Our nation is engaged in a years long occupation of Iraq following a pre-emptive invasion driven entirely by the profits to be made, and we are a nation of murderers. We have killed over 1,000,000 Iraqis and that shameful total will pale with the passage of time and the dead continue to pile up. The final death toll from our incursion may not ever be known, but it will assuredly be multiples of the figures we have today.
I have a question for all of the defense contractors, and the Pentagon brass, and the war profiteers, and the people who work for them, and the shareholders, and our fine legislators who enable this slaughter, and the media mouthpieces who screech the administration line--Does it bother you in the least that your money is soaked in human blood?
Food is becoming scarce in Iraq now, the doctors have fled in large numbers, simple sanitation is almost non-existent, and our continued presence exacerbates the problems. The factional fighting in and out of the government, coupled with rampant corruption, means that solutions to these problems will not be found or implemented until the divisions are healed. That will not happen as long as we are an occupying force.
But I digress. The last tally indicates that we started a chain of events that have made orphans of 5,000,000 Iraqi children so far. They will be lucky to live to adulthood, considering the conditions I have described. And what kind of people will they become if they do live?
And thanks to the nuclear industry, we will be spreading birth defects and cancer deaths for 4.5 billion years. Depleted Uranium (DU) is a byproduct of the process used to convert uranium into nuclear weapons and reactor fuel, and we have loads of this "low-level" radioactive waste just sitting around. Our weapons manufacturers, however, have discovered that this extremely dense material is useful in armor-piercing shells. The military loves the stuff, and although they treat it like the very essence of death in their internal policies, publicly defend it as harmless, and have gifted Iraq with over 2,000 tons of it since the first Gulf War.
Cancer deaths and serious birth defects will increase dramatically as the effects of the DU scattered throughout the now-radioactive Iraq soil work their inexorable magic.
Given the seriousness and diversity of the problems we have created, I cannot fathom how the Iraqi's can survive as a peoples, much less as a viable culture.
Murder, Inc. pays dividends into perpetuity. Hold onto your stock. Go shopping.
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The following is deliberate misinformation that began with Saddam Hussein's government trying to make it look like they were better than the US/UK. Not only is there no factual evidence to support this statement, but it also is completely refuted by two international field/laboratory studies.
And thanks to the nuclear industry, we will be spreading birth defects and cancer deaths for 4.5 billion years. Depleted Uranium (DU) is a byproduct of the process used to convert uranium into nuclear weapons and reactor fuel, and we have loads of this "low-level" radioactive waste just sitting around. Our weapons manufacturers, however, have discovered that this extremely dense material is useful in armor-piercing shells. The military loves the stuff, and although they treat it like the very essence of death in their internal policies, publicly defend it as harmless, and have gifted Iraq with over 2,000 tons of it since the first Gulf War.
Cancer deaths and serious birth defects will increase dramatically as the effects of the DU scattered throughout the now-radioactive Iraq soil work their inexorable magic.
The military does not treat DU as if it were the very essence of death. Iraqi soil is no more radioactive now than it was before. All soil and rocks contain Uranium. It is a very plentiful mineral. Natural soil also contains all of the Uranium isotopes and their decay products. DU is nearly pure Uranium 238 and contains no decay products.
For more information about what DU actually did in Boznia-Herzegovina and Kuwait as reported by the UN Environmental Programme and the International Atomic Energy Agency, read the following:
Depleted Uranium in Bosnia and Herzegovina - Postconflict
Assessment - 300 pg detailed UN Environmental Programme Report
http://postconflict.unep.ch/publications/BiH_DU_report.pdf
Radiological Conditions in Areas of Kuwait With Residues of Depleted
Uranium - Includes Appendix III - Experiments to Examine Resuspension
http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub1164_web.pdf
To learn more about Uranium in the atmosphere from Coal Fired Power Plants, read this
Uranium Emitted from Coal Fired Power Plants - Even U-235 is emitted from coal fired plants
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html
If you would like to learn even more, come to the Yahoo Group DUStory. The messages are public. The files and links require membership, but that is just the way that Yahoo does things. The files have a lot of information about some of the scientific con artists in the anti-DU crusade that the blogger has apparently bought into. He needs to learn that people who lie about who they are and their qualifications are not likely to tell the truth about anything else either.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/DUStory/
rhotel1--If you are seriously claiming that DU is not radioactive and thus poses no health threat, then I'm sure you would be willing to use it as a filler in your children's sandbox, or perhaps as home insulation, or as an abrasive in your toothpaste. Yes, people lie, and you are a victim, not I.
