Poison From Depleted Uranium Munitions Site Lingers
New study shows people who lived near or worked at former munitions factory in Colonie have depleted uranium in their bodies
COLONIE, NY - Former workers at a Cold War-era munitions plant and nearby residents still carry traces of toxic depleted uranium in their bodies, a team of scientists said Wednesday.
The findings, unveiled at a news conference, seem to contradict an earlier assessment by the federal government that deemed it impossible to measure contamination because it had been so long since the emissions ended.
Contrary to that 2004 assessment by the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, the scientists from England and the University at Albany say they can now show that more than two decades later, people still carry the radioactive metal in their bodies.
The state shuttered the former NL Industries plant in 1984.
Because the contamination can still be detected, a study could be done to track down the thousands of people who could have been exposed, the researchers said. But additional financial resources are needed to pay for the pricey tests, they said.
“Our new work, using better methodology, shows that we can overcome this difficulty,” said Randall Parrish, a professor at the University of Leicester.
The findings will soon be published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.
Neighbors and former employees have demanded more detailed analysis of the cancers, immune disorders and other illnesses they say have plagued their families.
Almost three months ago, the Army Corps of Engineers completed the major phase of its $190 million cleanup at the former plant at 1130 Central Ave., originally operated by the National Lead Co.
Now, the scientists and members of an activist group, Community Concerned about NL Industries, are calling for federal funding to study the scope and effects of the contamination.
“There’s never been a careful study of a population known to be exposed to depleted uranium,” said David Carpenter of the Institute for Health and the Environment at UAlbany. “Somebody needs to step in and really answer the question, ‘What are the health effects?’ ”
A spokesman for Gov. Eliot Spitzer said the report “should prompt the federal government to do more testing and monitoring.
“We support the community’s request and urge the Army Corps of Engineers to address these serious concerns,” said the spokesman, Michael Whyland.
Previous cancer studies by the state Department of Health, activists said, were overly broad and inconclusive.
An estimated 5 to 10 metric tons of uranium dust was spewed from the plant’s smokestacks between the late 1950s and early 1980s as it manufactured armor-piercing projectiles and burned the waste in a furnace.
Parrish has also tested British soldiers believed to have been exposed on battlefields to depleted uranium weapons. The weapons produce dust on impact, leading some to believe it could be linked to illnesses known collectively as Gulf War syndrome.
In about 800 tests of soldiers, Parrish said he was hard-pressed to detect a single urine sample containing depleted uranium. In Colonie, all five former NL employees tested positive at “very high levels.” About two dozen people were tested in all.
Roughly 20 percent of the residents or nearby workers also tested positive at lesser levels, Parrish said. The scientists cautioned that the small size of their study prevents extrapolating the results to a wider population, but it provides compelling evidence that more research needs to be done.
“A lot of my co-workers died young,” said Mike Aidala, 70, who worked at the plant from 1958 to 1980, starting as a janitor and working his way up. “Whether the plant was the reason, I’ll never know.”
Aidala, who also is an Albany County legislator, was among those who tested positive for depleted uranium.
Tony Impellizzeri, 59, who grew up on Yardboro Avenue just behind the plant, said he knows about 45 people in the neighborhood stricken with cancer. Impellizzeri said he hopes the current research will prompt action, unlike previous instances “where nothing seems to happen.”
The scientists also said they found depleted uranium in dust in four buildings around the 11.2-acre site — in some cases at levels that exceed the Army Corps’ cleanup standard for soil.
The extent of the contamination in other buildings is not clear, and the danger it poses could depend on whether that dust is disturbed, said John G. Arnason, a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at UAlbany.
The Army Corps has finished removing contaminated soil from the site and has submitted a plan to state environmental regulators to monitor groundwater. That plan could be ready for public comment by spring, said James Moore, the project’s manager for the Army Corps.
Moore said he had not been briefed on the research and noted that the Army Corps had not been charged with cleaning inside neighboring buildings.
In the 1980s, the Department of Energy cleaned about 53 neighboring properties, but the work was limited mostly to the exterior of the buildings and yards.
“It was like Love Canal,” Impellizzeri said. “They should have knocked down all these buildings on Yardboro Avenue and started over again.”
Carleo-Evangelist can be reached at 454-5445 or by e-mail at jcarleo-evangelist@timesunion.com.
© 2007 The Times Union
“In about 800 tests of soldiers, Parrish said he was hard-pressed to detect a single urine sample containing depleted uranium. In Colonie, all five former NL employees tested positive at “very high levels.” About two dozen people were tested in all.”
Very small number of former employees tested, can’t they find them or are all of them dead? The paragraph is also a bit confusing, were there 800 tests of 24 people? And why would you test urine for DU, for soldiers anyhow they’re more likely to breath in dust than to piss it out. If they did test 800 solders did any of them come from front line units or did they test the REMF?
SKIPPYAGOGO
KEM PATRICK will no doubt answer all your questions on this subject. he’s the ‘resident’ commondreams expert on DU. and he will be very glad to see this article and learn that at last some people are waking up to the dangers of this abominable creation.
Not to mention that much of the danger of DU would be eliminated if our bodies could actually eliminate the DU!
Slowly, very slowly the light is beginning to shine on this greatest of all war crimes. The use of, and get the misnomer, an element with a half-life of 4.5Billion years known to the public as depleted uranium across numerous conflict zones on foreign soils, has yet to be recognised for the incredibly heinous crime that it is. The American military have been using outdated and misguided testing techniques, rubbishing foreign expert researches and generally denying a problem exists. Even the references to urine samples, is misleading.
Anybody can Google up whole reams of information on DU, and quickly see the polarity of the arguments.
The most significant trail to the truth, I believe is via the work of Dr.Rosalie Bertell and her peers.
Desert Storm veterans along with the people of Iraq and Kuwait were
victims of one of the latest military experiments on human beings.
I believe that the ignorance was culpable and criminal.
by Dr. Rosalie Bertell
Americans (as a populace) are very slow to wake up to facts of global import, and even slower to care about lands and people abroad. This is one obscenity that I pray will sink in and arouse a great national guilt.
There are questions that will never be answered e.g. How do you compensate families of soldiers crippled by their own munitions? How do you clean up after exploding thousands and thousands of tons of what is basicly, nuclear waste? How do you explain the birth defects experienced by growing children? How do you prevent America, Britain and Israel, being accused of the worst indescriminate killing via WMD in history?
How do you make them care, when they won’t even agree to stop the use of cluster munitions. Such hi-tech indiscriminate killing seems so primitive.
Not to mention the birth deformations in Iraq, attributed to the DU levels of radioactivity floating around there, deformations consistent with those observed after the A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and rarely if ever seen elsewhere.
I do wish the vociferous anti-abortion/right to lifers would include the well-being of non-American embryos among their concerns!
I was alarmed to find uranium in a hair analysis and through a little research found that Jefferson Proving Ground in Indiana wasn’t just a place for wildlife.
http://www.epa.gov/fedrgstr/EPA-IMPACT/1995/April/Day-10/pr-737.html
http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/Jefferson-Proving-Ground.htm
I had no idea I was living near something else so dangerous. We had round-up-ready and Bt crops for miles in every direction and we were all in ill health so we moved away. I don’t think this DU thing is common knowledge.
