COLLEY: Frenold.

CALLISON: Frenold, right, yeah.

COLLEY: See, in Ohio, we have Frenold, we have Mound, we have Piketon, we have Ashtabula. I think Ohio probably has the most nuclear facilities than any other state.

CALLISON: There's about four or five?

COLLEY: Mm-hmm, and we have Frenold and Mound I would say are within about a hundred miles of each other.

CALLISON: That's crazy, I mean that's -- because if one didn't get you, probably one of the other ones did. The first question is just how long did you work at Fort Smith and what were your duties there?

COLLEY Okay, I started in 1980 and actually, I'm still on the recall list. They didn't fire me, they had to let me go, but I'm not working and I'm not getting any benefits.

CALLISON: And what did you do while you were working there?

COLLEY: I was an electrician. I started out as a second class electrician and as a second class electrician, I have been in every building on the plant site. And when I started here, I thought it was the safest job I ever worked because they wore hard hats and safety glasses and I never did have to wear those anyplace I ever worked and I thought they were really protecting me.

CALLISON: And were there other ways that you felt they were protecting you?

COLLEY: No, that was the only way.

CALLISON: You didn't have, like, safety meetings or --

COLLEY: They had many safety meetings and you basically went in there and signed your name and said you were at a meeting. They never, at no time, told us what chemicals we were working in or if there were any hazards there at the plant. It wasn't until 1999 that they finally admitted that they had plutonium there.

CALLISON: Is it one of the chemicals or __________ that you were exposed to?

COLLEY: Yes, everyone who worked at the plant's been exposed to it.

CALLISON: What are the health problems that you've suffered?

COLLEY: When I first got sick, I was having numbness in my arms, in my legs, my lips were going numb. I was working with trichlorethylene, cleaning down uranium contaminated cells, but at this time, I only thought it was like PCBs. And I got sick and was off for about a year, then I got better, and not knowing that it was my job, so I went back to work. Again, the company put me back in hazardous chemicals and didn't tell me what we were working in.

There were times when we would go in areas where there were blowing air hoses and they would be blowing uranium contaminated dust all over the place and we would walk into this area and these workers would be only wearing like a dust mask. Of course, we didn't know it was uranium contaminated dust at that time. It's taken me from 1985 until 1999 to figure out what I did get exposed to there and today, I still don't actually know.

And when I got sick, I wound up having three tumors, chronic bronchitis, thyroid problems, memory loss, joint/muscle pain. I had a tumor removed off the back of my neck and today, I have knots coming up in here in my glands, they started about three weeks ago. So every day, it's just something different. And when I went to work there, they only hired the healthy worker effect and they gave me a physical and I was completely healthy when I went to work there.

CALLISON: When you say the healthy worker effect, what do you mean by that?

COLLEY: Okay, the healthy worker effect is where they hire the healthiest workers, they give you a physical at plant, they have their own doctors there, and then if you're healthy, they hire you, because it takes you longer to get sick.

CALLISON: And you were perfectly healthy when you started?

COLLEY: I was perfectly healthy. I had 20/20 vision, my hearing was excellent, I had no problems whatsoever, had never taken a pill in my life.

CALLISON: How long from when you were hired to the first symptoms?

COLLEY: When I went to work here on my last job, I worked like three years and I worked six days a week and I never missed no more than two days of work. When I went to work at the plant, I worked one year before I started getting sick.

CALLISON: How many days did you start losing?

COLLEY: I was off for almost a year.

CALLISON: Continuously?

COLLEY: Mm-hmm.

CALLISON: Wow.

COLLEY: And then in '83, I got sick again. And in '83, I started at the plant, came back to the plant in '84. '83 to '84 was when I was off and I came back in '84, still not knowing that my job was causing my problems. In '85, I got really sick and I haven't been at the plant since '85.

CALLISON: But you're still on --

COLLEY: I'm still on their recall list and I'm still fighting for all my benefits.

CALLISON: Being on the recall list means simply what?

COLLEY: That means that I'm still an employee.

CALLISON: So they can call you back any time?

COLLEY: Because they can call me back any time. There's been some workers that they made provisions for and got them out of different buildings so they could go to work. I was never offered that provision, they have fought me from one end to the other. I haven't only fought with the company, I've also fought with the State of Ohio. They did a falsification of records, the doctors falsify your records and they send you to these doctors and these doctors -- at no time was I ever ordered to go see a toxicologist from the worker's comp. until my last hearing.

And the last hearing that I had, they called me an anti-nuker. They were ordered to turn in my exposure records and I was ordered to go see a toxicologist in Columbus. And when I got up there, he was to evaluate me for depression, which is another problem I'm being treated for is clinical depression. And so this toxicologist, he couldn't give an opinion because he was not a psychiatrist, but he felt like I was very depressed and should go see one.

CALLISON: This hearing that you were talking about, is that the one a couple of weeks ago?

COLLEY: The hearing?

CALLISON: Yes, didn't you say that you went to a hearing and --

COLLEY: A worker's comp. hearing.

CALLISON: Oh, okay, worker's comp. You've touched on this a little bit, but I'm going to ask you again. Do you think that you were properly warned about the potential dangers and adequately protected?

