Veterans Affairs committee  Depleted uranium?

Veterans Affairs committee  Normal uranium is in these processing plants all over the world. This is where they're most likely to be exposed. But we're exposed to uranium, every one of us, by drinking water. It's constant—right now, I'm drinking uranium—but at levels that are not harmful.

Veterans Affairs committee  That's correct.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes. I thought I had addressed that, but maybe I wasn't clear. Many, many studies were done, and they were very comprehensive. They're really well covered in here; it's a good part of our report. It's very technical and it's tough slogging. Essentially, some studies have show

Veterans Affairs committee  You want to know why we came to that conclusion?

Veterans Affairs committee  That takes us back to a question that Mr. Chicoine, I believe, asked at the outset. It was all about the symptoms, really. When the Gulf War syndrome was being studied, a possible link was observed between depleted uranium and some of the chronic symptoms. That was the starting p

Veterans Affairs committee  There were two aspects. There was this open e-mail account that was created, and any veteran could send in his remarks or suggest any literature that we might look at relating to depleted uranium. That would cover the whole ground. Surprisingly, we did not get that much traffic t

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes. Go ahead, ask your question.

Veterans Affairs committee  I admit it's not very clear. This is jargon from the epidemiologist. Case report means an individual report. That's what it means. One person would say, “Well, our study includes one case, and this person had this and this...”, and so on and so forth. This is usually not used in

Veterans Affairs committee  Excuse me, but that is not to say the studies were not comprehensive.

Veterans Affairs committee  I mentioned earlier the whole idea of mining uranium. At the end of the process there is uranium that is purified enough to be used to produce nuclear weapons, but the main production line is for nuclear energy. In this process—and I have to get just a tad scientific here—uranium

Veterans Affairs committee  Oh, they've handled them, for sure. For sure they've handled them in the sense that these are cartridges, if you wish. They're rounds and they're stored, and they were there on the ships.

Veterans Affairs committee  No, well, that's just it.

Veterans Affairs committee  Okay, thanks for setting me straight. But the external exposure—and everyone agrees with that—is very little because the radiation that is dangerous is called alpha radiation. That's associated with depleted uranium. That radiation is called alpha particles. They do not cross t

Veterans Affairs committee  I don't know, but I think that for any reasonable forces—in the absence of the device that you and Mr. Stoffer will be working on and get rich with—the only improvement at this time would be, in a given situation if there is a reasonable chance of exposure, let's say to depleted