After building nuclear weapons in Florida, they fought cancer. Now they fight red tape

The government officials convened in a colorless Tampa hotel ballroom, listening to the voice on the video call. These are the reasons, the voice said, that the United States government shouldn’t have to pay former nuclear weapons workers who’ve gotten cancer.In a clinical tone, the presenter delivered a PowerPoint of technical jargon, dappled with terms resembling science fiction: “Loose plutonium powder.” “Uranium doping.” “Zetatron neutron generator.” “Fallout.”“Morbidity study.”All of it leading to:“No credible evidence.”About 10 ex-workers listened in the audience of this obscure government hearing last month. One scoffed and shook his head. Another woman whispered rapid, angry protests. They’d heard explanations like this before. They’d attended meetings like this for years.Now gray and in their 70s and 80s, they were once among thousands of people who built weapons components at a government-contracted General Electric plant in Largo . The plant processed plutonium, uranium and a carcinogenic metal called beryllium in the pursuit of classified projects during the Cold War. In the decades since the plant closed in 1997, many of the workers have been diagnosed with cancers, often those most commonly associated with radiation exposure — like kidney, bone, breast.These sicknesses are not unique to the Largo plant. In 2000, Congress created a compensation program for former Cold War workers, acknowledging that hundreds of thousands of civilians had helped build the country’s nuclear arsenal, often without fully knowing the risks. The law created the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For those who qualified, then- President Bill Clinton promised , a grateful nation would pay their medical bills and help them process claims.That hasn’t been the reality for the Pinellas workers.While officials have approved petitions for medical compensation for staff from some plants, other applications have languished for years — including one from workers at Los Alamos, New Mexico, the famous site that developed the nuclear bomb. Los Alamos produced parts containing plutonium that were shipped to Largo, and the fates of workers at both sites have seemingly been intertwined ever since.Somewhere along the way, said Denise DeGarmo, a longtime advocate for the Pinellas workers, the teeth of bureaucracy got turned backward, trapping the old and sick in a never-ending war against federal physicists and consultants.“The program started out as such a wonderful moment in history finally recognizing the sacrifices — emotionally, physically, mentally — of our atomic heroes,” she said. “And now it’s become nothing more than an intellectual exercise of who’s right and who’s wrong.”The government has argued there isn’t enough evidence that the Pinellas employees were exposed to high doses of radiation. Its rationale rests on something called “dose reconstruction,” or an estimate of how much radiation exposure the workers would have received, based on records from the time.At the Tampa hearing in late August, officials depicted a nuclear plant that diligently looked after workers’ health and followed neat protocols. They cited urine tests from some of the employees and shipping records for hazardous materials. They mentioned maps showing the worst chemicals were confined to certain areas. General Electric closely monitored workers’ health, they said, and all the plutonium was sealed inside machinery when it arrived at the plant.When workers told interviewers that they handled uranium powder or loose plutonium, the government said it found no records to back them up. The times workers heard radiation alarms go off, one official said, were “due to radiofrequency interference,” not releases of dangerous materials. When a urine test suggested a dangerously high plutonium exposure, the government’s consultants found contradictions in other records and concluded it was a faulty test.Surviving workers say the government’s neat narrative bears little resemblance to what they lived through at the plant.Elton Scott, 72, started working as a machinist in his 20s. It was his job to take apart nuclear trigger parts to check for quality and make repairs. Those parts contained plutonium and uranium.He said that nothing about the government’s presentation aligned with his years at the plant, including the notion of regular health screenings.“Make it make sense. It’s crazy,” said Scott, who lives in St. Petersburg. “All that you heard, it’s just smoke.”He’s had cancer in his prostate and his bones.A deep scar stretches from the inside of his elbow to his shoulder, where doctors replaced the bone with titanium rods.At the hearing in Tampa, that scar peeked out from his shirt as Scott rose to address the board. Frustration bordered on amusement as he smirked, his gait slow and labored as he stepped to the mic.“The thing of it is — is that this place would be full if everybody hadn’t died or was incapacitated,” Scott said, gesturing to the huge ballroom, his voice echoing in its hollowness. He said the former workers keep a running list of colleagues who’ve died. They recently hit 694.