Slashdot Mirror
Surprise! More Than Twice As Much Mercury In Environment As Thought
sciencehabit writes The most comprehensive estimate of mercury released into the environment is putting a new spotlight on the potent neurotoxin. By accounting for mercury in consumer products, such as thermostats, and released by industrial processes, the calculations more than double previous tallies of the amount of mercury that has entered the environment since 1850. The analysis also reveals a previously unknown spike in mercury emissions during the 1970s, caused largely by the use of mercury in latex paint.
Broken fluorescent light bulbs may be e cause here.
Where did this mercury come from originally? Aren't we really just sending it home?
that Republicans are shoving down our throats. They hate the environment so they're pushing bulbs that have hazardous amount of mercury. The Democrats have been pushing for LED lights which make much more sense. The Republicans are still stuck their glowing tubes 1950s where white men ruled the world. The Democrats want to give us something that is solid state.
This is mercury that was produced and not necessarily in the open environment. Not sure what the point of this is.
You'll be amazed by how much toxic material ends up in a place you wouldn't expect!
Top 11 heavy metals released by industry!
Guess which neurotoxin scientists have found in the environment?
So you're saying mercury that's contained is "released to the environment" ... brilliant.
And how much of the mercury "released to the environment" is naturally released? Give you a hint, it's significant in parts of california, but deliberately ignored because that doesn't get funding like the larger quantity of mercury that entered the ecosystem from gold mining. Yes, believe it or not, this stuff does come from nature, just like every other heavy metal.
Where is "Environment"? I've never heard of a place by that name. Or was the headline about ambient mercury in "the environment"?
The good news is that finding out that there is twice as much of it around means that it is half as harmful as we were thinking it was, assuming the retarded LNT model preferred by statists everywhere.
See that "Preview" button?
A bit of calculation will show that CFLs are likely to save more mercury by decreasing the amount of coal burned, even if you smashed each one on the ground at the end of life. A huge fraction of anthropogenic environmental mercury comes from burning coal. Overall, they are almost certainly a net reduction in anthropogenic mercury. I don't think they're great, but they are a reasonable stop-gap solution until LEDs take over.
I would be more surprised if we found significant amounts of Neptune, Uranus or Pluto...
Mercury's in your flu shot and your Gardasil shot you give young boys without cervixes. What 'ya gonna do about that?
or chemtrails (lol)
Coal is messy stuff, with all sorts of wierd elements in it. hundreds of millions of tons of coal is burned each year. Most of those elements are not toxic in very low doses in the environment, so we don't care about them. Directly burning coal can be quite messy, and make air difficult to breathe, like secondhand smoke. Thanks to modern pulverized coal boilers, and scubbers, a lot of the worst of coal has been tamed. America made of bunch of changes in the 70s. China has been moving to modern coal power plants with scrubbers.
Were the latex paint people jealous of the oil based lead paint people and all the attention they were getting? Lead and mercury have been known to be hazardous for decades prior to the 70s. Why in a million years would they think that it was a good idea. Minimally with the late 60s and 70s being a huge eco movement time any company would think twice before potentially attracting the attention of a combination of the health authorities, the eco crowd, and shows like 60 minutes.
I wonder if the huge crime spikes of the 60's and 70's had this mercury as another contributing factor?
I am not sure how much mercury is used in gold mining. However, the fact is that some poor people use mercury in order to "capture" gold, and they then evaporate the mercury.
... ca. 1953, my daddy worked in a oil refinery and he'd bring home small sample bottles full of mercury.
We puzzled at it, amazed at how heavy the bottle was and stuff. We poured some in our hands and rolled it around.
Then we coated dimes and pennies with it to make them look like silver and played with those.
Fast-forward 25 years and I'm an instrument man in an oil refinery lab and I'm calibrating a pneumatic gauge with a manometer that uses lots of mercury and I get a case of the dumbass and blow mercury all the way to the ceiling, all over counter tops and on the flour.
They evacuated the entire lab and sent in the hazmat team and stuff.
It's funny how things change with education and I never experienced any fallout from the big white letter E on my keyboard with the bluetooth that clasps to the ballpoint pen of my mother's daisy.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
As soon as I heard that mercury was dangerous, I threw all my thermometers and thermostats in the garbage.
Have gnu, will travel.
