Uranium in false teeth unhealthy?

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
41

What primary source does it quote from? I’m not overlooking it, because you failed to mention it. Why is that?

Why don’t you use the book’s full title? Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don’t Know About Cancer. This is not a journal entry, and you can call Proctor “Jesus the Nazarene” for all it matters. Inventing silly titles doesn’t lend him credibility. So you’re right. It is a secondary source. One that’s clearly been designed to push a political agenda. Regardless of what he discusses, the “debate about dose-response in the period” was no more real than the “debate” about “creation science” being taught in public schools now. For anyone that cares to admit the facts, there is no debate.

Why not? Because I haven’t stated it? You seem to be a little weak on logical reasoning, and knowing when to invoke the word “logic” in your argument. Tell me if this scans:

The NRC is made up of people. People who like money and job security.

The money they make and the job security they want are guaranteed by making all radiation appear as dangerous as possible. Despite, for example, that the entire northern hemisphere has a measurable amount of plutonium all across it. The average is between 1 and 4 pCi/m^2, if I’m not mistaken.(1)

Every group that has influence based on fear has a reason to falsify things.

But that’s all irrelevant. The burden of proof isn’t on me to show that they’re lying. The original 18 sources I cited have done that. Feel free to read at least one of them. Obviously you haven’t done so, as yet.

Hyperbole. Also irrelevant. If you choose to assume that any given person knows what a dose-response curve is, that’s your prerogative. “Anyone remotely aware of the issues” wouldn’t be trying so hard to discredit me, when the facts speak for themselves. So go review them, and get back to me.

Your observation is noted. Not that I see how it’s relevant, since that isn’t what has been done.

What account is that? How do you define “neutral” ? I have dismissed it because it’s one secondary source with no clear references. Whereas I have 18 primary sources. I don’t know where you went to school, but 1 primary source has more weight than 1 secondary source. 18 primary sources certainly have more weight than 1 secondary source. Again, you might want to pick one and read it, so we’re actually on the same page, here.

Cecil’s account requires the levels of radiation in those teeth to be dangerous. He characterizes it as dangerous several times. I have provided evidence that directly contradicts his notion that it “wouldn’t be something you do for the health benefits”. What don’t you understand?

And what exactly makes you an authority on the point I seem to want to make? If you’d stop giving me garbage to reply to and pay attention, my point would be obvious. Why isn’t it? Not for lack of clarity. I think the problem is more along the lines that Cecil fanboys don’t like it when someone easily and effortlessly shows him to be wrong. If that’s the case, it’s a personal issue, and I’ll thank you to not involve me in your personal issues.

Frankly, you’re mistaken. Frankly. And that sentence doesn’t even make conceptual sense. Frankly.

At least you’re trying.
(1) Hardy E.P., Krey P.W., Volchok H.L, Global inventory and distribution of fallout plutonium, Nature 241:444-445 (1973)

42

No, I can’t. Mainly because that’s not the article I cited. However, if you find a free copy of this (the UN wants $45 for it, and I’m sure you’re not the type to pay for information), feel free to check out Annex B, like I said.

You didn’t name a specific example. Do you intend to? Since it has nothing to do with my point, and it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with your point, I would guess you don’t intend to.

43

Actually, alpha-only. As in, it does not emit beta or gamma. At all. We’re talking about 239Pu. It emits an alpha particle and decomposes into 235U, through spontaneous fission. It has a decay energy of 5.245 MeV. So, let’s not gloss over that, since you’re wrong. Let’s point at it and make fun of you. Yes?

And yes. It does “somehow” make it safer to eat. Because alpha particles are not energetic enough to penetrate most body tissue. Your exposure is thus reduced. Even if you eat it. Even if you inhale it. The “somehow” is, in fact, basic nuclear physics. I’ve said that far too often in reply to people who style themselves as knowing what I’m talking about.

Ridiculous. Good thing you gave the slightest bit of reference to show that you know what you’re talking about.

I don’t recall hiring you to tell me when I say something that’s true. I don’t recall recognizing you as the final authority on what is true. I doubt many other people here recall that, either. It’s true because it’s true. Not because you declare it to be.

You seem unaware that I’m aware of that. Yes, plutonium will never leave the body. It typically migrates to the skeleton. And I maintain that this will reduce my risk of cancer later in life. I’m starting to think that you, also, didn’t read my initial post. Let me repost the relevant portion:

Thanks for playing.

I’m happy for you.

You’re mistaken, insofar as you’re oversimplifying. Why don’t you provide data to that effect, instead of proclaiming it as if you are the chosen spokesman of the Nevada Test Site? People believe you when you have corroborating evidence, like I do.

