Chris Busby on depleted uranium and the radioactive cloud threatening Europe

May 20, 2023 admin Comments 2 comments

It may have taken a week but the Russians have come out about the radioactive cloud over Europe.

From RT

‘Radioactive cloud’ threatening western Europe – Russian security chief

The hazard was produced by depleted uranium munitions destroyed in Ukraine, Nikolay Patrushev has claimed

The destruction of depleted uranium shells in Ukraine has produced a radioactive cloud which has been blown toward Western Europe, the secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolay Patrushev, has claimed. The UK has supplied this type of munition to Ukraine to be fired from British-made Challenger tanks.

The senior official revealed the purported threat during a government meeting on Friday, in which he accused the US of manipulating its allies to provide “help” to other nations that results in harm being done to the recipients.

“They ‘helped’ Ukraine this way too, applied pressure to its satellites to supply depleted uranium munitions. Their destruction resulted in a radioactive cloud moving towards Western Europe. They have detected an increase in radiation in Poland,” Patrushev stated.

Unconfirmed reports have circulated in Ukraine regarding the target of a Russian strike last Saturday, which Moscow said destroyed an ammunitions depot in the city of Khmelnitsky. According to the claims, the military facility was used to store British-provided depleted uranium shells. It has been suggested that the material may have been turned into dust by powerful explosions at the depot.

Russia previously warned that the use of depleted uranium munitions poses a long-term environmental and public health threat, based on studies in nations such as Serbia and Iraq, where the weapons were previously used. London has denied such a risk.

While it is mildly radioactive, depleted uranium is mainly considered a health risk because the material is a toxic heavy metal. Particles of uranium or uranium oxide produced in an explosion could be inhaled by anyone exposed to them, or contaminate the environment.

Polish authorities have denied claims that a spike in radiation was detected in the eastern city of Lublin on Monday.

Speculation about the blast in Khmelnitsky was fueled by the reported deployment of Ukrainian military patrols that allegedly collected samples in and around the city. A nuclear power plant is located nearby, but reports claimed that patrols that normally monitor the situation around the facility were seen far away from their usual routes.

This report, apart from being. a week late was shallow and not very informative

I can confirm that George Monbiot ( who I used to follow) is a scumbag.

At the very time of the Fukushima catastrophe he came out in support of nuclear power. Here is his 2011 article.

Christopher Busby’s wild claims hurt green movement and Green party

The Green party adviser’s theories on the Fukushima nuclear disaster and a ‘leukaemia cluster’ in north Wales are baseless scaremongering – even the anti-nuclear lobby must oppose him

CHRIS BUSBY ON GEORGE MONBIOT, THE NUCLEAR CANCER CONSPIRACY, RADIATION FROM UKRAINE AND THE GREENS

https://greenaudit.org/papers/

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/369170067_Uranium_weapons_being_employed_in_Ukraine_have_significantly_increa…

Here are two articles from the Russian Sputnik website

Ukraine’s Depleted Uranium Blast: Europe on Brink of ‘Environmental Disaster’

A frame of a CCTV video, purportedly depicting a major blast at an ammo depot in Khmelnintsky, Ukraine. - Sputnik International, 1920, 19.05.2023

Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev warned on Friday that a radioactive cloud was heading towards Western Europe following the destruction of a Ukrainian warehouse storing British-supplied depleted uranium ammunition.

Sputnik News spoke with Dr. Chris Busby, physical chemist and scientific secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, about how the West’s decision to provide depleted uranium (DU) ammunition to Ukraine has potentially caused a continent-wide ecological disaster. Below is his answer in full.

Recently, several web media outlets provided videos of an enormous explosion in the town of Khmelnitski, located to the West of Kiev, and about 200 km from the border with Poland. There were two major explosions which produced a massive roiling swirling fireball which, like an atomic bomb, developed upwards and formed a mushroom cloud, which was black.

I have represented nuclear atmospheric test veterans in the Royal Courts of Justice in London and have seen many films of nuclear explosions: this was not one. A nuclear explosion is characterised by an immediate intense white light which wipes out the camera film or detector.

