The US Army has awarded the military contractor General Dynamics a $12 million contract to deconstruct and dispose of 78,000 heavy depleted uranium anti-tank shells.
The Pentagon’s May 6 announcement calls for “demilitarization” of the stockpile, as new depleted uranium rounds are added to the war arsenal.
The armor-piercing shells, thought to be both 105-millimeter and 120-millimeter rounds, are made of extremely dense and costly uranium-238. In the US, some 700,000 tons of this U-238 has been left as a waste product from the production of nuclear weapons and nuclear reactor fuel rods. The uranium becomes waste when the more fissionable uranium-235 is separated for H-bombs and nuclear power fuel. It’s only ‘depleted’ of this U-235, and is both radioactive and a toxic heavy metal. It’s given away free to weapons makers.
In the endlessly profitable business of war production, General Dynamics  with 95,000 employees that deal weapons to 40 countries on six continents  originally produced and sold some of the 120-millimeter anti-tank rounds to the Army.
According to the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons in London, the US is moving to replace some of the decommissioned shells. It is set to buy 2,500 large depleted uranium, or DU, anti-tank rounds this year at a cost of $30 million  or over $10,000 each. The shells will be manufactured and sold by Alliant Tech Systems, formerly of Minneapolis.
Coincidentally, $30 million was the lowest official estimate of the cost of decontaminating 350 known DU impact sites in Iraq. In 1991, between 315 and 800 tons of DU munitions were blasted into Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait by US forces during the 40-day-long, 1,000-bombing-sorties-per-day assault. The toxic, radioactive contamination left from the use of these weapons has been linked to the skyrocketing incidence of birth abnormalities in southern Iraq, and to the Gulf War Syndrome among tens of thousands of US combat veterans.
One indication of how poisonous these weapons are is that, in 30 years of resisting nuclear weapons and the war system, the only ‘not guilty of trespass’ verdict I ever won from a jury followed a protest at Alliant Tech over its DU program. The jury agreed with four of us that  since poison weapons are banned by the Geneva and Hague Conventions  our action was an attempt at crime prevention.
Once General Dynamics defuses the munitions, ultimate disposition of the waste uranium is unclear. The uranium in shells is often alloyed with titanium or molybdenum. If these alloys are not recycled, they could become part of the US’s vast stockpile of waste DU, necessitating indefinite storage as intermediate-level radioactive waste. Other parts of the weapons such as aluminum fins currently have to be disposed of as low-level rad waste. The Pentagon would like to re-classify this radioactive waste so it can be dumped in unregulated landfills.
After the US/NATO bombardment of Kosovo in 1999, our DU weapons were found to be spiked with plutonium and other isotopes far more radioactive than uranium-238. The news created a political uproar in Europe and led to the admission by the US Energy Department that “the entire US stock of depleted uranium was contaminated” with plutonium, americium, neptunium and technetium. United Nations investigators in Kosovo found DU-targeted sites poisoned with all these isotopes. The Nation magazine reported that about 150,000 tons uranium-238 was dirtied with plutonium-239 and neptunium-237 and that “some apparently found its way to the Persian Gulf and Balkans battlefields.”
The plutonium-tainted weapons headlines had US and NATO officials claiming that its shells contain “mere traces of plutonium, not enough to cause harm,” and that the highly radioactive materials “were not relevant to soldiers’ health because of their minute quantities.” But plutonium is 200,000 times more radioactive than DU, and less than 27 micrograms of plutonium-239  about a millionth of an ounce — will cause lung cancer.

— John LaForge works for Nukewatch a nuclear watchdog and environmental justice group in Wisconsin.