Haven\'t we had several energetic threads on this BS before?
Depleted uranium is just about as innocuous as lead; DU is just barely radioactive.
All this is just anti-American propaganda of the worst sort, playing on peoples\' fears of anything nuclear.
DU does make superior projectiles but its radioactivity does NOT contribute to its lethality.
Go to the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency site (www.iaea.org) and check out their report on DU.
As I pointed out earlier, if one assumes a LOT of DU is used on the battlefield, say one tonne per square mile, the background concentration of natural uranium in the top foot of soil increases less than 10%. And NATURAL uranium is more radioactive than depleted uranium since UNdepleted uranium contains U-235 with a much shorter half-life, not to mention the accompaning daughters (radon, radium, etc.)
Of course, the wrong source and processing of depleted uranium COULD make it more toxic. The US has two sources - enrichment plant \"tails\" and reprocessed submarine cores. We\'ve got gazillions of tons of the former and a relatively small bit of the latter. The tails are very clean and CHEAP so would be the preferred source, I\'d think. The recycled sub cores might have interesting and more toxic impurities. If the US is using recycled sub cores instead of tails, then one might have a case but it doesn\'t make any economic sense for the government to do so. Therefore I presume that we\'re using clean tails.
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