America’s Nuclear Nightmare: Rolling Stone magazine

America’s Nuclear Nightmare

The U.S. has 31 reactors just like Japan’s — but regulators are ignoring the risks and boosting industry profits

The Davis-Besse nuclear generating station in Ohio, 

where a football-size hole overlooked by NRC 

inspectors nearly caused a catastrophe in 2002

Energy Nuclear via the NRC

By Jeff Goodell

April 27, 2011 9:00 AM ET

The meltdown in Japan couldn't have happened at a worse time for the industry. In recent years, nuclear power has been hyped as the only energy source that could replace coal quickly enough to slow the pace of global warming. Some 60 new nukes are currently in the works worldwide, prompting the industry to boast of a "nuclear renaissance." In his 2012 budget, President Obama included $54 billion in federal loan guarantees for new reactors — far more than the $18 billion available for renewable energy.

Without such taxpayer support, no new reactors would ever be built. Since the Manhattan Project was created to develop the atomic bomb back in the 1940s, the dream of a nuclear future has been fueled almost entirely by Big Government. America's current fleet of reactors exists only because Congress passed the Price-Anderson Act in 1957, limiting the liability of nuclear plant operators in case of disaster. And even with taxpayers assuming most of the risk, Wall Street still won't finance nuclear reactors without direct federal assistance, in part because construction costs are so high (up to $20 billion per plant) and in part because nukes are the only energy investment that can be rendered worthless in a matter of hours. "In a free market, where real risks and costs are accounted for, nuclear power doesn't exist," says Amory Lovins, a leading energy expert at the Rocky Mountain Institute. Nuclear plants "are a creation of government policy and intervention."

They are also a creation of lobbying and campaign contributions. Over the past decade, the nuclear industry has contributed more than $4.6 million to members of Congress — and last year alone, it spent $1.7 million on federal lobbying. Given the generous flow of nuclear money, the NRC is essentially rigged to operate in the industry's favor. The agency has plenty of skilled engineers and scientists at the staff level, but the five commissioners who oversee it often have close ties to the industry they are supposed to regulate. "They are vetted by the industry," says Robert Alvarez, a former senior policy adviser at the Energy Department. "It's the typical revolving-door story — many are coming in or out of jobs with the nuclear power industry. You don't get a lot of skeptics appointed to this job."

Jeffrey Merrifield, a former NRC commissioner who left the agency in 2007, is a case in point. When Merrifield was ready to exit public service, he simply called up the CEO of Exelon, the country's largest nuclear operator, and asked him for a job recommendation. Given his friends in high places, he wound up taking a top job at the Shaw Group, a construction firm that builds nuclear reactors — and he's done his best to return the favor. During the Fukushima disaster, Merrifield appeared on Fox News, as well as in videos for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's lobbying group. In one video — titled "Former NRC Commissioner Confident That Building of New U.S. Nuclear Plants Should Continue" — Merrifield reassures viewers that the meltdown in Japan is no big deal. "We should continue to move forward with building those new plants," he says, "because it's the right thing for our nation and it's the right thing for our future."

Such cozy relationships between regulators and the industry are nothing new. The NRC and the utilities it oversees have engaged in an unholy alliance since 1974, when the agency rose from the ashes of the old Atomic Energy Commission, whose mandate was to promote nuclear power. "For political reasons, the U.S. wanted to show something good could come out of splitting the atom," says Robert Duffy, a political scientist at Colorado State University who has written widely about the history of nuclear power. "There was great pressure on the industry to get nuclear plants built quickly." With no effective oversight by the government, the industry repeatedly cut corners on the design and construction of reactors. At the Diablo Canyon plant in California, engineers actually installed vital cooling pipes backward, only to have to tear them out and reinstall them.

But even the lax oversight provided by the NRC was more than the industry could bear. In 1996, in one of the most aggressive enforcement moves in the agency's history, the NRC launched an investigation into design flaws at a host of reactors and handed out significant fines. When the industry complained to Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico, a powerful nuclear ally, he confronted the head of the NRC in his office and threatened to cut its funding by a third unless the agency backed off. "So the NRC folded their tent and went away," says Lochbaum. "And they've been away pretty much ever since."

