Talk:Depleted uranium/Archive 2

message: This article is currently littered with "Allied" this and "Allied" that. As our article on Allies notes, When spelt with a capital A, Allies usually denotes the countries that fought together against the Central Powers in World War I and against the Axis powers in World War II. The term is generally used in the generic sense of "all who opposed the enemy". In addition, it is usually used in a strict dichotomy of them vs. us, reflecting wartime propaganda, with no account taken of nuances of countries that were occupied as neutrals, changed sides or participated in concurrent wars.
There are obviously terms we can use that are far more neutral than this. —Christiaan 22:39, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  "[[Allies]]" is not a neutral term 

message: I moved the recently-deleted decay products commentary to the u-238 article, where it seems like it may have some relevance.  It was asked how long it would take thorium and U-234 to reach equilibrium; each of those two questions can be answered by a fairly easy differential equation, which would be a good exercise.  You would also get the exact concentrations at equilibrium, from which the rate of beta emission could be easily calculated.  See the article on half life to start the problem, and feel free to leave a note on my talk page if you get stuck along the way.--Joel 16:04, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Decay chain 

message: Hey it seems like it would be a good idea to have a separate article on Depleted Uranium Rounds that could serve as a better exposition of the controversy surrounding them.  TitaniumDreads 05:13, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Separate Article? 

message: In reference to thermonuclear weapons, the article contains the text "The extremely high flux of neutrons from the resulting fusion reaction causes some amount of transmutation and fission of the resulting Plutonium, which can add fission energy to the yield of the weapon."
This can't possibly be true.  Plutonium is not directly formed when neutrons hit uranium, what is formed is U-239 that decays to plutonium.  In the miniscule fraction of a second during the explostion, none of it will have yet decayed.
I believe the correct explanation is that the fusion reaction produces high energy neutrons.  U-238 will fission with high energy neutrons, though it won't produce a chain reaction.
I have no ready information source for this, so I hope someone else can fix it. Ken Arromdee 15:36, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  A non-political problem 

