KNOXVILLE -- Untold damages, medical monitoring and "a public apology" are being sought in two class-action lawsuits filed against a dozen contractors that operated the government's nuclear weapons and research complex in Oak Ridge since World War II, lawyers said Tuesday.

"One (lawsuit) deals with the health hazards that were created and have never been properly addressed," Nashville lawyer George Barrett said in a telephone interview.

"The other deals with the deliberate creation of a racially segregated community which has been preserved up to this time in violation of the Constitution and the laws of Tennessee."

Barrett said the lawsuits were filed Tuesday in federal court in Knoxville, although the court clerk closed for the day before copies could be obtained and Barrett's firm could not provide them to The Associated Press.

The lawsuits apparently will rely heavily on the results of an eight-year, $14 million health study released last January suggesting that some Oak Ridge residents may have suffered thyroid cancer or brain damage because of toxic releases, particularly from the 1940s to early 1960s.

The health study, prepared by the state and underwritten by the Department of Energy, estimated that perhaps less than 100 people developed these diseases.

"The ultimate question that we tried to answer can perhaps be summarized by this: Was anybody hurt?" study chairman Paul Voilleque said at the time. "Our answer today is, probably."

The eight plaintiffs include former employees, residents and their children.

Now Barrett is suing virtually every corporation that managed the DOE-Oak Ridge facilities since their creation in 1944 as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb.

The facilities are: the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the former K-25 uranium enrichment plant.

Listed as defendants are: Union Carbide Corp., Monsanto Co., Eastman Kodak Co., Eastman Chemical Co., the University of Chicago, Roane-Anderson Co., Turner Construction Co., Martin-Marietta Energy Systems Inc., Lockheed Martin, Lockheed Martin Energy Systems and Babcock & Wilcox Co.

Also named are present ORNL manager Battelle Inc. and Y-12 manager BWX Technologies. Company spokesmen could not be reached for comment Tuesday night.

The lawsuits claim hazardous, toxic and radioactive releases from the Oak Ridge plants damaged or threatened the health of residents and their children living in Oak Ridge or downwind or downstream of the plants.

The lawsuits seek "a public apology for deliberately irradiating the public and exposing them to deadly radioactive and hazardous materials without their consent," a press release said.

In addition, one of the lawsuits claims blacks who relocated to Oak Ridge for work in the 1950s were moved into the Scarboro community, where they were exposed to high levels of pollutants from the Y-12 plant about a mile away. The neighborhood remains predominantly black.

In 1999, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control said it could not substantiate claims of a higher incidence of asthma among Scarboro children. The CDC said that 13 percent of 119 Scarboro children had respiratory problems -- about double the national average but similar to children living in inner-city Detroit.

Last year, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson acknowledged that the government exposed bomb factory workers to health hazards, and Congress approved a compensation program. But DOE is not a defendant in the Barrett lawsuits.

In 1998, Barrett won a $10 million settlement against Vanderbilt University in Nashville and others for 1940s experiments in which pregnant women unknowingly ingested radioactive iron.