The Japanese disaster should have been a wake-up call for boosters of nuclear power. America has 31 aging reactors just like Fukushima, and it wouldn't take an earthquake or tsunami to push many of them to the brink of meltdown. A natural disaster may have triggered the crisis in Japan, but the real problem was that the plant lost power and was unable to keep its cooling systems running — a condition known as "station blackout." At U.S. reactors, power failures have been caused by culprits as mundane as squirrels playing on power lines. In the event of a blackout, operators have only a few hours to restore power before a meltdown begins. All nukes are equipped with backup diesel generators, as well as batteries. But at Fukushima, the diesel generators were swamped by floodwaters, and the batteries lasted a mere eight hours — not nearly long enough to get power restored and avert catastrophe. NRC standards do virtually nothing to prevent such a crisis here at home. Only 11 of America's nuclear reactors have batteries designed to supply power for up to eight hours, while the other 93 have batteries that last half that long.

And that's just the beginning of the danger. Aging reactors are a gold mine for the power companies that own them. Nuclear plants are expensive to build but cheap to operate, meaning the longer they run, the more profitable they become. The NRC has done its part to boost profitability by allowing companies to "uprate" old nukes — modifying them to run harder — without requiring additional safety improvements. Vermont Yankee, for example, was permitted to boost its output by 20 percent, eroding the reactor's ability to cool itself in the event of an emergency. The NRC's own advisory committee on reactor safety was vehemently opposed to allowing such modifications, but the agency ultimately allowed the industry to trade safety for profit. "The NRC put millions of Americans at elevated risk," says Lochbaum.

 FOR THE REST, Push the link.  This should have been written YEARS ago !

Nuclear energy needs handouts, can’t cut it in free market

Posted on May 1, 2011 by Russ Wellen 

 

Americans who favor it claim that nuclear energy makes us less dependent on Middle-Eastern oil with its attendant price spikes (those that aren’t a product of speculation, that is). But nuclear-energy plants don’t do much to ease the national debt. As Jeff Goodell reports in his Rolling Stone piece America’s Nuclear Nightmare (emphasis added)

Since the Manhattan Project was created to develop the atomic bomb back in the 1940s, the dream of a nuclear future has been fueled almost entirely by Big Government. America’s current fleet of reactors exists only because Congress passed the Price-Anderson Act in 1957, limiting the liability of nuclear plant operators in case of disaster. And even with taxpayers assuming most of the risk, Wall Street still won’t finance nuclear reactors without direct federal assistance, in part because construction costs are so high (up to $20 billion per plant) and in part because nukes are the only energy investment that can be rendered worthless in a matter of hours. “In a free market, where real risks and costs are accounted for, nuclear power doesn’t exist,” says Amory Lovins, a leading energy expert at the Rocky Mountain Institute. Nuclear plants “are a creation of government policy and intervention.”

Goodell also points out that without such taxpayer supports as the $54 billion President Obama included in his 2012 budget “in federal loan guarantees for [them] no new reactors would ever be built.”

In other words, nuclear energy is just another industry that wouldn’t exist were it not for the kindness of the government. In fact, it’s not that different from a New Deal WPA project. Of course, once they’re up and running, writes Goodell, nuclear-power plants are “cheap to operate, meaning the longer they run, the more profitable they become.” In other words, the public helps build nuclear power plants and assumes the risk while the industry reaps the profits. Where have we heard that before? Oh yeah, banks.

Related posts (automated):

1. In the end, Fukushima a gift to the nuclear energy industry?
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4. Why don’t the free marketeers of education believe in, you know, the free market?
5. Earth to Bush: “Goals aren’t enough and never will be” – An introduction to the tactics of smart energy policy

Is Any Radiation "Safe"?

