We Must Choose Between Our Babies And Affordable Energy: The New War On Coal

[bripat9643]

. Have you ever heard of anyone getting sick from environment mercury?

.

Although it is less toxic than methylmercury, elemental mercury may be found in higher concentrations in environments such as gold mine sites, where it has been used to extract gold. If elemental mercury is ingested, it is absorbed relatively slowly and may pass through the digestive system without causing damage. Ingestion of other common forms of mercury, such as the salt HgCl2, which damages the gastrointestinal tract and causes kidney failure, is unlikely from environmental sources.

Mercury in the Environment

Your report doesn't mention a single person diagnosed with environmental Mercury poisoning.

FAIL!

 

[flacaltenn]

I'm sure there are oodles of examples of clinical mercury poisoning. Especially from consumption of tainted fish and seafood. You are at the top of food chain. You can't afford to be the ultimate collector of heavy metals..

 

[Moonglow]

. Have you ever heard of anyone getting sick from environment mercury?

.

Although it is less toxic than methylmercury, elemental mercury may be found in higher concentrations in environments such as gold mine sites, where it has been used to extract gold. If elemental mercury is ingested, it is absorbed relatively slowly and may pass through the digestive system without causing damage. Ingestion of other common forms of mercury, such as the salt HgCl2, which damages the gastrointestinal tract and causes kidney failure, is unlikely from environmental sources.

Mercury in the Environment

Your report doesn't mention a single person diagnosed with environmental Mercury poisoning.

FAIL!

Cases of Mercury poisoning:
1. Jeremy Piven (actor) was diagnosed with hydrargyria caused by mercury poisoning, from eating sushi twice a day for almost twenty years. (December 2008)

2. Karen Wetterhahn, a chemistry professor at the Dartmouth College accidently spilled a little dimethylmercury on her latex glove on 14 august 1996. She developed symptoms of mercury poisoning after five months. She tried chelation therapy, however, died of brain malfunction.

3. An episode of Mercury poisoning took place in rural region of Iraq in 1971-1972. The grains treated with a fungicide (methylmercury based) were to be planted, but were used to make bread. It resulted in as many as 6530 cases of reported mercury poisoning and 459 deaths.

Chronic Mercury Poisoning: Causes & Symptoms | dashinghealth.com

 

[Moonglow]

. Have you ever heard of anyone getting sick from environment mercury?

.

Although it is less toxic than methylmercury, elemental mercury may be found in higher concentrations in environments such as gold mine sites, where it has been used to extract gold. If elemental mercury is ingested, it is absorbed relatively slowly and may pass through the digestive system without causing damage. Ingestion of other common forms of mercury, such as the salt HgCl2, which damages the gastrointestinal tract and causes kidney failure, is unlikely from environmental sources.

Mercury in the Environment

Your report doesn't mention a single person diagnosed with environmental Mercury poisoning.

FAIL!

are u always a little footy stompin biotch?

 

[mudwhistle]

Well, what we have here is the argument over the cost of energy financially and the cost of energy health-wise.
Both points have validity to them.
It is true that upgrading our energy process resources and emission will cost the consumer more money in the end. The America consumer is already strapped with flat wages and fewer jobs that are available. This doesn't appear to be a short-term problem either. Can working Americans afford to have their energy costs to skyrocketing? Can our economy?
Then there's the health issues side of the argument. Fossil fuel emission is not only laden with carbon dioxide but also sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, all which cause Acid Rain and smog, which in turn kills trees/plants and aquatic life and causes huge respiratory issues, particularly with asthmatics. Acid Rain can also destroy none-living things as it can eat away paint and building materials. So with the harmful gases issues, we are looking at respiratory related deaths and plus escalated treatment for respiratory related issues will drive up health care cost for everyone. In the last ten years, health care medical costs, which drive up the costs of cost of health care has risen by over 100%, nominal income only went up almost 40% during that same time. Acid Rain can also destroy none-living things as it can eat away paint and building materials, in other words it depletes our infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimated in early 2009 that the US needed to spend 2.2 trillion dollars of repair and improve it's infrastructure. So, not addressing toxic gases from fossil fuels also bears a huge financial cost.
It's a Catch-22 situation.
So the issue should be, how can the US and the industrial world hold down the cost of energy but at the same time resolve the issue of the seriously harmful gases of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides that are the result of the needed energy. It's all about money and the health of our people and environment?

