URANIUM PROBLEMS
John LeKay interviewed Dr Helen Caldicott about America’s nuclear programme.
Lekay said native Americans who had mined uranium or lived near the abandoned mines, had experienced unusual symptoms – particularly the Lakota people in the South Dakota reservations of Standing Rock, Rock Creek, Harding County and Pine Ridge and the Navaho peopole of Nevada and New Mexico. In these regions brain and kidney cancer seemed to be escalating. There was also an unusually high rate of birth abnormalities and increase in women having miscarriages.
Dr Caldicott said these people all lived near uranium tailings and uranium mines and were exposed to radiation continuously – either from radon gas continually emitted from the uranium tailings and radium. She said radon gas was a potent carcinogen that caused lung and other cancers. Radium was soluble and leached from uranium tailings into the water supply and back into food. So the people were eating radioactive food. Radium caused bone cancer, leukemia and other side effects like congenital anomalies.
Caldicott said one-third of the men who had mined uranium had developed or died of lung cancer. Mining uranium was a very dangerous occupation and so was living near the tailings. The tailings themselves were very radioactive and should be re-buried back into the soil but never were.
Lekay said there were 89 abandoned mines located in the Black Hills and rainwater was running off the Riley Pass uranium mine into the Grand River and the grasslands water affecting the herds of cattle there.
Caldicott explained that uranium clings to DNA and because of this was damaging. Uranium was a heavy metal excreted through the kidney where it caused acute nephritis and kidney cancer even years later. DNA damaged in the eggs or the sperm would pass genetic abnormalities on to future generations
Lekay asked if Gulf War Syndrome could be a depleted uranium sickness. Caldicott said Gulf War Syndrome symptoms were related to uranium toxicity caused by depleted uranium, OR uranium 238. She said depleted uranium weapons had not been banned because they were effective weapons. The shells were made of ten pounds of solid uranium 238. When shot from a gun at fast velocity, it reached great momentum and sliced through the steel of the enemy’s tank like a hot knife through butter. It was also pyrophoric – so when it hits the tank – it burns at a very high temperature and about 80 per cent of it dissipates into dust that is inhaled by everyone, including children. This was also entering the food chain through contaminated water and milk. The half life of uranium 238 was 4.5 billion years.
Uranium – from mining it to putting it into weapons – was having a devastating effects on the Lakota and Navaho Natives in America, then in Iraq or wherever weapons were used and all soldiers were exposed to it.
Caldicott also said that uranium that was put into a nuclear power plant became a billion times more radioactive than the original uranium before it was put into the power plants.
LeKay asked why the mainstream media was not informing people about the uses of depleted uranium and the white phosphorous, napalm. Caldicott said it was partly because it was a complex medical and biological problem and because there was a ban on anyone reporting on it from the Pentagon.
Although there had been no articles about the medical effects of uranium or depleted uranium in the New York Times or the Washington Post, there were articles in the European press because some Italian soldiers had returned from Iraq and developed cancers, leading to protests from the European Parliament.