Since I found out I was high in heavy metals I eat a lot of cilantro and miso. Other remedies can be found at these sites but I am not sure who runs them. Some of it echoes what my doctor told me and might help someone:.
http://www.radiationdetox.com/depleted-uranium-detox.htm
http://www.4optimallife.com/Detoxification-Recipe-to-Remove-Heavy-Metals.html
It seems to me that they should do a similar study and clean up in Southern Indiana. They haven’t cleaned it up because of the danger of live ammunition but the wildlife can get in. People live, hunt, fish, and farm in the area. I don’t know if DU is bio-accumulative but this stuff must be in the food chain.
There are only a handful of these DU hot-spots in the US including Hawaii and I am glad people are starting to take notice and remedy the situation. I am very sorry that the same cannot be said for so the places they are actually using these weapons. The concentrations are much higher and so many more are affected but nothing is being done about it. It is horrifying.
RESIDENT EXPERT? ___ I read a lot.
This is all I will suggest, READ ALL OF THIS ARTICLE !
Provided FREE, in this very informative and non political link. It explains all, any would ever need to know about perhaps the one of the most important issues we humans on this planet currently now have.
It will fully explain the very real dangers of “ionized” DU and how our government has lied about it and attempted to cover up the truth.
http://www.uraniumweaponsconference.de/background.htm
As Kem and others have pointed out in past discussions the real danger of this stuff is its half life of toxicity lasts in the thousands of years and its particles can be carried on the winds everywhere and anywhere on the planet. Be very afraid folks and expect striking increases in such disorders as cancer and autisim.
Hi there COCO, You keep those other blonds informed over there about DU, and be sure to wear your gas mask, because there is enough of that poison over there to do everyone in within the next few years.
Ya know, another big issue we must address is over-population. DU might be the cure there after all. Of course our kids and their babies may have a different opinon on that comment.
We may be hearing from another blogger named KENDPOTTER, who will have a far different set of “informed comments” to go by in regards to DU worries. He gives the governments spin, sort of like the spin they gave on Agent Orange and DDT. He refused to address the comments and scienfific evidence given in that link’s article. He says he knows them people and they are wrong. He sounds good too, a very intelligent and highly educated person. ___ But no common sense.
I read nearly all….and downloaded the .pdf for future reference. I will not stop fighting this one.
Thanks KP.
Hi KEM — I glad to read you’re here today, and what news here. My apologies if my response on that other thread provided that ’simian one’ a leg to wobble upon. I sure hope you stay, or at worst, come back later. I’m missing you already.
Namaste … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … Mahatma Gandhi … … … … … … … … … …
« We must be the change we wish to see in the world »
« There is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed »
This is the pivotal evidence needed, clearly the analogy with “the new Love Canal of DU” is appropriate
We need ASAP: thorough epidemiologically studies must be carried - out regardless of the cost, reparations must be made, and this whole town needs to be added to the EPA superfund sites.
One can predict that big Nuclear power industry will lobby for suppression of “evidence”, so ‘don’t even bother to look for it’ - and that US gov’t will be liable for WMD and war crimes charges, especially when all of the hidden research starts to come out about how long all of this has been tightly wrapped around the flag.
How very sad for the health of the world, but we can turn this around and heal ourselves.
Namaste … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … Mahatma Gandhi … … … … … … … … … …
« We must be the change we wish to see in the world »
« There is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed »
Thank You very much ERIC
Hi NSPIRE, We will never, stop, never give up, never surrender, as long as we have our minds and souls, we will never kneel down to the lies of the wicked ones who attempt to oppress us.
Who in hell wrote that?
Hi everyone. I wish we could have a continuing discussion or FAQ on these topics - it seems that after a few days it is off our screens and many topics keep needing to be revisited.
KEM, thank you for that link. I’ve dealt with uranium and radiation for nearly 20 years, but had no experience with military DU. Now I can see why you’re so concerned. My experience is primarily with naturally occuring radiation and, to some extent, the uranium/plutonium that exits breeder reactors - not nice stuff, but managable (in theory). I’m starting to understand why the thought of uranium can lead people to irrational panic if they think all naturally occuring uranium is as easily spreadable as DU.
One thing that I wonder about is whether anyone else knows ways to bioconcentrate and remove DU from the environment. I found one way entirely by accident as an undergrad. It turns out that Brazil nuts concentrate soil uranium to several million times background levels - but we only discovered this by having to measure 50 different substances and running low on ideas, finding that a can of mixed nuts was more radioactive than our sources, isolating which was radioactive, and eventually discovering why. It’s never been published, to the best of my knowledge, so if you can use the info by all means do it.
The other reason why I’ve been a little too skeptical of claims of the danger of uranium is that according to Rosalie Bertel, a nun who is a prominent anti-nuclear campaigner and who has been quoted on this site, three of those Brazil nuts is a lethal dose (LD-50, anyhow) for me to have ingested. Without demeaning the danger of radiation or the difference between airborne microparticles and radiation in food, my experience with people eating nuts at Christmastime suggests that her model of radiation danger is as flawed as that of the nuclear “everything’s peachy” model.
Craig
It is funny how we have such subjects as abortion or religion or Brittany to keep us occupied when there are so many real important issues that do not even break the surface. For instance are you aware that two major sites for plutonium production were in Dayton and Cincy, Ohio either on top of one of the largest aquifiers on the east coast or on rivers that flowed right through Indiana. Surely we have the money to do a study on cancer rates in radiuss around those sites, but I have not seen one done. We do know that if you are a Hollywood star, chances of going to jail for drunk driving, even a short time, are out of the question. More importantly, if we tested nuclear weapons in Nevada, which way does the wind blow?
Those new to the discussion of DU would do well to read “Killing Our Own,” which relates the trials of “Downwinders” and “Nuclear Soldiers.”
DU is a poisonous chemical weapon of the sort outlawed by the Genva Conventions. Its longterm effects on Iraqis will be equal to sowing Iraq with salt.
HI gang, I am tickeled that so many are reading that link. Please pass it on to all you can. Print it and have 500 copies printed and pass them out at church, or maybe a cat house.
Physics Teacher Guy. I’ve eaten a least a dozen Brazil nuts at one sitting many times and I’m still here. Now I will admit, I’ve never roasted them, then crushed them to microscopic powder and snuffed the powder up my nose. Well, that’s what you have to do to depleted uranium to make it deadly. That’s what occurrs when DU is used in weapons. Fine, burned, micrscopic powder.
We will hear arguments fron “experts” that DU is a heavy metal, which indeed it is. Because of that, they claim it will not become wind blown, as POET noted. ___ Well, Poet is absolutely correct and when it reaches the upper atmosphere, which it does, it can circle the globe in less than 12 days. Aersoled DU, is microscopic, smaller than a grain of pollen. The term is nano-particles. The wind carries it everyplace and if you inhale just one particle, over time cancer is assured.
For example an analogy: A big yule log of hard oak is heavy, the wind won’t pick it up, unless it’s tornado velocity. But we burn that log until nothing is left except smoke and fine ash. The log is not heavy anymore and wind can carry the smoke and ash anyplace it desires.
