CALLISON: What were your initial impressions of working at Y-12, what are your initial impressions of Y-12?

BELL: My initial impressions as a very greedy 20-year old were, I was overwhelmed at the high tech, the amount of work that was going on, how busy the place was. I did not have to serve in the armed forces, so this was a sort of alternative duty, I felt like I was performing my patriotism for the country to defeat the enemy of communism. And it was very exciting in the beginning. We had a wide variety of work, there were thousands of people. It was very interesting.

CALLISON: I guess my next question is at what point did you realize that you had developed beryllium disease.

BELL: I did not realize that I had developed beryllium disease until I was specifically tested for beryllium disease in 1993. I had developed breathing problems around 1980, which were misdiagnosed as asthma. And until the beryllium specific testing started in '92, there was no way of knowing specifically what caused the breathing problems. And as a former beryllium worker, I qualified for the testing, and when I received it, I also received the confirmation that the problem was beryllium related.

CALLISON: What are some of the symptoms? I mean you mentioned earlier that sometimes, you're doing fine, you can speak in sentences, and other times you can't. Do you want to talk about that?

BELL: That's correct, it's a very roller coaster type ride so far as the disease. Sometimes I have peaks where I don't have any symptoms at all, I can do almost anything I want to do. I have other times that my breathing capacity drops so low and stays that way that I either have to go in the emergency room or go in the hospital and take breathing treatments and they run IVs and I have to do that typically at least once a year. My doctor calls it the tune-up.

But when my breathing problems begin to get out of control, I have to take a more intense regimen of the medicine and there are a number of side effects from the medicine. I'm on steroids, bronchial dilators, antihistamines, that's the main course of treatment. The treatment is very similar to asthma, but it's much more intense. And the side effects can range from moodiness, mild depression, a bloating, redness of skin. Sometimes the symptoms from the medicine are worse, actually, than the disease itself.

CALLISON: When you started working at Y-12, do you feel that you were adequately protected?

BELL: In hindsight, no. We did have some safety meetings that explained that there was some danger to beryllium, as well as some of the other toxins and chemicals that we were working with, but the problems were minimized. There was a common expression, you could eat the stuff and it wouldn't hurt you. That's probably true, but you probably shouldn't breathe it, either. I think the biggest thing was the push for production was put ahead of worker health.

CALLISON: Once you realized that you had beryllium disease, did the plant take appropriate actions?

BELL: I believe in my case, they did take appropriate action. The area that I was working at the time I was diagnosed did handle some beryllium and showed trace amounts of beryllium in that area. I was almost immediately removed to another part of the plant that did not have a historical record of having any beryllium in it. But there are some people still working at the plant in beryllium areas who have been diagnosed as beryllium sensitive, which has a strong probability of developing into beryllium disease.

CALLISON: Is the link between worker health problems and exposure to nuclear facilities an obvious link or is it something that you're having to kind of fight for?

BELL: In the case of the beryllium issues, beryllium is such a specific use material that there is not much problem in linking that. In fact, one of the former Department of Energy secretaries has made a statement saying that where a person develops beryllium disease and has worked in a DOE facility that used beryllium, that the work relationship should not be questioned. However, with some of the other toxins, people have had a terrible time making the work link, even though the symptoms should have been obvious that they were work related. Beryllium is one of the few that are provable right off the bat.

CALLISON: If it is proven that the government is the cause of the health problems -- I mean it sounds like with beryllium it's obvious, with others it's not -- should they be held accountable and how?

BELL: This is a very big issue right now. I believe that in the cases where it is warranted, that possible civil fines or even criminal prosecution should be instituted if it's necessary. I think the main issue right now is taking care of the people that received the exposures. We, as workers, made a huge contribution to winning the cold war and we feel that we don't want a windfall profit from this, we simply want our lives to be as near normal as it would have been, had we not developed these illnesses. We would consider adequate compensation as being having our medical bills paid in full and having wages that would be comparable to what we would have been making, had we not developed the disease.

CALLISON: Do you think that the government is addressing these health issues?

BELL: I think they are skirting these issues. They are addressing some of the issues as they are with the beryllium, some cancers that are radiation induced. It seems to me that they are trying to appease a small amount of the people at the expense of exploiting an extremely large amount of people. The issue of communities that have been affected, for instance, the health problems of people near these plants is not being addressed, in my opinion, nearly as well as it should be.

CALLISON: How should they be addressed?

BELL: I feel that if there are people who feel that their health problems are related to the Department of Energy sites, there should be clinics and occupational medicine doctors available to check these people out and either confirm or reject whether or not these problems actually are related to the plant operations.

CALLISON: In the past, DOE was secretive about the materials used in their facilities. Has this policy changed?

BELL: I'm sorry?

CALLISON: In the past, they were pretty secretive about the materials they were using in facilities, like Mack showed us his medical records were blacked out with some substances. There were, like, experiments that were done that weren't really talked about. I mean I guess my question is is DOE keeping the public informed about what they're doing or are they still operating under the cold war secrecy?