Also I believe I already said “the desert contains few large chunks of debris” and “dust… the desert has plenty of”. Would you please give me credit if you’re going to quote me? Thanks.

44

What you illustrated is the fallacy of composition, which is the complement to the one you stated. Not to mention synecdoche. And the fallacy was in your illustration.

So let’s talk about logic. Set theory combined with governmental theory, perhaps?

  1. The UN is a set of sets.

  2. Each member nation is a set of elements.

  3. The sets of elements theoretically don’t differentiate between the set and the elements (if you choose to believe in so-called democracy).

  4. Thousands of elements among all the sets affirm X, through scientific rigor. Thus, the sets affirm (see 3).

  5. Those sets that had no elements that did this cannot affirm nor deny, and so have no computational weight. Meaning they have no negative computational weight.

Now assign a value of 1 to an affirmation, and a value of -1 to a denial, and a value of 0 to anything else. You will get several 1s, zero -1s, and many 0s. The result is positive. The set of sets affirms.

If you want to talk about logic, it would be wise to not pretend UN procedure has anything to do with logic, or that the “official stance” of a nation on a subject is in any way relevant to anything.

Maybe you can now shift back to the topic at hand, which is plutonium, and not the UN. If you are ignorant on this front, I don’t blame you for wanting to keep the conversation irrelevant.

If you have something to accuse me of, go to that forum and do so. I won’t read it, so you’re guaranteed to “win”. That works for everyone, since you don’t clutter this thread, either.

45

Thanks. You beat me to it. Another great illustration of why plutonium is far safer to be in contact with than 131I, 133Xe, 60Co, 141Ba, etc. When it takes 24,000 years for half the material to decompose, that obviously means that only 1/48000th of it decomposes per year. 1/17520000th per day. 1/1513728000000th per second. When the calculations are right there, it’s evident how minscule that really is.

And nobody is suggesting that you disregard those regulations, of course. You might be interested to know that a Canadian study of 4,000 nuclear workers had a cancer mortality rate far below 21,000 coal and natural gas plant workers, and in Britain the cancer mortality rate of 70,600 exposed workers was less that that of 24,500 unexposed workers in the same plants. The data in references 6, 9, and 13 of my original post would probably interest you.

I’m just pointing out that many people presume that your limited exposure will end up giving you cancer in 30 years, when the science shows that as long as you DO observe the exposure limits, it will at least not increase your risk at all, and potentially reduce it.

46

Yeah, yeah, I know Phybre, you get to define what is scientific and logical and everyone else in the discussion is guilty of various logical fallacies.

Let me pick you up on one you’ve made.

Cecil states that the debate between the AEC and tooth manufacturers included consideration of the possibility that “putting uranium in people’s mouths might possibly give them cancer and kill them”. You say you contest this, but in fact you are contesting that “putting uranium in people’s mouths might possibly give them cancer and kill them”, which Cecil did not state. He merely said that this issue came up in the discussion. Nowhere do you back your refutation of this nor seem to realise that you are arguing against a position Cecil did not take.

47

Results 1 - 10 of about 9,890 for hormesis.

I’m sure you can determine for yourself which are credible and which are not. I’m sure you’ll recognize a lot of what is said on many of those pages, since they’ll be going from the same sources I’ve cited. And more.

48

I’m afraid I don’t see the relationship between your accusation and your justification, there. And I’m curious as to why you make no mention of the cites from 1976, 1980, 1982, 1983, 1987, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1994, 1995, 1996? Are you only comfortable with science that has occured since you have been born?

How many radiologists did you talk to, in order to determine that? I don’t think your sample was representative. Ask them before you speak for them, eh?

Absolutely. Since all life on this planet has been exposed to ionizing radiation for about 4 billion years now, I don’t see how it’s so unreasonable to believe that we have not evolved characteristics specifically to deal with that. If natural selection would have been good for anything, it would have been good for that.

SciAm as a great source, and I have to say I wasn’t aware of that article. But do bear in mind that SciAm is essentially a periodical, and not a scientific journal, so they often inject a lot of opinion into their articles. Just a caveat. The article seems to suggest that Calabrese’s work is not mirrored by dozens of other studies, which it is. So I have issue that SciAm is implying that the evidence for this is new, or just developing now. But the conclusion is on the dot. A National Research Council review would be a good idea. As much scrutiny as possible, from as many as possible.

49

It was off the top of my head, so you’ll forgive me. It’s within the same order of magnitude, and so the difference really is negligible, when you’re talking about materials that can potentially have a half life of 700 million years.

The radiation doesn’t need to go down to 1% for it to be safe, of coure. I was just trying to illustrate a safety margin, and a general time frame. Obviously the longer you wait, the safer it will be.

