Questions Answered For Utah’s Radiation Control Board
June 17th, 2009
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Apparently the Utah Radiation Control Board has some questions about Depleted Uranium. Like any government agency, they’ve put together a committee tasked with taking as long as possible to come up with nothing in the way of clear answers. Thus, I’ll cut the whole thing short and give them all the answers they need:
Is depleted uranium too hot for Utah site?
No.
Utah’s Radiation Control Board will dig deeper into the long-term risks of depleted uranium before it decides whether the unusual form of low-level radioactive waste warrants a moratorium.
But an attorney for EnergySolutions Inc. cautioned board members about legal and technical challenges they will face if they try banning depleted uranium temporarily or permanently.
“It’s a fairly high bar” for the board to justify a moratorium, said attorney James Holtkamp.
If you’re looking to ban depleted uranium on the grounds of safety from radiation then the answer is simple: lie. That’s the only way you can get it done. The facts are not on your side thus you simply will have to make untrue statements.
Board members said they would rather have waited for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to wrap up its own in-depth study
Waiting for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission? You will be waiting a long long long time. The NRC has a way of not getting useful things done… ever
how much DU, as its called, can be safely buried in a shallow disposal site like EnergySolutions’ mile-square landfill in Tooele County.
However much will fit
But the that federal review could take years, and DU is already piled up at government nuclear sites and an equal amount is expected from new uranium enrichment plants coming online in the next few years. NRC estimates the total needing disposal at 1.4 million tons, with just two disposal sites available to take it: EnergySolutions and a yet-to-be-opened Texas landfill.
It doesn’t really need disposal. It can just sit there. It doesn’t take up as much space as one might think, because it’s quite heavy. Here’s an idea: why not sell the stuff for use on fork lifts or as an additive to concrete for radiation blocking applications or for other radiation-blocking applications like x-ray tubes or nuclear medicine casks?
DU in small amounts clearly falls within Class A for low-level waste, as the NRC reaffirmed a few months ago. But, because DU transforms over time to high-radon “decay” products, it actually gets more hazardous over time and peaks in danger in 1 million years.
That’s entirely deceptive – shamefully so. Depleted uranium is just uranium to start off with and in natural uranium ores, the majority of emissions are produced by daughter products like radium-226 and lead-210. The long decay cycle means that it will take upwards of one million years for the uranium to reach secular equilibrium, where it has generated all the daughters and has returned to the natural state of decay. Until then, it will be significantly LESS radioactive than the uranium that is currently in the ground.
That’s a problem for regulators.
Do they write a law that ensures the safety of public health and the environment for 100 years? A thousand years? A million?
There is no need to worry about this. There is already uranium in the environment. There always was. There is zero concern to public health. As long as the uranium is not ground up and snorted or dumped into a reservoir it will just sit there and not bother anyone. It’ll probably just be dug up for use in fast reactors eventually anyway.
“First of all, I believe the public should be protected and the environment should be protected,” said board vice chair Elizabeth Goryunova, suggesting that the board had a responsibility to consider the need for a moratorium despite hassles that might be involved in imposing one. “That’s absolutely a must.”
The “responsibility” that has fallen to the board is a pretty light one. It amounts to protecting the public from a relatively immobile, low-toxicity, extremely low activity material that is going to be sitting in a dry area in an approved landfill. As long as nobody breaks in and starts eating the uranium, there’s not much responsibility to protect anyone from anything.
Board members will hear presentations from Energy-Solutions, the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah and its legal advisors at its next meeting.
“I think it behooves us in terms of our responsibility,” said board member David Tripp, a University of Utah physicist.
Vanessa Pierce of HEAL was pleased with the board’s decision to take more time on the subject. HEAL requested the moratorium at the board’s May meeting.
Oh… well then, here come the lies.
“They’re showing good due diligence,” she said, “in how they are proceeding with this issue.”
No. Spending this much time trying to decide how to deal with something as innocuous as depleted uranium is like assembling a committee and spending several decades and several billion dollars mulling the decision of which brand of toothpaste to buy. Yes, dental health is important, but it’s not *that* important, especially considering that all toothpastes do a fairly descent job.
If we certified aircraft this way, the DC-3 would still be waiting for an airworthiness certificate before being allowed to be flown and the wright-flyer would be receiving another “life extension overhaul” to keep it flying while a replacement was being mulled over.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 at 2:14 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Depleted Cranium, Enviornment, Nuclear, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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June 17th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
This is of course totally bogus, apparently the Utah Radiation Control Board is devoid of anyone with even an undergraduate’s grasp of radiation.
If they had, then someone could explain to them that when life began on Earth almost 4 billion years ago, background radiation levels were five times higher than those we experience today. Life adjusted well, as it did to all other forms of energy to which it was exposed – heat, light, electromagnetic. This adjustment took two forms. The first involves the development of the biochemical systems that protect organisms against the noxious effects of ionizing radiation. The second suggests that exposure to low doses of radiation actually stimulates these repair mechanisms that protect organisms from disease and may actually be essential for life.
Life has had billions of years to evolve defenses against free radicals, reactive oxygen compounds and other physical and chemical assaults that can damage cell components, including our genetic material, DNA. It is only logical the those same, defense mechanisms protect us from low levels of ionizing radiation that we all receive from the cosmic rays that strike the earth surface to the radioactive particles continually released from the earth’s crust into the air around us.
