Oh boy, 20 years later a Brit comes and studies the problem. He doesn't want to say anything not based on hard evidence. Bull Hockey. There is so much evidence it would make you cry.
In the 80s I, along with Anne Rabe and Tom Ellis and others, knocked on almost every door in the surrounding neighborhoods. The stories we were told would horrify you. The NYS health department (the then commissioner, Axelrod is the one who cerified the reopening of Love Canal) wouldn't interview the residents so we did. Epidemiologists are reluctant to place the blame on any single thing there must be contributing factors. Only when a baseball bat hits them in the forehead will they reluctantly agree there might be a problem.
There was almost no security at the plant, kids told stories of playing hide and seek in the barrels used to ship the spent fuel rods and using the carbon castin blocks to paint their faces in wild indian fashion. Almost everyone in the area had health problems ranging from mild to severe.
There was a gate out the back fence leading to Patroon Creek, which leads to the Hudson River. During a press conference (on Mother's Day) Anne picked up a piece of carbon in the open field adjacent to the plant and showed it to the assembled reporters, including from the Albany Times Useless, It was later shown to be off the Geiger Counter scale.
The soil in the surrounding area is contaminated to a depth as much as three feet.
The plant was sold by NL to the US DOE (through a midnight bill sponsored by Senator Alphonse D'Amato) for $1. They saved $174,999,999 on the clean up. Of course Harlod Simmons CEO of NL was a major contributor to the former senator. He remains one of George W. Bushes major historic donors.
Corporate welfare at its finest.
Anne Rabe is a hero. She is tireless and selfless in her quest for evironmental justice. I am sure she said a lot more than this reporter reported. I am proud to call her a friend.

Let's face it, everybody's body could now be considered a toxic waste dump. We carry all kinds of pesticide/fungicide residue, as well as heavy metals in our fatty tissues. I grew up in the upstate adirondacks where DDT was used to control the local mosquitos and black flies. Today when i go home, i don't find many of either pest yet also notice an absence of birds i used to love to hear in the Adirondack mornings. And since i've traveled the Northway thru the area described in this article, i've probably got some particles of depleted uranium in me. I don't lament the fact that i've grown un in a culture of poison. Afterall, many of the benefits i enjoy are probably the result of living in a poison society. But now the poison society has evolved. It has created poisons for dealing with pests known as human beings. These pests speak different languages, practice different customs, have different colored skins and therefore, need to be controled/eradicated. Depleted uranium is the perfect solution for the human pests. It gives more bang for the buck as it keeps on working/killing for generations. What modern pesticide, working on mere bugs, could boast this? It's cheap because there is so much of it around and some are even turning to putting it into cookware. But its pesticide values are what make it attractive. Isn't it time we gave up on the belief of poisoning nature in order to achieve some kind of benefit from doing this. Isn't it like poisoning your mother in order to get her to stop nagging you about cleaning up your room? Wouldn't it be easier to clean up our rooms?

Did you notice our government has studied 80 men and found no significent problems. EIGHTY?

"Two thirds" of the troops, over three hundred thousand, who served on the ground in the First Gulf War are permanently disabled. PERMANENTLY. Many have already died and the rest are suffering from radiation posioning, a disease our government calls the Gulf War Syndrome. They are lying and they know they are lying. It is such a major blunder they are scared to death to admit the truth. It makes the Agent Orange disaster seem like a minor headache.

We have used "thousands of tons" of it in the current war in Iraq and are still using it daily. If you inhale just a few microscopic specks of it, it will slowly kill you. The air in Iraq is full of it. Gas masks will not stop it from entering your lungs. It is deadly for over four million years and it cannot be cleaned up in an entire country. The radiation reading in Baghdad are almost 2,000 times normal.

Go to Google and ask for depleted uranium. Read every article, ignore the ones who say it is safe. They lie to cover it up, or have monetary reasons.

It makes me wonder why they used it in the first place, except that it was probably a very "cost effective" armor piercing substance.

This seems like a form of chemical and biological warfare as a secondary effect. It is like a "dirty bomb" for the lungs of unsuspecting people many years later...horrible.

randolfski wrote "I don't lament the fact that i've grown un in a culture of poison."

WHAT??! Then buddy maybe you should go and drink dsome cyanide koolaid and do us all a favor. I don't really lament anything, however everyone needs to understand that ALL of the pesticides, herbicides and industrial fertilizers are derivitives of petroleum oil. So, the "benefits" don't exist when you consider that gee, the birds that ate the DDT sprayed insects are also dead now. Consider that the approval process for such things is non existent now and simply requires a check to be made out to the appropriate politicos, oh and the manufacturers are all making billions on this stuff.