A nano-particle of DU inhaled in the nose, can cross the olfactory bulb and go directly to the brain. Once lodged there, it will bombard brain cells with over 10,000 times the radiation allowed by a chest X-ray and continue to do so, until death do us part. A DU particle can also lodge in the lung and there do the same thing and can also enter the blood stream, just as oxygen does and travel to any part of the body and establish a cancer factory, or enter the bone marrow and alter DNA and attack the body’s immune system. There is nothng good about DU, except it makes marvelous bullets,cannon shells and bombs.
Sone worry about Iraq, Afganistan and Kosova for being polluted with DU dust. We should worry, but did you know that there has been much more DU ammo fired and exploded in the United States than in those places combined?
It is fired and used in bombs daily on military firing ranges all over the globe, by over 30 different nations now. There is over a ton of DU in a bomb and when a DU bunker buster bomb explodes, unlike cannon shells, where much of the DU burns, all of the DU in the bomb burns to a smoky powder of airborne death. ___ Pretty neat huh?
There are over five billion particles of DU in a cupfull. Five billion, and just one of those inhaled, can eventually kill you. OH, no one will likely say you died from radiation poisoning, you’ll sadly die from cancer or any number of other horriblle diseases. Children are far more susceptable, as their immune systems are not as well developed as an adults. They first may suffer from autism or cancers, or diabetes, and or PTSD, or many other diseases which were once rather rare in children. DU will kill any living thing, down to the microbal level and it will continue to kill for over four billion years, ___ or sadly, ___ forever.
KEM PATRICK
hi there kem. well, my statement about your expertise was ‘tongue in cheek’ really. but i know how you feel about this subject. and rightly so. and we now have some very good links about it. i especially like the recipes for the de-toxification of heavy metals etc. but it’s basically what i eat anyway………
I knew that Babe, and am I ever tickeled to see you posting again.
I eat scored deep fried hot dogs and put them on a toasted bun with natural peanut butter, mayo, chopped onion and relish. Really great. Of course they must be good, all beef hot dogs, cows lips and ears are alright ground up in a hot dog, but not swine’s lips and eye lids. ___ Yuk.
While I’m glad to see a number of posts on a new article about DU on CD, and delighted to see the usual ‘regulars’ here posting, I’m also somwhat disappointed to see so few comments on so important a subject…there should be hundreds.
Hi KEM, always good to have you in the mix, and don’t be ashamed to admit we’ve spent literally hundreds of hours researching, writing, and screaming bloody murder about this mass murder with the nuclear WMD of DU. As a point of information not stated, but referred to on this thread by one poster, yes, the Orwellian “depleted uranium” is a misnomer. It is ’spent’ by about 2/3 from it’s origional strength as fuel for nuclear reactors, but 1/3 of the radiological capacity is still intact, so it is far from benign, or harmless. The word ‘framing’ is intentional, and designed to take heat off the criminals who authorized use of, used, and continue to use, this long lasing insidious poison.
One thing I didn’t see mentioned, and which might answer a question I could see coming up from what some have posted is, “Why does DU have such a difficult time exiting the body?” KEM gave a great analogy with the oak yule log converted into smoke and ash, so I’ll try to add another one.
The fine aeorosolized particles created when DU munitions are vaporized by hitting a solid object are actually jagged, irregularly shaped, and ceramic. They lodge in & cling to, tissue within the body, and are very difficult to cough up, or eliminate through normal bodily excretions. This is analagous to trying to piss or poop out a length of barbed wire (ouch!). Pretty graphic, huh KEM?
After considerable research on DU, I started looking at causes rather than effects. When I found DU was a product of the same research project that came up with Agent Orange (and the atomic bomb—The Manhattan Project)it made me wonder who was pushing these products, and whether they knew how dastardly they were. Call me a conspiracy nut if you like, but a google search easily reveals information as to why these long suspect substances have been/are used, that it is an intentional ideology going back decades, and who is/was behind the effort. BTW, karlof1 December 6th, 2007 5:56 pm, your comment about, “…longterm effects on Iraqis will be equal to sowing Iraq with salt.” is spot on. Another name for it is a ‘clearing’. Here’s a very illuminating link:
http://www.rense.com/general2/kiss.htm
Hi NSPIRE, “we can turn this around and heal ourselves”. I do admire your internal fortitude, your great spirit and your obvious goodness.
Perhaps, IF we stop polluting our Earth with DU and stop now. Even then, there is no known method of cleaning invisible specks of poison, which is everyplace by now. Some areas of course are very heavily polluted, ion many land areas there maybe a speck here, or a speck over there, or a speck on a child’s finger.
Of course the more a person inhales, the more danger they are exposed to and the sooner radiation poisoning symptoms appear. Like our ground troops who have served in the Mid-East. The numbers of dead from cancers etc, those who have committed suicide and those permanently disabled is mind boggling. Inhaling DU can have a very serious adverse effect upon a persons mind and their normal reasoning power.
Every single day the pollution becomes worse and with 30 countries using DU, how do we manage to have all of them stop? The only military that I am aware of that limited DU, is our Navy. I ‘understand’ they will not allow it to be put on their ships. I don’t know if that is factual information.
If DU was a relatively fast acting radiation and the hazard dissapated rather quickly, as it did in Japan after the two atomic bombs were used, then we would not have such a serous problemm. People lead normal lives in Hiroshima, it will never be safe to live in Baghdad. The number of four billion years is often used, which is a high enough number, that is the half life number, it actually will be dangerous for nine billion years. ___ What on earth have we done?
Am I ever glad to see Paul MaGill Smith here.
Paul is the man who originaly informed me about DU, and that link I posted came from him, to me, to you. I’m one of his students and the class clown. He’s the genuine expert, but cannot post as often as I do, he ain’t an old retired duffer. __ Yet.
I have also learned that Paul is very well informed on many important subjects, so if you ever see one of his posts, you can pretty well believe what he writes.
You cannot cough or piss DU out of your brain either, but if any are like some of our politicians, they might be able to let it run out of their ears.
There are a lot of good threads running today Paul, so this one will not get the attention it deserves. The picture of the tank is not very eye catching either. Then too, we haven’t had any neo-con plants show up yet and so no shit fights to garner attention.
Billy_y4 where are yooouuooo!!!
For those concerned about cancer element of DU usage here is a video (when it starts playing click above the person speaking for the whole 75 minute presentaion):
http://www.veoh.com/videos/v291325JXcQ5hZp
KEM — People can be very creative in coming up with possible environmental solutions.
For example, the Italians had an extremely toxic pesticide spill over many square miles of land. They discovered that if they sprayed olive oil on the ground, the sunlight together with the oil broke down the poisons. Give it to them, they sure have a lot of olive oil to use, and it was effective.
Hi NSPIRE. I use olive oil and brown shoe polish to clean and polish furniture. It is super on old wood or antiques. Any small scratches or nicks disappear and the wood glows. Of course olive oil is natural for wood and it eats it up. When possible, you should rub it on both sides of a board. It’s real easy to do, just pour a little olive oil on the shoe polish and then use a soft clean cloth to smudge it up and wipe on the furniture, or even hardwood floors. It isn’t slippery and there are no toxic chemicals.
On the DU or others of the ‘man made’ radio-active poisons, which are the result of using uranium for fuel in a nuclear power plant, such as plutonium, they are not only very long lived, they are indestructable. To date, scientists have not figured how to destroy those wastes.
