SOIL in the Gulf and the Balkans that’s contaminated with debris from spent depleted uranium weapons presents far too high a risk to local children, an Italian study confirms. Playing in the soil dramatically raises the children’s chances of getting cancer and kidney damage.
This is just one conclusion from a clutch of new studies into the safety or otherwise of DU, which the military uses in shells designed to pierce the armour plating of tanks.
The Italian team says that children living in areas of conflict that have been bombarded with DU could get a dose of radiation above the internationally recognised safety limit. Breathing in particles of the toxic heavy metal could also interfere with kidney function.
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Some 270 tonnes of DU have been spread over battlefields in the Gulf and the Balkans during the last decade, the vast majority by US forces.
The trouble starts when the shells hit hard targets, the DU ignites and creates clouds of uranium oxide dust. Researchers from the University of Florence and the Tuscan Environment Protection Agency (ARPAT) say that children playing in contaminated areas are most at risk from the dust.
Using estimates of DU contamination of battlefields gleaned from the UN Environment Programme, the researchers calculate that a child inhaling 0.1 grams of the most polluted soil would received a radiation dose of 1.44 millisieverts. The annual limit for members of the public recommended by the International Commission on Radiological Protection is 1 millisievert.
“Children who inhale heavily contaminated soil could exceed the radiation safety limit and increase their chances of contracting cancer,” says Daniele Dominici, a physicist from the University of Florence. In addition, a child who happens to swallow a pinch of heavily contaminated soil could take in 120 milligrams of DU, a big enough dose to harm their kidneys.
Contaminated areas should be comprehensively surveyed, and the worst affected cleaned up, Dominici argues. “In sites targeted by DU munitions, special measures have to be adopted to reduce exposures.”
The Italian study is due to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity, alongside other papers underlining the potential risks of DU. In one of the papers, from the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, researchers have analysed soil from sites in Kosovo where DU shells were fired in 1999. They say that as many as a million tiny particles of DU could be present in just a few milligrams of soil. The particles, half with a diameter of less than 1.5 micrometres, “have a potential for resuspension and inhalation under arid conditions”, they conclude.
Another of the new studies, carried out by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, alongside the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Maryland, show that DU fragments embedded in a rat’s body behave very much like standard uranium – producing similar toxicological changes in rat kidneys, bone and liver cells.
Researchers at University College Dublin, meanwhile, have done a study on a spent DU shell obtained from Serbia. They found traces of plutonium in the shell’s DU casing which could cause a small increase in the radiation it gives off. The plutonium is left over from the nuclear fuel: spent uranium fuel is re-enriched to dig out any fissionable U-235 for power stations and nuclear weapons, but the depleted portion can still contain elements like plutonium and americium.
A growing body of opinion is now marshalled against the military’s use of DU. Earlier this year, Britain’s Royal Society warned of the potential risks of battlefields contaminated with DU to local children (91av, 16 March, p 9) and Dominici’s calculations appear to confirm this. The Royal Society also highlighted the toxicological risk to soldiers in tanks struck by DU. It said they could suffer kidney damage, possibly bad enough for their kidneys to fail “within a few days.”
While an overview of the latest research by IAEA experts concludes that any health effects from DU weapons “appear to be very minor”, they are certain to be seized upon by those campaigning against the use of DU in weapons.