As for depleted uranium - this is another nice name for nuclear power plant waste. Someone figured out how to use it for the tips of armor piercing rounds and voila!! we have a way of dumping what was once toxic waste back into the environment in the form of weaponry. The thought was that it will be in someone elses backyard. This is also why the military is blocking all relevant studies on the substance. No one expected the public backlash to come from our own troops. Now the genie is out of the bottle so they are once again playing cover up and deny. So you can keep your better living thru chemistry slogans and I'll take a more natural approach to life with organic food. the saddest point in all of this is that somewhere along the way many of us began to believe we know better than Mother nature.

Here is a snapshot of reality on Mother Nature vs. Man the idiot...

After Mt. St. Helen exploded in 1980 the US Forest Service decided to take a novel approach to restoring life on the mountain. 1/2 of the area devastated was to be "wild life managed" back from the dead while the other 1/2 was to be left alone to mother Nature to take her course...

10 years later the "managed" area was still struggling and the other 1/2 where mother nature was allowed to run her own show had ALL of its wild life back and the forest was well under way to fully regrowing.

Better living thru what again?

oh joy , the merry pranksters are at it again, lets all drink some agent orange and relieve this planet of its worst nightmare, humans...of course greed is the main motavator of the devil that run this world, to bad, they never learned to not play with matches, specially ones the burn for thousands of years, not to mention the big bic lighters that the subs carry around,,,,this world is in deep doodoo, everyone knows it but we keep playing the prank on ourselves, and whistle merrily on our way in the dark.;

Hi Neoconned, you posted some excelent points. "Depleted" just means it is not good for fuel in a nuclear power plant. If burned, it is very deadly.

The government has also mis-lead us on some other little things; they have said the bullets are plated or tipped. Actually the warhead for the tank cannon shells are ten pounds of solid depeted uranium, the 30MM shells for the A-10 Gatling gun are over three pounds of the stuff and coated with a thin sheet of copper. It is also used in rifle and machine gun shells and bunker buster bombs. Wow, they are great ammo!

Over thirty countries now purchase the deadly ammo from us, and yes it is inexpensive, the nuclear power plants don't want to pay to store it, so they practically give it away to arms manufactures.

When a round hits a target "it burns", actually it begins to burn as soon as it is fired. The result is a highly toxic radio-active smoke and dust, which puts billions of microscopic speckss of deadly uranium isotopes into the air. Winds blows it all over the place and much of it eventually gets into the upper atmosphere. When it rains or snows, it returns to land and sea. Thousands of tons have been expended on gunnery ranges in the unites States, Australia, China, Russia, etc. It is everyplace. Iraq and Afgan, Kosovo to name just three are ruined forever. __FOREVER!!!

Every person who has been to Iraq in the past five years is dying from radiation posioning, they may live another 30 years, they may die sooner, but they are dead,___ most just don't know it yet.

Mother Nature is screaming at us,__ and she's pissed. In the past few months the bird populations world wide have suffered a DRAMATIC decrease, not the normal sad decrease from pollutants, a "dramatic" decrease. Our atmosphere is now at the critical stage as far as nuclear waste is concerned. How much of it can plant and animal life in the oceans handle? Well, the clues of a serious problem are clearly obvious. Fish, sea mammals and plants are dying off and scientists are not sure why.

In the oceans live a tiny form of life called Phytoplankton. That plant life supplies our atmosphere with 70% of it's oxygen. Kill of that plant life, even 30%, and then turn out the lights, the fat lady will sing.

I'll stop now, do you have children, do you love them? We are sill using DU like there is no tomorrow,___ there might not be a tomorrow pretty soon, no tomorrows for any living thing on the planet. DU kills everything, plant and animal life,___ even microbes.

Billy__y4 faild to mention, he works in the nulear power field, but he's an Okay person, just brain washed into believing nucler power is perfectly safe and the way to go.

I read that same report Billy, it's an old report and was written by denyers. Tell me and everyone, why hundreds of thousands of our troops who have served in Iraq are now permanently disabled from inhaling DU. Then there are many who have died. Tell us, how many troops who sat on boxes of DU ammo for several days in the bradley fighting vehicles have developed rectal cancer. Young men Billy, and in comparison with those who have not done that, the cancer score is a hundred to nothing.