If you've been paying attention one can easily come to the conclusion that Obama isn't as much into solutions as he is into assuring fairness. He has a problem with this country and his goal is to punish those he doesn't like and help (or at least act like it) those he likes. Fairness is his one overriding motivation. Getting even with sections of America is the way it has manifested itself. Those he thinks have been living off of the sweat and hardship of others. http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/09/obama_wants_fairness_more_than_jobs.html

Obama doesn't care about the hardships his policies are causing us. He wants what he wants and he doesn't care what the effect is on the rest of us. His only response is to go on a political campaign to drum up support. He wants to make us all feel like we aren't getting screwed. He figures if he spends enough money he can convince us that all of this is good for us. Some of us have already been convinced as evidenced by the responses. I doubt all of us will ever be convinced.....simply because it isn't true.

 

[mudwhistle]

I remember Clinton signing water purity laws right before he left office that would have raised bottled-water prices to an estimated $100/gal.

Bush had to override the new regs and was accused of wanting to kill babies.

These regulations are intended purely to curb consumption.

Obama is in the habit of governing with politics only in mind rather than worrying about the economic impact.

Those were regulations on tap water, not bottled water. They would have cost communities across the country $ billions and $ billions.

Uh....some bottled water comes straight from a tap.

Arsenic is naturally in our water.

But making tap-water so expensive could never fly.

There is organic and inorganic Arsenic, and Clinton didn't seem to distinguish between the two in his directives.

 

[tonystewart1]

A common sense approach to the whole issue would be to use the coal we have now.

Realizing that coal will not last forever. Just another 200 years.

That is plenty of time to work on alternatives. Those alternatives are not ready yet.

 

[Trakar]

Trakar::

I need to see the chemistry for this claim -- before I can buy into it..

No problem at all, supporting evidence is crucial to a proper analysis and evaluation of any claim. It seems that mercury forms a divalent amalgam with the phosphorus coating in CFLs. The actual EPA report from which this information originates seems to be:

http://www.epa.gov/osw/hazard/wastetypes/universal/merc-emi/merc-pgs/merc-rpt.pdf

It looks like they are drawing heavily from industry research carried out by Sylvania and NEMA (National Electrical Manufacturers Association). I haven't tracked the research well enough to find the specific studies, assuming they aren't proprietary (in the case of Sylvania). Of course this is a 1997 study and looks at a variety of fluorescent lamps but the mercury binding principles are the same regardless of whether we are talking 3 foot straight tubes or compact coils. I keep running across references to more recent industry and governmental studies, but have thus far found no viable open links to the actual reports. I will keep an eye out for them.

Because there is a total of over 2mg of Mercury USED in the manufacture of the bulb. Which makes all those statistics pretty funny looking.

Support? and what makes the stats "funny looking" from your perspective?

If I tried to toss any amount of lead into a kids' product that was "bound to some structure" -- bet I'd be goin to court..

I'd take that bet

...Section 101 (b) (2) of the CPSIA provides that the lead
limits do not apply to component parts of a product that are not accessible to a child. This section specifies that a component part is not accessible if it is not physically exposed by reason of a sealed covering or casing and does not become physically exposed through reasonably foreseeable use and abuse of the product including swallowing, mouthing, breaking, or other children's activities, and the aging of the product, as determined by the Commission. Paint, coatings, or electroplating may not be considered to be a barrier that would render lead in the substrate to be inaccessible to a child under section 101 (b) (3) of the CPSIA....
...an accessible component part of a children's product is one that a child may touch;
...an inaccessible component part is one that is located inside the product and not capable of being touched or mouthed by a child, whether or not such part is visible to a user of the product;

http://www.cpsc.gov/about/cpsia/inaccessiblefr.pdf


The mercury isn't going into a kid's childs toy, it is going into a sealed electronics application. Any adult that allowed a child to play with a light bulb (even if it had no mercury in it) would be guilty of abuse, not the manufacturer of the light bulb. What kind of Nanny state are you trying to create?

