Depleted Uranium Bill Introduced into Congress

[SuperScout]

As the article stated, "...Because of its density, the military uses DU as a protective shield around tanks,..." the entire article should have been suspect, as should its author and his/her agenda from the git-go. And as Scamp so eloquently stated in his post, a vehicle clad in DU would be too heavy to move, or would require an engine the size of a small destroyer. Some tactical vehicle, eh?

That's why I posited the contention that the entire piece of drivel was probably politically driven. Did the author tell a lie to begin with? And if there's that one lie, shouldn't the flag of suspicion be raised for others? Seems that way, and one has to wonder why. Have you bothered to check out the website for the Lone Star Iconoclast? No overwhelming demonstration of objectivity there.

I find it hard to believe that in light of the AO black eye the military received it would turn around and foist another culprit on a much better informed soldier and public.

[colmurph]

Lessee........Depleted Uranium..............means that it's not radioactive any more or that it's the residue of what's left over when they separate the U-235 from the U-234. Either way, it's not radioactive. Now to the point......why do they use it?......because it has twice the mass of lead. That means that a projectile the size of a 50 cal. round that used to weigh 1 oz. now weighs 2 oz. .......What does that mean?.............When you hit a tank with 30 or 40 rounds of this stuff (which is extremely hard...harder than steel) it punches a hole in the side of the armor by kinetic energy alone....no explosives needed. The vector for all of this mayhem is the A-10 "Warthog" with it's gatling gun.
The dust from this is toxic if you breathe it in at the point of impact but once things have "Cooled down" it is just another composit of normal dirt. To say that people are dieing from Radiation Sickness from depleted uranium is an out-and-out lie!
To suggest that this is causing deaths is an indication of profound ignorance. I rather think that this is the opening salvo for an assault upon the VA to get 100% disability. Methinks that most applicants will have never been within 10 miles of the stuff, just like most of the PSTD applicants never saw real combat.

[MORTARDUDE]

http://www.chugoku-np.co.jp/abom/ura..._e/000709.html

On battlegrounds in southern Iraq near its Kuwait border, DU rounds flew during the 1991 Gulf War. They were also used in the southern Serbia (Yugoslavia) and Kosovo Province during the Kosovo War in 1999.

A total of 950,000 rounds of various sizes

While on assignment in these regions, a certain thought came to me repeatedly. "If this had happened in the US, the country that fired the rounds, how would the people react?"

During the Gulf War, the US and British armies used roughly 950,000 rounds of DU (about 320 tons) ranging in size from 25 to 120mm. They were fired in Kuwait and sourthern Iraq. Soil and atmospheric studies started by Iraqi scientists in 1996 are still detecting rather high levels of radioactivity in the vicinity of tanks destroyed by DU rounds.

U-238 in Kuwait

"Radioactivity is even higher in soil near unexploded DU rounds buried in the ground," stressed a female environmental scientist (47) employed as assistant professor at the University of Baghdad. Scientific studies in Yugoslavia have confirmed the same phenomenon there.

How many unexploded rounds are buried in the ground? No accurate estimates are available for either Iraq or Yugoslavia. The half-life of DU (U-238) is 4.5 billion years. However small the quantity, the U-238 scattered over the earth will emit radiation forever.

When the DU emissions from a DU penetrator plant in the suburbs of Albany (capital of New York) were found to have exceeded the monthly state permissible maximum of 150 micro curies (DU mass: 387 grams, 14 oz.), the plant was closed.

Kuwait is virtually the same size as Shikoku (the smallest of Japan's four major islands). Many believe the radioactive contamination from DU in Kuwait equals or exceeds that in southern Iraq. A fire in a US munitions repository in Doha in July 1991 burned stacks of DU rounds, reportedly causing massive environmental contamination. The US and Kuwaiti governments both stated at the time that the fire had "no environmental impact."

Just prior to the Gulf War, the US and Great Britain used a firing range in Saudi Arabia to test DU rounds. Contamination from these tests is feared as well.

When enriched uranium is produced for nuclear weapons or nuclear power, large amounts of DU are generated as radioactive waste. Though the radioactivity emitted is low, many countries have established strict standards for handling it.

For example, in the US DU may only be handled with the permission of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Workers at plants that produce DU penetrators must continually wear protective masks and film badges that reveal their exposure dose.

Sloppy DU controls

However, sacrificing control for the sake of production and the permissive monitoring system of the NRC have combined to allow grave environmental contamination at these plants and to adversely affect the health of workers and nearby residents.

A production plant in Concord, Massachusetts dumped U-238 sludge and contaminated water on its property for many years, contaminating soil and groundwater in the vicinity with radioactivity. Decontamination measures to prevent its spread outside the plant site are now an urgent task.

Moreover, depleted uranium is a heavy metal as toxic as lead or cadmium. Thus, the radioactivity contamination is compounded by heavy metal toxicity.

Contamination at DU test firing ranges used by the US Army, Navy and Air Force is also serious.

Arjun Makhijani (55), a nuclear scientist, is one of three editors of the book Nuclear Wastelands, which describes areas of radioactive contamination around the world. He is president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research located in the suburbs of Washington, DC.

Makhijani warns, "Contaminated areas are expanding in the US, the former Soviet Union, and elsewhere in the world due to development and testing of nuclear weapons and nuclear power accidents like Chernobyl. It is absolutely unconscionable to put radioactive waste requiring strict controls in weapons and strew them around in other countries just because they are effective."

[urbsdad6]

Well said!

Doc Urb

[Seascamp]

Minor technical correction?..

I just remembered that the 120 mm anti armor DU sabot projectile has an accelerator charge that goes off the instant there is impact. This charge supplements the inherent kinetic energy to drive the penetrating rod through the thick armor hide. Sorry about that, but I?m lucky to remember didly these days. My elder Brother is a test manager at a proving grounds and if something is unclassified and of interest, he passes it along. And he did bunches of run and shoot testing on the 120 mm Abrams turret gun and the Bradley 25 mm chain gun. Bad-ass weapons systems and I almost fell sorry for the poor hapless tropps that get in their sights, almost.

Scamp