WASHINGTON -- Uranium plant workers seeking payment for job-related illnesses may face frustrating delays if their newly won compensation plan is tied to a Justice Department program for uranium miners, the miners say.

Uranium miners in four Western states have complained about slow reviews of claims and even longer waits for checks under an 11-year-old compensation program created for them and operated by the Justice Department.

But Labor Secretary Elaine Chao cited the program last month when she proposed shifting the new effort to help uranium plant workers in Kentucky and elsewhere from her Labor Department to Justice. She argued that Labor is not properly equipped to handle the work.

Barring action by Congress, where a bill was submitted last week to keep the program under Labor's oversight, the White House could decide as early as this week where to place the program.

Uranium miners say the Justice Department can't keep up with their claims.

"We're really frustrated by this bureaucratic process the Department of Justice has," said Phil Harrison, a liaison for former uranium miners in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah.

Harrison said the comparatively small program under which miners, many of them members of the Navajo Nation, seek claims would be swamped by the new program for current and former Department of Energy nuclear-plant workers.

"They can't handle the miners' claims . . . and now, here comes the DOE workers? It's going to be a big problem," he said. Instead, the miners want their program moved to Chao's Labor Department.

FORMER WORKERS at Kentucky's Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, where uranium was processed for nuclear weapons during the Cold War, also are concerned about delays if Chao gets her way.

"All of these fellas are getting older, and they're going to be six-foot under" before any checks are written, said Leora Dallas, whose husband, Charles, worked at the Paducah plant for almost 27 years.

Charles Dallas, 85, is blind, partially deaf and has spots on his lungs, skin cancer and asbestosis. He attributes his health problems to the work he did on various types of uranium-processing machinery. "If it was out there, I was exposed to it," he said.

The Dallases want Labor to keep the new program, as does Corinne Whitehead, president of the Western Kentucky environmental group Coalition for Health Concerns.

"I hope they stick with the designation Congress made originally," said Whitehead, whose brother-in-law, Russell Ray, is an ill former plant worker at Paducah.

The Labor Department has 14,000 employees assigned to handle a variety of compensation programs. In fiscal year 1999, the department received 166,544 new worker-compensation claims, plus 15,926 claims under a program for longshoremen. In addition, the agency paid out 57,000 monthly benefit checks to victims of black-lung disease. An estimated 3,000 to 4,000 uranium-plant workers would be eligible for benefits under the new program.

IN CONTRAST, the Justice Department has reviewed about 6,000 claims from uranium miners since the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act was passed in 1990, and 3,328 claims have been paid, with payments totaling $246.4 million, said Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller.

Justice, which has 19 people running the RECA program, is processing applications "as quickly as can be done," Miller said. He said the average time for a decision is 237 days from the date a claim is filed. Justice operates nothing else similar to the RECA program.

By law, a decision on a claim is supposed to take no longer than a year. But Harrison said he has seen cases stretch three and four years before a claim is paid.

"People are dying right now before they see their claims," he said, speaking from a hospital bed in Albuquerque, N.M., where he recently received a kidney from his sister. He worked briefly in the uranium mines and believes his kidney disease was caused by exposure to uranium dust.

Last December, then-President Clinton issued an executive order putting the uranium plant workers' program under Labor. Congress subsequently endorsed the decision by giving $60 million to the department to set it up.

As recently as January, Chao responded in writing to questions from her Senate confirmation hearing by saying she saw no problem for Labor making the regulatory deadlines to begin the compensation program.

"The Department of Labor is currently capable of completing these regulations by May 31, 2001, and administering them through existing agencies without creating new mechanisms within the Office of the Secretary," she wrote.

By early March, however, the effort to move the program to Justice had started. On March 9, in a letter to Mitch Daniels Jr., director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, Chao said administering medical benefits under the new program "would be an expanded role."

Referring to the Justice Department program, Chao said that for her department "to create a new infrastructure when DOJ already has the tools to effectively implement and administer this program is duplicative."

Stuart Roy, spokesman for Chao, was unavailable yesterday.

CHAO'S SHIFT surprised -- and in some cases infuriated -- members of Congress who fought to set up the program for DOE workers.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., wrote the secretary a bluntly worded letter on March 27 saying she misunderstood the program and its legislative history and had made "inaccurate" statements about the Justice Department's capabilities.

Pointing to Chao's assurances in January that Labor was ready to take the program, Bingaman said, "I have been communicating to concerned New Mexicans that implementation of this program was proceeding on schedule. Your subsequent actions now leave me puzzled as to how I should view future assurances provided in confirmation hearings by other nominees for the department."

On Friday, Bingaman said he was assured by the White House that the program would not go to Justice. But the White House congressional liaison with whom Bingaman met, Nicholas Calio, told The Courier-Journal that no decision has been reached on the transfer.

Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn. and one of the creators of the program for DOE workers, has urged Chao to reconsider. "This new program," he wrote Chao on March 20, "is not, and was never intended to be, an apology payment" like the program for uranium miners.

"Instead, it is a workers' compensation system for a distinct group of federal employees and federal-contractor employees who were directed by the federal government to undertake activities that the government has now acknowledged placed those workers in harm's way," Thompson said.

Thompson said those who created the new program "believe that the Department of Labor is uniquely suited to administer the energy employees' program because it has vast experience in helping injured workers and a network of regional offices across the country where DOL-claims personnel administer payments for injuries, illnesses and medical benefits related to the workplace."

IN CONTRAST, a bipartisan group of House members said last week that the Justice Department has little staff and no regional offices to handle a program like the one for DOE workers.

Even the Justice Department is on record as saying it is not the right agency for the job. Deputy Associate Attorney General Richard Jerome told a House panel in September there were dramatic differences between RECA's one-time payment and the larger program to pay medical benefits that change over time.

Rep. Ed Whitfield, a Kentucky Republican whose 1st District includes the Paducah plant, was among a number of House members who appealed to Chao last week to reverse course and introduced the bill to keep the program under Labor.

Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., also has told Chao he objects to the move.

But fellow Kentucky Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, a key figure in winning approval of the DOE program, has not taken a position. He is in an awkward position: He is Chao's husband.

Miller said the Justice Department expects an increase in RECA claims because Congress last year expanded the program to include uranium millers and uranium-mine transportation workers. That expansion could swell new claimants to more than 11,000, he said.

But Congress has yet to come up with money for the new groups of claimants. The $10.8 million appropriated for the RECA program this year is going only to uranium miners. People in the newer categories are getting IOUs, Miller said.

So far, that number is at 179.