For the effect on health read the long report already mentioned on econology on the effects of radiation by the EU:
page 153 a long chapter on the health effects of depleted uranium to read to understand the official errors that make refuse the real effects of nanoparticles of depleted uranium inhaled !!
European Committee on Irradiation Risk
http://www.euradcom.org/2011/ecrr2010.pdf
Uranium weapons: why all the fuss?
http://www.unidir.ch/pdf/articles/pdf-art2758.pdf
This report does not seem to have been read carefully on econology !!
It is a very underestimated toxic horror that poisons our lives with
an effect 1000 times higher than that officially admitted by nuclear power, physicists who ignore real biology !!
The scientific investigation of DU gives a curious condensed echo of the earlier investigations into the nuclear site child leukemias. This is not surprising given the political consequences of having to concede that the low doses of DU, conventionally assessed, were capable of causing such graphic and appalling genetic effects on populations exposed to the dust. For if this could happen with Uranium, it means that all of the basic equations and assumptions of the risk model are wrong. The matter has been painstakingly researched and reviewed recently by an American academic, Paul Zimmerman whose conclusions, independently gained by an academic, closely agree with the ECRR thesis developed in 2003 and in the present 2010 report (Zimmerman 2008).
It is an interesting fact that the military and the nuclear industry internally take Uranium exposure very seriously as far as handling the material is concerned. Spills, even small ones have to be dealt with, with all the rigors associated with contamination by radioactive material. The same is true for the military, who publish internal documents warning of the health effects. However, as soon as the Uranium is shot from the gun and has contaminated the theater of war, it suddenly becomes benign, in all the reports of the issue, and in the denials of the military and its risk agencies and those of the governments involved.
The effects of exposure to Uranium are not, of course, restricted to DU and passive weapons fallout. Uranium is increasingly contaminating the environment, near nuclear sites, near isotope separation plants, near fuel manufactories, near Uranium mines and in atomic and thermonuclear weapons fission fallout, near and remote from the test sites. Uranium is increasingly found in food and drinking water as it is a significant component of agricultural fertilizer. It is therefore also found near fertilizer factories and phosphate mines and in the transportation of phosphate ore and its agricultural products
The mining of Uranium began at the beginning of the last century. aussi beginning at the same time was a new disease: childhood leukemia, which is believed to result from a mutation in utero. The temporal correlation between the incidence of this disease and the production of Uranium (modeled as Radium) is starting,
Owing to the high density of Uranium, (19 g.cm-3 metal and 10.96 g. Cm-3 for the dioxide) and the fact that the metal is pyrophoric (burns in air) the substance is used in the manufacture of armor piercing shells, missile nose cones and penetrators. It is also employed in certain ballast materials in some aircraft (eg helicopter rotors, commercial aircraft counterweights). As a weapon, on impact, the DU burns to a fine aerosol of ceramic Uranium oxide particles of mean diameters from about 1000nm (down to below 100nm depending on different study results and distances from targets. These particles are long lived in the environment (and in tissue), and can travel significant distances from the point of impact up to thousands of miles (Busby and Morgan 2005). They become resuspended in air, are found in air filters in cars at some distance from the attacks, and are respirable. Because their diameters are so small, below 1000nm, they are able to pass through the lung into the lymphatic system and in principle can lodge anywhere in the body. Here they may remain for several years in the same place. The biological half life of such particle Uranium is unknown but is very long. According to research with animals it can be greater than 13 years (Royal Society 2001).
A single Abrams 120mm tank shell contains about 3kg of DU (111MBq of radioactivity) and there is 275g in a 30mm GAU3A A-10 Thunderbolt Gatling Gun round. These munitions were used in Gulf War 1. More evidence has emerged that hard target warheads have been deployed on cruise missiles and bunker busting bombs, each containing up to one ton of Uranium. Estimates of the quantity of Uranium used in Gulf War 2 in 2003 are as high as 1700 tonnes (Al Ani and Baker 2009).
Military penetrators explode on impact with hard targets with about 80% conversion to micron diameter Uranium Oxide particles of a 'ceramic' nature. These particles are highly mobile and extremely long lived in the environment, owing to the very high degree of insolubility of Uranium Oxides UO2 and U3O8. They can be inhaled and the sub-micron diameter particles are translocated from the lung to the lymphatic system, building up in the tracheobronchial lymph nodes and potentially able to circulate everywhere in the body since they incapacitate macrophages (Kalinich et al. 2002). They can pass through the skin and through most gas-mask filters.
