"pearl" > wrote:

<...>
> The US Department of Defense has more than 1.1 billion pounds
> of nuclear waste in storage from 50 years of nuclear weapons
> production and nuclear power plants.

Two separate issues, of which the DoD is only responsible for the weapons part of it. Nuclear power plants are NOT under DoD -- NEVER have been. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which is now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), was the oversight agency Congress established to promote nuclear energy in the US and to regulate its safety.

> The government, hemmed
> in by public opposition, health and environmental movements, is
> always trying to find new "acceptable" ways to dispose of it. It
> has apparently found one. Billions of dollars allotted to the
> Environmental Restoration branch of the Department of Energy
> for cleaning up nuclear waste sites is now being used to ship
> nuclear waste free of charge to munitions manufacturers all over
> the world to be "recycled" into weapons.

Such twittery, but no surprise coming from someone who still insists polar fountains are terrestrial in nature and evidence that the earth is hollow (i.e., that the fountains are light coming from the Lemurians beneath Mount Shasta)! You are so ****ing daft, Lesley!

U-238, which is both the depleted AND natural uranium isotope, isn't very fissile and is weakly radioactive. But here's the big ugly fly in your ointment: because U-238 isn't fissile and because it's almost twice as dense (hard) as lead, it's been used in weapons -- tank busters, etc. -- long before the US DoD had such a surplus of spent fuel to "recycle."
http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae576.cfm

Moreover, there is scant evidence of danger to troops in the use of DU weapons. The biggest threat is to troops and civilians who are ingest SIGNIFICANT amounts through soil or water. Even then, it is known to affect very few individuals:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1867138.stm

> Depleted uranium is a highly toxic

Not much more so than any other heavy metal.

> and radioactive

The adverb "highly" is absolutely inappropriate in context of U-238.