By Joby Warrick, Washington Post Staff Writer, Sunday , January 30, 2026

A White House draft report linking nuclear weapons production to occupational illnesses is increasing the likelihood of the first national program to compensate workers who were put at risk while building America's Cold War arsenal, administration officials said yesterday.

The study by a panel of the White House National Economic Council (NEC) concludes that bomb-factory workers "may be at increased risk of illness" from radiation and toxic chemicals. It is the most significant acknowledgment to date by the federal government of widespread workplace hazards inside the Energy Department's nuclear weapons complex.

"The Department of Energy is coming clean with its workers," Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said in a telephone interview from Switzerland, where he was accompanying President Clinton at an economic conference. Richardson said the panel's findings remove "a major roadblock" to providing compensation for employees who may have been wrongfully exposed to hazards.

In the wake of new reports of illnesses among former workers, Clinton ordered the NEC last summer to review the scientific evidence of unusual illnesses among the more than 600,000 men and women who have worked in the weapons complex since the mid-1940s. The Energy Department has conducted dozens of epidemiological studies since the 1960s some of which found elevated cancer rates among workers exposed to radiation on the job. But while the federal government has agreed to compensate soldiers exposed to radiation during nuclear tests, the Energy Department has never acknowledged that its nuclear weapons workers may have been put at risk.

The NEC's Jan. 14 draft report, obtained by The Washington Post, notes numerous inconsistencies in the scientific record. For example, some studies show no unusual disease rates among workers who were exposed to some of the highest levels of radiation.

But overall, there is "credible evidence" of increased health risks due to "ionizing radiation and chemical and physical hazards," concludes the draft study, which was first reported by the New York Times. Research at each of the department's 14 largest nuclear weapons facilities found elevated rates of at least one type of malignancy, including leukemia and lung cancer. Some, though not all, studies also showed a correlation between disease rates and higher levels of radiation exposure, the study said.

In addition to the epidemiological studies, the report cited data from years of government-ordered medical screenings of former workers, which pointed to higher rates of lung disease and other ailments.

The NEC panel's findings, to be finalized in March, are expected to serve as the basis for an unprecedented, national compensation program benefiting ailing nuclear workers, administration officials said.

The framework of such a program which would be subject to congressional approval is far from clear. In recent months, Richardson announced pilot programs to compensate two relatively small groups: uranium workers who were exposed to radioactive plutonium at the government's gaseous diffusion plant in Paducah, Ky., and several hundred others who were exposed to beryllium, a highly toxic metal used in weapons production.

Longtime critics of the government's policy toward nuclear workers welcomed the finding but said it was long overdue. Robert Alvarez, a private consultant and former special assistant to Richardson, noted that uncertainties about radiation risks existed from the beginning. He recalled the words of Robert Stone, the top health official for the Manhattan Project, who in the 1940s described the workplace conditions for early atomic weapons workers as "one vast experiment."

"Never before has such a large collection of individuals been exposed to so much irradiation," Stone wrote.