50

If that were the case, why are you fulfilling your expectation more than I am, so far? Is it your custom to tell someone else “what they’re doing”, characterizing it negatively, and then proceed to do that very thing yourself? Makes you look kind of foolish.

No. Let me make it clear what Cecil stated, by directly quoting him, which you thusfar haven’t done.

As you can clearly see, this is a drastic oversimplification, at best. As you can clearly see, it is a false dilemma. So if you are trying to maintain that Cecil was simply stating history, and not endorsing it, I’m afraid you seem to be wrong.

And now I’ll remind you what I said.

But then why argue about what Cecil meant, as you seem to be trying to do? Unless you’re him, you can’t know. What he said is clear. And let’s not pretend that implication doesn’t factor into a Cecil Adams column.

Yes, yes. He merely said that, I merely said this, you merely said the other thing. Let’s all play the “I merely said” or the “I just said” game. Because words have arbitrary meanings and equivocation by proxy is reasonable. Apologize for Cecil some more. He’s wrong. Get over it.

51

Yes I did. You even re-quoted the exact same bit I did. Read my post again more carefully “which thusfar you haven’t done”.

52

Please tell me: What happens if an alpha particle hits some substance, such as body tissue, and does not penetrate? It’s absorbed. And thereby gives up its energy to whatever absorbed it. By contrast, if a particle does penetrate a substance, then it does not give up all of its energy, and perhaps not even any at all. This is why ingested alpha sources are more dangerous than ingested gamma sources, because most of the gamma photons will pass through the body without being absorbed, whereas almost all of the alphas will be absorbed by the body.

And there’s no such thing as an alpha-only source. Even if every decay of an atom produces an alpha particle, there’s always a chance that it will produce one or more photons (i.e., gamma rays) in addition, and there are also radiations from daughter nuclei and secondary radiations from alphas hitting other atoms, either of which can produce gammas as well. Some materials, such as plutonium, are primarily alpha sources, but not exclusively.

As to your UN argument, incidentally, your exercise in set theory does not support what you claimed. It would be correct to say that the UN as a whole supports that viewpoint (at least, so I presume, since I’m not about to pay $45 to see the proof), but it is incorrect that every single member nation of the UN supports that viewpoint. To put it another way, your claim concerned every member of the set, but the support you put forth for that claim only addressed a subset of that set.

53

I was referring to the direct quotations from 1946 in the passage I quoted. Did the author just make those up? They don’t identify the source they come from, but it’s easy to identify other pre-1958 sources that say the same thing. For example, section 4.1 of this FRC Staff Report (a pdf) quotes from the 1954 HCRP Handbook 59 as follows:

Did someone at the FRC make this quote up? If you again merely want to dismiss that as a biased source, what about this page, which takes much the same general line you’re taking? But it quotes from a 1950 paper by Egon Lorenz that “It is well known that absorption of ionizing radiation by tissues is connected with damage, no matter how small the dose.”
The concept that there might be a danger from low-level radiation didn’t magically appear in 1958.

In answer to the question: habit. For reasons of brevity, I rarely include subtitles when citing books on the board. It might also occur to you that the subtitle was clearly intended to be provocative. What matters is whether Proctor manages to justify it in the course of the book. Since you’re the one arguing that fears about low-levels of radiation were arbitrarily invented in 1958 and sustained for non-scientific reasons, you might find his arguments interesting. Hell, you might even agree with him.
The change in tense in the last sentence is revealing. I’ll say it again: you seem unable to disentangle your conviction about what the scientific answer should be from the history of the question. A belief that the matter has been settled now ought to be largely irrelevant to the issue of what people - and teeth manufacturers, in particular - thought in the 1950s.

What’s irrelevent to the issue we’re discussing are most of those references. Judging from the titles, there are possibly a few that discuss what people thought about low-level radiation in the 1940s and 50s, but none of them are exactly a primary source on the matter either, are they?
Out of interest, why’s Muller on the list? That work’s normally suggested as the beginning of the realisation that even small doses of X-rays can cause genetic mutations. I haven’t read it and it’s always possible that Muller was actually saying something different. But it’s an odd reference to point me to, since it was work like this that partly drove concern about low-level radiation prior to 1958.

I didn’t describe it as “neutral”, I described it as “likely to be neutral on the detail in question”. In other words, there was no advantage to the author in pretending that some people were worried about low-levels of radiation in the 1950s if they actually weren’t.

What I don’t understand is why you don’t seem to understand what we’re actually arguing about. Whether Cecil’s right or not about the point you quote there is irrelevant to whether he’s right or not about the actions of teeth manufacturers in the 1950s.

Well, as far as I’m concerned, the issue is that the very first thing you said in your original post was a ludicrous misrepresentation of scientific history.

