Whoa, that's a kick in the pants...

I understand what you are saying about the USA contaminating the sandl in Kuwait, but I think we should do more than move sand. I think we should hold the individuals who authorized the contamination of the sand accountable, not just move the sand to the US.

Americans dont understand what has been done in our name. We have caused great environmental harm and no one has been held accountable. The same ones who manufactured and authorized the use of depleted uranium are probably the same individuals who are profiting from moving the sand back to America.

Conniepae, it is the USA which contaminated that sand with depleted uranium, the Kuwaitis had nothing to do with it. America is duty-bound to clean up that radioactive mess they have spread in other countries, and bring it home for storage.

America is exporting jobs and importing nuclean waste? Doesnt see like a good idea does it? Who is benifiting from importing depleted uranium contaminated sand? Why would they choose to bring someone elses contaminated sandl to our shores. Are we running out of American sand?

The US should clean up the tens of thousands of tons of depleted uranium that they have pounded onto Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. 6,700 tons of DU-contaminated sand hardly makes a dent in the total of DU in these countries. Basically, using DU (which has been banned by the UN) in warfare is a form of nuclear warfare. This DU will go on poisoning the people, the fauna and the flora forever, what with its half-life of 4.5 Billion years.

Cannot comprehend this insanity - thank you for posting synclaire.... Depleted uranium is highly toxic, there is no cure, and the particles so small they can go anywhere and everywhere!

I wonder if there is any chunks of depleted uranium metal in there. Now they have to be a bit hot. Will any of the workers "pocket" them for souvenirs?

One guy here in Russia was arrested a few years ago with depleted uranium in the trunk of his car. The big metal peices were rigged up as weights for weightlifting. He said he found them at a dump and said he didn't know they were made of uranium. LOL! I wonder what kind of gain he was getting.

In the first quarter of 2008, American Ecology reported a record disposal volume and a $13.4 million profit, a 17 percent increase over the same quarter last year.

Asked if the sand is dangerous, Hyslop said, "It's not something you want laying around in Kuwait." So, send it to Idaho instead!

If American Ecology were really thinking outside the litter box, it would be supporting the NOBASES effort to repatriate all our military’s leavings.

Rumsfeld, coyly switching metaphors, referred to them as "lily pads," which is about as convincing a euphemism as "American Ecology." Lily pads may sound greener and friendlier than, say, "footprint," which makes one at least think of boot heels, but it is safe to assume -- because there has never been an exception -- that every one of those bases is an environmental disaster area. The U.S. military is the most profligate polluter on the planet.

The Thule base in Greenland, for example, was sort of a pioneer lily pad. In the '40s, it was a convenient hop, skip and a bomber run to Berlin, and later it was part of the Cold War surveillance network. In 1953, the U.S. Navy sailed into Thule Harbor and informed the local Inughuit community that they had 48 hours to leave. Sorry for the inconvenience, folks, but there are houses 100 miles north of here with your names on them. We promise.

"Everyone packed what they could on their dogsleds and set off north across the ice," remembers Aron Qaavigaq, who was 12 at the time. "After a while, my father stopped and looked back. He and my mother were crying. ... We were young and very excited to be going somewhere new. But they kept crying, so we knew there was something wrong."

There were no houses. Qaavigaq and his family spent the winter in tents 695 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The hunting and fishing was lousy, and now the ice is melting. After 55 years, Qaavigaq and the rest of the Inughuit still want to go home. But first they want the United States to clean up the mess they have made: thousands of barrels of toxic chemistry, rubbish heaps, electrical equipment contaminated with PCBs, and one whole hydrogen bomb -- serial number 78252 -- which was never recovered when a B-52 crashed upon landing in 1968.

Unfortunately, unlike the emir of Kuwait, the Inughuits are poor and not very many of them survived the transplant. In a deal struck with the Danish government in 2003, the Bush administration agreed to return the original Inughuit community land in return for continued use of the base.

But the administration insists it is not responsible for any cleanup. "They said if they were to clean up after themselves at Thule, then they would be met by similar demands in the Philippines, Japan and elsewhere in the world," Svend Auken, Denmark's former minister of the environment, told the Christian Science Monitor in August. "They didn't want to set that precedent." CSM also quotes Cheryl Irwin, a spokeswoman for the secretary of defense, opining that cleanup costs "reflected a shared burden with our host nation for our contribution for defense of the free world." The United States has, however, agreed to forgo "any claims for residual value of improvements made while there."
There is a growing resistance to the omnipresence of U.S. military installations around the world. The coalition, though practically invisible in the United States, is evident elsewhere. NOBASES seeks "an end to military domination and intimidation and an end to the social, environmental and economic consequences of these bases in the host countries." The coalition has recently organized massive demonstrations in Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic and elsewhere, and though few have ultimately been successful, they have made acquiescing to American military expansion an increasingly expensive political choice for foreign leaders.

Here at home in Idaho, however, raping the land is cheap. American Ecology supplies the lubricant, and Idaho's Republican officials bend over. Senators Mike Crapo and Larry Craig, Representatives Mike Simpson and Bill Sali, and Gov. Butch Otter and Lt. Gov. Jim Risch have all benefited from American Ecology's generosity.