[ RadSafe ] Tungsten Alloy Munitions Pose Unforeseen Threat -NIHresearch

[Mercado, Don]

James Salsman wrote:

"Right, each round has about 280 grams of metallic uranium, so based on
the percentage that burn when fired at a hard target"

Do you mean "fired at a hard target" or "striking a hard target"? Simply
bec a round is fired from a gun doesn't mean it burns. How did you
figure the percentage that burn?


"Even if you ignore uranium trioxide, which everyone except Salbu et al.
last year has, then you still get multimiligram resperable quantities of
U3O8 and UO2 dust at least 1200 meters downwind, even in a fairly strong
wind:  Mitsakou, et al., "Modeling the Dispersion of Depleted Uranium
Aerosol," Health Physics, vol. 84, no. 4 (2003), pp. 538-544:
http://www.bovik.org/du/aerosol.pdf"

I'm not sure where the "multimilligram respirable quantities" you are
talking about come from, but if you look at Figure 3 of the report,
they're talking about <1 X 10E-6 Bq/m^2 for even the closest distances
from the fire. The studues they quote on particle sizes indicate fires
cause particles between 1 and 10 microns. No mention of "nanoparticles".