If it wasn't bad enough that Mitch McConnell falsely tried to take credit for the sick nuclear workers' compensation program at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion uranium enrichment plant (PGDP), http://www.ruralthoughts.net/?q=node/92 he's now claiming in a new ad that he "lead the fight" for the cleanup of the PGDP.

There are a couple problems with that hypothesis. First, as I wrote about in the column at the link above, McConnell was not on the cutting edge of environmental awareness at the plant. Consider that it wasn't even the federal government that first notified the local residents about their wells being contaminated, which was the news that got the entire cleanup process going. (Where were the feds under McConnell's watch?)

"McCracken County officials, in response to complaints by a plant neighbors about their well water, called in Kentucky officials to test local private wells in 1988. The state found the contamination. That is what first alerted the immediate plant neighbors about the environmental problems at the plant," said Ron Lamb, a life long plant neighbor whose family's roots to the area predate the building of the plant. Lamb, who runs a successful auto alignment shop near the plant, has been, from the beginning, a neighborhood leader in learning about the environmental problems at the plant, and in trying to get just compensation for the environmental damage which has occurred on his and other neighbors' private lands.

"Yeah, we contacted McConnell's office, and Hubbard's, and others when we first learned of the contamination. We never met with McConnell. He just sent a letter back. He and the others just shrugged us off. They told us that the plant had it under control and that it was just a minor amount of contamination," Lamb went on to say. "Besides that, there is no cleanup planned for the contamination on private lands around the plant."

Vivian Puckett, one of the plant neighbors the state initially found had contamination in their wells, said "The state guy told us not to drink the water. We wrote Sen. McConnell, but everytime you write him, he writes you back like you are stupid. He never did anything. McConnell was in cahoots with all the people that said there wasn't any problems at the plant." Puckett said McConnell isn't being truthful in his ad when he says he lead the fight for the cleanup.

Corinne Whitehead, long time community and environmental activist, and president of the Coalition for Health Concern, the oldest local environmental organization in Western Kentucky, focused for years on the environmental problems at the PGDP, where her late husband worked. Whitehead, over the 20 years of working on issues at the plant, had many instances of approaching Sen. McConnell, pushing for cleanup and exposed worker's compensation.

"My general impression is that he ignored the problems," said Whitehead. "I felt he had no interest." Whitehead, past president of the Kentucky League of Women Voters and widely recognized for her lifetime of community activism in Kentucky (i.e. see http://www.womeninkentucky.com/site/reform/c_whitehead.html ) said, in response to McConnell's claim that he lead the fight for the cleanup of the PGDP, "It's laughable....It's not laughable...it's tragic. Sen. McConnell has been absent dealing with the agony of workers, workers' families, and plant neighbor's health issues. He's been absent on the cleanup."

In fact, it wasn't until 1992 until the facility was placed on the "Superfund" list, and the much cleanup started at all. Considering that McConnell took office in 1984, by 1988 he should have been up on the problems at the plant. Not only wasn't he up on them then, he downplayed them, and did little but secure the minimal amount of cleanup funding between 1992 and 1998, when the Washington Post expose' about the coverups at the plant went national and McConnell, and the other local and statewide politicians who had downplayed environmental problems at the facility, were caught like deer in the headlights having done little or nothing.

This is key, also, because it was the Dept. of Energy, along with the politicians, including McConnell, who continued to downplay the problems at the plant even as some workers and plant neighbors were trying to bring attention to the problem. One of the strategies that the politicians, McConnell included, found themselves getting sucked into was, in downplaying the problems at the plant, they created a false reality that if there weren't many problems, it wouldn't take much funding to clean it up. This was fine with the Dept. of Energy. Thus, Paducah received inadequate funding to deal with the serious environmental problems at the site.

McConnell has to share in the blame for that. After the August 1998 expose in the Washington Post about the environmental problems at the facility, McConnell became more interested in the facility. And, as a result of the bad publicity for Kentucky, he did manage, in conjunction with then Sec. of Energy Bill Richardson, who made three trips to Paducah in the aftermath of the international media barrage the plant came under, to get more money coming into the facility for cleanup. However, that brings us to the second big problem with McConnell's claim. Although there has been $2 billion dollars spent supposedly on "cleanup," there hasn't been a lot of cleanup at the plant.

A good deal of that money that has been sucked up by such republican-linked international corporations as Bechtel - but the work that has been accomplished for the most part has been superficial, and more just shifting problems around rather than actually eliminating them. Bechtel, for the many years they were the lead cleanup contractor, produced thousands of pages of written reports, engaged in some experiments, most of which did not end up in major cleanup. Their on-the-ground cleanup activities were minor - hauling things to the dump, so to speak, and the like.

The worst problems at the site are such things as old dumps, lagoons, ditches, and spill sites which have no liners or other environmental controls, and into which very toxic and dangerous materials have been dumped. These are leaching into the groundwater and have formed one of the largest, most toxic groundwater contamination plumes on earth. The Ohio River is being contaminated by this plume, and the poor, minority community of Cairo, Illinois, gets its drinking water below the plant site. Not much is being done to address this.

