Re: Can someone explain this to me in fireman talk

[daleboyce@charter.net]

Let me take this one step further without taking sides on cause and effect.



DU penetrates armor not only because it is nearly twice as dense as lead.

Uranium is also pyrophoric. When you shatter it into little pieces

penetrating armor it ignites violently inside the vehicle with the

misfortune to be hit. When you factor in that the kinetic energy of the

projectile gets converted into heat I would predict it is the equivalent of

a high explosive round going off.



The resultant uranium oxide smoke is very likely to be in the respirable

size range. If you convert the inhalation ALI's to grams you get about 50 mg

from ICRP and about three times that from U.S. regs.  That is a lot of

powder to inhale at one time.  Uranium Oxide is most likely inhalation class

Y. If it were D or W chemical toxicity would lead to a lower exposure limit.



That said ALI's are not supposed to lead to any significant probability of

long term health hazard and absolutely no acute health effect due to

radiologic considerations. Ten ALI"s?? threshold of possible long term

health effect.  To get to a dose that would cause acute radiation sickness

we're talking about drowning in uranium dust. As an amusement I calculated

the disintegration rate of a 1 micron uranium particle (I was lazy and

didn't do the oxide since the uranium will be higher than the oxide) to be

1e-6 Bq.



So I will take sides and say it isn't a radiological effect.



Now having done a bit of chemistry with uranium, I know that to get a fairly

coarse powder to dissolve in HCl requires concentrated acid plus heat, and

time. Not the conditions you find in the human lung.  However particle size

can make a difference (and frequently does) in the reactivity (non-nuclear

{8-).



I have never tried to dissolve uranium smoke. I suspect it would be easier.

In the inverse case, if you scrape the oxide coating off a piece of uranium

and take a little metal with it the metal you scrape off will ignite similar

to a Fourth of July sparkler.



The piece of metal will remain shiny briefly, but you can watch it quickly

darken as the surface oxidizes (you get some rainbow effects as the oxide

layer goes through a thickness between 100 and 1000 microns or so).  It then

slows way down on the oxidation, but doesn't stop. A loose oxide coating

will continue to eat away at the metal until it is totally oxidized (unless

you do something to protect it). A big piece may take a very long time for

this to happen.



That said even if the uranium were slowly dissolving in the lung it would be

absorbed, and the kidney would be where you would expect to see a problem.



All this said, I can't rule out chemical toxicity based on what I know. My

gut tells me that it isn't the uranium, but I always preach that you don't

rule out a potential source of a problem until you have found the real

cause, or it is proven beyond a reasonable doubt that it is not the cause.

I find that if there are two possible sources of contamination in a lab, it

is always the one attributable to the other guy ;)



Is there research out there on uranium smoke inhalation? Could it be a

secondary effect such as pH change in the lung?  Unless the pathway

(particle size, chemical form, and route of intake) has been studied

somewhere, we don't know if there isn't something going on that isn't new.



My normal instinct would be to dismiss uranium as the cause.  However a

nuclear medicine physician, whom I respected, contracted an unusual form of

head and neck cancer shortly after serving as a reserve in Gulf One.  Head

and neck tumors benign and otherwise were an early complaint of a relatively

small number of Gulf War vets.  It got washed out by all the other

complaints that came in after the publicity started to gain attention.



He and I discussed the possibility that it was caused by uranium, and I

assured him at the time that I had never heard of anything that would make

me suspect uranium. He died of it almost 5 years after contracting it, and

as is the case in most individual cancers, no cause can be assigned.  If I

hadn't known him, I would have been sure that there was no real Gulf War

Syndrome.



Is there a real GWS? I don't know. In lieu of specific research (including

follow up) we'll never know the cause of the health complaints of our

soldiers coming home, or even if there is anything for which to find a

cause.



All I know is that in the case of the poor sucker sitting inside the tank,

we know the cause.



Dale

daleboyce@charter.net





----- Original Message ----- 

From: "Frank Helk" <frank.helk@nis-hanau.de>

To: "radsafe@list.vanderbilt.edu" <radsafe@list.Vanderbilt.Edu>;

"LNMolino@AOL.COM" <LNMolino@aol.com>

Sent: Wednesday, April 07, 2004 2:38 AM

Subject: Re: Can someone explain this to me in fireman talk





> Hi Louis,

>

> >Can someone explain to me how DU exposure ='s RAD sickness?

>

> OK - I think I can ... and I try to make it short and simple.

>

> Uranium - as it is found in the nature - consists of three nuclides, U234,

U235 and U238, of which only U235 is fissile (=usable for NPPs and bombs),

but

> they're all radioactive. Depleted Uranium has been mostly stripped off the

fissile nuclide. Besides of the radioactivity, uranium is a heavy metal,

roughly as

> chemotoxic as i.e. lead.

>

> If DU is used as ammunition (it can break shieds due to its very high

density), a great share of the bullet is pulverized by the force of the

impact.

>

> If the resulting dust is inhaled, the dust praticles accumulate in the

lung, with the following effects:

>

> - the particles irradiate the lung lissue with alpha radiation, which

could cause lung cancer

>

> - some of the uranium gets dissolved by the body liquids and will travel

mainly to the bones and accumulate there, where it will irradiate the bone

marrow - that

> may result in bone cancer and leukemia.

>

> - the uranium may also cause chemotoxic damage to i.e. the kidneys.

>

> There are therapies that may remove uranium from the blood by binding it

to chemicals that walk easy thru the kidneys.

>

> Best regards

>

> Frank

>

>

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>





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