It is most telling is that one thing life did not apparently do was to evolve an organ that can detect radiation. This lack of a radiation sense points to the fact that living organisms have no need to detect such a low risk phenomenon. Indeed, ionizing radiation only seems exotic and mysterious to some people because it was not discovered until relatively recently, unlike light and heat say. It is time that we looked more closely at the phenomenon of hormesis. When the evidence is so clear, we should not allow it to be brushed aside by irrational fears driven by ignorance.
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June 17th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Hi Buzz: I’m finally back. Email me and I’ll email back what’s been up.
I just finished reading the nearly 500 page report, “Toxicological Profile for Uranium”, US Department of Health and Human Services, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, Sept. 1999. Given the thoroughness of this document in analyzing all the uranium studies that have been done, I think it is pretty darn definitive. The short, short summary is:
For uranium (U-238) to hurt you, you have to eat a heck of a lot of it in a soluble form (you poop out insoluble forms), or inhale a fair amount of insoluble forms (soluble forms are removed from the lungs fairly quickly and get pooped and peed out). It is more of a chemical hazard than a radiological hazard because of its heavy metal toxicity to the kidneys. However, to put this in perspective, its chemical toxicity is about ten times lower than the toxicity of other heavy metals such as lead and gold. In all the studies that the report reviews, there are no incidences of human deaths from overdose of uranium and in all cases of high human exposure the kidneys went back to normal once the uranium was cleared. Studies for cancer in humans from uranium (and there are lots) are absolutely inconclusive (very weak correlation in the worst case studies). Incidentally, one guy tried to commit suicide with uranium and some other drug – he failed – and what few effects they saw from the uranium were all cleared up within a year.
As a health physicist, I am always impressed with your knowledge of radiation and radioactive materials. All of your points are dead on the money. It should be noted that almost all depleted uranium is in the insoluble form. When buried in the ground, there is no possible way for the material to become airborne, so you can rule out the potential inhalation risk (albeit small). If someone wants to dig it up and eat it, well more power to them – nitwits. As regards the radon issue, a little common sense is in order. Radon’s a gas. IF it seeps out of the burial ground, it is coming up in the middle of a large, empty field. It then gets dispersed into the atmosphere where it rapidly becomes dilute (much, much less potential for harm) and indistinguishable from all the radon that is naturally in the environment.
I always love the argument from the “we have to protect future generations from uranium” crowd. I’d lay ten to one odds that future generations will dig the uranium back up and use it for something else. Maybe their great great great grandchildren will be stupider than they are, but I expect mine to be smarter than me.
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June 17th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
leg said:
It’s the breathtaking hubris of that way of thinking that always gets me. Can you imagine? Its like the Babylonians ‘protecting’ us from some hazard that they made. The shear arrogance of this way of thinking along with the talk of monuments near the dumps that would transmit a feeling of danger to illiterates in the future shows just how far these idiots are from any real grasp of the situation. Plus the attempts to make the Pu unobtainable by various means assumes that we have the right to dictate to future generations what they can or cannot do, an attitude that is ludicrous on its face.
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June 17th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
leg said:
I’ve read some good studies on it. It’s a toxic heavy metal of course, and nobody will deny that it can be something harmful if you get enough of it in your body (which is a challenge). It seems that the kidneys actually have a pretty descent tolerance for uranium. In low doses it doesn’t do much and is passed pretty well. In higher doses (lets say a few grams or more introduced to the body), it causes some damage to the renal tubes, but its temporary and they heal.
The time when it can cause some real problems seems to be associated with chronic exposure to very high levels. If you are exposed to high levels on an ongoing basis it can cause progressive kidney damage (the kidneys never get a chance to heal because they have constant exposure). This has been seen in laboratory animals (which were given absolutely enormous doses) but it is very rare in humans. The only time I think it has been observed was with heavily contaminated groundwater for drinking. This, by the way, was from natural uranium in the form of mineral deposits in an aquifer – of course the presence of radium and other nasty stuff doesn’t help either.
Uranium (in then form of Uranyl Nitrate) was once given as a treatment for mild diabetes, in the early 20th century. Of course, that’s no longer done because there are much better drugs and treatments for it, but the treatment apparently had some benefits. Of course the amounts were fairly low, but it was discovered that uranium salts caused renal glycogen, which, as it turned out, was a useful thing in diabetics because it reduced blood sugar through increasing the excretion rate. I’ve found some articles about this. Apparently the patients who received this treatment lived for some time and found it successful. It may have caused some damage, but compared to diabetes and the lack of good treatments at the time, it was not a bad deal.
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June 17th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Buzz: you are correct and the toxicology document, that I quoted, dissects the studies that you have probably seen. In the groundwater cases, once the people went on bottled water, their renal functions returned to normal and a 35 year followup showed no discernible problems. It’s ironic but the digging of a well allows oxygen to tag up with the uranium in the soil and the compound goes to a soluble state and gets transported in the water. There are other naturally occuring chemicals that also do this that can be a lot more hazardous, so it behooves one to test one’s well water.
DV: Your last paragraph is marvelous re organisms not having a sense organ for ionizing radiation because nature doesn’t see ionizing radiation as a problem (or useful). The argument just got added to my lexicon. Thanks.
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June 18th, 2009 at 12:12 am
The bottom line is that the Linear No Threshold (LNT) model of radiation effects, which is at the root of this nonsense over depleted uranium, is inappropriate and needs to be scrapped. However, for statistical reasons the LNT cannot be falsified and so the precautionary principle is adopted at an unacceptable societal cost. LNT is based on outdated assumptions, which are not supported by findings from years of research.
