Hey, was there a SR4 supplement that had info on DU rounds?

I've got the corebook, Havens, Augmentation, and Arsenal, but I don't think it's in any of those.

who's ranium?


no, not to my knowledge . .

No. And for smallarms it wouldn't be appreciably different from APDS.

You can always fluff APDS rounds as being made of depleted uranium.

just remember kiddos, Uranium is self sharpening (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Some tungsten alloys will do the same thing (they are not pyrophoric, like DU is, but that only comes into play at higher velocities than a small-arm will produce).

"It's ok. I'm sure they'll listen to Reason."

Good old Fisheye. Poor Bruce Lee. you get 1000 cool points.

Also: unless it came from spent nuclear fuel, depleted uranium is not particularly radioactive... it's very toxic though and will give you plenty of grief through its chemical properties alone, especially since after a DU penetrator (tank) round has done its job, it leaved behind a fine dust of DU that's easy to inhale, ingest and contaminate your clothes/body with.

(IMG:style_emoticons/default/cool.gif)

Depleated nuclear fuel is not depleated uranium. Depleated uranium is the left over from the uranium enrenchment process where they extract U-235 from masses of U-238. Its stable for a heavy element and has a stupid long half life.
Depleated nuclear fuel is composed of fission fragments which are a number of elemental isotopes not found in nature roughly half the size of U-235.

*Spent* nuclear fuel will have the majority of it's U-235 content burnt up (and for reactor grade fuel it was never more 3-5% to begin with), so it's mostly U-238 (like *real* depleted uranium), a whole bunch of highly radioactive trans-uranics and fission products. I wrote "unless it comes from spent nuclear fuel", because there were cases when spent fuel was used to fabricate DU rounds rather than plain 'ol DU from the enrichment process. (Why anyone would do such an insane thing is beyond me, but it *did* happen).

ok, to be fair I only delt with military grade reactors, they are a bit more concentrated (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

The majority yes, but a "spent" fuel rod still contains far more U-235 than natural uranium. The problem is that is also contains fission products with high neutron absorption, which would turn the fuel rod into a control rod if not replaced.


While that is a popular claim by scaremongers, there have never been any documented cases. Because as you said, why would anyone be so insane? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

DU is about as toxic as the rest of the heavy metals. You really don't want to eat or inhale lead, cadmium, thallium, mercury etc. IIRC, the alpha emitter part is not nearly as likely to kill you as the inherent toxicity is.

I thought DU rounds were starting to disappear in favour of tungsten...

DU is a better material for making penetrators out of then tungsten carbide (WC). WC is often more politically acceptable than DU, and DU is also harder to get a hold of due to controls.

The major reason why DU projectiles were introduced was that uranium enrichment produces vast quantities as a useless (read: cheap) byproduct. I'm sure there is enough to go around for countries without enrichment plants, too...

True, but most depleted uranium is actually in the form of uranium hexafloride. This is bad stuff. It needs to be reprocessed to uranium before it's safe, and there are some sort of permits required in the US to posses more then a few pounds.

As I understand it from the above posts, DU rounds are toxic and very slightly radioactive while spent fuel rounds are very toxic and lethally radioactive.

So, a drone with hardened electronics and shielding against radiation should have no problem carrying and using spent fuel rounds, which are probably a contravention of every weapon treaty ever signed ever. I would hate to be on the receiving end of that.

Make dioxygen diflouride out of it. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Why am I just reminded of Project Pluto?

And just to make that clear again, such "spent fuel rounds" are a purely hypothetical scenario

Spent fuel rounds sounds really inconvenient... Toxic bullets sound great... Until you realise it works both ways.

In retrospect I shouldn't have even mentioned the damn thing as it's just that... a rumor.

Frankly manufacturing rounds from spent fuel is probably more trouble than its worth. Here is why: when a spent fuel bundle is removed from the reactor pool at last, it's placed in a cooling pool where it stays for a whole year (or more, I'm not sure and can't find hard figures), just *cooling*. Afterwards the bundle can be stored without cooling, but it's still burning hot to the touch as the fission products and some of the transuranics are still undergoing fission decay producing heat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv-mFSoZOkE

So if you wanna manufacture rounds out of this, you gotta deal with something that's burning hot, radioactive (emitting alpha, beta, gamma... all sorts of nasty) and chock full of various elements with varying chemistry that could influence your tools are you're milling/stamping whatever to produce rounds... so all in all, having thought about it I think the whole idea of "spent nuclear fuel" used for DU rounds highly suspicious.

DU is about as radioactive as the ceramic plate you eat off of at the cafeteria. Does that make you feel more, or less safe?