impossible for the State of Hawaii to carry out due to lack of jurisdiction. If on base soil testing is impossible by non military personnel, what should HB1452 call for? If State Officers can be involved in talks in conference with NRC regarding decomissioning Pohakuloa, why can't they be involved in independent testing on bases?

We Hawaii island citizens fully support the credentials of Dr. Lorrin Pang of State Dept. of Health. Currently he must only represent himself or risk losing his State job, and that is wrong. He is not being paid for some of the most valuable public health work ever done in Hawaii. He has consulted at his own expense with nuclear scientists such as Marion Fulk and Chris Busby as well as geoscientist Leuren Moret and the Army's Gulf War radioactive contamination expert Major Doug Rokke. Dr. Pang served in the military honorably and has no bias against the military. We just happen to need a medical expert on this matter and that should be Dr. Pang as he is the most qualified in chemistry and health protection. Mr. Russell Takata has an important role to fulfill as the technical specialist who can manage monitoring but he should confer with Dr. Pang officially. Russell will long be involved in this issue through Pohakuloa's decomissioning steps as testing protocol develops, but he should be officially joined on the State team by Dr. Pang.

HB1452 should include Kahoolawe where there is no jurisdictional issue, only a safety issue for testing personnel. On Kahoolawe there is a safety issue for anyone there. Residual contaminants have not all been investigated. No radioactivity mapping has been published. No monitoring figures for fresh nuclear fission emissions in Honolulu from Naval reactors is known to us despite the diabetes cluster in Honolulu and reports of Cobalt 60 contamination at Pearl Harbor. Dry shorelines re- mobilize radioactive elements as dust, for example, at Chelyabinsk, the world's most radioactively contaminated site, more radioactive than Chernobyl. There is no reason the State cannot do continuous air monitoring around all the live fire ranges that received any level of use, especially Makua, Pohakuloa, and Schofield. We citizens are already doing continuous air monitoring on Hawaii Island and downloading the results. Following public disclosure that radiation has been detected downwind of Pohakuloa, the State has a legal duty to provide continuous air monitoring around that base in at least three locations as close to probable point source as possible. We have already ruled out cosmic flares and volcanic activity as causes. Cremated bodies with mere micrograms of uranium are an unlikely point source for a 1.5 Becquerel reading in South Kona while a pound of DU, millions of times more uranium, could be aerosolized in one spotting round. Someone else suggested we are reading potassium in bananas or other natural sinks. Does someone think the US military was dropping bananas or radium dials on the Afghan villagers to mutate them so horribly?. The thousand tons of U238 the US military dropped in Afghanistan and four thousand tons of DU that exploded in Iraq are a lot more serious than bananas.

So far the State has only planned to dispatch personnel for a one day atmospheric radiation sampling in Kona, the district on our island downwind of Pohakuloa which also has the highest cancer. All of us doing continuous air monitoring here can tell the State that a one day field trip is completely inadequate to assess the public exposure to sporadic explosions. We are not talking about the past which cannot be changed. We are talking about the future and right now. Only continuous air monitoring can detect radioactivity due to sporadic explosions at Pohakuloa. We citizens use a minute by minute count of nuclear disintegrations, which is an entirely acceptable protocol. Our instrument is certified accurate within 5%, and I have personally checked against instruments from other manufacturers and found accuracy reading the same nuclear disintegration counts per minute. It is wrong to say that geiger tube radiation readings are unreliable. There are better methods indeed but that does not invalidate the measurements taken by certified devices that are fully capable of measuring nuclear disintegrations. The State is welcome to use any devices it deems fit, but if it does not install continuous air monitoring for radiation outside Pohakuloa its methodology of periodic sampling is very unlikely to detect the radiation in sporadic explosion plumes.

Why can't the State handle setting up a simple continuous air monitoring effort on remote sites and private land? Are private lands never partnered in State projects? How difficult would it be to install a PV panel on top of a waterproof box with a battery and computer downloading data from a nuclear radiation monitor? A device can be bought for $400 that downloads continuous readings every four days. The box could be hidden on private land with the cooperation of the owner, preferably near Umi's heiau just downwind of Pohakuloa impact area. Why doesn't the State contact the Bishop Estate about this? And the State surely has access to government sites somewhere in mauka Kona. When will the State set these sites up to protect us residents downwind of a military live fire anti armor training area? Who will protect the tourists downwind? Who will alert them? The Stryker vehicles are due to arrive here any day now. They are already here. The Mobile Gun System is coming. Not even overwhelming public opposition at the scoping meetings could stop this. The Strykers are equipped with a 105mm Mobile Gun System that the manufacturer claimed on September 18th is designed to fire depleted uranium at armored targets, and there is an anti armor training area constructed at great expense at Pohakuloa. Contamination of topsoil at Pohakuloa by uranium munitions has never been disclosed or publicly tested. We are calling on the State of Hawaii to protect us now. We do not have any time left to ignore the problem of depleted uranium munitions, and elevated radiation readings taken on 4/21/07 validate the concern. The Strykers stir up large quantities of dust in a dry environment. What is in that dust? What will the State do to protect us starting right now? Besides a one day field trip? Please advise us citizens of the location of all the radiation reading sites visited on the current DOH brief field trip, length of reading at each site, device used, and counts per minute. We want to assure ourselves that the State will monitor our air continuously in strategic downwind locations throughout the Stryker deployment to Pohakuloa. We have already installed a citizens' continuous air monitoring system with minute by minute nuclear disintegration counts taken, downloaded every four days. But the State has an even greater responsibility in this matter.