message: Depleted uranium first emerged as a social, political, and scientific issue after the 1991 Gulf War. The decline of rational discourse about DU can be traced to the 1999 Kosovo conflict. At that time, the DU issue took on a more overtly political role. The Yugoslav government under Sloboban Milosevic suggested the use of DU in the Balkans would have genocidal effects, and when the U.S. government refused to release information about its use of DU following the war, activists and propagandists alike suggested that the United States was responsible for causing widespread and severe effects from its use of DU munitions. Saddam Hussein similarly blamed the United States (and DU) for a sharp increase in cancers and birth defects, and Yasser Arafat joined the chorus by accusing Israel of using DU in Palestinian territories. In the years since 1999, politicians, propagandists, and activists have intoxicated each other with heart-wrenching but extremely misleading and unsubstantiated claims about the effects of DU munitions, radicalizing the issue in a way that has had a chilling effect upon serious debate.
Ironically, U.S. propaganda fueled the uncertainty surrounding the effects of DU munitions on Iraqis, which in turn facilitated the Saddam Hussein regime’s own propaganda. A policy of “proponency” to prevent DU munitions from becoming “politically unacceptable” was recommended shortly as the war ended, and in the subsequent years, Pentagon spokesmen dismissed concerns about DU munitions in the same breath as they overstated its success in defeating the Iraqi tank corps. The hype helped create the impression that the battlefield was far more contaminated by DU dust than it probably was, thereby enabling the Iraqi government to effectively exploit an reported rise in cancers and birth defects by blaming the effects on DU munitions and, more importantly, the United States.
The scientific debate is now bogged down in confusion over the extent and severity of DU exposures, but many of the statements made by extremists have become a muddled mixture of verifiable facts, speculative assertions, and politically motivated falsehoods.
Prior to the use of DU munitions in combat, large quantities – probably on the order of thousands of tons of DU – were shot at testing ranges in the United States, United Kingdom, and as well as in the former Soviet Union and other countries. In addition to the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel, it is possible and even probable that other countries or armed forces have used DU munitions in combat. Some anti-DU activists have claimed the quantities of DU shot by U.S. forces are orders of magnitude higher than the figures released by militaries and governments. While such deception is not outside the realm of possibility, the figures released by some activists, such as the claim that the U.S. released 900,000 kg (2,000,000 lbs) of DU in Afghanistan, lack any supporting data, and in some cases are complete fabrications.
Some activists also started to advance claims based more on assertion than proof. These activists, including some with science backgrounds, started to exploit the scientific uncertainties and decry DU as a “crime against God and humanity.” Cults of personality formed around activists who spread a dire gospel based on a blend of fact and fiction as they marched forward, ever forward, in a messianic haze. A new crop of self-proclaimed DU experts emerged in the wake of the Kosovo conflict exploiting the DU issue to raise money for their organizations, and others pointed to DU as a manifestation of the evils of the United States and NATO. Some of these new activists joined forces with more seasoned experts to claim not only proof of widespread and severe effects from DU, but also to assert that these effects were an intentional consequence of the U.S.use of DU munitions. A few marginal scientists marred their professional reputations by becoming scientist-activists who made claims and interpreted data to create misleading and intellectually dishonest assessments of DU’s actual and potential effects.
The fantastic claims of well-known activists have grown progressively more extreme since 1999. Without any credible health or environmental studies in post-war Iraq on DU, activists have claimed the effects are comparable to those of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion. Some prominent activists have claimed that not only has the use of DU already caused genocidal effects in Iraq, but that the US uses DU munitions to intentionally inflict genocide on populations. In some cases, one lie leads to another, such as when one activist asserted – without supporting data – that U.S. missiles and bombs contain large quantities of DU, and then a publicity-seeking, fund-raising organization calling itself the Uranium Medical Research Centre used this claim to advance its own unsupported assertion that the U.S. had spread uranium contamination across Afghanistan, resulting in severe health effects. The prize for the most outlandish claim about DU to date goes to activist Leuren Moret. Moret, who works closely with Doug Rokke and other anti-DU extremists, has uttered some of the most bizarre and uninformed statements about DU, including the following statement made in February 2004:
Anyone within 1,000 miles of Iraq; anyone within 1,000 miles of Afghanistan is potentially contaminated now. It’s not just the people [living] in the country Anyone going to Iraq or Afghanistan now will become contaminated. There’s no way to escape it.
Such certainty is the hallmark of the DU extremists. However, Moret’s most distinctive and substantial contribution to the decline of rational discourse about the effects of DU is her claim that the use of DU munitions has resulted in atmospheric pollution by radioactive dust equal to the detonation of 400,000 Nagasaki bombs. Of course, there are differences of opinion even among the most irrational and uninformed extremists another activist says the use of DU is equal to only 250,000 Nagasaki bombs.
When moderate activists raised concerns about the accuracy of the increasingly alarmist claims about DU, they became the target of character assassination campaigns. In fact, the debate over DU has declined to the point where the simple act of questioning a claim made by Doug Rokke, Asaf Durakovic, or other prominent activists is labeled a heresy by a small jury of vocal extremists who operate mainly through the Internet. Rational discourse about the use and effects of DU munitions has become increasingly difficult and rare.
As far as the people suffering from the health effects of being in combat, it would seem to me that it would be very, very hard to isolate exposure to any one material from the hazmat background in an active theater; such places are not exactly OSHA compliant to begin with.
There are many environmental hazards caused by modern munitions, singling out DU is a bit of a red herring that is leveraging peoples fear of all things nuclear. This stuff has been use in ordinance since 1958, but it wasn't till two tin-pot dictators tried using the issue to discredit NATO in general and the U.S. in particular that anyone noticed it. Never mind Iraq, why hasn't epidemiological studies been done to the populations near test ranges in the U.S., the U.K. and France? Why would anyone want to run a study under conditions where the confounding variables will make any conclusion scientifically suspect?
:DV8 2XL 00:57, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Verifiable facts, speculative assertions, and politically motivated falsehoods. 

