Veterans Affairs Committee on Feb. 26th, 2013

[Nicholas Priest]

Yes. The nucleus starts with a mass of 238 for uranium, the major isotope. When it decays it loses four of those. It gets rid of part of its nucleus and forms new mass weight. It now becomes something with uranium 234, with mass 234. Then it decays away, and you go down through a chain like this. At each stage the nucleus of the atom gets a bit smaller. Sometimes it becomes more stable and sometimes less stable. Eventually it gets down to a state where the nucleus has the right balance of protons and neutrons and it's stable. It no longer wants to break up. With these decay chains that is normally lead. It's occasionally bismuth, but normally it's a lead isotope.

[Sean Casey, Liberal, Charlottetown, PE]

Is depleted uranium one of those stages of decay?

[Nicholas Priest]

No. In natural uranium, there are three isotopes. It's basically just three forms of the uranium which have different atomic masses. As I said the weight, some are less stable and some are more stable; you've got the most stable one, which is uranium-238, with a mass of 238. The next one is uranium-235, with a mass of 235, and then there's uranium-234. In normal, natural uranium, these are present in a fixed ratio.

When you use uranium to make fuel for reactors, then you sometimes want to increase the amount of uranium-235 in the fuel, which is the fuel component in the uranium. You can burn uranium-238 in fast reactors, but not in normal reactors. So they enrich the uranium by putting it through a separator, which means there's more 235 than there normally is. Instead of being about 0.07%, it goes up to 3% or 5%. At the moment, the big argument is because the Iranians are producing 20% enriched uranium, which means that 20% of the atoms would be this 235-type.

When you do that, you end up with uranium that has less uranium-235 as a by-product. We call that depleted uranium. The original thought was, well, we'll use this as breeding material in plutonium-generating fast reactors. That was the idea. Then other uses came up. It was used as a chemical because it's safer than natural uranium. Almost immediately all the fine chemicals used in chemistry labs and things like that, including uranium salts, were switched over to depleted uranium salts. Its weight was used by Boeing as counterweights in the surfaces of aircraft. It's used in a wide range of applications, including military applications for penetrators, and also armour. The United States actually uses depleted uranium as part of the armour in their Abrams tanks.

So there's a wide range, but that's the leftover product, so it's not a decay product. It's basically where you've taken the natural uranium and you processed it so that part of it is enhanced, and in the process of doing this you've created some uranium that has less radioactive material in it. You typically get about a 60% reduction in uranium-235, and 80% or 90% reduction in uranium-234.

The critical thing is that people tend to think of depleted uranium as something that is fixed, but the reality is that any uranium containing less uranium-235 than found in natural uranium is officially depleted uranium. So depleted uranium hasn't got one composition, but a variety of compositions, depending on where it came from. Most of the material that was used by the armed forces came from the Paducah plant in the United States, and there the composition always remained the same. That's the material that's used in three places. The U.K. uses it for its CHARM3 armour-piercing rounds in tanks and it's used in Phalanx guns as well. The Americans use it as well in the Warthog A-10 aircraft, which Britain doesn't operate. Those are the three uses for it.

I think in Canada, then, the only usage was in the Phalanx in the navy, and I'm not even sure if that's still ongoing. That gun has probably been taken out of service.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Peter Stoffer]

Mr. Priest, thank you very much.

Now over to Mr. Lobb for five minutes....

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Mr. Priest, forgive me if I'm repeating things, but when you did your studies over in the Balkans, did you have an opportunity to go there twice?

[Nicolas Priest]

Yes.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

When you were over there, did you have a chance to test both.... I'm assuming there would be former military personnel over there—

[Nicholas Priest]

It was just members of the public.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Just maybe by happenstance, did any of those members of the public have any shrapnel or anything like that in them?

[Nicholas Priest]

No, the only weapons that were used in the Balkans were A-10 Warthog rounds. The anti-armour rounds fired by tanks are very precise; they normally hit their target. Normally they try to put two rounds through the target just to make sure it's knocked out. The A-10, on the other hand, operates in a different way. It fires hundreds of rounds at very rapid rates, and you strafe the target. So very few of the depleted uranium rounds actually hit the target. Most of them get embedded in the road or in the local environment and things like that.

