The federal government wants to do nuclear weapons testing and bio-warfare agent experimentation on Site 300, near the city of Tracy, California. Tracy, 19 miles from Livermore, home of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, is in the northern part of California’s San Joaquin Valley, some of the world’s most fertile farmland. It is a fast-growing city of the outer San Francisco Bay Area. The 2000 census pegged the population at just over 56,000 people. Five years later, a new estimate found that Tracy had added over 20,000 people.¹

A 5,500-unit housing development is planned for an area only 1 mile from the fence line of Site 300.² Like its neighbors in the Bay Area, Tracy is in earthquake country. The Black Butte Fault, the Midway Fault, the Carnegie Corral Fault and the San Joaquin Fault are all sources of seismic hazard in the immediate area. And Tracy would be endangered by a “well-placed” quake along the San Andreas, Hayward, or Calaveras faults.³

Site 300 is a 7000-acre (11 square-mile) open field owned by the Lawrence Livermore National Lab that is used as a high explosives testing range. It is located on Corral Hollow Road on the outskirts of Tracy, near the heavily-trafficked Interstate 580. Earthquake faults, such as the Elk Ravine Fault, traverse the whole area. Additionally, the area is prone to wildfires.⁴

A Witches’ Brew of Bugs and Bombs

Site 300 has been on the EPA’s “Superfund” list since 1990. It is polluted with many toxic and radioactive materials, including tritium (radioactive hydrogen) and uranium-238. Despite over 25 years on the list, the government still has no cleanup plans for Site 300.⁵

In early March, 2007, community members and environmentalists celebrated a victory when the San Joaquin Air Pollution Control District rescinded its decision to allow the Lawrence Livermore Lab to test 350-pound bombs on Site 300. The planned tests were to have simulated full scale nuclear weapons blasts. The district withdrew its permission after learning from local residents that the bombs would contain depleted uranium. The lab did not mention the use of depleted uranium in its initial permit application.⁶

“Generally, depleted uranium is not considered radioactive because its radioactivity level is so low as to be equal to or below background level,” said Lawrence Livermore Lab spokesman David Schwoegler. “It is in the ballast of every sailboat and jetliner and commercial use.”⁷ However, having depleted uranium contained in boat and airplane ballast is different from letting it travel through the air on the wind, and settle on the ground where it might contaminate groundwater, the neighboring farm produce, and the wild plants eaten by the animals in the area. “If these huge explosions had been allowed to go forward, the hills, nearby waterways, the workers and the surrounding community would have all been put at risk,” said Loulena Miles, staff attorney for Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment, a nuclear watchdog group in the area.⁸

But while plans for explosives testing are on hold while the federal government decides how it will respond to District’s decision, other plans with respect to Site 300 are going forward. On April 16, the Department of Homeland Security sent its “site selection” team to Site 300 to evaluate the site as a home for high-containment biowarfare agent research. Site 300 is one of 17 locations being evaluated for a proposed lab that is slated to cover 500,000 square feet.⁹

Consider that many communities do not want a “big box” Wal-Mart store in their neighborhoods. This lab would be equal in area to five Wal-Mart big boxes. And whereas Wal-Mart contains things that people find useful, such as groceries, toilet paper and DVDs, the lab would contain such unappealing items as anthrax, bubonic plague and Q fever in the BSL-3 portion of the lab, where potentially lethal infectious or exotic pathogens are kept. The BSL-4 portion of the lab would harbor organisms that cause diseases for which there is no known cure, such as the Ebola and Marburg viruses and Central European tick-borne encephalitis.¹⁰ Not exactly the kinds of things you go looking for when you visit a Wal-Mart.