message: Due to the lack of experimental data, the approach taken was to estimate the typical levels of exposure on the battlefield over a wide range of scenarios, and the worst-case exposures that individuals are unlikely to exceed. These estimated values have then been used to assess the potential health risks from radiation. The report also considers epidemiological studies of occupational exposures to uranium in other situations as an independent source of information on the risks of inhaling DU particles, although it recognises that the parallels may not be precise.
Except in extreme circumstances any extra risks of developing fatal cancers as a result of radiation from internal exposure to DU arising from battlefield conditions are likely to be so small that they would not be detectable above the general risk of dying from cancer over a normal lifetime.
The greatest exposures will apply only to a very small fraction of the soldiers in a theatre of war, for example those who survive in a vehicle struck by a DU penetrator. In such circumstances, and assuming the most unfavourable conditions, the lifetime risk of death from lung cancer is unlikely to exceed twice that in the general population.
Any extra risks of death from leukaemia, or other cancers, as a result of exposure to DU are estimated to be substantially lower than the risks of death from lung cancer. Under all likely exposure scenarios the extra lifetime risks of fatal leukaemia are predicted to be too small to be observable.
Many soldiers on a battlefield may be exposed to small amounts of DU and the risks of cancer from such exposures are predicted to be very low. Even if the estimates of risk for these conditions are one hundred times too low, it is unlikely that any excess of fatal cancer would be detected within a cohort of 10,000 soldiers followed over 50 years.
This report was referenced to support this edit:
The mainstream media, however, has consistently shed light on stories of DU related illnesses and birth defects from the children of soldiers recently returning from conflicts involving Depleted Uranium. As early as September 3, 2000, CNN reported that Dr. Asaf Durakovic was treating cases of soldiers contaminated with Depleted Uranium in the First Gulf War of 1991.  Time Magazine has featured several articles about the growing concern over the dangers of Depleted Uranium, one about NATO soldiers on January 9th, 2001  More recently, The New York Daily News' Juan Gonzalez reported in a front page article about the war's littlest victim, referring to the newborn daughter of a soldier suffering from Gulf War Syndrome who was born with three fingers missing. The soldier in question tested positive for Depleted Uranium.  	 
-		 
Moreover, a comprehensive study by The Royal Society, a fellowship of over 1400 distinguished scientists, researchers and professors, found that Depleted Uranium poses serious health risks for civilians as well as soldiers.  
DV8 2XL 23:32, 26 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Quotes from the Royal Society Report 

message: Where did the reference to the Gonzalez article go?  It's not good Wikipedian practice to delete every part of an edit just because you don't personally agree with one or more other parts.  Please re-add this reference, as the story adds important context about recent investigative reporting and makes for a more well rounded article.  Thanks.  Badagnani 23:49, 26 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I went with everything else because it is full of supposition, not fact. look I said above: "As far as the people suffering from the health effects of being in combat, it would seem to me that it would be very, very hard to isolate exposure to any one material from the hazmat background in an active theater; such places are not exactly OSHA compliant to begin with." It is not investigative reporting, it is yellow journalism, something the New York Daily News is no stranger to. Suggesting that it should be quoted as a reliable source in an encyclopedia is ludicrous. DV8 2XL 00:49, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: NY Daily News is not a reliable source of information of this type for an encyclopedia. Even if it was it doesn't provide any facts germane to the topic at hand since it is based on supposition; it does not supply a epidemiological link between this mans toxic load and the tragedy that befell his family. It only implies it and with very flimsy evidence. If you want to take this to an RfC go ahead. The fact that 66.82.9.52 uttered an outright lie by claiming that the Royal Society's report found that Depleted Uranium poses serious health risks for civilians as well as soldiers, is not an opinion ether; just a bald fact. DV8 2XL 01:29, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

text: Don't you get it? Before you can claim cause you have to have more than just correlation. Did you read what I said? You cannot isolate DU from the rest of the hazmat in a battle zone. And for heavens sake Badagnani, the check-out press in the U.S. outsells the NY Daily; are we going to start using material from the National Enquirer here now too? DV8 2XL 02:00, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

text: No, it's not worthy of note. Not unless you can show it causes something. You can you can only hope to imply it, my touchy friend, and that's not encyclopedic. DV8 2XL 02:24, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

text: It seems that there is an attempt to cite the New York Daily News as if it were a credible scientific source. It is not a credible source of scientific information. If this were an article about "the scandal surrounding DU", then it might be a good ref about the scandal. linas 05:32, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  What happened to the Gonzalez article? 

