The Kentucky Nuclear Plant That Poisoned Its Own Workers

Four whistleblowers exposed decades of hidden radiation and toxic contamination at Kentucky's Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a uranium enrichment site.

Health physicist Ron Fowler, radiation technicians Chuck and Kay Deuschle, and veteran worker Garland Bud Jenkins gathered evidence that plant managers had hidden transuranic contamination, and a later Energy Department report found managers knew about plutonium as early as 1953.

Workers shoveled radioactive black oxide dust while rarely wearing respirators, hosed spills into ditches at night, and likely carried radioactive dust home on their clothes.

Their 1999 lawsuit against Lockheed Martin sparked a Washington Post expose, congressional hearings, and an apology from Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, though the case eventually settled for just 5 million dollars.

Congress responded with a compensation program that has paid former Paducah workers 1.5 billion dollars, even as hundreds of claims remain denied.

Now, with investors planning new uranium enrichment operations and a massive AI data center on the old site, the surviving whistleblowers are telling their story to remind people of the tragedy of past mistakes.

The men who shoveled radioactive black oxide at Paducah were assured the uranium they handled was safe enough to eat, whistleblower Bud Jenkins told Congress. When the scandal broke in 1999, the Energy Department admitted 103,000 tons of recycled uranium carrying 12 ounces of plutonium had moved through the plant between 1953 and 1976, and Energy Secretary Bill Richardson apologized and offered 20 million dollars for workers whose cancers were linked to radiation, payments some doubted would match the harm, AP reported. The site shut in 2013, and General Matter now leases 100 acres there for a 1.5 billion dollar enrichment plant targeting operation before 2030, WKMS says. Its Nuclear Regulatory Commission license fight comes next.