Critics attack Army plan to leave toxic mess

From: Army Times

Critics say it would be a bad precedent to let the U.S. Army retreat from the task of cleaning up or even monitoring the site in Southern Indiana where live-fire tests left behind more than 160,000 pounds of depleted uranium shell fragments plus millions of unexploded conventional shells.

The story about the Army's request to end environmental testing at the Jefferson Proving Ground's former firing range — brought to light in The Courier-Journal ahead of a local public hearing last week — yielded responses from thousands of miles away about the potential health hazards of the toxic, radioactive metal as it oxidizes into dust then spreads.

"It's a travesty that the Army might walk away without doing a detailed analysis of how they could clean it up," said Lenny Siegel, executive director of the California-based Center for Public Environmental Oversight.

The Army has submitted a decommissioning plan for the site north of Madison, Ind., to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The firing range was used as early as 1941 and continued up until 1995. But it was used to test the radioactive, armor-piercing shells from 1984 to 1994, according to the Army.

According to the NRC's latest annual decommissioning report, this would mark the first time the NRC has considered a license to be terminated with restricted use.

The federal Fish and Wildlife Service operates the Big Oaks National Wildlife Refuge on most of the 55,000-acre site about 45 miles northeast of Louisville, though fencing surrounds the 2,080-acre area where the majority of testing was done from 1941 until 1995. The Indiana Air National Guard also uses part of the northern area for bombing practice.

Siegel doesn't believe the NRC should allow the Army to avoid cleaning up the area north of the firing line, where the Army estimates there are about 162,040 pounds of depleted uranium remains in the impact area and 3 million to 5 million shells with live detonators, primers or fuzes.

Experts say radioactive levels of depleted uranium are relatively low in comparison to enriched uranium used for nuclear weapons and energy. A study conducted by Materials and Chemistry Laboratory Inc. for the Army last year concluded it will take "many decades to corrode completely" due to the low-corrosion rates of depleted uranium material in the penetrating darts, which remain largely intact.

But Siegel and others remain concerned about the potential health hazards if the dust is carried as it was in Colonie, N.Y., where the state Supreme Court in 1980 ordered a manufacturing plant that mainly used depleted uranium to shut down because of airborne releases of uranium compounds.

Siegel first traveled to the Southern Indiana installation in the 1990s, when he met Mike Moore, one of the final Army workers there before it closed. "He was the one who first told me of the risks of the unexploded ordnance," said Siegel, who's among those who've spoken out about parts of the four decommissioning plans the Army has presented since 1999.

The NRC rejected the 2001 plan and others have been withdrawn.

Army studies have focused mainly on the costs of comprehensive cleanup, finding it could cost federal taxpayers billions of dollars. Siegel doesn't doubt cleanup will be costly, but maintains there are "options between all or nothing" that would help restore much of the area.

"It is likely that most of the uranium—thus most of the environmental and human risk — could be removed for a small fraction of the estimated cost," Siegel wrote in a 2003 letter to the NRC.

Siegel added that human safety always a concern with clearing military explosives, which is why the Air Force uses unmanned ground vehicles that are controlled remotely to clear old ranges. And newer technologies may help determine what could be ordnance and what's not, he said.

Siegel also wonders why Indiana leaders haven't done more to contest the decision that the benefits of cleanup are outweighed by the costs.

"A lot of states insist the Army clean it up," he said.

While there has been some discussion in Congress over the last decade about the need to take a closer look at the effects of depleted uranium contamination from military weapons, there's been little traction. Such weapons have been test fired at several U.S. locations.

Doug Weir, a Manchester, England resident who coordinates the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons, agrees with Siegel that the NRC allowing to end its license could have a ripple effect at other test sites such as Hawaii, where two ranges were found to have depleted uranium contamination from a battlefield nuclear weapons system dubbed the Davy Crockett.

After the Army applied for an NRC license there, NRC staff responded in 2010, in part: "It appears that the U.S. Army's approach to development of the Environmental Radiation Monitoring Plan's is based on the assumption that environmental radiation monitoring is triggered by a certain dose level close to regulatory limits.

"Environmental monitoring is used to determine if material is being released from a facility, in this case the range, which could potentially impact public health and safety or the environment. In developing ERMPs it should not be assumed that DU is not being released from a facility."

Earlier this year, NRC staff disagreed with the Army's environmental analysis that found "no potential for the release of DU" during controlled burns or as vegetation decays at Schofield Barracks on Oahu.

"So it seems fair to say that if Hawaii is anything to go by, the Army is primarily focused on pursuing its own interests," Weir said.

http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2014/12/15/uranium-testing-indiana/20463385/