“Depleted uranium is a highly toxic and radioactive byproduct of the uranium enrichment process needed in nuclear reactors and the manufacture of nuclear weapons.
…
And, according to independent scientists, “a DU antitank round outside its metal casing can emit as much radiation in one hour as 50 chest X-rays.” (5) A tank driver receives a radiation dose of 0.13 rem/hr to his or her head from overhead DU armor (6) which may seem like a very low dose. However, after 32 continuous days, or 64 12-hour days, the amount of radiation a tank driver receives to his head will exceed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s annual standard for public whole-body exposure to man-made sources of radiation.”
-Green Parties World Wide
The first sentence is (intentionally?) ambiguous about DU’s toxicity. They never say that DU is highly radioactive (it isn’t), but it is clearly implied. Plus, enrichment is needed neither for nuclear weapons nor nuclear reactors. A bomb can be made from plutonium, which would be produced from natural uranium in a specialized weapons-production reactor. A civilian reactor may or may not need enriched uranium, depending on the type of reactor. Reactors used in the US and most of the rest of the world do; reactors in Canada (and a few in other places) do not. A connection between uranium bombs (nuclear weapons based on weapons-grade highly-enriched uranium) and American-style reactors (which use low-enriched uranium) is also implied; the only connection is that an enrichment facility that is in use for American-style-reactor fuel production cannot be used for weapons production (i.e., the nuclear power plant poses a negative proliferation risk by requiring that a dual-use facility be used for civilian purposes).
The second statement has a couple of major practical problems. First, DU doesn’t emit x-rays, so a comparison between a piece of DU and an x-ray machine is pointless. X-rays penetrate objects; alpha particles from DU do not–they would be blocked by any one of the following: anything covering the DU plating, four inches of air, the tank driver’s helmet, or the skin on the tank driver’s head. And the allowed whole-body dose to the public is not the occupational allowed dose to part of the body–they’re factoring in children and pregnant women, and the calculation is based on weight of the entire body, not the weight of the head (a given intensity of radiation over the whole body involves much more radiation than that same intensity to only the head). The only way to be harmed by DU is to eat it, and even then, the chemical toxicity is much worse than the insignificant radiation produced.
Filed under Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Conspiracy, Fuel Cycle, Health, Physics, Radiation
Posted on November 26, 2006 by Stewart Peterson | 3 Comments »
