March 13, 2006

It is a dangerous world - not just because of what people might like to do, and actually try to do to us, but the residues that result from when they DO those nasty things to us or each other. And we all expect the worst from government (after all, when have they disappointed us?), so we don’t take much persuading to believe that once more, government has done something stupid, even insane, then both proclaim it and worry about it. Examples abound.

But sometimes, just some times, it really isn’t as bad as it appears, or as bad as people what to make it out to be. And sometimes, when a threat turns out to be fake, it also seems to have consumed an inordinate amount of time and attention and distracted people from more serious dangers and issues. A very old example of that is the “FCC- Madelyn Murray O’Hare” letter that has been circulating since at least the early 1970s if not earlier, first by snail mail (remember 22 cent stamps?) and then (and still!) by e-mail: it cites a phony FCC docket number that purports to be an attempt by Mrs. O’Hare to remove all religious broadcasting from the airwaves. Tens of thousands of man-hours and dollars have been spent responding to this bogus attempt, and in FCC time to respond - taxpayer dollars as well as private time and money. Mrs. O’Hare did some nasty things before her confederates murdered her, but this wasn’t one of them - and in the meantime, Hollywood has used trash to dominate and corrupt our culture in far worse ways than prohibiting televangelists on Sunday mornings.

Other people will recall millions of dollars wasted on the Alar pesticide scare about apples, or the billions spent on needless cleanups of non-friable asbestos. And in the case of needless, indefensible wars, we can recall just a few short months ago “activists” were busy spreading the bogus “news” that the government was concealing the deaths of thousands more Americans than were being reported as dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, discrediting the opposition and distracting people from other, true issues. Americans are not alone in this: the world is awash in rumors and false claims about everything from how poor Indian and Thai children are stolen off the streets to be butchered for their organs for Americans (“rich” Americans, but then to the Third World, are not ALL Americans “rich?”), to how HIV was created by American governments (or businesses) to kill off all the Africans so we can steal their resources; to how wealthy Jews fatten Gentile babies in Ukraine or Belarus for their suppers. And let us NOT get started talking about why periodically stickers appear on gas pumps ordering (“State Law Prohibits…”) us to turn off our cell phones while pumping gasoline, lest we be immolated.

Such is the case with the continuing false horror stories being spread about an unusual material named “depleted uranium.” Expecting the worst from our government, those who pass on tales about how “DU” has poisoned the Middle East and the Balkans, how American soldiers are coming back with dreaded diseases as a result, and how future generations will be mutant monsters as a result. In the meantime, more real and serious problems face returning soldiers AND civilians trying to survive in a former war zone are overlooked, ignored, or shoved to one side.

The claims about DU have resurfaced regularly about once every five years or so: they first cropped up after Desert Shield/Desert Storm in the early 1990s, and again during the fighting in Kosovo in the mid-nineties. Fielding of some new weapons systems and closure of bases in Germany and Stateside seemed to have revived interest in them as the Y2K furor settled down; now, after nearly three years in Iraq occupation and four in Afghanistan, we once more hear about how the US government is poisoning our own troops and contaminating generations of Afghani peasants and herders and Iraqi Marsh Arabs and farmers.

Because Uranium is associated with, (gasp!) nuclear bombs (see: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Nuclear Winter, End of Civilization, panic, hyper-screaming hysteria, etc.) and (double gasp!) nuclear reactors (see: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Los Alamos, deep-fried crispy babies, etc.), most people are irrational and have a superstitious fear of the stuff. This sadly seems to be especially true of liberal arts majors and juris “doctors” (i.e., lawyers).

To understand the claims and get past the hysteria and gossip, we need a very basic chemistry and physics lesson. Many years ago, back in the early 1990s, in fact, after the ’91 Gulf War, I did some research about DU. Here are some basic facts about this material:

Uranium, like other elements, has several different isotopes, six to be exact, and not all of them are radioactive. In fact, the most common, U-238, is NOT radioactive. For nuclear work, the desired isotopes are the radioactive ones, particularly U-233 and U-235. The ratio of U-235 to U238 in natural uranium is 1 atom of U-235 to 140 atoms of U-238.

Yes, uranium is a naturally-occurring element, found all over the world but like most metals, found in more concentrated form (ore bodies or veins) in just a few places. Also like most metals, it is not found free (in pure form) in nature, but in compounds with oxygen and other elements. In the US, that includes the well-known pitchblende ores of North Carolina, Colorado, Utah, and South Dakota, but also includes phosphate deposits in Florida and other Gulf Coast states. The ore must be processed to obtain the metal, or a workable compound (like uranium hexafluoride or tetrafluoride), then the uranium is “enriched” to capture and use the U-235 and U-233 in as pure a form as possible, for use in nuclear reactors or nuclear explosives.

