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The Health Costs of U.S. Nuclear Weapons

The Costs of U.S. Nuclear Weapons
mil.news.sohu.com 29 July 09

……………….Environmental and Health Costs
“…………..one great irony of the Cold War is that although the United States produced nuclear weapons en masse to destroy the Soviet Union, and vice-versa, the principal victims of each country’s nuclear weapons were its own citizens.

From the very beginning, nuclear officials dealt with the problem of nuclear waste by devising interim rather than long-term solutions…………………..
………millions of gallons of wastes leaked into the ground. Hanford officials insisted for years that it would take centuries for the waste to reach the groundwater underneath the site. In fact, it was only a matter of decades before their optimistic assumptions were proven wrong.
“…………………..A major reason why the United States today faces a “cleanup” bill of at least $300 billion is that problems such as the Hanford waste tanks were ignored in favor of maintaining or increasing production of nuclear weapons. Production was the first priority of the government. Making sure it was done in a manner that did not unnecessarily hurt people or destroy the environment was a distant second. Had the government thought through more carefully the consequences of unrestrained production of plutonium and highly-enriched uranium, many of the problems—and bills—we face today could have been avoided or substantially mitigated. It now appears that in a number of cases, no effective “cleanup” will be possible and highly-contaminated sites will simply have to be fenced off and monitored for generations………….

…A number of the 600,000 people who worked in a nuclear weapons facility were exposed to unnecessarily high levels of radiation. Exposure to toxic chemicals was also high. At several facilities, no consistent records were kept of employee radiation exposures. At at least one, plant officials entered false readings into dosimetry logs. When workers fell ill and applied for worker’s compensation, the DOE spent millions of dollars on lawyer’s fees to avoid paying out even a single claim, out of fear that paying one claim would open the floodgates to lawsuits and increase calls for stricter health and safety measures, which would necessarily drive up costs and impede production of more weapons………………

……..Uranium miners, many of whom were Navajo, developed lung cancer after working in unvented mines without respirators or any sort of protective gear. Government officials were well aware of the dangers to the workers, but chose to ignore them to keep production high and the price of uranium low.

The Costs of U.S. Nuclear Weapons-搜狐军事频道

August 1, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 1, environment, USA | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear wastes, radioactive, uranium, wastes