COLLEY: No, at no time did I ever wear a respirator, except one time, we ran inside the cell housing, another employee and I, and we had to wear a full face mask. And now I'm kind of wondering what was the mask, you know, was it a dust mask, was it a gas mask. They do train the workers and take you over and fit you for a mask, but these masks, they're not to wear around your work site, in case you ever need them. I found out that they were having, like, releases almost every day. They can't run the uranium enrichment facilities unless they are having releases every day.

CALLISON: What are in the releases?

COLLEY: In the buildings.

CALLISON: But what are they, I mean --

COLLEY: Hexafluorides, uranium hexafluoride. At Piketon, we produced the highest assay of uranium, which was 97.7 percent, and that made the extra blast in the bomb. We also did a lot of stuff there for the nuclear navy and we're still producing special nuclear material for whatever that is. It's hard to get any information now about the Piketon, you have to have a Q clearance and just certain people are allowed to go in and look at old records. I'm not sure that even the attorneys can get in to look at them, I don't know.

I found a document at one time that dated back to 1947 where one certain colonel or something was told not to tell the workers or the contractors because they were scared of lawsuits at that time. So the government has known it from the very beginning of the production of the Manhattan Project.

CALLISON: And when you say known it, you mean --

COLLEY: They knew that they would make the workers sick and many of them would die from the chemicals and the radiation. And that's one thing at Piketon, it's not just the radiation, it's the variety of chemicals. We have hexafluoride, fluorine, freon. You know, you can't even put freon in your car, but they have all this freon that they release to the atmosphere. They clean the system with SO₂, sulfur dioxide and that's been into the atmosphere. They had chromium, hexachromium in the cooling towers, which they just switched out and now they have phosphate and this stuff recirculates. The cooling, it takes as much electricity to operate Piketon as it does to run the whole city of Los Angeles, California.

CALLISON: Wow.

COLLEY: So these cooling towers run the system and recirculate the water. These waters have radioactive material in them, plus the chemicals, and these are discharged into the Cider River, which goes into the Ohio River.

CALLISON: Where does it go from there?

COLLEY: Towards Cincinnati.

CALLISON: So it's still getting into the rivers?

COLLEY: Oh, yes. They have some pipes and they're about this big around and two of them, there's one straight down in the water in the Cider River and the other one is like a big stone and the water's coming out of it. And at one time, we had the EPA there and they were there taking fish samples and the fish were radioactive. But they refused to post any signs in the creeks for the community people and the children still swim in the creeks and a lot of people still eat the fish. And we've had some of the fish opened up and they have tumors and they're really gross looking.

CALLISON: And they're not doing anything about --

COLLEY: And they're not doing anything about it. They just now admitted that they did find plutonium in the east drainage ditch. Like I was telling you, when I first got sick, I thought I had gotten sick on PCBs and trichlorethylene. And the PCBs they claim was below the standards of being harmful. Well, after I got sick, my doctor, he noticed my hands, they were dry and cracking, and we used buckets of this stuff to clean down these components and they're in confined spaces.

So when I started complaining about them surveying the areas that we worked on, because I wanted to know what I was working in, they came and took a survey of me and in a 15-minute survey, I exceeded the time limits in seven minutes and I had a respirator on at that time and we had been doing this for six months. When we got through with these chemicals, we just dumped them down the drains because we didn't know any better.

And so after I complained and they took this test -- and of course, it has it wrote up that I was wearing a respirator. Well, that's the only time I ever really wore a respirator, except for the one time I went in the cell housing. And so they done away with this job and they wouldn't let the workers go back inside these components and they had to use, like, a little squirt bottle and squirt the trichlorethylene to do the job.

And when the Health Physics come to survey the area, they said that when the stuff was dripping on the floor, there was another hazard that was happening, but I don't know what that was. And for a long time, the government made me think that I was the only one being exposed to the chemicals, the trichlorethylene and PCBs. And they came to my house and they interrogated me and they asked me over and over and over what I thought I was working in. And then in 1989, I read a paper where the citizens in the community of Piketon, Ohio, filed a lawsuit against the company and their main thing was the chemicals, trichlorethylene and PCBs. So at that time, I knew, in '89, the government had to be lying.

And I had been paid worker's comp. and today, I'm still being paid my medical and my doctors get paid, but they took me off of worker's comp. in 1989 or '87, I'm not real sure. They sent me to this doctor, Dr. George Ishman, who was told not to give me an examination, but I was supposed to be examined by worker's comp. to be taken off of worker's comp., basically. He said I was fine, he saw no reason why I shouldn't go back to work, and he even stated in his papers that they told him not to run any tests.

So three or four weeks later, I had this appointment with Dr. Song in Portsmouth and when I went in his office. I had three tumors and I had to have a total hysterectomy. And he called me at home and he said due to the enlargement of my stomach and due to the last ultrasound he had taken and due to the chemicals that I was involved in, he felt like I should have emergency surgery. And I was in my 30s when all this happened.

CALLISON: Since you started speaking out about your health concerns, how have you been treated?