So, what was it? It was suggested by several commentators that an arms depot that had been hit contained the Depleted Uranium (DU) weapons sent by the UK to the Ukraine for use in the British Challenger tanks as anti-tank penetrators. That the explosion was one involving the burning of the DU in the fireball. Since I am a scientific authority on Uranium and its health effects, but have also examined its dispersion and behaviour in the environment, I will comment on what I believe happened, and why it is important. I was a member of the UK government Ministry of Defence Depleted Uranium Oversight Board (DUOB) in 2000-2005, and also the UK government Committee Examining Radiation Risk from Internal Emitters (CERRIE) 2000-2004. I am Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR) which is an independent NGO that provides advice on risk from ionising radiation.

My main research interest in this area is Uranium and health, particularly the DU particles, which are so small they act as a gas and move over very large distances once they are created by the burning of DU. I found them in England in 2003 after they had come from Iraq. I found them in 2023 in England after they came from the Ukraine war. So that is the first thing: the material is able to travel very large distances.

Therefore, if the Khmelnitsky explosion was a DU one, the material would move with the wind direction and should be detectable at monitor sites downwind.

First, we need to say that DU has a gamma signature, it releases gamma rays. The UK and USA governments lie about this. They point to the fact that the U-238, that remains after the fissile U-235 is removed in the centrifuges (and is sent off for nuclear weapons and reactors), is a weak alpha emitter.

They say that alpha radiation cannot penetrate skin and so the DU itself is harmless. That it cannot be detected by a Geiger Counter and the alpha particles don’t make it through the window. There is, of course, a health problem if the post-impact particles are inhaled and pass into the body through the lung into the lymphatic system or directly into the digestive system, but essentially DU is harmless.

UK Gave Ukraine Thousands of Shells, Including Depleted Uranium Rounds

What you need to know is that Uranium 238, when it decays with its alpha emission, turns into Thorium-234 and Protoactinium-234m which then turns into Uranium 234. Thorium 234 is a beta and gamma emitter delivering 6% of its decay energy as a gamma ray. Thus, large clouds of DU particulate aerosol will be detectable by gamma detectors.

When I visited Iraq with Al Jazeera in 2000 I went to the south and examined the corpses of the tanks that had been hit by DU in the first Gulf War. Some of the A-10 DU penetrators were still lying around. They gave off an intense gamma ray signal, and the holes in the tanks were highly gamma ray active. So much for only an alpha emitter.

I am a yachtsman: examination of the UK metereological weather pressure maps tell us that at the time, and for days after the explosion, there was an anticyclone to the North of the explosion site and winds were weak but from the South East blowing North Westerly around the high-pressure area. So, the plume would move towards Poland. If the winds were about 5km/h they would reach any Poland detectors 250 km away on the 15th.

After Chernobyl, the European Union set up a Europe-wide gamma radiation detector system that used to give gamma readings in real time. I went to look. But astonishingly, all the data was blocked. The web- based system, administered from Germany, (EURDEP) would not provide the detector maps that are normally available. Luckily, there were some location maps on the web and some that had been already downloaded by colleagues of mine before the system stopped working. I obtained maps from Poland. One of these I show below.

Radiation Levels in Poland in May

You will see that a very highly significant increase in gamma radiation occurred at this detector, north west of the explosion site almost exactly when it would be expected on the basis of a distance of 250km and a mean wind speed of 5km/h. The increase, from 60nSv/h to 90nSv/h was highly statistically significant about 50%. Other detectors all across Poland showed an increase*, as the plume passed over them, the increase being weaker the further away (due to dispersion of the plume).

Later, the Poles measured the increase at the Marie Curie Institute in Lublin, but their map was a more sophisticated one and needed some expert interpretation. The Polish map gave gamma increases split into two natural isotopes, Bismuth and Thallium, also total gamma and cosmic ray gamma.

From the map, we are to assume (and this was the implicit message) that the gamma peak was due to Bismuth. Enter Sherlock Holmes. Bismuth 214 is a Radon daughter. The natural background radioactive gas Radon (Rn-222) is always present, since it is produced from Uranium and Radium in the ground. If there is a sudden change in atmospheric pressure, or when it rains, there is a gamma peak from Radon, which shows itself as the Bi-214 peak. So, the Poles seem to be implying that the increase in gamma radiation is normal and nothing to get scared about. Many have picked up on the Bismuth spectrum. But the way in which the Polish graphs are presented is misleading.

The problem with a radon argument is first that the gamma increases go up all across Poland at a time scale that identifies a plume from Khmelnitsky and second that there was a stable anticyclone weather system and no atmospheric pressure changes that might pull radon out of the ground. I checked all that. There was only some light rain over Lublin.

