Depleted Uranium in Aircraft

[RebelYell]

Uranium pollution from the Amsterdam 1992 plane crash

A year after an El Al cargo jet crashed in Amsterdam on October 4, 1992, in which 43 people were killed, the LAKA documentation and research center on nuclear energy in Amsterdam announced that the plane contained counterweights made of depleted uranium (DU)1.

http://www.antenna.nl/wise/463-464/4609.html


1. Introduction

On 4 October 1992, a Boeing 747 cargo plane crashed into an apartment building complex near Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands, leading to the immediate death of 43 people <1>. The aircraft, cargo, fuel and damaged apartment building caught fire immediately after the crash and burned for more than one hour. In the years following the accident, an increasing number of people began reporting various physical and mental health complaints, which they attributed to the exposure to dangerous substances during the fire after the crash. Especially depleted uranium was pointed out as a possible cause of their health problems, since the aircraft contained depleted uranium to function as counterbalance weight and because about 150 kg out of the total 282 kg uranium was missing following clearance of the crash area. This paper presents the risk analysis carried out to determine whether the dispersion of uranium following the air crash could have led to long-term health complaints of bystanders present near the crash area. The reader is further referred to reference <2> for details not included in this paper. Reference <2> also describes the risk analysis, using a similar approach, of other hazardous substances issuing from the cargo or other burned material, such as HCl, PACs and heavy metals.

http://www.cyclone.nl/bijlmer/bijlmer.htm