A court case on radiation exposure in Israel’s Dimona nuclear plant has revealed that health damages at the Israeli nuclear site were ‘covered up.’
 
Dr. Dan Litai, an Israeli safety engineer who gave a testimony to the Petah Tikvah District Court on Monday, said that no department was tasked with assessing the levels of internal radiation contamination at the Negev Reactor until the late 1990s.
 
The Israeli safety expert also testified that workers at the Negev Nuclear Reactor Center at the Dimona nuclear plant underwent “superficial and inadequate” radiation exposure tests, a Ynet report revealed on December 12.
 
The court was tasked to determine whether former employees of the reactor should be recognized as the victims of work-related accidents after they developed cancer.
 
In mid 1990s, 44 employees of the Negev and the Soreq Nuclear Reactor Centers filed a lawsuit against the nuclear plants. Some of the plaintiffs have died since then.
 
"Only if the employee’s external radiation levels were irregular, we would run further testing. Looking back, this is something we should have done, but we didn’t," said Dr. Litai.
 
Earlier last week, head of radiation safety department of the Soreq Nuclear Center presented a similar testimony to the court, saying the cancer victims of the Soreq Center could have been spared if they had undergone preventive radiation exposure tests.
 
"I worked with materials whose nature was unknown. They didn’t tell us what we were exposed to," Dr. Thelma Byrne said.
 
The Negev Nuclear Research Center is an Israeli nuclear installation located in the Negev desert. The purpose of the reactor is widely assumed to be the manufacturing of nuclear weapons and the majority of defense experts have concluded that it does in fact do so.
 
(Press TV)