Fallout of another kind

Environment

By Barbara Ray

AS the Bikini Islands can attest, political clout, size, and strategic importance are the cards to hold in a world of super powers. The tales uncovered in recently released US classified documents of the now infamous Bravo atomic bombings on Bikini Island, the nuclear experiments on less fortunate American citizens, and failure to warn the downwind

Rongelapese of lethal atomic fallout paint a clear picture. Political trifles have no hand to play. Today, nearly 50 years later, the Marshall Islands, the Johnston Atoll, and others, still marginal in

Washington politics, are experiencing

fallout of another kind.

With fatalistic logic, the islands are being considered as the solution to the world’s nuclear waste problem. Why not, world leaders suggest, use those distant islands as dump sites for the nuclear

waste. After all, they reason, many are already contaminated; uninhabitable for centuries to come.

As incendiary as this sounds, not all the islanders are opposed to such an idea.

Bikini Islanders are being courted by waste management companies and are seriously considering the proposals. In need of a constant stream of money to complete the cleanup of their native island, the Bikinians see the Energy Department’s promise of $5O million a year for 20 years in exchange for storing radioactive material on already contami nated Nam as the optimum solution.

Although the pikinians manage a $lOO million trust fund, set up by the US government to compensate for their loss, total clean-up costs exceed their rev enues. While Bikini makes plans for its future, other Pacific Islands have already been reborn.

Kalama, on Johnston Atoll, remote and uninhabited, falls into the last category. In 1990, US President George Bush and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl agreed to begin moving US chemical weapons out of Germany.

Johnston Atoll was marked as the first site for incineration of these weapons.

The US army today monitors the site on the island of Kalama. Civilian personnel, the majority recruited from Hawaii, man the plant, with no recourse to collective bargaining.

According to Guam delegate Robert Underwood, the move to Johnston angered many in the Pacific, and he has monitored the situation from its incep tion. He recently learned that on March 23, 10 milligrams of nerve gas were accidentally released into the air at Kalama. Department of Defense reports claim that tne release posed no health risk. Underwood notes that the leak was 10 times the level allowed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). However, he is still waiting for the actual data in order to determine the health risk. The leak, according to Underwood, confirms suspicions that the facility was not being adequately moni tored. He has been asking for research into the weapons burning plant on Johnston since May 1993, but none has been forthcoming. At a hearing before the Armed Services Sub-committee on Military Installation in May of 1993, deputy assistant secretary of the army, Lewis Walker, admitted to Underwood that there have been problems with the incinerator, but he could not be specific.

Whether the army will admit to any Eroblems is questionable, according to Fnderwood. f ‘The army is under pres sure to show that Johnston works. If Johnston doesn’t work out, the eight other chemical weapon incinerators planned for the US mainland may meet resistance,” he said. D