US soldiers & Iraqi civilians: "Victims of US/British DU contamination?"

Like the 19 million gallons of deadly toxins (Agent Orange) the US poured on the hapless people of Vietnam in the 1970's that have resulted in chronic cases of asthma, spinal diffida, brain tumors, birth defects, and toxin laced mothers milk that continues to flow from nursing mothers 30+ years after the US invaded Vietnam, again we find the use of weapons discribed as "inhumane" and a violation of international law being used in Iraq by the US and British.

Depleted Uranium (DU) has caused hundred's of thousands of birth defects, still born fetuses, cancers, brain/kidney/lung malignant tumors and a malady of dread dieseases among the civilian population of Iraq and US soldiers who have been exposed to the radioactive dust and by-products of DU.

Meanwhile, the US has refused to cooperate with UN and doctors from other countries that have continued to investigate the phenomena of DU as it is related to the 1,800% increase in dread diseases that have errupted like a plague ever since the US/English began using DU munitions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Read and learn or ignore me and die stupid....


http://www.csmonitor.com/atcsmonitor/specials/uranium/index.html?leftNavInclude

Whirlwind

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http://usinfo.state.gov/regional/nea/iraq/press/0326depuran.htm:

1,800%?

Lol, propagandist.

 

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Whirlwind responds....

Oh, the life of a keyboard warrior, noting fazes them. Reminds me of our Whitehouse terrorist and his cabal of NeoCon(men), they will fight to the last American soldier, like most draft dodgers, reel MACHO MEN!

How do you say it: "Bring 'em on?!".

Meanwhile, since you seem to have overlooked the greatest (Agent Orange) environmental disaster in the history of the world in Vietnam, I thought I would send you a reminder of these past "US glories."

Thanks: Nixon, MacNamara and Gen'l Westmoreland!

Whirlwind....

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http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=22589

 

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DU dust is about as bad as lead dust (which is bad!)! Its radiation levels are minimal and its toxicology is in fact the more damaging hazard. As a heavy earth mineral is ranks with lead and mercury as a poison. Yes Uranium is bad stuff when ingested or inhaled. Just as a ban on small obedience lead rounds has been call for it’s not unreasonable to call for a ban on combustible DU rounds… But I have a problem with people that go ape shit about this stuff just because the words “nuclear waste” and “radioactive” are use.

 

It's been about three months so I'm not too surprised to see another potshot at an innocuous element founded on a patent lacking of scientific evidence.

There have been multiple threads on this board regarding the myth of DU toxicity and each avenue of activism has been dispatched in detail. Even the fucking World Health Organization says it's not a threat. Kindly do yourself a search through the archives and note that each hazard has been thoroughly addressed and its aggrandized apparitions debunked, many by yours truly. I'll be happy to do it again if you can post something substantive beyond quoting an activist internet website chapter and verse.

Like WCF said, it's no more dangerous than the dust of any other heavy metal, like lead, and less than others, such as mercury vapors. The hazards presented by U-238 are categorically chemical, and minimal.

http://www.reason.com/rb/rb032603.shtml

"Read and learn or ignore me and die stupid...." indeed.

 

My, my, so many nuclear physicists and forensic scientists on the Sciforms payroll! I'm almost conviced that breathing DU is no worse than sniffing kool aid!

So where is that diploma mill at folks, so I can get my PhD in LTBSO (listening to Bull Sh!t opinions)

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Yep, I bet that 4 oz of lead coming out of the muzzle of an AK-47 at 3,750 f/p/sec is probably as harmless as getting hit by a roasted marshmellow if you're sitting safely behind your keyboard 10,000 kms. away.

But there's 4 armed-to-the-gills US mercendaries in fallujah that forget to duck last week and boy was that an expensive lesson!

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Whirlwind......

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I'm a Marine. Comparing me to a draft dodger or some politician that might or might not have personal interests in Iraq is just like assuming it was better to keep Saddam in power to see what happens.