“Odds are, if that many people are getting cancer, there might have been a problem there,” Scott continued. “But we come here, waste your guys’ time talkin’. I’ve been to so many meetings like this.“Nothing happens,” he said, his words shrinking to a pained whisper. “And we’re still here.”Scott was part of a small parade of former workers and their surviving family members who spoke.A frail man named Alan Marcott noted he’d had several surgeries for kidney and breast cancers. Another woman wept as she spoke of her late mother, who worked at the plant for 23 years before an illness struck that didn’t run in their family.One resident kept it brief: “My name is Sherry, and I was diagnosed with beryllium in my lungs.”More people in the audience elected not to speak. Marilyn Bossard of Seminole, who ferried sensitive documents around the plant, has since had her colon removed. As she listened, she thought about her late husband in the shipping department, unloading packages that contained plutonium. Next to her sat Delmore and Cathy Ehlers. She’s had uterine cancer; he, a portion of his lungs removed from mercury exposure.To DeGarmo, the ex-workers’ advocate, the people are the point. A retired professor, she’s fought for them for years as a volunteer, after her father died of bone cancer following a career working on nuclear missiles in New York.She’s turned her home in a small town north of Orlando into the clearinghouse for tens of thousands of documents about the Pinellas plant, from historical logs to doctors’ notes.At the hearing, it was time for DeGarmo’s rebuttal. She launched into a presentation loaded with intricate infographics, all arguing in tiny, color-coded fonts why the government’s “reconstructed” radiation exposure estimates aren’t reliable. There were too many variables at the plant — too many people, multiple dangerous chemicals, an ever-changing list of classified projects and job descriptions — for decades-old documents, not all of which survived, to be trusted with the full story.“These folks are my family,” she said. “I have walked through everything with them. I have walked through births of grandchildren, diagnoses of really traumatic disease. I’ve sat at bedsides where people have passed.“The question is not whether radioactive materials were present at the Pinellas plant. We know that they were,” DeGarmo said. “And it’s not whether historical records exist. We know that, too.”But does the evidence give them enough certainty to deny the workers’ medical claims?It’s unclear when the workers will find out the result of the hearing.Their case now goes to a “work group,” a subset of the larger board. But that meeting hasn’t been set because its timing partially depends on paperwork being filed by government officials and consultants who made the case against the workers’ compensation in Tampa.“It’s out of our hands,” Dr. Henry Anderson, the chairperson of the board and a longtime state health official from Wisconsin, told a Tampa Bay Times reporter when asked about timing.The feds have added more layers of red tape under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., DeGarmo said. Every time the work group wants to meet, it has to get approval from lawyers at the department. And if this board approves workers’ claims, the final blessing would have to come from that department’s higher-ups.“Lots of federal bureaucracy,” Anderson added. “We work as quickly as we can.”The Times covered the workers’ plight last year, when the federal overhaul by President Donald Trump suspended all meetings of the board indefinitely. The board was at risk of dissolving unless Trump renewed its charter, which he did through an executive order in September 2025. All board members are appointed by the president.Amid all these starts and stops, though, there are signs that the board’s opinion is shifting in favor of the workers.One board member, Brad Clawson, a retired nuclear fuels specialist from Idaho, spoke directly to the former Pinellas workers in the room. He said some of what he’d heard in this case were “triggers” of his own experience.“Trying to reconstruct a facility that’s been gone since the ’90s, it is a little bit hard,” Clawson said. “I can sit up here, and I can go through 1,000 documents, but I don’t know what you did. ... Nobody knows it like you guys do.”This is the eighth version of the workers’ petition DeGarmo has submitted to the government over two decades.At this point, she said, many of the workers have come to believe that federal officials are simply waiting for all of them to die to avoid responsibility.“You gotta wonder that sometimes,” DeGarmo said.As more of the former workers die, she reckons with waves of guilt. Could she have done more to force the government to see what she sees in their stories? To confront the evidence she believes is irrefutable?A resolution remains just out of reach. The Tampa Bay Times launched the Environment Hub in 2025 to focus on some of Florida’s most urgent and enduring challenges. You can contribute through our journalism fund by clicking here .

After building nuclear weapons in Florida, they fought cancer. Now they fight red tape

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After building nuclear weapons in Florida, they fought cancer. Now they fight red tape

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