World News
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF OCTOBER 19 2025
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
view the rest of the comments
U-238 (the most common isotope in natural uranium, present to an even higher degree in depeleted uranium which has had the shorter-lived U-235 removed) has a half life in the billions of years and with such a long half-life life even with a large mass of the material you won’t be getting many radiological decays occurring. Which is not to say it’s good for you to ingest or contact, it’s definitely not, but that’s more due to the chemical properties it has as a heavy metal (think like how lead is bad for you) than its radiological ones.
Fission products formed in a nuclear reactor on the other hand have half lives all over the place from tiny fractions of a second to days, years, millions of years and so on. So you can get a high dose from short-lived isotopes going through many decays if you happen to be around them while they’re freshly generated, and intermediate life isotopes can persist in the environment for sustained periods while still dosing up the area. So a flying nuclear reactor venting its exhaust over you is quite a lot worse radiologically speaking than some depleted uranium being in your environment, though that said the chemical properties of having uranium in your drinking water or the physical properties of a high density round shot at you are plenty bad regardless of the radiological harm being often overstated.
Your explanation makes sense to me (a very non-physicist), but I remember more than one journalism piece from a decade or so ago about uncharacteristically high rates of cancer in areas in Afghanistan or Iraq that were basically carpeted with US depleted-uranium bullets. Do you think that's a fluke? Is it possible there is poor quality control in manufacturing the bullets, resulting in some stuff with shorter half-life in there? Could the cancer rates be due to the heavy-metal properties?
(Of course it's a correlation/causation thing, so there could be other causes, too, but I'm interested in what you think of this)
Probably from the chemical properties; very unlikely from radiation.
Reading through this. There are plenty of carcinogenic chemicals such as arsenic, beryllium, cadmium, chromium, cobalt...
Did I say worse or better? Reread what I said and answer within context.
The premise once again for the pedantic minded - Russia can get fucked, but don't put the US on a pedestal
Incorrect, if anything, understated - but because it's a bunch of brown people and nobody cares enough to read the research
Now apply those findings to a small enclave like Gaza.
I feel like you didn’t actually read the papers you linked.
They show elevated health issues. The person who responded to me is differentiating between radiation and toxicity. But the primary detriment and premise is still health issues to civilians caused by munitions.
I’m speaking to radiation since that’s my interest. The specific activity of uranium is generally around 14.8 Bq/mg vs. 25.4 Bq/mg for natural uranium, where one Bq is one nuclear transformation per second. That sounds like a lot but as far as radioactive materials goes is incredibly low. The Americium-241 used in smoke detectors for instance has 127 million Bq/mg.
As I said before there certainly are health impacts but they are largely arising from the chemical toxicity, not the radiological activity. It is ONLY the radiological aspect where I said the risk was overstated, I recognize that the chemical one is very real. For example, the WHO 2001 report on depleted uranium that your second source cites gave a limit on depleted uranium of 0.28 mg/L in drinking water for its radiological toxicity… and a 140x smaller (!) provisional guideline of 0.002 mg/L for the chemical toxicity.
Your third source states this in its summary:
I'm glad you have interests...but we don't share them.
Do you think this is going well for you? Because it's not.
I'm sorry, was this supposed to be an argument? Can you point out the premise?