The Department of Homeland Security claims that “community acceptance” will be one of the selection criteria for the lab. The Tracy City Council has voted against the lab. Additional opposition has come in the forms of petitions, letters to the editor, letter-grams, e-mails, and phone calls to DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff. Some 7000 people are estimated to have participated in some form of opposition to placing the lab on Site 300.¹¹ “What part of ‘no’ does the Department of Homeland Security not understand?” asks Marylia Kelley, executive director of Tri-Valley Cares.¹²

It remains to be seen for how long “community acceptance” will remain a selection criteria for DHS. There is heavy opposition to locating a high-containment biowarfare lab in any sizable community, from the San Francisco Bay Area to Boston’s Back Bay. DHS might want to locate these labs in areas where there is a good chance of attracting the highly-educated personnel required to run such a facility. But situating such a lab in an urban area where such highly-educated people are likely to be, presents potential danger to millions. According to DHS, the potentially-affected community whose acceptance of the Department seeks is the community of people “living within a 60-mile radius” of a proposed facility. For Site 300, the potential community is over 7 million people.¹³

DHS wants to scare people into thinking that terrorists are busy designing biological weapons and we have to know what the terrorists are up to. This in itself is terrorism. The evildoers that the current administration would have us believe are lurking behind every tree would have to be extremely sophisticated to work with the organisms that one finds in BSL-3 and BSL-4 laboratories. So sophisticated, in fact, that they would likely be state-sponsored. And by hiding biological research within classified nuclear weapons research facilities, the government leaves itself open to reasonable suspicion that it is the United States, not “terrorists”, that wants to develop offensive biological capabilities rather than to defend against them.

References

1 City of Tracy official web site
2 Press release, Tri-Valley CAREs, April 16, 2007
3 Wikipedia entry for Tracy, California
4 Google Maps
5 Press release, Tri-Valley CAREs, April 16, 2007, Op. Cit.
6 Quick Facts About the Proposed Tracy Biowarfare Agent Research Facility, August 31, 2006
7 Press release, Tri-Valley CAREs, March 7, 2007
8 AP wire copy read on KPFA Evening News, March 8, 2007
9 Ibid.
10 Press release, Tri-Valley CAREs, April 16, 2007, Op. Cit.
11 Quick Facts, August 31, 2006, Op. Cit.
12 Press release, Tri-Valley CAREs, April 16, 2007, Op. Cit.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.

In the mid nineteen eighties I found my self visiting a lovely little town in Eastern Washington called Pasco. Part of the “Tri Cities” which includes Richland and Kennewick, the town of Pasco seemed idyllic. Quiet, clean, plenty of parks, inexpensive housing… I liked it.

Well, I liked it except for the 586-square-mile Hanford Nuclear Reservation located on the outskirts of town. Yeah, that’s right — not a nuclear plant — a nuclear RESERVATION.

You see, it seems that after supplying plutonium for America’s war effort in World War Two, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation kept expanding until it had, by the time I arrived, not three, not five, but a full NINE reactors processing nuclear material and as a result had no small waste storage disposal issues.

This is where plutonium comes from.

You would think that this would send people running for the hills or at least to a safer part of the state, such as the base of Mount St. Helens, but the attitude of the town, at least during the time I was there, was mixed.

A large number of people I talked to really liked the plants. After all, it was a company town and the company was cooking, humming, irradiating, all that. Unemployment was low, company benefits were high and people seemed content with making the simple trade. Quality of life, in exchange for length of life.

I’ll give you an example, I’m sitting in the hotel bar and a sexy, attractive woman sits down next to me and puts three packs of Camel non-filters next to the ashtray. I said, ”Wow, those are a lot of cigarettes,” and she replied, “I like to see what I’m going to smoke in a night.”

I asked her if she worried about getting cancer and she looked me in the eye and said, “I work in the plant. What the fuck is the difference?” I bought her a double. And no, before you think that I brought her upstairs, I did the math, and figured that sleeping with her would be like placing my manhood in the microwave.

True story. Except for the part about me doing math. And the part about her being sexy and attractive. But back to the macro.

The Hanford Nuclear Reservation represents a major clean up problem. According to the web site of Washington Senator Patty Murray there are 50 million gallons of nuclear waste material sitting in 177 underground tanks all way past their intended life span. And, just because it can, the waste has entered the water table and is moving toward the Columbia River.

Fifty MILLION gallons? That’s right. But it used to be much, much worse.

There were five radionuclides that contributed the most to radiation dose from the river pathway (dose is the amount of radiation absorbed by a person’s body). The five radionuclides were phosphorus-32, zinc-65, arsenic-76, neptunium-239 and sodium-24. The Dose Reconstruction Project estimated that these radionuclides accounted for more than 94 percent of the potential radiation dose from the river pathway. There were many other radioactive materials released into the river as well.