When the industrial application of a technology has a poisonous environmental by-product, clearly a primary requirement is to understand the consequent public health hazard. Past experience shows that, at any point in medical history, we are unlikely to know enough to assess such hazards with accuracy. But the consequences of underestimating these hazards, especially genetic hazards, can be so grave that we must be extremely conservative in assessing them.
          An error on the side of conservatism in estimating a danger can be, at worst, a delaying nuisance for the promoters of the technology. An error on the side of optimism, leading to some underestimation of the true hazard, can be extremely costly to the human species. We can always later allow more exposure to a poison, such as radioactivity, if we learn that it can be tolerated. We cannot undo genetic and chromosomal damage from overdoses of poison already consumed.
          For nuclear electricity generation, the by-product poison is radioactivity (or radiation itself). Any of the hundreds of radioactive substances produced in the course of all phases of nuclear electricity generation can be harmful to man, from uranium mining through to disposal of astronomical quantities of radioactive wastes. It doesn't matter whether the radiation is external to the body or provided by one or more radioactive compounds that have gained access to the body through air, food, or water. What counts, for any particular organ, is the total absorption of radiation energy, which is measured in rads or millirads (1000 millirads = 1 rad).
          The only possible way to set a truly safe standard -- a definite number of rads or millirads assigned to a particular tissue or organ -- would be to know beyond any reasonable doubt that within that amount no biological effect will occur. We can state unequivocally, and without fear of contradiction, that no one has ever produced evidence that any specific amount of radiation will be without harm. Indeed, quite the opposite appears to be the case.
          All the evidence, both from experimental animals and from humans, leads us to expect that even the smallest quantities of ionizing radiation produce harm, both to this generation of humans and future generations. Furthermore, it appears that progressively greater harm accrues in direct proportion to the amount of radiation received by the various body tissues and organs.
          It came as a great shock to us, in the course of our study of radiation hazards to man, that nuclear electricity generation has been developed under the false illusion that there exists some safe amount of radiation. This unsupportable concept is surely one of the gravest condemnations of nuclear electricity generation. Obviously any engineering development proceeding under an illusion of a wide margin of safety is fraught with serious danger.
          What is more, the false illusion of a safe amount of radiation has pervaded all the highest circles concerned with the development and promotion of nuclear electric power. The Congress, the nuclear manufacturing industry, and the electric utility industry have all been led to believe that some safe amount of radiation does indeed exist. They were hoping to develop this industry with exposures below this limit -- a limit we now know is anything but safe.
          Before describing the widely pervasive nature of this serious misunderstanding of the radiation hazard problem at such top levels in industry and government, it is important to establish carefully that we put the integrity, sincerity, and motives of no one into question. Undoubtedly, the scientists, the engineers, and the power executives involved, as well as the Congressmen, were simply misled in their belief that some safe amount of radiation truly exists. It was the result of some inadequate observations involving persons exposed to radium salts industrially. Numerous reputable scientists had long discounted these inadequate observations. All of the national and international standard-setting bodies had also refused to accept this inadequate evidence of a supposedly safe amount of radiation.

This just the opening to a good article from ratical.org.

It is just way too long to post in its entirety but you can access the full thing on the topic heading above.  Includes sections on:

A Multi-Billion Dollar Industry on a Dangerous Premise         
          " ... We were assigned to evaluate the hazards of atomic radiation by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1963. It was our job to assess the cost in human disease and death for all sorts of proposed and on-going nuclear energy programs, including nuclear electricity. "
         


Faith Is Not Justified           There are, in addition, further mechanisms which operated to confuse the Congress, the electric utility industry, and, eventually, the public of the United States. It is commonplace to find that people in industry, the Congress and the public-at-large, have an almost mystical faith in governmental regulatory agencies.


"No Effect Observed"          
          ..."Suppose there were 1,000 persons in an auditorium and suddenly the lights were extinguished. During the period of ensuing darkness in the auditorium, suppose a man is stabbed to death. When the lights go on again, it is perfectly appropriate (in Dr. Thompson's framework ) to state that no murder was observed ("no event observed"). Yet there is a result for certain -- in the form of a murdered man!
          What does this analogy teach us? Simply if we do not look, or if it is too dark to see, then no event can be observed -- no matter what disastrous result has occurred. We have every right to be shocked that such devious, non-reasoning pronouncements are typical of nuclear electricity promoters. "

          Such a disaster can be introduced easily and unobtrusively because of two fundamental errors in public health thinking:

1. We tend to look for "immediate" effects of poisons.
2. We forget what careful studies are required to show that 1 out of 600 die per year of a disease.