LOL...keyboard warrior. Speak for yourself. You regard yourself so highly you address yourself in the third person. That is your right, just as you are allowed to say that there has been an 1,800% increase in disease in Iraq/Afghanistan since the US/UK began using DU munitions in the area. At the same time, it is my right to question your claims and ask for supporting evidence.

To me it sounds like propaganda.

 

I hate to get off topic, but if such a degree existed, I'd recommend you pursue your PhD in SBSO (Sharing Bull Sh!t Opinions).

 

Whirlwind,

before we let you go on with this Red Herring or with your reverse appeal to authority you later mention, please answer this question: show where we said DU was no worse the sniffing kool aid??? I specifically remember mentioning lead and mercury not kool aid, but hey if you can’t read you need serious help, and should not be critizied but pitied

 

Dude, there are so many logical fallacies in his posts that I can't begin to make any sense of them. Kudos to you for trying.

 

Your violation will be televised!

Sniffing Kool-Aid, and other notes

Logical fallacies aside, I get the Kool-Aid line, enough to respond to it that if we accept unquestioningly the "official" explanation of Depleted Uranium and its hazards, sniffing Kool-Aid is, in fact, more harmful than living for years in an area where massive amounts of DU munitions have been spent.

As I understand it, living atop a former DU battlefield from conception for the rest of your life has such an insignificant radioactive effect that it isn't even considered against your lifetime exposure.

I don't necessarily believe it, but it's going to be another ten years at least before the cancer officially corrodes the official story. And who knows? DU might indeed be that harmless, but that seems so counterintuitive.

As to other issues, I must admit that it's nice to see Whirlwind in action. Even if that's just so I can chuckle at the notion, "And y'all had problems with my sympathies . . . ?"

Welcome to the new voices shooting from farther afringe than I--I've been wonderng where y'all were. Even an infinitesimal degree of the appearance of normalcy gives me room to work by revealing that there are certain boundaries I tend to stay within.

 

I have a solution for you Whirlwind,

Convince all of our enemies to start making their tanks out of wood. That way we wont need DU.

 

We could try getting along together around the world. I know, it's so crazy that nobody's ever wanted to try it before.

But it's just a suggestion. No DU, no cutting trees for tanks ... You could make the entire war out of hemp, almost. I'm not sure if hemp would work in explosives or gunpowder applications, though.

 

Actually now that I think about it sniffing Kool-Aid is in fact very harmful, all the sugar in your lungs will increase the chance of lung infections, people sniffing Kool-Aid constantly will have a higher fatality rate then people living in High DU areas.

Also I have seen calculations on it and the human body gives off more ionizing radiation per gram then uranium! Uranium with a half-life of 4.6 billion years is a very weakly radioactive substance. Like I said its toxicity as a heavy metal is what to worry about.

 

Whirlwind replies.....

Stop, Look & Listen:

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http://www.web-light.nl/VISIE/extremedeformities.html

 

I haven't laughed this hard on sciforums since forever.

 

I'm afraid this a a "cause and effect" fallacy, let me give you a example to explain: "I notice that in areas were there are allot of papaya people have darker skin, thus papaya must be what makes people have dark skin!" this is a fallacy in that I attach two things together without proving a relation.

The same goes for the DU in iraq, take for example the massive amount of oil fires, oil is filled with many mutagens why should we not assume they are the cause?

 

So which is worse, the DU we leave or the Tobacco products we sell in other countries. Which kills more people? Which is more likely to take heat from the left.

DU is a very usefull material. It is not going to go away. If it makes you feel better Whirlwind the U.S. is trying to develop newer rounds based on tungsten. However, DU has some very unique properties (like self-sharpening) which makes it almost irreplaceable.

I guess we could just drop some Nerve Gas on the bad guys.

