Nuclear Investigations from Iraq
A US military health physicist and radiation expert in Iraq has endorsed a call from Greenpeace for the UN nuclear experts, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to be given a full mandate to search, survey and decontaminate towns and villages around the Tuwaitha nuclear facility near Baghdad
When they invaded Iraq, the US and UK failed to safeguard dangerous nuclear material, secured at Tuwaitha while under Saddam Hussein's regime, and highly radioactive materials have ended up in local communities where they are threatening people's health and environment.
The IAEA were due to leave Iraq the same day the call was made, having only been allowed by the occupying powers to return to Iraq to carry out a limited inventory inside the Tuwaitha nuclear plant.
The Greenpeace team, that has been in the country for only a week conducting surveys in the local community living near the plant, has found a number of radioactive areas including one in a house that measured 10,000 times above normal levels and another outside a 900 pupil primary school that measured 3,000 times above normal levels.
Having returned one radiation source to the US military, Greenpeace took them to the radioactive house where troops verified the levels of contamination at 10,000 higher than normal, removed the source and took it back to the Tuwaitha complex for storage.
