64.233.187.104...:XnWpikPGJbgJ:134.11.61.26... pleted+uranium+reads+cpm+geiger+counter&hl=en

us.altnews.com.au...
"A 747 may contain as much as 1,500 kilograms 3,300 lbs. of the material," the Canadian Press reported. It took 60 firefighters and 20 trucks about three hours to control the fire.

Fowler said: "there is no threat or concern" about DU exposure to those working on the wreckage.

"Thatâ??s baloney," Marion Fulk, a retired staff scientist from Lawrence Livermore National Lab, told American Free Press. Fulk, 83, is currently researching how low-level ionizing radiation causes cancer, birth defects and a host of other health problems. Burning depleted uranium creates a "whole mess of oxides," Fulk said, "which is what makes it so wicked biologically."

In 1988, American physicist Robert L. Parker wrote that in the worst-case scenario, the crash of a Boeing 747 could affect the health of 250,000 people through exposure to uranium oxide particles. "Extended tests by the Navy and NASA showed that the temperature of the fireball in a plane crash can reach 1,200 degrees Celsius. Such temperatures are high enough to cause very rapid oxidation of depleted uranium," he wrote.

"Large pieces of uranium will oxidize rapidly and will sustain slow combustion when heated in air to temperatures of about 500 degrees Celsius," Paul Lowenstein, technical director and vice-president of Nuclear Metals Inc., the company that has supplied DU to Boeing, wrote in a 1993 article.

Originally posted by PeanutButterJellyTime
Your hand is more radioactive than DU. That is simple scientific fact.

www.stopthenato.org...
Rokke and his crew were measuring significant levels
of radiation up to 50 meters away from affected tanks:
up to 300 millirems an hour in beta and gamma
radiation, and alpha radiation from the thousands to
the millions in counts per minute (CPM) on a Geiger
counter....
Within 72 hours of their inspections, Rokke and his
crew started getting sick.

But they continued with their work. They went back to
the U.S. to perform tests on Army bases. They
deliberately blew up tanks with DU rounds, then ran
over and jumped on the tanks while they were still
burning. They videotaped the uranium-oxide clouds
pouring out, and they measured the radiation being
thrown off.

In the past decade, Rokke said 30 men out of 100 who
were closely involved in these operations dropped
dead.

Rokke's lungs and kidneys are damaged. He believes
that uranium oxide dust is permanently trapped inside
his lungs. He has lesions on his brain, pustules on
his skin. He suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome. He
has reactive airway disease, which means he can't stop
wheezing and coughing, and experiences a loss of
breath when he exercises. He also has fibromyalgia, a
condition that causes chronic pain in his muscles,
ligaments and tendons.

The VA tested Rokke for uranium levels in his body in
1994. He got the results back two and a half years
later. His urine had 5000 times the amount of
permissible uranium....
The problem with DU, he said, is the stuff that's
given off when a round is fired. The projectile begins
burning immediately, and up to 70 percent of it
oxidizes. This aerosolized power—uranium oxide—is the
really dangerous stuff, Rokke said, particularly when
it is inhaled.

Rokke insists that he and his men were wearing
protective equipment—or equipment they thought would
protect them. But their face masks were capable of
straining out particles of 10 microns or larger.
That's as big as the DU particles get, according to
the Army and the Pentagon.

Rokke, however, insists that he has measured particles
as small as .3 microns, and that scientists at the
Livermore laboratories have measured them as small as
.1 micron.

www.disasternews.net...
Dated March 1, 1991, the memo was written by Lt. Col. M.V. Ziehmn at the Los Alamos Laboratories in New Mexico.

"There has been and continues to be a concern regarding the impact of dU [sic] on the environment. Therefore, if no one makes a case for the effectiveness of du on the battlefield, du rounds may become politically unacceptable and thus, be deleted from the arsenal," the memo reads. "If du penetrators proved their worth during our recent combat activities, then we should assure their future existence (until something better is developed) through Service/DoD proponency. If proponency is not garnered, it is possible that we stand to lose a valuable combat capability. I believe we should keep this sensitive issue at mind when after action reports [sic] are written."

The meaning of this memo is quite clear, Rokke said. Since DU munitions are so effective, they must continue to be used in combat, regardless of the environmental or health consequences.

indypgh.org...
According to a August 2002 report by the UN subcommission, laws which are breached by the use of DU shells include: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the Charter of the United Nations; the Genocide Convention; the Convention Against Torture; the four Geneva Conventions of 1949; the Conventional Weapons Convention of 1980; and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, which expressly forbid employing 'poison or poisoned weapons' and 'arms, projectiles or materials calculated to cause unnecessary suffering'. All of these laws are designed to spare civilians from unwarranted suffering in armed conflicts.

indypgh.org...
In 1991, the Allies fired 944,000 DU rounds or some 2700 tons of DU tipped bombs. A UK Atomic Energy Authority report said that some 500,000 people would die before the end of this century, due to radioactive debris left in the desert.

www.sundayherald.com... or
indypgh.org...
The use of DU has also led to birth defects in the children of Allied veterans and is believed to be the cause of the 'worrying number of anophthalmos cases -- babies born without eyes' in Iraq. Only one in 50 million births should be anophthalmic, yet one Baghdad hospital had eight cases in just two years. Seven of the fathers had been exposed to American DU anti-tank rounds in 1991. There have also been cases of Iraqi babies born without the crowns of their skulls, a deformity also linked to DU shelling.