         


The Careful Studies Required to Observe Effects           We have pointed out that one person out of 600 dying annually from cancer represents a "major killer" entity -- equivalent to the entire cancer problem in the United States. Could officials miss such an effect for an environmental poison through inadequate studies? The answer is "Yes." In fact, one repeatedly encounters supposedly scientific studies that have led to erroneous results and enormous public-health blunders, simply because an inadequate number of exposed persons were studied.

          No amount of ionizing radiation is safe!

1. Quoted in "Nuclear Hazard In Santa Cruz" by Harold Gilliam, San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, June 28, 1970.
2. Reference: "Radiation Exposure of Uranium Miners." Hearings of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, 90th Congress 1st Session. May-August, 1967. Part 1.
3. Reference: Power Technology and The Future by Commissioner These Thompson (USAEC). Presented at "Briefing Conference for State and Local Government officials on Nuclear Development," Columbia, South Carolina, May 21, 1970.
4. Reference: Dr. Paul Tompkins, quoting directly from 1954 NCRP Statement. In "Environmental Effects of Producing Electric Power." Hearings before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy," 91st Congress, 1st Session, October-November, 1969. Part 1.

Link to Canadian film, URANIUM

http://www.nfb.ca/film/Uranium

The nuclear industry as a serious political issue has gone viral on the internet, in the wake of the Japanese meltdown. Globally, the anti-war/anti-nuke movements have a mature and strong, well-established infrastructure. Together as a coalition, they have the potential to exert a mighty pressure at this time, given public preoccupation with the immediate hazards of airborne radiation products. We’ve already seen the great impact on public consciousness, of the global profiteering in food and other commodities, and the diffuse anger in response – ranging from the middle-eastern rebellions, to the emerging “99% movement” in the USA.

There is a possibility that the Japanese government may be an early victim to the lack of natural disaster and nuclear safety preparedness, and cover up of the current crisis. If that occurs, it’s entirely possible that a right-wing replacement government will fill the political void: a result which might be welcomed by a bumbling Obama administration, given its failed policies of containing China’s rising influence in Asia. With the significant news blackout in mainstream media, many “alternative” commentators now expect the worst-case scenario may quickly affect North America, with considerablepublic anger directed at governments who hide the facts. In Germany, for example, the Merkel government, facing an election in a week or two has quickly suspended allnuclear electric plans pending further investigation.

There has perhaps never been a better opportunity for the consolidated peace/anti-nuclear/green movements worldwide to exert a very significant influence on public policy; re-opening a substantive non-proliferation debate, and even asserting widespread popular opposition to the current status quo. A responsible but firm advocacy of public health and safety responses downwind of the nucleotide stream would go a long way to establish credibility; and a rational linkage to the military geopolitical nexus could produce an unprecedented opportunity for the world to re-think some of our basic ethical precepts about the nuclear genie which has been released.

Canada, as one of the world’s strongest proponents of nuclear “development” will do its utmost to deep-six any real critical discussion of the issue, due to its obvious economic self-interest. As a nation with considerable experience in and promotion of an industry inimical to public health we have a humanitarian obligation to play an active, assertive role in the debate. That means confronting both government and industry, and disseminating factual rebuttals to Orwellian double-speak whenever and wherever it happens, in an effort to expose the contradictions and educate an already wary public. The basic premises are really very simple and understandable. Those who obfuscate the facts through complex scientific data and scenarios, or celebrity status as “experts” must be quickly debunked. The anti-nuclear/anti-war infrastructure has the capacity to do this but it must act immediately if it is to seize the initiative.