The so-called “precautionary principle”, which seeks to reduce exposure to ever lower levels and at any cost, has not proved to be “cautionary” at all. It has led to unacceptable penalties The time has come to change the LNT paradigm and to base radiological safety and protection on modern knowledge and the realities of the natural radiation environment.
The consequences of politically correct bad science always are absolutely ghastly. Rachel Carson in Silent Spring persuaded the world that DTT would wipe out birds and decimate nature. She was absolutely wrong, but her pseudo-science was accepted as holy writ. DDT was banned and tens of millions of poor people suffered and died because of her propaganda. Exactly the same thing is occurring with the LNT.
The upshot of the reliance on LNT is that it has created astronomical expenses in the public and private sector attempting to protect the population from dangers that are not really there, severely limited the use of therapeutic radiation treatments and hobbled the development of new ones and it has severely limited the use of radiation to reduce spoilage in food, and to disinfest food shipments of vermin.
But most importantly an unwarranted fear of radiation hazards has limited the development of nuclear energy which in turn has maintained the continued reliance on combustion of carbon fuels for our energy needs and the environmental and human health impacts that follow.
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June 18th, 2009 at 1:23 am
leg said:
In response to someone asking me “What would happen if you ate a chunk of depleted uranium?” I told them that it would likely cause them some unpleasant health problems which would have them purchasing a lot of Preparation-H.
(Uranium is pretty hard and I don’t think it would be very comfortable on the way out)
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June 18th, 2009 at 1:28 am
DV82XL said:
Well, it *can* be dangerous. I mean, if you were sitting next to a half a kilo of cobalt-60 then you’d be dead in short order and there’s no doubt that you wouldn’t want to grind up fresh spent fuel and sprinkle it on your pizza as a topping. The low levels you usually encounter outside extraordinary circumstances are not much to be concerned about though.
I mean there are times when natural radiation can be dangerous (like radium seeping into water supplies or if you lived for many months in a radon-filled cave).
I think that outside some extreme circumstances that it would do you no good to have an organ to sense radiation. This organ would rarely be of any use at all and it is more likely to just be an extra organ to get infected or cancerous and thereby cause more harm than in the extremely rare circumstances when it helps.
But anyways, it’s not like that means anything. High radiation levels can hurt you and high levels of light will blind you and eventually burn you to a crisp. High levels or RF radiation can cook you. That does not mean you need to fear the less extreme variety.
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June 18th, 2009 at 6:51 am
Chem Geek Gregor said:
Professor Bernard Cohen once challenged Ralph Nader that he would eat some plutonium on TV to refute Nader’s claim that plutonium was the most dangerous substance known to man. Since DU is dense enough that it can be used for armor piercing rounds, I imagine you’d probably break your teeth if you tried to chew on it, so the preparation-h probably wont be needed.
This gives me an idea- someone ought to get a hold of some DU, shaped as a swallowable pill shape and take a few with a glass of water and capture it all on video. Present it with a doctor’s exam before and after to show the person’s state of health. If the whole process can be edited into about 8 minutes of video for youtube it just might serve to educate a few people that DU is not hazardous. Lord knows there is already a ton of videos already on the dangers of DU on youtube already so this might counterbalance that propaganda. Such an effort might be labeled as a kind of Jackass-movie type stunt but it seems that a little extremity might be required here to serve an educational purpose.
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June 18th, 2009 at 7:26 am
leg said:
Theres another market for DU. A “safer” alternative to gold jewelery! A necklace of DU, wedding ring… i wonder what anniversary is celebrated with DU?
Or imagine a set of knuckle dusters made of it, with its weight and density the effect versus standard brass or whatever they’re made of would be vastly improved!
I can see a whole market for DU right here. Why bury a few tonnes of it when you can sell it and people can wear it around!
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June 18th, 2009 at 11:37 am
Let’s call Utah’s Radiation Control Board what it is; it’s another bureaucratic boondoggle that produces nothing useful or even truthful while providing inflated salaries and benefits to committee members. Does that express it correctly?
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June 18th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Jerry: I’ve been on the regulatory side and I can tell you it’s a no-win situation – which is why I got out of it in a hurry. 1) you have to be “fair”, despite the fact that the anti-nukes haven’t got a clue about the science or are lying and manipulating people’s ignorance of the science; 2) government employment doesn’t attract folks who are particularly courageous so you don’t see them telling an anti-nuke politician that he/she is full of it – so the charade goes on. The courage really needs to come from our politicians, but we know how often you find a courageous politician. The bureaucrats response to the no-win situation is to committee the issue to death. Unfortunately this means there is no sensible progress, and oft times we go backwards.
Kingbob: Your humor is not lost on me, but just in case someone thinks this might be something to try… uranium as a metal will oxidize and then gets flaky and has the potential for ingestion. It’s like lead this way. Besides, you will have a tough sell as it is not a very pretty metal. However, there are some gorgeous minerals out there with uranium in them, and if I remember, autenite is one of those. I do like the knuckle duster idea – there’s a few folks out there that could benefit from a good pounding. : )
DV hammering the LNT theory and Jason citing Bernie Cohen – too sweet!
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June 18th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
leg said:
I have seen a lot of issues on the reglatory side and part of it comes down to the politics of “protecting” the public. Any kind of streamlining of the process is going to be seen by someone as cutting corners and not protecting the enviornment or public.
