Helen Caldicott on Depleted Uranium:
America used over one million pounds of uranium weapons in the Gulf war – 7000 tanks rounds and 940,000 bullets fired from planes. 10,800 shells were fired in Bosnia and 31,000 in Kosovo.
...
Because uranium 238 has a half life of 4.5 billion years, and plutonium, which is by orders of magnitude more carcinogenic than uranium has a shorter half life of only 240,400 years. Iraq, Kuwait, Bosnia and Kosovo are now contaminated with carcinogenic radioactive elements for ever. Because the latent period of carcinogenesis, the incubation time for cancer, is 5 to 10 years for leukemia and 15 to 60 years for solid cancer, the reported malignancies in the NATO troops and peacekeepers and in the American soldiers and the civilians in these countries are just the tip of the iceberg.
In other news, Helen Caldicott is an incredible human being.
Hmm. I was just reading a discussion about this in soc.culture.iraq. According to this person, depleted uranium is no more radioactive than the equivalent mass of topsoil.
Interesting. Thanks for posting that.
Two differences between Caldicott's account and the Trakar guy's jump out at me:
1) Caldicott says that the DOE admitted that Depleted Uranium ammo contains significant amount of contaminated uranium. Trakar neatly sidesteps this by claiming that talk about anything outside of pure DU is "irrelevant to this discussion"
2) The wartime use of DU ammunition (again according to Caldicott) high-speed impact, resulting in a lot of "tiny aerosolized particles", which are easily inhaled. I wonder how the battlefield compares to the testing environments that Trakar cites. Even if pure (i.e. not what the ammo is made of) DU isn't radioactive, I doubt that having tiny particles of a heavy metal lodged in your lungs is particularly good. At the very least.
2.5) I don't know about how bioaccumulation works with radioactive metals, but if it's anything like DDT, the consequences could be bad in the long term.
I did a quick search on the contamination issue. The alt.war.nuclear regulars discuss this:
Yes, some lots of US DU have been identified as having been contaminated with reactor products. The general radioactivity level of the resultant DU was still very low, the contamination was not identified by increased radiation, it was identified by isotopic analysis.There is no evidence that the tiny increase in radiation relative to properly processed DU is any health hazard. While this was clearly a processing error and needs to be guarded against, the practical health effects appear to be zero.
One of Trakar's references discusses the dangers of inhaled DU particles -- apparently the greatest danger isn't radiation but heavy-metal toxicity, which is similar to that of lead.
Scientists have shown that elevated concentrations of uranium in kidney tissue may cause an effect called proximal tubular necrosis -- cell damage in the first part of the collecting tubules of the kidney. The damage in research animals was either temporary or permanent depending on the amount of excess uranium. We believe the Level I DU exposures from friendly fire during the Gulf War constitute the highest DU exposures as a result of inhalation, ingestion, wound contamination, and retained DU fragments. While there were no specific measurements for kidney damage when individuals were wounded, kidney function could have decreased due to burns, blood loss, and hypovolemia (water and sodium loss leading to insufficient blood volume). However, the Baltimore VA's studies on 33 Gulf War veterans severely wounded by DU friendly fire have shown no subtle or persistent kidney abnormalities from their DU exposure. The VA conducted extensive testing in 1993-1994, 1997, and 1999 and documented no kidney abnormalities, even in veterans with retained DU fragments who are excreting elevated levels of uranium in their urine. Their testing included measuring retinol-binding protein and ß2-microglobulin, which would indicate the presence or absence of proximal tubular damage.[40] (Tab P further discusses the medical results noted to date in the DU medical follow-up program.)