Mercury was used as a bacteriacide and mildewcide in many latex paints through the late 80's. Skane M-8 was a common one. It was much cheaper than alternative products, and more effective. No one wanted their latex paint to smell like rotten eggs when they opened a can of latex paint. It also slowed down mildew buildup on painted basement walls and exterior surfaces. Mercury was not considered as dangerous as it is now, as all paint companies followed legal EPA guidelines when formulating their paints.
Surprise! More Than Twice As Much Mercury In Environment As Thought
Here are a couple more Slashdot headlines in this new style:
Fuck's sake! Facebook's Auto-Play Videos Chew Up Expensive Data Plans
About Bloody Time! 3 Decades Later, Finnair Pilots Report Dramatic Close Encounter With a Missile
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Now there is a lot more mercury available to be put, in elemental form, into vaccines.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Mersury is a naturally-occurring substance. That's right, boys and girls, contrary to what some hyperventilating soccer-mom or EPA bureaucrat may have told you: mercury, lead, arsenic, asbestos, and uranium ALL are natural substances that have always been in nature, and always will be. This is what makes most of the EPA a scam. When the EPA was created in the 1970s there really were big pollution problems but the EPA was permitted to regulate NOT on levels of substances known to cause harm but rather on levels that could be detected... and now after many decades we can detect far smaller quantities of everything. It's now common for towns in America to be ordered to "clean-up" their "polluted" drinking water to higher standards of purity than exist in nature. All this phony outrage over tiny harmless quantities of various substances that have always been there is a great tool that the left uses to justify ever-increasing regulation of individuals and businesses and an unending growth in government.
Good news! Slashdot Beta now live for all users!
go drink a full glass and video tape it and i'm not paying for your casket or for the place we put you while you go stark raving looney
#2, Silver Mining. It turns out mountains don't come labelled as "gold" and "silver-only". As world affluence increases, demand for gold and silver increases. Today, affluent trapped from filters at gold mines produces more mercury than mercury mines. But the only mines "trapping" any mercury are in regulated western economies... most gold mining is in unregulated forests.
Lamps, by the way, have jackshit mercury, less than a fraction of what they had when lamp recycling got started. Billions of dollars are being spent "recycling" lamps which have barely any mercury in them.
At least the recycled mercury saves the environment, right? Oh. Nope. Read the great journalist John Fialka on WSJ 2006. Most of the mercury recovered from the recycling went to alluvial gold mining in Amazon and Congo river basins. http://online.wsj.com/news/art...
I'm an environmentalist, but environmentalists 3.0 need to recognize past mistakes, and correct them, the same as engineers and software coders are expected to do.
Gently reply
Whenever I hear the word "neurotoxin" anymore, I think of GLaDOS.
Most mercury in the environment comes from the ocean or other natural sources, not human emissions-coal plants included,
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/01/mercury-the-trickster-god/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/04/mercury-in-california-fog-linked-to-ocean-upwelling/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/04/was-good-science-really-applied-in-the-recent-mercury-report-issued-by-the-florida-department-of-environmental-protection/
Right, Mercury is horribly toxic, and releasing it in the environment is bad. But where do we get the mercury first?
I guess it comes from the environment itself, which suggests some kind of mercury cycle. It was there before as a reasonably harmful compound, perhaps we can ensure it returns to this state?
Is this the case in the US? I know mercury can be used to seperate gold from the other rocks (rocks float but gold sinks I think), but that is only done in third world countries that don't know about better ways to do it. I didn't think it was from pulling the gold from the ground, I thought it was just one possible process for seperating the gold.
I don't know a lot about gold mining, but I think that is not true in the US at least.
After all the mercury that was spilled in gold mining operations....
Rick B.
Not as big a deal as having it in the form of vapour - it's not even a huge deal in landfill unless there's enough water moving through to get it out of the landfill, or biological activity turning the metal into some pretty nasty stuff that can get into the food chain more easily. There's nothing immediately unsafe about an open container of mercury or blobs of it all over the floor from a broken thermometer - the problems arise when it can be breathed in or metabolised into something that's part of the food chain. Mark Twain had his hands deep in the stuff while gold mining with no signs of ill effects, but hatters went mad. That's the difference between it staying completely outside the body as a liquid that cannot penetrate and breathing the stuff in as part of a process involving heat.
Not as such. Metallic mercury is rare. It's a bit of work to get mercury out of various ores, many of which would probably be safe to crumble up and eat since stomach acid is not going to reduce it.
Its all the compact flourescent light bulbs.. have you ever read the disposal instructions for one of those!?!?