Some could be, in certain types of nuclear power plants if used as fuel, but there are serious problems there also. Once DU has been spread around as ionized dust, there is absolutely no known method of destroying it, only time will render it harmless. Lots of time. Chunks of DU can be collected and put into storage, but it would be impossibe to vacumn the entire planet. Of course much has gotten into our oceans and other waterways and there it kills the life forms in the waters and will continue to do so___ forever. We do have a serious world wide problem and I wish I had an answer, but I’m just an old foggie and not highly educated actually.
P/S the olive oil trick only works on bare wood.
My island had a military base on it with: just my luck: a firing range for battleships and aircraft (closed in the 90’s.) Now I’m scared chitless that DU was used. KEM, does anybody know how you test water for this crap? Do you put a geiger counter in a well?
Maybe it’s better if I don’t know…..
And like an idiot, I drove my jeep into the abandoned weapons magazine (big underground vault.) and turned around. If there was any dust on the floor, I’m sure my radiator fan stirred it up…. If I had to do it over again, I’d have picked a different island…..
Luckily?, a volcano went off covering everything with a foot of ash before I showed up. Maybe any DU casings in the mountains got covered up?
Wishful thinking, huh.
Shidt, there’s just no getting away for sure from the hazards of Doctor StrangeLove. My whole life I’ve been tiptoeing around this strobing menace, holding my breath when I walked by it. Still alive, and now, maybe I picked a big pile of it to retire in!
Doah!
The book, Blowback by Chalmers Johnson mentions the contamination of DU munitions at US military bases around the world. At long last these bases should be closed down, investigated, and cleaned up. With global warning being such hot topic you would think DU elimination would play a roll in saving life on earth. Come to think of it, I don’t believe Gore mentioned anything in his Inconvenient Truth. Sorry, I can’t verify because I gave my copy away some time ago.
I would not trust The Army Corps of Engineers to do cleanup. Afterall, The Army Corps of Engineers cleaned up for Honeywell by placing 1448 barrels of toxic waste in Lake Superior 50 years ago and it’s still there because now it’s too dangerous to move.
PACPLAYER, I understand it requires special detectors to measure DU radiation. They are having a major problem in that regard in Hawaii. You can check for uranium background radiation readings with a geiger counter, but I understand an abnormally high reading would not ‘confirm’ there was ionized DU present. That is my understanding about it. The military has the test equipment to give an answer but don’t expect any help there.
If that was a military firing range, you can be certain that tons of DU were fired there. Of course the entire island is very likely heavily contaminated anywhere down wind of the range. You don’t have to inhale a great deal to be a dead man walking.
We’re gonna miss you Pacplayer.
KEM, or anyone else, I wonder about some of the claims that have been made. Do you have a reference so I can investigate them in detail? And before I get started, I just want to state that I’m not trying to downplay the severity of the problem!
1. Given that coal is about 6 ppm (parts per million) U-238, and DU is 99% U-238, is there any health difference between the powdered DU dust from munitions exploding and the powdered dust from burning coal in a coal power plant? Most coal plants don’t have atmospheric scrubbers, once you leave the developped world or go back more than ~30 years.
2. Lots of processes remove microscopic dust and minerals from the atmosphere. A volcanic eruption can spread dust worldwide, but very few leave dust in the atmosphere for more than 4 years - and most are cleared faster. Is there something specific about Uranium that would make it last longer or recirculate?
3. As I said, we’ve all eaten radioactive materials. For those of you who live in New York, Grand Central Station emits enough radiation from the uranium in its granite walls to be considered low level radioactive waste, the same category as cancer treatment radioisotopes or used X-Ray machines. Yet somehow we have survived. Microparticles of any sort lodge in our lungs and are considered carcinigens (cancer causing agents). How have people tried to figure out exactly how deadly DU dust in particular is? I am aware of a considerable debate in the medical field as to the danger of low levels of radiation - the sides go from “it’s deadly even at small doses” that I’ve seen in KEM’s statement that one particle will cause cancer (7:47, Dec 6 post) to “low levels stimulate the genetic error correction mechanism, so there’s a threshold dose that must be passed to have any likelihood of causing damage”, which if you don’t already know about your local nuclear power agency will be glad to research for you and send you lots of info about. If the second one was true, how would that change your level of concern about DU compared to other problems?
Thanks
Craig
PS Has anyone thought about a way to archive discussions or a FAQ on topics like this? I’ve found out things in this thread that I haven’t in others.
For further information, see Barbara Rose Johnston’s new book, Half-Lives & Half-Truths: Confronting the Radioactive Legacies of the Cold War. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007. Dr. Johnston just received the Life Time Achievement award of the American Anthropology Association and played a key role in the Marshall Islanders’ Award of $1billion from the Nuclear Claims Tribunal earlier this year.
I don’t believe I can answer your questions with any satisfaction for you Physics Teacher Guy. I just pass on what I have learned from reading reports about DU. BTW, there are over a million sites on the web about the issue. The first ones we come to, are generally written by the government and their spin is DU ammunition is not a hazard. It isn’t, until it is burned. They don’t address that issue to any degree.
As far as DU staying in the atmosphere, I would presume that any type of dust in the atmosphere stays up there until it finally drifts back to earth. The problem with DU dust is, when it does come to rest, it is still very deadly dust, will be forever and any breeze will once again move it, just like a grain of pollen. Our air is always full of tiny specks of dust, some of it could be DU dust. That’s why we have kleenex, when we blow our nose we get mucus and dirty dust and pollen. __ Sometimes yellow boogers.
I understand that burning coal is just about as bad as burning depleted uranium. Of course there is probably far more DU in the smoke from a single fired and burned 105mm shell, than there would be from burning hundreds of tons of coal. None of it is very hazardous until it has burned. That’s the problem. When DU ammo is fired, it burns at a very high temperature and the result is microscopic specks of deadly ionized DU in the smoke and smoke gets into the air.
Once burned DU is ionized, each invisible to the eye speck will emit radiation. On the surface of our outer skin that is not deadly, the rays won’t penetrate our skin. But when lodged on an internal organ, the radiation does not have to penetrate skin and will cause cancers over time on that organ. The cancers can then spread to other parts of the body just as melanomaa does.
Here is a good link
http://www.gulfwarvets.com/du_howkilling.htm
Kem
“Once lodged there, it will bombard brain cells with over 10,000 times the radiation allowed by a chest X-ray and continue to do so,”
Fact source please, ie. number of pico-curies of activity (assumed since it is of course dependent upon depletion percentage, age and subsequent growth of daughter products, contamination with other radionuclides, etc.), particle size in nanograms, particle solubility, and excretion rate.
I can then run the math and confirm your figure.
P.S. “plutonium, they are not only very long lived, they are indestructable. To date, scientists have not figured how to destroy those wastes.” Why do you keep repeating that. It simply isn’t true-plutonium can be readily transmuted into stable elements and short half-lived products.
Ken
I want to thank you all for the contributions to this thread, and for the very important links.
I have one “delicate” question. I’m new to this, and wonder if some of you might be open to email exchange. I’m a high school physics teacher working on a resource-sharing website; email christian AT newsci.org if interested in sharing information to build or distribute a succinct, clear and informative case (I know this has been done! but I’d like the emphasis on those qualities.)
I’ve been helped in just those directions by this exchange.
Thanks,
Christian Sweningsen
NewScience Alliance
A resource community renewing science and education
with individuals and home, alternative, public and Waldorf school teachers world-wide
Hi there KENDPOTTER, gee, it took you long enough to show up here.
I say that becausue that was the only information about plutonium I had to offer. From the book, “Turn on the lights, but turn off the plutonium”. Of course that is a dated book, over 20 years old.
I am delilghted to see you are here and can explain to us, how that is done, who is doing it, and why are they planning on hiding tons of Plutonium underground at the earthquake prone Yucca Mountain site, which is located above an aquifer.
What do you mean by, short, half, lived products? ___ How many years?
As far as facts go, look them up for yourself. I do believe all of your questions will be answered in the two links I have posted here. If they don’t satisfy you, there are more than a million other sources available on the net __ for free. Knock yourself out. BTW Do you still glow in the dark?
America’s legacy to the world: depleted uranium. Thanks USA!!!
I could be very wrong about this, but if the Uranium was truly depleted wouldn’t it be Lead?
Maybe I’m just a sucker for alchemy, or that I’ve not taken a science course in ages, but I thought that over a few billion years Uranium naturally decays into Lead.
What do you know, it does according to the IEER. org
Takes quite a few billion years, but don’t worry folks, in less than 6 thousand million years half of the ‘depleted uranium’ used today will be lead. Don’t that just make you feel ever so much safer to know that nature will get rid of half of it and we don’t have to do a thing. Wait, what about the other half of the supply?
Kem,
There is a reason I take issue with your statements. They aren’t supported by your own sources. I read your links and I think there is the need for a lot more research in the field. Some very interesting work has been done and some of the indications of the toxicity of the nanoparticles - “A 2001 study of DU’s effect on DNA done by Dr. Alexandra C. Miller for the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Bethesda, Md., indicates that DU’s chemical instability causes 1 million times more genetic damage than would be expected from its radiation effect alone, Moret wrote.” - are truly dramatic. But they don’t say anything like your statement. In fact the article stresses the chemical toxicity. This is an area that most certainly should be a focus of serious research and not your blatherings.
You don’t even have your high-school physics right. You keep referring to “ionized DU”. Ionized means that an atom has lost or gained an electron. DU has done neither. It does emit some small doses of ionizing radiation (which, one more time for the learning impaired, are far overshadowed by the chemical toxicity).
But then it is always easier to make up stuff than to be accurate.
Actually KENDPOTTER, I don’t know uranium fron horse shit, I’m not well educated. I can read however and comprehend what I’ve read. My IQ is up there pretty far even though I don’t spell words well at times. I can use my brain and do have common sense. I happen to believe the links I offered are credible and written by people who are far more informed on the subject than you or I are.
You are correct about my incorrect use of the word ionized, it should have been aeorsolized, I had the dumb thought the first word was an abbreviation of that. Silly me.
Anyway, I don’t expect anyone to take my word for anything. I do urge people to check it our for themselves on any of the million sites available on the net and usually offer a web site or two. I only attempt to help make this issue a concern and I do that.
When I state something here about DU, I’m quoting those sources and other credible to me sources. So it is not my ‘blathering’, as you put it, you are arguing with. Yes there are some I have read that disagree with other experts in the field. I didn’t offer opposing viewpoints. I have read where government sources state that DU is not dangerus in any form. I don’t choose to believe that.
Now, here and on other threads I have asked you for facts and or to answer a few questions because you had done the same thing you have done on this thread. You have always refused to answer. You spout off about what a nut case I am instead, or quote a government source. but you never give any answers to fair and honest questions. That of course is, because you could not answer them honestly and therefore you ignore them, return and change the subject and or attack my credibility. I don’t have any credibility to attack on the issue. I only offer the credibility, opinions and facts given by doctors and scientists who are well informed. So take your snide comments about me and shove them.
Are you going to answer the questions I asked of you and show everyone here how brilliant you are? Don’t make any errors in your figures BTW, because we will hammer you if and when you do.
I believe you are a government shill and are likely paid to attempt to defuse the issue of the dangers of DU. If that is so, then you are a despicible rat and should crawl back under the rock you slithered out from under. You got that snake?
PhysicsTeacher:
I believe the uranium in coal emissions is a coarser particle size than Kem and Paul are concerned about. It would not be pure uranium oxide but agglomerated with other minerals in the soot. A coarse size particle size does not travel as far into the lungs and is more easily coughed out (unless you are a smoker and the tars act like a glue for inhaled particulates).
You mentioned external source from granite. Radiation safety standards are based on the linear damage model which assumes that all radiation is harmful and additive. The model posits there is no such thing as a safe dose. The legal limits for radiation workers and the general population assume a minimal but real risk with those limits. There is no data to support the linear model at low levels and there is serious debate within the health physics community. There is an alternative but less conservative model which posits a beneficial effect from low level exposure. This threshold model is supported by in vitro testing and some epidemiology. Both of these models are concerned with external gamma sources, not internal.
Paul,
You are correct in that about 2/3 of the U-235 is removed from depleted uranium. Your post might be misunderstood however.
Even if you could remove ALL the U-235, the residual uranium would still be radioactive. U-235 is about 6 times as radioactive as U-238 but the removal of most of the U-235 does not seriously affect the radiological or chemical hazard.
Kem,
I haven’t run the numbers but I believe the atmospheric dispersion of uranium from unfiltered power plants dwarfs the airborne uranium from munitions. We generate electricity all the time but only a small number of armies use uranium munitions; and then only in wartime or in training.
The particle size of the airborne uranium would, however, be different.
Bill
Hi Billy, how are you BTW?
I was only guessing about how much DU comes from smoke stacks, because I don’t know. Who does? I do know coal fired plants are a problem and some DU does get into the atmosphere, how much is a guess by anyone, for we don’t have any data from other countries, like China or India, Indonesia for example that I’m aware of.
This site is about military DU however, and the coal issue is not something I have studied, yet I am aware it is a serious problem also. I sure do hope that our coal fired plants all combined, don’t emit as much DU in seconds, as say a single Big Blue bunker buster bomb does. There we are talking trillions times trillions of DU particles being developed in one big blast.
If we consider the estimated specks of DU in a single cupfull is five billion. Imagine how many specks of poison are in two tons of burned DU? That’s one Big Blue. We have detonated hundreds of those in the past few years. A C-130H or J, Spectre gunship will expend several tons of DU on a single mission. As you stated, the wind blown DU from ammo is not the same size as that from burning coal. I believe I am correct on the assumption, we have a more serious problem with military ammo than from the burnig of coal. That is an opinion of mine only but does not detract from the dangers of military DU use.
KENDPOTTER, I do notice that this article, gives some pause for serious thought on the subject of DU, if not outright outrage. So any who wish to argue the merits, argue with the author, not me.
Hey Billy, I have a serious question. You got me thinking.
How many tons of coal would it take, to extract a pound of uranium? On average, you don’t have to be precise.
The reason I ask, is because there is about ten pound of DU in an Abrams tank shell and 3.5 in a 30mm Gatling gun shell. If we fired off 50,000 rounds of those 30mm jobs every week, world wide, and I’m sure that would be a very conseritave figure, as it wouldbe about 20 or so training missions a week for A-10 Warthog aircraft. It would add up to about nine million pounds of DU fired a year.
So since say 1977, or 30 years, how many tons is that so far? Just in 30mm Gatling gun rounds? I know you like math and I don’t, perhaps you could help me there?