I am wondering, at what level of Becquerels would the State and Civil Defense like to be alerted by our citizens doing continuous air monitoring? Would a level of .5 Becquerel be sufficient? Should we then call 9/11? We registered 1.5 Becquerels on 4/21/07 in South Kona. Should we alert authorities to evacuate Kona if we register above 2 Becquerels? Ask Civil Defense? All the radiation experts we contacted since the 1.5 Becquerels reading on 4/21/07 have advised us it is a hazardous reading, six times background. For comparison, after Operation Shock and Awe, when the US dropped tons of depleted uranium bunker busters, cruise missiles, and 30mm shells on Tora Bora and Baghdad, the DU that was released into ceramic aerosols of uranium oxide travelled 2400 miles in nine days and was registered by Aldermaston lab as the highest atmospheric level of DU ever recorded. This level registered 6 times background or 1.5 Becquerels and has now been dispersed throughout the Northern Hemisphere in the same way that the Chernobyl fallout was transported. Already the lung cancer rate in the US increased to six times trend in 2006. Global epidemics of diabetes and cancer are forecast to increase fifty percent more by 2020 according to the World Health Organization. The latency period for lung cancer is 3-5 years. Do the math and realize we are undergoing the same radioactive overburden here downwind of a live fire range contamination point source of elevated radioactivity. We demand protection from DU radioactive overburden and its disease syndromes, including cancer, chronic fatigue, birth defects, cognitive disorders, and muscular skeletal degeneration. These are now known hazards in Kona. Action is required beyond a one day field trip.

Travel in an airliner at 35,000 feet results in cosmic ionizing radiation exposure of up to thirty times background, but the ionization effect on cells ends with descent. Intense radiation at short intervals such as xrays, while damaging (all ionizing radiation is harmful according to the National Academy of Science), does not create as much total exposure to living tissues as long term low level radiation to cells. Additionally, low level radiation has a superlinear effect compared to high level radiation which plateaus due to the "bottleneck" effect of high radiation free radicals. It is the long exposure of inhaled DU that creates the overburden and inability of RNA to repair errors in the genetic code. DU is teratogenic, mutagenic, carcinogenic, and leukemogenic.

The State of Hawaii must investigate Kahoolawe for potential contamination by uranium oxides. Citizens are not capable of doing this dangerous work. We as citizen air monitors do not encourage anyone other than professional testers to do any testing work like that in dangerous areas, which I am told means most of the island except 10%. Even that 10% has never been tested for radiation that anyone knows of. Kahoolawe should be in HB1452 because there is no jurisdictional issue there. Waiting for the federal government to clean up its radioactive mess in Hawaii or trusting it to deal honestly on an issue it has covered up in the past is likely to expose Hawaii residents to further damage to their health. The State must purposefully and seriously provide protection of its residents from the unwanted guest occupying so much of our land. This unwanted guest is the single worst polluter in our islands. We need to realize that they are capable of any degree of environmental degradation including permanent radioactive contamination of Hawaiian soil. DU can never be cleaned out of soils and usually remobilizes during the military's excavation at bunker buster craters. The military method of digging out DU topsoil and trucking it away to be dumped actually makes the whole situation much worse by spreading the contamination. Low level alpha radiation from U238, one of the densest nuclei in nature, is particularly insidious due to its logorythmic dose response and long half life. DU is radioactive forever. The particles are so small they freely enter cell nuclei and disrupt DNA. The dose response ratio is superlinear with a long lasting linear energy density. While the Pentagon claims depleted uranium is only mildly radioactive and therefore safe to disperse far and wide, that is a bald faced lie. This misrepresentation has been responsible for massive alpha radiation contamination across the Northern Hemisphere. The truth about depleted uranium is that Argonne National Lab states in regard to the U238 that makes up 99.8% of depleted uranium,

"On an activity (curie) basis, risk coefficients are essentially the same for all three natural uranium isotopes. Hence the risk is essentially independent of the ratio of the various isotopes in a uranium compound. For this reason, the risk of a fatal cancer from exposure to depleted uranium is essentially the same as for enriched uranium on an activity basis."

Isn't it troubling that the Pentagon told us it never used DU in Hawaii and that DU is not as actively harmful as enriched uranium?

But there is more to this mess. Depleted uranium munitions are in fact illegal weapons of mass destruction under US Federal Code Title 50 Chapter 40-2302. And they are illegal under the Geneva Convention of 1925 against poison gas weapons. The UN Human Rights Commission passed a resolution in 1996 specifically banning depleted uranium munitions. Various Army rules and regulations are consistently ignored in widespread radioactive munitions contamination which is prohibited anywhere, even on battlefields. The State of Hawaii has no business whatsoever in extending any blind trust to the US Army in light of the Army's deployment of weapons of mass destruction that have an adverse environmental effect globally and locally. Weapons such as cluster bombs at Pohakuloa fall outside the civilized rules for warfare which prohibit action after a war ( and are similar to landmines) yet the US military spreads them in Hawaii. Cluster bombs will make decommissioning Pohakuloa very difficult. No open detonation of cluster bombs or any other unexploded ordnance should be allowed there upwind of Mauna Lani Resort and Waikoloa Resort. The State must involve itself fully in negotiations on this point to prevent open detonation of any unexploded ordnance, conventional or nuclear, at Pohakuloa. We citizens will be monitoring what happens with continuous radiation readings, but it's time for the State of Hawaii to do a lot more to protect the public.

Doug Fox

POB 100

Honaunau, HI 96726