Birdshot Idea: Depleted Uranium?

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

Duck down

Good shot! Especially when it's made of depleted uranium

Marc Abrahams
Tuesday June 3, 2008
The Guardian

Depleted uranium should, perhaps, be the ammunition of choice for duck hunters. That's the conclusion of a study called Response of American Black Ducks to Dietary Uranium: A Proposed Substitute for Lead Shot.

The recommendation, published in 1983 in the Journal of Wildlife Management, has not been much disputed. The study's authors, biologists Susan Haseltine and Louis Sileo, were based at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Centre in Laurel, Maryland.

Lead shot is dangerous for ducks, especially if it hits them. When it doesn't hit a duck (or another hunter, as sometimes happens), the shot falls into the wetlands. The lead leaches into the muck, slowly poisoning any ducks that have managed to avoid being shot.

In many hunting areas, lead shot is verboten. At the time of the study, steel was being touted as the best alternative to lead. But Haseltine and Sileo pointed out its drawbacks. "Steel shot shells are more expensive than lead shot shells when purchased in a retail outlet," they wrote. "They cannot be used in all guns and have not been well received by some hunters, who question their performance on ducks and geese."

Haseltine and Sileo credit the idea of substituting uranium for steel to the metallurgist Dr Carl A Zapffe of Baltimore, Maryland. Zapffe was no slouch about steel: witness his 1948 study Evaluation of Pickling Inhibitors from the Standpoint of Hydrogen Embrittlement: Acid Pickling of Stainless Steel. Zapffe also wrote a book disputing Einstein's theory of special relativity, but that is a separate matter.

Haseltine and Sileo listed what they call the "attractive characteristics" of depleted uranium as a raw material for making birdshot.

"In its pure form," they wrote, "it is denser than lead and, in alloys, might be made to produce shot patterns and velocities attractive to hunters and within the effective range for waterfowl. Depleted uranium can be alloyed with many other metals and its softness and corrosiveness can be altered over a wide range."

But nothing is perfect. "Negative aspects for potential uranium shot include pyrophoricity [proneness to spontaneously burst into flames] problems with pure depleted uranium, which can be altered by alloying, and the expense of separating depleted uranium from other nuclear waste products."

Their main argument was that uranium may not be very poisonous even to a duck that, of its own accord, swallows some in pellet form. That is what Haseltine and Sileo sought to verify.

They fed 40 ducks a diet of commercial duck mash salted with powdered depleted uranium. None of the ducks died of it, or got sick, or even lost weight. Moreover, the researchers reported, the ducks "were in fair to excellent flesh" when slaughtered.

And so they enthused that "further examination of this metal as a substitute for lead in shot is justified".

However, no one has yet followed up on this in a big way for hunting anything other than people.

(Thanks to Ewald Schnug and Silvia Haneklaus for bringing this to my attention.)

· Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize.

[Broomstick]

I don't know about how it affects ducks, but depleted uranium is toxic to human kidneys. Since unintentional ingestion of shot is a known risk of eating wild fowl brought down with shot (the New Journal of Medicine once ran a photo of an x-ray of a Native Alaskan woman clearly showing ingested shot, including an appendix stuffed full of it from years of eating wild game), I can't help but think that using DU to bring down fowl intended for human consumption is not a good idea, regardless of what it does or doesn't do to the health of ducks.

[Gullible Jones]

Uranium is still a heavy metal, and IIRC is more chemically toxic than lead.

I would also question whether the way it deforms on impact might be less likely to kill a duck and more likely to distribute the stuff all over the place.

[Patrick Degan]

How cute. By all means, let's exchange one form of heavy metal poisoning for another form of even more dangerous heavy metal poisoning.

[gizmojumpjet]

Why not just use bismuth?

[Ted C]

Sounds like a joke article to me.

[Starglider]

Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize.

Sounds like a joke article to me.

Ya think?

I was trying to work out if the earlier posters were playing along or genuinely didn't get it.

[Gullible Jones]

D'oh... Fuck.

[Lancer]

And thus you demonstrate your username to be correct.

[CJvR]

We need DU rounds to deal with the modern super animals, like the flying squirrel and electric eal...

[Ward]

IIRC, DU is no more toxic than lead, which is to say, toxic enough but safe as long as you don't actually eat it! Lead however leaks into the water table much more readily than uranium. In fact, uranium is commonly found in soil and loose rock anyway. It was commonly called pitchblende. DU is the same stuff, but with LESS than one third as much U-235 and U-234 as natural uranium.

DU is emphatically NOT obtained from nuclear waste. This is a complete myth. DU is actually less radioactive than common dirt.

DU is used in munitions because it's denser than lead, stronger too so that it has more penetrative power against armoured targets. It's not a waste material or especially radioactive. The kinetic impact itself represents the entirety of its lethality unless the armed forces can convince the insurgents to ingest DU voluntarily.

[Ward]

Actually, I think DU is MUCH LESS toxic than lead. It's just burdened with a scary sounding name that greenpeace likes to jump on at every oppurtunity.

[Ted C]

DU is emphatically NOT obtained from nuclear waste. This is a complete myth. DU is actually less radioactive than common dirt.

It is my understanding that U238 is not waste from a nuclear reaction, but it is a byproduct of uranium enrichment, which separates U235 from U238 in centrifuges.

DU is used in munitions because it's denser than lead, stronger too so that it has more penetrative power against armoured targets. It's not a waste material or especially radioactive. The kinetic impact itself represents the entirety of its lethality unless the armed forces can convince the insurgents to ingest DU voluntarily.

DU also gets extremely hot when deformed. DU shells melt their way through armor almost as much as they punch through.