| The hidden cost of depleted uranium (DU)
by Dr Robert Anderson 11:20pm Sat Apr 12 '03 We are regaled every night by the growing destruction
We are regaled every night by the growing destruction
Physicists the world over have come as near to
The increasing use of this vile material is
1. Transcript of Blix's remarks Monday, January 27,
2. “Hazards of Uranium weapons in Afghanistan and
http://www.talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?13@@.ee7dbf0 add your own comments
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| Saramago - 10:48am Jan 15, 2001 BST (66.) |
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Sick, bleeding and losing nails:
By Robert Fisk in Bratunac, Bosnia 14 January 2001 Sladjana Sarenac remembers the pieces of a depleted-uranium bomb that she picked up outside her home in Sarajevo. "It glittered and I did what all children do," she says. "I was six years old and I pretended to make cookies out of the bits of metal and the soil in the garden. Then I hid the pieces on a shelf because my puppy Tina was playing with it." Sladjana is now 12 and has been seriously ill ever since. Her nails have repeatedly fallen out of her fingers and toes. She has suffered internal bleeding, constant diarrhoea and vomiting. When her Serb parents fled their home in the Sarajevo suburb of Hadjici after the Dayton Accord, she took her dog with her. It had three puppies. Then Tina died. Then the puppies. Sladjana has a desperately pale face and tired eyes. Everyone tells her she will be all right. I tell her that too. Sladjana's parents spend 450 German marks a month (£140) for her medicines – she takes 2mg of Benesedin twice a day, 600mg of magnesium tablets once a day – but the family are too poor to pay the bills. In their refuge home in Bratunac the electricity has been cut off. The landlady wants them out. And, needless to say, no one from Nato has bothered to enquire about Sladjana's mysterious sickness. Nato's raids followed the shelling of the Sarajevo marketplace and the Serb massacre of thousands of Muslim refugees in and around Srebrenica. Sladjana did not see the American A-10 aircraft that dropped the bombs around her home in the summer of 1995, including the round that exploded on her family's small farm. She was hiding downstairs. But her father Jovo watched the planes, so low that he could see the pilot of each aircraft as they dived. "The houses in our street were very close to a [Serb] army base which made the bombing very intense," he says. "From 30 August to 15 September 1995, we not only got Nato bombings but also shells fired by the [Nato] Rapid Reaction Force on Mount Igman. The pilots were breaking the sound barrier and Sladjana never slept." Sladjana's sickness yet again places a heavy onus upon Nato to disclose all it knows about depleted uranium munitions and to start an immediate investigation among Bosnian Serbs from Hadjici about how those closest to the bombings in 1995 became so frequently the victims of cancer and leukaemia. Nato has already acknowledged that ingestion of DU particles in the immediate aftermath of a bomb explosion can have a serious effect on health. Here are civilians who clearly were only metres away from DU explosions who are suffering a devastating incidence of cancer, who would willingly speak to Nato investigators, but who Nato has not made the slightest effort to talk to. Jovo and his wife, Sretanka – and Sladjana herself – believe that her fascination with the bomb parts was her undoing. "She was playing with them like all children do," Sretanka says. "Out of curiosity, we all went to see what it looked like after the bombings. We went into the fields where the craters were. Then in the middle of October Sladjana had this kind of yellow sand under the nails on her hands and toes. Then the skin round the nails became red and it hurt her a lot. She was upset, crying a lot, vomiting and suffering diarrhoea." That's when Sladjana began her calvary of hospitals; a clinic in Sarajevo, a clinic in Bratunac, medical examinations in Belgrade. Sretanka produces a wad of fading, thin carbon copies of typed hospital reports. In a hospital at Blazuj, she was given two-days of blood transfusions. Doctors told her she had somehow been irradiated. Her fingernails and toenails fell out. She spent 30 hours in a coma. "In the early stages, we didn't think it was anything to do with the bombing," her father says. "Now we are aware of the kind of bombs that were fired and of what happened to other people from Hadjici." Up to 300 men, women and children who lived close to the site of the bombings in 1995 have died of cancers and leukaemia over the past five years. It does occur to me – though I do not say so – that there are doctors
aplenty in S-For, the Nato force now controlling Bosnia. And that those
doctors must know all about depleted-uranium munitions and its risks. I
have a feeling they will not be visiting the dark house in Bratunac where
Sladjana lives.
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It also seems that Carla del Ponte will investigate charges of war crimes
and breaches of rules of war by Nato on this issue. However, is there really
any chance of it going further than last year's attempt which was abandoned
because Nato wouldn't cooperate with the investigations.
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Of itself, the U236 does not constitute a significant worsening of the hazard, since the amounts will be tiny. It's actually only 200 times more radioactive than U238, not 200,000, and its decay products aren't significant either. However, the implication that "dirty" uranium is being used is more
damaging to the nuclear lobby's case. It also raises the question of how
effectively even more radioactive reactor products are removed from the
material.
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There are other, inert, metals with equal penetrative capacities in the anti-armour role. They just happen to be more expensive. We just have to put DU in the category of someone's bright idea that had unfortunate side-effects. Like chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gas. And stop using it. Tomorrow.
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You are aware, I hope, of the parallel Depleted Uranium thread in the
Science area?
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That was all I was referring to. Cheers Clive
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America in particular has a pretty shameful record in contaminating other countries and leaving them to clear up the mess, Hiroshima, Vietnam, Kuwait/Iraq and now Yugoslavia, of course Nato says there is no danger from DU, but I wonder how NATO governments would react to people trying to repartriate the material back to it's countries of origin. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Almost half the radioactivity of natural uranium comes from U234, which has a much shorter half-life, but which is only present in tiny amounts - produced by the decay of the U238. A large proportion of this is removed along with the U235 in the process that produces the depleted uranium as a by-product. The quantity of U234 in depleted uranium increases as the U238 decays, until equilibrium is reached with the U234 decaying as fast as it's produced. This means the radioactivity of depleted uranium goes up over the first quarter million years or so, to almost twice what it is when it's first produced, only decreasing thereafter very slowly over billions of years. Clive |