Compendium of Uranium

Since it became known that radioactive depleted uranium weapons were used in the 1991 Gulf War by the allied forces against Iraq, there has been considerable debate on the residual effects that these weapons have on the environment and on the health risks to soldiers and to the civilian population living in and around the battlefields where DU weapons are used. Governments and the militaries that use DU weapons insist that their effects are benign. Others, including many medical researchers and scientists, believe that the opposite is true and that these weapons should never be used.

This compendium was compiled in order to help shed light on the DU issue by collecting and organizing references, with summaries and abstracts, to the large amount of scientific research that has been done with uranium and depleted uranium. All citations within this document are to scientific research published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. It is the editor’s wish ultimately to include every published peer-reviewed article that can be found, regardless of its results. Thus this publication is an on-going effort with periodic updates as new material is brought to the editor’s attention.

Abstracts or summaries are provided with most references. Please note, however, that descriptive material relating to each article has been derived solely from that article’s abstract. The editor has neither read nor analyzed the articles cited in this compendium. Any errors or misrepresentations as to the research covered are entirely those of the editor. Please take the time to pass along any comments or corrections to the editor at: dbishop@idust.net .

In each chapter, the citations are listed in chronological order with the most recent citations appearing toward the end of the chapter. Since this is an ongoing effort, citation numbers may include alphabetic letters (e.g. 18C) to allow citations to be inserted into their proper chronological sequence after the initial publication of this compendium.

Each reference has been given a key unique to that article. These keys are listed in the Author Index in Appendix A, and each entry is hyperlinked to that reference. Each key has the following format:

AuthorlastnameYYYYmmJournalAbbreviationVolumeNumberPage

For example: Yazzie200304CRTv16n4p524

Authorlastname is the last name of the primary author (the first author listed) for the paper. The Journal Abbreviation is the first letter of each significant word in the journal name (e.g. JACS for The Journal of the American Chemical Society). Since several different journals may have the same abbreviation, an alphabetical list of these journals is given in Appendix B. In some cases a month may be missing for the date, or a volume number may be missing. In these cases, the unknown numbers are replaced with “x” or “0”. By maintaining these keys in the author index, it is a simple matter to check this index to determine if a particular reference has been included in the compendium.

Each chapter covers a single major topic of interest. As might be expected, many articles contain material relevant to several chapter designations. It is therefore important to look through each chapter to find all of the references relating to a topic you might be researching. The choice as to which chapter a citation should belong is entirely the editor’s.

Although not reflecting original research, review articles, if they are fair and unbiased, can be an excellent resource for further research, particularly if they are well referenced. Review articles have been included in the compendium. It may be that a specific reference in a review article is included in the compendium, along with its abstract or a summary statement. The Author Index will help you locate these references.

Of course, a review can be tailored to support a given set of conclusions by the choice of articles included and omitted, so the reader must use caution. Here again, this Compendium can be put to good use, in that it will become readily apparent when a review author has purposely omitted articles that provide research evidence contrary to the author’s views and conclusions.

The introductory material for each chapter represents an effort to provide a brief but comprehensive overview of the conclusions reached in the articles cited within that chapter, with numbered references (hyperlinked) to the article in that