COLLEY Well, pretty badly. I've been told in newspapers that, "If I was her husband, I would take out more insurance," and to remember Karen Silkwood. I've been kicked out of the union hall two or three times and go right back because I'm still a union member. Now the union is starting to realize what I've been saying is true because they testified at one hearing in Congress. That was the first time Jeff Wilburn has ever testified and he gets to go to Congress and I've been fighting them for 14 years and I still haven't been able to go to Congress to tell my story.

What makes it back for me, I have relatives that were working there. It was like I was putting my relatives out of a job because I was trying to shut the plant down, which I had never said I wanted to shut the plant down or stop the production, because I still really didn't know what was going on out there. I would ask for surveys and I'd see them taking -- some of the surveys were back in the '70s and they would take a pencil and erase them out and change the surveys.

When I went to one of the public meetings about the community lawsuit and started telling my story, the community people eventually made me president of this group called Portsmouth-Piketon Residents for Environmental Safety and Security so I also kind of like represented the community and the workers. And so at one time, they turned the community people against me, they turned the workers against me, they turned my family against me. And I told them as long as I have a penny in my pocket that I'll continue to fight them because what they did is criminal and what they continue to do is criminal.

And I was going in the union hall, gathering documents and giving it to the community residents for their lawsuit. I've been trying to fight for workers' health benefits because once these workers get sick, we can't get insurance, we can't get anyone to hire us. I have a whistle blower now that's -- he blew the whistle about the health and safety issues back in '94. He's turned in 5,000 applications and can't get a job. They bankrupted him. The end of '99, I had to go refinance my home for $65,000.00, so today, right now, I'm $75,000.00 in debt and I had everything paid off.

CALLISON: You talked a little bit about representing the community. Can you talk about how -- I really get the sense that this is not just a worker's issue, but it's also civilian issues.

COLLEY: One thing that people don't seem to understand is the workers are the community, you know, I live 15 miles south of that plant. And I know that there's a lot of young girls and there's girls that's got endometriosis, there's a lot of kids with brain tumors and leukemia. At one of the Piketon meetings, we had ATSDR come and we put out a sheet of paper for people to sign in and there were like 300 people that signed in and 249 or -60 signed in that they had rashes, thyroid problems, miscarriages, tumors, cancer. During the Piketon meeting, I sat beside five workers, all different ages, different time periods working there, that had colon cancer.

I have this one guy, he's 42 years old, his name is Rick Mingus, and he has colon cancer. He's going through radiation and chemo. He's supporting two daughters and he cannot work. He's been turned down twice now for Social Security. He was able to get welfare through at $375 a month and so now they want going back on his ex-wife, causing him more stress and family problems because she's upset because the welfare came after her for the $375 a month.

We went to our representatives to try to get them to do something for him, but they haven't done anything for him yet, and he's so sick he can't even get out of his house. I even asked the contractor.

This Worker Health Study is another big issue because I feel like the government's giving us another study that we don't need. I've got my own Occupational Health and Safety doctor and he's reported my illnesses and I have my own doctors. And some of my doctors, like Mike Toller, who worked at Piketon who won a lawsuit against them, these doctors are credible and they have won lawsuits against the Department of Energy.

The Worker Health Study at Piketon is not taking any chemical or radiation testing at all, just normal testing, and even with the normal testing, they are starting to find a lot of lung cancer. They diagnosed me finally with -- when I was at that hearing in Washington, D.C., where workers went to testify about what happened to them, Dr. Markowitz told me that, yes, I did have a work related chemical bronchitis. All of us seem to have hearing loss because of the big motors and of course, I have vision loss now, too.

The thing about this Worker Study, they're not telling these workers to send in your doctor's statement so they have something to compare it to. And I have like a 30 or 40 percent lung capacity loss and during this Worker Study, it said that I have normal lungs. So I asked Dr. Markowitz, "What do they mean I have normal lung functioning when every doctor, including some that they sent me to worker's comp., said that I had 30 or 40 percent lung capacity loss?" He said that's because they didn't send him any of my other records. But they're not telling these workers to do that.

And so I also had a contractor, because I felt like the contractors also got a lot of exposures because they come in and they use these, like, sponges, we cleaned up the facility and then we're out of there. And this one guy named Larry Daye, who's about 57, about a month and a half ago, he went in to take the test and they basically told him this was normal and nothing real major, including Rick Mingus who has colon cancer. They find out that we have, like, triglycerines are high.

So they told him that they thought he had three spots, he had some spots on his lungs and recommended that he go to see a physician. Well, last week, they opened him up, they closed him back up and said, "We can't do nothing for you." And it just seems like such a crime that they have to open you up, because once the air hits you, it just spreads. He had kidney cancer, now they're telling him it's in his lungs and it's going to go to his brain. And I can relate to that because my brother just passed away. And before I came up here, I stopped to see both of the workers.

And another thing that I feel about this Worker Health Study is they're telling these workers a little bit and they've got this book that they put together with no input, and I asked to have input in it because I'd been the main vocal voice for almost 14 years, except for a couple of other workers that are already dead now. And I asked to have input in this book so I could tell what chemicals that I thought might be there and I didn't, was unable to give any input.

