From: jad@ckuxb.att.com (John A Dinardo)
Subject: Pt 1, RADIOACTIVE MEAT, MILK & PRODUCE: Supermarkets Selling Leukemia?
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Keywords: radioactive meat, milk & produce: supermarkets selling leukemia?
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Distribution: na
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1992 20:50:49 GMT

     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


Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive