How dangerous is Depleted Uranium used in munitions and what effects if any does it have on the environment and people that inhabit the environment in which it’s used?
Depleted tells you one thing about it. It is not radioactive.
But it is still a heavy metal. When a bullet is fired at an armored vehicle the bullet shatters and a certain percentage becomes dust in the air. Heavy Metal dust. Imagine the number of bullets fired from a .50 cal machine gun, imagine how much dust this would create. Now imagine a firefight with multiple machine guns and armored vehicles. Soliders then breathe this.
This can’t be very good for human physiology, think what other heavy metals do to us, eg; chrome/lead.
The question seems to be; “How much is too much?”
From the executive summary of the WHO’s 2001 report Depleted Uranium: Sources, Exposure and Health Effects:
Well, there has not been any conclusive studies on the effects of DU, so you’ll mostly get opinions by people who: a. have an axe to grind (preferably against the US) b. try to guess with their knowledge of the area in general c. actually know what they’re talking about.
I fall into category B. Now, uranium is a heavy metal after all, but not nearly as poisonous as plutonium. Most of the uranium on the planet is in the form of U-238, with a half-life of 4.5 billion years or so, which makes it radioactive, of course, but not all that dangerous. Radiation intensity and such decreases as half-life increases, and 4+ billion years makes for a low intensity. So, I think it’s fair to say that the most dangerous part of it would be the heavy metal effect, but it’s still not dangerous as long as it doesn’t get into you. Also, unless it can then be changed into a form that will stick in your body, it should go right through and out the end.
The point is, we don’t know for sure except for some generalizations. What I would like someone to do would be to get a Geiger counter, measure the background radiation, measure the radiation coming off the DU, and then calculate the total amount of rads you’re getting and whether or not the radiation coming from the DU is lower than the background radiation.
If only it were that simple. But radioactive material can also be ingested and stay inside the body for a long time, where it can do a lot more damage than through the skin. So measuring the radiation from the DU is not enough; you need to track how much of it is dispersed, how much is ingested or inhaled by people, where in the body it ends up, how long it stays there and how much damage is done.
DU is depleted uranium - it is not radioactive. It’s basically just a heavy, dense material that makes excellent armor-piercing ammunition for vehicle-mounted weapons. Otherwise, Asterion’s post was spot-on.
As Asterion said before, the “health effects” tend to be “discovered” by organizations/governments with an axe to grind against the primary users of DU ammunition, the US and NATO. The Serbs even blamed DU for causing a harsh winter…
That’s horseshit; ALL uranium is radioactive. DU is merely depleted of U-235 so that it’s less radioactive than native uranium – the remainder, U-238, has a half-life measured in billions of years instead of millions, but claiming that it’s not radioactive is considerably overstating the case.
It’s entirely possible that the heavy-metal effect dominates the danger from ingested DU, but make no mistake, even pure U-238 is a potent radiation source when it’s inside the body.
I was asked by a DOT cop once if I was hauling hazardous materials. I told him “No, not hazardous by the HazMat guide, but 15 tons of non Haz stuff falling on your foot can ruin your day.”
You’re right. However, that at least would be a way to see if there is any danger while it sits intact on the ground.
More importantly, what does the metal do in the body? Without looking it up, I’d be willing to guess that most of the time it’ll go right through without absorbing.
I don’t know all the compounds uranium can make and the textbooks I have that mention any have: uranium hexafluoride (which you aren’t going to create on a battlefield), uranium tetrafluoride (ditto), other similar halide compounds, uranium oxide, and a few others, but this textbook is not a bioinorganic book but an inorganic book. There could easily be compounds that are a problem in the body, but I don’t know what they are. I might look this up. This is a page on compounds from Argonne National Labs, and here is some info from WebElements, which I’ve found to be a good basic site.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a library nearby which has such books–most of the books dealing with uranium in my school’s library are geology books.
Something else you could use as a point of comparision would be the effects of Fiestaware. That stuff’s hot, after all, made with a uranium compound in the glazing.
:rolleyes:
Rather than giving us the benefit of your guess, why not examine the link I provided to the World Health Organization’s study of DU’s health and environmental effects ? The report’s just chock full of facts about what is known, and not known with regard to the dangers of depleted uranium.
Well, I don’t know much about depleated uranium, except the definition the Nuclear Regualatory Commission gives
URL=http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/glossary/depleted-uranium.html]here :
For more information on radioactivity and the body, I would suggest putting down the chemistry books and seeing if you can find a book on “Health Physics” or a copy of the “Chart of Nuclides”. Those should be somewhat common library resources.
Also, even if the uranium had completely decayed, uranium does follow a chain decay reaction…meaning that the uranium might be gone, but, suprise! now you have thorium, or radium, or some else radioactive. The process continues until you get to something stable, like lead.
How much of it that “passes right through” depends on what type of uranium it is. I think something about depleated uranium, makes it more prone to stay in the body. Also, some radioactive materials have target organs, which they “seek out”. A bone seeker acts like calcium and heads for the bones, where it stays for a long time. I don’t know if Uranium is a bone seeker, but one of it’s products, radium is.
One more thing… U-238 is an alpha emitter, while U-235 emits both alphas and gammas. Alphas are dangerous only if ingested, by gammas can penetrate skin.
So my best educated guess is that you probably shouldn’t eat or breathe it, but you’d have to do quite a BUNCH of complicated calculations to figure out the exact risk to yourself.
And I was right. 98% ingested will pass right through and be excreted in feces. 2% absorption for soluble and 0.2% absorption for insoluble. 20% of inhaled will pass into bloodstream, but 70% will pass out in urine within 24 hours and 90% after a while.
Now, of course, you could stress the kidneys that way.
Okay, so which uranium compounds and complexes are soluble? I don’t know and I’ve yet to find anything that tells me.
Some recent articles [bolding mine]:
Note that the above paper is from the Naval Health Research Center Detachment-Toxicology, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
In summary, it is radioactive, can get absorbed and remain in the body for many years. Aside from the long-term radiological risks, there is also an acute risk of heavy-metal poisoning.
Where I work we get a fair amount of bioterrorism and CDC materials passing through.
According to that information (and no, I"m not looking it up right now, it’s 40 miles away at the office) uranium is most toxic to the kidneys. So it’s a “kidney seeker”. The damage it does to the kidneys is chemical/toxic, not radiological (well, OK, the radiation has an effect, but apparently it’s the biotoxic effects that destroy the organs, long before the radiation does)
Obviously, amount of exposure, means of exposure, and so forth have an effect.
IIRC, depleted uranium was mentioned as a possible factor in Gulf War Syndrome, the clusters of unexplained illnesses experience by numerious troops after the first gulf war. The debate about that is still going on, though.
This one is skirting with GD territory, but there are some sources that link Depleted Uranium shells to Gulf War Syndrome. Apparently US troops were not warned to avoid Iraqi armor that had been hit with DU shells and souvenir hunters may have been exposed. So far though there has been no direct correlation proven clinically cite.
Personally, I think its one of those situations like breast implants, cell phones, or aspartame. We haven’t been able to prove it, but something doesn’t seem right.
doh, simulpost on preview
Oxidized Uranium (U[sup]+6[/sup]) is mobile in aqueous solutions; reduced Uranium (U[sup]+4[/sup]) isn’t.
All right, so the question is which would easily be created on a battlefield or by just sitting there. I don’t think you’re going to create UF6 on the battlefield. I wouldn’t want to be near it in any case–fluoride compounds can be nasty.