The reason that DU is employed is that the weapons are astoundingly successful and have revolutionized warfare, rendering the tank and its armor useless. In addition, its use represents a route for the nuclear industry to rid itself of a waste product which would otherwise be expensive to dispose of. Aim the downside est que le material Clearly Represents a radiation hazard qui est indiscriminate: battlefields are going to be contaminated and civilian populations are going to be exposed.
U-238 has a very long half life, 4500 million years, so owing to its much shorter half life of 24,100 years, the specific activity of Pu-239 is far greater. It is 2.3TBq / kg. But this means that 350 tons of DU (or 4.30TBq of U-238) is equivalent in activity (quantity of radiation) to about 2 kg of Plutonium-239. The ethical dimensions of the intentional scattering of 2kg of Plutonium-239 over a populated area are easy to imagine.
DESPITE this, there-have beens Virtually no epidemiological studies of populations exposed the carried out to Uranium weapons. The one exception is a study carried out at the request of the Italian military into cancer in the Balkans peacekeepers. The first report showed a significant excess of lymphoma (equivalent to 8-fold) in peacekeepers stationed in Bosnia and Kosovo (Italian report 2001). More recent investigation of the data shows that the cancers were mainly from those who served in Bosnia, making the relative risk more like 14-fold. A recent update on the situation seems to have been kept confidential; reports are that levels of cancer in this cohort are startingly high and checks are being carried out.
Cancer data from Sarajevo in Bosnia has been reported, and show remarkable increases (up to 20-fold) in the incidence at many sites (Hamburg 2003). A cohort study of cervical cancer in Greece concluded that exposure to Uranium aerosols was the cause of a statistically significant increase in the disease those exposed as shown by cervical smear screening results (Papathanasiuo et al 2005). There have also been many reported of high levels of cancer in Iraq following the bombing both in 1991 and later in 2003,
The situation in Iraq has become serious: genotoxicity of Uranium exposures has resulted in a catastrophic increase in cancer and congenital disease.
A case control study of UK Atomic Test Veterans children and grandchildren identified a 9-fold excess of congenital conditions in the children and an 8-fold excess in the grandchildren relative to national controls (Busby and de Messieres 2007). These veterans were exposed mainly to Uranium since their gamma film badge doses were in general known and analysis showed the existence of significant quantities of Uranium on the test sites.
A review of the reproductive toxicity of natural and depleted Uranium by Domingo (2001) concluded that Uranium was a development toxicant when given orally or subcutaneously to mice. Decreased fertility, embryo toxicity, teratogenicity and reduced growth were shown to occur. Paternain et al (1989) had already showed developmental and birth outcome effects in mice at doses as low as 5mg / kg with no zero effect dose. A study of the effects of Uranium on the hatching success, development and survival in early stages of zebrafish (danio rerio) was reported by Bourrachot et al (2008). The authors used levels of depleted Uranium in the water of 200-500g / l (about 3Bql-1) but also employed a higher specific activity Uranium isotope U-233 to examine the effects of what they believed to be chemical rather than radiological stress. Both regimes showed significant developmental effects at the lowest exposures. 250gl-1 showed a 43% reduction in median hatching times relative to a control. A 15 day exposure to this concentration of depleted Uranium gave a 100% mortality at the pro-larval stage. The more radioactive U-233 was more effective, but both isotopes showed the effects at this very low concentration. The radiation doses at which this was occurring are vanishingly small and would not be considered harmful on the basis of current risk models.
It is clear from the results of Lestaeval et al 2005 that at levels where there is no nephrotoxicity, there are measurable changes in behavior in rats exposed to 144g / kg. by injection. Taken together, these studies strongly suggests that Gulf War syndrome is an effect of inhalation of micrograms of Uranium and draws attention to the extraordinary neurotoxicity of the material.
When doses are calculated in terms of absorbed dose following ICRP, the quantities of Uranium usually found in the environment confer very small doses compared with natural background gamma radiation, and even smaller when compared with the levels of dose which correlated with cancer in the A- Bomb groups. But it is clear that this approach is massively in error, since it has avoided or, more accurately, knows nothing about, chemistry, biology, physiology and pharmacology. These sciences were historically considered of less importance than physics and mathematics, in some deeply felt (by the physicists anyway) philosophical and emotional way. This is the flaw in rational analysis: it is only as good as its data, and if, in order to solve a problem, it has to be reduced to the level where a solution can be claimed, the answer is often wrong.
The Committee has had to deal with this very real problem by presenting a real solution; In this case the solution is to weight Uranium exposures by a factor of 1000 at normal background gamma photon levels (100nGy / h). This will be modified when experimental results of Secondary Photoelectron effects become available. It is clear that the effects of Uranium are wide ranging, and so to consider only genetic effects from Uranium exposure would be quite wrong. In addition, different types of exposure will cause different spectra of conditions.