John,
Next time be man enough to identify yourself and provide a reply e-mail address. I do not appreciate being called a liar; I do appreciate scientific inquiry, but unlike Leuren Moret do not consider having a baccalaureate degree in Geological Sciences to make me a "scientist". Moret, on the other hand, wants to impress audiences that she is a "scientist" when she was no more than a computer lab technician for less than a year at a nuclear research lab. I guess she learned all about DU and radiation by osmosis! You, John, on the other hand seem to just lash out at anyone who disagrees with you. DU has not caused birth defects or cancer. It is not even present in something like 99.9 per cent of Iraq. It is only present within a few meters of an armored target that was destroyed by a kinetic energy penetrator. Read the Kuwait study by the International Atomic Energy Agency. They experimented with DU containing sands and blew them high into the air to see how far the winds would carry them and found that the DU was so dense that it immediately settled out of the dust and remained in the immediate area.
Roger
rwhelbig at gee mail dot com
Rhotel1--I did not call you a liar. A careful look at my reply indicates agreement that people lie, and I maintain that you, sir, are a victim of lies. You, like me, are free to believe what you wish from whatever facts you have accessed, but you seem to have a special problem with criticism of the use of nuclear waste in warfare.I neither know why nor want to--that's your business. The fact that you question my manhood for not giving you my e-mail address is telling. I may be wrong, but I'm not nuts. Do you attack everyone who tweaks a "hot button"? Such behavior usually indicates someone incapable of mutually beneficial discussion, and so further correspondence between us will be useless. Thanks.
John,
I have a special problem with deliberate lies about the character of depleted uranium and what it actually has done to the environment, which is very little!
You have mischaracterized it and no, you are not willing to discuss the subject one on one, you need the bullying power of a faceless blog to hide behind.
The thing that really gets me about mindless posts like yours is that DU has most likely not been used since 2003. You also conveniently ignore hundreds of pages of reports actual field and laboratory work to determine if there are any long term health or environmental effects and these reports totally refute what you write. I presume that you did not bother to open either link.
I got into this mess because I do know enough about nuclear fallout to know that DU and fallout have nothing in common. Then I got slandered by the con artist Douglas Lind Rokke (aka Doctor Doug Rokke, aka Major Doug Rokke) who neglects to tell his adoring crowds that the doctorate has nothing to do with DU, it is in Vocational Education and the thesis was "Perceived physics concepts needed to teach secondary technology education as general education" and that he was actually a First Lieutenant in the Army Reserve when he served in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. That made me really dig into DU and find out who the con artists were and who actually had credible information. You, John, Sr. have not got credible information and it is clear that you only listen to the anti-DU crusaders and no one else on the subject. Your blog readers deserve better than that. You also should come out from behind the curtain and be willing to discuss this without it being a public forum. I want to send you information about Rokke, etc. and I want you to tell me exactly where you get your information so that it can be better analyzed and you perhaps convinced that you can say that you were wrong.
Roger
rwhelbig at gee mail dot com
You throw around the term "nuclear waste" - there is no such actual term but what follows is a discussion of "high level radioactive waste" -- DU is not this type of material, but the anti-DU crusade that you seem to be an adherent of tries make DU into something like this --
How hazardous is high-level waste?
Spent nuclear fuel is highly radioactive and potentially very harmful. Standing near unshielded spent fuel could be fatal due to the high radiation levels. Ten years after removal of spent fuel from a reactor, the radiation dose 1 meter away from a typical spent fuel assembly exceeds 20,000 rems per hour. A dose of 5,000 rems would be expected to cause immediate incapacitation and death within one week.
Some of the radioactive elements in spent fuel have short half-lives (for example, iodine-131 has an 8-day half-life) and therefore their radioactivity decreases rapidly. However, many of the radioactive elements in spent fuel have long half-lives. For example, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, and plutonium-240 has a half-life of 6,800 years. Because it contains these long half-lived radioactive elements, spent fuel must be isolated and controlled for thousands of years.
A second hazard of spent fuel, in addition to high radiation levels, is the extremely remote possibility of an accidental “criticality,” or self-sustained fissioning and splitting of the atoms of uranium and plutonium.
NRC regulations therefore require stringent design, testing and monitoring in the handling and storage of spent fuel to ensure that the risk of this type of accident is extremely unlikely. For example, special control materials (usually boron) are placed in spent fuel containers to prevent a criticality from occurring. Nuclear engineers and physicists carefully analyze and monitor the conditions of handling and storage of spent fuel to guard further against an accident.
A barrier or radiation protection shield must always be placed between spent nuclear fuel and human beings.
Water, concrete, lead, steel, depleted uranium or other suitable materials calculated to be sufficiently protective by trained engineers and health physicists, and verified by radiation measurements, are typically used as radiation shielding for spent nuclear fuel.
Depleted Uranium is used as shielding material for high level radioactive waste. That means that it protects people from the dangerous effects of exposure to high level radioactive waste.
Source http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/nuregs/brochures/br0216/
Well, John, I guess that you are not man enough to directly debate this one on one - I had an old draft reply and that brought me back here.
Roger
DUStory-owner@yahoogroups.com
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