I came up with 4,450 tons of burned, unfiltered DU a year. WOW! Do you think the coal burning can top that?
No? Add in the big shells and the bombs, lets see what it might come to. Gotta guess there though, ___ scientists and bean counters call that estimating.
Did you know, nano particles of DU, will go right through the filters of the very best gas masks? ___ Amazing.
Kem,
A majority of the DU in a penetrator does not burn. That is why decontamination teams are able to clean up battlefields by picking up the fragments (if they don’t also have to contend with unexploded ordinance). Most of the smaller rounds are buried in the ground after missing the target. (During WW2 it took 50,000 rounds of ammunition to inflict a casualty on the German army. A similar ratio is probably true with smaller caliber DU munitions. This of course would not apply to the bunker busters.)
In answer to your question, I found an interesting paper “Nuclear Proliferation thru Coal Burning” by Gordon Aubrect, Ohio State University, Dept of Physics, 1995. I have not crosschecked any of his numbers or calculations. (Actually his uranium and thorium numbers in coal are lower than other numbers I have seen.)
Aubrect reports US coal averages 1.3 parts per million uranium and 3.2 parts per million thorium. (Thorium is another radioactive element which occurs in nature.)
EIA.DOE.gov reports 2006 US coal consumption at 1.162 billion tons.
Putting these 2 numbers together you get about 1500 tons of uranium per year and 3700 tons of thorium per year in the ash. Aubrect assumes that an unfiltered boiler emits 10% of the ash giving 150 tons of uranium and 370 tons of thorium. He also assumes 1% of the ash is emitted on filtered boilers giving 15 tons of airborne uranium and 37 tons of airborne thorium. He claims that coal burning emits 150 times as much radiation per year as the TMI-2 accident.
Any uranium emitted by a power plant would be natural uranium rather than depleted uranium. It would, therefore, have slightly more radioactivity per pound.
The Chinese burn more coal than we do. Much of it is currently unfiltered.
Regards,
Bill
Hi Billy & KEM, I’m glad to see both of you here. Your expertise in various areas of research is appreciated regardless of academic credentials. You don’t need to be an expert on fire to know if you put your hand in a flame it will burn you, more appropriately, if you see someone else get burned that it could also happen to you the same way, right?
Kendpotter, KEM has called for you to ‘put up or shut up’, so if you don’t wish your credibility to sink lower than Bush’s you should comply IF YOU CAN. For the record, KEM and myself are opposed to DU usage, and even nuclear power generation, based on numerous articles studied WRITTEN BY OTHERS, since we make no claim to expertise other than to look at the facts we can find, then critically weigh their credibility based on the when, who, where, & why of their being written. Between us we have done enough research to have formed solid opinions and are exercising our right, perhaps even duty, to express them.
Billy_y4 on the other hand, has worked within the nuclear industry , and is a proponent of utilizing nuclear power generation, bringing to the table experience & knowledge (especially techical), but I believe he is as very concerned about the indescriminate, illegal, detrimental consequences of willful DU usage as we are.
We have hashed these subjects out on literaly hundreds of posts, involving dozen of threads concerning dozens of CD articles, and other sites as well. Check out the CD archives on articles regarding DU or nuclear power to see all of our comments and even heated arguments. If the CD ’stats’ page still worked you could see them all in one place, but alas it appears it no longer does. Everyone’s loss (are you listening CD?)
None of us are asking for the world, though. The main thing we would like to see, however, is honest PUBLIC coverage & discussions, especially on the MSM regarding these subjects that stand to have a serious negative health impact on millions more than they seem to have already had. Money & politics need to be removed from the equation, because this is a public health issue, with none (rich or poor) exempt from consequences.
If you are truly interested in adding to the discussion then welcome & stick around, if not, then get lost because you will just be in the way, or we will just ignore your comments. When you have finished your homework & calculations we welcome seeing the results…double check for accuracy, though.
So Billy, then what you are saying is that KEM’s figure (more from DU than coal burning…US only) is correct? One other question, what is the half life comparison between DU & coal burning uranium emmissions, or is it the same?
Thanks Bill, good information. That figure comes to almost the exact same figure I had figured for just training missions for A-10 warthog aircraft a year. If we figured in the 40mm and 105 cannon shells, bombs and missils, the DU Ammo is far ahead of the power plants in America and of course the DU from ammunition is far more likely to get up into the atmosphere and travel much further.
I do disagree with one of your comments. In WW2 we didn’t have heads up display, laser sights, night observation sighting and infa red, so that isn’t a good argument to compare then with now. Also, when a DU round hits ANYTHING, a tank, a road a tree, a building, anything, most of it does burn, not every single round, but most do. They don’t have to strike a person or enemy soldier. So the 50,000 rounds to kill one person is not a good argument at all. We aren’t talking rifle rounds here.
There are always a few scraps of solid DU after a burst of ammo fired from a Gatling gun that don’t burn. Then when DU shells first came out, it was called a penetrator, as they were tipped with DU, now they are solid DU. The bombs are called penetrators, but they too are not just tipped with DU.
When the barrels get hot, the projectiles start burning as they exit the end of the barrel. I was amazed at the night photos of a C-130 gunship firing. It looked like solid tracers. We didn’t use tracers in the C-130 gunships that flew out of Ubon Thailand, unlike the C-47s and C-119 gunships, we didn’t need tracer ammo with our sighting system. We didn’t have DU ammo either. Now, it’s a solid stream of fire, from the cannon to the target.
Google AC-130 spectre gunships. You can see what we have wroght. Wroght? Wrought?
I failed speling.
Don’t worry about the spelling, KEM, passing morals & ethics was more important
Paul,
Whether there is more atmospheric uranium from munitions than coal fired powerplants would apparently depend on the fraction of munitions uranium that ends up as smoke and how much ends up as macroscopic metallic fragments. Kem thinks it is a high percentage but I have my doubts. If it is in excess of 10% then, yes, there would be more uranium dispersed to the atmosphere from munitions when we are engaged in combat than from US coal burning.
There would not be a significant difference in half life between natural uranium and depleted uranium. Natural uranium is 99.3% U-238 and depleted uranium is about 99.7% U-238.
If the depleted uranium is derived directly from the tails of the enrichment process, it will be just uranium and it’s daughter products. If the depleted uranium was used in the plutonium weapons production process, it could have been imperfectly purified and be contaminated with some fission fragments from that process.
BTW, I still work in the nuclear industry-got a kid in college and nobody can retire with that adverse cash flow going on.
Kem,
I don’t know about the design of the 30mm ammunition but the larger caliber tank munitions are discarding sabot type surrounding a smaller diameter uranium penetrator. The uranium would not, in that type round, be in contact with the barrel.
I don’t believe a solid large piece of uranium will support combustion although it could certainly spark. The ignition of the uranium would come from friction with the target, fracture, and high speed deformation as the kinetic energy is dissipated.
In answer to your question: at 1.3ppm it would take 385 tons of coal to get one pound of uranium. Depending on the state of pollution controls on the power plant, that pound would be divided between the clinker, the fly ash and emissions.
Regards,
Bill
Thank you Bill, I knew you would help there.
It really is a shame that everyone is not aware of this. I knew coal fired plants were a very serious problem, but unaware of just how deadly serious.