The nuclear fuel consisted of fuel “elements” which were less than two feet long and encased in metal. There were thousands of fuel elements in each reactor. The increase in the reactor power levels put more stress on the fuel elements. Under this stress, the metal covering could split and allow small chunks of the radioactive fuel to be flushed into the river with the cooling water. The largest chunk weighed more than a pound. There were nearly 2,000 fuel element failures during the operation of the eight original plutonium production reactors.

Washington State Department of Health

That’s right, raw chunks of fuel rods discharged into the river, from 1944 through 1971. Twenty-seven years of 200 degree water fresh from the overloaded reactor cores.

The cores were overloaded because Hanford “increased the power levels of all eight reactors to produce more plutonium for the country’s nuclear arsenal. As a result, more radioactivity was discharged into the Columbia,” according to the Hanford Health Information Network. They were essentially running the reactors with the volume cranked up to eleven. Running them at warp nine.

The radiation in the Columbia also reached the Pacific Ocean, contaminating shellfish along the Washington and Oregon coasts. The levels of zinc-65 in the oysters of Willapa Bay on the Washington coast were monitored beginning in 1959. According to a 1959 Hanford document, the levels of zinc-65 in Pacific oysters were more than 300 times higher than in Japanese or Atlantic coast oysters.

Some people have recalled that in the 1950s and 1960s, they preferred swimming near Hanford because the water felt warmer there than further downstream.
Washington State Department of Health

They are working on the problems, of course. In May of 1989 the EPA, The state, and the department of energy entered into a Tri-Party Agreement to clean the area up.

They are currently constructing a plant, due to open in 2007, that will convert the waste into glass for easier storage. Not only do I not know or understand how this works but I can’t possibly begin to fathom what one does with highly radioactive glass – sell it to the bottlers of Jolt Cola? A new kind of solar panel for places that don’t get sun? Happy meals?

Actually, there have been recent cuts in the budget to clean up this mess. Apparently the money is needed to help clean up the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Senators Murray and Cantwell recently issued a joint statement that said among other things,

“For the past five years there has been an unprecedented attack on our nation’s ability to cleanup nuclear waste. Today we know why. The Administration has officially labeled these cleanup efforts as ‘lower-priority federal programs.’

There is no more important priority for the federal government than protecting the health and well-being of all Americans. The cleanup of nuclear waste at Hanford and other sites across the country is a signal about how our nation treats the communities that have sacrificed to protect all of us.

There is nothing fiscally responsible about the Administration’s efforts to rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul attempts at Katrina recovery. If the President were serious about fiscal responsibility he would rethink a short-sighted and dangerous tax cut policy. Denying funding to a national priority like Hanford cleanup, will only lead to increased costs in the long run.” source

It was 11 AM the next day. I was in my hotel room on the fourth floor overlooking the entire area. It was a lovely day and I was shaking off the cobwebs of the night before when I heard the siren. Loud. One of those 40’s air raid ones.

My first instinct is to “Duck and Cover” but then I remember Glasnost and rule it out. Probably only a test. Then the screaming starts. Children screaming at the top of their lungs. Running. Screaming. True.

My blood ran cold. I could not believe that this is how I was going to die. Then it sort of got quieter. I could still hear the kids but now they sounded happy. I went out on the terrace and there, across the street, was an elementary school. It was recess.

Kids.

I lit up a cigarette, picked up the phone and called John Hancock about getting some term life.

According to the International Action Center article Iraqi cities ‘hot with depleted uranium’ reporters have measured radiation levels that are between 1,000 and 1,900 times higher than would normally be expected in parts of Iraq.


The Dutch are concerned about this, as they plan to send troops to Iraq. They are slated to be stationed in the small town of Al-Samawah, where the U.S. insists it has not used D.U. However, according to the above referenced study, a Dutch journalist was able to confirm that when the U.S. Army fought Iraqi forces there, D.U. ammunition was “widely used.”

According to the American Gulf War Veterans Association, half of the soldiers who have returned to the U.S. since serving in the Gulf War have reported “serious illnesses.” About 30% of those suffer from chronic illness–a surprising number since the military screened soldiers for chronic conditions like asthma, cancer, diabetes, birth defects and heart conditions, before they were inducted. This unexplained incidence of chronic illness, therefore, has many believing it is related to exposure to D.U. radiation.

