Laurel to the Rocky Mountain News for uncovering a systemic effort by a federal Department of Labor program to deny compensation to former nuclear-arms workers sickened by exposure to radiation.

In January 2008, the Denver-based Rocky launched a six-month investigation to examine why thousands of sick workers were experiencing extensive delays and rejections when they sought compensation from a federal program created to serve them. In the three-part series that resulted, deadly denial, published in July, reporter Laura Frank, with the help of project editor Jim Trotter and reporter Ann Imse, showed that the “Labor Department has delayed the cases of sick nuclear weapons workers or their survivors across the nation by giving misleading information, withholding records essential to their cases, failing to inform them of alternative paths to aid, repeatedly claiming to have lost evidence sent by ill workers and making requirements for compensation impossibly high.” Throughout the series, the Rocky hammered home a central point: these problems were not a result of bureaucratic bungling, but rather a conscious plan by the Labor Department to avoid paying claims.

Frank wrote her first story about the plight of the nuclear workers in 1997 as a reporter at The Tennessean. Former employees at plants where uranium was processed into bomb fuel began developing a variety of cancers and other diseases that their doctors couldn’t explain. At first, the government denied that radioactive materials and related toxic substances were making the workers sick. Then in 2000, in a surprising about-face, the Clinton administration created the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program within the Department of Energy to pay medical bills and provide compensation.

Complete access to this article will soon be available for purchase. Subscribers will be able to access this article, and the rest of CJR’s magazine archive, for free. Select articles from the last 6 months will remain free for all visitors to CJR.org.