DU redux

To: Retort 
Via: IC
& From: GS 


[Ignacio was puzzled by this new report on depleted uranium (DU) in yesterday's Observer. We asked Geoffrey Sea to comment. Geoff's response follows on from the report below and is informed by a deep knowledge of the science and health effects of uranium and its daughters, as well as involvement in the events described here within the US nuclear weapons complex, going back nearly thirty years to his days with the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union in Ohio. IB]  

'Safe' uranium that left a town contaminated
David Rose
November 18, 2007
The Observer

Colonie, New York-----It is 50 years since Tony Ciarfello and his friends used the yard of a 
depleted uranium weapons factory as their playground in Colonie, a 
suburb of Albany in upstate New York state. 'There wasn't no fence at 
the back of the plant,' remembers Ciarfello. 'Inside was a big open 
ground and nobody would chase us away. We used to play baseball and 
hang by the stream running through it. We even used to fish in it - 
though we noticed the fish had big pink lumps on them.'

  Today there are lumps on Ciarfello's chest - strange, round tumours 
that protrude about an inch. 'No one seems to know what they are,' he 
says. 'I've also had a brain aneurysm caused by a suspected tumour. I'm 
constantly fatigued and for years I've had terrible pains, deep inside 
my leg bones. I fall over without warning and I've got a heart 
condition.' Ciarfello's illnesses have rendered him unable to work for 
years. Aged 57 and a father of five, he looks much older.

The US federal government and the firm that ran the factory, National 
Lead (NL) Industries, have been assuring former workers and residents 
around the 18-acre site for decades that, although it is true that the 
plant used to produce unacceptable levels of radioactive pollution, it 
was not a serious health hazard.

Now, in a development with potentially devastating implications not 
only for Colonie but also for the future use of some of the West's most 
powerful weapon systems, that claim is being challenged. In a paper to 
be published in the next issue of the scientific journal Science of the 
Total Environment, a team led by Professor Randall Parrish of Leicester 
University reports the results of a three-year study of Colonie, funded 
by Britain's Ministry of Defence.

Parrish's team has found that DU contamination, which remains 
radioactive for millions of years, is in effect impossible to 
eradicate, not only from the environment but also from the bodies of 
humans. Twenty-three years after production ceased they tested the 
urine of five former workers. All are still contaminated with DU. So 
were 20 per cent of people tested who had spent at least 10 years 
living near the factory when it was still working, including Ciarfello.

The small sample size precludes the drawing of statistical conclusions, 
the journal paper says. But to find DU at all after so long a period is 
'significant, since no previous study has documented evidence of DU 
exposure more than 20 years prior... [this] indicates that the body 
burden of uranium must still be significant, whether retained in lungs, 
lymphatic system, kidneys or bone'. The team is now testing more 
individuals.

In 1984, having bought the factory from NL for $10 in a deal that meant 
the firm was exempted from having to pay for its clean-up, the federal 
government began a massive decommissioning project, supervised by the 
Army Corps of Engineers. The clean-up did not finish until summer 2007, 
having cost some $190m. Contractors demolished the buildings and 
removed more than 150,000 tons of soil and other contaminated detritus, 
digging down to depths of up to 40ft and trucking it 2,000 miles by 
rail to underground radioactive waste sites in the Rockies. All that is 
now left of the NL plant is a huge, undulating field, ringed by razor 
wire.

Despite this colossal effort, Parrish and his colleagues found high 
concentrations of DU particles in soil, stream sediments and household 
dust in the vicinity of the site, deposited long ago when the factory 
burnt the shavings and chips produced by the weapons manufacturing 
process: the study estimates that, over the years, about 10 tons of 
uranium oxide dust wafted from the chimney into the surrounding 
environment.

The Army Corps clean-up team tested the soil from some of the gardens 
of houses backing on to the plant, and in cases where it was found to 
be emitting more than 35 pico curies of radiation per gram they removed 
it. The researchers discovered dust in and around buildings emitting up 
to 10 times as much. DU, inhaled in the form of tiny motes of oxide 
that lodge inside the lungs, emits alpha radiation, nuclei of helium. 
Unlike the gamma radiation produced by enriched, weapons-grade uranium, 
alpha particles will not penetrate the skin.

But inside the body DU travels around the bloodstream, accumulating not 
only in the lungs but also in other soft tissues such as the brain and 
bone marrow. There, each mote becomes an alpha particle hotspot, 
bombarding its locality and damaging cell DNA. Research has shown that 
DU has the potential to cause a wide range of cancers, kidney and 
thyroid problems, birth defects and disorders of the immune system.

