From: parrish@ecn.purdue.edu (Stephen L. Parrish)
Newsgroups: sci.environment
Subject: Re: Pt 1, RADIOACTIVE MEAT, MILK & PRODUCE: Supermarkets Selling Leukemia?
Keywords: radioactive meat, milk & produce: supermarkets selling leukemia?
Date: 7 Oct 92 23:15:13 GMT
Followup-To: talk.environment
Distribution: na
Organization: Purdue University Engineering Computer Network

In article <1992Oct7.120408.6949@cbnewsl.cb.att.com>, jad@cbnewsl.cb.att.com (John DiNardo) writes:
|> 
|>      The following article is from IN THESE TIMES,   
|>      August 19 - September 1, 1987.  Subscriptions and back issues
|>      can be ordered by calling (312) 772-0100.
|> 
|> *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *  
|> One day in the spring of 1984, a teenager in eastern Oklahoma's
|> Muskogee County took his BB gun and went hunting at a pond by
|> Rabbit Hill Farm.  He shot a frog that had nine legs.
|> 
|> "Freddie the nine-legged-frog" is not the area's only animal anomaly.
|> People have shot rabbits that have two hearts. And some folks report
|> seeing a two-headed blackbird flying about. But not six-year-old
|> Lisa Girty, who was born without eyes or eye sockets. 
|> 
|> Such are signs of the times around Sequoyah Fuels, a uranium
|> processing plant located between the towns of Gore and Vian, and
|> within the boundaries of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, a
|> 14-county area in the eastern part of the state. This facility is
|> owned by Kerr-McGee Corporation, and it is there where the late
|> Karen Silkwood's former employer turns powdered uranium ore into
|> uranium hexafluoride (UF6). 
|> 
|> Kerr-McGee makes UF6 by dissolving the powdered ore in an acidic
|> solution from which the most readily fissionable uranium is
|> chemically removed. Cylinders of UF6 are then trucked to nearby
|> Interstate 40 for delivery to more than 50 customers -- including
|> 25 U.S. nuclear power plants, seven nations and the Department of
|> Energy. These nuclear clients either enrich the UF6 into nuclear
|> fuel, use it to make nuclear medicines or, in the case of the
|> Department of Energy, refine it into weapons grade material for
|> nuclear bombs. 
|> 
|> Kerr-McGee's plant, one of two of its kind in the country, is vital
|> to the U.S. nuclear industry and the war machine that the industry
|> symbiotically supports. Local critics say this strategic importance
|> has enabled Kerr-McGee to operate outside normal regulatory
|> controls -- with the end result being a contaminated environment,
|> and the area's high incidence of cancer deaths. 
|> 
|> In addition to making uranium hexafluoride, Kerr-McGee produces a
|> lot of toxic wastes. 
|> 
|> Until 1982, when the Nuclear Reguatory Commission (NRC) ordered
|> Kerr-McGee to install scrubbers on the plant's main smokestack, the
|> company regularly spewed radioactive debris into the air and onto
|> the surrounding neighborhood. And Kerr-McGee continues to dump
|> radioactive water into the Illinois River. 
|> 
|> But the waste that the company finds the most difficult to dispose
|> of is the solution that remains after the uranium is extracted.
|> Technically known as raffinate, this toxic sludge contains
|> radioactive elements like radium-226, thorium-230, and uranium, as
|> well as seventeen toxic and heavy metals including arsenic, cadmium,
|> mercury, lead, molybdenum and selenium. According to the NRC,
|> Kerr-McGee produces about 7.8 million gallons of raffinate each year.
|> 
|> In 1982, the NRC gave Kerr-McGee permission to begin injecting this
|> industrial waste into underlying sandstone rock formations. Five
|> million gallons were disposed of before intense public opposition
|> forced the company to seal off its well. 
|> 
|> Out of that public revolt was born Native Americans for a Clean
|> Environment (NACE).  Jesse Deer-in-Water, who -- with her husband
|> William, organized the initial opposition to the waste injections --
|> is NACE's chairperson. 
|> 
|> A former beautician, the 43-year-old Cherokee woman and mother of
|> five runs the organization out of her home in Vian. Deer-in-Water
|> scorns the NRC: "It's just out to save the nuclear industry."
