Surprise! More Than Twice As Much Mercury In Environment As Thought 173
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.
Are we british now? (Score:2, Troll)
Where is "Environment"? I've never heard of a place by that name. Or was the headline about ambient mercury in "the environment"?
The good news is that finding out that there is twice as much of it around means that it is half as harmful as we were thinking it was, assuming the retarded LNT model preferred by statists everywhere.
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Headlines miss out words all the time. Film at 11...
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What has being British got to do with anything?
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What has being British got to do with anything?
I suspect OP was being ironic. British English tends to include words in sentences that US English usually omits.
Were the latex paint people jealous (Score:3)
I wonder if the huge crime spikes of the 60's and 70's had this mercury as another contributing factor?
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Led was used for two things in paint. Pigment and mold control.
Banning it as a pigment was a no brainer, white led paint is about 8% led. But banning its use for mold control led directly to the use of mercury as a substitute and it was never more than a tiny fraction.
Washington got it wrong, yet again.
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Tetraethyl Lead was used in automotive fuel from the 1920s through much of the 70s, and is still used in some aviation fuel. There appears to be illegal manufacture and use of the substance ongoing in the PRC. The amounts involved as a fuel antiknock ingredient exceed Lead's use in mold control and paint, and should be considered the primary source for increased Lead in the environment..
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Back when Moby Dick was a minnow ... (Score:5, Informative)
... 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.
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Liquid elemental mercury is actually hard to absorb by the body. It's chemically modified mercury, or mercury vapor, that are dangerous. Dimethyl mercury [sciencemag.org], for example, is fantastically dangerous stuff, and rapidly passes through latex, PVC, butyl, neoprene, and skin, and a drop of it can kill you. Meanwhile the mercury amalgam in my tooth fillings apparently is absorbed via vaporization and the lungs, and contributes about as much as occasionally eating fish, even though I have a few thousand mg of it in m
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Occasionally eating fish is chronic exposure too. And larger doses vs chronic exposure could go either way as to which is worse. In the case of mercury, the body can filter out mercury, albeit very slowly, and very low levels have no noticeable effect.
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My science teacher had similar comments; however, he was really careful with the stuff. It can cause a lot of problems, it's deceptively dangerous it is not like a poison. Different people have different thresholds, plus you also have younger generations growing up with higher exposure rates for their whole lifespan which makes them less tolerant. Handling it with your hands is one thing, eating it is another. In a powder or gas it's bad stuff --- which is why procedures are over protective, if you spill
Don't blame me (Score:4, Funny)
As soon as I heard that mercury was dangerous, I threw all my thermometers and thermostats in the garbage.
"Surprise!"? Really? (Score:5, Funny)
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
And the headline we all dread (Score:2)
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Good news! Slashdot Beta now live for all users!
Extraordinary! Wave Of Geek Suicides Has Investigators Perplexed!
This is great (Score:2, Troll)
#1 Source of Environmental Mercury = Gold Mining (Score:5, Interesting)
#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... [wsj.com]
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.
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#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.
Don't worry. It turns out that the cost of mercury is rising much faster than the cost of gold. Another decade or so of this, and it will be more economical for the gold miners just to sell their mercury stocks straight back to us.
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Is this the case in the US? I know mercury can be used to seperate gold from the other rocks (rocks float but gold sinks I think), but that is only done in third world countries that don't know about better ways to do it. I didn't think it was from pulling the gold from the ground, I thought it was just one possible process for seperating the gold.
I don't know a lot about gold mining, but I think that is not true in the US at least.
Its used in small scale placer mining. You use a pan (or sluice) to separate the heavier material, gold, iron and such, from the lighter rocks, then you add mercury to the black stuff at the bottom of the pan. The mercury and gold combine into an almagram (sp?), much like the paste the dentist mixes up to put in your mouth. Then you heat and evaporate the mercury leaving the gold and perhaps some silver. Since mercury is expensive, usually you evaporate it in a kind of still so you can recapture it. Used to
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I don't know a lot about gold mining, but I think that is not true in the US at least.
We've been mining the USA for a lot longer than we've had an EPA. I live in Lake County, CA and I have an RO filter because there's a hell of a lot of stuff around here in the water which is harmful for three big reasons. The first reason is that the area is volcanic, the second is that it's agricultural, and the third is not just silver mining but also outright cinnabar mining. Luckily, I live on the side of the lake which is relatively clean. Clear Lake has a lot of thermal turnover, though...
Mercury cycle? (Score:2)
Right, Mercury is horribly toxic, and releasing it in the environment is bad. But where do we get the mercury first?
I guess it comes from the environment itself, which suggests some kind of mercury cycle. It was there before as a reasonably harmful compound, perhaps we can ensure it returns to this state?
Passing comment (Score:2)
Not as such. Metallic mercury is rare. It's a bit of work to get mercury out of various ores, many of which would probably be safe to crumble up and eat since stomach acid is not going to reduce it.
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Your "mercury cycle" suggestion is a bit weird and is a bit like suggesting an Iron cycle or Silicon cycle.