When DU 'penetrators' - armour-piercing shells that form the standard 
armament of some of Britain's and America's most commonly deployed 
military aircraft and vehicles - strike their targets, 10 per cent or 
more of the heavy DU metal burns at high temperatures, producing oxide 
particles very similar to those at Colonie.

TV footage shot in Baghdad in 2003 shows children playing in the 
remains of tanks coated with thick, black DU oxide, while there have 
long been claims that the DU shells that destroyed Saddam Hussein's 
tanks in the 1991 Gulf war were responsible for high rates of cancer in 
places such as Basra.

Parrish's team includes David Carpenter, an environmental health expert 
from Albany University. 'DU burns, it releases particulates that can be 
breathed in, and it doesn't go away,' he says. 'The issue does not 
concern military personnel as much as civilian populations in theatres 
where they are used. Now we know that we can still find measurable 
levels of DU among the people of Colonie, we need a much bigger study 
to establish whether they have suffered disproportionate ill-effects 
such as cancers as a consequence. If they have, it would raise a 
serious ethical challenge to the use of these weapons. Arguably it 
could constitute a war crime.'

The NL plant on Central Avenue, Colonie's main artery, opened in 1958 
and became one of the Pentagon's main suppliers. DU - the material left 
in huge quantities by the process of refining enriched uranium for 
bombs and nuclear reactors - is extremely dense. A pointed rod fired at 
high velocity will penetrate not only armour but several feet of 
concrete. In 1979 a whistleblower from inside the plant told the local 
health department that it was releasing large amounts of DU from its 
50ft chimney, which was not properly filtered. The state government 
carried out atmospheric tests and in 1981 ordered that main production 
cease. The factory shut three years later.

One of those who has now tested positive is Mike Aidala, 71, who worked 
at the plant for 22 years and became its health and safety director. 
'When it started, the place was spotless,' he says. 'But over the years 
it got dirtier and dirtier. We burnt the chips produced by the lathes 
in a steel furnace.' He added: 'A lot of my co-workers died young. 
Whether the plant was the reason, I guess we'll never know.'

As concern in Colonie rose, a residents' group began to call for a 
publicly funded health study. For Anne Rabe, a founder member of a 
campaign that has now lasted for 25 years, the Parrish study represents 
overdue vindication. 'I do find it very ironic that the US government 
at state and federal level refused for so long to do anything, and now 
the UK comes along and has funded these tests,' Rabe says.

Repeatedly, US agencies have claimed that the Colonie plant was 
reasonably safe, despite the massive clean-up. Most recently, in 2003, 
the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry issued a 
report saying that, although the pollution produced when the plant was 
operating might have slightly increased the risks of kidney disease and 
lung cancer, there was now 'no apparent public health hazard'.

Rabe's campaign has conducted a health study of its own, assembling a 
dossier from personal contacts and by knocking on neighbours' doors. It 
found that among almost 400 people surveyed there were numerous cases 
of rare cancers, thyroid and kidney complaints and birth defects.

The main difficulty the campaigners faced in the past is that DU 
eventually dissolves and is passed in the urine. The US government 
claimed that the plant had been shut so long that it would be 
impossible to determine who had been contaminated - so rendering a full 
health survey pointless.

However, Parrish has developed new, more sensitive methods. At the same 
time, his impartiality is impeccable. Before his work in Colonie, 
Parrish tested more than 400 Gulf war veterans, failing to detect DU in 
any of them - so dealing a serious blow to those who claimed that DU is 
one of the causes of Gulf war syndrome. 'I did not expect to find it in 
Colonie,' he says.

Some of those who have tested positive display classic, common symptoms 
found in DU victims elsewhere. For example, Ciarfello says he was still 
in his twenties when his teeth 'just started to crumble: they ground 
down to nothing until they were just these little stumps and I pushed 
them out with my tongue'. Other members of his family are sick. His son 
developed a severe kidney condition, while his brother, Frank, can 
barely walk and also suffers chronic fatigue. A nephew was born with a 
disfiguring facial skin tumour that has required repeated surgery.

Tom Donnelly, 56, spent 34 years as a foreman at a garage door workshop 
next to the NL factory, where tests have found high concentrations of 
DU in dust samples from places such as shelves and light fittings. He 
has three auto-immune disorders: Crohn's disease, a chronic 
inflammation of the bowel, total alopecia, and cerebral vasculitis, an 
immune system-related narrowing of blood vessels in the brain.

'The new tests suggest I inhaled about 4,000 particles of DU,' Donnelly 
says. 'I used to come to work in the morning and see the chimney 
blowing its smoke in a thick black plume. Most of us had no idea that 
the plant was using uranium at all. After all, the sign outside said 
National Lead. The Army Corps removed all that soil, but they never 
looked at the dust at all. The effect on my life has been devastating, 
but how many others are already dead?' One is his late boss and friend 
Tom Murphy - who, like Donnelly, developed Crohn's and died of it at 
61.

