From my above citation, in case anyone’s been too lazy to click on it:
=========================== SHIFTING THE BURDEN OF PROOF
Description: The burden of proof is always on the person making the assertion or proposition. Shifting the burden of proof, a special case of “argumentum ad ignorantium,” is a fallacy of putting the burden of proof on the person who denies or questions the assertion being made. The source of the fallacy is the assumption that something is true unless proven otherwise.
ARGUMENTUM AD IGNORANTIAM
Description: An argument that a proposition is true because it has not been shown to be false, or vice versa. Ad ignorantium arguments are also known as “appeals to ignorance.” This fallacy has two forms:
P is true, because it has not been proven false.
P is false, because it has not been proven true.
ARGUMENTUM AD NAUSEUM
Description: The incorrect belief that an assertion is more likely to be true the more often it is heard. An “argumentum ad nauseum” is one that employs constant repetition in asserting a truth.
Bolding and formatting mine. BoyScout11, can you argue your position without resorting to these (or any of the other classical) fallacies listed above? Can you argue your position at all? It doesn’t look like it.
I’ve been lurking in this thread since I saw the pit thread on BS, waiting the inevitable banning. This thread has had me rolling on the ground laughing so hard I was literally in tears. For all you who participated you have my heart felt thanks.
(If BS was smart he would have used the old Alderbaran standby “My post is my cite” and THEN where would you all be?? )
I said “usually” because there are some metals that do not react much with air, and so will not burn as a dust- gold for example. Finely divided uranium, as said again and again, will ignite spontaneously. It is pyrophoric.
Biological half-life has nothing to do with radioactivity. It refers the the amount of time it takes for half of a chemical load to be removed from the body. A long biological half-life means that if you recieve a single large exposure, it will remain in your body longer… or, if you recieve a constant low level exposure, it will build-up to a higher equilibrium concentration than materials with a shorter half-life under similar exposure conditions.
A biological half-life isn’t a straightforward thing… it’s a weighted average of the biological half-lives of individual types of tissue (blood, bone, liver, kidney, etc) depending on how the specific substance interacts with each.
The concern is not with DU so much as it being in the form of ceramic uranium particulate- which you are not likely to be exposed to in significant amounts while gardening. Ceramic uranium particulate has a double-whammy of being a good airborne candidate and having a particularly long biological half-life in the lung due to it’s low solubility in lung fluid.
I did tell him to quote somebody else’s post. I even told him, in that post, to quote the post I had written, as it contained cites! We’re talking several levels of meta-stubbornness.
If this was directed at me, I’m well aware that you (and others) tried to get him to post a cite…over and over again in fact. I don’t think you recognized the tongue in cheek reference to Alderbaran that I made…you see, his POST is his cite (there for he doesn’t NEED to cite anything…get it? :)).
At anyrate, it was a highly amusing thread…especially if one also reads his final What is a debate thread for additional chuckles.
Well, honestly, a slight potential risk of cancer, which no one has ever been able to seriously correlate, is not really a valid objection to DU.
I mean, “Gulf War syndrome” wasn’t even a real disease. The only symptoms were: 1) somebody got sick or had a deformed baby and 2) they were in the Gulf.
The problem is, part 2) was assumed to be the cause of part 1). Its defining the answer before the question was asked.
The correlations with DU similarly are so small that they are nigh-invisible. At which point we can’t be sure they do exist.
Allright, here is a cite that says uranium, depleted or otherwise, is hazardous.
And by the way it is the law of the US and European laws are probalby more restrictive.
Hey, I’m no health physicist but I can do the math and one of the antitank rounds hitting a target and vaporizing 50% would cause a volume of 400 feet by 400 feet by 400 feet to exceed the DOE limit.
The whole point of shooting at someone with DU rounds is to kill them and those around them, so if you are shooting said rounds on a battlefield then 400x400x400 additional death sounds like a good idea. The debate is, is there a residual effect after said rounds impact said target? If so, how long does it last? What are the increased probabilities of harm from said residual effect (assuming there is one)? Is this long term or short term? Does the increased probability of harm from using DU outweight its utility on the battlefield?
From everything I’ve read in this thread no one has yet been able to show that there is a serious increase risk of a residual effect from using DU that isn’t there from using other high explosives or weapon systems on the battlefield. It seems no more than a slight increase in risk above the background level, and no more than all the other dangerous stuff used on todays battlefield (wars are dangerous places). Its a long thread and perhaps I missed it, but I didn’t see any cites showing this anyway.
<hijack=“DOE Limits”>We have drains on site that we cannot put tap water down because it’s above the limits for cupric waste on those drains. You can drink it, you just can’t put it down that drain- as that would be hazardous to the environment. You could drink the tap water and then go take a piss in the creek we’re protecting, and that would be fine. You could take a glass of tap water and pour it in the creek, and that would be fine. Pour tap water down that drain it’s an upgrade program on the proper disposal procedures for potentially hazardous wastes. Tap water.</hijack>
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, I guess… it’s also worth a ton of paperwork.