Tell everyone about the nuclear waste dumps in New York and Michigan to name only two disasters with nuclear waste, where nuclear waste was buried in thirty foot deep ditches and now the nearby rivers and lakes are horribly poluted with nuclear waste and it is getting into the aquifers. POLLUTED FOREVER!!

Tell us the real truths of nuclear waste. Tell us that if a person inhales a few specks of DU it will get into their blood and then travel to almost anywhere in the body and causes cancers. Tell how it gets into the male sperm and is transferred to the fetus and their child is born with horrible deformties, missing legs, arms, fused fingers, missing eyes and no mouths and brain damage.

Tell us Bill. because that is the truth and our government has been silencing the experts the doctors and scientists who want to tell the truth but the media won't tell it and our government hides or distorts the truth from us as much as they possobly can.

Would our government do that?

Anyone who may read this, please do not take my writing as gospel, go to Google and ask for depleted uranium,read the reports and make up your own mind of who you wish to believe.

We should test it by shoving a couple rounds up cheney's backside, and see what happens to him.

Its a great way to get rid of all that spent radioactive fuel...just illegally invade a country you dont like, and blast it all over the their landscape...

THE USA IS A WAR CRIMINAL

You got it Canuch, DU is the last word for weapons of mass destruction. And to think that was the first reason Bush invaded Iraq. He and his gang should be brought before a world court. May hapen some day,___ we'll see.

A friend has been reading this debate and called me and asked how DU gets into a person's lungs and then to their blood stream?

The DU is microscopoic, it goes right in the blood stream just as the oxygen does.

It is that tiny, but DU is posionious enough to kill anything. It never goes away, it shows up in urine samples that if any DU is in the body, but it never will be harmless for at least four million years.

Come back Billy, we are ready to read your reply.

In the decade between 1945 and 1955 incidences of lung cancer in the west (the only place such things were monitored) rose by 100%. During this period an estimated 750,000 tons of plutonium and plutonium contaminated dust was thrown into the stratosphere, (and hence everywhere) by above ground atomic bomb 'tests'. In the mid-fifties, smoking was identified as the primary cause of lung cancer, and this became the accepted orthodoxy. At that time smoking rates among the adult population were close to 90%. Today, that rate is down to 25% or less, but incidences of lung cancer have not declined proportionately, ergo some other factor is at work. If you inhale a particle of plutonium (the most toxic substance on earth) and it embeds in your lung tissue, it will (not might) cause cancer.

I have read (but cannot verify) that in the last few years there has been a spike of incidences of lung cancer in south-eastern Europe, an area downwind of Iraq. For several tears after Chernobyl, located in the Ukraine, caught fire, sheep in North Wales were deemed not fit for consumption because of the levels of radioactive material in their tissue.

A useful tool for palaeontologists are ravines where layers of ancient subsoil are accessible, and distinct lines in the soil indicate the various extinction events that have occurred regularly on this planet. In millions of years time, any passing palaeontologists arriving on the earth will have a similar, in fact even more precise dating mechanism for fossilised organic material. Anything that was alive after 1945 will have traces of strontium-90 in their remains, anything that died before 1945 will not. Sorry, can't think of a happy ending.

Allblue: You are absolutely correct, and I thank you for the comments.

In 1975, our esteemed managers of the nuclear regulatory commission, grudgenly acknowledged, that world wide there were tons of the higly regulated plutonium missing and was unaccounted for. It was presumed to have been "lost" in the industrial process.

A rather frightening presumption, as it is the most deadly substance known to exist in the universe. It is a man made substance, a by product of using enriched uranium for fuel in atomic power plants. It is only found in almost immeasurable trace ammounts in nature.
It is only used to make bombs and could be used to fuel fission plants. It cannot be destroyed and it deadly for many thousands of years.

An average size nuclear plant, produces 200 to 300 pounds of plutonium every year. There is enough posion in a single cup full, to kill five billion people. I can find no data on ammounts stored since 1975, or of how much is missing or lost. It is not lost, it is here on the planet, we just do not know where it is.

These are the exact words of a retired man who worked at a nuclear facility in Tennessee. "We used to take that shit and put it in boxcars and roll them onto unused rail sidings".