Ann Carusone lived in a house behind the plant from the time of her 
birth in 1966 until 1993. 'When I tested positive, my reaction was 
sheer disbelief,' she says. She has endured years of a chronic lung 
disease, sarcoidosis, an inflammation of the lymph nodes usually found 
in much older people, as well as a blood disorder that produced 
petecchiae - dots of blood beneath her skin, similar to those seen in 
some of those exposed to radiation at Hiroshima. In her twenties she 
had a pre-cancerous ovarian cyst that when removed was the size of a 
grapefruit.

'I knew many people from round here who died young, in their twenties 
and thirties,' she says. 'We used to play out in the creek that flowed 
out of the plant site. The water was sluggish, a weird yellow-green 
colour. We'd splash about in it. Now we know it was laden with depleted 
uranium.'

'It's very striking how many people in this small group have immune 
disorders like Tom Donnelly's,' says Carpenter. 'I can say with great 
confidence that people who inhaled DU are at greater risk of lung 
cancer, as well as leukaemia, other cancers and genetic damage of the 
type that causes birth defects. Previous responses by official bodies 
could be said to amount to a cover-up. People have been told that 
there's no problem, and that's very clearly not true.'

Yesterday NL failed to return calls requesting comment.

Notes on DU
Depleted uranium (DU) is the residue left in massive quantities when 
bomb-grade uranium is refined to make reactor fuel and nuclear weapons.

The densest naturally occurring metal, it is used to make 
armour-penetrating shells, standard armament for some of the West's 
most widely deployed military aircraft and vehicles, such as Bradley 
armoured cars, Abrams tanks, and Jaguar A10 fighter planes.

Less intensely radioactive than bomb-grade uranium, DU emits alpha 
particles, known to cause cancers.

DU weapons that strike their targets produce clouds of tiny uranium 
oxide particles, which lodge in the lungs and other soft tissues such 
as the brain and bone marrow.

DU shells were widely used in the 1991 Gulf war; in Bosnia and Kosovo; 
and are being used now in Iraq and Afghanistan.

-----------------------------------------------------

Geoff Sea responds: 
 
Thanks for the opportunity to comment. It's extremely important to get this one right.
 
The problem with DU was always located at the manufacturing facilities and test ranges. That is precisely why we started the DU campaign in 1980, focused on the two facilities at Jonesboro, Tennessee, (TNS) and Colonie, New York (NL) and at the Fernald Plant which was also run by National Lead. Virtually all of the DU used by the US military came from Fernald and then was shipped out to other locations. Similar concerns were raised at the large test ranges at Vieques, Puerto Rico, and Okinawa.
 
The problem at the indoor manufacturing facilities was that DU dust was building up to tremendous levels. There was 6 inches of DU dust on the floors at times. Workers would leave work blackened like coal miners. Regulations allowed this because DU has such low radioactivity as to be negligible compared to its chemical hazards, but when you allow hundreds of tons to accumulate, two problems arise -- it becomes an internal hazard by breathing the dust, and uranium decay products like radium and radon begin to accumulate inside the buildings. As a result of our campaign, the long strike at TNS, and the shutdown of Fernald in 1989, these problems were addressed.  At both TNS and Colonie, glove boxes replaced open manufacturing, gases were vented, and dust accumulations were removed.
 
At the test ranges, a somewhat different problem existed in that you had the same soil being bombarded over and over again over decades, resulting in obvious accumulations of toxins, not only DU. The DU problem at the ranges was always primarily chemical in that uranium, just like lead, has a heavy metal effect, which includes cancer and also birth defects.  In other words, if lead munitions had been used at these ranges -- and they probably were -- without safeguards, the same environmental effects might occur, or worse. The problem is in the nature of a test range, not in the choice of DU as the metal. And the point that people always neglect is that DU rounds are smaller, with less heavy metal, than lead equivalents.
 
During the Cold War, a different kind of calculus applied to these activities. We were poisoning workers and some ecosystems at test ranges for the sake of weapons that, hopefully, would never be used in battle. Before 1991, with the exception of the Yom Kippur War, DU weapons pretty much were only being expended at test ranges, and the US and its allies had these weapons almost exclusively. Under those conditions it made logical sense to call for a ban on DU weapons, in part to stop their spread.
 