Depleted Uranium Doesn’t Distinguish Between Ukrainians & Russians, It Poisons Everyone: Journalist

There is, however, an additional possibility. Very fine particles attract Radon: you get a slight increase in gamma from Radon near factory chimneys that emit fine particles.

The European radiation detector system web map came back online on May 18. The map type had been changed and everything we saw in the downloads had disappeared or had been smudged out by data analysis averaging. Why? This, and the early blocking of access to the site suggest panic and cover-up.

So taken all together, what we see is a massive explosion which is thought to be DU, and reports of a spike in gamma radiation near the site. Uranium oxide is black, and the black plume moves north west slowly, the weather pattern is stable and the wind blows to Poland. The Polish EU detectors all show gamma radiation increases at the expected time of arrival of the plume. The EU detector system is shut down rapidly, but not before we have obtained data from several sites. The Poles provide a detector result that identified Bismuth as the cause of the increase, but do not go so far as to formally state that it is (in case of later blowback).

One final piece of evidence. We see videos on the internet of the Ukrainians clearing up the explosion site using Robot vehicles, not ordinary firemen. Why do they need Robot vehicles? The last times we saw Robot vehicles clearing up was in the ruins of Chernobyl and Fukushima.

If I am right, there has been an environmental disaster, and the DU particles will travel across Poland, Germany and Hungary, and will end up in the Baltics, probably later the whole of Europe including the UK (after all, the Chernobyl Uranium particles came to the UK).

They will deliver genetic damage and death like that seen in the Balkans and Iraq. Cancer, birth defects, miscarriage, infertility, lung damage, mental problems (Gulf War Syndrome) and so forth. The scientific and epidemiological evidence on this has been clear since the Gulf War. It is all there in the scientific literature—but the governments in the West and the military ignore it, deny it and cover it up. In the case of the UK coroners court finding for Stuart Dyson, the jury found that DU caused his fatal colon cancer. But when the coroner wrote to the health minister (as he had to by UK law, Rule 43) the reply was: we disagree. This stuff can be measured, but no one will measure it, or if they do, they will be attacked and their arguments dismissed.

Fractured Ukraine Poisoned by Depleted Uranium ‘Win’ Scenario for Pentagon, Says Ex-DoD Official

Even if I am wrong, and there is some other explanation for the gamma peaks, DU must be banned. It is a weapon of indiscriminate effect and kills civilians, the enemy and your own troops (well, Ukrainian troops). It is much worse than a war gas, like Sarin, or phosgene, mustard gas or all the other chemical agents banned by civilisation. This stuff destroys the genetic basis of life itself. And no one does anything. Those who use it base their action on obsolete science supported by dishonest epidemiology carried out by dishonest scientists and obsolete and fantastical risk models.

Those who provide the weapons, the UK government in this case, are morally bankrupt. Unless it is their intention to destroy the Ukrainian people. Who knows anymore? The world has gone mad.

*Poland’s National Atomic Energy Agency claims there is no increase in radiation levels

Use of Depleted Uranium in Ukraine Could Spark Global Health Crisis: Here’s Why

The US and Britain expended over 2,000 tons of depleted uranium (DU) in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Syria. Now, London plans to hand DU shells to Ukraine. British and US officials insist the weapons are safe, but what does the evidence say? Sputnik investigates.

Uranium Weapons Residues In UK Air Samples Have Been Measured Since The Ukraine War, Why Is Google Suppressing The Evidence? – Dr. Chris Busby

Since Fukushima in 2011 there has been a revolution in the scientific understanding of the relation between radiation exposures and subsequent cancer and leukemia. But you would be hard put to find anything about this on Google, which has, over the same period of time as it has increasingly excluded any real news about what is going on in the real world, systematically erased, excluded, airbrushed and spun the news in a way that was common the Soviet Union from Stalin to Brezhnev. This is the era of “fake news”. Much of the work on the radiation risk model has been carried out by me and my colleagues in the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR).

