Re: Humans and the Environment
Posted: Thu Mar 02, 2017 10:06 pm
@ campitor, nope. I was doing some digging to get good links, but will need my PC to post it all, the phone won't work.
Uranium is about as common as tin, it is probably in the water you drink and most foods you eat. Everyone has urainium in their urine, all the time. It is very easy to measure in tiny traces. I am in no way surprised to hear it is soldier's urine, 10 years later.
DU is used in armor, (not usually left behind, our armored vehicles pretty much came out unscratched) and armor penetrators. This means armor piercing tank rounds, only really used on enemy tanks, ( tanks are still manually loaded, so the loader chooses the right kind of ammo) and the big offender is the A-10, close support aircraft. These use 30mm miniguns, and because they need to keep up a hypervelocity for tank busting, they use lots of DU.
DU is much heavier than lead. In a tank, this isn't an issue, in a plane, using DU means reduced payload. You would only use it if you are expecting to need to disable armored vehicles. This is one of the reasons that DU hasn't been used in the ME since 2003 (until for some damned reason it was used in Syria a few months ago, confirmed by the military 2 weeks ago)
DU is about 60% of the radioactivity of urainium ore, which as I said above, is already all over, common as tin. Adding in tons more in a desert isn't the disaster it is partayed to be.
As an example, ( I'll link later) Boeing uses hundreds of kilos of DU in their 747 as balast. They had a 747 hit an apartment, and burn, at temps high enough to burn DU. They only recovered 1/2 the DU. As I pointed out above, DU is easy to find and separate. Yet they couldn't find the missing 100 kilos or so. This was an urban setting, and there were survivors in the apartment, first responders exposed, and a huge corporation with deep pockets. And those people haven't shown increased risks from exposure.
I have links to various real-time logging giegor counter networks. This afternoon, Baghdad was showing 12 CPM on one, and 30 on the other. For reference, Colorado usually runs about 60 (rocks and high elevation) and Seattle runs about 12 (low elevation and sedimentary soils). Also a first person account of someone with one of those networks working with NGOs in Iraq.
But first I need to get home...
Uranium is about as common as tin, it is probably in the water you drink and most foods you eat. Everyone has urainium in their urine, all the time. It is very easy to measure in tiny traces. I am in no way surprised to hear it is soldier's urine, 10 years later.
DU is used in armor, (not usually left behind, our armored vehicles pretty much came out unscratched) and armor penetrators. This means armor piercing tank rounds, only really used on enemy tanks, ( tanks are still manually loaded, so the loader chooses the right kind of ammo) and the big offender is the A-10, close support aircraft. These use 30mm miniguns, and because they need to keep up a hypervelocity for tank busting, they use lots of DU.
DU is much heavier than lead. In a tank, this isn't an issue, in a plane, using DU means reduced payload. You would only use it if you are expecting to need to disable armored vehicles. This is one of the reasons that DU hasn't been used in the ME since 2003 (until for some damned reason it was used in Syria a few months ago, confirmed by the military 2 weeks ago)
DU is about 60% of the radioactivity of urainium ore, which as I said above, is already all over, common as tin. Adding in tons more in a desert isn't the disaster it is partayed to be.
As an example, ( I'll link later) Boeing uses hundreds of kilos of DU in their 747 as balast. They had a 747 hit an apartment, and burn, at temps high enough to burn DU. They only recovered 1/2 the DU. As I pointed out above, DU is easy to find and separate. Yet they couldn't find the missing 100 kilos or so. This was an urban setting, and there were survivors in the apartment, first responders exposed, and a huge corporation with deep pockets. And those people haven't shown increased risks from exposure.
I have links to various real-time logging giegor counter networks. This afternoon, Baghdad was showing 12 CPM on one, and 30 on the other. For reference, Colorado usually runs about 60 (rocks and high elevation) and Seattle runs about 12 (low elevation and sedimentary soils). Also a first person account of someone with one of those networks working with NGOs in Iraq.
But first I need to get home...