Something as simple as saying “you know, we really don’t need three enviornmental reviews for this” is always going to come across as “So you’ve decided not to be as careful about safety, huh???”
The other thing comes down to the whole idea that we have to give everyone their say in things – this sometimes means that they get their say many dozens of times. A committee makes it possible for the public to submit a petition for a second review if they disagree and suddenly they get two hundred petitions. They are bound to treat every one of them as if it were serious and credible.
I went to a hearing recently on the water discharge from a local nuclear plant. This was not a radiation-related or nuclear-related hearing. It was simply a department of enviornmental protection hearing for amending the license for thermal discharge to account for a new system. In my state these hearings are open to the public and members of the public and local organizations have the opportunity to submit letters to the review board or to go on the record and make a comment of two minutes or less for consideration.
When they have these meetings for a sewage treatment plant or a coal burner, nobody really bothers going to make a comment or anything. But when its a nuke plant… oh boy!
Anyway, one thing that set me apparent from some of the local rampant anti-nukes is that when I was told that my comments needed to be kept to the topic (I started by saying I felt it necessary to present some facts involving the credibility of certain parties) I changed the topic. When I was told my two minutes were up I thanked them and sat down. On the other hand, the other side got about 4 minutes by talking so loud and fast they couldn’t be stopped and by saying “But you have to listen! I have a right!” And by doing other rude things. Like one of them came up three times. The second time the mediator said “you already have your chance” and she insisted that the last time she was not speaking as herself, but speaking on be-half of the fish, because they could not speak. Then she said she was speaking as her self, as a private citizen. Then she said that she was speaking on behalf of the community etc etc.
The mediator was obviously irked by this but she tried (in my opinion too hard) to be civil even when the crazy lady was directly attacking her (the board mediator) and saying she was in the pocket of the nuke plant.
So that is what it comes down to: I only got the two minutes and had to limit the context to thermal discharge because I could not bring myself to be that rude.
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June 19th, 2009 at 4:04 am
I think it was here that reported that the NRC decided to classify depleted uranium at the lowest level of radioactive waste (which is reasonable, assuming it is even considered waste at all. Some might say it’s not even worth regulating in that manner). So this seems like the NRC making a fairly good and science-based decission because it’s not like DU is really high level or needs any kind of containment.
Anyways, the fact that they did this lead to the NRC being hauled before a congressional panel and demands for an investigation. (OH THE HORROR! OH THE CHILDREN).
So yeah, in some ways it seems like these agencies have to function poorly and if they don’t, thye get themselves in trouble.
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June 19th, 2009 at 8:31 am
WTF!!! This is Utah. Who cares! use the uranium and even other nuclear waste mixed in building brick and then build more churches which will REALLY have the warm glow about them.
MuaHaHaHahAhahahhahahahah–chough choke ach!
Damn! I’m never going to get my Mad Scientist Degree Until I can get the mad cackle right!!!
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June 19th, 2009 at 9:41 am
CybrgnX said:
You joke about it but all rocks contain traces of uranium. Radiation from the granite used in Grand Central Station exceeds the NRC limits for nuclear-plant operation. Grand Central Station wouldn’t get a license as a nuclear plant.
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June 19th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Why exactly does this need to be disposed of? Ideally it would be great to see depleted uranium used in a fast-spectrum closed cycle with reactors, but I don’t think that’s going to happen for some time because for now, the latest estimates of Great Bear Lake and other deposits make it unlikely that a highly effecient cycle will be a big deal for the next decades.
Eventually, if we get to the point where the world generates most power by nuclear energy then there will probably be no surplus of depleted uranium. In the mean time, since there is so much of it sitting there why can’t it be marketed for something? What about weights? For example, counter weights for elevators are often made of lead and if they were made of DU that would mean they could be smaller (more room in the building design for utilities or elevator space or floor space and less for the shaft containing the counter weight). For that matter: Cranes, forklifts, aircraft weights and so on. I assume it is a regulatory issue that most aircraft made in the last ten years now use tungsten. Wouldn’t DU be cheaper and just as good?
What else? X-ray machine shielding or shielded containers (mentioned above).
Perhaps it could find use as an additive to alloys or something like that. I also know that uranium oxide has a role in high power semiconductors like rectifying diodes.
No point in putting perfectly good metal in the ground if a use for it exists.
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June 19th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Gordon said:
Wasn’t DU phased out for such applications at least in part because it was too difficult to machine?
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June 19th, 2009 at 9:54 pm
George Carty said:
Uranium is a bitch to work with as a material and it also oxidizes very rapidly and that oxide crumbles off. It will burst into flames if machined without proper cooling and it has no strength and will crack just looking at it the wrong way.
Other than the little bit used in semiconductors and some used in catalysts, the only bulk applications are as weights radiation shields, armor and DU rounds. While uranium weights would be a godsend to the forklift industry the regulatory issues make it not worth the effort.
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June 19th, 2009 at 11:44 pm
George Carty said:
It is a bitch to machine. In DU rounds they make machining easier by alloying it with various other metals – depending on the application it may be titanium or molybdenum at about 1% up to 3%. These make it reasonably easy to work with and machine by reducing the brittleness (which can be a big problem)
but it’s still difficult both because of its hardness and the fact that it tends to oxidize. This might be reduced a bit by alloying, but I believe they actually mill the rounds on equipment in an inert gas atmosphere because the turnings that come off of it tend to burn.