 

Perhaps this thread will become more substantive if we take a step back and examine the object of debate. In practice, I find that the properties of Depleted Uranium are poorly understood by those who cite it as a dangerous contaminant.

First of all, DU is the same thing as Uranium 238, the most innocuous isotope of all the transuranics. Natural Uranium, pitchblende or yellowcake, consists of 99.3% U238, 0.7% U235, and a trace amount of U234. For nuclear power reactors you need about 5-7% U235 in the fuel rods in order for them to be neutron captive and sustain a criticality. HEU for weapons needs to be at least 90% U235 or greater.

As you can see from these percentages, when you enrich Uranium for fuel in either reactors or weapons you're going to end up with a lot of leftover U238. U238 has additional useful properties that makes it worth keeping around.

Modern fission-fusion-fission weapons use U238 as a tamper to add a final kick to their yield and increase the efficiency of their fusion secondaries. U238 is an excellent reflector of neutrons, so as the fusion secondary is being compressed and generating its massive neutron flux, the neutrons are kept bouncing around inside of it for a few shakes longer, thereby increasing the amount of fuel that fuses before the bomb blows itself apart. Second to this, a U238 nucleus will fission if you whack it hard enough, it's just that its binding energy defecit is so high that the only place you'll find neutrons energetic enough to overcome it is in a nuclear weapon. While the secondary is fusing and tossing out all kinds of neutrons, the U238 will absorb some of them and begin to fission itself, which releases even more energy than the secondary normally does. In the Castle Bravo test this is what happened. While the scientists at the time knew U238 would work as a tamper, they didn't know it would also fission. The 10-something tons of U238 that surrounded the hydrogen pit ended up fissioning and the Shrimp device yielded 15 megatons - triple what it was expected to.

That being said, the use of DU/U238 in AP munitions in no way is related to nuclear weapons. The assertion that it is is simply guilt by association; a textbook fallacy. Don't believe the activists who try to tell you this. They insult your intelligence by doing so, and are a waste of valuable gravity.

Without further ado, let's take a look at the properties of DU in ammunition:

Radiological properties of DU:

As far as radioactivity goes DU is a low-energy alpha particle emitter with a half life of over 4 billion years, so it's not dangerous radiologically unless you sprinkle it on your food for years at a time. Again, binding energy defecit is so high that spontaneous fission is only a freak occurence, meaning gamma emissions are virtually nonexistent for practical purposes. Alphas themselves are the least energetic of all particulate ionizing radiation, and are so large that the dead epidermal layer covering your body will stop them before they can even enter your system. Remember, radiation is not glowing green goo that will make your dick fall off and give your kids three heads.

While it can also be argued that DU is not strictly an alpha emitter because it is an amorphous mix of various decay products, this is by no means an accurate depiction of its radiological output. I will now explain why.

Any isotope has certain, very limited decay types that will emit a known type of radiation. It may be that an isotope could emite alpha, beta, and gamma through three different decays, but in the case of U-238 it emits only alpha or a gamma; there is no U-238 mode that allows a beta decay. U-238 is a gamma source because it does undergo spontaneous fission, however, the U-238 binding energy defecit is so high that the gamma rate is very low. In one mole of U-238, you can expect about 1 spontaneous fission per day releasing about 1.2KeV of gamma (before absorbtion and diffraction). That's why in most instances you see U-238's alpha mode listed as 100%; spontaneous fissions only 5.4x10^-5% of all decays and is too small to really acount for in any meaningful way.

By the same token, you were saying that it's a a beta source because U-238 isn't pure. Any U-238 is going to have some weirdo decay products that have a beta decay embedded it or some such. Those can have all the beta they want, but again, in the quantities they're present in DU it's not something that can be easily measured. One of those decays will happen about every 107 or 109 decays and you get less than 1KeV out of them (beta's not a very efficient decay in big atoms).

So the gamma/beta decay process of U-238 accounts for less than 1/100th of the aggregate ionizing radiation output. Utterly insignificant.

