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A letter arrived at Sherrie Neff's Germantown home on Jan. 18, informing her she had been turned down for compensation and medical coverage under a federal program for cancer-stricken atomic workers.

Neff's family had to open the letter for her. The retired Mound Plant worker was in a morphine dream state in an intensive care unit at Ohio State University Medical Center, sedated so she wouldn't pull out the breathing tube that's keeping her alive.

A former Germantown councilwoman, Neff has lost a breast, a leg and a lung to cancer. She has been in the hospital most of January. Doctors say a new, fast-growing mass in her chest, probably inoperable, is obstructing her esophagus.

Neff and her family believe her illness was caused by exposure to radiation and chemicals over her 37-year career at Miamisburg's Mound Plant. Federal officials say a technical document detailing the plant's hazards, known as a "site profile," doesn't support her claim.

But a newly released independent audit says that document is flawed, and may be a poor guide to whether some Mound workers were poisoned on the job.

The audit found that support staffers like Neff often weren't monitored for radiation exposures even though many faced the same risks as radiation workers. And employees like Neff, who helped to clean up Mound buildings in the 1990s prior to the plant's closure, were exposed to significant hazards without adequate monitoring.

Among the audit findings:

• Mound workers weren't properly monitored for possible exposures to toxic heavy metals and superheated plutonium-238 oxide, which linger in the lungs and don't show up in urine tests. That means workers may have gotten significant exposures without knowing about it for months, if ever.

• Workers in some buildings were likely exposed to high levels of colorless, odorless radon gas that came from the "Old Cave," a storage pit for radium and thorium wastes. Ironically, negative pressure hoods that were designed as safety devices actually sucked the carcinogenic gases into buildings through foundation cracks. "Radiation safety personnel would put their alpha monitors over the cracks and (the monitors) would peg out."

• While employees deemed to be radiation workers were monitored with film badges, many others who worked around the same hazards — administrative, security, maintenance and janitorial staff — may not have been monitored. Mound officials ignored film badges that turned completely black due to radioactive exposures, assuming that workers intentionally exposed the badges in hopes of being reassigning to safer duties.

• Mound, which processed plutonium and polonium and developed a reactor that used highly radioactive thorium, handled a wide array of radioactive materials, including exotic isotopes that weren't always part of worker monitoring.

• Inadequate worker monitoring procedures "may have led to significant under-reporting and missed dose at Mound." The plant's poor monitoring and worker-protection practices persisted even into the late 1990s, as employees were removing equipment from the buildings to shut the plant down.

• Old Mound records that may have shed light on some of these problems were buried in 2005 in a radioactive waste landfill at Los Alamos, N.M., without the knowledge of compensation program officials.

Scientists with Sanford Cohen and Associates of Vienna, Va., a company that provides technical advice to the government on energy and environmental issues, made the findings as part of a 191-page audit of the existing site profile for Mound. The profile, or guidebook, is used by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to determine whether a worker was likely sickened by on-the-job exposure, and therefor eligible for compensation. The Mound profile was drafted by scientists at the Energy Department's Oak Ridge (Tenn.) Associated Universities.

Written in July but released publicly earlier this month, the audit is a first step in a "scientific dialog" on the site profile expected this year before the federal Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, said NIOSH spokeswoman Amanda Harney. The board oversees the federal Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program.

Worker advocate Richard Miller of the Washington watchdog group the Government Accountability Project said the audit flags some problems that could help Mound workers qualify for special cohort status — a classification that would allow them to automatically receive lump-sum payments and medical benefits if they have certain cancers.

"These are not trivial, minor doses" that may have been missed by faulty monitoring, Miller said. "There are possibly significant doses here."

Sherrie Neff's husband of 40 years, Bob, said his wife was a dedicated Mound worker for decades. She was featured in a Dayton Daily News series on atomic workers called "Ohio's Nuclear Legacy: troubled past, uncertain future."

"She won awards, all kinds of plaques, anywhere they wanted her to work, she'd go," he said. "She's paying for it with her life right now."

17 former workers interviewed in audit of Mound Plant site profile

As part of its independent audit of a proposed Mound Plant site profile, Sanford Cohen and Associates interviewed 17 former workers to get a better understanding of radiological control and worker monitoring practices at the Miamisburg atomic plant. Here are some highlights of their comments, paraphrased in the audit report. The workers weren't named in the report.

Radon dose was considered by workers to be "the joker in the deck" at Mound. In Building R and SW, radon exposure trumped all other dose contributions.

A number of strange types of radionuclides were used at Mound. These radionuclides were ubiquitous and moved all over the site and you would find them in the most unexpected places.

Mound was generally safe in most cases. There were a lot of burnouts (workers reaching their radiation exposure limits) in SM building, though (from handling fuel cells and heat sources).

The workers put too much faith in the fact that they were wearing their respirators. Some workers didn't submit urine samples when they were supposed to. Also the bioassay group did too little monitoring and for too few isotopes. Mound was a research facility under a code of silence that transcended good common sense.

The health physics staff was understaffed, but those present were good technicians. It was just hard for only a few RCTs (radiological control technicians) to cover all the areas adequately. In the early days, very few people were formally trained in health physics. They just learned it on the job as they assisted in the monitoring efforts.

Because Mound work was done by many independent researchers, their classified work and the isotopes they were using were often only known to them. Janitors and other maintenance workers, who had to access their spaces, often did not know of the radiological hazards present, and were not monitored.

There have been reports that individuals used to put their badges under the lip of the hoods to get out of doing hot work. As a result, dosimetry personnel did not trust the data when badges came back totally black. One individual indicated that he was working in a hood with high dose rates, and was assigned a zero dose.

How to get information on the compensation act

Atomic workers and survivors who want information about the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Act can meet with federal health officials when the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health meets in Mason next week.

The board will meet Feb. 7 through 9 at the Cincinnati Marriott Northeast Hotel, 9664 Mason-Montgomery Road, starting at 9 a.m. each day. To schedule an appointment with staff of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, call (800) 356-4674, or e-mail ocas@cdc.gov.

The meeting, which will include discussion of granting special exposure cohort status to workers at the Feed Materials Production Center at Fernald, is open to the public.

»Read the special series 'Ohio's Nuclear Legacy' DaytonDailyNews.com/piketon