How do I dispose of this bulb?

[Clot]

:)

[Clot]

I appreciate (like) this response. The issue of mercury in CFLs is a non-issue I suspect. Kids today cannot splash their fingers in mercury. When I were a lad, a broken thermometer in the home was a wondrous chance to play. When in the senior school, I could play with mercury to learn about atmospheric pressure.

Years later, after University, I learnt at work that the bearings to sewage filter beds were liquid mercury.

The use of mercury and its discharge to the environment has plummeted.

Hello dear, what was that you just said? I jest, we are getting paranoid about this.

[Clot]

I'm highly amused by this:

the article and the Defra advise. OTT?

[Clot]

I not sure that I can agree with this but I appreciate the point you are maikng. CFLs must surely use more energy to produce than filaments but overall what do they use? I told an inadvertent lie on this group a while back when I thought that I had still got a CFL in use from a previous house. I took it out of the fitting the other day to find out that it has only been in use from 1997, far less than I thought at the time,(I have always marked them with the date of installation to see whether thay were saving me money).

Much of our power was, is and will be from coal with significant emmisions of Hg. What is the overall balance? What are the other contents of the control mechanism in the lamp and their impact on the environment in terms of production costs and disposal - environmental I mean rather than £s?

[OG]

Why do you think you have to 'rely on the kindness of a neighbour' ? Have you not even thought of phoning the council ? Under the Disability Discrimination Acts (1995, 2005) councils have a duty to provide services to all; so if your dad or mum can't move waste to the kerb, the council is duty bound to do it for them.

What is it with some people, is it too much effort to find out what councils can do?

[OG]

Ah; in the same way that 99% of unsubstantiated statements on newsgroups should be ignored.

What exactly did you mean by "isn't dangerous"?

[Derek Geldard]

FWIR after the Windscale weapons plant reactor fire a plume of radioactive Iodine got blown across the countryside and a great deal of milk was poured away on dairy farms in the cause of "safety" resulting in a shortage of milk.

If OTOH the milk had been made into cheese and matured as normal it would have been perfectly safe to eat by the time it was ready. :-))

Derek

[Pete Verdon]

Yep - my council (Southampton) keep putting things through the door that say (among others) that people who have difficulty bringing their bins to the kerb can apply for a special sticker that tells the bin-men to fetch the bins out from round the back or wherever they're kept. Seems reasonable to me.

Pete

[Rod]

Agreed. And partner hasn't even got to retirement age!

[Rod]

Well I can tell you what it is with my partner, assuming she counts as a member of 'some people'. She has not been diagnosed. She is not registered disabled. She does not get DLA. One day maybe she could manage; the next day she couldn't. I cannot see a council being willing to help.

(Of course, as I am around, I can take stuff out.)

[Rod]

Don't know for sure but I'd guess melting point. Possibly they end up with a mix that simply has too high a melting point to be manageable (fuel cost?, equipment design?, etc.).

For toughened, maybe they are concerned about getting laminated as well?

[Bruce]

The colossal chlorine production facility at what used to be ICI's Rocksavage works near Runcorn had huge beds of mercury on a slope.

There was only a very thin layer of mercury with a layer of soon-to-be 'some chlorine chemical' running down the slope on top of it, but it apparently played some very significant part in the process of making chlorine.

I don't know whether chlorine manufacture is still done this way. When it was built in the early 1970s, it was claimed to be state of the art.

.

[The Natural Philosopher]

On the other hand, the one statistically significant effect of Chernobyl has been a rise in thyroid cancers amongst those living nearby.

It less the level of radiation, than the fact that it tends to get into various organs and concentrate itself right close and snug to cells ..which then mutate.

There is a bit of evidence that natural Radon, if you are a smoker, is really dangerous. Radon+smokong gives a far higher incidence of cancer than either alone.

[Bob Eager]

WHOOOSH!

[Dave Liquorice]

We can get small bags for the Local Linck Centre (combined Library, Tourist Information Center and Council (district and County) Information Center). These are then dropped into the post, postage paid. To somewhere in the Midlands.

Plastic is no longer the nasty it was, most, if not all is biodegradeable. If it wasn't we would be up to our necks in supermarket bags considering how many are used every year. Not sure when the change happened, we have so old (10 year) supermarket bags that are still soft and useable yet ones only a year or two old fall apart when you look at them. These bags have been kept inside with things in, not buried outside.

[Steve Firth]

Chernobyl released a real witches' brew of isotopes. As well as 125I it released 131 I and 129 I. The dose was also huge.

Hmm, using "mutate" in this context seem wrong. They suffer radiation damage leading to lethal mutations in the genome.

And of course Radon has f*ck all to do with the nuclear industry. The blame for that can be laid at the door of builders who construct improperly ventilated houses.

[Derek Geldard]

IOW it's not the lamb it's the ceasium source ;-8

I jest, the Chernobyl disaster was mishandled from the minute the designer of the reactor put pen to paper.

In an area of such contamination the population needed to be evacuated before they had been exposed. They could then come have back after the radioactivity had decayed away. The authorities acted too late.

In the UK there are stocks of stable iodine tablets ready for issue to the general population held close to reactor sites. These saturate the body with Iodine and reduce the uptake of any I125 in the environment. I didn't hear of this being done at Chernobyl.

Probably related to the self repair mechanism of cells being overwhelmed.

There is very little Radon in domestic buildings in the UK anyway. In the Scottish Highlands the Granite is too dense for the radon to escape before it has decayed into it's daughter products. In Cornwall there can be a Radon problem, principally in the cellars of buildings or in the ground floors of buildings below ground or built into hillsides. It's easily dealt with (if not necessarily cheaply) by Radon sumps and ventilation done the right way.

The only other places I am aware of are the show caves in Derbyshire where absolutely stupendous doses of Radon of the order of 40,000 working levels used to be had. AFAIK they are all ventilated now. They are workplaces and come under the HASAW acts.

Derek Geldard [Radon monitor for rent]

[Huge]

We had a store cupboard full of bags of old scintillation vials awaiting their time...

[Huge]

Waste of time.

Talking of which, recycling is only worth doing if you assign zero value to the time of the forced labour (householders) doing it.

[Steve Firth]

Yeah same with us. The major headache was stock rotation. The majority of low level waste was LIP plastic test tubes which had been used for radioimmunoassay.