I spent Wednesday evening and Thursday afternoon at Stanford's chemistry library. I have good news and bad news.

First the bad news: The fact that UO3 represents about a fifth of uranium's oxide combustion products at standard pressure means that the O-U-O bond angle is flexible enough that a small amount of uranyl nitrate forms spontaneously on the surface of uranium metal exposed to air at standard temperature and pressure. This alone is an "airtight, iron-clad" argument that any uranium metal ammunition should always be plated with another kind of metal coat to keep it from contact with air. I believe this should be made a top priority, and that all unclad D.U. munitions should be withdrawn at once.

Uranyl nitrate -- formula UO2(NO3)2 -- is very poisonous. It is produced in much larger quantities when uranium combusts in air. There is no one temperature at which all metal U ignites in air, because finely separated uranium metal will ignite spontaneously. So, in metallic dust form, it ignites and burns long before its melting point. That is not good news for anyone using any kind of uranium anywhere, for any application where it is exposed to air and either friction or acoustic wear. I gather that one of the most popular forms of 30 mm depleted uranium ammunition will burn -- with a large volume of fire -- when it strikes a hard target. All D.U. munitions are likely to burn near the target when fired, and anyone downwind, friend or foe, is in trouble.

Uranium melts at 1133 degrees Celsius, boils at 4131, and it will produce temperatures far above 5000 degrees when it burns in air, exceeding 10,000 deg. C. under sustained conditions. It softens starting around 200 deg. C, but then begins to harden again at around 650 degrees; hence its self-sharpening effect. At 700 degrees Celsius, it will burn in a pure nitrogen atmosphere, producing insoluble nitrides. Liquid uranium has a vapor pressure about 4.5 times that of molten iron. UO3 (again, about a fifth of the oxides formed in uranium combustion) melts at around 500 deg. C. At some temperature (well, any temperature, if you count the rare nuclear decay, which I will henceforth ignore), UO3 will, by loss of an oxygen atom, produce the UO2++ ion, which is the very dangerous problem. If there are any N or NO3 ions, or UxNy nitrides, or N2O4 -- or many of the other nitrogen compounds which are commonly found in propellants and explosives -- in the vicinity of combustion, then burning will make huge amounts of the deadly UO2(NO3)2, which will precipitate slowly as a yellow film. Burning U in ordinary air will produce nitrogen ions from air's N2, according to the heat of combustion. There are several complex uranyl and uranium-halogen compounds which do not precipitate from the atmosphere at room temperature and pressure, but remain dissolved in air until captured by a cohesive surface such as lung tissue.

If inhaled, the half life of uranyl ions in bone tissue is more than 300 days, but elimination follows a distinctly nonlinear pattern. It accumulates in bone tissues where it attacks the immune system, and also in testes, where it leads to congenital malformations. I have not been able to determine the half life in the testes, yet. I still need to visit the medical library.

Now, the good news: There are antidotes. Please see Springer-Verlag's _Gmelin Handbook_ of Inorganic Chemistry, Title U, Supplementary Volume A7, "Biology," pp. 326-333, "Therapeutic Removal." I suppose a citation search with the combined Science citation Index, BIOSYS, Inspec, Medline, and the Engineering Index, using the citations in that section, will likely find even more useful therapies for treating uranium poisoning.

More bad news: Most all of the therapies I saw looked like they wouldn't do much good in the bone or the testes. Based on the published incidence data at hand from U.S. and U.K. troops and Basrah civilians, there is reason to believe that chromosome damage and birth defects will continue to increase. The incidence curve is probably sigmoid, but it probably doesn't level off until well past average human life expectancy. This is really tragic and terrible, and probably amounts to the biggest friendly fire incident ever.

More good news: for people who were just exposed yesterday, you may be able to get much if not most of the uranium before it makes it out of the bloodstream, and you can catch the trickle coming from UO2 still in the lungs, apparently.

There are lots of different detection methods, and I am still working on trying to determine which is most cost-effective. The _Gmelin Handbook_, Title U, Supl. Vol. D4, "Cation Exchange -- Chromatography," has a wealth of detection information which I only skimmed because I decided to focus on antidotes. Again, a citation search on the Gmelin citations is sure to produce plenty of good resources.

More to follow when I get back from the medical library.

I think that a panel of Ohio and federal judges could convince the Supreme Court to throw Bush in jail. He's been an unmitigated disaster. He can't decide whether to ask people to buy more or fewer land mines. Without the French, we would be part of UnitedKingdomCorp about now. That's what everyone knows Bush represents: a return to monarchy. Doesn't everyone remember why the dictatorial monarchy was bad? People were treated less fairly, there were more wars, and standards of living went down. We had slavery and more evil.