message: I moved the section to the Gulf War Syndrome article. There was almost no mention of it there and the section here was growing too large for this topic. I removed no material from the section at all before or after transfer. DV8 2XL 18:05, 10 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you, I agree this is better. Nrcprm2026 06:17, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gulf war material 

message: Badagnani, please don't be an ass. I haven't 'purged' anything. The article was split with the support of Nrcprm2026. we have both been working all day on this and if you looked at the history of both pages you would see that between us we have made several edits. Look at the section two blocks up here in talk, Nrcprm2026 and I don't see eye-to-eye on this subject yet we manage to work together with out raising the rhetoric to the hysterical level. DV8 2XL 00:01, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Split out links 

message: Which version best reflects Wikipedia policy, is more factual, and is NPOV Old Version or Revised Version03:55, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: This may be helpful:  Difference between old version (left) and new version (right), showing gutted content.  Badagnani 06:44, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

text: *Well that's not quite true is it? You have neglected to point out that most of it was moved to Gulf War syndrome; a move that done with the agreement of at least one other editor (see above) DV8 2XL 07:25, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I prefer the revised version just because it has a more global scope and I think it speaks more to the regular user than the original does. And I'm an outsider on this. :) I'd never read either version before. --Woohookitty(cat scratches) 06:32, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

text: There are many, many differences that don't amount to a hill of beans. Are you guys working on the same article? Can't you agree on anything? I don't have time or inclination to sort through the whole edit war history. I suggest you take one section at a time and establish an editorial concensus where you can. Where you can't, understand your differences enough to express then clearly and succintly, and then ask for outside help again. --Art Carlson 08:54, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

text: I prefer the revised version because it does seem more international, and the gulf war syndrome stuff does belong in it's own article seperate from this one, revised health effects section is sufficient for this article. Art Carlson also makes a good point, the differences in the versions do seem relativly minor.  Astaroth5 10:00, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The revised version is considerably more polished. I cannot easily say which version is more "factually correct" or "less POV". Also agree with Art Carlson above as to how to proceed. Finally, I wish to note that it would not be unreasonable to also have extended topic articles, such as DU in munitions, Health hazards of DU, UN legal status of DU and so on, which could review these topics in greater detail than this one article can.  These are all interesting topics, and are of considerable currency in the social and political climate we are in (and our grandchildren will still be in). linas 01:23, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

text: I found the revised version the better one.  Even as an ex-military reserves officer I didn't find the ammunition details very interesting.  I agree with the "more global" comments.  But I think some of the replaced material could be blended back in.  (I will read the Discussion later today and comment further.  I already see that how DU is portrayed has been an issue.) Simesa 14:31, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

text: *Other than the material that was moved whole to Gulf War syndrome the edits fell in to three classes: outright violations of Wikipedia policy (highly POV editorial comments appended to external links); that which was extraneous to the article (detailed descriptions of international agreements on the rule of warfare) ; and those passages that were outright error or dissemination. (Implying that certain reports had stated DU had a major health impact, when they had in fact stated the opposite.) Most of the edits were backed up here in Talk with evidence and where another editor was able to clarify the previous position, the mater was reverted or reworded. DV8 2XL 16:04, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

text: Sorry, you can't actually just delete material! Dan100 (Talk) 15:13, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: "Too much detail" seems like a very strange argument to me. That's not exactly the WP way. Based on the discussions above, it also seems clear to me that we need an article titled Health effects of depleted uranium that would be linked from this article. linas 01:09, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

text: Thorium is actually about three times as common (see Thorium and Uranium). I'd speculate that uranium would be used simply because there's an extensive refining infrastructure in place and plenty of depleted uranium produced as a byproduct of enrichment, but I don't actually know which was used in the Phenix and Superphenix reactors (I'd remembered thorium from an old article about the two, but could be misremembering). --Christopher Thomas 00:54, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

text: Update - I've found one paper, at . The research was done at Oak Ridge, which has a vested interest in promoting the use of nuclear-related technologies, but the paper seems legitimate. It was published in a "waste management" symposium, not a semiconductor technology symposium, however, so it hasn't been vetted by people in the field. They've also made a few bloopers (for a bandgap between Si and GaAs, you have all sorts of commonly available options, like InP, and everything in the GaAlInP spectrum, to start with). For solar cells, InP has a band gap of 1.34 eV, right in the range they want, and we already know how to handle and process it. The real problem is also not precisely where the bandgap is tuned, but the fact that you're using one bandgap; efficient solar cells use a multi-junction approach, absorbing high-energy photons in a high-bandgap material, which allows lower-energy photons through to be absorbed in a material with a lower bandgap, wasting less energy. I'm not in a position to talk about their ideas for thermoelectric devices. As far as integrated circuits go, the only thing they've mentioned is the dielectric constant. Nothing about electron and hole mobility, which is vital, nothing about process integration (we use silicon because we can grow an insulating native oxide easily), and handwaving about doping (mostly saying that they need to study it). What you actually need to know is not (just) how soluble the dopants are, but what dopant concentrations are required for a given type of electrical behavior, and how well the "intrinsic" material (without excess carriers of either type) acts as an insulator. In summary, I'm not impressed. As the paragraph from the DU article sounds very similar to some of the phrasing in the paper, I suspect this paper is the primary source of the claims made. If nobody else edits the paragraph, I'll change it when deadlines die down. --Christopher Thomas 21:38, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

