Uranium shells held 'cocktail of nuclear waste'
by Jonathon
Carr-Brown
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/01/21/stinwenws02005.html
SHELLS fired in the Gulf war and Kosovo were made out of
material
contaminated by a potentially lethal cocktail of nuclear
waste,
according to a book published this week.
The claim, supported by
American army and government documents, suggests
that the military in
Kosovo and Iraq used depleted uranium (DU) shells
containing traces of
elements that indicate the probable presence of
plutonium and other highly
toxic nuclear by-products.
The allegations contained in Depleted Uranium:
The Invisible War will
embarrass the British and American governments,
which have consistently
denied DU is harmful, and enrage veterans of the
Gulf and Kosovo.
Martin Messonnier, Frederick Loore and Roger Trilling,
the authors of
the book, are convinced that the Pentagon has misled the
world with
claims that its DU is safe.
Until now, the Pentagon has
maintained that DU shells are safe because
they contain only mildly
radioactive uranium. But the authors claim the
shells were made with
uranium contaminated with more toxic elements.
DU was first used in the
Gulf war where the dense metal proved deadly
against Iraqi tanks. The
American army is determined to keep the shells
in its arsenal despite the
fact the American navy has withdrawn them on
health grounds.
The
authors' claims are based on papers that have led them to three
nuclear
plants in Paducah, Kentucky; Portsmouth, Ohio; and Oak Ridge,
Tennessee -
the main makers of DU.
Last January Bill Richardson, the energy secretary,
accepted after
decades of denials that thousands of workers at Paducah "had
been
exposed to radiation and chemicals that produced cancer and
early
death".
Most of the victims display symptoms similar to Gulf war
veterans -
particularly chronic fatigue and joint pain. The authors claim
the
workers had been handling uranium contaminated with plutonium, which
was
then used to make DU.
Documents from August 1999 show that workers
at Paducah had been
inhaling plutonium as part of a "flawed government
experiment to recycle
used nuclear reactor fuel". The first sign was
employees with a string
of cancers in the 1980s.
In October 1999 the
energy department reported that "during the process
of making fuel for
nuclear reactors and elements for nuclear weapons,
the Paducah gaseous
diffusion plant . . . created depleted uranium
potentially containing
neptunium and plutonium".
Plutonium can cause cancer if ingested even in
minute quantities. What
the workers at Paducah and its sister plants were
dealing with were
recycled uranium stocks already contaminated during the
enrichment
process at other nuclear plants.
The workers, like the
soldiers in Iraq and Kosovo, were not equipped to
deal with these hazards.
Paducah was designed to handle uranium, not
plutonium, which is about
100,000 times more radioactive per gram.
Last week United Nations
officials investigating the effects of DU in
Kosovo confirmed they had
found traces of elements indicating plutonium.
According to the authors,
the only possible source for DU containing
plutonium are Paducah,
Portsmouth and Oak Ridge, which used the
contaminated
uranium.