If I were king, I would order George W. Bush to rehab, get Kerry a four-year contract, and sue for peace. But I'm not a king, so please join my petition.

The more I look at this, the more depressingly foreboding it is. Not the pictures -- I can handle those. It's the numbers and their damned graph:

Incidence rates of congenital malformations
in Basrah 1990-2000

Column 1: Year
Column 2: Number of Births
Column 3: Number of congenital malformations
Column 4: Incidence rate per 1000 births

1990 12161 037 03.04
1991 09845 028 02.84
1992 11800 023 01.95
1993 12416 028 01.31
1994 12250 036 02.93
1995 10576 046 04.35
1996 10470 048 04.56
1997 13653 032 02.34
1998 10186 079 07.76
1999 13905 136 09.78
2000 12560 221 17.60

This crap isn't going away; we're on the front end of the kind of chromosome damage which will stay in families -- AMERICAN AND IRAQI FAMILIES -- for generations. We are so screwed. I wish this was just stochastic market data.

Damn friendly fire and the small-minded soldier boys who spend other people's lives trying to convince each other it's no big deal. Damn the NRC and the Health Physics Society.

Just keep reminding yourself that any apparently exponential proportion of a finite population has to be a sigmoid.

Reuters writes:

A 53-year-old Vietnam veteran from western Pennsylvania has been called up for active service with the U.S. military in the Iraq war, The Tribune Review of Greensburg, Pennsylvania reported on Wednesday.

Paul Dunlap, a sergeant in the Army National Guard, will join an armored division next month as a telecommunications specialist in Kuwait, and expects to be there for at least a year, the newspaper reported.

Dunlap, who has not been in combat since serving as a 19-year-old Marine in Vietnam, could not be reached for comment. He will leave behind his wife Mary, four children and three grandchildren.

"I don't think any of them want me to go," Dunlap told the paper. "I'm thinking it's a long time since I've been in war."

Dunlap, from the town of Pleasant Unity, near Greensburg, Pennsylvania, said he received a call from his sergeant major and was told to report for a soldier readiness program, the newspaper said.

Dunlap's wife was quoted as saying the entire family "prayed that he wouldn't pass his physical."

"It's very, very scary," she said. "He's been a soldier since I met him, but there's a part of me that wonders at 53: Is he going to be up to doing what he needs to do over there?

Found on Kos.

P.S. Please join my petition.

Well, well, well! It looks like everyone who was so adamant that we had to, "finish what we started," before the election are now ready to turn tail and skadaddle.

Told ya' so. Now, how many generations are we going to be paying for this folly?

A few years ago, Slashdotters en masse, when faced with a story about electric cars, would complain about charging times and not suggest any work-arounds. What a difference an oil war makes! Now battery exchange ideas gets posted early on the thread, and even in the middle, replacable cell station ideas get modded up.

Do these shenanigans look like they might amount to more than 69,000 votes? They do to me. The courts get to say, again?!

Congress deleted all funds for new nuclear weapons in the omnibus appropriations bill, which passed the House of Representatives this afternoon. It is expected to pass the Senate shortly. This includes funds for the Robust Nuclear Earth penetrator, or nuclear bunker buster, and for the Advanced Concepts Initiative for new nuclear designs.

You win some and you lose some. Bush tried to steal the election and got caught, and we'll all be living a lot longer.

Given what we've learned about A.Q. Khan's operation, what are the chances that Iran doesn't already have at least 10 atomic bombs?

See what a great global cop the U.S. makes.

Berkeley finds evidence of Republican fraud in Florida. And Yubanet has more.

Stanford really makes me wonder, sometimes:

CARLOS MCCLATCHY MEMORIAL COLLOQUIUM
on Monday, 23 November 2004, 4:00pm
Bldg. 200:030 (History)

            "Of Democracy and Communication"
                              John D. Peters
        Communication Studies, University of Iowa

Democracy is haunted by impossibility. Especially its requirements of communication are extraordinary: hundreds, thousands, or millions of voices need to be somehow heard; mortal minds are taxed with the job of formulating an intelligent picture of the world; and finite energies are expected to participate in hard to locate public forums. Rather than lamenting such impossibility, we should celebrate it. Democracy is an indispensable folly. Taking democracy in this light allows us to rethink its communication requirements, especially what rationality, participation, and voice might mean.

About the Speaker: Peters is the F. Wendell Distinguished Professor of Media History and Social Theory and Professor of Communication Studies at University of Iowa. He is also author of "Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication" Chicago University Press, 1999; and "Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition " Chicago University Press, forthcoming, Spring 2005.

I would try to make that if I wasn't trying to keep Monday free.