So making anything precise out of it or machining the metal to any degree would be a pain. Not impossible, but a pain.
I don’t see why this would be much of a problem for weights or something. If you just wanted a stack of counter weights for a crane or forklift or an elevator they could just be cast bars. Maybe something like blocks with holes to bolt them down with. Just cast as bricks with through-holes in them should be simple enough.
Then just hot dip them or otherwise cover them in a decently durable coating to stop the oxidation problem. Perhaps something like zinc or even a good powder coat or something even.
The depleted uranium is initially in the form of uranium hexaflouride stored in pressurized drums. Disposal or use as a final product requires that it be processed to either a metal or an oxide anyway.
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June 20th, 2009 at 1:18 am
drbuzz0 said:
Where they are used as weights they are most often clad in Al ~1/8″ thick with welded seams. The stuff is very difficult to electroplate on to and paint just won’t cut it as a legal containment in most jurisdictions
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June 20th, 2009 at 6:35 am
Why is their propaganda more effective than our propaganda?
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June 20th, 2009 at 6:54 am
George Carty said:
Simple George, they lie; we don’t
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June 20th, 2009 at 6:58 am
DV82XL said:
Don’t follow – why would people be more likely to believe lies than the truth (unless the liars are saying something that the people who listen to them want to hear anyway)?
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June 20th, 2009 at 7:12 am
George Carty said:
Well in the case at hand it’s not so much a case of what people want to hear as it is what they don’t know. Ignorance begets fear: if one side is saying radiation will kill you, and the other side says it’s OK, and you have no means to weight the truth of each statement, the wisest course of action is to accept the first position. Right or wrong this will guarantee no harm. This of course is the Precautionary Principle. It doesn’t require that you believe ether side, only that you select that side which leads to the safest perceived outcome.
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June 20th, 2009 at 7:18 am
George Carty said:
People listen when you say that something will harm their children. People don’t listen when they hear something is safe. They don’t bother. People also respond visserally to pictures of dead babies and they get scared. If two people say different things about the safety of something then they’ll listen to the worse one.
Let me ask you: If you saw a bridge and one person said to you it was safe to walk across and another said it was about to collapse and walking across would probably kill you, who would you listen to? Would you walk across it? Me, I’d probably think it wasn’t worth the risk if I didn’t have added info to judge who was right.
Sensationalism sells is one thing. You don’t make much money selling news stories about the thousands of planes that landed safely yesterday but you do about crashes.
There are also a lot of people who like an issue like this because by lying they can make themselves the hero and say they are standing up for the people being harmed etc. Then there’s the politics of this. Depleted uranium is the horrible crime of (INSERT NAME OF UNPOPULAR POLITICIAN). I mean we all know George Bush has a pretty bad backlash and Tony Blair and the whole war in Iraq buisiness is something that a lot of people take issue with. So ride the wave of those who think Bush is the devil and make DU part of it. People love that stuff.
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June 20th, 2009 at 7:49 am
DV82XL said:
Instead of saying “Simple George, they lie; we don’t”, you should have said this in the first place – “‘Coz they’ve got the Precautionary Principle on their side”.
Fear makes you stupid – that’s its evolutionary purpose after all. What can be done about the epidemic of fear-based politics (which almost all political factions in the present time seem to be guilty of in one way or another)?
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June 20th, 2009 at 10:17 am
NOT TOO HOT FOR UTAH? Maybe you should ask the servicemen coming back from Iraq or even better the Iraqi people about this and how they feel about the safety. Depleted uranium has been linked to cancer, birth defects and all kinds of illness and the big problem is that it has shown it is impossible to clean up so they will be paying for this for years to come. Bosnia has already suffered badly because we did not realize the concequences (or maybe we did and didn’t care, but I hope that is not the case.) So too Afgahnistan and also there has been found to be DU contamination in Hawaii and other places.
I understand we need to put this stuff somewhere where it will not hurt anyone and that’s the big problem. Maybe Utah will be the place for it. Whereever it is it needs to be very well sealed and protected and that is a huge issue that needs to be planned out.
There have been many news reports on how dangerous this has been and I believe the military should ban it for humanitarian reasons, but that does not mean we will not still have the horrible waste to contend with which is going to need to be protected for basically the rest of history. Maybe in years to come our great grandchildren will be able to dig it up and blast it into space or something where it can’t hurt anybody but for now I don’t think there’s any doubt that it needs to be sealed up and put somewhere safe.
I do not know if DU is linked to Gulf War Syndrom, but I saw something on 60 minutes about this and it looks like there might be some worse syndroms for the people who handled it directly, and even worse, some of them came home and had kids and their children are in very bad shape even if their parents seemed healthy at the time they were born. Basically they said that the crews who used depleted uranium had different symptoms and much worse ones than everyone else and also, of course, huge cancer risk. There is a city in Iraq where they used a lot of depleted uranium in the 1991 war and they went back to investigate and found that years later the health of everyone had been destroyed.
Please research this a bit before making these statements. It was stated on 60 minutes that all the experts believed DU would be safe before hand and they said stuff similar to this but they had to change their tune when they started seeing so many dying from mysterious diseases with no other explanation.
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June 20th, 2009 at 11:16 am
Juno77 said:
Hi Juno77.
Actually, drbuzz0 has researched the subject of DU and its effects quite extensively. You might want to check out the following links and associated comment threads:
http://depletedcranium.com/?p=358
http://depletedcranium.com/?p=453
Once you have checked those out, you may wish to reconsider your stance. Or maybe not, but we will see.