And I agree that the whole point of shooting someone with DU rounds is to kill them. The problem is, of course, that the ceramic uranium generated doesn’t conveniently follow around the people you’re trying to kill, or politely settle to the ground when your troops, whom you are not trying to injure, carry their lungs through the area. It also doesn’t know that it’s supposed to stay on the battlefield, so when GI Joe gets orders home, we end up with DU outside of the war zone.
U-238 has a radioactive halflife of 4.5 billion years. So there will be residual radioactivity on the battlefield for a long time.
U-238 decays to Radon-222 which causes lung cancer.
Its use justifies the use of dirty radiological weapons against us. Although I think any nation that could fashion an effective dirty bomb would have no problem deploying nuclear weapons. no time to try and support that right now.
I read that first paper, and nowhere in it did I see that “DU is hazardous” is “PROVEN.” Did you make that part up yourself? You know, my aunt used to drive a Chevy Impala, and she died of cancer. Therefore…
And if DU injected in muscles causes cancer, so what? If I’m hit by a DU round, my least concern is the slight possibiliity of cancer years later.
That bit about the half-life of U-238 shows that you have no understanding of radioactive materials. I don’t mean to be insulting, but you just don’t.
Half-life refers to the amount of time it would take for half the material to decay into some other element. So, for U-238 it would take 4.5 billion years for half of it to decay into Radon-222. Radionuclides only emit radiation when they decay, that’s the definition of radioactivity. A half-life of 4.5 billion years means that U-238 decays very very very very very very slowly. So slowly that U-238 isn’t very radioactive at all. Materials that have short half-lives (like U-235) are much more radioactive. They decay faster, and so they emit more radiation, and their decay products (whatever they are) are also produced more quickly. So yes, long half-life materials are dangerous for longer periods, but in an exact inverse of how dangerous they are.
The dirt around us has minute traces of radioactive materials. The concentrations vary from place to place, so people in (say) Colorado get more radiation from the soil than people in (say) Indiana. So contaminating the soil with U-238 is about as dangerous radiation-wise as trucking soil from Colorado and dumping it in Indiana.
That isn’t to say that U-238 can’t be dangerous in certain circumstances. It is a heavy metal, and almost all heavy metals are toxic (Gold being one of the exceptions). But casual exposure to U-238 isn’t a radiation danger BECAUSE its half-life is 4.5 billion years. Note that carrying around chunks of u-238 in your body isn’t exactly casual exposure. But carrying around chunks of lead or mercury or other metals around isn’t likely to be good for your health either.
It seems to me that it would be reasonable to compare the dangers of U-238 to the dangers of lead. Both are used in weapons designed to kill people. We can certainly agree that the primary danger of a lead weapon or a U-238 weapon is the kinetic energy it carries when it hits you. But we can also certainly agree that lead also poses other dangers. In many places lead shot is prohibited for duck hunting because of the toxicity of lead. So…how much more dangerous than lead is U-238? If the contamination dangers of U-238 are within an order of magnitude of the contamination dangers of lead, it seems unreasonable to be particularly upset about its use.
Now ARE the dangers of U-238 within that order of magnitude? I’m not sure. But the mere fact that U-238 can cause health problems in certain circumstances isn’t enough to call for the banning of U-238 weapons, any more than lead causing health problems isn’t enough to call for the banning of lead bullets.
Also, your contention that anyone who could make a radiologic bomb could probably also build a nuclear bomb is certainly not true. All you need to build a radiologic bomb is some radioactive material of some type (say, radiologic medical waste) and some conventional explosives. Wrap the radioactive material around the explosives, set off the explosives, and you contaminate an area with radioactive materials.
But really, this isn’t a very effective weapon. The real reason this weapon would be effective is that it would force the victim to spend a lot of time, money and effort to decontaminate the area. The real threat is that if we didn’t make a huge effort to decontaminate the area we’d face lawsuits every time anyone who had any tangential connection with the site developed cancer any time in the future, and of course even a thorough effort to decontaminate the area wouldn’t protect us against all lawsuits, just some of them.
A nuclear bomb is a whole different thing. You need refined U-235 (which is what you remove from metallic uranium to leave depleted uranium or U-238) or plutonium. Those aren’t easy to get, in fact this is probably the hardest step. You can’t build facilities for separating uranium in your backyard, you need an industrial infrastructure to do this. This is why most of our non-proliferation efforts focus on enriched uranium. Once the terrorists have the enriched uranium or plutonium building a bomb is pretty straightforward…not easy certainly, but doable. Probably any university engineering department could build one given the time and budget.
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