BELL: I believe that a lot has been improved so far as the secrecy aspect. There's been a tremendous amount of declassification, especially since Hazel O'Leary was secretary of the Department of Energy, she pretty much started the declassification, and it's currently ongoing. One good example would be the beryllium collection at the Oak Ridge reading room consists of over 9,500 titles of beryllium related documents. This is just on beryllium and of course there's a number of others, other radioactive elements, other toxins. Quite a bit has improved.

But if we have that amount of material that is available, we often wonder what have we not found yet, what has been declassified. And we're finding that historically, DOE and the contractors have pretty much hidden a lot of material that would have been detrimental to them, for instance in court cases, by declassifying them; they simply buried them in declassification -- buried them with classification, not declassification. Let me restate that, that DOE has at some point buried some of the documents in classification issues.

CALLISON: I had a follow-up question, but I lost it somewhere from there. I have heard stories of, like, falsified records, serious, like, just managers not following safety procedures, safety programs pretty much falling apart. In your opinion, do you think that's coming directly from, like, DOE headquarters or is it kind of happening more at the contractor management level?

BELL: I have a feeling that the -- let me back up and think about this a minute. The contractors are the ones who are generating the most of the records where this is involved or failing to produce the records. We do have instances where records have been changed, where records were not generated that should have been, where there were outright coverups. I have a feeling that this probably did come from upper level DOE management. I don't have any proof of this, but there again, the classification issues cloud what we're able to find out about where to put the blame.

It's really hard to nail it down sometimes as to how it all got started, but the air of secrecy, the classification issues, the need to know basis under which we operated -- if I was working in a particular shop on a particular job, I did not need to know what was going on in another shop. So there was even within the plant itself, unless you got moved around quite a bit like I did, it's possible that an employee would not know what was going on in other parts of the plant.

CALLISON: What is your general impression of the government as a neighbor?

BELL: The government as a neighbor?

CALLISON: Yes, as a citizen, how do you feel having these facilities right here?

BELL: Very mixed. There are people within the government, both in the Department of Energy and in Congress for instance, that are trying to change things for the better, but so far, it's been pretty much piecemeal. They haven't done enough and they haven't done it soon enough.

Some of the people are sick enough that they need immediate help, their issues need to be addressed now. Some are broke, some have lost almost everything. They've lost their homes, they've lost their health, they've lost their income, and the government says, "Yes, we put people in harm's way and we're going to do something about it, but so far, they haven't offered enough to be reasonable.

Some of the past settlements, such as with the uranium miners, it's been proven that even people who qualified had trouble collecting and that the amounts that they were offered were not adequate and that health coverage often was not provided. We need all of that and I don't think that's unreasonable to ask that.

CALLISON: You mentioned earlier a little bit about the government being pretty much immune to the...

BELL: Yes, there's a problem with sovereign immunity. The government more or less cannot be sued, unless they give you permission to sue. Some of the beryllium victims recently were denied suit under sovereign immunity on federal tort cases. We had filed for damages against the federal government and a federal judge dismissed the cases on the grounds of sovereign immunity and we have no recourse in this. It's just like saying, "Yes, we're guilty, but so what." I mean it's almost like a slap in the face. And I understand the reason that sovereign immunity exists; the government has to operate and it can't operate and fight lawsuits all the time. But I think there should be some exclusion for people like myself and others that have been harmed by the government or indirectly by the government and its contractors.

CALLISON: I guess my question would be was your developing beryllium disease, like, from one large dose, long doses?

BELL: Probably not. There have been cases where there's documentation that one exposure has caused disease, but it's more likely that it developed over a period of time. The normal latency period is somewhere around ten years from first exposure, but since I worked in and out of the beryllium shops over a period of about 15 years, it's very hard to pinpoint when the exposure occurred that actually triggered the disease.

Beryllium disease is pretty much -- let me back up. We're going to get rained on. Time out, let me collect my thoughts. Beryllium disease develops over a long period of time and to some people that develop it, the disease never becomes symptomatic. And it's just very, very difficult to nail down a specific time, a specific exposure that triggered whatever -- it's similar to an allergic reaction and it's just almost impossible to nail down exactly the time that the exposure occurred that triggered the disease.

CALLISON: Can you just kind of explain what you've got going here?

BELL: Okay, I developed a hobby of airbrush art back in the late '70s, I suppose, and I have used this art form to pretty much advertise the plight of Oak Ridge and this 1969 Chevy van has been the canvas for doing that. It's highly visible in traffic, it gets the point across.

This particular scene here is a depiction of the K-25 site Tosca incinerator. I use the sort of sorcery type theme that I have used on motorcycles and vans for quite some time. It depicts the discharge from the incinerator being picked up by the lady in the cauldron and the cauldron overflows and turns into flames that are engulfing the man behind her. It's just -- it's a rolling statement, I would say.

CALLISON: What's with the barrels down there?

BELL: The barrels are a depiction of some of the chemical leaks. This is pretty typical of most of your DOE sites. They have a lot of barrels on site that are degrading. There's uranium hexachloride cylinders that are leaking. There's just a lot of contaminants and waste that have not been cleaned up and there's nothing to do with them, nobody wants them in their back yard, so they stay in place. Then as the containers deteriorate, they begin to leak and they end up in the ground water or as airborne contaminants and this is sort of a depiction of this situation.