Exactly how radioactive is depleted uranium? If it had been an actual nuke, it would have been too late to do anything once it reached the port.
There are 'different' forms of Uranium.
If you mined Uranium, you would get 99%+ Uranium-238, all the 238 means is thats the total numbers of protons and neutron in the nucleus.
There is also Uranium-235; U-235.
All Uranium is radioactive. It emits radiation.
What happens when it emits radiation? Well, one of the atoms in the sample of Uranium Spontaneously goes 'pop' and emits radiation. Depending on what type of radiation it emits, the Uranium atom changes into something other then Uranium. A different element. Over time a sample of pure Uranium will decay, emitting radiation, and becoming other elements, eventually Lead.
This is nuclear decay. So Depleted U has some U in it, but also some of the other elements the U changed into when it emitted [and still emits] its radiation.
Why is it used? Depleted U is very very dense, meaning if you have five different cubes all exactly the same size; one made of aluminum, one of iron, one of lead, one of gold, one of U.
Picking up the cube of Uranium youd be like WOW this is a LOT heavier then the other cubes, even the Lead! So with U you can pack a lot of Mass [weight] into a small volume [space].
The energy of a bullet is made up of two simple things; how fast its going, and how massive it is. Those add up to it's Energy; Kinetic Energy. The energy of Moving Things.
So! How do you make a bullet more bad-ass? Well, give it more Energy! Well, you only have two things to work with:
1. Make the bullet go faster
2. Make the bullet more massive
Depleted U makes for a bullet or shell, with a greated mass, and hence great Kinetic Energy.
If this energy can be focused on a single point? Well you're half-way to having an armor-piercing shell. The Shell actually is more bad-ass because the Armor-Piercing Tank Round, has an explosive that literally gets injected into the pierced armor, so that it explodes Not on the outside, where the Energy would go mostly to the surrounding air, but INSIDE the vehicle, where all the energy is used to blow the fuck out of whatever and whoever is inside.
Back to U-235. Now this stuff is mean. Only the tiniest fraction of U mined from the earth is U-235, its almost all U-238.
But if you mine, and purify it such that you have a pure enough sample of U-235, you have material that can undergo what is called a Chain Reaction of Nuclear Fission.
Long story short, this Uranium, when a Neutron hits it, splits, just like above, but ir also releases an ENORMOUS amount of energy. When it splits it also emits more Neutrons, which hit the U-235 atoms around it, and in a thousandth of a second, a sample of U-235 will under that reaction so fast that you get the explosion Energy of an atom bomb.
The atom bomb Dropped on Hiroshima was nothing more then two samples of U-235, each not massive enough to undergo the Chain Reaction, being shot together fast enough that the Chain Reaction would begin, and you'd get as much energy out as you could in that millisecond before the whole thing blew itself up.
So when you here a country has Uranium stockpiles, it means they might have enough to start purifying it into U-235. You need a LOT of U to do this, the Manhattan Project was basically about pureifying mountains of rock to gets grams of U-235.
Having said this; there is a LOT of this stuff missing, along with Plutonium, another element, very similar to Uranium. Plutonium is one of the by-products of some of these nuclear reactions.
Plutonium is about the deadliest stuff, chemically, on earth.
Ugh I'm rambling...
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This message was edited by Mike Teacher on 9-11-03 @ 1:39 PM