Originally posted by: Slimline
That is nucking futs!! Depleted Uranium ammo? That sounds expensive and hard to come by?
Not really all that hard to come by. "Depleted" uranium is nothing more than the (if I remember the numbers right) 98+% of natural uranium that's left over after it's enriched for nuclear reactor fuel. Likely this is the stuff they're getting as a by product of enrichment for the reactors the navy uses in it's subs & surface ships (just a guess, but hopefully considered an educated one......the navy uses enriched uranium for their reactors, while civilian power plants don't enrich their fuel hardly at all).
Uranium, when it's pulled from the ground, is <2% (think it might even be less than 1%, but that memory is 25 years old (from my days learning how to operate navy nuclear reactors), and a little fuzzy! :roll: ) of U-235, which is the material that will actually fission in a nuclear reactor. The remaining material is different isotopes, mostly U-238, which also is radioactive, but not nearly so much as U-235, and will not sustain a nuclear reaction in a reactor adequately enough to use it (think of it like the difference between putting normal unleaded gasoline in your car, versus 120 octane avgas). Let's face it too, the navy doesn't want to be refueling their ships & subs every 5 years, and enriching the uranium allows them to go upwards of 20+ years between refuelings.
So what happens to the remainder of that uranium? Some is used for shielding high radiation sources, like what are used in radiography cameras (remember that uranium is close to 1-1/2 times as dense as lead, so makes a better shield for gamma radiation than lead would), where the radiography source is so highly radioactive that the small amount of radiation put out by the U-238 is small potatoes, comparitively speaking. Some is used for ballast in various vessels, and some is used for armor and armor-piercing shells.
How safe is this stuff?? Let's put it this way......I've held a chunk of it in my hand for about 5 minutes, and I'm still typing with 2 hands! :laugh: Radioactively speaking, you could pretty much walk around with a chunk of this stuff in your pocket all day long, every day for a year, and not exceed the annual radiation exposure limits that congress has set for you, by law. The real danger with this stuff would be if you inhaled it (then the alpha radiation would be penetrating to the vital organs, where it can't do that from outside your body), if you ingested it (think heavy metal poisoning, like little kids eating leaded paint chips)........and, of course, if some big honking 30mm shell tipped with this stuff slams into your body at 1000fps!! :shocked: There is some concern with the vast amount of DU that's been used in the middle east in the past decade and a half, but that's more due to the ingestion/inhalation concerns than the radiation concerns.
Bottom line? The government pretty much has a vast supply of this stuff, and since it's a byproduct of reactor fuel enrichment, the cost is negligable. It's super-dense, it's relatively safe to be around, and it's not radioactive enough to bother you unless you put it INSIDE your body (so it's even pretty useless to use for a "dirty" bomb).
Okay......that's my lesson.......hope ya enjoyed it!
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