CFL guts

CFL's are the next great health scare. I hate them because the light they make is very unnatural and they radiate more than light. 

How can they be cheaper and better? There's a bunch of caps, a transformer, a voltage regulator, resistors etc. The old one uses a piece of wire. It seems like the opposite of going green. All that stuff has to be stripped out before the landfill and the bulb is a much nastier affair. I don't get it, short term you save energy and long term you increase waste. 

craigb


CFL bulbs don't really have any electronics.  You actually are being bugged by Big Brother the Government!

Ha ha, no, I don't think so.  Anyway, these bulbs are made in China......  oh.  

FYI ... If you break a CFL you are supposed to contact the EPA because they contain mercury. Do a quick search for cfl cleanup. 

Bub


Just checked it out and they changed their tune. They say to call now only if you are concerned. Thats not what they used to say. Funny. 

Their financial analyst has determined that burying the bodies is cheaper than the cleanup...

Just checked it out and they changed their tune.

So much poison, so little time. 


It is not so much that we live in a more dangerous time as that we are much more aware of how toxic the stuff we use every day is.  Still, there does seem to be a need for some kind of cost/benefit analysis in this area; and then there is politics.  Prior to the first  food drug & cosmetic act, there was a company making and selling green colored "edible" cake decorations using arsenic compounds as the colorant. Makes you wonder how many jobs  that regulation killed, as compared to how many children it saved. Canada, the worlds largest miner of asbestos, has government programs to encourage its use. Their standard for "dangerous" asbestos content is 10%, in the US it is 1%, even though it is widely recognized (including by the US EPA) that there is no safe level of asbestos. If every broken CFL required the hazmat team to scramble, there would be no one to clean up the insecticide tanker that crashed into the grammar school. A CFL has a lot less mercury than a dental filling, but you do not see recommendations for stringent cleanup every time someone gets a tooth knocked out. And of course there is coal, the burning of which releases substantial amounts of mercury, radionucleides and other nasties into the air. There are analyses that indicate nuclear instead of coal is a win for the environment (human health risk) on the basis of released radioactive materials alone.

Here is one for mercury in incandescent vs fluorescent lighting:

http://www.cdphe.state.co.us/hm/mercury/cflfactsheet.pdf

Just for clarification, the existence of the reactor isn't a huge secret, but the fact that it had a meltdown and had to be entombed is.

slartabartfast

I would assume that analyses was made only for correctly functioning reactors.

I assume the same. Massive catastrophic radiation releases by a few bad apples can spoil the fun for the whole planet.


The SM-1A reactor at Fort Greely Alaska was closed in 1972 and is officially in safe-store condition. That is a more or less standard method of nuclear reactor decommissioning, and does not imply that any accident has occurred. Because it is a Corps of Engineers project, it does not show up in the Nuclear Regulatory Commissions list of facilities undergoing decommissioning, but it does not appear to be a classified location.  So if you hear the black helicopters over your house, tonight, it is probably not because you posted that picture. On the other hand if they really were trying to hide a melt-down...

Yep.  Note my clarification above.

Guitarhacker


Yeah.... it's been covered....^^^^^^  

For the record, I hate them. The light color temps are crap. But I do have a few in the house. They get cheaper all the time. I think once they get the chemicals right on the LED"S and the price gets reasonable, they might be the way to go. No toxic stuff cause they are damn near impossible to break and they are solid anyway. The technology needs tweeking and the price needs to come down. 

They (CFL) use less electricity so the higher the cost of electricity the more cost effective they become. However, breaking one is very bad since they contain mercury in a vapor form.  

But.... when I was a kid in school, we used to play with mercury in it's liquid form.... roll it around in our hands, across the desk, and occasionally, it would get away from us and hit the floor, splattering in all directions......and no one told us the stuff was dangerous........ and in the evenings, we would ride our bikes behind the mosquito sprayer trucks back when DDT was used....... and I feel pretty healthy..... 

And, that extra arm comes in handy in the studio...
 

Double-kick drums?