|> 
|> THE FINAL SOLUTION:                                            
|> Much of Deer-in-Water's work these days centers on the company's
|> current solution to its liquid-waste problem. No longer allowed to
|> pump the radioactive, heavy-metal-laden raffinate into the ground,
|> Kerr-McGee sprays it on 15,000 acres of company farmland as
|> fertilizer. 
|> 
|> This is Kerr-McGee's recipe for industrial waste fertilizer:
|> add ammonia to the raffinate as it leaves the plant (the ammonia
|> combines with nitric acid already in the solution to create the
|> fertilizing agent, ammonium nitrate); filter the liquid that
|> settles on the top of the holding pools; collect some of the
|> remaining radioactive and heavy-metal particles using chemical and
|> centrifugal processes.  Presto. The Industrial waste is ready to be
|> spread on company-owned farms -- farms like Rabbit Hill whose
|> fields run off into the pond where Freddie-the-nine-legged-frog
|> once lived.
|> 
|> With the NRC's blessing, Kerr-McGee began examining the fertilizing
|> potential of its industrial sewage in 1973. In 1979, Kerr-McGee's
|> Director of Regulation and Control W.J. Shelly wrote to the
|> Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) regional office in Dallas:
|>   
|>    "The raffinate .... has been treated to reduce its radioactivity,
|>     and is applied to the soil as part of a waste disposal program
|>     licensed by the NRC."
|> 
|> Since then, the radioactive, heavy-metal-laden raffinate has been
|> renamed "ammonium nitrate fertilizer", and there is no talk of
|> "waste disposal programs" from farmer Kerr-McGee. 
|> 
|> On March 31, 1982, the NRC's Uranium Process Licensing Section
|> recommended that Kerr-McGee be given:
|>    "on a permanent basis ... permission to spray ... treated
|>     raffinate as fertilizer"
|> on company land. The NRC said that these raffinate applications
|> would neither pose an:
|>    "undue risk to public health" nor "have significant adverse
|>     environmental impacts."
|> 
|> "IT'S ALL A FICTION":                                           
|> The NRC based this conclusion on Kerr-McGee-supplied tests indicating
|> that the raffinate fertilizer, a concentration of uranium, thorium
|> and radium, is within Federal limits.   "It's all a fiction,"
|> says Dr. Rosalie Bertell, the Canadian epidemiologist who has made
|> a career out of studying populations living around nuclear
|> facilities (see IN THESE TIMES, Dec. 24, 1986). "Every exposure to
|> the population has a harmful effect." 
|> 
|> Bertell is currently working with Deer-in-Water on an epidemiologic
|> study of cancers, miscarriages and new allergies that have occurred
|> around the Kerr-McGee plant. Until Bertell examines the data, she
|> will not speculate as to whether the two hundred plus cancers that
|> the survey has documented are related to Kerr-McGee's operations.
|> But she comments that it "certainly looks extraordinary at first
|> glance."  Bertell has already examined the nine-legged-frog.
|> "It is conceivable that the raffinate could cause that," she says.
|> 
|> Kerr-McGee's Manager of Media Relations Annita Bridges says, when
|> asked about the nine-legged-frog:
|> 
|>    "Well, I've heard that story before. The number of legs keeps 
|>     increasing every time I hear it. I don't think anybody has ever
|>     seen that frog."
|> 
|> [JD: The front-page has a full-length photograph of a frog with
|> extra legs growing out of the area around the upper frontside of
|> of its body. I counted nine legs in all.]
|> 
|>    "If that frog exists, I am certain that there is no medical
|>     evidence that would link the uniqueness to the operations at 
|>     Sequoyah Fuels Corporation."
|>                         (to be continued)
|> *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
|>     Transcribed by John DiNardo


What a gem.  Had to pass this on...
-- 
Stephen Parrish              |  "Do not speak to me of good men, bind them
Purdue University            |   with the chains of the constitution"
School of Nuclear Engineering|   --  Thomas Jefferson  (roughly) 
parrish@gn.ecn.purdue.edu    |  KEMP/BAKER '96   (If the US survives '92-96)
Newsgroups: sci.environment