A study of Gulf war veterans showed that 67% had children with severe illnesses, missing eyes, blood infections, respiratory problems and fused fingers.

www.nuclearpress.com...
Breathing Uranium Oxides: Global Medical Crisis of Depleted Uranium

Originally posted by PeanutButterJellyTime
DU doesn't turn into dust on impact either.

For the particles formed when a DU penetrator impacts on armour plate, a larger fraction, about 25%, dissolves quickly. Other tests have shown that in both situations, the particles consist mostly of two uranium oxides (U3O8, with some UO2) both of which are relatively insoluble. Experiments carried out on industrial forms of these oxides indicate a long-term dissolution rate in the lungs of the order of 0.1% per day.

www.newscientist.com...
Radioactive fall-out from the world's nuclear weapons tests during the Cold War has killed 11,000 Americans with cancer, according to a new report by US scientists. Experts say that many thousands more are likely to have died in other countries.

The report, prepared by the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHSS) for Congress, is the first attempt to estimate the total number of cancers caused by the atmospheric testing programme. Between 1951 and 1963, 390 nuclear bombs were exploded above the ground, 205 by the US, 160 by the former Soviet Union, 21 by Britain and four by France.

The fall-out from these explosions circulated the globe and exposed the world's population to radioactivity. Scientists have long assumed that this would result in extra cancers, but until now no government has tried to estimate how many.

The new report concludes that the number of fatal cancers attributable to global fall-out amongst Americans alive between 1951 and 2000 is 11,000. This includes deaths from leukaemia caused by exposure to strontium 90 and from a host of other cancers triggered by other isotopes.

"This is a useful estimate of the long term effects of global fall-out on the population of the US, but it is only part of the story," says Dudley Goodhead, a leading radiation specialist with the Medical Research Council in Harwell, UK.

Source
John Hanchette, a journalism professor at St. Bonaventure University, and one of the founding editors of USA TODAY related the following to DU researcher Leuren Moret. He stated that he had prepared news breaking stories about the effects of DU on Gulf War soldiers and Iraqi citizens, but that each time he was ready to publish, he received a phone call from the Pentagon asking him not to print the story. He has since been replaced as editor of USA TODAY.

Dr. Keith Baverstock, The World Health Organization's chief expert on radiation and health for 11 years and author of an unpublished study has charged that his report " on the cancer risk to civilians in Iraq from breathing uranium contaminated dust " was also deliberately suppressed.

The information released by the U.S. Dept. of Defense is not reliable, according to some sources even within the military.

In 1997, while citing experiments, by others, in which 84 percent of dogs exposed to inhaled uranium died of cancer of the lungs, Dr. Asaf Durakovic, then Professor of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine at Georgetown University in Washington was quoted as saying,

"The [US government's] Veterans Administration asked me to lie about the risks of incorporating depleted uranium in the human body."

Source
As much as irradiation kills food bacteria, it also strips it of its vitamins and minerals leaving minimal to no nutritional value. Irradiation changes the chemical structure of food, depleting so many nutrients up to the point that it is just little more than empty calories. Irradiation can destroy up 90% of vitamin A in chicken, 86% of vitamin B in oats and 70% of vitamin C in fruit juice.

The longer the food stays on the shelf, the more nutrients are lost. The consumer is deceived in believing what one purchases delivers the full nutritional value it claims. Over the long run, the human body will suffer serious effects if it does not receive the adequate amount of nutrients it needs to survive. One can only assume the risk of diseases due to low immune system b/c of lack of essential vitamins increases the more irradiated foods are consumed over an extended period of time.

As mentioned, irradiation changes the chemical composition of foods. The long-term effects of ingesting irradiated foods on humans are not yet completely proven. However, initial laboratory research, where animals were fed irradiated foods over a period of time, indicate potential health complications to human beings. The animals developed mutations, had premature deaths and nutritional deficiencies, reproductive problems, fatal internal bleeding, suppressed immune systems and stunted growth....

Irradiation blasts food with radiation equivalent to hundreds of millions of chest X-rays. These high levels of energy initiate a complex sequence of reactions that, in addition to killing bacteria, literally rip apart the molecular structure of the food. This process creates new and unidentified chemicals that have not been adequately studied as safe to consume.

One of these new chemicals, called 2-DCB, has been shown to cause cellular and genetic damage in rats and in human cells. The chemical has never been found naturally in any food on earth. Ironically, it is a well-known “marker” for determining if a food was irradiated.