At 02:14 PM 10/16/2004, you wrote: > I >have a hand time believing these materials are one and the same and think I >would be getting another source of information to further investigate this >little item. >Doug Rupert > >Did you know that Lead is Depleated Uranium!!!
This is NOT KR related and the thread should be dropped but what the hell. Most of you should delete this message unread. Those who care about isotopic trivia can read on. Speaking in my capacity as a Nuclear Engineer, the person who made the erroneous claim that lead is depleted uranium is really confused. Depleted uranium is the material left over when natural Uranium is refined into either nuclear fuel or weapons grade Uranium. Natural uranium is made up of two different isotopes. An isotope is a element with the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons. Natural Uranium is made up of approximately 99.3 percent U-238 and 0.7 percent U-235. Nuclear reactors generally use Uranium that is enriched to approximately 4 percent U-235. Weapons grade Uranium (the stuff that can make a really loud boom) is approximately 95-99 percent U-235. The left-over material from the enrichment process is called depleted Uranium and it is almost exclusively U-238. It has excellent mechanical and refractory (high temperature) properties and it is extremely dense. Uranium is naturally radioactive and undergoes decay to different daughter elements and their isotopes. I will not go through the full decay scheme, but the end result of the decay chain is lead, which is stable. Lead is not depleted Uranium but it does come from Uranium decay. Don Reid - donreid "at" erols.com Bumpass, Va Visit my web sites at: AeroFoil, a 2-D Airfoil Design And Analysis Computer Program: http://www.eaa231.org/AeroFoil/index.htm KR2XL construction: http://users.erols.com/donreid/kr_page.htm Aviation Surplus: http://users.erols.com/donreid/Airparts.htm EAA Chapter 231: http://eaa231.org Ultralights: http://usua250.org VA EAA State Fly-in: http://vaeaa.org