“Depleted Uranium” is so called because it is what remains after the more useable (and radioactive) isotopes of uranium are removed in the enrichment process. DU is far less radioactive than normal, natural uranium ores, and emits primarily alpha and beta, not the more penetrating gamma rays. The only reason it is radioactive at all (and at a level comparable to lead or other heavy metals) is because the enrichment process is not 100% efficient. However, the percentage of radioactive atoms of uranium (and related metals) is reduced from about 1% to about 0.01%, a factor of 100 times less.

DU is not just used for military applications: it also has many civilian applications, especially as aircraft and ship counterweights, and ironically, as radiation shields in medical radiation therapy machines. Uranium itself, whether depleted or not, has many commercial and artistic uses, including being used as a pigment in ceramics and glass (very pretty glass, too) and (fine-art) paints. It is also alloyed with iron to make ferrouranium, which is very useful in making special steels, and is an industrially-useful deoxidizer and denitrogenizer.

DU is useful in many of these applications for very good reasons: it is very dense (heavy for its volume), easily worked (much like iron), and for use in shells, will burst into flame under the right (i.e., high enough temperature and pressure) conditions, creating still hotter conditions. (You don’t have to worry about that pretty uranium-yellow glass suddenly bursting into flame or melting down on its own, any more than you have to worry about being made sterile by it (unless the broken edge of the glass is used to do nasty things to your body).

DU, like all uranium and most heavy elements (such as lead), IS chemically toxic, but is also rapidly excreted (98% within days) if ingested or inhaled. The only people in which urine levels remained high even after massive exposure were those who actually had fragments embedded in their bodies, and even in those cases, the various symptoms claimed were very rare. The major impacts are to the kidneys (as with any heavy metal) and for inhaled DU, the lungs (again, similar to any heavy metal or silica).

Obviously, as with any substance (consider peanuts!), there are some people that are far far more sensitive to a given chemical than the general population; but as a whole, DU seems to be less of a threat than lead.

My conclusion back in the early '90's was that this was a "threat" and "crisis" on about the same level as asbestos, urea foam insulation, radon, and maybe hanta virus: certainly a real threat in some very specific and extremely limited circumstances, but blown completely out of all proportion by panic reactions and for people seeking to exploit it for other reasons.

With DU, this is made worse by the irrational fear people have of "nukes" in general - clearly since DU is produced by the same processes that produce nuclear fuel. It MUST be evil, deadly, and Satanic. I haven't read anything that would change my view since then, although there certainly might be some more. As a battlefield hazard, either to the troops (on either side) or to the civilians who have to go back to work and live in the battlefields, I rated it as less than the threat that French farmers face every Spring when they plow their fields - from 85 year old gas and HE shells buried in those fields since the bloody and fruitless battles of the Great War (WW1 of 1914-1918).

Of course, I'm not the normal person. I've worked as an engineer and construction manager in northern Germany and Benelux, and we got used to digging up the odd 500, 1000 or even 5000 lb bomb, plus the occasional Messerschmidt aircraft, still mostly intact 40 years later. I've seen the ancient shells and canisters left alongside the road next to fields in France and Belgium by farmers plowing their fields, for the Ordnance Corps johnnies to come by and gather up. I've cleaned old industrial chemicals out of cells on Alcatraz Island and from pre-WW1 ammo bunkers and fortifications within throwing distance of the Golden Gate Bridge. And I've cleaned out high school lab storage closets (now THERE is something that scares me!) and other messes left by civilians and by government-brain-trusts from the local district to federal level.

But the result of my research seems to be borne out by serious research conducted in the last 15 or so years, as well. To compare DU to the mess the Soviets caused at Chernobyl, or even to our much-ballyhooed nuclear waste problem here in the US (and the rest of the world) is to completely overreact. People who lived downwind from aboveground nuclear testing in New Mexico, Nevada, and out in the Pacific may be at risk from exposure to radiation in dust sources, as even might the people who work in the processing plants or mine the original uranium ore out of the ground in Colorado, South Dakota, or elsewhere - a risk which, though small, is thousands of times greater than the risk offered by DU to soldiers or even to the targets of those soldiers, to say nothing of the civilians living and working in the battlefields. The farmers of France and Belgium, 85 years later, are at far greater risk. No, the real dangers facing our soldiers, their soldier, and the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, and elsewhere are far different, and far more deadly.

DU can pose a serious problem, for some people, in some very specific and fairly rare cases, but for the vast majority of us, such “common” threats as unexploded shells, landmines, damaged rifle cartridges, thugs, petroleum contaminated soil, normal particulate and silica air pollution, polluted water, etc., are much, much worse. The more we waste our time moaning and protesting and whimpering about DU and other imaginary hazards from war, the less time will be available to work on the real hazards.

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