This link connects to a powerful 45 minute film worth watching if you haven’t seen it before. It was produced by a former associate of mine at the National Film Board and documents the Canadian uranium industry in the Elliot Lake region of Ontario. I lived and worked there in 1956-59, in the isolated town site of “Pronto Uranium Mine”, the very first developed by Rio Tinto on the shores of Lake Lauzon in Algoma Mills, Ontario before Elliot Lake was even built. I’ve seen the environmental abuses first hand and early on, and was aware of the premature deaths of almost all our neighbours, before the mine was cleverly “disappeared” from most historical records. On Google Earth you can still see the vestiges of “yellowcake” and other by-products in the tailings ponds and lakes, long after the mines were de-commissioned. The film tells the rest of the story, and there are many articulate Canadian scientists in the vanguard of the opposition movement today.

I urge you to watch the film and talk to your colleagues about “upping the ante” on government and industry in the wake of the unfolding human catastrophe in Japan. It is not the first such catastrophe. It may very well affect us and our grand-children directlyand, unless we are able to do something about it, it will certainly not be the last. With apologies for my truncated editorialization and best regards,

Jay Spark

jspark@telus.net

Nuclear items running the UK Observer

'Safe' uranium that left a town contaminated

They were told depleted uranium was not hazardous. Now, 23 years after a US arms plant closed, workers and residents have cancer - and experts say their suffering shows the use of such weapons may be a war crime

David Rose in Colonie, New York
Sunday November 18, 2007
The Observer

The following correction was printed in the Observer's For the record column, Sunday November 25 2007

Professor Randall Parrish's research, which found depleted uranium (DU) in the urine of people exposed at the former Colonie, New York weapons factory, was funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council, not the UK Ministry of Defence, as we said in the article below. His facility has participated in other DU tests for the MoD, but these are not directly linked to the New York study. A fact box accompanying the piece called depleted uranium 'the densest naturally occurring metal' but as a by-product of the production of enriched uranium it does not occur in nature. Neither is it the densest when compared with, for example, tungsten, gold or platinum. This has been corrected.

It is 50 years since Tony Ciarfello and his friends used the yard of a depleted uranium weapons factory as their playground in Colonie, a suburb of Albany in upstate New York state. 'There wasn't no fence at the back of the plant,' remembers Ciarfello. 'Inside was a big open ground and nobody would chase us away. We used to play baseball and hang by the stream running through it. We even used to fish in it - though we noticed the fish had big pink lumps on them.'

Today there are lumps on Ciarfello's chest - strange, round tumours that protrude about an inch. 'No one seems to know what they are,' he says. 'I've also had a brain aneurysm caused by a suspected tumour. I'm constantly fatigued and for years I've had terrible pains, deep inside my leg bones. I fall over without warning and I've got a heart condition.' Ciarfello's illnesses have rendered him unable to work for years. Aged 57 and a father of five, he looks much older.

The US federal government and the firm that ran the factory, National Lead (NL) Industries, have been assuring former workers and residents around the 18-acre site for decades that, although it is true that the plant used to produce unacceptable levels of radioactive pollution, it was not a serious health hazard.

Now, in a development with potentially devastating implications not only for Colonie but also for the future use of some of the West's most powerful weapon systems, that claim is being challenged. In a paper to be published in the next issue of the scientific journal Science of the Total Environment, a team led by Professor Randall Parrish of Leicester University reports the results of a three-year study of Colonie, funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council.

Parrish's team has found that DU contamination, which remains radioactive for millions of years, is in effect impossible to eradicate, not only from the environment but also from the bodies of humans. Twenty-three years after production ceased they tested the urine of five former workers. All are still contaminated with DU. So were 20 per cent of people tested who had spent at least 10 years living near the factory when it was still working, including Ciarfello.

The small sample size precludes the drawing of statistical conclusions, the journal paper says. But to find DU at all after so long a period is 'significant, since no previous study has documented evidence of DU exposure more than 20 years prior... [this] indicates that the body burden of uranium must still be significant, whether retained in lungs, lymphatic system, kidneys or bone'. The team is now testing more individuals.

