Britain's secretive and dangerous trade in depleted uranium (DU) has been thrown into jeopardy because a leading uranium processing company in the US is facing bankruptcy, the Sunday Herald can reveal.
The Starmet corporation, based in Concord, Massachusetts, is selling off its DU manufacturing operations to meet multi-million-dollar debts. The corporation has deals with the Ministry of Defence which involve shipping up to 750 tonnes of DU across the Atlantic.
The DU is used to make armour-piercing shells, 100 of which were fired in the Gulf war. The metal is radioactive and chemically toxic, has been linked to cancers and other illnesses suffered by Gulf veterans and civilians in Iraq and Kosovo.
Starmet also admits that its DU has been contaminated with plutonium. Researchers at Harwell in Oxfordshire say the radiation emitted by a single atom of plutonium in the body can trigger cancer.
Documents from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission disclose that Starmet exported 500 tonnes of DU to Britain in the early 1990s. Now the corporation is requesting a licence to import up to 250 tonnes of waste DU back from the MoD .
The waste - offcuts from the machining of shells and from abandoned weapon designs - has to be stored and shipped in 240,000 gallons of mineral oil to stop it bursting into flames. The risks have caused alarm among environmental groups.
Starmet's main DU factory, at Barnwell in South Carolina, is up for sale to help pay off a multi-million-dollar bank loan.
Environmental campaigners welcome the company's crisis leading to the cancellation of its trade with Britain.
"It's no bad thing for the transport of hazardous materials such as DU to be brought to an end because of the financial problems of a US supplier," said David Lowry, an environmental policy consultant in London. "The outstanding and unanswered question is why Britain was going in for such a dangerous trade when there are large stockpiles of DU in Britain, including at Chapelcross in Dumfries and Galloway."
According to a document just filed with the Securities Exchange Commission in Washington DC, Starmet has called an emergency meeting of stockholders next month to endorse directors' plans to sell off the company's assets. The company admits it "may need to seek legal protection under the Bankruptcy Act".
The main reason for the financial crisis, Starmet claims, is the US army's refusal to fund an $18 million (£12.5m) clean-up of the company's Massachusetts headquarters, badly contaminated by DU. Starmet has also just lost a $4.4m (£3m) lawsuit filed by an environmental company contracted to dispose of waste from the site.
Starmet failed to return a series of calls and e-mails from the Sunday Herald on Friday. The Ministry of Defence confirmed yesterday that it had imported DU from Starmet, though a spokesman was unable to go into further detail. Ministers have always maintained that there is no evidence linking the use of DU with ill-health.
Lowry, editor of an expert briefing on contaminated land, said: "This highlights an issue that will become a bigger political problem in the future - the cleaning up of militarily contaminated land and the question of who is going to pay for it."
http//www.starmet.com
http//www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/276331/000113388401500137/gdefs14a-24061.txt
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/276331/0001133884-01-500137.txt