Those horses are now all out of the barn. Every major army in the world uses DU. The Iraqi army had deployed it after the 1991 war. The Syrians, Saudis, Iranians, Egyptians, Turks and Pakistanis all deploy DU munitions, and there is no way to call those horses back. DU has been discarded haphazardly all around the world, there are stockpiles that include maybe a hundred times what all the armies of the world will ever need. So you cannot control the substance as you might control plutonium. The technically ignorant just don't comprehend this.
 
And by the way, if the U.S. had not developed DU weapons in the 1960s and 70s, the Soviet Union would have invented them. It was a simple logical development and could not have been prevented, once DU metal existed in such excess.
 
No country would ever stop deploying DU unilaterally, it would be both suicidal and unsound. Unsound because, as I have argued, in actual battle situations, DU reduces the number of collateral casualties when compared to alternative metals like lead. If you did, hypothetically, decide to remove all DU from weapons, you'd have to replace it with not an equal amount but a far larger amount of lead, which is about equally toxic. The individual bombs would have to be much bigger (because they penetrate less well), and you'd have to expend more munition rounds, including at the test ranges, to ensure an equivalent kill ratio. This upping of the material quantities would far far outweigh any additional toxicity of DU's slight radioactivity. In other words, in hot war situations, you'd be killing thousands of additional civilians in the near-term from the use of larger and more numerous bombs and bullets, in exchange for saving a handful of lives from fewer cancers over thousands of years.
 
Which is why I say -- If you want to end all war and ban all bullets, fine and dandy. But as long as bombs and bullets are deployed in war, from now on, DU is going to be the material of choice, and rightfully so. It is no more "ethical" or "legal" to kill with lead toxicity than with uranium toxicity. Nor is it more ethical and legal to kill a thousand people instantly to save one hypothetical life from cancer far down the road.  Why don't any of the anti-DU activists ever talk about banning lead?  (Stop and think -- it's the National Lead Company that ran Fernald and Colonie for a reason -- precisely because they used to be making lead munitions.)
 
The military understands this, and that is why they have done the responsible thing regarding DU. They are dealing with an organized campaign of willful ignorance, where mistaken facts are repeatedly asserted for no other reason than propaganda value. Yeah, it's easy to scare people with radiation fears. Yeah, it's easy to generate genocidal conspiracy theories about Americans and Jews in the Arab world. Does that make it right?  The anti-DU people need to be held to account for their crass agenda -- they obviously don't give a whit about saving lives or about health and safety -- their entire concern is to attack the U.S. military and the Jews. And so?  In the words of a Columbia professor, is this freedom?
 
Now as to the extension of the Colonie situation to Iraq. The old saw about teensy weensy amounts of radiation still being deadly does not apply in this case. First, uranium itself emits alpha particles, which do not penetrate the skin. It has to be inhaled or ingested to be harmful. A soldier sitting near or handling DU weapons does not get any exposure to radiation. Further, the amounts involved, even at a supply depot, do not begin to approach the amounts necessary to produce a radon-buildup problem as existed at Fernald or Jonesboro, where you had thousands of tons in a single unvented room.
 
Similarly, the amount of DU scattered on a battlefield does not begin to approach the environmental problem at a test range like at Colonie or Vieques. Think about it. We're talking about the difference between a single firing episode, versus constant bombardment of the same soil over decades. The allegation that DU dispersed on the battlefield will irradiate people for billions of years is pure Caldicottian bullshit. The vast majority of DU particles scattered to the soil will rapidly be buried, and half of the atoms will not disgorge their radiation until after the earth is swallowed by the sun.  The added radioactivity is also insignificant compared to the natural uranium content of the soil.
 
In short, the environmental problem at test ranges is a heavy metal accumulation problem that doesn't exist on the battlefield. If it did exist, we would already be familiar with it from the expenditure of lead munitions.
 
Yes, yes, some soldiers are struck by DU fragments, and for them, the DU exposure is a health problem. But here's the thing -- if the munitions had been lead instead of DU, those same soldiers would be already dead, because the round would have been much larger. Here too, the calculus favors DU.
 
So in conclusion, yes, DU is a continuing occupational problem at manufacturing plants, and a continuing environmental problem at test ranges. It's a reason some facilities should be shut down (as we did at Fernald) and a reason that test ranges should be moved from ecologically sensitive areas (as is happening at Vieques). It's a standard environmental and occupational health issue that should be addressed and is being addressed in textbook fashion.
 
It is NOT a justification to incite conspiratorial accusations against Americans and Jews. Because it's those accusations that are resulting in real attacks and real loss of life, in the here and now.  The repeated off-hand references to a DU "cover-up" or DU "genocide", such as the one included in the text of the "Veteran Against the Iraq War," should be guarded against by responsible editors like yourself.
 
Best,
 
Geoffrey