Bechtel failed, although they received hundreds of millions of dollars, to even address the groundwater contamination or the sources. They hauled off a huge pile of crushed uranium barrels, dubbed "Drum Mountain." They brought in cranes and loaded them into train cars and shipped them out to be dumped in the desert in Utah at a place called "Envirocare." Other radioactive scrap metal went to the same place. They have shipped barrels of radioactive, PCB sludges to the DOE incinerator in Oak Ridge, Tennessee., which is poisoning that community. They did a few other things that are good, but very minor. They also had problems - leaky shipments, wastes disposed in improper landfills. But they, like Union Carbide and Martin Marietta, got out while the gettin' was good. Where was the government oversight?

The major cleanup projects - the cleanup of the old landfills, (including the "classified landfill which contains non nuclear (we think) parts to nuclear weapons) the uranium burial grounds, the C-400 spill and leak sites, the oil landfarm, the old coal pile, and then the tearing down and disposal of the 10 or more buildings that are currently considered "radiological sites" (which means they are too radioactive to go into without protection) - haven't even begun for the most part. DOE keeps moving back the "completion date" for the cleanup - it's now 2040 I believe - and the Bush administration has tried its best to reduce funding for the cleanups at nuclear facilities. The cost is going to run into billions more, although over 2 billion taxpayer's dollars have already been used up, with little oversight from McConnell or other leaders, for that matter.

But, as Ronald Lamb points out, there has been no plan for cleaning up the contamination that has been documented on private lands surrounding the plant. Back several years ago the Dept. of Energy released maps of surface contamination outside the plant boundaries. This includes findings of plutonium, neptunium, and the like found on many private land holdings. http://www.sprol.com/?p=43 There is no plan to clean up this contamination, and people are still living in it!

Through all of this McConnell has played a mostly mechanical role. The Dept. of Energy includes funding for cleanup at Paducah in the president's budget request, and for the most part, it gets funded. McConnell isn't going to go out and ask the president not to bring money into his state. But the fact is that McConnell has not gone out and fought for more funding for the cleanup, and his leadership on the issue is "laughable" and "tragic."

Through the 8 years that I was on the Dept. of Energy Citizen's Advisory Board for the Paducah site, McConnell never once attended. I don't recall that his Paducah office people ever came. They may have once in a great while, but they weren't regular attendees. We did not have a running dialogue with McConnell over what we were finding through the committee. McConnell was detached and uninterested. Ron Lamb, Vivian Puckett, Corinne Whitehead and I all agree - McConnell's attitude was that the plant had it under control and the problems were minor. This attitude has, in the long run, hurt cleanup efforts at the plant. That is the truth. For McConnell to be trying to say that he "lead the fight" for the cleanup at the PGDP is such a distortion that he shouldn't be allowed to get away with it. People need to know the truth, and the truth isn't in that political ad. But then again, is that such a surprise?

A good way to close this article would be to quote from the published academic paper, "State-Corporate Crime and the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant," Western Criminology Review 8(2), 29–43 (2007) Alan S. Bruce, Quinnipiac University; Paul J. Becker, University of Dayton http://wcr.sonoma.edu/v08n2/29.bruce/bruce.pdf .

"Given the government’s role in encouraging corporations to participate in a dangerous business, it was government’s responsibility to implement and enforce strict regulations to ensure safety of nuclear plant employees and the public, however, government efforts were entirely inadequate and sanctions were rarely enforced for violations of safety standards. At the organizational level, while safety guidelines were devel-oped, safety programs were inappropriately staffed, and it was generally left to line personnel to make sure that safety measures were being followed. Given the climate created by government and management, and the failure of government to regulate and enforce safety standards PGDP employees were unlikely to fully appreciate the dangers of their work and thus unlikely to take adequate precautions.

"The Louisville Courier-Journal provides a good summary of the harms caused to PGDP workers as well as the community and surrounding area: 'safety practices, concealed health concerns, and decades of ignorance, expediency and poor oversight have left workers, nearby wildlife and the land itself damaged by chemical and radioactive toxins. Workers have inhaled the radioactive dust, chemicals have seeped into the ground water, and debris dumped off the site has created pockets of radiation. And the silent devastation is being seen in creatures ranging from insects to bobcats—an ominous warning to the humans who share the same soil, water, and air. (Carroll and Malone, 2000a)'

In this case, as acknowledged by the federal government (Carroll, 2000c), a series of decisions from the governmental level to the plant operators ensured PGDP workers, the environment, and public safety were victims of state-corporate crime."

No doubt these "state-corporate crimes" started before McConnell took office. But he's had 24 years of being a part of that government, and a good deal of this occurred under his watch. To somehow now try to say that he has been on top of the situation is one big fib and he shouldn't be allowed to get away with it.