So in this book, it tells you what's in the buildings, supposedly, which it doesn't tell you about the plutonium, the neptunium and other things. And so the union's helping these workers to fill out, "What building did you work in," what they thought was in the buildings. And so to me, that's saying these workers know. At first, I didn't turn that in to Markowitz, but he said that I had to do it, so then I filled it out and I took it up to the union hall and one of the guys filled it out for me.

So now my time limit starts on these chemicals, because once you know, you have a time limit that you can file worker's comp. Then the Department of Energy comes in with this worker's comp. sign and you call this number and some workers have called and it's not gone anywhere. Some workers at Piketon are being referred to an attorney in Cincinnati, which I tried to get to do a class action lawsuit. He's held it up now for three or four months and just last week, they say they can't file a class action lawsuit. And these are the same attorneys that these workers are sending out there to file worker's comp. and he couldn't do anything for me on worker's comp.

So it looks to me like they're giving us information and if Congress doesn't pass some type of compensation bill, these workers are out. They can't sue because of their time limits of knowing. And one thing with the Piketon workers, they lobbied in Washington, D.C., in 1979 over health and safety issues, and nothing has changed since then. They were ordered to do a study of diseases and they wound up doing a study of death and this was a young worker population, so it took them a little longer to die. And still today, we still haven't had a study of the diseases.

And the president of the union at that time, they did a number on him and he's no longer the president of the union. And even though these workers stormed Senator Brennan's office in '79 -- and I lived in the community, but I didn't go to work until 1980, I still didn't know about this -- even though they stormed his office, they did not ever talk about radiation hazards, there was always chemical hazards.

And I feel that since the Department of Energy came out in 1999 saying that we had -- first, they said we had diluted plutonium shipped to Piketon. And I read a book one time called Nuclear Witness and it talked about West __________, New York, sending stuff to Piketon and gumming up the whole system. So I was able to give that to Mary Byrd Davis and she was able to do a press release saying that plutonium was shipped straight in to Piketon. They tried to say it was diluted because it came from Paducah to Piketon.

And even with the story at Piketon, Piketon and Paducah and Oak Ridge basically all do about the same thing and they have about the same hazards and they have the same problem in the community and the same problem with the workers, but they're still denying it.

CALLISONL: Should the government be held accountable for these actions?

COLLEY: Definitely, they should be.

CALLISON: How would you suggest they --

COLLEY: Criminal justice. They say that they don't have the documents, but every document I've seen has somebody's name on it. Somebody knew, some supervisions knew, somebody higher up knew. And like I have mentioned before, that these contractors, they kept changing contractors. Ours was Goodyear Atomic up until 1985 or '86 and then Martin Marietta and Martin Marietta, Incorporation, and then USCC and whoever else is in between there. But the government had these contractors and they'd come in and they make 100 percent profit, they don't have to pay anything and they fight all these claims.

And the government knew back in 1957 that two workers in Piketon, one in '57 and one in '64, was paid compensation for radioactive illnesses. They had a list of 12 workers at Oak Ridge and the amount that the government paid. Herb Smith, I believe, was in '64 at Piketon and he got paid $12,800.00. And Herb Smith's death was in 1957, or Nathan Suyer Smith or Nathan Suyer's was in '57. So the government has known all along that radiation kills and harms you because, you know, even low level radiation, if you're pregnant, kills a fetus or causes damage and childhood leukemia. So they've known since 1912 the harmful effects of radiation.

CALLISON: 1912?

COLLEY Mm-hmm, I think that was the earliest date that I've seen. They knew in the Manhattan Project because how many of the workers died? Even the guy who invented it didn't want it to go any further because he was scared of it, he knew what the harmful effect was of it. We have actually radioactively and chemically killed our own people and we're in a health care crisis in the United States. And that's one reason I think they have held all of this back, because they don't know what to do with all of these people, there's too many of us.

We have a huge problem with fluorines and fluorides and hexafluorides and they cause a lot of damage. We have a lot of workers that have heart problems. I gathered, when I was in Washington, D.C., and I haven't seen it in any of the testimonies. I gathered community residents that had cancer and the workers. Someone at the union hall kept track of the issue, workers as they either died of either accidents or leukemia or brain cancer or whatever, but there's a track in every union hall.

And the Department of Energy has had at one time something called the plutonium-uranium -- the plutonium registry where they had stored body parts. I have tissue missing from my hysterectomy that I had in a tumor. Someone got into one of the components and took some of my tissue out. And so they have stole body parts from community residents and workers, testing them for chemicals. They've also used patients for human experimentation to see how much effect it would have on our soldiers.

And to me, they continue today to experiment on these workers because they know they're being harmed, they're not fully suited up. And I'm not sure that even if they wore protective equipment all day long that they still would be protected in these facilities.

CALLISON: That kind of leads us to sovereign immunity. What are your thoughts on sovereign immunity?

