Depleted uranium:
Where does it come from?By Ward Sanderson
Stars and Stripes
Where does depleted uranium come from?
Not from Mother Earth. It comes from the Energy
Department.
It’s what’s left once natural uranium
is "enriched" during the manufacture of nuclear reactor fuel and weapons.
Depleted uranium is waste.
Maj. Doug Rokke, an Army Reserve health
physicist who once headed up the Pentagon’s DU safety project, calls its military use
a scam.
Rokke says the Energy Department has more
700,000 metric tons of DU stored in facilities at Oak Ridge, Tenn.; Puducah, Ky.; and
Portsmouth, Ohio.
War, he believes, is the perfect way to dump it
overseas.
"Basically, [we] move our radioactive waste
from the U.S. to other countries and leave it there," Rokke said, "then refuse
to clean it up, then refuse medical care."
In April, the Clinton administration pledged
money and medical help to thousands of workers exposed to radiation at those facilities.
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson then promised
to end the bureaucratic flinch of fighting worker claims regardless of merit.
Rokke claims people are "sick and
dead" all around gaseous diffusion plants at Oak Ridge, Puducah and Portsmouth.
Researchers believe that as many as 4,000
Paducah workers faced health risks from breathing radioactive dust there. The cited
offenders were highly radioactive plutonium and neptunium that had tainted uranium stores.
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