No. I've never seen any data that suggested there were any toxicological consequences to drinking well water.
Can I tell you how the WHO derives their drinking water limit for uranium? They start off with something they call the “lowest observable adverse effect” level. They go through all the experimental evidence and find the lowest concentration they can find in effect.
Now, when you're exposed to uranium, the kidney does adjust. It actually changes. It becomes more resistant to uranium. So we're not quite sure whether the lowest observable effects are actually adverse or whether they're adaptive—but that's besides the point.
So we find these levels, and these levels are found in animals. Then the WHO says, right, because this is a lowest adverse effect level, we'll say that the no adverse effect level is ten times lower. We're putting a conservative factor of ten so that this is now the level at which we would expect no effects. We're confident there are no effects in these animals at below this level. But we don't know how the animal works relevant to man, so we're going to put another safety factor of ten to account for the possible differences between the animal model and man.
Then they turn around and say, yes, and we don't know if there are sensitive individuals within the population, so we'll put another factor of ten in to account for those sensitive members of the population.
We now have a level that is a thousand times lower than the level that was shown to produce these effects, which may or may not be adverse, in these animal populations. So I'm really not surprised that people drinking well water have never seen any adverse effects in the population.
There are some ways that you can find out. You can actually get your urine tested to get an estimate of what your uranium burden is. Also, if you do have kidney damage or changes in the kidney, there are some proteins that are increased in the urine. You also increase the level of an enzyme called catalase, which makes hydrogen peroxide bubble if you put hydrogen peroxide in the urine.
But no, there's not.... And as I said, it's hugely variable. Some water wells contain none and some contain huge quantities. Really, the more worrying thing is that radium is a daughter of uranium, and radium tends to be much more soluble than uranium. If you have high uranium in water, then often there's a lot more radium there as well.
I was asked to participate in an engineering project in Jordan, where an aquifer had been discovered that actually spanned across Israel and Saudi Arabia as well. They wanted to use it to extract water for the population. The levels of radium in that water were high. What they wanted to do was to dilute it. They wanted me to say how much it had to be diluted with clean water, such that it could come under the regulatory limits.
I said, no, you can't do that, because you're just halving the dose to twice the people, and that's of no benefit. So I didn't participate.
But no—and I'm wandering, sorry—there's no indication that uranium in our well water is harmful.