 

[Trakar]

Mercury Vapor Release from Broken Compact Fluorescent Lamps and In Situ Capture by New Nanomaterial Sorbents

The projected increase in the use of compact fluorescent lamps
(CFLs) motivates the development of methods to manage consumer
exposure to mercury and its environmental release at the end of
lamp life. This work characterizes the time-resolved release of
mercury vapor from broken CFLs and from underlying substrates
after removal of glass fragments to simulate cleanup. In new
lamps, mercury vapor is released gradually in amounts that reach
1.3 mg or 30% of the total lamp inventory after four days.
Similar time profiles but smaller amounts are released from spent
lamps or from underlying substrates.

Figure 1 shows time-resolved mercury release data from
two CFL models. The release is initially rapid producing vapor
concentrations from 200−800 μg/m3 during the first hour, which
far exceed the OSHA occupational limits. The release decays on a
time scale of hours and continues at significant rate for at
least four days (data beyond 24 h not shown). The total Hg
released after 24 h is 504 (13 W model) and 113 μg (for 9 W) by
integration, which are 11.1% and 1.9% of the total Hg content
specified by the vendors, respectively. Over 4 days (extended
data not shown), the 13 W bulb released 1.34 mg or 30% of the
total Hg.

Mercury in new lamps is primarily in elemental form, but over
time interacts with the phosphor and glass to produce a more
complex internal partitioning in spent lamps, which contain
elemental, immobile (glass matrix imbedded), and oxidized soluble
forms (3,5,12). Landfill leaching can be minimized by avoiding or
reducing the mercury to water-soluble oxidized forms. Some
manufacturers are reported to incorporate reducing agents in
lamps to improve performance in TCLP testing. This approach may
protect local groundwater but would lead to formation of volatile
elemental mercury and enhanced environmental release of the vapor
in landfill gases.

The graphs in that doc CLEARLY show that MOST ALL of the Mercury WILL get out eventually..

Which in a worse case senario, amounts annually (if we dump the entire production of CFLs each year into a landfill) to be less than 3% of the annual emissions from coal fired power plants, and it is sealed within landfill barriers and might slowly leech into the surrounding soils and watertable over a few centuries. Meanwhile the mercury from coal combustion is being dumped into the air and settling into the surface soils, lakes and streams across the nation in huge amounts with no delay in its much greater impacts.

If you are seriously concerned about mercury contamination, you need to focus first on the semi-truck full running through your living room rather than the thimble full in a sealed vial buried 10 feet down in your back yard. Defending coal while attacking CFLs over mercury is at best disingenuous.

At best CFLs are a transitional lighting source and that is all they were ever intended to be. LED systems are already available and quickly becoming competitive in application and pricing.

 

[Trakar]

Your report doesn't mention a single person diagnosed with environmental Mercury poisoning.

Try these

Human Exposure | Mercury | US EPA

Environmental Health Perspectives: Public Health and Economic Consequences of Methyl Mercury Toxicity to the Developing Brain

http://www.nj.gov/health/eoh/cehsweb/kiddiekollege/documents/diner05_toxicity_mercury.pdf

 

[bripat9643]

I'm sure there are oodles of examples of clinical mercury poisoning. Especially from consumption of tainted fish and seafood. You are at the top of food chain. You can't afford to be the ultimate collector of heavy metals..

Almost all mercury in fish comes from natural sources, which are many orders of magnitude larger than man made sources. The ocean is full of mercury. The stuff we add amounts to spitting in it.

 

[bripat9643]

Cases of Mercury poisoning:
1. Jeremy Piven (actor) was diagnosed with hydrargyria caused by mercury poisoning, from eating sushi twice a day for almost twenty years. (December 2008)

2. Karen Wetterhahn, a chemistry professor at the Dartmouth College accidently spilled a little dimethylmercury on her latex glove on 14 august 1996. She developed symptoms of mercury poisoning after five months. She tried chelation therapy, however, died of brain malfunction.

3. An episode of Mercury poisoning took place in rural region of Iraq in 1971-1972. The grains treated with a fungicide (methylmercury based) were to be planted, but were used to make bread. It resulted in as many as 6530 cases of reported mercury poisoning and 459 deaths.

Chronic Mercury Poisoning: Causes & Symptoms | dashinghealth.com

Only the first example constitutes environmental mercury poisoning. The other two cases are accidental poisonings.

Fish in the ocean of had high levels of mercury for eons. The ocean is full of mercury, and always has been.

 

[bripat9643]

Your report doesn't mention a single person diagnosed with environmental Mercury poisoning.