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June 20th, 2009 at 11:48 am
Juno77 said:
I am in sharp disagreement with Buzz on the subject of US foreign policy — in fact, one reason why I support a vast expansion in nuclear reactor capacity is in order to make synthetic fuels that will eliminate the West’s need for Middle East oil (and therefore, the West’s need to meddle in the Middle East).
However, I don’t think the cancers in Iraq are down to DU (after all, it’s only minimally radioactive). More likely IMHO are:
1. Air pollution from Kuwaiti oil wells torched by Saddam’s troops in 1991.
2. Unsafe disposal of Iraqi chemical weaponry during the 1990s.
3. Devastation of the Iraqi health sector by UN and US sanctions.
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June 20th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
George Carty said:
I have some disagreements on that side (and don’t get me wrong I’m not in total agreement with US foreign policy either, but I think you and I disagree on what is wrong with it and how). However, I am in complete agreement that nuclear energy and the use of energy carriers like synthetic fuels would be a great way to end the dependence on the Middle East.
More than anything else, I wish the US, Europe and other industrial areas could just wash our hands of the Middle East and stop giving them riches and various concessions for their oil. I believe if Saudi Arabia didn’t have oil, the world would treat it like they do North Korea because of its atrocious policies on human rights, justice and regional politics.
I would love to see the West build enough reactors to produce energy for synthetic fuel production as well as enhanced extraction of non-conventional oil (of which we have quite a lot, but it takes a great deal of energy to extract and refine)
George Carty said:
Add to that the policies of Saddam Hussein himself. This can be seen very distinctly in Basra. Basra is often put forward as an example of DU creating birth defects. Depleted Uranium was heavily used in the region because that was where Saddam had his big armor amassed during the first Gulf War in 1990.
Birth defects in Basra went up dramatically in 1998 and into 1999, but what is interesting is that they spiked on that year but didn’t rise appreciably any years before that. Even if there were a delayed response, one would not expect them to suddenly rise like that. It would tend to rise more as a bell-curve of the delayed response. IE: There would be a modest rise in 1996, a larger one in 1997 and then an even larger one in 1998.
But why the jump? If you look at the events of the time it becomes obvious that the reason was not depleted uranium at all and is quite obvious.
Basra was outside the Sunni area and as such never was really given much even during the best times in Iraq. There had been some anti-Bathe Party uprisings in the area in years past and it was not regarded as one of the more loyal or stable areas. In late 1998 and climaxing in January 1999 there was an uprising in which some local leaders and clerics openly rebelled and challenged the Iraqi government.
The response to this was that the uprising was squashed pretty quickly and Saddam Hussein ordered the destruction of many of the important facilities that the city still had (which were not very good to begin with). From that point on all basic utilities and services were cut and the area was basically treated not much better than the Kurds and in some cases worse. Thus from 1998 on the area largely had no electricity, had almost no food, had zero money spent on medical care, had almost no functional sewers, (even gravity-driven sewage drains were blown up or non-functional).
The cause here should be obvious. That kind of reduction in living standard, medical care, nutrition, health and other related factors is going to have a very dramatic effect on birth defects.
Info:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/32/Basrah_birth_defects.svg/385px-Basrah_birth_defects.svg.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basrah#1999:_Second_revolt
Given the context of the discontent of 1998-1999 and the deliberate neglect from 1999-2003, the contention that the increase in birth defects is the result of depleted uranium from the 1991 war is absurd. Yet this is constantly used as ‘evidence’
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June 20th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
drbuzz0 said:
I don’t believe the Saudi regime would last very long if the West didn’t support it. Saudi Arabia is not a truly totalitarian state like North Korea, nor does it have the nationalist legitimacy of North Korea, whose first leader Kim Il Sung is portrayed as a hero of the Korean resistance to Japanese occupation (compare with South Korea, which is now a democracy but which in the ’50s was a US puppet state with a government full of men who had collaborated with the Japs).
drbuzz0 said:
Thanks for that – I didn’t know that most of the supposed “DU victims” were in the Shi’a areas…
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June 20th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
George Carty said:
Open ended questions like: “Why is their propaganda more effective than our propaganda?” get open ended answers
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June 21st, 2009 at 2:54 am
George Carty said:
Assymetries.
Lies are simple, facts are complex.
It doesn’t take many people to obstruct(e.g. precautionary principle) but it takes broad consensus to marginalize them.
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June 21st, 2009 at 7:39 pm
Okay, I am not an expert on this (but I everyone can’t be an expert on everything) but I still know what I have seen and heard from a lot of good sources which all say either one of two things that they are certain that depleted uranium causes extreme health problems or that they aren’t sure but that it probably caused at least some and the ones who are saying this are not all ones you can say are fanatical nuts and hippies.
I see it on reputable news shows which did a piece on DU that was very compelling and showed a lot of issues. I think it was 60 minutes that did a show on it but it might be another. Also news reports about how they have found bad contamination and need to clean it up and always make it clear it is dangerous. Plus, also there are politicians who are concerned. I know politicians are not always honest, but some who support the military and even support war with Iraq now turn around and say we need med tests for troops exposed to DU.
Plus, what about veterans groups because I know some are against it. Also, there are experts who even worked for the army and other researchers. Also doctors in Iraq and service people and people who did work in Bosnia and some of them are not even American and they all say the same thing about this.
You can just do a Google search. I don’t know why it should all be ignored when there seem to be so many who say the same thing.
