What are the military uses of depleted uranium?
Uranium’s physical and chemical properties make it very suitable for military uses. DU is used in the manufacturing of ammunitions used to pierce armour plating, such as those found on tanks, in missile nose cones and as a component of tank armour. Armour made of depleted uranium is much more resistant to penetration by conventional anti-armour ammunitions than conventional hard rolled steel armour plate. Armour piercing ammunitions are generally referred to as “kinetic energy penetrators”. DU is preferred to other metals, because of its high density, its pyrophoric nature (DU self-ignites when exposed to temperatures of 600° to 700° and high pressures), and its property of becoming sharper, through adiabatic shearing, as it penetrates armour plating . On impact with targets, DU penetrators ignite, breaking up in fragments, and forming an aerosol of particles (“DU dust”) whose size depends on the angle of the impact, the velocity of the penetrator, and the temperature. These fine dust