The chemical properties of DU:

The only form of DU that is of any harm at all to humans is oxidized DU dust, and it is only formed when DU bullets strike hard materials, like tanks or armored vehcles. And even then, it's only harmful when inhaled in large quantities as skin or light clothing protects from the alpha radiation and small quantities are easily and harmlessesly dealth with by the body like all the other naturally radioactive isotopes we inhale every second of every day.

Besides which, the toxic chemicals in those burnt out tanks is the far worse health problem... All the shots that miss sit harmlessly in the desert, not hurting anything. A DU penetrator is encased in a thin polymer coat at manufacture to protect against the sharpness of the tip and also the dust an incident bump could knock off. The only place DU detritus will be encountered will be inside the hulks of burned out tanks. Also, breathing tungsten dust from a more traditional AT round will be none the better for you, so the alternative critics suggest for DU is quite insignificant. Anyway, tungsten sucks when compared to DU. DU is about 50% more dense, and has way cool additional properties that make weaponizing it a favorable endeavor.

Physical properties of DU:

U238, for armor piercing munitions called DU, is also an excellent material for armor piercing munitions for a number of reasons

• DU is 1.7 times denser than lead and Tungsten, meaning that more kinetic energy can be packed into a penetrator of the same size.
• DU penetrators are self-sharpening due to their innate crystalline structure. This is a process called adiabatic shear.
• DU is pyrophoric - combusting as it's ablated in the same manner that flint and steel does. The resultant incindiary effects are particularly useful when it is considered for destroying armored vehicles, because the white-hot spall fragments will rattle around inside the cabin, detonating ammunition and igniting fuel.
• Because there's a surplus of it left over from enriching Uranium for power reactors, it's also dirt cheap. The only metal with superior AP qualities is Osmium, which is so fucking expensive that it's not worth the trouble.

First, a picture to help illustrate what adiabatic shear is:

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Here you can see the difference in plasticity between the DU rod and WHA Tungsten rod on impact. While both show some signs of deformation, the DU rod is markedly less deformed, and focuses its energy on a smaller area, resulting in greater penetration ability.

A picture of what the munitions look like may help. Here is the US M829A1 Armor Piercing Fin Stabilized Discarding Sabot, with tracer and combustible casing. The DU penetrator itself is the long, finned, gray dart in the very center. It is shrouded in a black anodized aluminum sabot that seals the 120mm smoothbore gun barrel during firing for propulsion. After leaving the muzzle, the sabot is ripped off by air resistance and the 42mm penetrator is left flying toward its hapless target at over a mile a second. Thus, the DU is not exposed directly when the shell is in storage, nor is it exposed during flight, or unless it hits a hard enough target to strip its polymer sheath. Additionally, when a penetrator misses and burrows into the ground, it goes quite far - remember, these things are designed to penetrate eighteen inches of rolled homogeneous steel armor, so they lance through umpteen feet of earth and rock without a hitch. They bury themselves far and away from the prying hands of poor Iraqi children.

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Here is the penetrator and sabot undergoing breakaway after leaving the gun barrel:

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And here is a DU round from a 25mm Bushmaster chain gun that I happen to have here, in my room, in a drawer next to me, where it has been for several years. Don't ask me where it's from. That's a 12 inch engineering rule next to it for comparison:

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Finally, the World Health Organization of all people report that its military use is not dangerous:

Link

It's no more dangerous than any heavy metal. I now submit that we must ban lead, tantalum, mercury, polonium, and rhenium, for starters.

Now, I know that somebody else is going to come onto these boards within the next few months and resurrect this topic yet again, because we've seen this faddish nonsense several times before. Because I'm sick and tired of debunking it, I've saved this post to a text file and won't hesitate to append it to the next recidivation.

 

Actually tobacco kills more americans a year through lung damage, lung disease, lung infections from lung damage, cancer,ect... then AIDS!!!!

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