Reuters: US to send depleted-uranium munitions to Ukraine
Source: Yahoo! News
Fri, September 1, 2023 at 7:21 PM EDT
In a significant development, the Biden administration is preparing to ship armor-piercing munitions containing depleted uranium to Ukraine, marking the first time such weaponry will be sent to the country. This information was revealed in a document seen by Reuters and independently confirmed by two U.S. officials.
Depleted uranium is a by-product of uranium enrichment. It is roughly two and a half times denser than steel, which makes it particularly effective for piercing heavy armor on the battlefield.
These specialized rounds, designed to effectively combat Russian tanks, form a key component of a forthcoming military aid package for Ukraine, scheduled to be officially announced within the next week. The coming aid package will be worth between $240 million and $375 million depending on what is included.
The munitions are compatible with U.S. Abrams tanks, which are anticipated to be delivered to Ukraine shortly, according to the source.
Read more: https://news.yahoo.com/reuters-us-send-depleted-uranium-232150639.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
I have a rather long post in preparation here on the subject of environmental uranium that sites, at this point, about 20 or 30 scientific papers. It is mostly concerned with a process to remove natural uranium from groundwater and fertilizers, where it is relatively common, the latter because of the high affinity of uranium for phosphate species.
I am saving it for DU4's appearance, since it refers to scientific papers and scientific units and DU4 will feature. once again as earlier versions of DU, the use of exponents.
In my files I have thousands of papers on the actinides, including uranium, papers I've been collecting for decades. They are not papers by social scientists, but in general, physical scientists and molecular biologists. Now it is true that most of the thousands of papers I have on the subject of the actinides and uranium concern their use as nuclear fuels, and are about saving the world from the fear and ignorance that is driving climate change and has left the world in flames, and not about uranium health fetishes.
A subset of these papers are on uranium physiology, generally connected with the role of U(VI) as a Fenton type oxidant inducing free radicals. The toxicology is generally chemical (not radiological) in nature, and shows up primarily as a nephrotoxic toxic species. Uranium is a relatively common element, as common as tin. It is, in fact, a toxic element, as is well known, but all toxic elements in the periodic table require two things to exhibit toxicity, absorption and mobility. This would include the mercury and lead that is routinely dumped into the planetary atmosphere by coal plants because of idiot fetishes about uranium, among other things, have constrained the use of nuclear energy. I note that depleted uranium is much less radioactive than natural uranium found in groundwater in places like Texas and Kansas on the Ogalala aquifer. Natural uranium, as uranium, in disequilibrium with its decay products, has a specific activity of about 1 microcurie per gram. Depleted uranium is about half of that, and on the order of the radioactivity associated with natural potassium, an essential element.
The mobile state of uranium is generally U(VI), whereas the metal when it "rusts" is generally in the insoluble state U(IV).
The reactions that take place in metallic uranium are these:
Stephanie Handley-Sidhu, Miranda J. Keith-Roach, Jonathan R. Lloyd, David J. Vaughan, A review of the environmental corrosion, fate and bioavailability of munitions grade depleted uranium, Science of The Total Environment, Volume 408, Issue 23, 2010.
Only reaction 5 results in mobile uranium, and then at low levels, since while the U(VI) divalent cation is soluble, it is only sparingly so.
We can cherry pick from the scientific literature all day, but here is an excerpt from an open sourced review paper:
Despite this, there are also epidemiological studies that found an increased frequency of micronuclei formation [56] or other chromosomal instability [57,58,59] in the exposed population and military veterans from wars in the Balkans and the Gulf War. Another study showed, for example, increased incidences of various types of cancer and birth defects among civilians living in those affected areas [60,61,62,63,64,65,66]. These studies suggest that DU exposure is either a primary cause or related to the main cause of congenital anomalies and increased rates of cancer.
It is difficult to detect an increased cancer risk due to radiation at doses lower than 100 mSv due to the excess risk at low doses being small in comparison to spontaneous rates of cancers of the same type [5]. As the increase in cancer occurrences being high (by a factor of two to five) in the above-mentioned cases, it is possible that these negative effects were also caused by other factors (e.g., biological or chemical agents, etc.).
After the various military conflicts in which DU was used, studies were conducted to evaluate whether there were/are grounds for concern about the health hazards of DU for military members and civilians. These epidemiological studies that have examined the levels of uranium in the urine of these groups have come to the conclusion that there were no significant exposure amounts of DU [67,68,69,70,71].
Studies were not limited to only military field DU ingestion, but also examined civilian life, as in the case of the release of DU in fire. An example of this kind of events took place in 1992 in Amsterdam, as a cargo plane using DU as a ballast crashed. The plane was carrying 282 kg of DU as the ballast, but only 130 kg was recovered. It was assumed that the remainder was consumed in the fire, which created the possibility that uranium oxide particles had been dispersed through dust and smoke and were subsequently inhaled or ingested. A follow-up study, which began in 2000 and was attended by 2499 workers (firefighters, police officers, hangar workers) involved in the liquidation of the accident, revealed significantly elevated concentrations of uranium in their urine compared with untreated workers. Impaired renal function parameters were also found [72].
From the results of most epidemiologic studies, it follows that the association between the use of DU ammunition and oncological or other diseases of soldiers from the Gulf War, as well as from the Balkan Wars [1,73,74], has not yet been conclusively demonstrated. There is also no convincing evidence that the use of the DU ammunition is dangerous to the civilian population in areas of former military activity [1,12,75]...
Depleted Uranium and Its Effects on Humans
I added the bold.
War is always a toxicological nightmare, which should not be surprising, since the goal of war is to kill people. It is relatively difficult to isolate one cause of toxicology from another in war. What we have here among antinukes, a class of people who are responsible for roughly seven million deaths per year, 19,000 per day, from air pollution and are also to my mind the direct and obvious cause of climate change, who wish to fetishize uranium.
cf. Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249).
It's a rather old and tragic story; one that should generate as much disgust as antivax rhetoric produces, although antivax rhetoric has not killed anywhere near as many people as antinuke rhetoric has killed. Since the Gulf War in 2003, about 140 million people have died from air pollution.
Now, for the record, I generally oppose war, although I regard the Ukrainian defense of their country from aggression as justified. I note that the Russians in this war were funded by antinukes from Germany who bought Russian gas and oil because of an idiotic fear of nuclear energy.
Nuclear energy would not have only saved lives had the Germans not funded an uncivilized thug like Putin, however. It saves lives associated with the use of energy, initially from air pollution, but far more exigent over the long term, from climate change:
Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)
To save human lives and to save the planet, we need to deal with uranium. We should minimize the risks, but the risks associated with uranium are far lower than the risks of not using uranium.
I apply that standard to our follies also, IE Vietnam, Iraq, etc.
the person you should be asking is the tyrant that illegally invaded a sovereign country.
Oh, BTW, the only one threatening to use nukes is the country that illegally invaded Ukraine, the US/NATO alliance has not threatened to use nukes.
Try again.
how does one force a peaceful outcome when the one who illegally invaded a sovereign nation has no intention of a peaceful outcome?
Putin has shown zero inclination to settle the war peacefully, except on his own terms.
Putin is a war criminal that's bent on European conquest, you don't negotiate with a war criminal who's slaughtering innocent civilians.
Why you insist on this peaceful solution when it's been very clear that Putin doesn't want a peaceful solution has me scratching my head.
you're one of those that prescribes to the Chamberlin doctrine, Peace for our time.
How well did that work out?
Never, ever give in to a tyrant, it just leads to more tyranny, as witnessed in WWII with Nazi Germany and the Axis powers.