If sunbeams were adequate weapons of war, we would have had solar energy decades ago.

so much criminality & insanity was unloosed on this world by the events of world war 2, but the weaponization of atomic energy will prove to be the worst of all. with complete disregard for the consequences to the world of atomic power, the "great" powers, w/the US in vanguard, fetishize such power, even when it destroys their own military, citizenry, and national environment (much less the "enemy's" world.) the US used nuclear weapons at the end of ww2 to intimidate the ruskies, and we haven't batted an eyelash since. there's more than a whiff of satanism, the demonic in all this, such grotesque perversion of human nature and human tools.

thanks to everyone, esp. you evelyn smith, for posts on this.

Evelyn Smith, You stand to be corrected; it's 4.5 ,billion years, for it to be half of it's radioactivity. Unbelieveable, I thought million too, and I read million once, but it's BILLIONS OF YEARS.

Thanks for the correction NMBILL.

You know, after the first million, I sort of lost interest in the years. Plutonium will be deadly for less time, but pound for pound it is a thousand times deadlier. DU is deadly enough to fninish us off and there is a lot more of it.

You know what makes me wonder? I wonder why when Common Dreams spots an article like this or one about the enviroment, it gets such little attention. Mention Cheney and wow, everyone is there. The use of DU should make everyone on the planet scream murder. I bet not even one percent of the public ever heard of it.___A shame.

"Depleted and Spent"
Well, that means it must be perfectly safe, doesn't it? Don't think for a moment that the use of these terms is accidental. Depleted uranium is very deadly when ingested, and 'spent' nuclear fuel is actually TOO hot and radioactive to safely be used in a nuclear reactor any more. A more accurate term would be 'activated fuel rods' rather than 'spent fuel rods'.

Depleted uranium has already had a fraction of the fissionable isotope, U-235, extracted. The weapon is called an 'armor piercing firebomb' because the uranium, once it has penetrated the armor shell, than bursts into very hot flame. All of the uranium is released to the atmosphere as uranium oxide dust, which coats the landscape and contaminates any exposed water supply.

External exposure is not the problem, however. The problem is that the stuff gets into the lungs and the body, where it goes to work on the fragile proteins and nucleic acids that are the essential elements of all cells. The ionizing radiation (alpha rays (helium nuclei) and gamma rays (more powerful than x-rays)) rips through proteins and DNA, causing all manner of damage and mutation which can lead to cancer and other problems.

The best discussion of DU toxicity I've come across is at http://www.ratical.org/radiation/DU/KYagasakiOnDU.pdf

As I understand the hotter it is the shorter the halflife.

Thank you Ike, that is the website I'd lost.

NMBILL. It's shortened, but not enough to worry about, it's still in the billions.

Hi Billy, it's true there are conflicting reports. Just scroll up three blogs to Ike and click on that website at the end of the blog. Everyone should read it all.

Guess I'm not brainwshed either then, get the same compliment from my wife and she says I'm still good in bed. That's why we've been married for 51 years.

"I find it ironic that the Brits came over here to study it...There are no agencies here that are specifically funding nondefense-related research on depleted uranium."

That, to me, says it all.

Robert Fisk has a slide deck showing the children with cancer in Iraq that he snapped personally at the hospitals. The cancer rate in Iraqi children is something like 2000% higher than what would be expected for the age. The only factor that differs between the childhood of these Iraqi children and other children around the world is that they grew up among the remnants of depleted uranium shells left behind after Desert Storm. The shells littered the streets and the fields. Children, being curious, would pick them up, kick them around. They seeped in to the ground, into the water, into the crops.

I suppose if you are willing to bomb the country so severely that hundreds of thousands of noncombatant Iraqis are killed by bombs, then why would you care about Iraqi cancer babies?

These tragedies are accepted by our leaders as "an unfortunate necessity," or something to that effect. Yes, unfortunate always for the other guy it seems. If I were an Iraqi father, and it were my child with terminal cancer, I would dedicate my life to destroying the US.

And, surprise, based on Chertoff's "gut" we have an elevated terror alert. I wonder how this type of thing comes about?

The kids don't have to pick up empty shells to contact DU, actually the DU in the shells burned when they were fired. DU on the skin is not very harmful. It is the microscopic specks of dust that remain on the ground that is killing everyone. The wind blows it all over the place. Inhaled, the DU causes horrible damage to the body, it attacks the immune system and alters DNA. That is why there are so many babies born with horrific deformities. Young children show the symptoms of radiation posioning sooner than adults. All one has to do in Iraq to insure a long, slow death, is to inhale. And it is not just in Iraq, it is all over the Earth, there is more of it in Iraq, Afgan, Kosovo, to name three, than most places. You only have to inhale one microscopic speck of it to have serious health problems.

