6,000 Tons Of Radioactive Sand From Kuwait Ended Up In Idaho

By- Suzie-Q @ 10:00 AM MST

How 6,000 Tons of Radioactive Sand from Kuwait Ended Up in Idaho

By Penny Coleman, AlterNet. Posted September 17, 2008

Questions remain about how depleted uranium waste from the first Gulf War was transfered, and whether health risks were posed.

On April 26, 2008, the BBC Alabama arrived in Longview, Washington carrying 6700 tons of Kuwaiti sand. The sand had become contaminated with depleted uranium when U.S. military vehicles and munitions caught fire at Doha Army base in Kuwait during the 1991 Gulf War. The depleted uranium was being repatriated. The sand was a gift of the Kuwaiti government.

So was the cost of repatriation. Neither government will discuss just how much the tab was.

Mike Wilcox, vice president of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union local 21, told the Longview Daily News that initially he had been “concerned about the safety of longshoremen and the entire community when he heard a shipment of depleted uranium was coming into Longview.”

But the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission determined that the sand contained “unimportant quantities” of radioactive material, and officials from the Department of Health would be available to test radiation levels–just in case any of the sand spilled.

At the last minute, the Army notified port authorities that tests had revealed that the sand was also contaminated with lead–in fact 4 times more lead than EPA’s limit for hazardous materials. Transshipment was delayed for a few days awaiting a green light from the EPA.

Mike Wilcox told the Daily News he hoped it would be a one-time thing.

Over the next month, longshoremen loaded 160 containers onto rail cars bound for an Idaho-based waste disposal site owned by a company called American Ecology. When the sand arrived at the Idaho site, the company did its own tests and, as Chad Hyslop, project director for American Ecology, told the Daily News, “found no hazardous levels of lead.”

Doug Rokke, who quit his job directing the clean-up of radioactive battlefields for the Army, contacted American Ecology and discovered “that they had absolutely no knowledge of U.S. Army Regulation 700-48, U.S. Army PAM 700-48, U.S. Army Technical Bulletin 9-1300-278, and all of the medical orders dealing with depleted uranium contamination, environmental remediation procedures, safety, and medical care.”

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