DU's global spread spurs debate over effect on humans
Scott
Peterson
BAGHDAD,
IRAQ
At
least 17 countries already have in their arsenals bullets made from depleted
uranium
(DU). Many - such as Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Taiwan - get
them
from
the United States. England and France buy DU wholesale from the US. Russia
now
sells DU rounds on the open market.
Such
proliferation has raised unanswered questions about the long-term
health
effects of the hard-hitting and controversial ordnance.
Is
there a continuing health risk from DU fragments and particles for civilians
in Iraq
and
Kuwait? And if the degree of danger to human health can't be nailed down,
how
should
future use of DU be dealt with?
Several
official bodies already take serious precautions. The United States Nuclear
Regulatory
Commission (NRC), for example, requires a license to handle or test-fire
DU
munitions. The US Army has 14 separate NRC licenses related to the substance.
The
Navy and Air Force each have one NRC "master materials" license.
Workers
handling DU in the US must treat it as low-level radioactive waste. Disposal
typically
means the substance is locked into a 30-gallon canister, sealed with plastic,
then
sealed again inside a 55-gallon drum and, by law, buried in licensed underground
dumps.
Fine particles are mixed into concrete and locked into drums.
Definitive statements about DU's health risks to humans are not easy to make, scientists say.
"We
don't know everything we'd like to know," says Ron Kathren, a physics professor
and
director of the US Transuranium and Uranium Registries in Richland, Wash.
Attached
to
Washington State University, the registry has studied uranium and its effect
on industry
workers
for 30 years.
"The
reason people get panicky is because DU is radioactive, but [the battlefield
dose]
is
so small that it never approaches chemical hazard," says Mr. Kathren.
Part
of the problem with DU is public misperception, says John Russell, the
associate
director
of the registries: "You say 'uranium,' and people think of the bomb. That's
not
the
case here."
At
the heart of the health debate is this question: Do small DU particles
trapped in the body
emit
enough radiation over time - in the form of alpha particles - to cause
physical harm?
Most of the concern is focused on dust particles left after a bullet is incinerated upon impact.
Carried
aloft by the wind, the small particles can work their way into the human
body, where
the
emission of alpha particles can be extremely damaging to cells, says Douglas
Collins, a
health
physicist for 20 years and an NRC division director of nuclear material
safety in Atlanta.
A
1990 study commissioned by the Army links DU with cancer and states that
"no dose is so
low
that the probability of effect is zero." Dr. Asaf Durakovic, who was chief
of nuclear medicine
at
the US Department of Veterans Affairs' medical center in Wilmington, Del.,
from 1989 until
1997,
takes that a step further. Even the smallest internal alpha dose, he says,
"is a high
radioactive
risk."
One
safety memo, written by the US Army in 1991, says a single charred DU bullet
found
by
US forces was emitting 260 to 270 millirads of radiation per hour. (A rad
is a measurement
of
ionizing radiation absorbed into material.)
"The
current [NRC] limit for non-radiation workers is 100 millirads per year,"
it noted.
The
limit for radiation workers would be some 30 times more.
Du's critics cite incidents to bolster their case against its use.
In
1992, for instance, a German scientist found a spent DU bullet in the Iraqi
desert and
was
later arrested and fined by a Berlin court for "releasing ionizing radiation
upon the
public"
when he brought it home.
"You're
not playing with anything innocuous," says Leonard Dietz, a nuclear scientist
who
worked for 28 years at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in New York.
In
1979, DU particles escaped from the National Lead Industries factory near
Albany, N.Y.,
which
manufactured DU penetrators. The particles traveled 26 miles and were noticed
in
a laboratory filter by Mr. Dietz. The factory was shut down in 1980 for
releasing more
than
0.85 pounds of DU dust into the atmosphere every month - a fraction of
the 320 tons
fired
during the Gulf War.
"It's
still hot forever," says Doug Rokke, a Pentagon DU expert until last year.
"It doesn't
go
away, it only disperses and blows around in the wind."
The
British Atomic Energy Agency, at the behest of the Ministry of Defense
in 1991, tried
to
quantify the risk. Based on an early estimate of just 40 tons of DU used
during the
Gulf
War, it said that that amount could cause "500,000 potential deaths."
Recently
declassified, its report says this purely theoretical calculation is "obviously
n
ot
realistic" because it would require every single person to inhale similar
quantities.
But
the sheer volume does "indicate a significant problem."
The
Pentagon rejects that. "The problem is that all of that stuff has to be
put into people.
It
physically can't happen," says Col. Eric Daxon, the radiological staff
officer for the
Armed
Forces Radiobiology Research Institute. The possibility of DU causing serious
health
problems in Iraq, he says, is "exceptionally small, to the point where
it should be
absolutely
at the bottom of the list."
Bernard
Rostker, the Pentagon's special assistant for Gulf War illness, also sounds
an
all-clear.
The Gulf War "is not an extraordinary nuclear event," he said. "This area
[where
DU was used], we would say, is free for any agricultural, industrial use,
any
personal
use."
But
Dr. Durakovic says those areas are still dangerous. Widespread use of DU,
he told
Congress
in 1997, means that "the battlefields of the future will be unlike any
... in history."
The
result is that "injury and death will remain lingering threats to 'survivors'
of the
battle
for years and decades into the future," he testified. "The battlefield
will remain
a
killing zone long after the cessation of hostilities."
DU-Kosovo || DU-Iraq -- One | Two | Three
