No threat? ADVERTISING No threat? In your article “Tests find no DU threat” (Tribune-Herald, April 16), you reported that traces of DU (depleted uranium) were found at Waiki‘i Ranch, miles from Pohakuloa. But you also quoted Jeff Eckerd, state Department
No threat?
In your article “Tests find no DU threat” (Tribune-Herald, April 16), you reported that traces of DU (depleted uranium) were found at Waiki‘i Ranch, miles from Pohakuloa.
But you also quoted Jeff Eckerd, state Department of Health radiological branch manager, saying any DU “aerosolized through use of high explosives” “would likely only travel a couple hundred yards.”
Which is correct?
You didn’t report that wind-borne uranium aerosols can travel 26 miles, according to Leonard Dietz, a physicist with 28 years’ work experience at Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in New York.
You didn’t report that Dr. Lorrin Pang reviewed the study done at Waiki‘i and did not say there was no threat. Instead, he said if “the reading is 1 percent DU with a measurement error of 1 percent then it might really be 2 percent.”
Pang, M.D., M.P.H., is a longtime consultant to the World Health Organization, former Army doctor and chief of the Maui District Health Office (but speaking on DU as a private citizen).
You didn’t report that Dr. Marshall Blann said for the Pohakuloa Training Area, helicopters might have blown away the contaminated dust they were searching for.
Blann, Ph.D., is a physicist and former consultant to Los Alamos (N.M.) and Lawrence Livermore (Calif.) National laboratories.
You didn’t report that Dr. Mike Reimer concluded the latest Army DU plan “is designed to specifically avoid finding DU migration.”
Reimer, Ph.D. in geology, was involved with the American Nuclear Society and International Atomic Energy Agency, and was a guest editor for the Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry.
You didn’t report that Pang, Blann and Reimer raised numerous other concerns about several Hawaii DU studies.
All these items that you didn’t report (except Dietz’s background) were in my statement sent to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and to you.
Martha “Cory” Harden
Hilo
