Volume 21, Number 5 (September 2023)
From the Director’s Desk
John Howard, M.D., Director, NIOSH
The Manhattan Project and the Fusion of Worker Safety and Health
Christopher Nolan’s summer movie blockbuster Oppenheimer focuses on the eccentric yet charismatic physicist, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer. Dr. Oppenheimer was appointed by General Leslie Groves to direct our country’s WWII mission to build an atomic bomb. The movie stars many scientists-turned-celebrities, such as Robert Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Neils Bohr, Edward Teller, and Ernest Lawrence. The movie also features the tens of thousands of Americans who played a central role in our nation’s nuclear weapons program. Those workers continue those efforts today—their efforts, not without sacrifice.
The Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act (EEOICPA) was enacted in 2000. This Act aids in compensating individuals (or their survivors) who developed cancer while doing their jobs at a Department of Energy (DOE) facility or an atomic weapons employer facility. The NIOSH Division of Compensation Analysis and Support is responsible for assessing work related radiation exposure for those workers who worked at these facilities. Several EEOICPA-covered facilities are highlighted in Oppenheimer, as described below:
- The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was also known as the “Rad Lab” in the film. This was where the electromagnetic enrichment process was developed to separate the more useful type of uranium, U-235, from the natural form.
- The Los Alamos National Laboratory was the secret city where the world’s top scientists came together to work on the “Gadget.”
- The Metallurgical Lab, known as the “Met Lab,” was the home of the laboratory under the football stadium at the University of Chicago. This was where the world’s first nuclear reactor was constructed. This technology was then used at the DOE Hanford and Oakridge X-10 labs to manufacture the plutonium needed to produce “Fat Man.”
- The Hanford Site in Washington State was where the reactors were built once scientists had demonstrated that Pu-239 (a form of plutonium) could be produced in a nuclear reactor.
- The Labs in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, played a major role as the site for both uranium enrichment and plutonium production plants. The Y-12 lab, one of two labs at Oak Ridge, was where workers produced the highly enriched uranium for “Little Boy.” That material was then sent to Los Alamos for fabrication into the nuclear weapon that was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945.
Health Physics—Practice of Radiation Safety
Although radiation safety existed for many years before the Manhattan Project, focus on radiation worker health and safety intensified during this time. Partly out of the secrecy of the project, but also to protect the health of the workers handling radioactive materials, physicists and medical doctors came together to develop improved radiation safety guidelines and measurement techniques, coining the term, “health physics.”
Following the development of health physics at the Met Lab, further improvements were made at each site. This included the use of film badges to quantify external radiation doses received by personnel. Employee training also helped decrease risks when working with radioactive materials. Internal tolerance limits for inhaled and ingested plutonium were developed from information based on health effects observed from workplace exposures to radium. Direct and indirect methods were developed to quantify radioactive materials deposited and retained within the body.
Since the start of the Manhattan Project, more than 300 EEOICPA-covered DOE and atomic weapons employer facilities have contributed to the production of nuclear weapons and nuclear power. Nearly 80 years after Oppenheimer fathered the atomic bomb, these facilities continue to employ tens of thousands of workers to solve our nation’s energy, environment, and security challenges today.
NIOSH scientists have spent the past two decades evaluating and researching radiation safety practices. Today, under the EEOICPA, NIOSH health physicists use these personnel radiation exposure data from film badges and individual bioassay results (interpreted with modern biokinetic modeling software) to estimate specific radiation doses. These data help to determine the probability that an employee’s cancer was caused by their radiation exposure in the workplace.
NIOSH and its Division of Compensation Analysis and Support are proud to serve the community of America’s nuclear workforce. Under the EEOICPA, NIOSH will continue to provide scientific support for claims involving workers with cancer due to radiation exposure.
Additional information about radiation safety before and during the Manhattan Project can be found at the following links:
