Global Ecological Problems and Issues

In Kosovo and Bosnia much smaller amounts of depleted uranium were used, probably about ten tons. According to a recent study by an Italian team in the badly polluted areas of Kosovo there can be as many as a million tiny uranium particles in just a few milligrams of soil. The particles are so tiny that they "have a potential for resuspension and inhalation under arid conditions". The Italian team and the UN Environmental Programme have estimated that a child inhaling 0.1 grams of the polluted soil would receive an additional radiation dose of 1.44 millisieverts - more than the recommended maximum annual level of radiation for adults.

The chemical toxicity of the uranium dust is especially dangerous for children. In Kosovo and Bosnia it has been found out, that children who happen to swallow a pinch of heavily contaminated soil can easily take in 120 milligrams of uranium, a big enough dose to seriously harm their kidneys. The normal average annual dose of uranium people get from air, water and food is only about 0.4 milligrams.

In the Second Gulf War much larger amounts of depleted uranium were used. Some estimates have spoken about 2200 tons of depleted uranium consisting of nine million rounds of ammunition containing DU. This is not official, yet, but it is known for sure that very large quantities of DU were used. The most worrying thing is that most of these nine million or so DU rounds were spread over the most densely populated areas of Iraq. If the currently existing information about the matter is true, the US and British armies have really behaved in an astonishingly barbaric way. 2200 tons means 2 200 000 000 000 milligrams, almost twenty billion doses sufficient to destroy the kidneys of a child.

In future wars most major battles will probably be fought in densely populated urban environment, because partly or totally demolished structures of major cities will create the kind of killing grounds that level the odds between troops armed with highly sophisticated weapons systems and their less well armed opponents. The psychological and symbolic turning point of the Second World War, the battle of Stalingrad, and the battle of Madrid during the Spanish civil war are the classical arch-types of such a situation. The idea of hundreds of millions of DU rounds fired in such battles in the future wars is highly uncomfortable. The present stores of depleted uranium which have already been produced by our existing nuclear power plants are sufficient to produce thousands of millions of uranium rounds, and the world's nuclear power plants are producing vast further quantities of depleted uranium, every year. The USA has sold ammunition containing depleted uranium to at least 16 countries, including Bahrain, Egypt, France, Greece, Israel, Kuwait, Pakistan, Russia, South Korea, Taiwan and Turkey.

Nobody knows how dangerous depleted uranium really is. It may be that the fears have been exaggerated, but there is no doubt about the chemical toxicity of the material, and the way it can damage the kidneys of small children. Also the radioactivity is likely to do some damage. However, perhaps the most important aspect of the situation is that most people in Iraq believe that DU is very dangerous. In the future the US army will, in any case, be blamed about every cancer and every birth defect in Iraq. Thus the use of depleted uranium may also increase the probability of terrorist strikes using radiation weapons or "dirty bombs", or strikes against US nuclear power plants.

For instance used nuclear fuel which has just been taken out of a nuclear reactor can be more than 300 000 000 times more radioactive than depleted uranium but it has, otherwise, similar physical and chemical properties. Already now there are, on Earth, about 10 000 sites that store radioactive materials that could be used to make dirty bombs.

These possibilities have become much more real than before because of the worsening conflict between the USA and its allies and a number of extremist guerrilla movements, especially the Al Qaida network. In an interview given to the Al Jazeera television, two Al Qaida leaders who had been involved in planning the terrorist strikes to Washington and New York on 11.9.2001, said that their original plan had been to strike against US nuclear power plants. However, they had changed the plan because they had thought that a strike against nuclear power plants might have done too much damage and have too uncontrollable consequences.

In June 2003 the Thai police arrested a man who had smuggled 30 kilograms of radioactive cesium-137 from Russia. The arrested person was probably trying to sell the material to a terrorist organization.

When the US and British military forces occupied Iraq the official explanation was that this was done in order to prevent Iraq's possible weapons of mass destruction from getting into the hands of terrorist organizations. Due to an amazing blunder the Americans, however, left the most important and best known storage of various radioactive materials in Iraq unguarded for more than a week after the troops of the Iraqi government had withdrawn. The Tuwaitha nuclear complex contained at least 400 medical and industrial radiation sources, and it is now feared that some of them were stolen in the middle of the chaos caused by the war. Many local people seem to be suffering symptoms of radiation poisoning such as nosebleeds and diarrhoea. The most likely explanation is that they stole something from the complex and either hid the material or sold it forward to somebody.

When Michael Levy of the American Association of Scientists was describing the impact of a dirty bomb for the US congress, he was talking about a pea-sized bomb containing only 74 gigabecquerels or 2 curies of radioactivity in the form of cesium-137. The detonation of such a mini-bomb in the middle of New York or Washington DC would force, according to the existing legislation, the government to evict people from a stretch of land one and a half kilometre wide, in order to avoid about one thousand extra cancer deaths. The 30 kilograms of cesium-137 captured in Thailand would have been enough to make tens of thousands of such mini-bombs.

An attack that would cut the cooling pipes of a 1600 megawatt, water-cooled nuclear reactor might cause a release of 10 000 curies of radioactivity, five thousand million times more than the detonation of a 74 gigabecquerel dirty bomb. The cooling ponds - especially their water pipe systems - storing used nuclear fuel rods are even more vulnerable to terrorist strikes than the actual reactors.

Contd...

For Hindi click here

Copyleft. Any part of the content on this site can be used, reproduced, or distributed freely by anyone, anywhere and by any means. Acknowledgement is appreciated.

Designed and maintained by CAPITAL Creations, New Delhi. Phone 91-11-26194291