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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.
Compared the coal-fired electric plant, that's nothing.
The whole issue makes me mad as a hatter.
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.
Blame $EASY_TARGET for hundreds of years of humans everywhere not giving a fuck.
Not much:
http://earthtechling.com/2011/...
5 thousandths of a gram is a lot of mercury for 1 cf bulb. 720,000 tons of mercury amounts to about 100grams per human, so cf bulbs are likely responsible for less than 100th of 1% of the total mercury pollution.
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Except CFLs are regulated to have less than 2.5mg of mercury in and some will no doubt have a lot less.
CFLs prevent more mercury from being released into the environment via coal than they release: ...
How much Mercury is in Compact Fluorescent ( CFL ) bulbs , watch
Of course LEDs are better, do you have an argument against those?
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Whilst I'm not condoning China's pollution record, most of their industrialisation capacity-wise has been this last decade. The article shows that mercury has been entering the environment for over a century with the amounts being released in the year 1900 being similar to that released in the year 2000.
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Correct, mercury is mined from fish. (sarcasm)
Mercury is 'mined'. It was locked up nicely in rocks that were below ground. Once released it is then in the air, water soil etc - not where you want it.
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one can produce elmental mercury from ore with alchemy. At least that's what I'd assume you'd call it.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Have a look at the history of when American coal plants started installing scrubbers and figure out when they reached 10%, 20%, 30% of plants etc, old & new, that were properly outfitted.
You'll find there's more than enough blame to go around.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
I blame all that mercurochrome my mom put on my cuts when I was little.
Aren't we really just sending it home?
Actually we sent it to a farm where it can run free and be happy...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Also, the 48" straight florescent bulbs that everyone use to have in their garage and above their workbench contained 85 mg of mercury (per bulb) up through 1990; are now limited (!) to 25 mg. Haven't heard any complaints about those from the rolling coal set.
sPh
From the (maximum of) 5 milligrams of mercury? What did you do? Break the lamp very carefully and then snort the contents?
Blame $EASY_TARGET for hundreds of years of humans everywhere not giving a fuck.
The neurological effects of mercury were not understood hundreds of years ago, nor did people understand that burning coal emitted it. So their behavior was out of ignorance. We know far more today, so China's emissions are not as excusable. You can buy thermometers with a bulb of mercury at any Chinese drugstore. The long term economic costs of neurological damage will far outweigh the few fen they are saving today.
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?
Heavy metal poisoning does not work that way. You might want to pop to your doctors and get a CT scan, because that sounds more like a brain tumour than any short term effects from 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.
The long term negative economic and health effects of coal have been known about in the US for at least a few decades, and besides some cosmetic changes and this public relations "scrubbers!" effort, we haven't done a thing about it. In fact , our government has done everything it can do hide the fact that people are being poisoned across generations with mercury, because so many energy execs and owners, including certain coal-country billionaire siblings are big contributors, for and against politicians.
http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/abuses_of_science/mercury-emissions.html
You are welcome on my lawn.
As soon as I heard that mercury was dangerous, I threw all my thermometers and thermostats in the garbage.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
besides some cosmetic changes and this public relations "scrubbers!" effort, we haven't done a thing about it.
Nonsense. Scrubbers are not perfect, but they catch a lot of mercury and other pollutants. Furthermore, America has reduced the percentage of electricity generated by coal, and this percentage will continue to drop, since no new coal plants are under construction. With plenty of cheap shale gas, it is unlikely any more coal power plants will ever be built.
I'm not a geologist, an educated guess would be that the answer is part cosmology - the mercury was present in the materials that formed the Earth in the first place and part geology, the mercury got to where it was after billions of years of earth changes through tectonic plates shifting, volcanoes, erosion, compression etc.
Wikipedia says
"It is found either as a native metal (rare) or in cinnabar, corderoite, livingstonite and other minerals, with cinnabar (HgS) being the most common ore.[23] Mercury ores usually occur in very young orogenic belts where rocks of high density are forced to the crust of the Earth, often in hot springs or other volcanic regions.[24]"
3 Occurrence
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It's always cheap until the externalities get figured in. We thought coal was cheap until we started paying the price as a society for increased crime, increased poverty, increased health costs from mercury everywhere (also, the mercury in gasoline). Mining country won't be normal for several more generations to come thanks to King Coal. You know who never pays the cost for these "cheap" sources of energy? The people who profit the most from them.
Now, the "clean, safe, and too cheap to meter" fuel du jour is "shale" and "fracking". Until we start talking about the real cost of things, any discussion of the way we get energy will be seriously defective and we'll keep screwing up.
You are welcome on my lawn.
#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
I like to know a little bit about where citations are coming from, you know?
From the Wikipedia entry on the website where all of your citations come from:
I'm not sure the blog site of a climate change denying weatherman and Fox News favorite is a solid source of information, but who knows? Anything's possible when there's money at stake.
You are welcome on my lawn.
From your description it sounds like it wasn't the mercury so much as receiving a full dose of Obecalp.
Did you seek medical attention?
Scrubbers were not cosmetic. Ask someone who was paying attention in the US before 1970 to find out why, or ask someone in China today.
Things are not perfect but writing off a major improvement in air pollution as cosmetic is somewhat misleading and unrealistic to the point which can lead to doubts about understanding and honesty.
And you were present to see this but didn't call an ambulance?
There are some forms of heavy metal exposure that produce such symptoms and have near instantanious onsets. One account of such concerns a french soldier who poured and drank about 250 ml of wine passed through a 155 mm artillery piece barrel as part of a unit induction ceremony, and picked up a substantial Tungsten exposure. He had immediate onset of symptoms including seizures and rapid unconsiousness. All the symptoms mentioned by the parent poster are recognized for acute inhalation exposure to Mercury, but I'm running into paywalls trying to find out just how rapid their onset can be. Still the AC who generalized that heavy metal poisoning does not work that way is simply wrong, and is probably not picking up on the differences between gradual and rapid exposure, or inhalation vs ingestion, or both.
And about your sig: You'll take your insight where you find it, like everybody else. and you'll like it!
Who is John Cabal?
The Heartland Institute published Watts' preliminary report on weather station data, titled Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?.[12] Watts has been featured as a speaker at Heartland Institute's International Conference on Climate Change, for which he acknowledges receiving payment.[55]
Documents obtained from the Heartland Institute and made public in February 2012 reveal that the Institute had agreed to help Watts raise $88,000 to set up a website,(...)
So, paid for by a fine organization that, apart from the climate change thing, is also known for denying the health effects of second-hand tobacco smoke, promoting franking, and openly advocating free-market environmentalism? A likely story!
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr... I have a couple of these for various reasons (where did i put it this time.....)
And of course the non-compact ones that have been in your kitchen for decades, you took those to the recycler too when they burned out, right?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.