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Wednesday, July 28, 2004

Lab Problems Don't Affect CDC Project

By Adam Rankin
Journal Staff Writer
    POJOAQUE— A work stand-down at Los Alamos National Laboratory hasn't affected a historical document retrieval project aimed at determining how much pollution has been released by the nuclear weapons lab in its 60 years of existence, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials.
    Charles Miller, chief of radiation studies for the CDC, said the work shutdown at LANL occurred just as the CDC is looking to fill a new five-year contract to complete the document retrieval project.
    "The current issues at Los Alamos are having just about no impact on CDC's effort," he said. "Our work has stopped, but fortunately, we're not in the middle of anything major right now."
    Miller and several other CDC officials were here on Tuesday night to discuss the future of the Los Alamos Historical Document Retrieval and Assessment project.
    Miller and his colleagues also passed out an interim report detailing the status of the project, which is designed to identify and prioritize chemical and radioactive releases that likely had the greatest impact on neighboring communities and people.
    CDC will use the study to decide whether it should reconstruct public exposures to chemicals and radioactivity released by the laboratory over the years.
    Begun in 1999, the project is taking much longer than anticipated. The original $4.1 million contract, held by ChemRisk, expired at the end of June with about half of the relevant documents still unreviewed.
    Documents that aren't classified are being copied and placed in an electronic database for the public to access and review.
    Until March, when CDC announced the project would continue, its future was in question, in part because CDC and the laboratory disagreed over access to various documents.
    "We just were not getting very far, very fast," Miller said.
    But in the last six months, with help from the Department of Energy and LANL, CDC and its contractor have been "getting access to documents, we were not getting access to a year ago," Miller said.