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White House Sending DU Weapons to Ukraine

By John LaForge

The Biden administration will send depleted uranium (or DU) munitions to Ukraine, even though the weapons are radioactive and their use causes contamination hazardous to health and the environment. The armor-piercing munitions made of waste uranium-238 are part of a new military supply donation for Ukraine, according to Reuters, and the DU will be delivered to Ukraine in the coming weeks.

Uranium is extremely hard, a toxic heavy metal almost twice as dense as lead. It becomes “depleted” uranium or “DU” after most of the uranium-235 is separated for use in making nuclear reactor fuel and cores for nuclear weapons.

The U.S. military began testing DU about 40 years ago, and used it as a weapon on a mass scale for the first time in the 1991 bombardment and occupation of Iraq. As late as July 7, 2023 the Pentagon’s website says “DU has fewer risks than natural uranium because it is less radioactive.”

This disinformation appears on the same website (The Pentagon’s “Health Readiness & Combat Support” site) where the military admits that DU munitions and tank armor are contaminated with radioactive and hazardous metals besides uranium, including plutonium, americium, neptunium and technetium. The website notes that even after claiming to have studied the inclusion of the highly radioactive waste materials in the DU munitions, the military doesn’t know how much of today’s DU weapons (30-millimeter shells, 120-mm shells, and tank armor) is spiked with plutonium, etc. Back in the year 2000, when plutonium was first found to have contaminated the Balkans following the U.S./NATO bombings of 1994, 1995, and 1999, the Pentagon said it would find out what percentage of its DU munitions is contaminated with plutonium — a substance called the most toxic known to science.

Photo: davidswanson.org

The above “Health Readiness & Combat Support” website includes official material about DU. It says in part: “The Department of Defense (DoD) began testing depleted uranium (DU) about 40 years ago, and first used it in a military operation in 1991. It has fewer risks than natural uranium because it is less radioactive. DoD and many other organizations have studied, and continue to study, the health, chemical, radiological and environmental effects and exposures of DU.”

Sydney Young reported in Harvard International Review Sept. 22, 2021, that DU “may pose a risk to both soldiers and local civilian populations. When ammunition made from depleted uranium strikes a target, the uranium turns into dust that is inhaled by soldiers near the explosion site. The wind then carries dust to surrounding areas, polluting local water and agriculture.”

“Researcher Al-Azzawi cites studies,” Young reported, “showing that children’s leukemia cases increased by 60 percent between 1990 and 1997 and that birth defects tripled between 1990 and 1998 in Basra, Iraq. Basra experienced massive U.S. bombardment in response to Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Al-Azzawi suggests that depleted uranium used during such conflicts is responsible for the rise in cancer and birth defects in the area.”

— Democracy Now!, Sept. 5, 2023; Harvard International Review, Sept. 22., 2021; Health.mil

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Atomic Veterans Dying, as VA and Supreme Court Deny Benefits

Photo Credit: El Pais.
By Lindsay Potter

In August 2022, the new PACT Act (Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics) expanded eligibility for compensation to 8,000 U.S. military veterans, many suffering from cancers, who were tasked with observing nuclear weapons tests or cleaning up radioactive disaster sites. However, the VA rejected 86% of radiation-related claims filed over the last year. “They’re waiting for us to die,” said Kenneth Browneil, who was sent to Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific following 43 U.S. bomb tests conducted there between 1948 and 1958. In June, the Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Victor Skaar, a veteran of the 1966 disaster cleanup of Palomares, Spain, where a B-52 bomber collided with a refueling plane and dropped three H-bombs, one of which blew apart scattering seven pounds of plutonium-239 across the village. The court claimed the PACT Act is sufficient, although it recognized it does not cover Skaar. To win compensation, veterans with cancers or tumors “have to provide expert medical reviews and organ-specific radiation dose assessments” through the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, according to NBC News. But it’s “virtually impossible” to prove said U.S. Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., an atomic historian, who last month introduced a bill that would lift that burden of proof. The Pentagon recently handed out medals to atomic veterans, making clear the recognition would not accompany any federal benefits. Leo Feurt, a veteran who witnessed 28 of the 36 atomic bomb detonations in 1958 and now faces a dozen radiation-related illnesses, says “Every dang bit of it has been denied.”

