Nuclear Weapons Waste Made Workers Sick. Despite a Law Meant to Help, the DOE Keeps Fighting Their Claims.

Lonnie Rouse was diagnosed with a neurological disorder that medical experts attributed to exposure to chemicals during his work cleaning up the Hanford nuclear site in Washington. Margaret Albaugh for ProPublica Lonnie Rouse shuffled into a wood-paneled conference room at the Washington state Capitol in March 2018. It had been nearly a decade since medical experts diagnosed him with a neurological disease they attributed to his exposure to chemicals at work. In the time since, he had acquired a stutter, begun limping and lost several teeth biting into a banana. For nearly 20 years, Rouse had packaged plutonium and monitored radioactive waste at the Hanford Site , a now-decommissioned Department of Energy nuclear weapons production plant in south-central Washington and one of the most contaminated nuclear sites in the country.