Leuren Moret

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Leuren Moret is a former scientific laboratory employee who has become known for her involvement on the health and environmental effects of depleted uranium. Some professionals in radiation safety have claimed that she is working outside her area of expertise. Moret has worked at two U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories, although she has never made clear the nature of her employment.

She earned her Bachelor of Science in Geology at University of California, Davis in 1968, and her Master of Arts in Near Eastern Studies from University of California, Berkeley in 1978.

Ms. Moret is a harsh critic of the US use of depleted uranium. She has contributed to the United Nations subcommission investigating depleted uranium. She researched, in a library sense, the environmental and public health effects of low level radiation from atmospheric testing fallout, nuclear power plants, and depleted uranium weaponry. In spite of her claim to be an expert on radiation issues, there is no evidence of any scholarly contributions on the subject. In fact she has sometimes made incorrect claims in regard to the effects of depleted uranium, once claiming that children of a Mississippi National Guard unit had birth defects far above the normal rate. This flawed claim was made a number of years after the Centers for Disease Control investigated the case and found no such increased rate of birth defects. (Information about this study can be found on the CDC website)

In 2003, she testified at the International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan held in Japan. This was an ad hoc affair conducted by opponents of American use of nuclear WMD. In her testimony before the tribunal, Ms. Moret provided incorrect information about the number of steps in the uranium decay chain, which subsequently was used by WMD advocates to show her lack of experience on matters related to uranium.

She was a presenter at the World Depleted Uranium Weapons Conference in Hamburg, Germany, and at the World Court of Women at the World Social Forum in Bombay, India in January 2004. She is a Contributing Editor to GLOBAL OUTLOOK, Environmental Commissioner for City of Berkeley, and a former president of the Association for Women Geoscientists.