[ RadSafe ] Tungsten Alloy Munitions Pose Unforeseen Threat -NIH research

[John Andrews]

Mercado, Don wrote:

>James Salsman wrote:
>
>"In the _Military Medicine_, vol. 168, no. 8 (2003), pp. 600-605 article I cited a few minutes ago, the authors estimate an inhalation exposure of only about 0.34 mg in five symptomatic ("Gulf War Illness") patients, but I think they assumed a slower lung solubility than is really the case."
>
>5 patients with GWI symptoms sure doesn't seem like a good study pointing to DU causation of anything. 
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>"Each 30 mm round of DU ordnance suspends on average about 60 grams of elemental uranium in the form of various oxides in the air."
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>*Each* round, or those which hit something and burn? Every round that fires doesn't burn, some that do burn are buried in the ground and produce no "inhalable particles", etc. 
>
>
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>"Of the dust particles, about 18% are small enough to be absorbed right away. Some amount of gaseous UO3 vapor is also produced, but nobody knows exactly how much, yet:  more will come from a round burning on a concave surface than a convex surface, for reasons of heat transfer. 30 mm DU ordnance is typically fired at about 20 rounds per second, from an Apache helicopter's gun, for instance.  I have calculated that just two seconds of such firing can result in plumes which might result in multi-milligram inhalation exposures a kilometer away in a 6 km/h wind.  Franz Schönhofer thinks my calculations were wrong somehow, but refuses to say why."
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>I think Franz is right. There's so many holes in this argument, including "nobody knows exactly how much", it isn't funny. It isn't how much that is produced that's the problem, its how much dose is absorbed by a human that's important. And you STILL haven't answered the question of what dose the inhaled particles deliver. "Multi-milligram quantities a km away" mean nothing if there's no concentration figure. Take what multi-milligram quantity and spread it over 20 cubic km and you have nothing. 
>

In addition, in my experience it is very hard to keep uranium 
particulates airborne.  They seem to fall out of the air like rocks.  I 
personally doubt that uranium particulate material is going to be 
transported for 1000 meters in a 6 km/hr breeze.

John Andrews, Knoxville, Tennessee