Payout in nuclear plant case

Babcock & Wilcox recently paid $52.5 million to several hundred claimants in one of few nuclear contamination cases to even be tried, let alone reach settlement for personal injury and wrongful death. The case was filed in federal court in 1994 alleging that radioactive emissions from two nuclear fuel processing plants caused illness, death and property damage. "These cases have always been hard to litigate and go on for a long time," said Robert Alverez of the Ploughshares-funded Institute for Policy Studies. Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, another Ploughshares grantee, served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs, reviewing data on uranium releases from the Apollo plant.