A raft of lawsuits by more than 75 Apollo area residents claiming they contracted cancer from a neighboring nuclear fuel factory’s plumes of radioactive uranium dust continues to move toward jury trials, with a new deadline in the case this week.
On Wednesday, the alleged victims’ lawyers will continue fighting to have jurors — if and when the individual cases reach trial — to hear the expert testimony of Steve Wing. Mr. Wing, a radiation safety officer with a doctorate in physics and radiological sciences, has previously told the courts that both the Apollo uranium-processing facility and its fellow Parks plutonium factory founded by Nuclear Materials and Equipment Co., and later owned by Babcock & Wilcox Power Generation Group and Atlantic Richfield Co., “regularly emitted large amounts of radioactive material into the environment through airborne stack emissions, unfiltered stack emissions, ventilation problems” and other handling mistakes and that “these releases regularly and consistently exceeded federal regulatory limits,” according to court documents.