By 2023, last year, my increasing personal scientific credibility had enabled me to publish in the scientific peer-review literature 5 papers which showed clearly that the legally defined exposure levels, based on the risk model of the International Commission of Radiological Protection (ICRP) was in error by a factor of upwards of 10,000-fold. In the latest 2023 paper this means that owing to the power of the nuclear military complex more than 300 million people have died from cancer caused by the fallout from the 1960s atmospheric testing. This is the cancer epidemic which began in the 1980s, and which every one of you reading this article will have experienced. You might have thought that this was news, since it was based on scientific peer-reviewed publications.

What is Truth? asks Google—waits for no answer.

The perception of the truth nowadays rests on Wikipedia and Google. I will focus on Google and the exclusion machine, the Soviet air-brush; here there is a simple test. If you type “Chris Busby” into Google on a laptop, you will get about 2.7 million pages cited. But what you see is Chris Busby, the Irish Rugby Referee, in a little box with a picture. Also, some other Chris Busbys. The Google laptop first page has 9 hits, only 1 of me. If you bother to look at the first 5 pages, there are 45 Chris Busby’s but hardly any are me or refer to anything important. So, then we type in “Dr Chris Busby”. On the laptop you get 2,150,000. No box or picture. You then type in “Chris Busby referee”. You get 214,000. We conclude from this little test that anyone looking for me will not find me on Google even though, by subtraction, I represent 80% or more of the Chris Busby’s on the media planet. On cellphone Google it is worse. The Irish referee dominates the first page and I am pretty much non-existent.

OK, Boo Hoo, but this article is not about me. It is about how the scientifically provable truth is being systematically excluded in an area which is arguably the most important area for humans in the history of the race. The nuclear military complex and their tame governments continue to pursue the policies of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy by ignoring scientific evidence. I have been doing this for 30 years and have now won the scientific argument. The Risk Model underpinning all USA legal protection is totally false and its basis is dishonest. Between 2004 and 2022 I was winning these arguments as an expert witness and representative in Courts in the USA and the UK. The cases, in which I worked with the late Stuart Smith, the famous New Orleans attorney, were routinely settled for considerable sums so as to not allow them to be won the Courts, thus creating dangerous precedents.

In 2022 I was working with Smith and his team of attorneys on a challenge to the US Environmental Protection Agency legal framework on the basis of the 5th Amendment to the US Constitution. The argument was that the risk model assumptions about safe doses to the public were “an Arbitrary and Capricious standard as applied to rulemaking” and thus challengeable in US law. This is a powerful attack, and one that might have succeeded, as the new information in the peer review literature shows just this, and clear dishonesty and cover up as well. Shortly after we began this, Smith suddenly fell seriously ill in Paris, and was on life support for 3 weeks. He survived this episode for several months and we went ahead with the discussions. Then he suddenly died of a heart attack (age 60). The rest of the lawyers in the cases that we were taking against radioactive sites in Ohio, Missouri and Illinois stopped talking to me. So, I am assuming they have been bought off. After all, these are Big Dogs we are up against.

There are now only three arenas where these arguments can be successful and the world changed. These are (1) the internet (2) the courts and (3) the peer-review scientific literature. Those paid to protect the risk model and the status quo have their people (firemen) in all three, also in political parties like the Green Party where I was once nuclear expert and Speaker on Science and Technology. Now I am now pretty much alone as a scientist in this war. My colleagues in the ECRR are all old, and three of the original ones, Alexey Yablokov, Alice Stewart and Rosalie Bertell are dead. Since the death of my friend Stuart Smith (a key clever, powerful and rich opponent of the risk model) there is no money to support the ECRR work. But I soldier on as you will see below.

Weapons Uranium dust from Ukraine

Putting all these Google shenanigans to one side, I do have some new and interesting news for you all, indeed the purpose of this article. From 2010 I studied the effects of Uranium weapons in Iraq and published 3 papers showing the appalling genetic effects which followed the exposure to the Uranium particles: cancer, leukemia and birth defects. I subsequently presented the results to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. The Gulf War veterans in USA and UK have suffered a range of effects (Gulf War syndrome) and their children have a high rate of birth defects. Naturally, the cover-up machine was put in place.

In 2006, I obtained air filter data from the UK Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, near London, to look and see if the Uranium dust that was generated in Iraq might blow about and end up in Europe. It turns out that it did [1]. So recently, I made a similar Freedom on Information (FoI) request to AWE to see if Uranium weapons were being used in Ukraine, asking for all their data from the end of 2017 to the latest, Nov 17^th 2022. It seems that Uranium particles have come to England (and therefore also Europe). In the graph below we see the sudden increase in Uranium in the 5 offsite air samplers near Aldermaston beginning as soon as the war began in February 2022 (point 55 on the graph).