COLLEY: If you can make it that far, to Supreme Court, which I've never been that lucky, they go after your doctors, they go after your attorneys, they discredit everybody. In sovereign immunity, the ones, some, that have taken it all the way to the Supreme Court to have sovereign immunity, they took it like the king can do now wrong. I think that we have to do away with that as citizens because nothing is ever going to change until that sovereign immunity is changed. And why should the government have a license to kill? I mean what makes them any better than anybody else? If it had been a small company, they'd go right after you. So I don't know how we, as citizens, have let them get by with that. There needs to be some legislation to change sovereign immunity.

CALLISON: You mentioned a little earlier about the link between DOE and DOD.

COLLEY: Well, our facility is the nuclear navy and so I think that they're all tied up with the Department of Defense and so far, out of 14 years, I've never really heard anyone go after the Department of Defense on these uranium enrichment facilities or the other facilities. Somehow or another, they're all tied up with the Department of Defense. I've met a lot of people in human experimentation and it's so sad that our government can do that.

CALLISON: Yeah, it is sad. A lot of people don't want to believe it.

COLLEY: And we've had so many releases at Piketon. At one time, we had a cylinder that dropped, a hot cylinder, and we lost 21,000 pounds of uranium hexafluoride. A friend of mine, Arn Thompson, worked on that, he's now dead with a brain tumor. They had to use dry ice to try to stop it and some of these workers weren't suited up. A lot of it went off site in an airborne plume, there was something like 64 workers involved. There was a little article in the newspaper about a release. No one in the community has ever been evacuated from any of the releases.

In '95, there was an airborne plume that left the site. They have all these, oh, what do you call them, like emergency response and drills. Well, how do the drills do any good and what good is the alarms if you never tell the people that there's a release? There's a lot of people that I've talked to that live right up alongside of the plant that have the same problems I have, some of their skin is peeling off, they have thyroid problems and hysterectomies and -- but this here cylinder that dropped in '78 was compared to Three Mile Island, according to the citizens' lawsuit that I read.

CALLISON: What happened with the lawsuit?

COLLEY: The lawsuit is __________ in court right now. The judge had certified it, he was an older judge, and then they turned it over to another judge who's got the Mound facility and the Piketon facility tied up in court. And what they're saying is the Department of Energy, some of the things that they have filed on for Goodyear Atomic, they have come in and cleaned it up. But I don't know how they can say they cleaned it up because, you know, how do you clean up radioactive contaminants when the half life of 24,000 years and there's no way to -- I can't believe that our government made a product and they know all the isotope stages. How come they can't go back and do however chemically you do that, but they can't do that. So I don't know how they're cleaning it up, except for exposing a lot more contractors.

I know there's a contractor down home, I went in and told him that his workers were being exposed. I mean they were standing by the truck, they weren't suited up, and a lot of them are family members. And Owen and I both went down to tell them about the exposures out there and now, today, this was in '87, I know that he has a lot of family members that are dying of different types of cancer. And it's not all the same type of cancer, it seems like it affects each one of us different from our genes. Just because I had three tumors and hysterectomy, you may have a brain tumor, so it just depends on what cell that it damages.

And now they're saying that we have all this trangeranium waste (phonetic), but it's low level trangeranium. I don't know how they arrive at that. In 1986, they got caught shipping this stuff off site, not just Piketon, but other facilities, and they were sending it to regular landfills.

And my issues sometimes, too, is the privatization and the commercializing of these facilities and NRC, who has no jurisdiction over the radioactive nuclides, so in there to fool the community as if, "Hey, we're cleaning up this facility now and we're doing the right thing and we've got NRC in here." But that's just a big joke. All these people are the same people with a different title and a different name.

The radioactive component, as I understand, is the DOE, no one has jurisdiction over that but the DOE. And I'm not sure about the involvement of the DOD, since it's moved our navy stuff. Our main purpose was to produce nuclear weapons and then it changed in the years to nuclear power.

CALLISON: You were talking a bit about the reading, the documents that are being released are not really necessarily declassified. Is there just --

COLLEY: The documents that I've seen that they're releasing, very few of them have ever been classified, but they've been hidden, we weren't allowed to see those, either. And I've seen very little documents on classified. So a lot of these documents I guess have been public knowledge, but they said they were classified.

CALLISON: And they would do that just to keep people uninformed?

COLLEY: It was to keep people from filing lawsuits. I had a document one time that I read that the unions were starting to get together and they didn't want that because it was like blackmail, because once these unions got together, they would be able to find out that different exposures were set for different plants. And of course, the unions did all get together and they were finding out what our exposure was at one plant was not the same at the other plant. And now the government's coming in and saying that they don't know what our exposure record is because they didn't keep good records, they falsified the records.

At one time, I had a higher exposure when I didn't work at the plant. Worker's comp. had ordered to see my records, they sent it to them, and the highest exposure I had was when I was not even at the plant. And so there's a lot of workers that's getting me the records and we've been looking at them and they have actually committed fraud to fight these cases, to keep a low profile and no compensation.

They had that plutonium registry where they stole the body parts and checking you and what it would do to you and now it's called the uranium registry. There's a guy there that he was in the plutonium part of it, but now he's saying that, he just became head of that and he's saying that now, you have to have a consent to do that. But I don't know for sure that they have to have a consent to do anything, the government can do what they want to do, as long as they have sovereign immunity. You know, like they stole the whole body of Karen Silkwood and her parents thought they even had her and then they wind up, what, about year or so ago saying that they still had her body.