54

Read it and weep.

But you’re avoiding the question I put to you.

Yes or no: do you believe that every member of the UN believes your claim? Answer this first, and I’ll answer the questions you posed of me. That’s only fair.

55

Don’t be rediculous, I saw the Hulk and you can save your buddy from beign fried form a large emission of gammas by throwing your body in between him and the emission. Right? I mean, would Hollywood put such a blatent error in a move? C’mon…

I’m going to agree with Chronos, here. Alphas inside the body are the most dangerous form of radiation, considering equal levels of exposure. Almost all of the energy of the radiation is going into cells in your body. Sure you could get lucky and nothing happen, or you could get thousand of mutated cells. Its all probability and statistics.

56

You really should consider reading it. Everyone over there is laughing themselves silly at how you’re handing Bosda his ass on a plate. Definitely worth the read.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=282167&page=1

57

It seems to me that the part of Cecil’s column phybre objected to is the part where Cecil says something to the effect of ‘you wouldn’t put uranium in your mouth for your health.’

phybre seems to be trying to say something to the effect of ‘well, based on some valid scientific research that I have read, you would put uranium in your mouth for your health.’

I believe that the basis of the misunderstanding that turned this thread into a trainwreck is that these two points were not made clear in the OP.

Carry on.

58

Welcome,** phybre**.

For everybody seeking a good online source of information about radiation hormesis, I suggest http://www.angelfire.com/mo/radioadaptive/ . It lays out the hypothesis fairly and describes some of the studies.

Basically, there are two forms of evidence used to support the hypothesis: epidemiological surveys of populations that can be presumed to have been exposed to radiation above background, and lab studies using controlled exposures.

A. Epidemiological studies.

For a one-stop shopping critique of the epidemiological surveys, especially Cohen, see http://www.gfstrahlenschutz.de/docs/hormeng2.pdf/ . Mostly these criticisms break down as follows:

  1. Studies involving radon gas. Cohen, especially, is criticized for failure to account for pertinent variables including lifestyle, access to health care and exposure to other carcinogens. The link claims that when proper controls are applied, cancer rates still increase as background radiation exposure increases, even though the population may be healthier overall.

  2. Studies of nuclear workers. The big argument with these studies comes from the so-called HWE or “healthy worker effect,” meaning that the selective recruitment of much more robust than average persons into the industry, along with their continuing better-than-average access to health care, skews the sample of the study. It’s also contended that a proper reading of the numbers, comparing cancer SMR (standardinzed mortality ratio) to all causes of death still shows the expected correllation to radiation exposure. Another source attacking the “inconclusive” (often mislabeled as “negative”) studies involving radiation workers is from the National Economic Council, which decried such in a report that can be read here: http://www.eh.doe.gov/advocacy/archive/necreport/.pdf .

  3. Studies of Bomb Survivors. The two biggest problems here are 1) There’s just no reliable way to determine the levels of radiation exposure iin the subjects of the study; and 2) the “healthy survivor effect,” which suggests not unreasonably that the subjects of a bomb survivor study might be self-selecting for better-than-average radiation tolerance.
    B. Lab studies.

The lab studies to date have used (mostly, so far as I can tell) a protocol involving the exposure of mice, insects, bacteria and cell clumps to “pre-exposures” of 0.1GY (roughly 100x background level) followed by exposure after 4-70 hours by a larger dose. The findings have been pretty much as phybre reports: increased immunoresponse and lower cancer rates overall. There is nothiing inherently wrong with the science here, but to extrapolate the results for purposes of public policy may well be premature. For example, the pre-exposure in Bhattarcharjee’s work lasted 5 days. By my math, there is only a fair likelihood that this exposure increased the “cell hits” above what might be expected from background radiation at all. Second, there is no necessary parallel between the cells in the lab and the cells of the human population. Cell response to radiation may well vary according to other stresses on the cell from age, chemical exposure, genetic factors, etc. Cells in a lab have been preselected for health and homogeneity, neither of which can be expected in the outside world.

Finally, since phybre brings up a presumed bias on the part of the NRC, it would be incomplete not to point out the pressures working on the hormetic hypothesis. There is a great deal at stake, and radiation is only a small part of it. Most of this work deals with chemical toxins. If hormesis becomes accepted, it could save industry enormous dollars in regulatory compliance dealing with hazardous waste disposal, for example.

There is nothing inherently implausible about the contention that a little radiation is good for you, at least on average, and there’s some good science being done in support. For public policy purposes, however, the low-dose, no-threshold model still seems like the way to bet.

59

Let’s try that link again:

http://www.gfstrahlenschutz.de/docs/hormeng2.pdf

60

For those following this thread this from the BBC may be of interest.