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The documents show that fallout from atmospheric nuclear testing contains
enormous amounts of uranium. This should be no surprise as nuclear bombs
contain a lot of uranium, and most of it remains unfissioned after a nuclear
explosion.
But what will come as news to a great many people is the importance in the
fallout of an isotope of uranium that few of us have even heard of: uranium-
234, a highly radioactive alpha emitter which concentrates in the 'enriched
uranium' (EU) used in nuclear bombs.
All uranium binds to DNA and causes cancer and genetic effects in the
children of those exposed - but U-234 is especially hazardous. A restricted
document shows that the matter was raised as early as 1953 at a meeting at
Harwell by the late Karl Z Morgan, who was in charge of analyzing health
effects of the US Nevada tests.
Indeed, they have tied themselves in knots trying refuse to release data and
meanwhile (in the courts) to argue that there is no uranium at all in fallout.
The secret documents give the lie to all this. All of the calculations made by
official agencies of fallout exposures are thus faulty and should be revisited.
I was astonished to find that although the MoD defence was that there was no
appreciable fallout at the test sites (and therefore the veterans could not have
been exposed) there was no solid evidence of this. No measurements, no
numbers, no reports. This seemed impossible.
"Other subjects were touched upon and Dr (Karl Z) Morgan (Oak Ridge
Tennessee) promised to send details of some of their analytical methods for
estimating radioactive substances in the urine. In reply to a question from
Dr Butterworth he said that the hazard from enriched uranium would be a
radioactive hazard rather than a toxic one and related to the presence of U-
234. (Minutes of meeting held AERE Harwell, 8th July 1953.)"
I asked Rosenblatts for photocopies of the few papers I had found which
might be useful but in the event, this particular document didn't appear. I
asked for it again. It had disappeared.
Meanwhile I had begun to think about enriched uranium. This was a period
where I was quite involved in DU and its effects in Iraq and the Balkans.
I had also obtained a small grant to re-examine the fallout of the US tests in
the Marshall Islands, where the US government had funded a huge desktop
analysis by S L Simon et al of the exposures of the Marshall Islanders from
the Bikini tests in 1954.
When the 15 megaton Castle Bravo bomb cut Bikini atoll in half, the islanders
had to be rescued and the unfortunately named Japanese fishing boat, Lucky
Dragon was covered in rainout 100 miles away. Crew members later died
from the exposures.
My report criticising the Simon et al. study was sponsored by the American
Anthropological Association and I met the Marshall Islands delegates and
presented it at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in 2012.
This Marshall Islands fallout also contained uranium, including a new hot
isotope, U-237, produced by the very high energy (10MeV +) neutron
irradiation of the U-238 tamper, and is thus evidence of nuclear fusion in an
H-bomb. But the authors of the US Marshall Islands exposure report omitted
all mention of uranium.
Which is odd. Because all these bombs are made of uranium. Enriched
uranium for the preliminary fission, and DU or natural uranium for the
casing and neutron reflectors. The bombs were very heavy. The accepted
authority, Glasstone gives 1 ton of uranium per megaton of yield.
The big British Christmas Island bomb, Grapple Y, which figures in most of
the test veterans with cancers and congenital effects in offspring was 3
megatons and we would expect it to contain 3 tons of uranium. As we shall
see, the secret documents agree although none of this got into court.
Natural uranium has three isotopes, U238, U235 and U234. The proportions
can be characterised as mass or activity (kilograms, Becquerels) and I show
the numbers in Table 1 (below) since they are relevant to what comes next.
Table 1: Specific activity and half life of U-238, U-235, U-234. A Becquerel
(Bq) represents one atomic disintegration per second. The half-life is the time
it takes for half of the material to decay.
To make bombs you need highly enriched uranium (as high as 80%) hence
the arguments about 'enrichment plants' in Iran, and previously Iraq. All
methods of separation rely on the fact that U-235 is lighter than U-238.
But what no one seems to have noticed is that U-234 is even lighter. So U-234
will be separated from the natural uranium along with the U235! How much
U-234 is this? In terms of mass, a small amount. But in terms of its
radioactivity, a lot.
Because the half life of U234 is very much less than U-238 it will be present in
'secular radioactive equilibrium', Becquerel for Becquerel. That is, 100 Bq of
natural U-238 will have 100Bq of U234 mixed in with it.
From the table we can calculate that the activity of the U-238 in those 1,655
kg amounts to 1.2 x 107 x 1655 = 2 x 1010 Bq - which is also equal to the
activity of the U-234. This compares with 1.2 x 109 Bq of U-235 in the 15kg of
fissile enriched uranium.
This envelope calculation tells us that there should be about 17 times more U-
234 in the fallout than U-235 (measured by activity) - just as Karl Z Morgan
warned in 1953.
In fact, it may end up being a more than this. In reality only about two thirds
of the U-235 is extracted, and the centrifuge process will tend to refine out
the lighter U-234 in preference to the U-235 that is actually desired.