Under pressure to assess the dangers D.U. radiation poses to American solders, the Department of Defense hired the Rand Corporation to study the issue several years ago. The DoD briefing on the study was held on April 15, 1999. Interestingly, the Rand Corporation did not use the commission to gather data that would allow them to study health problems in soldiers and correlate them to data on actual D.U. usage. They focused, instead, on conducting a review of the literature.

Simply put, they compiled studies that had already been conducted by others. So the Rand Corporation’s final work is largely a science lesson on what D.U. is, and how it works. It does not delve into specifics regarding use of D.U. or numbers of soldiers/civilians who’ve been exposed to it, or the consequences of such exposure. In other words, it’s relatively useless for the purpose for which it was ostensibly designed.

What’s more, the study paid very little attention to the fact that D.U. can be internalized in more ways than one. In the press briefing that covered the literature review, Dr. Bernard D. Rostker said that while it is possible to ingest or inhale D.U., they don’t have any statistics on it. And in a surprisingly cavalier follow-up, added “Some people think that’s an issue.”

When asked for the actual number of soldiers believed to have been exposed to D.U. via friendly-fire instances (only U.S. soldiers were using shell casings made with D.U. during the Gulf War) or during D.U. clean-up, Dr. Rostker couldn’t seem to find the information in his report. When the reporter covering the briefing moved on to ask about airborne uranium left-over from battles in which D.U. shell casings were used, military spokesperson Col. Daxon was quick to point out that the tests showed the radioactive dust didn’t seem to travel more than about 50 yards, and “eventually settles.”

Perhaps that’s how the U.S. Military is now justifying its use in densely populated urban areas; in that case, even a 50 yard radius around a battle site would be a dangerous area to cover with uranium dust, wouldn’t it?

And doesn’t the dust just come back up again for somebody else to breath in when a car drives by or it’s particularly windy? In fact, even if the dust stays put, in water or in soil, isn’t that considered contamination? Wouldn’t ingestion vs. inhalation then be a problem? It’s not like the stuff just disappears. D.U. has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. Yet, for some unknown reason, nobody during the briefing bothered to address these issues.

While statistics citing “mysterious” illnesses and “Gulf War Syndrome” abound, the military’s decision to separate those from any connection to D.U. exposure meant that only a small group of soldiers, 33 in all, who have actual D.U. shell casing fragments in their bodies, were included as part of the Rand study.

The military argued at the time that the soldiers in that group would, naturally, have a greater chance of suffering the effects of D.U. radiation because they had internal exposure to it; whereas, those who do not have actual shell fragments made from D. U. in their bodies (i.e., soldiers, Iraqi civilians and U.S. troops currently suffering from “mysterious” illnesses/and or Gulf War Syndrome), would be much less likely to be ill as a result of D. U. exposure. In other words, both the military and the Rand Corporation decided that D.U. radiation left over from U.S. military action is harmless. They didn’t research it; they assumed it.

Now, six years after the Rand Corporation published their literature review, veterans are even more concerned about the long-term health effects of D.U.; yet no more comprehensive work has followed that original study. More disturbing, the military has deliberately avoided the task of compiling the data that might answer questions concerning the relationship between the two. Instead, the military has continued to cite the Rand study as definitive evidence of the failure to connect D.U. exposure to the chronic illnesses suffered by veterans of both Gulf Wars.

But according to the International Action Center, Iraq’s National Ministry of Health put together a couple of international coalitions to do what the U.S. military would not, and their findings were quite disturbing. They showed “a six-fold increase in breast cancer, a five-fold increase in lung cancer and a 16-fold increase in ovarian cancer among those exposed to D.U.” Unfortunately, many are unaware of this because U.S. sanctions prevented the Ministry from publishing its findings in much of the world.

Meanwhile, Iraqis are focused on rebuilding their war-torn country: repairing power plants, securing clean water, fighting for jobs, and creating a Constitution that they hope will stave off civil war. Concerned about their immediate physical safety, they are totally unaware of the fact that their biggest battle–the battle for their long-term health–is still ahead.