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The March 25th [1997] New York Times article by Matthew Wald on Depleted Uranium (DU) is more than informational. It puts us on notice. It is an early warning that the U.S. Department of Energy plans to recycle massive quantities of radioactive waste -- 1,250,000,000 pounds of DU -- into the commercial marketplace for reuse in consumer goods.
In addition to fabricating its DU into shielding blocks for use at remaining nuclear weapons sites, as Wald reports, the DOE hopes to be able to dump its surplus DU onto the open market to be smelted, refabricated, and then reused in a wide array of consumer products. "Slightly radioactive" buildings materials, cars, furniture, cooking utensils and other items, as well as bullets and tanks, will be produced and sold, with no warning labels.
This dense, radioactive, toxic metal form can be reused again and again, perhaps eventually being dumped into municipal solid waste landfills, still radioactive. There will be no way for the individuals coming into contact with these materials to be able to measure them or to know how many "permissible doses" they may be receiving.
What is important about these potentially numerous minute doses is that all exposures to ionizing radiation, including those from naturally occurring background, carry a risk to the recipient of premature death from cancer or leukemia, genetic defects in future generations, and a host of other noncancer illnesses and diseases that are associated with impaired immunity. Developing embryos and rapidly growing young children are most vulnerable.
DOE is actively pressing EPA
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Depleted uranium, from which the fissionable isotope U-235 has been removed for nuclear weapons or reactor fuel, is U-238, with a half-life of 4 ½ billion years. Its decay chain includes extremely hazardous radioactive thorium, radium, radon, the radon "daughters" and lead. The Times article did not stress that all of these decay products of DU also pose biological dangers to human health and to other inhabitants of our biosystem essentially forever.
In recent months, the DOE has been actively pressing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to set dose standards for the exposure of members of the public to radioactively-contaminated scrap metal -- the discarded equipment and structural steel components from aging nuclear power plants, for example -- so that DOE can get rid of them without having to pay the high costs of their long-term safe storage in isolation. Currently there are no regulations setting public exposure limits for contaminated metals.
Instead, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) allows release of contaminated materials and wastes by its licensees on a case-by-case basis. The NRC uses regulatory "guidance" that was adopted in 1974. This "Reg Guide" lacks numerical limits and is merely guidance, not an enforceable formal regulation. Dangerous loads of radioactive scrap metal are being detected at scrapyards with increasing frequency, according to EPA regional officials and the Scrap Metal Dealers Association. One recent NRC report noted doses that were more than 500 times the maximum limit that a member of the public is allowed to receive from an operating nuclear power plant.
The Depleted Uranium Education Project is to be commended for drawing attention to this significant source of radioactive contamination left over from the Cold War and for working to help the victims of Gulf War Syndrome.For related information contact:
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