(Please don’t be rude in responding. I know this is a matter of disagreement but I won’t even bother listening or reading any rude response)
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June 21st, 2009 at 7:51 pm
Juno77 said:
Depleted uranium first emerged as a social, political, and scientific issue after the 1991 Gulf War. The decline of rational discourse about DU can be traced to the 1999 Kosovo conflict. At that time, the DU issue took on a more overtly political role. The Yugoslav government under Sloboban Milosevic suggested the use of DU in the Balkans would have genocidal effects, and when the U.S. government refused to release information about its use of DU following the war, activists and propagandists alike suggested that the United States was responsible for causing widespread and severe effects from its use of DU munitions. Saddam Hussein similarly blamed the United States (and DU) for a sharp increase in cancers and birth defects, and Yasser Arafat joined the chorus by accusing Israel of using DU in Palestinian territories. In the years since 1999, politicians, propagandists, and activists have intoxicated each other with heart-wrenching but extremely misleading and unsubstantiated claims about the effects of DU munitions, radicalizing the issue in a way that has had a chilling effect upon serious debate.
Ironically, U.S. propaganda fueled the uncertainty surrounding the effects of DU munitions on Iraqis, which in turn facilitated the Saddam Hussein regime’s own propaganda. A policy of “proponency” to prevent DU munitions from becoming “politically unacceptable” was recommended shortly as the war ended, and in the subsequent years, Pentagon spokesmen dismissed concerns about DU munitions in the same breath as they overstated its success in defeating the Iraqi tank corps. The hype helped create the impression that the battlefield was far more contaminated by DU dust than it probably was, thereby enabling the Iraqi government to effectively exploit an reported rise in cancers and birth defects by blaming the effects on DU munitions and, more importantly, the United States.
The scientific debate is now bogged down in confusion over the extent and severity of DU exposures, but many of the statements made by extremists have become a muddled mixture of verifiable facts, speculative assertions, and politically motivated falsehoods.
Prior to the use of DU munitions in combat, large quantities – probably on the order of thousands of tons of DU – were shot at testing ranges in the United States, United Kingdom, and as well as in the former Soviet Union and other countries. In addition to the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel, it is possible and even probable that other countries or armed forces have used DU munitions in combat. Some anti-DU activists have claimed the quantities of DU shot by U.S. forces are orders of magnitude higher than the figures released by militaries and governments. While such deception is not outside the realm of possibility, the figures released by some activists, such as the claim that the U.S. released 900,000 kg (2,000,000 lbs) of DU in Afghanistan, lack any supporting data, and in some cases are complete fabrications.
Some activists also started to advance claims based more on assertion than proof. These activists, including some with science backgrounds, started to exploit the scientific uncertainties and decry DU as a “crime against God and humanity.” Cults of personality formed around activists who spread a dire gospel based on a blend of fact and fiction as they marched forward, ever forward, in a messianic haze. A new crop of self-proclaimed DU experts emerged in the wake of the Kosovo conflict exploiting the DU issue to raise money for their organizations, and others pointed to DU as a manifestation of the evils of the United States and NATO. Some of these new activists joined forces with more seasoned experts to claim not only proof of widespread and severe effects from DU, but also to assert that these effects were an intentional consequence of the U.S.use of DU munitions. A few marginal scientists marred their professional reputations by becoming scientist-activists who made claims and interpreted data to create misleading and intellectually dishonest assessments of DU’s actual and potential effects.
The fantastic claims of well-known activists have grown progressively more extreme since 1999. Without any credible health or environmental studies in post-war Iraq on DU, activists have claimed the effects are comparable to those of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion. Some prominent activists have claimed that not only has the use of DU already caused genocidal effects in Iraq, but that the US uses DU munitions to intentionally inflict genocide on populations. In some cases, one lie leads to another, such as when one activist asserted – without supporting data – that U.S. missiles and bombs contain large quantities of DU, and then a publicity-seeking, fund-raising organization calling itself the Uranium Medical Research Centre used this claim to advance its own unsupported assertion that the U.S. had spread uranium contamination across Afghanistan, resulting in severe health effects. The prize for the most outlandish claim about DU to date goes to activist Leuren Moret. Moret, who works closely with Doug Rokke and other anti-DU extremists, has uttered some of the most bizarre and uninformed statements about DU, including the following statement made in February 2004:
Anyone within 1,000 miles of Iraq; anyone within 1,000 miles of Afghanistan is potentially contaminated now. It’s not just the people [living] in the country Anyone going to Iraq or Afghanistan now will become contaminated. There’s no way to escape it.
Such certainty is the hallmark of the DU extremists. However, Moret’s most distinctive and substantial contribution to the decline of rational discourse about the effects of DU is her claim that the use of DU munitions has resulted in atmospheric pollution by radioactive dust equal to the detonation of 400,000 Nagasaki bombs. Of course, there are differences of opinion even among the most irrational and uninformed extremists another activist says the use of DU is equal to only 250,000 Nagasaki bombs.
When moderate activists raised concerns about the accuracy of the increasingly alarmist claims about DU, they became the target of character assassination campaigns. In fact, the debate over DU has declined to the point where the simple act of questioning a claim made by Doug Rokke, Asaf Durakovic, or other prominent activists is labeled a heresy by a small jury of vocal extremists who operate mainly through the Internet. Rational discourse about the use and effects of DU munitions has become increasingly difficult and rare.