Just read the report from the website on the 1:16 pm July 17, by Ike. It's right up there on this page.

Then go to Google and ask for depleted uranium. Read what the doctors and scientists say abut DU. There are reports written by those, who so far have managed to cover it up. The facts and the hundreds of thousands of people who are dying from radiation posioning are the smoking gun. We are in big trouble, all of us.

If any would like to read an excellent report about DU, here is the website.

http://www.ratical.org/radiation/DU/KYagasakiOnDU.pdf

Thank you for an informed discussion on a HOT topic. Seems there's a big of emulating the 'god of big bang' in these nuclear displays of force. Perhaps those convinced it all started with a big bang think that's an apt exit for mankind?
On a different note, what about skin cancers? My relatives used to sun bathe and NEVER had any, and now LOTS of people I know who casually walked under the Caribbean or Florida sun have skin cancer spots. Could the little morsels descend and plant themselves on our skin and create these growths? I have no science on the matter, but it seems to be happening...

One of the congenital problems caused by DU exposure is hydrancephaly or being born without a brain. DU was tested by NM Tech near Socorro on the Rio Grande. After the testing there were many cases reported in communities on the Rio Grande. At first my thought was industrial pollution but a good friend of mine who was an artillary officer during the Gulf Adventure of the early 90s fathered a child with the condition. Tragic.

@Siouxrose

I have read (in one of those out of the way places on the internet where such things can be found) that it is possible that the huge rise in incidences of skin cancers over the last few decades could be related to the number of toxins (not specifically DU or other radioactive pathogens) that we have put in our bodies by eating our junk food and drinking our junk water. There are literally hundreds of such chemicals, and when they embed in the dermis ultraviolet light reacts with some of them them causing them to become carcinogenic (so this theory goes). Let's face it, we walked around naked for millions and millions of years, so evolution would have ensured that our skin was not susceptible to UV derived cancers by the process of natural selection. This is a new phenomenon, very new, so presumably the cause is new as well.

When I first learned about the Depleted Uranium being used in munitions, and how much more has been used in this war than in 1991, I think I was depressed for weeks or maybe months. I wrote a few things in a few places, but it was all crickets in response. No one takes it seriously, and I seldom think about it anymore. The fact that we've seen cancers in the troops already, rather than taking many years, is just another very bad sign. Cancers weren't supposed to show up this fast, if it were the passive radiation exposure they'd have us believe it to be. It's internal radiation exposure, and there's very little in the way of research of it. Honestly, they don't even know what it's going to do. And the fools think it won't come here.

All we can do now is know about it. There isn't a damn thing we can do about it. In the upper athmosphere, it won't be a local issue. Limit exposure as you can. By the time enough people figure it out, we all know, it will be far too late. Permanent genetic damage. All I can say to the monsters that allowed this, is, you're going to miss your schools full of healthy rowdy children. You really are. There will never be enough of us to take care of the rest of us.

Add in the wars and oil shortage/cost and food crop/cost issues, global warming and no health care, and it paints a very bleak picture of the future no matter who you are or where you live.

And I used to think the Russians didn't treat their people very well. Cold war. What a joke.

Me, I think that when the world figures out that the US is responsible for it, we'll be that place they used to call America.

Evelyn Smith- What I'm saying is the more radioactive the element (plutonium) the shorter the half life.
Weaker emissions from DU give it a 4.5 Bn Yr halflife.

That is correct Bill. No argument from me or for anyone actually.

Siouxrose, I wonder about the skin caners also, and the dramatic rise of the macular degeneration problem, and breast and thryoid cancers. Compared to now, those medical problems were not common in children and younger adults just sixty years ago.

THANK YOU Common Dreams writers, readers and responders! Especially "Evelyn Smith," especially for the Katsuma Yagasaki paper. This issue of double-speak-labelled "DU weapons" is probably the nuclear last straw of our addiction to war which has evolved to "total," mega-destructive and, now with the neocons, permanent. Scott Ritter has masterfully condemned our mendacious invasion of Iraq and has persuasively warned of further attack on Iran; however, when asked about DU weapons he became defensive and said, "If you don't want us to use them, don't send us to war" (implying that they are a military necessity). NO WAR is the REAL NECESSITY. It has develped into a FATAL addiction--- total, permanent, now covertly nuclear. GOODBYE! It was nice living with you!