Another is eye injury (and blindness) if the victim is looking down when the thing blows up.

I suspect that the manufacturers keeps a fairly low profile. A school friend of my wife’s works in the Bay Area for a company that manufactures the triggers for land mines.

When we visit him, we both bite our tongues because we hate land mines so much.

I don’t know how many times I’ve sat, waiting for the green, and looked at a guy with only one leg and wondered if my tax dollars bought the mine that blew his leg off.

Consider the implications of “the most stable nuclide of all the existing elements”. Every element has “radioactive isotopes”. Naturally occuring, unstable isotopes. More radioactive means more unstable, and vice versa.

Google “decay series”.

Incidently, Uranium slugs do not carry explosives. They shatter on impact and the pieces ignite from the kinetic energy of the impact.

The radioactivity in Depleted Uranium is a secondary issue. It is the heavy metal. When the shells explode, as munitions are designed to do, the air is filled with the heavy metal dust from the DU. As with most heavy metals, their ingestion and especially the inhalation are particularly dangerous. Once in the body, then the radioactivity, weak as it may be, is much more potent.

Health issues include kidney failure and lung cancer.

Oh ya, BTW, the US is the only country using DU in its munitions. Its radioactivity is readily measurable. Nickel, on the other hand, isn’t readily measurable. In fact,

]Nickel-62 is the most stable nuclide of all the existing elements; it is more stable even than Iron-56.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel

Oh and

The five cent piece in your pocket? Try to find a stable isotope of nickle. You are carrying radioactive metal next to your balls.

The only unstable isotopes are synthetically made. The “coin” is made of copper with only a very small amount of nickel.

Damn I love showing the Right Wing Nut neo-con Conservative Evangelical Republican Radio-head shut-in crowd up. Yup, they just gotta invent crap to take the spotlight off of the truth.

Come down to it, all elements have radioactive isotopes, and only two isotopes (IIRC) out of the hundreds identified are “stable”, i.e. they will not break down into something else given enough time. All the others are “unstable”.

The five cent piece in your pocket? Try to find a stable isotope of nickle. You are carrying radioactive metal next to your balls.

Now, once the harm of left over munitions is highlighted, why not on our own stop using depleted unranium since we are the only nation that uses it? GOUSA denies that DU causes any problems whatsoever, even with a half life of, get this, 4.5 Billion years?

Makes me proud.

http://www.criticalconcern.com/depleted_uranium.htm

As for the “Unless, of course, you are one of the people that had a limb blown off… my guess is that one person would really notice.”; Go whine at someone else, crybaby.

Do you really LOL about people getting limbs blown off? That is really a sick thought.

“…and the number of people crippled would not drop enough to notice.”

Unless, of course, you are one of the people that had a limb blown off… my guess is that one person would really notice.