Posted on 11/20/2001 7:21:17 AM PST by Voronin
Over 100,000 Balkan villagers may have died from kidney failure brought on by toxic chemicals seeping into their well water from shallow coal deposits.
Robert Finkelman of the US Geological Survey in Reston, Virginia, has found that well water in regions where people suffer from Balkan endemic nephropathy has elevated levels of organic poisons such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
First recognised in 1956, the condition affects villagers aged 40 to 60 in valleys along tributaries of the Danube. Unlike most victims of kidney failure, only about 20 per cent of them have high blood pressure, but 40 to 50 per cent get normally rare urinary-tract cancers. The disease appears to affect some villages but not others nearby.
Villagers get their water from shallow wells. And when Finkelman's team carried out tests in wells in the former Yugoslavia, it found that toxic chemical concentrations are higher in water from affected areas than from unaffected areas nearby. That argues for a geological cause, he told a meeting of the Geological Society of America in Boston.
Geologically reactive
The leading suspects are geologically reactive coal deposits called lignites. Unlike other coals, the young Balkan lignites release large amounts of potentially toxic organic compounds into groundwater. Villagers tap the contaminated water when they drill shallow wells into the nearest aquifer.
Problems like this could lurk unrecognised in other rural areas with similar coals, Finkelman warns. He says Greek and Turkish villages, which also use well water, are the most likely to be affected.
This kind of coal is also found in Japan and France, but residents probably won't have problems because they drink municipal water, which is unlikely to accumulate the poisons.
But David Long of Michigan State University believes coal might not be the culprit. He studied a similarly affected area in Bulgaria, and failed to find any correlation with coal deposits.
But he did find higher levels of arsenic and molybdenum, and lower levels of selenium, in well water. Some wells also had exceptionally high levels of nitrates. The two groups plan to compare notes to try to resolve the issue. 10:09 19 November 01
VRN
Or have a beer and spend a quiet evening in...
No need to mix apples and oranges. BEN is well documented in scientific literature and known for decades. DU in the Balkans is hushed up.
DU controversy is two-pronged because DU is both radioactive AND toxic.
Radioactivity danger is insignifficant, except if DU is ingested.
Toxicologic is not and it is seldomly mentioned.Uranium itself is toxic, see standard occupational medicine manuals.
DU used for ammo shells is laced with Plutonium, one of the most toxic elements on Earth.
For mathematicallyu and ethically unchallenged, calculate total amount of Plutonium in 10 tons of DU
and compare with lethal doses for Plutonium and then go figure.Nice homework for Downwinders too.
Ok, I calculated it, and can see that you didn't bother to or you wouldn't have made such a statement.
Go ahead and use the worst case scenario of 12.87 Bq/kg for all the rounds used during Allied Force - it's still going to be embarassing.
Hoplite, You kicked the ball out from the court, as usual
Becquerel has nothing to do with my question, this is is unit for radiactive decay (1 Bq = 1 s -1) and has nothing to do with the weight of Plutonium in 10 tons of DU waste.
We are not plain stupid.
Here is the calculation I asked. For you, explained step by step:
10 tons of DU = 10,000 kg = 10,000,000grams = 10,000,000,000 mg of DU.
1 part per billion means that in 10 billion milligrams of DU there is 10 mg of Plutonium.
Hoplite, that is what I have asked.
10 miligrams of plutonium is released. This is toxicological risk, not radiological.
How many people you can poison with 10 miligrams of Plutonium, Hoplite? How many will develop cancer?
When they die, Plutonium is released into ground to start the next cycle of poisoning, for the next 100 human generations.
How about enrolling into some community college evening courses to aleviate CRI Syndrome?
While the unit Becquerel may not directly address your assertion, one can use the information available on the rounds recovered to perform some basic compositional analysis regarding the amount of Pu-239 contained in these rounds and use the results to apply to all the DU rounds used during Allied Force.
Pu-239 has a specific activity of .063 Ci/g (Curies/gram)
1 Ci = 3.7E+10 Bq (becquerel)
Ergo, 1 g of Pu-239 has a specific activity of 2.3E+9 Bq/g.
The most active of the samples recovered from Kosovo had a Pu-239 activity of 12.87Bq/Kg, or 1.3E-3 Bq/g.
We can use this information to find the amount of Pu-239 contained in the sample: (1.3E-3 Bq/ g sample) / (2.3E+9 Bq/ g Pu-239) = 5.7E-13 grams of Pu-239 in the most active sample, per gram of sample.
There were ~31,000 DU penetrators fired during Allied Force. Du penetrators weigh ~300g each.
That's 9.3E6 g of DU.
Multiply that by the calculated ratio of Pu-239 per g of DU and get 5.5E-6 g of Pu-239 contained in the DU rounds fired in Allied Force.
That's 5 micrograms, not 5 milligrams, and not 10 milligrams as in your, ahem, calculations, which appear to be based on a reporter's understanding of what constitutes the "lowest measurable level" and is based on another story.
And here's the official report in .pdf form for you to read.
Please note: "The plutonium concentrations are very low and constitute impurities at the level of detection." (pg 158)
Once you've digested this, you're on your own to determine what percentage of the Pu-239 was actually released into the environment instead of being buried in intact DU penetrators.
Interesting reading regarding the actual toxicity of Plutonium.
