Lonnie Rouse shuffled into a wood-paneled conference room at the Washington state Capitol in March 2018. It had been nearly a decade since medical experts diagnosed him with a neurological disease they attributed to his exposure to chemicals at work. In the time since, he had acquired a stutter, begun limping and lost several teeth biting into a banana.

For nearly 20 years, Rouse had packaged plutonium and monitored radioactive waste at the Hanford Site, a now-decommissioned Department of Energy nuclear weapons production plant in south-central Washington and one of the most contaminated nuclear sites in the country. Tanks full of radioactive sludge exposed him to at least 48 potentially hazardous chemicals. The worksite was so toxic, he said, that the floor once melted the rubber off his boots.

Rouse was among the thousands of workers responsible for the ongoing environmental cleanup at Hanford, which has been underway since the DOE shut down the last reactor in the late 1980s. Congress has acknowledged, based on voluminous studies, that radiation at DOE sites poses health risks to workers.

Over time, some people at Hanford became so sick they could no longer work. Like Rouse, they filed for workers’ compensation. The DOE consistently challenged their claims and tried to shift the blame onto the workers themselves.

By the time Rouse took his place behind then-Gov. Jay Inslee, he was desperate. His 2009 workers’ compensation claim had been denied. He had burned through his retirement savings and declared bankruptcy.

As he watched, the governor signed a bill that was supposed to change his life.

For years, Hanford employees filing workers’ compensation claims had to prove the chemicals they were exposed to on the job made them sick. The new law Inslee signed flipped that burden of proof. Under the law, agencies were instructed to presume that working at Hanford had caused certain cancers, neurological diseases and respiratory illnesses. Now the Department of Energy would have to prove to the state that something other than the job had made the workers sick if it wanted to deny their claims.

Rouse thought the presumption law would speed up his claim for benefits. State lawmakers and the former governor thought it would force the DOE to take responsibility for the harm Hanford workers were experiencing.

But despite the law, the DOE continues to fight new and existing claims, Cascade PBS and ProPublica found. We asked the state for claims records going back to the presumption law’s passage in 2018, but the state only provided records going back three and a half years, to 2023. In that period, workers filed 102 new claims for benefits, state data shows. The DOE did not recommend approving a single one.

The state, which has final say, overruled the DOE and approved 75% of those claims. The DOE appealed all but seven of those approvals.

Cascade PBS and ProPublica spoke to workers, surviving family members, lawyers representing workers and state officials. They all pointed to a pattern: The DOE systematically challenges and then drags out workers’ compensation claims for years with recommended denials and subsequent legal appeals. Along the way, it has spent millions on outside lawyers and expert testimony, including doctor evaluations that point to other causes for workers’ illnesses.

The DOE has paid out benefits to Hanford workers in some cases, lawyers and families said, but it has done so while still actively appealing the claims. It warns workers that they may have to pay the money back.

Our reporting found that not even death ends the cycle of appeals. About 152 workers’ claims remain stranded in this legal limbo — approved by the state but still under appeal by the DOE. Half of those workers are dead. The DOE continues to fight to deny their families survivors’ benefits.

“It seems pretty coldhearted, calculated, that they’re trying to save money on the back of sick workers who they made sick,” said Gerry Pollet, one of the Washington state representatives who sponsored........

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