CALLISON: I think we've covered all my questions. Do you have anything else that you need to -- COLLEY: Some of the jobs they're getting ready to do, like the decommission of the uranium enrichment facilities, I read a book where they might have to do robots, but they're going to put these workers in there, they're going to have a lot of new criticalities. I don't think they can catch other stuff, it's still going to go down the drains. At Piketon, they claim there's no off-site contamination, there might be surface contamination from water overrunning or whatever, but they're still denying beryllium disease, even though I found a document that says they have it all over the plant site.

The plutonium, they're saying there wasn't much shipped in there, but I think we've been doing it as long as Paducah's been doing it, since the startup of our production in 1954. One time I had a document of these workers, there was like 17 of them, who cut into a converter and they all got contaminated with technetium 99 is another big isotope and there's strontium and of course, they're denying all this, but we'd have to have it if we dealt with nuclear material.

These workers were exposed to big, high counts and so the company decided they weren't going to do that any more on certain shifts because it involved too many exposures, they would do it on a later shift when they didn't have as many workers. They had a varnishing tank in the 720 building. This 720 building at Piketon was opened up to the machine shops and the welding shops and a lot of supervision and that building wound up being highly contaminated and there's nobody in there that ever wore protective equipment. Now one time, we had safety shoes, they would give us boots and we were supposed to leave our shoes at the plant. Well, they took that out of the contract, so everyone there wore their shoes home, so whatever we ran into or tracked, we tracked to home.

There have been a couple of workers that I know that they came back in and they contaminated their whole house. Because a lot of this contamination, they can paint over it and once the paint peels, the contamination's still there. And evidently, he must have gotten it on his hands, but they checked him for a long time and they checked his home and they couldn't find it, Roy Skinner. When he came in the plant, they tried to tell him that he was carrying it from home to the plant, but they finally found out it was on his telephone and he had contaminated his daughter. And just here recently, I heard this happened again and they were blaming it on the worker, saying he was bringing it to the plant.

And you have all these workers' clothes that are all washed in the same laundry and you wear like a coverall, a suit. And one time when I asked them to protect me and I thought they were protecting me, in addition to the hard hat and this safety glasses, I had to wear paper coveralls and rubber gloves and shoes. And so I thought they were protecting me again, but they weren't. They put me in these cable trays and the cable trays got really tacky as the temperature got hot and I was working there for like six months. And the guy I was working with, he had a heart attack and I was having chest pains and I couldn't really relate what was happening to me with him. So I would do all the climbing because I didn't want him climbing, but then I started breaking out with the rashes and starting to get sick again.

So I called Health Physics, because I was afraid to call the company because I was afraid that I'd get in trouble and I didn't want to lose my job because I had worked since I was 12 years old. And so they came over and they surveyed the area and they pulled me off the job and they said, "You know, you're better than our machines that we have to detect this stuff." And so they pulled me off the job and put other workers on the job, but no protective equipment.

So then they stuck me with my supervisor and he was supposed to take and keep track of me. So he sent me outside on an electrical component and it was kind of windy and I was really scared and as I was unbolting this electrical component, I saw all these little, gray, silver particles floating around and I was really scared because I didn't know what it was. And I was trying to hold my breath and wrap stuff around my mouth and trying to get the job done. Well, whenever they did a lumposcopy (phonetic) on my throat, they found little, small, gray particles.

And so I got that job done and then my boss came over. And they have like these little electrical cards because we have like 3,800 acres and we have like three process buildings, the 330, the 333 and the 326, which did the highly enriched uranium. Well, he took me over in the 330 building because there was an alarm they were having a problem with. And he took me up on the top floor and he took me in the front of the building and all this stuff was coming out of these pipes, this white-gray stuff was coming out. And he got in the cart and he turned real fast and took me back to the elevator and he said the job was done. Well, three weeks later, I tested for fluorides in Occupational Health and Safety in Cincinnati. And so he had me in a release then that I didn't even know about; he knew it, but I didn't know it.

And the problem is they need more Occupational Health and Safety doctors. They need to let these doctors do their job and say chemicals do harm you, because they'll know it, they've been doing the testing on human experiments to know that they harm you. And the doctors down home -- the cancer patient, Larry Daye, who's got lung cancer and they opened him up and there's nothing for him, they can't even give him chemo. or radiation. He asked the doctor about his job and the doctor said, "I don't want to talk about it." No, no, no, no, no, they say.

And sometimes I wonder on this chemo. and radiation if sometimes it might help people who don't really need it and it's a way that these doctors are making lots of money doing chemo. and radiation. Because I know my brother just went through the chemo. and radiation and they told him they got it all and two months later, it spread to his brain and he died.

