(September 12, 1991) [The following is reprinted from "Atoms & Waste". It represents the beginning of a larger report that will detail the flow of depleted uranium weapons in the Gulf War and in the future. The report is part of an ongoing campaign. In the words of its authors, "Underlying this picture is a uranium waste cycle in which nuclear power and toxic warfare will progressively reinforce each other. In view of the United Nations sponsorship of the war against Iraq, we believe that a ban on uranium weapons and armor should be proposed in the council of the UN with support of massive petitions from a full coalition of organizations devoted to sustainable energy and disarmament." Work on the report is still in formation and the authors would like to see this preliminary article circulated among international groups that might be interested in joining the campaign or have contributions to the report itself.]
(358.3546) WISE Amsterdam - War has always been a mortal business. Through the present century, however, warfare has taken on an increasing dimension of morbidity in the medical sense of lingering toxicity and illness. Chemical arsenals ranging from mustard gas in World War I to Agent Orange in Vietnam have filled veterans' hospitals, and the polluting processes of weapons production have enveloped larger and larger civilian populations at home.
Industrial toxicity is becoming an ever present characteristic of the battlefield as horrendous new limits of environmental devastation are exceeded. To an extent that is not yet fully known, the Gulf War, fought by armies in gas masks among seas of burning oil, has probably strewn Iraq and Kuwait with record quantities of armaments made of the nuclear industry's largest waste category: depleted uranium.
In the midst of heightened interest in Iraq's nuclear program, little-noticed evidence has come forward that the western forces also used another kind of nuclear initiative. For example, an industry newsletter reported in March that a fire spreading from the engine compartment of an American tank into a compartment filled with uranium weapons has resulted in disposal of the tank at the Barnwell waste dump in South Carolina. And a 10 June article in "The Wall Street Journal" on uranium weapons adds three other instances of radioactive tanks being buried in Saudi Arabia and Germany. Possible radiation effects on military personnel is a question reportedly being investigated by Sen. Alan Cranston's Veteran Affairs Committee.
Dead Weight, Live Rounds
Uranium is the only element mined from the earth which is 99.3 percent useless in its pure form. This is because only the fissionable U-235 isotope yields the energy used in bombs and power plants. Thus the 0.7 percent natural content of U-235 must be enriched up to about 5 percent for power plants and 90 percent for bombs. The leftover U-238, depleted of over half of its U-235 content, now forms a national stockpile -- or wastepile -- of one billion pounds.
Depleted uranium or DU has a toxicity similar to that of lead (the maximum airborne concentration for lead in [US] federal regulations is 0.05 milligrams per cubic meter and for uranium is 0.25 milligrams). However, DU is also slightly radioactive, yielding radon gas in its hundred-million-year decay chain. It also retains about 0.3 percent of the slowly fissioning U-235 isotope. The contact dose rate from DU is about 200 millirems -- or about a year's normal background radiation -- per hour.
Only the military has been able to exploit the sole useful characteristic of depleted uranium: dead weight. Compared to a gallon of water weighing 8 pounds, or a gallon of steel at 60 pounds, or of lead at 90 pounds, a gallon of uranium weighs 152 pounds. Concentrating maximum force upon a single point is what ordnance designers do, and multiplying the weight of a projectile by 2.5, as we do when we substitute uranium for steel, increases the moment of force to the same extent. As an inevitable consequence, more and more uranium ammunition, alloyed for hardness with 2 percent molybdenum, has been introduced into military arsenals over the last few decades.
Logically enough, more and more uranium is also being incorporated into tank armor. Currently being looked at in Congress, the M1A2 tank, which will succeed the M1A1 model made famous in the Gulf War, is said to contain twice as much uranium as it's predecessor. The 1991 federal budget calls for the acquisition of 36 million pounds of DU metal for the "National Defense Stockpile" over the next 10 years.
A Global Marketplace
Many of the big names in the arms market -- Remington, Olin, Honeywell -- have manufactured uranium rounds of various sizes. After a start in 1958, Nuclear Metals of Concord, Massachusetts, continues to produce DU ordnance. Activist-writer Mary Jane Williams of Concord says the plant has discarded half a million pounds of uranium waste onsite and is the state's largest industrial generator of low-level radioactive waste. As "The Wall Street Journal" article makes clear, Nuclear Metals is spearheading lobbying efforts under way to incorporate more and more uranium into the Pentagon's materials stockpile.
Among other long-operating manufacturers, Aerojet Heavy Metals of Jonesboro, Tennessee, takes its feed material directly from the uranium hexafluoride/tetrafluoride stream between a General Atomics plant in Oklahoma and the DOE enrichment facilities. Target Research, near Dover, New Jersey, began DU manufacturing in 1982 with a license for 6000 kilograms.
There's also the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant near Kansas City, run for a number of years on contract by Remington Arms. For about three decades, Lake City has test-fired over 100,000 rounds of 5-inch DU ammunition leaving 7,655 pounds of shell fragments and 3 million cubic feet of contaminated sand to clean up. A recent review of cleanup sites by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) says the Army has set aside $750,000 for this purpose at Lake City.
The NRC's "Site Decommissioning Management Plan" also describes the Soft Target Range at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, where 70,000 kilograms of DU projectiles have been test-fired into the area of approximately 5 miles by 2 miles. Many unexploded rounds complicate the cleanup at sites like Aberdeen, and an added hazard is that uranium is pyrophoric at high temperatures, burning spontaneously in oxygen and leaving small fires to distribute dispersed particles. Other military DU test ranges with similar problems have been documented by the Military Toxics Network at locations like Grayling, Michigan, and Jefferson Proving Ground in Indiana. Citizen Alert has acquired records of bombing runs by A10 aircraft using uranium missiles in the Nevada desert.
Export to the international weapons market represents another dimension of DU proliferation. Some NRC export licenses, such as one for 375,000 DU rounds to the Saudi Arabian Navy in 1979, are clear enough in their purpose. Others, such as a license for 126,000 kilograms of DU in the same year to Cogema of France for the manufacture of flywheels and yachting keels, seem to be suspect.
Waste into Weapons
From the point of view of the nuclear industry, making a profit from one of its most intractable waste streams looks like a win-win game. In the wars of the future, however, uranium-plated tanks and stockpiles of DU ammunition could turn battlefields into radio-active wastelands. All wars are dirty wars, but economic pressures and the drive for global supremacy are scorching the planet with military sacrifice zones. Warfare with conventional arms will continue to escalate as one of the world's greatest environmental threats, and reduction of armed conflict will continue to be the capstone of every thoughtful environmental program.
Source: Atoms & Waste (US), 17 July 1991. Atoms & Waste is a publication of Don't Waste U.S., a Washington DC-based public interest organization which seeks to halt the generation of radioactive wastes from atomic power and atomic weapons.
Contacts: Kemp Houck, Don't Waste U.S., 2311 15th Street NW, Washington DC 20009, US; tel: +1-202-328-0498.
Lenny Siegel, Military Toxics Campaign, 222B View Street, Mountain View CA 94041, US; tel: +1-415-961-8918.
Grace Bukowski, Citizen Alert, Box 5391, Reno NV 89513, US; tel: +1-701-827-4200.