Ban Depleted Uranium Weapons! [link]
"At Hunters Point Shipyard, Cyclotron Smashed Atoms Where Lennar Wants to Build Homes",
2005-01-12 by Dennis Kyne for "San Francisco Bayview" newspaper [http://www.sfbayview.com/011205/shipyard011205.shtml] [archive.org]:
Dennis Kyne is a combat veteran with 15 years in the U.S. Army. He holds a degree in political science cum laude from San Jose State University with an emphasis on nuclear proliferation, [www.denniskyne.com].
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Plutonium, a radioactive metal named after the planet Pluto, was discovered in 1940 after uranium was bombarded with neutrons in a cyclotron. Plutonium 239, the end product of this cycle, as well as uranium, are among the few materials whose atoms can split (or "fission") to create a nuclear explosion, releasing massive amounts of energy instantly.
The cyclotron, often called an atom smasher or plutonium breeder, appeared on the Hunters Point Shipyard after the arrival of the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory (NRDL). NRDL was operational from 1946 until 1969 and used several buildings for radioactive laboratory and cyclotron operations.
Three decades after Hunters Point was vacated by NRDL, the Navy has transferred Parcel A to the city, and San Francisco is giving it away to Lennar to build 1,600 homes. This shouldn't happen. Cyclotron activity was near Parcel A, and, although named after the planet Pluto, plutonium behaves like the god of hell.
Plutonium, only in the environment since 1945, remains radioactive for an extremely long time, and health results from contaminated plutonium sites have not been shared with local leaders. Manhattan Project participants have been observed for decades, and the population of Rocky Flats, Colorado, is a group that is being monitored as well. Veterans of Desert Storm have been asked to participate in study groups because of exposure to the 300-plus tons of uranium that were dumped on Kuwait and Iraq in 1991.
Low level radiation has been found to damage human organs. Ingestion of particulate matter causes incredible contamination to the organ donor system as well as the blood donor system.
Plutonium, with a half life of 24,000 years, and uranium, with a half life of 4.5 billion years, are causing cancer and birth defects in the surrounding Hunters Point community at an alarming rate. Lennar's liberation of radioactive particles from contaminated acres will put the Hunters Point community under radiological attack.
Ernest Lawrence, the famed physicist that the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory is named for, won the Nobel Prize for developing a cyclotron in 1939. Housed in Building 820 at the Shipyard, just west of Parcel A, cyclotron use left cesium 137 and strontium 90 in the area. These highly radioactive metals cannot be found on the element chart as they are byproducts of the fissionable (atom splitting) process.
Leuren Moret, famed Lawrence Livermore Lab whistle blower, in her seminal work for the Hamburg Uranium Conference in 2003, writes that after the shutdown of the Rancho Seco Nuclear Power Plant near Sacramento in 1989, infant mortality rates improved for nearly all races in San Francisco County, but did not improve for Blacks.
Moret's work, "The Trojan Horse of Nuclear War," explains the role strontium 90 plays in this statistic: "The Radiation and Public Health Project began to collect baby teeth from children with and without cancer living near nuclear reactors for comparison of the Strontium-90 levels."
The results clearly show that children living around the Turkey Point and St. Lucie nuclear reactors in Florida were affected. After collecting the teeth, it was found that in children under 10 years of age, cancer rose 325.3 percent.
Strontium-90 levels in children with cancer were an average of 85 percent higher than in children without cancer. Causal relationship? I think so.
It appears that because there was a cyclotron, and because uranium atoms were smashed, we are seeing an incredibly high number of infant deaths in the Hunters Point community.
Breast cancer is no stranger to Hunters Point women either. Samuel Epstein states in his book "The Politics of Cancer," "There is suggestive evidence that radiation-contaminated water supplies are in part responsible for escalating breast cancer mortality in some areas of the country.
"Recent evidence suggests that increased breast cancer incidence in the Long Island counties of Suffolk and Nassau, as well as Westchester County north of New York City, is related to radiation-contaminated drinking water. This is due to radioactive contamination of the Croton River watershed reservoirs; the watershed is located only about five miles downwind to the northeast from the Indian Point nuclear plant that has released radioactive fission products since the early 1960s."
Cross-applying this conclusion from Indian Point to the Hunters Point watershed, we will see the same result in the surrounding communities. Decades of radioactive waste, washed into the Bay daily through broken tidal gates and leaking storm drains at the Shipyard, created a water table that is surely carrying radiation. As with the Croton River in New York, some of this waste was carried away and became the bottom of the Bay.
Decades of nuclear research has been dumped into the watershed of San Francisco, and, like our friends in New York, we have been victims of a faceless enemy. Science has told us not to worry, and civics has told us to keep building. History has taught us to clean up our messes, and that is where civics and science abandon us.
Did San Francisco and the Navy forget about the radiation? After ceasing active operations in 1974, the Navy leased most of the yard to Triple A ship repair company. Improper waste disposal was reported in 1986, leading to an investigation by the San Francisco District Attorney. While this company did dump a lot of garbage, they didn't use the cyclotron.
Decades after the Navy abandoned the Shipyard, officials have not addressed the effects of low level radiation on humans. Some news agencies have ignored the fact that radiation ever existed on this Shipyard.
There is a sense of urgency to halt the upheaval of this toxic soil so it can be cleaned appropriately. I have visited Hunters Point, stood as close as possible to the Rocky Flats facility and once slept on the radioactive battlefield of Desert Storm.
My tour of Parcel A gave me a buzz, the same buzz I felt on the front line of Iraq and the same buzz I would later feel upon my visit to Colorado. I no longer need a dosimeter to tell if I am in a radioactive area. Moret and Epstein clearly support my conclusion with statistically significant evidence.
There is a sense of complacency in the world. Indigenous people have been slaughtered and left to die around the uranium mining areas. Pygmy cultures in Africa have been exploited, while Hopi and Navajo reservations have been exposed to the uranium tailings. After mining it, communities were established to process and research this uranium.
Hunters Point was a community that housed NRDL. Communities that have been violently attacked with this element, such as Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Basra, Vieques, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Baghdad, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan can attest to the incredibly horrific birth defects that have occurred from the use of radioactive munitions.
Hunters Point has been attacked. Until the complacency to address the implications of low level radiation is reversed, cancer rates will continue to soar. Should San Francisco's leaders choose to ignore the effects of low level radiation coming from Hunters Point, they will be guilty of sentencing thousands of people to an early death.