They have ruined a lot of doctors that say that you have exposures. And now here, we have CDC who's studied us, we've had ATSDR who studied us, we had NIOSH who studied us, and all of these studies that they've done have been bogus. They covered up, just like we asked for diseases and got death. They make sure they do a study where they're not going to find a problem. We have like 37 electricians that were hired in 1954 and 1940s, 1985, and P.E. Smith was one of the original electricians who has lung cancer and has a hole here. He told me that he was able to document 27 electricians that had upper lung problems, and that doesn't count all the other problems that they had.

I had another worker who worked in the Maintenance Department. He had over 300,000 counts on his. His name was Vern Webb. His wife had a worker's comp. claim and she was unable to prove that he had any exposures, but after the worker's comp. claim, I was able to find his record. And they told this guy, "Either go do your job or you go home." And he died of lung and I'm not for sure if he had brain cancer or not.

These buildings are so contaminated, at one time when we were in the buildings and I started complaining, they even had hazardous waste in drums sitting inside the plant in the buildings and they were leaking. The dust in these facilities have uranium dust in them and we had to climb up in the cable trays. And on the outside of the building, they didn't have anything and then when we called, I called and complained about health and safety issues, they started posting these signs up saying, "You're entering a radioactive contaminated area." And I would ask the supervisors, I said, "Why are those signs out there," and they said, "Well, we don't know, there's just certain areas that have radioactive material." And I said, "But we've been cleaning everything in these buildings. What area are they talking about," but they would never tell me.

And when I complained about the drums being in the buildings, I was off site at the time, the electricians told me that they had them to load them in a truck and put them in a truck and got them out of the buildings until the EPA or whoever came in to do the inspection. And so we have all these chemicals and all these testings and nothing. And I keep going hearing these workers, like the beryllium workers, they're just finding out that they have it, but the government knew it. Tomorrow at Piketon, you'll have another worker who probably will say that they're sick and the government will say it just now happened.

After you go to the Supreme Court, the next stage is sovereign immunity and then the next stage is up to Congress. Now what's Congress going to give us? They were trying to put in the Marshall Island bill for us and I had to give them some information on that because the Marshall Island bill is not good for uranium enrichment workers because we are chemical and radiation and you still have to prove the cause. I don't think these workers should have to prove the cause of anything because the government knows that they're going to be sick.

And I have proof of a lot of off-site contamination, even though they deny that it's off site. We double the standard of fluorides in Piketon, Ohio, and the State of Ohio doesn't have a standard for fluorides, but we double the Oak Ridge and Kentucky standard.

CALLISON: Pretty amazing. Anything else?

COLLEY: Other than we've still got another study going on here with, you know, the Worker Study. I think it's good for a lot of workers because a lot of guys, a lot of the older guys and things, they wouldn't go to a doctor because the company had a doctor, so they wouldn't go to their own physicians or anything because they depended on -- and they're all finding out that they have lung cancer. So the study has showed some good things, even though they're not doing the chemical and radiation and giving the information to run the time limits out for lawsuits. Because I know men don't like to go to doctors and so when the company says, "You're healthy and there's nothing wrong with you" --

We had one guy named Richard McGee, he was a welder inspector, and he had no type of cancer in his family whatsoever, and he died of liver and something else. He didn't smoke, he wasn't a drinker. I'm not a smoker or a drinker. And the company fought his wife on the worker's compensation, too. I could give you a list of workers that have died at Piketon and names.

CALLISON: Like a written list or a --

COLLEY: Yeah, I turned it in to Congress, but I didn't see it in the written statements. I turned in community residents and the workers that -- that copy that I had from the union hall, plus copies of obituaries of workers that I knew that were sick at the plant. And so the union had documents up to 1985 or '86 that I saw and then I just kept adding to the documentation. In Piketon, there was like 300 workers that came out to testify and they didn't have enough chairs for them to sit down and they were carrying breathing machines and it's hard for me to believe that that many people had been affected that they didn't know about in the government -- in a small community.

Of course, they hire for, like, 25 miles around to a hundred miles, people work at the plant. And sometimes I would work there and not see the same person for six or seven months. And you were told not to talk about your job because you would go down and get your hair fixed and the beautician could be an FBI person and if you talked about your job, you'd go to jail and you would get a $10,000.00 fine.

They did an in vivo on me, but some of the workers never got an in vivo. And they did an in vivo on me and the in vivo, I just looked at it not too long ago and it showed that I did have neptunium in my body, but I didn't know that. There was something I was going to say, but my concentration sometimes comes and goes and if I don't say it right then, I forget it.

CALLISON: Right, I understand, don't worry about it. Are we finished?

COLLEY: Yeah. I was trying to think of that other thing, it was kind of important. Oh, the urinalysis they give the workers, they're supposed to take them like the beginning of the shift and the end of the shift because all this stuff passes through your urine and it don't show up. So if you were in exposure one day and you didn't have a test for two or three weeks, a urinalysis, then they wouldn't be able to pick up your exposures.

And there was one time when Owen Thompson was in a release and him and I were in Columbus, Ohio, at Penny's Islet, and he was telling me how hot and contaminated he got. And I said, "What are you talking about, Owen?" He said, "Well, I'm on restriction and then can't get this contamination off and they're scrubbing me down and . . ." And I said, "Owen, I worked in the same area you worked in, but nobody told me that I was hot." And so they're not telling the workers they're hot, they know they're hot and they won't tell them and they don't give them the urinalysis.