Try these

Human Exposure | Mercury | US EPA

Environmental Health Perspectives: Public Health and Economic Consequences of Methyl Mercury Toxicity to the Developing Brain

http://www.nj.gov/health/eoh/cehsweb/kiddiekollege/documents/diner05_toxicity_mercury.pdf

Nope. No actual cases of Mercury poisoning are mentioned in any of those papers.

 

[daveman]

the rule affects 27 eastern states and Texas, so not all states will be able to raise rates. My state is not included

So, **** the poor and working class...it doesn't affect you.

Right?

no not at all. I merely stated where te new rules take effect. And where I live. Rates go up to help support the nergy suppliers, I have no recoures but to accept that which I can't change

You can vote against the idiots who force this stupid crap on people.

Did that ever occur to you?

 

[Moonglow]

So, **** the poor and working class...it doesn't affect you.

Right?

no not at all. I merely stated where te new rules take effect. And where I live. Rates go up to help support the nergy suppliers, I have no recoures but to accept that which I can't change

You can vote against the idiots who force this stupid crap on people.

Did that ever occur to you?

I am sure that will recend this adminstrative legislation

 

[mudwhistle]

I'm sure there are oodles of examples of clinical mercury poisoning. Especially from consumption of tainted fish and seafood. You are at the top of food chain. You can't afford to be the ultimate collector of heavy metals..

Anyone who doesn't like my opinions can always eat me.

 

[skookerasbil]

OK.......Ive been on this forum for two years and have seen lots and lots of bass ackwards threads........but this one clearly gets the nod for "STUPIDEST THREAD OF THE YEAR" award!!! LOL.....and its not even a regular environmental nutter either!!!

Like most far lefties.........most have zero ability to comprehend what people refer to as acceptance of necessary tradeoffs. And this here thread is in the realm of beyond fantasy land......especially now that the lid has been blown off the green energy stimulus scam.

s0n......pick up a newspaper one of these days or better yet.......scan the internet for about 2 mintues. Crap and Fraud is dead......and thank God for the sake of my kids. Only the nutters on the far left think its a good idea to slam the middle class with a doubling of their electrical bills. Of course, most of these assholes dont own anything except debt and maybe a decent basement apartment with some gay-ass pet. Too....do they care if 2.3 million people are put out of a job due to carbon fines and the attempt to close our coal industry? Of fcukking course they dont........too busy watching re-runs of Puff the Magic Dragon and American Idol while they sip their latte.

Fact is........the escalator up is in clean energy coal and smart investors are ready to make hay when the bozo's are kicked out in 15 months and the Varsity returned to its rightful throne. Green energy stimulus BS will be permanently placed in a museum, propped up in a big glass case like a relic of a former era. Write it down because it is the future............as will be domestic and offshore drilling.

And I'll still be laughing my balls off...............


Indeed......it is all about the tea leaves and nothing about the temperatures.



Coal = winning

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=future-of-clean-coal-tied-to-success-of-carbon-capture-and-storage

 

[daveman]

no not at all. I merely stated where te new rules take effect. And where I live. Rates go up to help support the nergy suppliers, I have no recoures but to accept that which I can't change

You can vote against the idiots who force this stupid crap on people.

Did that ever occur to you?

I am sure that will recend this adminstrative legislation

So, no, it didn't occur to you.

 

[kiwiman127]

I'm sure there are oodles of examples of clinical mercury poisoning. Especially from consumption of tainted fish and seafood. You are at the top of food chain. You can't afford to be the ultimate collector of heavy metals..

Almost all mercury in fish comes from natural sources, which are many orders of magnitude larger than man made sources. The ocean is full of mercury. The stuff we add amounts to spitting in it.

That may be true, but that statement doesn't apply to coastal fish and certainly not fresh water fish.

