkeley site is waiting for reports from NIOSH on some open issues before they can meet again.

The petition for Santa Susana Field Lab, Area IV, will not be on the agenda for December.  NIOSH and the Board’s technical contractor, Sanford Cohen and Associates, did not find evidence of production of processes involving americium in the documents the petitioner previously provided.  However, the petitioner filed a Freedom of Information Act request and is waiting for documents to be released by the Department of Energy.  This petition will most likely be on the agenda for the April 2020 meeting.

The Board was informed that their recommendations to approve SEC status for certain years at West Valley Demonstration Project and Y-12 was with the HHS Secretary.  The Secretary’s deadline to make a decision on whether to accept the Board’s recommendations is October 25, 2019.

Cold War Patriots will provide the location of the meeting and the official agenda once they become available.