In 1984, having bought the factory from NL for $10 in a deal that meant the firm was exempted from having to pay for its clean-up, the federal government began a massive decommissioning project, supervised by the Army Corps of Engineers. The clean-up did not finish until summer 2007, having cost some $190m. Contractors demolished the buildings and removed more than 150,000 tons of soil and other contaminated detritus, digging down to depths of up to 40ft and trucking it 2,000 miles by rail to underground radioactive waste sites in the Rockies. All that is now left of the NL plant is a huge, undulating field, ringed by razor wire.

Despite this colossal effort, Parrish and his colleagues found high concentrations of DU particles in soil, stream sediments and household dust in the vicinity of the site, deposited long ago when the factory burnt the shavings and chips produced by the weapons manufacturing process: the study estimates that, over the years, about 10 tons of uranium oxide dust wafted from the chimney into the surrounding environment.

The Army Corps clean-up team tested the soil from some of the gardens of houses backing on to the plant, and in cases where it was found to be emitting more than 35 pico curies of radiation per gram they removed it. The researchers discovered dust in and around buildings emitting up to 10 times as much. DU, inhaled in the form of tiny motes of oxide that lodge inside the lungs, emits alpha radiation, nuclei of helium. Unlike the gamma radiation produced by enriched, weapons-grade uranium, alpha particles will not penetrate the skin.

But inside the body DU travels around the bloodstream, accumulating not only in the lungs but also in other soft tissues such as the brain and bone marrow. There, each mote becomes an alpha particle hotspot, bombarding its locality and damaging cell DNA. Research has shown that DU has the potential to cause a wide range of cancers, kidney and thyroid problems, birth defects and disorders of the immune system.

When DU 'penetrators' - armour-piercing shells that form the standard armament of some of Britain's and America's most commonly deployed military aircraft and vehicles - strike their targets, 10 per cent or more of the heavy DU metal burns at high temperatures, producing oxide particles very similar to those at Colonie.

TV footage shot in Baghdad in 2003 shows children playing in the remains of tanks coated with thick, black DU oxide, while there have long been claims that the DU shells that destroyed Saddam Hussein's tanks in the 1991 Gulf war were responsible for high rates of cancer in places such as Basra.

Parrish's team includes David Carpenter, an environmental health expert from Albany University. 'DU burns, it releases particulates that can be breathed in, and it doesn't go away,' he says. 'The issue does not concern military personnel as much as civilian populations in theatres where they are used. Now we know that we can still find measurable levels of DU among the people of Colonie, we need a much bigger study to establish whether they have suffered disproportionate ill-effects such as cancers as a consequence. If they have, it would raise a serious ethical challenge to the use of these weapons. Arguably it could constitute a war crime.'

The NL plant on Central Avenue, Colonie's main artery, opened in 1958 and became one of the Pentagon's main suppliers. DU - the material left in huge quantities by the process of refining enriched uranium for bombs and nuclear reactors - is extremely dense. A pointed rod fired at high velocity will penetrate not only armour but several feet of concrete. In 1979 a whistleblower from inside the plant told the local health department that it was releasing large amounts of DU from its 50ft chimney, which was not properly filtered. The state government carried out atmospheric tests and in 1981 ordered that main production cease. The factory shut three years later.

One of those who has now tested positive is Mike Aidala, 71, who worked at the plant for 22 years and became its health and safety director. 'When it started, the place was spotless,' he says. 'But over the years it got dirtier and dirtier. We burnt the chips produced by the lathes in a steel furnace.' He added: 'A lot of my co-workers died young. Whether the plant was the reason, I guess we'll never know.'

As concern in Colonie rose, a residents' group began to call for a publicly funded health study. For Anne Rabe, a founder member of a campaign that has now lasted for 25 years, the Parrish study represents overdue vindication. 'I do find it very ironic that the US government at state and federal level refused for so long to do anything, and now the UK comes along and has funded these tests,' Rabe says.

Repeatedly, US agencies have claimed that the Colonie plant was reasonably safe, despite the massive clean-up. Most recently, in 2003, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry issued a report saying that, although the pollution produced when the plant was operating might have slightly increased the risks of kidney disease and lung cancer, there was now 'no apparent public health hazard'.

Rabe's campaign has conducted a health study of its own, assembling a dossier from personal contacts and by knocking on neighbours' doors. It found that among almost 400 people surveyed there were numerous cases of rare cancers, thyroid and kidney complaints and birth defects.