Where you're talking about the environmental aspects, they arise mostly from the rounds not hitting the target but other things. You can go around and see the holes in the road. We did that, and if you dig deeply enough, you find the penetrators. They were being picked up. Teams were clearing mines and they would occasionally find the penetrators and pick them up, put them in a plastic bag, and take them back for disposal.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

I don't know if this is relevant or not but I'll ask the question anyway. Is there any relevance to ranking the risk of exposure, whether it's inhalation or ingestion? If you possibly have shrapnel in your body by fluke, is there any way of saying that this shrapnel or exposure by inhalation put you at higher risk? Has that been determined?

[Nicholas Priest]

I guess the risk increases as the amount in the body increases. Quite clearly if people have bit of depleted uranium metal in them—which some of the people involved in the friendly fire incidents both on the U.S. and U.K. sides do have—they will have the highest amounts of uranium in their bodies and would be at highest risk. But the studies done in the U.S. have not shown any adverse effects in these people, to the point that they've not considered it necessary to remove all of the shrapnel. They've removed the big bits but often they've left smaller pieces of shrapnel in the individuals concerned. There's no evidence of any toxicity.

Many other metals are much more toxic, including the conventional rounds that are used by the armour-piercing rounds, which contain nickel and cobalt and tungsten. If you look at it from a chemical toxicity point of view, they're probably much more toxic than depleted uranium. Uranium is not very toxic as a material. I would quite happily wear a watch made of depleted uranium, except that it tends to oxidize and my arm and my shirt would be black. Other than that, it wouldn't worry me because the radiation under that piece of uranium would never reach a level where I would expect to see any damage to my skin.

Similarly, if I completely surrounded myself with gamma rays from depleted uranium, I wouldn't exceed the radiation worth a dose limit in a year. If I wanted to get up to the same dose that I get every year from natural background radiation, I'd have to eat about a teaspoonful of uranium, about five grams.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

That's interesting because Bruce Power is in my riding. You will be well familiar with Bruce Power when it was trying to move the steam generators to Sweden to get them recycled. You remember that ongoing debate. The argument was that there's more radiation in a pacemaker than in a steam generator. There are tonnes of data in the nuclear industry to back up the science behind the procedures that have taken place, but quite often the public chooses to ignore those facts, I think.

[Nicholas Priest]

Can I be brutally honest with you as well?

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Sure.

[Nicholas Priest]

I often think that it's politicians' perception of public opinion that is actually driving things rather than public opinion itself. We did a survey looking at the acceptability of nuclear technologies in Canada, and we did it pre- and post-Fukushima.

After Fukushima, acceptance of nuclear technologies across Canada rose, including in Quebec, which has a slightly different attitude to nuclear technologies. It didn't fall, and yet the perception among the political class was that it was a gut reaction. This must mean there's going to be more opposition to nuclear within Canada, Germany, or other countries.

What happens is that people are beginning to realize that we've had a succession of nuclear accidents or power plant failures. I don't like calling Fukushima a nuclear accident because it was 100% predictable, given the circumstances there. The reactor wasn't designed to meet what was thrown at it. People realize the consequences are quite small; they're mostly economic consequences. You can go back to the first one, the Three Mile Island reactor accident. Nobody was harmed as a consequence of that accident. Go to Chernobyl. The predictions were that thousands and thousands of people were going to die as a consequence of the radiation from Chernobyl. The reality is that there is no excess in anything as a result, except childhood thyroid cancer, and that's treatable. You've only had about a few tens of deaths that you can attribute to Chernobyl.

From Fukushima, the doses are really quite low. The doses around Chernobyl now in the exclusion zone are lower than they are in Cornwall in southwest England. Similarly, people were being moved from areas around Fukushima where there was some contamination, but they were being moved into areas in Japan where the natural background dose was higher than the areas they had come from. There are lots of things involved, and I think the problem is that the perception is very difficult to fight.