The Iraq war in 1991 was the first conflict where Depleted Uranium weapons were used on the battlefield. They were critical to the destruction of Saddam’s tanks. I visited Iraq with Al Jazeera in 2000 and toured the southern tank graveyards with radiation measuring equipment. Later I was in Kosovo surveying areas where NATO used similar weapons. I collected and measured samples of DU from puddles where the airborne aerosol dust had been precipitated in rain: areas far from the impact sites. So, the ability of the Uranium particles to travel huge distances is clear. Now they turn up in England with the Ukraine war. It is, in passing, inconceivable that given the focus on tanks and anti-tank weapons in the Ukraine war, that missiles donated by the West, do not employ Uranium penetrators. The Russians say they do not employ DU, but who knows? This finding is no about any blame. It is a major public health issue. A major story, we might think.

A test of the “War Uranium” levels versus the “Non-War Uranium” levels shows a highly statistically significant doubling of Uranium in the filters, similar to those seen during the Iraq war in 2003. Of course, Ukraine is closer to London than Iraq, but the Germans, Belgians, Dutch, Poles, Hungarians, Roumanians, Austrians, Bulgarians, Czechs, French, Italians, Danes and those in the Baltics are closer to Ukraine still. A simple calculation shows that dividing the British between the Uranium particles gives an inhalation of 250 million particles per person. Not Good. And as to those who think it is too far, just remember that Chernobyl (also in Ukraine) delivered its radioactivity to England, Wales and Scotland with effects that are all too measurable in ill-health and cancer, as my recent paper, still with the referees, but accepted by the “preprints” website, makes clear.

I wrote this Uranium from Ukraine paper up and submitted it to a journal, the same one that published my Fallujah paper. It was instantly rejected with no explanation and without being sent to any reviewers. I put it up on their “preprints” site. That also rejected it. I have now sent it to another journal and also its “preprint” site. It has vanished into a black hole. I uploaded it to Research Gate, and for the moment it is still there. We shall see. [1543]

Fig 1. Uranium (nBq/m³) in offsite High Volume Air Samplers deployed by the Atomic Weapons Establishment for Silchester, Reading, Aldermaston, Tadley and Burghfield. The Burghfield data points are reduced from 2-weekly data. The other data points are monthly. The Ukraine war began at point 55.

Links

1) Birth defects after Chernobyl https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26791091/

2) Failure of the Hiroshima basis of the risk model due to dishonesty

https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/204/4/1627/6046823

3) Hiroshima radiation epidemiology model was dishonest and unsafe as a basis for radiation protection

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34486897/

4) Ionising radiation and cancer: the failure of the risk model

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35483316/

5) High cancer risk in US Sailors serving in nuclear powered ships

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32063067/

6) Childhood leukemia increased in Wales and Scotland after Chernobyl

https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202303.0130/v1

7) Ukraine weapons Uranium found in air filters in the Atomic Weapons Establishment Aldermaston. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/369170067_Uranium_weapons_being_employed_in_Ukraine_have_significantly_increased_Uranium_levels_in_the_air_in_the_UK

Dr Chris Busby is the Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk and the author of Uranium and Health – The Health Effects of Exposure to Uranium and Uranium Weapons Fallout (Documents of the ECRR 2010 No 2, Brussels, 2010). For details and current CV see chrisbusbyexposed.org. For accounts of his work see greenaudit.org, llrc.org and nuclearjustice.org.

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2 thoughts on “Chris Busby on depleted uranium and the radioactive cloud threatening Europe”

Proudhon100 says:

May 20, 2023 at 6:58 am

Thank you for this information, Robin. Here’s an archived article on birth defects in Iraq. 144 out of every 1000 live births. https://web.archive.org/web/20201203134158/https://merip.org/2020/09/birth-defects-and-the-toxic-legacy-of-war-in-iraq/

1. Canadian Jigger says:
  
  May 21, 2023 at 3:39 am
  
  144 of 1000. That’s 14.4% … A near 1 in 5/6 chance of a birth defect. Worse than I thought. To find any decent information, you have to look hard for it often.
  I don’t have the time to look up birth defect numbers, in former Yugoslavia or other DU ridden areas.

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