As far as the people suffering from the health effects of being in combat, it would seem to me that it would be very, very hard to isolate exposure to any one material from the hazmat background in an active theater; such places are not exactly OSHA compliant to begin with.
There are many environmental hazards caused by modern munitions, singling out DU is a bit of a red herring that is leveraging peoples fear of all things nuclear. This stuff has been use in ordnance since 1958, but it wasn’t till two tin-pot dictators tried using the issue to discredit NATO in general and the U.S. in particular that anyone noticed it. Never mind Iraq, why haven’t epidemiological studies been done to the populations near test ranges in the U.S., the U.K. and France? Why would anyone want to run a study under conditions where the confounding variables will make any conclusion scientifically suspect?
Now you Know
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June 21st, 2009 at 10:16 pm
Juno77 said:
60 minutes is not what it used to be (assuming it ever was), but the show has been around for a long time and apparently was very well respected as a television news outlet in the 1960’s. CBS news in general has gone to hell and I could point out many examples of 60 minutes being very sensational and alarmist and just plain wrong.
They have a way of coming off as serious and credible when their actual stories are not. DU is the kind of thing that appeals to political
feelings, to conspiracy theories, to fear in general, to the boogie man of radiation and so on. This is all stuff that gets viewers.
I’m not saying ABC or NBC news are perfect or that they don’t have their share of sensational crap, but in my opinion CBS news is the worst of the big three broadcasters in the US.
DV82XL said:
There is reason for this. One of the big issues throughout the Cold War and something to which a great deal of R&D went into was the possibility of an armored conflict in Europe and there is still a lot of interest in the tactics and technology involved with US forces clashing with Russian made tanks and armor. The exact capabilities of US armor and US anti-armor systems are a fairly sensitive subject and the Pentagon would prefer that the world is left guessing and with nebulous information on this side. Clearly you can’t keep it all seceret because there will always be slugs left on the battlefield after.
They would prefer that the exact extent of KE penitrators versus other rounds not be totally clear. How you build your armor to survive attack depends on what kind of weapon you expect to go up against. It would be preferable for an enemy to not be entirely sure what situations you use what kind of weapon in.
Also, we’d prefer not to have these kind of rounds copied and used against us. There is difficulty in producing DU rounds due to the problems machining the stuff. Special alloys and methods have been developed over the years and the US military would rather keep these all on the down low.
By the way: A lot of other countries are even less forthcoming. It’s well known that France and Russia both produce depleted uranium-based weaponry but neither will acknowledge this. It’s also well known that the stuff is in the inventory of every NATO country and also Japan, South Korea and others who have bought US hardware for military purposes.
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June 21st, 2009 at 11:52 pm
drbuzz0 said:
I wasn’t criticizing the US, I was only showing one of the reasons this got out of hand. I’m not even sure that the official silence was a major reason but it did lend a cachet of ‘government cover-up’ to the affair that the anti-DU types were able to spin to their advantage.
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June 22nd, 2009 at 12:06 am
DV82XL said:
Understood, but I’m just a bit pissy about the whole issue of it because it’s been turned into the “US Genocide” or occasionally “US UK Genocide” and this idea that it is unique and unusual.
The fact is the stuff is neither new nor exclusive to the US. DU has been used in various munitions for decades and all the major militaries of the world use it to one degree or another. The physical properties of it are simply very useful in this capacity.
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June 22nd, 2009 at 1:02 pm
By the way… sorry if I come off as pissy or sensative about anti-Americanism in the whole DU thing. I don’t mean to be a hypocrate because I can certainly dish it out to other countries when it comes to bad policies that have disiasterous results and I’m the first to admit that the US has many of these. However, I get an average of two to three emails per day ranting about how the US is the great evil of the world because of depleted uranium.
Stuff like
“******* AMERICA!!!!! ***** You, you ***’ing *******. Your *****ing depleted uranium has ******ed the world and caused such ****** suffering. US = WORST GENOCIDE EVER. WORSE THAN HITLER AND YOU ARE JUST *****ing helping the ***** kill *****ing babies. I attached a bunch of photos of what depleted uranium does to people so you can ***ing see. Look what you and your country has done to these kids! I hope you ***ing die and then I will ***ing take a ***** on your grave, you dirty ***”
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June 22nd, 2009 at 1:03 pm
(the stars = expletives)
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June 22nd, 2009 at 4:19 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Holy moly!
You know I don’t agree with your neoconnish foreign policy views, but I think I can at least see where you’re coming from, given that.
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June 24th, 2009 at 3:30 am
As one who spent the better part of 30 years working at the Idaho National Laboratory site, I must say I was amused by the rad hysteria I found upon moving to the Salt Lake City area a few years ago. There was a bit of that up in Idaho, but it was mainly confined to the pages of the Idaho Falls Post Register, and to the Snake River Alliance from which the majority of quotes on the subject were solicited.
In my new home, however, the downwinder situation combined with an almost complete lack of local people with any radiation background (pun intended) has resulted in a population which has been completely bamboozled into a state of abject terror where anything radioactive is concerned. I would write to the Salt Lake Tribune (“Tribulation”?) about the amount of fully equilibrated uranium+daughter tonnage in the soil between here and the Energy Solutions site, but given their maximum of one letter per month policy, any letter I might write would be followed up by 29 letters of (specious) rebuttal from all and sundry, as I found when attempting to explain the virtues of the Integral Fast Reactor in that venue once upon a time.
So thanks for trying to shed a little light on the subject in your blog.
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