The reality is that if I had 200 people and I irradiated them with so much radiation that half of them were going to die in the next week or so, of that 100 remaining, 80 would never see any radiation-induced cancer. The reality is that radiation is a remarkably poor carcinogen; it's not very carcinogenic. That's why we can use radiation for radiotherapy. Otherwise we'd be inducing as many tumours as we were trying to treat. That sort of perception, that sort of message, is not there, even within our own workforce at Chalk River. We had issues with misperceptions about risk and radiation. I remember the incident with those devices being taken away from Bruce Power. It didn't make any sense, but that was the perception. In fact, they're clean.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Peter Stoffer]

I appreciate your time. Thank you.

Now we go to Ms. Mathyssen, please. Thank you.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much, Dr. Priest. I have a number of questions.

First of all, you said that the British and the Americans are still using depleted uranium to build vehicles of war or combat vehicles.

[Nicholas Priest]

The British are not using it in the construction of the Challenger tank. I believe that the Americans use it as shielding in the construction of the Abrams tank. But both in Britain and the United States, the armies use depleted uranium in anti-armour piercing rounds as one option for their tanks.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Thank you.

Are they continuing studies on the impact of depleted uranium, since they're still using them for armour plating? Or have they stopped?

[Nicholas Priest]

I think it's fair to say that both in the U.K. and the U.S....but I am less familiar with the latter. I was asked to go there to make some comments on its monitoring program, but that was a while ago and I'm not sure what's happening now.

My feeling is that there is still monitoring. The biggest problem they had in the U.K. is that when we asked people whether they wanted to have measurements, a large fraction of the people who were approached didn't want to bother.

But there will be continuing monitoring, as there always is. We have monitoring now. We're seeing some cancers that were induced in military personnel by the explosions from nuclear weapons testing after the war. There is possibly some excess there.

We're still monitoring our populations, and people do it all the time. It's exactly the same in Canada, where we're monitoring our nuclear workers. There's a continual monitoring of them to make sure there's no excess adverse health effects in the worker population.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

From what you have said and the report that was brought to us by Dr. Morisset, there is a very real sense that the concern around depleted uranium is not borne out in reality, that it's not this toxic and dangerous substance.

If that is the case—and there you made mention of nickel, cobalt, and tungsten—should we be looking at something else? Are we spinning our wheels here? Should we be concerned about some of the other toxins that veterans or populations might be exposed to? I'm thinking of the Gulf War syndrome, with veterans reporting fatigue and sleeplessness, headaches, and forms of depression. Are we going down the wrong road here with this concern about DU?

[Nicolas Priest]

There were lots of issues. I'm talking about the Gulf War situation now rather than the Balkans. There was a sand fly problem, and so organophosphate insecticides were widely used. The tents were sprayed with them, and all sorts of things like that.

People were given injections, which were not normally, I understand, given.

Can I say something here? My knowledge in this area is hearsay, from talking to people, okay? I don't want....

But I understand that a number of injections were given to armed forces members against possible biological agents that the Iraqis might use. There was extensive use of organophosphate insecticides. There were other exposures there, and as a toxicologist, a lot of things I see in the Gulf War syndrome are more easily attributed to organophosphates to my mind than to depleted uranium. I think of the list of all of the ones that could have caused it.

Undoubtedly with those issues of the Gulf War syndrome, I think it's much more likely it was something like organophosphates rather than uranium.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Are studies being done in regard to these organophosphates or the injections?

[Nicolas Priest]

A lot have been done, because these were the sorts of things that were used in sheep dips and things like that, where you had exposures among farmer populations. So there's a long toxicological knowledge of the effects of exposure.

Similarly they had a problem in the Gulf when they were trying to grow their own crops in the desert in the United Arab Emirates. People were using fertilizer, but fertilizers and pesticides had the same name in Arabic, I think, being translated as chemicals. So people were putting huge quantities of organophosphates onto the food crops, thinking they were fertilizers. I think there were problems there as well.

There is a body of knowledge on the toxicity of these types of things. I'll be honest with you. Within the U.K., and possibly within Canada and the United States as well, there has been more emphasis on saying that it's not uranium than on trying to work out what caused it. That's a personal opinion.