U-238 has a half-life of about four and a half billion years. Thats almost a third the age of the universe. provided it remains as a lump, it should be pretty intert. Shoot it at a target, smash it up into fine dust, and spread it around, and it will do you and no good, even if it does not hit you. Bricks and the ground gives off radioactive Radon, which you can breathe in, delivering the ionising alpha decay straight into your lungs.
If the US goes off to the Middle East again, and chuck more of the stuff around, then innocent people will die. But they will not necessarily die of radiation. I don’t think people know what caused the cancers in Iraq, but the effects of radiation doses are pretty well understood.
I am not American. I am not party to any of these shenanigans, thank goodness. But I have worked with nuclear things, and that has left me with the urge to explain things like this.
Haven’t looked into it recently, but the most dubious thing about the ‘depleted uranium pollution’ story to me was the focus on the depleted uranium.
War these days is a pretty toxic endevour generally. That blob of uranium was fired out of a gun using a blob of complicated chemicals developed out of many millions of dollars in research with effectively no attention to the medium or long term health effects of the resulting vapors, and only the barest “it would be nice it this didn’t melt all our troops faces off provided they stand 50 feet away” attention to acute dangers.
So after the blob flies along it hits something at ludicrous speed vaporization a reasonable chunk of whatever that is, along with a blob of a super-duper-heavy metal, surely all of that then goes through interesting chemistry.
And then a bunch of plastic, or maybe a russian tank full of whatever propellants its weapons use, burns for a while.
In the meantime everyone in the area is under tremendous stress.
Insert whynotboth.gif here. Also, I’m fairly certain that at age 70, and having been surrounded by sycophants for most of his life - with the exception of his father, apparently - it’s way too late to massage any change or tempering of his personality traits into him.
Ugh. Even thinking of metaphorically massaging him makes me feel ill.
I don’t think it’s any more off the rails than any other press conference or speech he’s given. We may be missing the bigger picture here: although this may have been called as a press conference, it wasn’t. It’s literally the bully pulpit. He’s talking to, and attempting to expand, his base.
to push this argument out of the way: I am aware that correlation does not imply causation
the health issues in Iraq are a very good fit to areas sprinkled with DU dust:
while the effects of uranium on the human body are not well understood (see this twopapers) most data suggests that uranium is at least as damaging as lead and long-term low-dose radiation exposure is more dangerous than thought
So in his “press conference”, he mentioned that he wanted to blow up a russian spy ship off the coast of Connecticut (wtf the first), but his advisors told him that a full-out nuclear war with russia would be bad, not-good at all (wtf the second). Jesus, it’s only been a month and this Joker impersonator is freaking me the fuck out.
Did not escape notice. The whole uhh… canto was like a childlike reporting of his most recent security briefing: “I’m allowed to say this;” “Uranium can make bombs, but other things, too.” Shitbird in the room pipes in to remind him of the Hillary 20% uranium bullshit story. “A nuclear exchange would be really bad.”
It’s time for SNL to spoof Trump by replacing his incoherent, belligerent ramblings with well though out, intelligent, persuasive and considerate communication. It will be HILARIOUS!
Reading through the quotes it just struck me that 45 is like a Pandora station or some chat bot gone wrong.
For awhile he could juggle sound bites and recombine them to sound somewhat sentient. But now it’s like the metal playlist on Pandora that insists on playing disco or the MS AI chatbot that was taught to be racist. The machine just keeps making the same mistakes with no real self awareness. And any additional input doesn’t fix the bad input it just makes things more and more incoherent. In a movie this is when sparks would fly out of his ears and he would start to stutter like max headroom. If only life was so simple.
@renke has answered this, but I would also add that the half life is not interesting; what is interesting is the alpha energy. Uranium produces roughly 4MeV alphas at a rate of about 12000 Bq/g. The actual emission depends on its state - just as for granite which if cracked releases far more Rn than if intact. My argument is with the “if it remains as a lump” because, used as a munition, it typically won’t. It will end up as oxide powder that can be breathed in or ingested via the water route, and because of that long half life its activity won’t change throughout your life (if you are exposed to radon the activity halves roughly every 4 days).
As I say, you may not intend it, but you are coming across as if you were an apologist for the armaments industry, who are fond of playing down the dangers of DU. Their arguments seem to have been borrowed from the tobacco industry, and we know how that turned out. This isn’t mobile phones and non-ionising radiation; this is seriously ionising radiation from stuff that was spread around the Balkans and the Middle East.
