Thought I'd get this settled before the usual hysterical types get a hold of it.

One realizes immediately that Mr. Johnson knows jack shit about uranium, radioactivity, or probably anything else having to do with elementary physics.

While uranium is chemically toxic, like many metals, it is less radioactive than the rocks they mine uranium from. Some scientists grudgingly admit this, but as mentioned in the New Scientist article linked there, wonder if there might not be some "mysterious effect" that would make it harmful anyway. The whole New Scientist article reminds me of the Pinky and the Brain episode where the Brain was trying to exploit the credulity of courts and juries by invoking a damage suit based on the mysterious interactive aspects of microwave ovens and non-dairy coffee creamer. "Two things that almost no one knows how they really work."

And Johnson screwed up on the exposure as well.

According to the Army Environmental Policy Institute, holding a spent DU round would expose a person to about 200 rem per hour. That's a level of radiation equivalent to receiving eight chest X-rays per hour, said to Tom Carpenter, director of the Government Accountability Project's Nuclear Oversight Campaign. That's also twice the annual radiation exposure limit allowed by the Washington state.

The actual report I found says in Chapter 6:

Holding a spent DU penetrator (DU metal without shielding) would deliver a skin dose of approximately 200 mrem/hour (Coleman et al., 1983; Cross, 1991; Needham and Coggle, 1991; Piesch et al., 1986; Rohloff and Heinzelmann, 1986). The current occupational exposure radiation dose limit for skin is 50,000 mrem/yr. The only plausible way that a soldier or support person could exceed this skin dose would be if a piece of DU from an expanded penetrator were carried as a souvenir.

There's one hell of a difference between 200 rems and 200 mrems. For the record, a dental whole-mouth X-ray is about 900 mrems.

Much more on this here.

One can bet there are lawyers champing at the bit on this one. Science never got in their way before, why should it now?