Do you want to earn sales commissions from ReadSay Literacy by helping to write copy (e.g., user manuals, ads, technical writing, and/or web design) for ReadSay's PROnounce English pronunciation and reading literacy system?

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Over time, I'll convert to a software-only sales model, but my best sales agents will be offered the best gigs in that respect.

As far as non-English work, I need someone to help fix my Chinese translation -- http://www.readsay.com/pro-cs.htm -- and to translate into many other languages such as Spanish, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Russian, Hindi, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Traditional Chinese, etc.

Send me an email to discuss terms.

Sincerely,
James Salsman

P.S. Freejung can vouch for the extent to which I keep my financial promises to those who help me -- he did the artwork on the product site.

According to the peer-reviewed International Journal of Epidemiology, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 74-86:

Overall, the risk of any malformation among pregnancies reported by men was 50% higher in Gulf War Veterans (GWV) compared with Non-GWVs (NGWV).

For musculo-skeletal malformations, the significant association with Gulf war service was largely driven by the 'other musculo-skeletal malformations' subgroup (Odds Ratio (OR) = 3.1 [meaning a 210% increase in observed birth defects compared to nonveterans], 95% Confidence Interval for Odds Ratio (CI): from 1.9, to 5.1). The commonest diagnoses within this subgroup include codes related to head size and shape (plagiocephaly, macrocephaly, or craniosynostosis) (33 GWV/9 NGWV). The risk of 'other non-chromosomal malformations' was 70% higher among GWV, and this was driven wholly by the group of malformations remaining when specified syndromes were removed (OR = 3.5, 95% CI: 1.5, 8.4)....

The risk of genital malformations was 80% higher in offspring of GWV compared with NGWV (P = 0.04), the most common diagnosis being hypospadias (24 GWV/10 NGWV). Risks of one or more malformation within the urinary system (OR = 1.6, 95% CI: 1.1, 2.2), and of musculo-skeletal system malformations (OR = 1.8, 95% CI: 1.4, 2.4), were statistically significantly associated with paternal Gulf war service. Within the urinary system, the risk of renal anomaly was approximately 60% higher in the offspring of GWV and the commonest diagnosis within this subgroup was vesico-uretero-renal reflux (32 GWV/17 NGWV).

The risk of malformation within the digestive system as a whole was 40% higher among offspring of GWV, the effect being driven by the subgroup 'other malformations of the digestive system' (OR = 1.6, 95% CI: 1.0, 2.5). The three commonest diagnoses in this subgroup were pyloric stenosis, congenital hiatus hernia, and unspecified anomalies of the digestive system.

A February, 2004, U.K. Pension Appeal Tribunal Service decision implicated depleted uranium in birth defects of children fathered by a Gulf War Veteran. How could this happen? Depleted uranium has been shown by the U.S. military laboratory responsible for describing its action as causing "delayed reproductive death" in human cells:

Genomic instability in human osteoblast cells after exposure to depleted uranium: delayed lethality and micronuclei formation, in J Environ Radioact. 2003;64(2-3):247-59. Here are some excerpts from its Abstract: "Delayed reproductive death was observed for many generations (36 days, 30 population doublings) following exposure to DU, Ni, or gamma radiation. While DU stimulated delayed production of micronuclei up to 36 days after exposure, levels in cells exposed to gamma-radiation or Ni returned to normal after 12 days. There was also a persistent increase in micronuclei in all clones isolated from cells that had been exposed to nontoxic concentrations of DU. These studies demonstrate that DU exposure in vitro results in genomic instability manifested as delayed reproductive death and micronuclei formation."

Observation of radiation-specific damage in human cells exposed to depleted uranium: dicentric frequency and neoplastic transformation as endpoints in Radiat Prot Dosimetry, 2002;99(1-4):275-8; abstract: "Published data from [the U.S. Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute] have demonstrated that DU exposure ... is both neoplastically transforming and genotoxic.... Data demonstrated that DU exposure (50 micromolar, 24 h) induced a significant elevation in dicentric frequency in vitro in contrast to incubation with the heavy metals nickel and tungsten, which did not increase dicentric frequency above background levels...."

Depleted uranium-catalyzed oxidative DNA damage: absence of significant alpha particle decay, in J Inorg Biochem. 2002 Jul 25;91(1):246-52: "In the current study we demonstrate that DU can generate oxidative DNA damage and can also catalyze reactions that induce hydroxyl radicals in the absence of significant alpha particle decay. Experiments were conducted under conditions in which chemical generation of hydroxyl radicals was calculated to exceed the radiolytic generation by a million-fold.... These data not only demonstrate that DU at pH 7 can induce oxidative DNA damage in the absence of significant alpha particle decay, and also suggest that DU can induce carcinogenic lesions, e.g. oxidative DNA lesions...."