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Depleted Uranium Shells Used in Iraq
So, what do you all think? I'd be especially interested to know what JDub and NukeChem have to say on this, coming from the military, and chemistry, respectively.
I bring it up because this has become a rather large story.
Myself, I found the many claims surrounding DU hard to believe, just considering the source. Not only do reports of the harms of DU seem to be coming uniformly from rabid anti-war activists, but their comments show that they are completely ignorant about the concepts of causation versus correlation, and the fact that DU is just not very radioactive. Certainly it's not radioactive enough to cause deformities.
On the other hand, DU is a very heavy metal that can powder on impact, settling to the ground. Combined with spent shells that are left on the ground, the next rainfall could wash trace amounts of DU into the water table. Here is a Harvard abstract detailing a possible causational link between heavy metal exposure (non-radioactive) and leukemia.
In the end, the "DU is a war crime!" crowd lost all credibility, to me, when they started blaming everything under the sun on it. There are a number of websites out there hosting absolutely horrendous pictures of deformed babies, and quite frankly, there is just no way most of those conditions were caused by the military's use of depleted uranium. Anyone who's more interested in shocking you than giving you decent information has immediately made anything it says suspect.
I bring it up because this has become a rather large story.
Myself, I found the many claims surrounding DU hard to believe, just considering the source. Not only do reports of the harms of DU seem to be coming uniformly from rabid anti-war activists, but their comments show that they are completely ignorant about the concepts of causation versus correlation, and the fact that DU is just not very radioactive. Certainly it's not radioactive enough to cause deformities.
On the other hand, DU is a very heavy metal that can powder on impact, settling to the ground. Combined with spent shells that are left on the ground, the next rainfall could wash trace amounts of DU into the water table. Here is a Harvard abstract detailing a possible causational link between heavy metal exposure (non-radioactive) and leukemia.
In the end, the "DU is a war crime!" crowd lost all credibility, to me, when they started blaming everything under the sun on it. There are a number of websites out there hosting absolutely horrendous pictures of deformed babies, and quite frankly, there is just no way most of those conditions were caused by the military's use of depleted uranium. Anyone who's more interested in shocking you than giving you decent information has immediately made anything it says suspect.
Comments
a) the central route, which uses an appeal to intelligene (ie. facts, credibility, and knowledge)
b) the peripheral route, which uses an appeal to emotions (ie. pictures and images)
In this case it seems that the group against the use of DU is making a strategic folly by pursuing the peripheral route. Either they are not aware of the intelligence level of the audience they are targeting, or their own intelligence is not very high. Either way, I think by reading the article above, the negative health effects of DU are obvious...and very disturbing
So it's not good for your biochemistry if you eat the stuff (particularly if it's solvated - that is, it exists in a compound soluble in water); I don't know of detailed studies involving its effect on biochemistry - not that it's very feasible or humane to feed the stuff to animals and watch what happens, never mind doing it to human beings.
From a radiological standpoint, depleted uranium is actually not very radioactive. Because of its very long half-life (and being stripped of its far more radioactive daughters - the primary source of natural uranium's radioactivity is the radium in it), the rate of alpha decay from uranium-238 is very slow. That having been said, the danger of alpha emitters is that they deposit their energy in a very concentrated volume around the emitter, because alpha particles don't go very far. Outside the body, an alpha emitter is harmless; I could stand one foot away from a sample of uranium (the alpha particles only travel a centimeter or so in air) and it would be no more harmful to me than an equivalent amount of lead (an alpha particle cannot get through your skin, unless you touch the emitter; then you risk having them deposit their energy into your skin cells and give you a radiation burn).
So the primary danger of uranium is if some of it gets lodged into your body from which it cannot then be removed; usually, the lungs are most in danger here. If you swallow uranium, chances are your body will eventually eliminate it on the same timescale as that for the removal of lead. But if you breathe it, some of it may stay in your lungs essentially permanently. This is the origin of lung cancer in smokers as well, due to the lead-210 (which is radioactive) in the fertilizer being taken up by the tobacco and then breathed in (even with filtered cigarettes some of it can still get in), and lodged into the lungs.