I wonder how many are aware of the problem of strontium-90 in babies teeth is?
Thank you again Bill and a special thank you Paul for making me aware of this DU issue several months ago. Wish we could all get together someday and have a fun discussion.
That’s right about the friction of the target Bill, and anything a DU round hits becomes the target, aimed at or not. When a fired DU round hits anything ___ DU burns.
South Pacific calling real world…. South Pacific calling real world…. come in real world….
Physicsteacherguy was asking about the duration aloft of fine DU particles, and I think the answer is kind of like Mercury poisoning in fish…. nobody really knows for sure. The problem is not how long it is airborne I think. The problem is that small ionized particles as in the Navy’s well documented Puerto Rico bomb range are so atomically light that they get a ride on any wind at all including thunderstorms (which are essencially big vacume cleaners) and chuck their contents out into the jet stream. This over 100kt wind circles the globe. The problem is the potential of this stuff to wind up in the drinking water and food chain. I quizzed the firing range locals near where I live. They claim many injuries/fatalities do to kids trying to salvage scraps of metal while and after the range was shut down in 1991. Live ordinance is still a problem up there according to a guy with one arm. Yes, he was a kid when he lost his arm up there. But what worries me is the number of mutated native children I have seen around town all these years. They have huge heads and abdomens.. tagged “inborns” by the locals. I always thought they were victims of shell and chevron as these companies left plastic containers with thick gooie chemical residues in them that the locals use to haul water to their houses. No, they don’t wash them out first. I had to confiscate these toxic two to five gallon containers as they where lableled with things like MEK (super toxic.) I checked googlle Earth topography and can see that the watershed tributaries of the firing range do in fact go right to one of my houses.
Well, goodbye cruel world,
It was nice knowing you…..
pac - signing off…
KEM PATRICK,
I really shouldn’t skip ahead like I do, I miss much of the argument that way…..
I feel, Paul Smiths and Bills arguments are stellar. We, as citizens of a democratic republic (in theory anyway) do not have to be scholars because we are in reality jury members for public policy. We vote. We are taxpayers. We will decide what is appropriate gov policy, not some think tank, lobby, or gov turd spouting biased mill-speak whitewash sources for toxicity or safe exposure levels sent in here to spin doubt on an issue that is very real and deadly. Kendpotter’s post is typical munitions industry disinformation in my opinion. No one doubts that drinking Depleted Uranium (U-235 or U-238 with traces of P-238) is chemically toxic to the chromosomal stability of both the nucleus DNA and the Microcondial DNA! ; That was not the question as I understood it.
(Typical Neocon spin-doctor trick: “LOOK THERE GOES A RED HERRING!”
The issue, which Mr Potter wants to deflect, is one of radiation. How many milirads can those bio structures stand in close proximity to a particle that very likely became ionized when it was sucked up into a thunderstorm, bombarded with massive electrical charge and exhausted out at 40,000 feet. Fortunately, I did take college physics and got a B. Unless somebody convinces me otherwise, I am aware that a thunderstorm acts like a battery, moving along the oceans/earth’s surface producing a charge as it moves. Very nasty negative ions form on the top of the cloud, while positive ones form on the bottom of the cloud. ATG Lightening is caused by a practically invisible feather descending from those bottom positive ions and then an corresponding visible Bolt returning to the cloud from the negatively charged ground back up to the positive ions at the bottom of the thunderstorm. As I said before, Thunderstorms are vacuum cleaners, they have four stages which in two of them alternatively downburst with gusty winds, stirring up dust and alternatively sucking up dust particles to either combine with super-cooled droplets forming hail, or exhaust these particles out the top of the anvil head. This is why after a cold front moves through visibility is so good for a few days.
Thus, you have the mechanism to ionize a DU particle, making it even lighter atomically than it was before. Disclaimer: I too am a layman when it come to atomic particles and could be wrong about any of the particle physics; so Bill and others please feel free to correct me.
I greatly admire KEM PATRICK and others here, for recognizing and fighting the greatest human crime ever committed in our names: DU.
pac “dead-man-walking” plyer
p.s. Good spelling is for the insecure!
Besides being very intelligent and educated to boot, I see you have a great sense of humor also PACPLAYER.
Are we gonna lose a wonderful person here, because some like to play war games with atomic waste as a weapon?
I believe there may be some misunderstanding about the significance of the ionic state of uranium oxide (DU) particles. kendpotter alluded to this.
If you have a small particle of DU (or other dust for that matter), it will normally exist in a non-ionized condition. If it is at a very high temperature, in a strong electric field, or is struck by cosmic or earthly radiation it can gain an excess of or be stripped of some electrons.
The excess or deficiency of electrons on a dust mote would not significantly effect the weight of the particle. It would give the particle a tendency to be attracted or repelled by a similarly charged particle (Opposites attract, like charged particles repel). The attraction of opposites would tend to neutralize the charges. A dust mote would also be attacted to a flat plate with the opposite charge. (This is the operating principle behind an electrostatic air filter.)
A particle of dust, DU or otherwise, that has an excess or shortage of electrons is not, in the sense used by a chemist, ionized. It merely has an imbalance, an electrostatic charge. A dust mote would consist of a million or more individual atoms. The electronic imbalance would be a very small fraction of the number of atoms in the mote.
Their are two concerns with uranium:
One is the chemical toxicity. Uranium is a heavy metal and has about the same level of chemical toxicity as lead. It will chemically damage the liver. To be toxic, uranium must be taken internally, either by inhaling, ingesting or by being lodged under the skin.
The other is radioactivity. Uranium gives off alpha radiation. When the alpha particle comes out of the uranium atom it is traveling very fast. Once the alpha particle slows down it is harmless (it becomes an atom of helium). Slowing down, it can do a lot of very localized damage. An alpha particle cannot penetrate the outer layer of dead skin. It can travel less than an inch in air.
Normally the radioactivity of uranium is harmless unless, like the chemical toxicity, it is inside the body. The one exception is if uranium dust gets in the eyes. With enough exposure, uranium dust in the eyes can cause cataracts.
An alpha particle released inside the body will do tissue damage. Whether that damage is medically significant to the body or the progeny of that body is the crux of the debate over DU.
Uranium does not cause or fail to cause damage by being ionized or not ionized. What damage uranium may inflict is caused by either the chemical toxicity or the alpha particles, not the ionic state.
Yeah, that’s what the doctors said in the link I provided. Of course they said a lot more about the hazards of DU when it enters the blood stream, or lodges in bone marrow or the brain. Thanks Billy, we knew you were very intelligent, that’s why we always wonder why you work in the nuclear field.
Fascinating information from both KEM on the equipment used and Bill on the nuclear physics. Yes thank you Billy for correcting me on that. The super insignificant weight of an electron makes my argument about increased dispersal due to lighter weight wrong. Twenty-five year lectures are coming back to me now….. (that’s why I only got a “B” grade!)
So Ionization is unimportant in the body. It may however make (atomically) large dust mote particles (with DU in them) which are positively charged (due to being sucked into the weather cell) stick to the negative ions on the tops of cumulous nimbus clouds providing a risk of jet stream dispersal. We know that this world wide dispersal can happen anytime a volcano pukes up into the troposphere. Geologists use radioactive markers in layers under the ground to determine world-wide events as PhysicTeacherGuy discussed earlier. However I must confess I enjoyed trying to run off Potter with my wild theory!
