Earth Day Surprise: Defense Department Favors Mercury Storage Over Sales
by U.S. Newswire
22 April 2003 (Fort Belvoir, Va.) –
In a surprise move, the Department of Defense has issued an environmental report recommending storage -- rather than continuing sales -- of 10 million pounds of U.S. government surplus mercury. On Earth Day, environmentalists applauded DoD's recommendation.
"Surplus mercury should be placed indefinitely in monitored storage as a dangerous waste--and not masked as a commodity and marketed at home or abroad," said Michael Bender of the Mercury Policy Project. "We applaud DoD's common sense approach."
The Defense National Stockpile Center recently completed a draft Environmental Impact Statement for managing the federal government's mercury. The EIS identified three options for the mercury - resuming sales, leaving it stored in its current locations, or, their preferred option, consolidating it for long term storage of at least 40 years.
A bi-partisan letter from US Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Olympia Snow (R-ME) to DoD Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last year recommended storage over sales.
"We urge you to give strong emphasis in your EIS to management options that would provide safe, long-term retrievable storage for the excess mercury in the National Defense Stockpile. We hope this vast quantity of mercury will not return to the marketplace, where industrial and commercial use would inevitably release much of it to the environment, threatening humans and wildlife alike," stated the Senators letter.
Up until 1994 when its sales were suspended, DNSC's mercury stockpiles flooded the world market, keeping the price of mercury cheap, encouraging haphazard use and release. Today, the U.S. satisfies all of its domestic needs for mercury via recycling--and is exporting three times as much as it imports.
The 4,436 metric tons of DNSC mercury is stockpiled at locations in New Haven, Indiana; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Hillsborough, New Jersey; and Warren, Ohio. The EIS has identified three other possible locations for possible storage use; the Utah Industrial Depot in Tooele, Utah, the Hawthorne Army Depot in Hawthorne, Nev., and the PEZ Lake Development in Romulus, N.Y.
The DNSC has schedule several hearings on its draft EIS, with public comments accepted until July 18, 2003.
For more information, see http://www.mercuryeis.com; http://www.truthout.com/docs_01/0543.Leahy.Mercury-P.htm; http://www.mercurypolicy.org. http://www.usnewswire.com
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