Is this the case in the US? I know mercury can be used to seperate gold from the other rocks (rocks float but gold sinks I think), but that is only done in third world countries that don't know about better ways to do it. I didn't think it was from pulling the gold from the ground, I thought it was just one possible process for seperating the gold.
I don't know a lot about gold mining, but I think that is not true in the US at least.
Its used in small scale placer mining. You use a pan (or sluice) to separate the heavier material, gold, iron and such, from the lighter rocks, then you add mercury to the black stuff at the bottom of the pan. The mercury and gold combine into an almagram (sp?), much like the paste the dentist mixes up to put in your mouth. Then you heat and evaporate the mercury leaving the gold and perhaps some silver. Since mercury is expensive, usually you evaporate it in a kind of still so you can recapture it. Used to be quite common, not sure now but placer mining is still popular with people making a living from it..
Which also brings up the other use of mercury, making fillings and putting it into peoples teeth where it hopefully stays. Of course if you get cremated the mercury gets released into the environment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
No big surprise, gotten use to scientists being wrong. When it comes to the environment, they are just guessing and hoping they are right
My friend is working in the engineering trailer on a project to install additional scrubbers on the nearby coal power plant. It has to be completed within the year, it's definitely happening and is a very real project. This system is much better than the already good system presently being used, but refer you to actually read it:
http://www.wisconsinpublicservice.com/environment/react.aspx
Also take a look at the before and after photo. This is a HUGE project, not some cheap paper filter.
#2, Silver Mining. It turns out mountains don't come labelled as "gold" and "silver-only". As world affluence increases, demand for gold and silver increases.
Don't worry. It turns out that the cost of mercury is rising much faster than the cost of gold. Another decade or so of this, and it will be more economical for the gold miners just to sell their mercury stocks straight back to us.
Made up bullshit designed to suggest higher costs for something that ideologues don't like.
Mad as a hatter
Fail for not mentioning naturally occurring mercury. Salmon and lake trout fisherman have known the science about naturally occurring mercury for a long time.
I don't know a lot about gold mining, but I think that is not true in the US at least.
We've been mining the USA for a lot longer than we've had an EPA. I live in Lake County, CA and I have an RO filter because there's a hell of a lot of stuff around here in the water which is harmful for three big reasons. The first reason is that the area is volcanic, the second is that it's agricultural, and the third is not just silver mining but also outright cinnabar mining. Luckily, I live on the side of the lake which is relatively clean. Clear Lake has a lot of thermal turnover, though...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I live in California where Hg occurs in nature and was used in extraction of gold from ores and has a latency in sediments shed from mining in the Mother Lode. USGS has been looking for the signature of Hg in sediments and it may be delayed by the mobilization process. More was applied to ores than has yet appeared in sediments. My source for the path of Hg in sediments comes from a video I saw authored by USGS in about 2000. I am sure that there are links to papers on the subject. Part of the problem of Hg in the environment in California is that its ores are found in the Coast Range and so it is a natural constituant of the environment. Most of the time it is pretty insoluable.
I mention this because that is what the chart in the link from the article seems to indicate. The spike in total Hg at 1970 and its elevated concentration is due in part to landfills, but the more recent uptick seems to be due to its mobilization in the atmosphere. This would coincide with the concern from USGS about its path in sediments. The metal is pretty insoluable, but conversion to its salts and organic versions are more volitile and take time, decades, to appear in the environment.
Hmm, good enough reasons to consider appropriate precautions. And considering that we don't know what the safe lower exposure limit for mercury is (assuming that it's significantly different to the homeopathic concentration), that's going to need some careful thought.
Sorry, what's an "RO filter"? Run-Off? (I wouldn't have thought that snow-melt and rainfall from a clean roof would have picked up much ; unless you're horribly dusty, when you've got other issues to attend to.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Sorry, what's an "RO filter"?
Reverse osmosis, which uses water pressure both to push water through a plastic membrane (the osmosis part) but also to back-flush the filter. An "efficient" RO filter wastes about 10 parts of water for each 1 part filtered, but we have a well and a septic system so no harm done really.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ah, got you. Still needs appreciable power, but being a continuous load, that's not a major issue. The water makers on board are RO too, feeding and washing a couple of hundred (very) sweaty bodies. But for big fresh water requirements (hundreds of cu. m. ) we bring in non-potable water on one of the flotilla boats.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"