The main difficulty the campaigners faced in the past is that DU eventually dissolves and is passed in the urine. The US government claimed that the plant had been shut so long that it would be impossible to determine who had been contaminated - so rendering a full health survey pointless.

However, Parrish has developed new, more sensitive methods. At the same time, his impartiality is impeccable. Before his work in Colonie, Parrish tested more than 400 Gulf war veterans, failing to detect DU in any of them - so dealing a serious blow to those who claimed that DU is one of the causes of Gulf war syndrome. 'I did not expect to find it in Colonie,' he says.

Some of those who have tested positive display classic, common symptoms found in DU victims elsewhere. For example, Ciarfello says he was still in his twenties when his teeth 'just started to crumble: they ground down to nothing until they were just these little stumps and I pushed them out with my tongue'. Other members of his family are sick. His son developed a severe kidney condition, while his brother, Frank, can barely walk and also suffers chronic fatigue. A nephew was born with a disfiguring facial skin tumour that has required repeated surgery.

Tom Donnelly, 56, spent 34 years as a foreman at a garage door workshop next to the NL factory, where tests have found high concentrations of DU in dust samples from places such as shelves and light fittings. He has three auto-immune disorders: Crohn's disease, a chronic inflammation of the bowel, total alopecia, and cerebral vasculitis, an immune system-related narrowing of blood vessels in the brain.

'The new tests suggest I inhaled about 4,000 particles of DU,' Donnelly says. 'I used to come to work in the morning and see the chimney blowing its smoke in a thick black plume. Most of us had no idea that the plant was using uranium at all. After all, the sign outside said National Lead. The Army Corps removed all that soil, but they never looked at the dust at all. The effect on my life has been devastating, but how many others are already dead?' One is his late boss and friend Tom Murphy - who, like Donnelly, developed Crohn's and died of it at 61.

Ann Carusone lived in a house behind the plant from the time of her birth in 1966 until 1993. 'When I tested positive, my reaction was sheer disbelief,' she says. She has endured years of a chronic lung disease, sarcoidosis, an inflammation of the lymph nodes usually found in much older people, as well as a blood disorder that produced petecchiae - dots of blood beneath her skin, similar to those seen in some of those exposed to radiation at Hiroshima. In her twenties she had a pre-cancerous ovarian cyst that when removed was the size of a grapefruit.

'I knew many people from round here who died young, in their twenties and thirties,' she says. 'We used to play out in the creek that flowed out of the plant site. The water was sluggish, a weird yellow-green colour. We'd splash about in it. Now we know it was laden with depleted uranium.'

'It's very striking how many people in this small group have immune disorders like Tom Donnelly's,' says Carpenter. 'I can say with great confidence that people who inhaled DU are at greater risk of lung cancer, as well as leukaemia, other cancers and genetic damage of the type that causes birth defects. Previous responses by official bodies could be said to amount to a cover-up. People have been told that there's no problem, and that's very clearly not true.'

Yesterday NL failed to return calls requesting comment.

Deadly residue

Depleted uranium (DU) is the residue left in massive quantities when bomb-grade uranium is refined to make reactor fuel and nuclear weapons.

DU is used to make armour-penetrating shells, standard armament for some of the West's most widely deployed military aircraft and vehicles, such as Bradley armoured cars, Abrams tanks, and Jaguar A10 fighter planes.

Less intensely radioactive than bomb-grade uranium, DU emits alpha particles, known to cause cancers.

DU weapons that strike their targets produce clouds of tiny uranium oxide particles, which lodge in the lungs and other soft tissues such as the brain and bone marrow.

DU shells were widely used in the 1991 Gulf war; in Bosnia and Kosovo; and are being used now in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Special report
The nuclear industry

Useful links
British Energy
Department of Trade and Industry
British Nuclear Fuels Ltd
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Greenpeace
Come Clean WMD awareness programme
UK atomic energy authority
National Radiological Protection Board
Friends of the Earth
World Nuclear Association
World Nuclear Transport Institute