From: dblackbu@alleg.edu (Dave Blackburn)
Subject: No wonder chemists have such a bad name!
Organization: Allegheny College
Date: Sat, 10 Oct 1992 00:32:31 GMT

In article <1992Oct9.232246.24344@pellns.alleg.edu> jannotj@pell2l23.alleg.edu  
(Jason Jannot) writes:
|In article <1992Oct7.231513.18189@noose.ecn.purdue.edu>  
|parrish@ecn.purdue.edu (Stephen L. Parrish) writes:
|> 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)
|You may be getting more than you didn't bargain for...jannotj

Part 2 contains more of the same, plus info about the local activist who is  
fighting the company to prevent disposal of the wastewater onto farm fields...
Not worth posting. 
Anyone from kerr_mcgee.com out there?
--

* Dave Blackburn  dblackbu@alleg.edu  flames to self@home.dev.null *          
* Chemistry, Macs, Hypercard, cats,  <>< religion, & the Dead      *
* (Anyone else who held these opinions would be as crazy as I am.) *
*   "Sometimes the songs that we hear are just songs of our own"   *