* Something in the air tonight
Several columns ago (see “What is the U.S. selling?” link below), I talked about things the U.S. seems to be good at manufacturing and exporting. Interestingly, a strength the U.S. has is in developing nuclear power and associated power plants. This piece of information startled me, so I asked for comments. Sure enough, several people affiliated in some way with the nuclear power industry e-mailed me to second what I had written.
But there is a secondary offshoot from nuclear power production that you might not be aware of, and should be.
Ready to dust off your high-school chemistry books? What’s the most common form of uranium? That’s right! U-238. Well then, what kind of uranium do nuclear power plants use in their power rods? U-235. To make U-235, you take U-238 – a lot of it – and perform an extraction. The leftover U-238 is called “Depleted Uranium” (DU), a misnomer because it’s actually not depleted at all. The term DU simply means that it has had most of the U-235 extracted from it. It still has all the radioactive power it had before extraction. Its half-life – that period of time that must expire before just one-half of the U-238 has decayed – is almost 4.5 BILLION years.
What happens to this DU stuff? Well, here is where the story gets really interesting. It turns out that DU makes great ammunition for weapons. There are four reasons for this:
* The substance is much harder and denser than lead and consequently has an easier time going through solid things like tank armor.
* It is very cheap.
* There is an abundant supply.
* It is “pyrophoric” – i.e., it spontaneously bursts into flames when exposed to the air.
The substance is made into everything from rifle bullets to 30mm canon shells. It has been in extensive use in U.S. military engagements in Iraq 1991, the Balkans and now in Iraq 2004-2005. According to the Campaign against Depleted Uranium (https://www.cadu.org.uk/) Web site, 15 countries are known to have DU in their military arsenals: U.S., U.K., France, Russia, Greece, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Pakistan, Thailand, Iraq and Taiwan. Others are actively looking to obtain it.
The problem is that when any DU ammunition is fired and burns on impact, tiny aerosolized glass particles are distributed. These particles can be carried in the air for great distances and inhaled. They are highly radioactive, emitting alpha, beta and gamma radiation.
So much of the stuff was used in the Balkans and Iraq that there are some people around the world who question whether these places are safe to live anymore, let alone set up shop. They think that the use of such ammunition will lead to an increase in birth defects, cancers, and other sicknesses. And they say the evidence is already there, both in U.S. troops who’ve come home from engagements and in the civilians in these countries.
I am not an alarmist who thinks that the entire world has a cloud of this stuff hovering over it. But I do think it’s important for business leaders to consider the impact of setting up a site in a country in which there may have been quite a bit of activity using DU munitions.
I’d like to hear your thoughts.