Who knows, Potter could be right. But to be so dogmatic about dismissing radiation concerns and then fail to answer any simple question put to him, makes me suspect that he has no knowledge and is just regurgitating the Maryland (gov) studies of which he has no understanding. He is making an argument from authority. In my Logic class that was considered an unscientific logical fallacy. To accept the Maryland study, I would want to know who funded it (the military) and whether or not is was peer reviewed and verified.
Medical science is hard to quantify, imho, because there are so many variables involved and it is so dynamic. The understanding of the generation and function of adult stem cells which miraculously regenerate damaged tissue is in it’s infancy. Dr. Irving Weissman of Stanford University (the discoverer of the adult stem cell) is only now learning how these specialized regenerative cells spin off daughter cells after chasing chemokines (sp?) which are the chemical smoke signals, if you will, that damaged cells put out. They can repair tissue due to chemical toxicity in the organs but they cannot eradicate a constantly alpha-emitting particle which is walled off by the immune system, if my understanding of that risk is correct.
Last thought: The thought of aerosolized nano particles resulting from bomb impact worries me. My water filter is only good at straining out particles with a one-micron size!
Sigh,
Deadman Walking
Pacflyer,
Unless you are on a battlefield, in a nuclear fuel plant or a uranium mine, don’t worry about uranium dust in your drinking water. Trace amount in the gut have a pretty low absorbtion (not zero but low) and a fairly fast clearing time.
The greater hazard is inhaled uranium. How much of a hazard is a point of debate. Paul and Kem follow the NGO literature and it paints a starker picture than governmental literature. Even if you believe, as Kem and Paul do, that our government either suppresses data or maintains a state of intentional ignorance, other governments have corroborated a lower level of hazard than the more alarmist NGOs. (Germany, Netherlands, Poland and IAEA).
OBTW, if you are a smoker, the hazard from inhaled uranium dust goes WAY up. (Just like asbestos, coal dust, silica and cotton dust hazard go up with smoking).
Sleep well,
Bill
I only smoke in the house or my vehicles so I’m Okay there. According to the links I provided and many many others available, not government sponsored, when DU burns, it does so at a very high temperature BTW, the partiles do become ionized and are ether wind blown, or some may get into the upper atmosphere and or, some most likely stay in the near vicinity of the fire.
One major problem to me is, there are billions of the particles in a single round of DU. Do Google AC-130 Spectre gunships and take a look at the picture in the first article. That’s DU ammo being fired.
I flew on those during the Vietnam war and we fired thousands of rounds on a mission, there was fire at the ends of the barrels, but it didn’t snake to the target because tracer rounds were not needed or used. We had the early A models and we didn’t have any DU ammo. I was in on the ground floor and worked with Mr. Pulver, president of the Lockheed Marietta Georgia branch on the initial project, a concept submitted thru the Big R suggestion program, by a young Air Force A1C in 1959. It was a great idea for a night time close air support aircraft.
The movie Bat 21 came from an actual downing of one of our C-130 gunships in Laos. The mission evolved into a truck and sampan killer along the ‘HoChiMein’ Trail from Camboia and Laos to Vietnam during the Vietnam war. Now they are used for even heavier targets, even have a 105 cannon to supplement the Gatling guns that can fire a round every eight to ten seconds. A lot of DU. If they wish to track and target a single person, the target would be in very serious trouble. One shot one kill, with any of a variety of weapons.
Golly am I glad you fells are here to discuss this, of course it will be in file 13 tomorrow. There will be others. If Kenpotter shows, it will make it interesting and fun.
Kem
“I believe you are a government shill and are likely paid to attempt to defuse the issue of the dangers of DU. If that is so, then you are a despicible rat and should crawl back under the rock you slithered out from under. You got that snake?”
Please feel free to go f*** yourself.
But Ken Potter, you forgot to read the phrase where I wrote, “IF that is so”.
You didn’t confirm or deny it, so what’s the answer there?
Since you were pleasant and wrote please, I think I’ll take your advice. I need a fun break anyway.
Glad you were here Ken, you made it interesting. I do hope you learned something other than what you previously believed. ~Bye~
Well I’ve learned a lot anyhow. Thanks KEM, Billy, Ken, and the rest of you.
My studies in cloud physics tell me that most of the ionized particles in clouds serve as condensation nuclei for cloud droplets. Assume that DU is distributed uniformly in the atmosphere and surface of the Earth. Then it will be taken into clouds fairly quickly (in days, rather than decades, due to wind blowing the dust around). If the droplets are light enough to spread worldwide, 70% will fall over oceans. Once the DU hits the ocean surface, about it will evaporate at about 7% (16/238) the rate of water, due to its greater mass. If even half of the rest were to settle to the bottom, the oceans would serve as a considerable sink for DU, as I believe they have for the lead aerosols our cars used to spew out. That’s why I’m hoping that DU, though permanent, may not be a direct problem for us (lobsters may disagree, but many abyssal plains are fairly devoid of life).
Craig
Thanks Craig. That’s exactly the info we were hoping someone would post here. We’ve been accused of not understanding basic high school physics (big grin) so it’s great to have a teacher and industry expert like Bill on board with us paranoids. (Of course at one time, the government deemed cigarette use perfectly safe and those who wanted it stopped paranoid!)
Interesting…. If I remember correctly, Smog is the attachment of ozone and nitrogen oxide etc to particulate matter. It’s heavy enough that it congregates near the ground until weather systems suck it up and disperse it in much the same way. This may be why our oceans are becoming acidic and coral reefs are bleaching worldwide. (not due to greater ocean temperatures as some say, but because of one hundred years of heavy industrial airborne particles being distributed throughout the world’s oceans via weather systems.
BILL, I just checked on Gooogle Earth, and I am 6nm/10km downwind of the Navy/Airforce firing range that was used from 1947 until 1991.
Gulp.
Well I like KEM’s idea, I’ll go take a break: make some babies and see what happens….
Cheers,
DeadMan
I agree that a great deal of the airborne DU will end up in waters. I wonder if you took into consideration, that thse DU particles we are talkng about, are invisible to the naked eye? We are talking about very, very, very light particles.
Now, I dusted the top shelves of my book cases and blew the quite visible dust into a deep bowl of water. Lotta dust too. The visible dust hadn’t sunk after five hours. I stirred the water, and dust was still on the surface after the waves quit moving. I am fairly certain that after time, the dust will sink to the bottom of the bowl. How about if the dust was so tiny, it was invisible,how long would it float on the surface?
I do hope that none will assume, that DU will mostly sink to the bottoms of our oceans and that will solve the problem. Think of the sea life which takes in tiny particles of anything that come into reach, or fish that take in tons of plankton every day, then are eaten by bigger fish.
Have you ever read about the serious reduction of the oceans phytoplankton? A facinating subject and perhaps the most important plant life on this planet. Why? Because the oceans phytoplankton produce over 70% of the oxygen in our oceans and in our atmosphere. it was 70% 30 years ago but the phytoplankton have decreased in numbers by 10 to 12% in the past few years. Something is killing them and no one is sure of what is.
Good experiment KEM, and some scary chit too.
Hey check out the Chris Hedges story: why we resist, if you haven’t already.
Cheers mate,
DeadMan