— NBC News, Aug. 23; AP, June 20, 2023

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U.S. Disregards Marshall Islands, Senate Approves RECA Expansion

Photo Credit: KRWG
By Lindsay Potter

The U.S. senate approved legislation on July 27 expanding the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to provide benefits to more radiation-affected Americans, the New Mexico Downwinders, uranium miners and workers since 1971, and residents of Montana, Idaho, Colorado, Guam, and previously excluded areas in Nevada, Arizona, and Utah. This legislation still awaits a decision in the House. In contrast, the U.S. government claims the pool of funding for medical compensation has run dry for the Marshallese people, displaced and poisoned by nuclear weapons the U.S. detonated over their homelands. Marshallese parliament speaker Kenneth Kedi told the Marshall Islands Journal, “the fact that U.S. authorities can tell the Marshall Islands there is ‘no more money’ for nuclear test exposure for people who lived through 67 of the largest U.S. nuclear weapons tests ever conducted while at the same time preparing to expand compensation coverage for Americans is astounding.”

The U.S. and the Marshall Islands are renegotiating the Compact of Free Association to address the egregious crimes against the Marshallese people by providing compensation, benefits, and access to immigration, though in amounts far below what was requested by the Marshall Islands. Still, Kedi says, “As nuclear test victims ourselves we support compensation for American victims of nuclear tests, whether they are Downwinders or worked at nuclear test sites or worked in uranium mines.”

—AP and KRWG July 27; Marianas Variety, Aug. 21, 2023; trinitydownwinders.com

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Navy Contamination “Lower than Zero”

Photo Credit: San Francisco Chronicle
By Lindsay Potter

The U.S. Navy has been accused of covering up dangerous radioactivity, including high levels of strontium-90, which displaces calcium in bones and causes cancer, on a 40-acre parcel of its Hunter’s Point Shipyard in San Francisco. When the EPA flagged the 23 tests from 2021 showing elevated strontium levels, the Navy simply responded with a new set of data, showing levels “lower than zero.” The EPA said “the new testing reads as if the Navy is suppressing data results it doesn’t like.” Declared a Superfund site in 1989 and closed in 1994, the shipyard was home to the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, the military’s biggest applied nuclear research facility, and later became a site for decontaminating ships from 1946 nuclear weapons detonations at Bikini Atoll. In 2016, the EPA stopped transfer of the land to real estate developers because the Navy was discarding “anomalous” soil samples and obscuring the true level of toxicity. Though the Navy agreed to remediate the area to a level acceptable for residential property, they repeatedly shirked this agreement — downgrading several parcels to “industrial use” with lower standards for toxicity, and installing covers in the soil to suppress contamination rather than removing the soil. On one already developed parcel, residents report cancers and health problems linked to radioactivity. There are currently 12 lawsuits related to the site.

— The Guardian June 25, 2023; NBC Dec 2, 2022

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Senate Extends Reactor Insurance Handout With No Public Scrutiny

By John LaForge

On July 27, the U.S. Senate approved a 20-year extension of the Price-Anderson Act. The law provides that if there are disastrous consequences resulting from reactor accidents, the manufacturers, builders, and operators won’t be held liable. The Act was first adopted in 1957 because no private insurer would issue an insurance policy to cover potentially huge costs. Later the government even took on responsibility for the industry’s radioactive waste disposal or abandonment.

In Europe, the Organization of European Economic Cooperation and EUROATOM assumed public liability for reactor accidents there.

As Victor Gilinsky reports in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Price-Anderson was handed to industrial giants General Electric, Westinghouse, and others after they told Congress they would not build civil power reactors — machinery with which they had no experience — if they faced liability for catastrophic accidents.

The recent Senate action was done at night, without any pesky public hearings, and after being added to the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act. The Act’s extension is likely to pass in the majority Republican House of Representatives.

Photo Credit: nuclearnews.net

To promote nuclear power, “the government gave the builders and vendors freedom from liability for offsite accidents,” Gilinsky wrote.

The act currently provides a mere $13 billion for post-accident public compensation, with the funds coming over time from a self-insurance scheme funded by reactor owners.

This is because not even the richest insurance agencies in the world will sell a reactor accident liability policy to operators: the risks are too astronomical. The estimated cost of the 2011 Fukushima accident — $300 billion dollars and counting — dwarfs the Price-Anderson “policy.”

Any compensation costs beyond the $13 billion “would land in the lap of Congress” Gilinsky notes, which is to say regular taxpayers — the same people who would be the health and environmental victims of a reactor disaster’s radiation dispersal.

— Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Aug. 22, 2023

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