Depleted Uranium, The Cause of Veterans' Illness & Birth Defects
WHAT IS DEPLETED URANIUM?
Depleted Uranium, or DU, is a waste material left over from the nuclear industry. A vast amount of this waste DU is produced when natural uranium is enriched for use in nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. Only the uranium isotope U-235 can be used in nuclear processes, such as reactors and weapons. As most of this isotope is removed from naturally occurring uranium, the remaining uranium product comprises U-238 and smaller amounts of the more highly radioactive U-235 and U-234. DU is both chemically toxic and radioactive. It is this latter product, the left over uranium, comprising mainly U-238, which has been used to make ‘depleted’ uranium weapons. It is used for weapons because this heavy, dense metal is judged by the army to be an excellent penetrator of enemy armour, tanks, and even buildings.
A large amount of DU in the stockpiles held in the United States has been contaminated with recycled spent nuclear fuel from nuclear reactors. For example trace amounts of U-236 and highly radioactive substances such as plutonium, neptunium and technetium were found in a DU anti-tank shell used in Kosovo. Hundreds of thousands of tons of this contaminated stock was exported to the UK, France and other countries in the 1990s. The extent to which this DU has been contaminated with recycled spent fuel is still unknown and undisclosed.
Governments have largely ignored the serious dangers this recycled fuel represents. A common defence used by the British and US governments and their militaries is to claim that depleted uranium is less radioactive than natural uranium and therefore does not constitute a risk to human health. This statement is, however, misleading. In its natural form uranium is present in our environment in very small quantities as an ore, for example in rocks and soil. Conversely, the DU used by the military has been concentrated relative to background amounts, and is therefore many times more radioactive than uranium ore.
In May 2003 Scott Peterson, a writer with the US newspaper CSM, examined radioactivity levels next to DU bullets in Baghdad and found Geiger-counter readings were 1900 times greater than background radiation levels next to DU bullets. When natural uranium is concentrated in a similar form to ‘depleted’ uranium it emits about 40% more alpha radiation, 15% more gamma radiation and around the same level of beta radiation. The chemical toxicity of uranium does not depend on the isotope, therefore enriched, ‘normal’, and depleted uranium are equally toxic chemically.
It is extremely difficult and expensive for the nuclear industry to store DU. It is thought that the US currently has 1 billion tonnes of depleted uranium radioactive waste, while the UK has at least 50,000 tonnes. This waste is stored in cylinders at many sites across the US and UK and is vulnerable to corrosion and leaks owing to ageing cylinders and outside storage. It is stored mainly in the form of depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) which can leak if the corroding cylinders are breached. At least 10 cylinders are known to have breached during the past 10 years.
Turning this DU waste into weapons solves some of the problem faced by the Government and nuclear industry, concerning what to do with these large stockpiles. Not only is DU practically free of charge for the arms manufacturers, but it no longer has to be stored and monitored indefinitely.
THE HEALTH EFFECTS OF DEPLETED URANIUM
Depleted uranium is a risk to health both as a toxic heavy metal and as a radioactive substance. The UK and US Governments have long sought to play down these risks. While, as late as 2003, the UK Government was claiming that DU presented no harm to soldiers or civilians, yet accumulating and alarming evidence from scientists, soldiers and activists has forced them to back down and recognise the risks posed.(1) However what is clear from reading all major studies is that more research urgently needs to be done. There exists very little research on the effects of uranium contamination in humans and accurate tests to understand exposure doses from military uses of DU have never been done.
There are three main routes through which DU exposure on the battlefield takes place: inhalation, ingestion and wounding.(2) As a DU penetrator hits its target some of the DU from the weapon reacts with the air in the ensuing fire and becomes a fine dust (often called an ‘aerosol’) that makes inhalation and ingestion a possibility for those in the area. Even after the dust has settled, the danger remains that it may be resuspended in the future by further activity or the wind, and again pose a threat to civilians and others for many years into the future. DU particles have been reported as travelling twenty-five miles on air currents.(3) Open wounds also allow a gateway for DU into the body and some veterans have also been left with DU fragments in their bodies, remaining after combat.
