Discounted Casualties
Part II The Threat in Our Backyards
Closed factory
Akira Tashiro
Particles Drift over 26 Miles Cleanup Continues
"These are the remains of the closed factory. The clean-up operation is still underway." Nuclear scientist Leonard A. Dietz (77) pointed through a fence to a huge pile of earth silhouetted by the evening sun. Six or seven workers inside the fence were raking soil from a deep hole dug with a back hoe. To the southeast, we could still see the towering office buildings of Albany, capital of New York State.
These factory ruins lie in a town called Colonie on the outskirts of Albany. A company called National Lead Industries (NL) ran the factory for over 20 years, until early 1980. It produced 30mm cannon penetrators under an Air Force contract and dynamic flight control ballast weights for aircraft. The raw material for these products was depleted uranium (DU).
Source Discovered Immediately
"In 1979, DU particles were found in an air filter monitor ten miles from this factory." After we returned to his home in Schenectady, about 20 kilometers (about 13 miles) northwest of the NL factory site, Dietz continued his explanation, referring to a report he compiled himself. At the time, Dietz was a senior researcher at General electric (GE), where he was a recognized expert in the field of isotopic analysis of uranium by mass spectrometry. His office was at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory (KAPL) in Schenectady which GE ran for the US Navy. He and his colleagues were using mass spectrometers to measure the uranium content in air filter monitors around Navy facilities in the area when they accidentally detected the DU. KAPL did not process DU, so they knew immediately that the particles came from NL, "We monitored a number of checkpoints for five months. We even found them at the most distant checkpoint which was 26 miles north west. We found spherical and non-spherical DU particles 4 to 6 micrometers long. You breathe particles of this size into your lungs."
Submitted Report to the Navy
According to Dietz, the only reason particles were not found at greater distances was the lack of monitoring stations. He believes that the right wind conditions would surely spread the particles much further. Dietz compiled his data in a report and submitted it to the Navy in January 1980.
In early February, less than two weeks after Dietz sent his report to the Navy, the New York state government ordered NL to terminate operations. Unrelated to Dietz' study, the state Department of Environmental Conservation had also been measuring radiation levels outside the plant. They found that the amount of DU discharged in January 1980 was ten times the allowable state standard (150 microcuries a month).
"One hundred fifty microcuries is produced by 387 grams of DU. Nl was routinely discharging far more than that in the form of minute uranium particles. Dietz explains.
Cleanup to Cost over $100 Million
NL shut its doors permanently in 1983. The next year, it sold the factory and site to the Department Energy (DOE) for a nominal fee in lieu of the cost of cleaning up. The full-scale cleanup, including dismantling the buildings and removing contaminated soil, began in 1996. "So far the cleanup alone has cost over $100 million. This is our tax money, you know."
Until he retired in 1983, Dietz was unable to submit his report to anyone but the Navy. He believes that his 1980 report had nothing to do with the closing of the factory, but his investigation increased Dietz' own concern about depleted uranium munitions. In 1991, when he heard that DU munitions would be used in the Gulf war, he immediately protested in the pages of a scientific journal. His article appeared in early February, before the start of the ground war (February 24).
"A 30mm shell contains about 300 grams of DU. The largest 120 mm shells contain about 4.7 kilograms. To protect the health of Americans, we shut down a factory for discharging the equivalent of about two 30mm shells into the atmosphere per month. How can we justify using a million such shells in Iraq and Kuwait, most of it in only four days of war?"
Calm by nature, Dietz was thoroughly convincing, an expert with the figures to back him up.
Note:
Sutting down the military licensing for the use of DU in live fire at makua is important to understand whether Waianae residence get to live in Waianae or be forced to move away from the islands. The military spreads isotopes everywhere through fires, trucking it in continued bombing in Schofield and Makua. It's horrible to not take a step towards stopping the bombing.
Replies
Tuesday, July 13, 2010 It’s not out of the question that the United States might not be around long enough to see the complete cleanup of its Cold War legacy in Washington State.
Not far from the banks of the Columbia River resides the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, once the most important manufacturer of plutonium for America’s nuclear arsenal. Today, the 560-square-mile decommissioned facility is teeming with plutonium, one of the most toxic substances on earth (minute particles of it can cause cancer), with a half-life of 24,000 years.
The U.S. Department of Energy estimated back in the mid-1990s that Hanford had more than 111,000 kilograms of plutonium to dispose of. A former department official, Robert Alvarez, recently went over old Energy reports and determined that the original math was way off. It turns out that Hanford has three times more plutonium than was calculated in 1996.
The New York Times reported that the plutonium doesn’t “pose a major radiation hazard now, largely because it is under ‘institutional controls’ like guards, weapons and gates.” But the highly radioactive material “is certain to last longer than the controls,” meaning the systems put in place by the U.S. government could be long gone by the time the plutonium reaches a safe level for the surrounding area.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Analysis Triples U.S. Plutonium Waste Figures (by Matthew Wald, New York Times)