Depleted Uranium

The army uses depleted uranium in armor penetrators. These solid metal bullets have the mass, speed and physical properties to perform exceptionally well against armored targets. Depleted Uranium provides substantial advantageous on performance compared to all other materials. For this reason, they allow soldiers to defeat an armored target at a significantly greater distance. Its physical properties and density make it ideal for use as armor plate.

 

For many years, the depleted uranium has been used in weaponry for many years now. Depleted uranium is the result from natural uranium that is used in nuclear reactors. The natural uranium metal is known to be slightly radioactive, and it consists of two main mixtures of two uranium isotopes of uranium 238 (U238) and uranium 235 (U235). They are in a proportion of 99.3% and 0.7% respectively.

 

A nuclear reactor requires U235 to produce energy. For this reasons, the natural uranium has to be enriched with an-alloy to obtain the isotope U235 by removing a large part of U238 and hence resulting to depleted uranium. This procedure makes this metal 0.7% times more radioactive compared to natural uranium. Because of its properties, the depleted uranium has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, and this gives room for little decay of minerals.

 

What Is Depleted Uranium?

 

Depleted uranium (which is also known as Q-metal, or D-38 Depletalloy) is uranium with a low content of fissile isotope U-235 compared to natural uranium. The uses of Q-metal takes advantage of it’s high density of 19.1 g/cm3 that is 68.4% denser that lead.

 

Military Uses

 

The military use of DU is for weaponry. The UK and US troops in the attack on Iraq that started on March 21th, 2001 used it in various places in Iraq. The use of Du was confirmed and admitted by Brigadier General Brooks in a press briefing on March 26th that same year when he said “Du bombing was used in the war."

 

Michael Kilpatrick, who is the deputy director of deployment health support in the office of the assistant secretary of the defense for health affair, confirmed this in a forum at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on March 6th, 2004. He said that the army used and fired DU ammunition from different assault vehicles, and they were armored with 24 tonnes or less of DU bombs. The air forces were used ten tonnes or less of Du bombs from an A-10 Planes. If you combine all this, you will come up with an equivalent of one hundred and fifteen tons of uranium metals.

 

At the same time, even before the Iraq war broke out, on March 15th 2003, in the press meeting; Colonel Naughton said that Abrams tanks were being loaded with DU bombshells and all A-10 Planes. The reason they gave was that they do not have any other choice other than going with this decision.

 

The war saw many civilians being bombed with Depleted uranium bombs throughout the period. Well, it is clear that military uses due to its armor-piercing and plating projectiles. Depleted uranium is used mostly in nuclear reactors.

 

Civilian Uses

 

Depleted uranium also has also a lot of benefits to civilian. Apart from military use, depleted uranium is also used to counterweight in an aircraft, radiation shielding in medical (also known as radiation therapy) and in industrial radiography equipment. It is also being used in containers for transporting radioactive materials.

 

Uranium History

 

The early 1940s, enriched uranium, was first manufactured during the years when United States Of America and British began their nuclear Weapons programs. A decade later, the Soviet Union and France began their nuclear weapons and nuclear power programs. During this time, depleted uranium was first being used as an unusable waste product.

 

Over the years, they continued to do some research and performed experiments until soon there was light at the end of the tunnel. This led the Pentagon to study on it, and they tried to make the metal much denser. After several tests, they knew that depleted uranium had armor piercing properties.

 

Health Associated Problems Associated With Uranium

 

Depleted uranium is known to affect the body in many ways, and it is considered hazards to health if it entered into the body. If you are riding in a vehicle with depleted uranium, weapons, shielding will not expose a Service member to significant amounts of DU or external radiation.

 

Storing depleted uranium is enormously expensive, but disposing of it by all means is what the US Department of Energy has wanted to do. It is in military weapons that depleted uranium is used in extremely large scale, and it is used mainly as penetration body that is attached to bombshells for the sake of increasing its penetration capacity, and also as armor of tanks in order to increase its defense capacity. Find out more about disposal of DP here.

 

It offers benefits such as:

 

Ø  It is very denser

 

Ø  Even when there are no explosive

 

Ø  It is very cheap

 

Just like any other particle, DU particles can find its way into the body through breathing. These particles will attach on respiratory systems. With time, they accumulate on it and buildup. For this reason, the accumulation of these particle is the cause of many illnesses and health problems. The particles that are clinging continue to expose the neighboring organs to radiation. This leads to cell and gene to go into some transformation, and they can lead to cancer and any other blood-related illnesses.