Inhaled DU dust will settle in the nose, mouth, lung, airways and guts. As a DU penetrator hits its target, the high temperatures caused by the impact ensure the DU dust particles become ceramic and therefore water insoluble. This means that, unlike other more soluble forms of uranium, DU will stay in the body for much longer periods of time. This aspect of uranium toxicology has often been ignored in studies of the health effects of DU, which base their excretion rates on soluble uranium. DU dust can remain in the sticky tissues of the lung and other organs such as the kidneys for many years. It is also deposited in the bones where it can remain for up to 25 years.(4) This helps explain why studies of Gulf War veterans have found that soldiers are still excreting DU in their urine over 12 years after the 1991 conflict (5) . Ingested DU can be incorporated into bone and from there will irradiate the bone marrow, increasing the risk of leukaemia and an impaired immune system. (6)
External exposure to DU entails exposure to alpha, beta and gamma radiation. Although the skin will block alpha particles, beta and gamma radiation can penetrate beyond the dead outer skin layers and damage living tissue. Beta particles can penetrate to a depth of 2 cm, while gamma radiation (through a process called ‘the Compton effect’) generates beta particle radiation along its trajectory through the body. Neither is all external exposure to alpha radiation harmless. Cataracts, for example, can be caused by exposure to alpha radiation.(7)
Inside the body, DU poses a health risk in a variety of ways to different organs. The kidneys are the first organ to be dfamaged by DU. At a high dose kidney uranium levels can lead to kidney failure within a few days of exposure.8 Lower doses lead to kidney dysfunction, and can lead to an increased risk of kidney disease later in life.
As a radioactive emitter, DU also presents a risk to the lungs. Traditionally, radiation dosimetry measures the extent of harm by calculating the external radiation absorbed by the tissues; the so-called ‘absorbed’ dose.(9)However because DU dust is inhaled or ingested, it can remain in the body tissues and emit intensive radiation over a longer period. This way it can cause a large amount of damage over a relatively small area, changing a person’s genetic codes and causing cancers. For these reasons soldiers and civilians exposed to DU risk developing lung cancers, particularly if they are smokers because their lungs will already have been irritated.
There is much new evidence emerging about the risks from so-called ‘low level’ radiation and the damage it can do to DNA. Considerable evidence has been accumulated recently about the ‘by-stander’ effect, which shows that irradiated cells pass on damage to surrounding healthy cells. In this way it is thought low-level radiation can cause much greater damage than would otherwise be expected.(10) Studies have also shown that irradiated cells pass on chromosomal aberrations to their progeny so that non-irradiated cells several generations, or cell divisions later, will exhibit this radiation-induced genomic instability (RIGI).(11)
New evidence is also suggesting that the chemical toxicity of DU and its radioactivity reinforce each other in a so-called ‘synergistic effect’, which means it ‘punches above its own weight’ in terms of the damage it can do to cells. Alexandra Miller of the US Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in the USA found in a study in 2003 that when human bone cells are exposed to DU, fragments break away from the chromosomes and form tiny rings of genetic material. This damage was seen in new cells more than a month after removal of the DU, leading to an eight-fold increase in genetic damage relative to that expected.
It’s not just in terms of increased risk of cancer that DU DNA damage can affect health. It is also implicated in causing a depressed immune system, reproductive problems, and birth defects. For example, a study of US Gulf War veterans has found that they are up to three times as likely to have children with birth deformities than fathers who had not served; and that pregnancies result in significantly higher rates of miscarriage.(12) A major 2004 Ministry of Defence-funded survey study from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has found that babies whose fathers served in the first Gulf War are 50 per cent more likely to have physical abnormalities. They also found a 40 per cent increased risk of miscarriage among women whose partners served in the Gulf.