Mercury In Ocean Fish May Come From Natural Sources, Not Pollution

<Snip>

The findings imply that the high levels of methylmercury in these fish are not coming from increased pollution, but from a natural source. The specific source is not yet clear, Morel says, but he suggests it could be hydrothermal vents and deep ocean sediments.
The research should also extend to other ocean-going predatory fish, like swordfish and sharks, according to Morel, which could mean that whatever is passing the mercury up to the tuna is probably doing the same to these other fish.
Morel is more cautious, however, about extending the findings to coastal fish. Bluefish, for example, run up and down along the eastern coast of the United States feeding on the continental shelf, and they may be taking up human pollution there. Lake fish are also a different situation, Morel says, since scientists have established a strong link between pollution and mercury levels in lakes.
The U.S. EPA and the U.S. Tuna Foundation provided support for this research.
Mercury In Ocean Fish May Come From Natural Sources, Not Pollution

 

[flacaltenn]

Mercury Vapor Release from Broken Compact Fluorescent Lamps and In Situ Capture by New Nanomaterial Sorbents

The projected increase in the use of compact fluorescent lamps
(CFLs) motivates the development of methods to manage consumer
exposure to mercury and its environmental release at the end of
lamp life. This work characterizes the time-resolved release of
mercury vapor from broken CFLs and from underlying substrates
after removal of glass fragments to simulate cleanup. In new
lamps, mercury vapor is released gradually in amounts that reach
1.3 mg or 30% of the total lamp inventory after four days.
Similar time profiles but smaller amounts are released from spent
lamps or from underlying substrates.

Figure 1 shows time-resolved mercury release data from
two CFL models. The release is initially rapid producing vapor
concentrations from 200&#8722;800 &#956;g/m3 during the first hour, which
far exceed the OSHA occupational limits. The release decays on a
time scale of hours and continues at significant rate for at
least four days (data beyond 24 h not shown). The total Hg
released after 24 h is 504 (13 W model) and 113 &#956;g (for 9 W) by
integration, which are 11.1% and 1.9% of the total Hg content
specified by the vendors, respectively. Over 4 days (extended
data not shown), the 13 W bulb released 1.34 mg or 30% of the
total Hg.

Mercury in new lamps is primarily in elemental form, but over
time interacts with the phosphor and glass to produce a more
complex internal partitioning in spent lamps, which contain
elemental, immobile (glass matrix imbedded), and oxidized soluble
forms (3,5,12). Landfill leaching can be minimized by avoiding or
reducing the mercury to water-soluble oxidized forms. Some
manufacturers are reported to incorporate reducing agents in
lamps to improve performance in TCLP testing. This approach may
protect local groundwater but would lead to formation of volatile
elemental mercury and enhanced environmental release of the vapor
in landfill gases.

The graphs in that doc CLEARLY show that MOST ALL of the Mercury WILL get out eventually..

Which in a worse case senario, amounts annually (if we dump the entire production of CFLs each year into a landfill) to be less than 3% of the annual emissions from coal fired power plants, and it is sealed within landfill barriers and might slowly leech into the surrounding soils and watertable over a few centuries. Meanwhile the mercury from coal combustion is being dumped into the air and settling into the surface soils, lakes and streams across the nation in huge amounts with no delay in its much greater impacts.

If you are seriously concerned about mercury contamination, you need to focus first on the semi-truck full running through your living room rather than the thimble full in a sealed vial buried 10 feet down in your back yard. Defending coal while attacking CFLs over mercury is at best disingenuous.

At best CFLs are a transitional lighting source and that is all they were ever intended to be. LED systems are already available and quickly becoming competitive in application and pricing.

This 3% figure you still sling about doesn't jive with..

Electricity use is the main source of mercury emissions in the U.S. CFLs use less electricity than incandescent lights, meaning CFLs reduce the amount of mercury into the environment. As shown in the table below, a 13-watt, 8,000-rated-hour-life CFL (60-watt equivalent; a common light bulb type) will save 376 kWh over its lifetime, thus avoiding 4.3 mg of mercury. If the bulb goes to a landfill, overall emissions savings would drop a little, to 3.9 mg. EPA recommends that CFLs are recycled where possible, to maximize mercury savings.

Which is based on the bastardized interpretation of the 24 hour release number I described above. If a bulb contains 2 mg of mercury and it saves 4.3 mg over it's lifetime -- that's laudatory (i guess) if all of the electricity it ate CAME from coal -- It didn't.

And in a landfill, that bulb WILL RELEASE almost all of the mercury. Not the 11% falsely used for that calculation.

So maybe you could claim the waste stream "savings is over 50%" IF the bulb ate coal all it's life.

Actually coal is about 40% of the REAL energy mix -- therefore you'd be lying about the 50% savings of waste stream.. In reality -- more like 25% would be correct.