Repeatedly, US agencies have claimed that the Colonie plant was reasonably safe, despite the massive clean-up. Most recently, in 2003, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry issued a report saying that, although the pollution produced when the plant was operating might have slightly increased the risks of kidney disease and lung cancer, there was now ‘no apparent public health hazard’.

Rabe’s campaign has conducted a health study of its own, assembling a dossier from personal contacts and by knocking on neighbors’ doors. It found that among almost 400 people surveyed there were numerous cases of rare cancers, thyroid and kidney complaints and birth defects.

The main difficulty the campaigners faced in the past is that DU eventually dissolves and is passed in the urine. The US government claimed that the plant had been shut so long that it would be impossible to determine who had been contaminated - so rendering a full health survey pointless.

However, Parrish has developed new, more sensitive methods. At the same time, his impartiality is impeccable. Before his work in Colonie, Parrish tested more than 400 Gulf war veterans, failing to detect DU in any of them - so dealing a serious blow to those who claimed that DU is one of the causes of Gulf war syndrome. ‘I did not expect to find it in Colonie,’ he says.

Some of those who have tested positive display classic, common symptoms found in DU victims elsewhere. For example, Ciarfello says he was still in his twenties when his teeth ‘just started to crumble: they ground down to nothing until they were just these little stumps and I pushed them out with my tongue’. Other members of his family are sick. His son developed a severe kidney condition, while his brother, Frank, can barely walk and also suffers chronic fatigue. A nephew was born with a disfiguring facial skin tumor that has required repeated surgery.

Tom Donnelly, 56, spent 34 years as a foreman at a garage door workshop next to the NL factory, where tests have found high concentrations of DU in dust samples from places such as shelves and light fittings. He has three auto-immune disorders: Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammation of the bowel, total alopecia, and cerebral vasculitis, an immune system-related narrowing of blood vessels in the brain.

‘The new tests suggest I inhaled about 4,000 particles of DU,’ Donnelly says. ‘I used to come to work in the morning and see the chimney blowing its smoke in a thick black plume. Most of us had no idea that the plant was using uranium at all. After all, the sign outside said National Lead. The Army Corps removed all that soil, but they never looked at the dust at all. The effect on my life has been devastating, but how many others are already dead?’ One is his late boss and friend Tom Murphy - who, like Donnelly, developed Crohn’s and died of it at 61.

Ann Carusone lived in a house behind the plant from the time of her birth in 1966 until 1993. ‘When I tested positive, my reaction was sheer disbelief,’ she says. She has endured years of a chronic lung disease, sarcoidosis, an inflammation of the lymph nodes usually found in much older people, as well as a blood disorder that produced petecchiae - dots of blood beneath her skin, similar to those seen in some of those exposed to radiation at Hiroshima. In her twenties she had a pre-cancerous ovarian cyst that when removed was the size of a grapefruit.

‘I knew many people from round here who died young, in their twenties and thirties,’ she says. ‘We used to play out in the creek that flowed out of the plant site. The water was sluggish, a weird yellow-green color. We’d splash about in it. Now we know it was laden with depleted uranium.’

‘It’s very striking how many people in this small group have immune disorders like Tom Donnelly’s,’ says Carpenter. ‘I can say with great confidence that people who inhaled DU are at greater risk of lung cancer, as well as leukemia, other cancers and genetic damage of the type that causes birth defects. Previous responses by official bodies could be said to amount to a cover-up. People have been told that there’s no problem, and that’s very clearly not true.’

Yesterday NL failed to return calls requesting comment.