There's some electricians that have never had an in vivo and I'm wondering why they gave me an in vivo a couple of times, so there's something there they must know about the women, that they give them the in vivo or they put me on some jobs as an experiment, I think.

It's now left up to Congress to compensate us and $100,000.00 is no money if you don't have any medical benefits. And who's going to hire these workers? When I refinanced my home, I couldn't even get insurance on it, so if something happens to me, the kids will have to pay that loan off. And these workers are losing everything. I am on Social Security, I finally got my Social Security.

CALLISON: It's not much.

COLLEY: It's $700 a month. I was lucky, though, because I had a husband and he was still working. You know, if I was a man and had to go through this -- these men are losing everything they have and I'm about to lose everything I have, even though I have another provider there. You go through your whole life saving just to retire and here, my husband retired in February and I have him $65,000.00 in debt and plus there was a few that I forgot about, so it averages up to $75,000.00. And I've been in this for 14 years and I've not seen a change whatsoever. I see a lot of lip work and lip service. Just like the meeting in Piketon, they made sure that I didn't get to testify until the end and I was so busy trying to -- afraid the workers weren't coming and the union came out in forces, which I think the government told them to get out there, "You'd better tell your health issues now or you're not getting compensated."

And so like the testimony in Washington, D.C., they deliberately not let me be there because I'm not for the Worker Study, I'm not for any more studies. I'm for the compensation and medical packet, medical more than anything. Even though I have medical insurance now because of my Social Security, I pay for that, and plus worker's comp. pays for my medication and my doctors, but there's a lot of workers out here that don't have worker's comp. and medical insurance or Social Security.

I can't think of anything besides a lot of releases that we have, we have lots of releases and a lot of exposures to workers and nothing. Like the local paper, anything that I print or talk about, I have to show them documentations. The Department of Energy, they send out press releases and they print every word; they don't have to prove it, they don't have to do anything. And they have the best PR people in the world, they have a lot of control in the media. I know GE was one of the biggest producers of the bomb and they also own one of the TV stations, And I always find it striking that certain workers are allowed to talk about their stories and other workers never get any coverage.

One time, one of our state representatives came down. She was Voinovitch's righthand lady, lieutenant governor. The Clements Dispatch was writing stories because I was giving them documents and they were really putting their neck on the line, like Lafferty. And in 1992, I went to this meeting and I was told I shouldn't have been there. You had all your mayors, your commissioners. We have five mayors that's working at the plant.

CALLISON: Really?

COLLEY: Yes. Well, Jeff Robinaut testified, he was a city councilman for Portsmouth. And so they -- I lost my thing right there. What did I --

CALLISON: You were talking about state representatives coming down?

COLLEY: Okay, so in this meeting I went to, we had all the local papers, the state representatives, Strickland was there, Nancy Hollowiss was there, who's Voinovitch's lieutenant governor of Ohio. And she came down with an article saying, "We're going after the Clements Dispatch. We don't want them writing any more negative stories about that plant." And what she was saying is, "We don't want them to tell the truth, what goes on out here at Piketon. We are more concerned about the jobs and closing this plant down than we are of the health of these workers and this community."

And not too long ago, people from Oak Ridge and Hanford and them came in and said it's okay for Frenold. Frenold never made the Superfund list is what I heard. We double the Superfund list and never made it. And so to keep from breaking a consent agreement at Frenold, they're shipping their stuff to Piketon because they have a consent agreement and if they don't get it done, they're going to get this fine. So instead of doing that, they're going to send it down to Piketon because they feel like we're a disenfranchised community that are too dumb to know what's going on.

And I'm a stakeholder and I haven't been to a meeting for almost over a year. They quit sending me things. And all of a sudden, when the Department of Energy comes in, they have this stakeholder meeting and I hadn't been notified for a stakeholder meeting for a long time. And a lot of the community residents there they say don't want to get involved. Well, they came to the meetings, they threatened them they'd take them off of welfare or they'd do this or do that, and they lied so much that why go to the meetings?

And we don't have a lot of educated people to do community input on the documents. I'm not really smart, you know, I never even graduated from high school.

CALLISON: That doesn't mean you're not smart.

COLLEY: I guess I have a feeling that things aren't right and so then when I found out they were falsifying my records and I'd been reading documents and learning a lot, I guess that's why the Department of Energy says I make a great leadership as an anti-nuker. They didn't even consider any of my health problems in that hearing.

CALLISON: Amazing.

COLLEY: Hard to believe they've been able to cover this up for 40, 50 years. Because every facility that I go to and they're just finding out all these problems and it's the same thing over and over and over. I mean Piketon workers went to, we weren't the first nuclear workers that went to Washington, D.C., and they stormed Senator Glen's office and he's had congressional hearings about the PCB oil where I got a thing in there, 1980, and here I'm getting hired in 1980 and there's a congressional hearing in 1980 that the PCB oil was uranium contaminant. The stuff is leaking out of the system and there's no way they can keep it from leaking.