Author's Note: I now have actual figures for the U-234 concentrations in
actual nuclear material used in the bomb tests. They indicate that the U-234
concentration effect is a powerful one, leading to U-234 activity 36 times
greater than the U-235 activity.
When the bomb explodes (in the Pacific, Christmas Island, the Marshall
Islands) moist tropical air is drawn from sea level into the rapidly rising
fireball. As the fireball cools, uranium condenses as sub-micron glassy
particles. For low level bursts (Bikini, possibly Grapple Y) also sea water and
according to one Christmas Island veteran eyewitness, even fish fell from the
sky.
As the temperature falls with altitude, this water condenses on the particles
and falls as Black Rain (as set out in my article here). This deposits enormous
quantities of uranium, also isotopes of plutonium formed by the neutron
irradiation of U-238 in the explosion.
The ground is contaminated - but all three uranium isotopes are alpha
emitters and thus mostly invisible to Geiger counters and film badges.
Uranium was not looked for at Christmas Island, or at least not reported.
However, U-238 can be found through its beta daughters: I was able to
analyse some beta gamma measurements made in 1963 by Aldermaston
clean-up chief AE Oldbury on the aircraft runway at Christmas Island, and
these showed far too much beta activity (just as Morgan had warned).
The only explanation for this high beta-gamma ratio was the presence of U-
238 which has two beta-emitting daughters Th-234 and Pa234m. This
analysis became part of a number of successful Test Veteran Pensions cases
until my reports were sidelined in 2013.
The standard account of the components of fallout is the series of (non peer-
reviewed) papers 1982-84 by Harry Hicks of the Lawrence Livermore
Laboratory. All of the dose calculations used to defend governments from
cases brought by the victims (veterans, Marshallese, etc) are based on Hicks
computer program output.
Yet in the case of U-234 we are talking about quite a hot isotope (compared
with U-238 and U-235) with a long half life (244,000 years) which will be
there long after the Caesiums and Strontiums have decayed away.
Letters went back and forth. MoD wrote that they would let me have three, as
to photocopy more would exceed the £600 limit for FoI requests. Eventually I
lost patience and wrote directly to the judge, HH Hugh Stubbs. He ordered
the MoD to release the documents.
But a number of them were still refused: now on the grounds that their
release would affect Britain's relationship with a foreign power. I was asked to
sign the Official Secrets Act (Yes!). I refused. The judge ordered that a
redacted version of the papers be made for me by the MoD expert Mr
Johnston.
Later Hogan Lovells new expert Prof Paddy Regan was enlisted to collaborate
with Johnston on the redacted version of the secret document. When it
arrived it was useless: no numbers, no data. I wrote to Stubbs. He ordered
them to produce some numbers.
Eventually I was sent a short report written by Bevis Parker of the MoD. It
contained tables of the maximum amounts of uranium and Plutonium in the
fallout of all the British tests. The judge asked me if that was sufficient. It was
good enough.
I analysed the data. It showed that there was a very large amount of uranium,
particularly U-234 in the fallout, measured in the material scooped by the
Canberra Sniff aircraft that flew through the mushroom clouds. I wrote a
supplementary report.
Unfortunately this evidence was excluded from the court when my reports
were suddenly set aside at the last minute in January 2013 by Hogan Lovell -
the solicitors who intervened to represent the veterans after solicitors
Rosenblatts, who originally commissioned me as an expert witness, suddenly
and unexpectedly pulled out.
Sadly we will never know what really happened since the judge, also suddenly
and unexpectedly, died shortly after the case was heard in February 2013.
Paddy Regan, the new (ex-Harwell|) expert that Hogan Lovell brought in
agreed with the MoD expert Mr Johnston (in the hearing) that there was no
uranium on Christmas Island and that Busby's obsession to the contrary
(which in any case by then wasn't even there) was nonsense.
Some of the data on uranium reduced from the secret documents by Bevis
Parker for the MoD is given in Table 2 below.
So you can see that the theoretical calculation is correct in its prediction that
there is a lot of U-234 in the fallout: it is the main radioactive hazard, just as
Karl Z Morgan warned.
"In reply to a question from Dr Butterworth, [Dr Morgan] said that the
hazard from enriched uranium would be a radioactive hazard rather than a
toxic one and related to the presence of U-234."
There is one final proof of all this in the bones of the veterans themselves. A
team of Japanese scientists visited the Semipalatinsk test site in Russia and
measured uranium and plutonium in autopsy bones of those who had lived
near the Soviet test site and also sampled the local environment.
Using alpha spectrometry they measured U-238 and also U-234. What they
found was that the natural U-238 / U-234 ratio of 1.0 was wildly perturbed
with the samples of those living near the tests sites having very high ratios
and relative levels of U-234. The authors don't say much about this
interesting finding.
This hot isotope of uranium is retained in the bones of the veterans for all
their lives, and is there on their chromosomes also, causing the chromosome
defects found in the New Zealand study but easier to test for. We can have a
look.
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