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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.
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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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
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.
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.
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
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?