text: My point is that I don't think that use as a semiconductor is seriously considered by industry or by experts in the field, for reasons stated above, and as a result of my (brief) literature search on it in appropriate technical databases. Any mention of this potential use should reflect the fact that it's a small minority opinion (and a rather silly one, in my opinion as a Comp Eng researcher). The article read like someone who wasn't quite an expert was doing their best to _find_ a use for UO2 as a semiconductor, as opposed to assessing it on its own merits. --Christopher Thomas 00:54, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. I find this particularly odd in light of the fact that the main debate seems to be about health effects. The importance of the use of DU for sheilding and semiconductors absolutely pales in comparison to the health concerns. linas 01:09, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Request for Comments 

message: There seems to be some confusion about Gulf War syndrome - as the GWS article states, birth defects are not part of GWS. Therefore that information belongs in this article, not the GWS one. Dan100 (Talk) 15:11, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: And then you deleted it; why? Nrcprm2026 20:12, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gulf War syndrome 

message: Hi Anonymous editor, please create and use a login account. This is a rather controversial topic, and it would help significantly if you operated from a non-anonymous account.  It would also help if you became much more familiar with Wikipedia policies and practices, since a considerable part of the controversy seems to revolve around the application of these policies. If this weren't such a controversial topic, it wouldn't be a big deal. But it is a controversial topic, so it is. linas 02:05, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Okay, sure.  Thank you both. Nrcprm2026 04:01, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Plea to anon editor 

message: I've been suggesting this kind of thing alot lately, but why not give health concerns of depleted uranium its own article.  Right now it takes up half of this article and from the look at the initial outline you'd think it took up just a few sentences.  I think the Health concerns section is more then big enough for its own article. This sort of thing helps to clean up controversial topics, just look at evolution.  I think this sort of thing helps to make articles more concise. Lcolson 03:00, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Seconded. --Christopher Thomas 20:13, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Make article on [[health concerns of depleted uranium]]

message: What the heck is going on here?  An editor (today) made huge edits to the article with comment that he is restoring mass deletions, but then there are still elements that were deleted in his edits.  Can you please be more careful with this data and not chop up the article in such a haphazard way?  Badagnani 19:09, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Dan100 recently made similarly destructive edits to Gulf War syndrome and he is apparently either unable or unwilling to support any of his edits with sources, and has offered not a single peer-reviewed medical or scientific publication in support of himself.  Reverting. Nrcprm2026 04:17, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

text: Dan, the problem was that you removed things from this page by moving them to GWS, and a few days later reverted those contributions away.  Why?  Nrcprm2026 01:42, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Mass deletions

message: Oddly, the explanation of how DU is made and how much there is in the world was moved to the bottom of the article, which is the wrong way round. In an article such as this, you explain what something is, how it's made, how it's used, and what the effects are. Dan100 (Talk) 10:15, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Re-arrangement

message: Is there a source for the Formula 1 race car story? —James S. 21:03, 29 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Web searching finds only mention in passing, e.g. , and only pre-2001 sources. No mention on official Formula 1 site. Since the arrest of Jose Padilla, DU has been more highly regulated in civillian applications.  Given the implications, and the RfC questions above, I'm removing that from the list of applications. —James S. 04:36, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: FYI. I am told by a track fireman that it is in use, but like the use of beryllium parts in F1 cars we are not going to know officially about it until the FIA bans it! That's because of the high secrecy around the auto racing business. The FIA current stand is: "If we decide it's an issue we will rule on it." Now this is not to say it should go back in the article yet, but the day it does it will probably be in the past tense. 70.51.173.221 01:27, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cars