Who knows, maybe we will learn sometime soon that Plutonium in small quantities
is beneficial for our health, kind of "Downwinders wonder food supplement"
ZaDomSpremni, tell that to American Gulf War vets
{n.b. "za dom Spremni" is Croatian Nazi salute, equivalent of "Zieg Heil"]
If you're going to mount a campaign against organizations using toxic elements in the Balkans, I suggest you research those who were administering lethal thoracic or cranial lead injections via Kalashnikov rather than tilting at pseudoscience induced windmills.
It would seem unlikely.
NATO didn't provide close air support or use armor. That's where most if not all of the DU comes from. Helicopeter gun ships and A-10s use 30mm DU shells for close air suport and most if not all armored vehicles but I don't think that it is dropped in bombs ?
Maybe in anti-armor cluster bobs but I've never heard of that.
This has been a long running and heated debate here on Freerepublic.com and there was some interesting information posted. There is a US Army report 'out there' which details the risks of DU but is not widely known. The themes seem to be:
1: Quantity and dispersal,
2: Quality/ impurity (one of the nuclear plants that produced the stuff also accidentally added very small quantities of plutonium),
3: Radiological vs toxilogical effects,
4: Path through the food chain and environment (samethinginnit?)
Apparently DU (tipped?) bullets are quite common and not that hard to get hold of. My opinion is still out as it is early days, but it disturbs me that the countries that use it (Britain and the USA) need to when they have the technological ability to make non-DU rounds as effective (as is now being claimed by some arms manufacturers) and that other countries (such as Russia) do not. It is extremely odd. I also don't like the idea that any nuclear waste is used in such a way - maybe it has something to do with money?
VRN
Lignite coal was mined for the express purpose of burning the coal in pits to process the recovered ash for Uranium for the Manhattan Project in North Dakota.
Although other sources contributed as well, (to the Manhattan Project), local side effects included high levels of Molybdenum in flyash--sufficiently high to affect downwind cattle herds with Molybdenosis. The affected cattle were destroyed and buried.
Commonly, in areas where high levels of Uranium occur in groundwater, there are high fluoride levels also, which helps to make the uranium mobile in solution.
There is an eH pH boundary in the coal aquifers which causes the Uranium to become bound in organometallic complexes and concentrate in the coal. Coal of this nature exists in North and South Dakota.
If this coal has been burned locally over long periods of time, without control of flyash, or disposal methods more sophisticated than shoveling out the stove and tossing the ash out back, the soils in the area could show high concentrations of Uranium, molybdenum, selenium, and other toxic metals.
This was to be my Master's thesis topic before I jumped ship to the oil industry--two weeks before Three Mile Island.
VRN
If the lignite coal in the region is similar to that which was mined for the Manhattan project, the results will be similar. First, the amount of fissionable material recovered in mining the North Dakota lignite was small, but then, cost was no object. Of the recovered uranium, only a small percentage was fissionable material; this had to be concentrated considerably to be of any use to the project, other sources proved to be more efficient.
However, the link between uraniferous lignite, the presence of other toxic metals, and flyash distribution was firmly established. Recall that entire cattle herds downwind had to be "liquidated" in a time in which beef was at a premium, due to obvious symptoms of heavy metal poisoning, including, but not limited to hair loss and 'the staggers'.
While much of this was blamed on Molybdenum,there was really no control on flyash emissions from the open pits where the coal was burned to concentrate the chemically complexed uranium. Thus, it takes no great leap of intellect to find that uranium was dispersed downwind with the other toxic metals, uranium which, for the most part, was not fissionable material, and might be known as "depleted" in today's euphamisms.
Keep in mind that this is a portion of North Dakota where cattle herds have exceeded the human population in numbers for over a century, so the symptoms noted were veterinary, and subsequent to the war effort, few, if any records may have been kept to account for symptoms experienced (or not) by cattle.
What does this have to do with Kosovo, etc.?
In Kosovo, where metals may be concentrated in the lignite, that coal will have been mined locally as a fuel source, where possible. Locals may have long ignored any outside claims of mineral rights to simply obtain fuel. Individual heating/cooking fires will have the same basic flyash regulation devices as an open pit, with the effect of fine particulates (containing heavy metals, including uranium) being distributed over the landscape over a long period of time-in human terms--hundreds of years. These metals, in relatively low concentration, would be entering the food chain as well, both through agricultural products, and concentrated in livestock, fish, and wild game.
Despite efforts at modernization, during times of war, a culture will revert to tried and true, if slightly primitive methods (from an economic development standpoint) of obtaining the necessities. Subsistance agriculture, in the back yard where the ash has been falling, fishing, hunting wild game, large or small, and digging/burning coal for fuel, all could contribute to increased contamination in humans.
This could explain localized increases in detected metals levels, including uranium, especially if alternate fuels had been utilized prior to infrastructure breakdown.
This same group of contaminants would be carried into the groundwater by precipitation.
Another factor which would affect the stats in Kosovo, and perhaps other areas, is the incursion of medical staff from all over the world. Reporting of diseases and ailments would increase with increasing medical scrutiny. Cancer is a disease which rarely becomes detectible overnight, immune disorders may be caused by other factors than just 'depleted' uranium.
Be that as it may, this cannot account for similarly observed changes in population health in other areas, but may indicate how coal could be a contributing factor in the Balkans.
Has anyone checked for asbestos or for tremolite/actinolyte series pyroxenes in the dust? A lot of buildings were demolished, and the local soil mineralogy may be a problem as well.
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