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Your "mercury cycle" suggestion is a bit weird
I was just wondering what prevented us from making sure mercury goes back to the environment in the same form we got it once.
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you sound libertarian
Please don't insult me.
A little late (Score:2)
After all the mercury that was spilled in gold mining operations....
Latex condoms? (Score:2)
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Compared the coal-fired electric plant, that's nothing.
Re:Broken light bulbs. (Score:5, Funny)
The whole issue makes me mad as a hatter.
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Blame $EASY_TARGET for hundreds of years of humans everywhere not giving a fuck.
Re: Broken light bulbs. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: Broken light bulbs. (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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besides some cosmetic changes and this public relations "scrubbers!" effort, we haven't done a thing about it.
Nonsense. Scrubbers [wikipedia.org] 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.
Re: Broken light bulbs. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Are you confusing leaded gasoline with mercury from coal emissions? Because I haven't yet heard of mercury being blamed for the rise of criminality in the twentieth century.
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I'm not sure why I put the gasoline thing in there. I was drunk. It was the first Sunday of football season and was drinking gasoline with mercury in it.
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So, you don't believe there are external costs to things, like the cost of protecting the oil industry by fighting Middle Eastern wars?
Do you believe the cost of the Fukushima cleanup should be figured into the cost of the electricity the plant produced? Do you believe that there were any costs associated with lead being used in paint for decades?
Of course there are externalities. You are the first person I've even seen deny they exist.
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You should know better than to drink and post!
I'm not sure what specific problems are caused by mercury exposure, but lead from leaded gasoline has been correlated with the rise in crime during the twentieth century. To my knowledge, gasoline contains no significant amount of mercury, if any. I think most of our mercury exposure comes from seafood and coal plant emissions. Is mercury thought to be responsible for behavior problems, as well?
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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:
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Hmmm....so they are promoting Congressional postal propaganda (franking)...those bastards!!
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The difference is that Wikipedia has citations to actual sources that you can check yourself.
The people who accuse Wikipedia of bias never seem to point out what the bias is.
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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.
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Yeah, I'm not ready to buy a power company telling us how great they are as proof that they're not dumping the scrubbed pollutants into ash ponds.
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Awesome - thanks for the information.
I hate digital fever thermometers - when I need one every five or ten years, the battery is dead (and the very reason I want to take my temperature is the same reason I don't want, nor to people in the outside world want me, to go out at 3AM to find and buy a new one or a new battery). Fortunately, I still have a "backup" mercury thermometer that's close to 40 years old - but I've wondered where to
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You don't have batteries at home?
Keeping a few charged aaa batteries in the house is useful not just for digital thermometers. They are also used for other things which you may need too.
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Most consumer oral fever thermometers use a button cell battery of a size I don't keep around.
I keep lots of charged AA and AAA rechargeable batteries (Eneloop et al) around but that doesn't help me with the fever thermometers.
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Fortunately, I still have a "backup" mercury thermometer that's close to 40 years old - but I've wondered where to buy a backup for the backup should it meet an untimely demise.
You should consider replacing it with a readily-available spirit thermometer, e.g. this one [amazon.com]. Spirit thermometers have a smaller temperature range that they can measure than mercury thermometers, but are often more accurate over that range, and if you just want one for medical purposes, you're not interested in any temperatures outside a very narrow range anyway. Plus, when that untimely demise eventually happens, it won't create a health hazard that requires careful cleanup.
Not all coal is equal (Score:2)
Not as big a deal as having it in the form of vapour - it's not even a huge deal in landfill unless there's enough water moving through to get it out of the landfill, or biological activity turning the metal into some pretty nasty stuff that can get into the food chain more easily. There's noth
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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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I'd certainly support anti-pollution tariffs. Regarding that, the WTO, TTIP, NAFTA etc trade treaties are all rabidly against tariffs, no matter what they try to protect (anti-dumping tariffs are allowed).
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Oh, so you mean the EPA is requiring what used to be called "externalities" be paid by the industry involved instead of imposed as a health tax on the rest of Americans? Those bastards.
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Re: Broken light bulbs. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: Broken light bulbs. (Score:2)
and yet "we need to" fine the solar plants that are frying a few birds while all the mercury from coal plants probably kills three orders of magnitude more.
I know, let's protest the solar plant and then head out to KFC for an afterparty. We'll toast to the bureaucrats.
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If KFC could just use the Boeing Chicken Launching Cannon during Solar Plant working hours, it could be a tourist attraction and a place to get a Barbequed Impact Chicken sandwich. Bring the family!
Re:Broken light bulbs. (Score:5, Funny)
From the (maximum of) 5 milligrams of mercury? What did you do? Break the lamp very carefully and then snort the contents?
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From the (maximum of) 5 milligrams of mercury? What did you do? Break the lamp very carefully and then snort the contents?
I might as well have done. No, I was trying to remove the dead bulb from an overhead lamp when it shattered in my face. Unfortunately, it was in my office at home so I had to keep working in that environment (trying to meet a daily word-count). Even with the windows and doors open it still affected me for several hours. Not pleasant, though it seems to have been temporary.
Re: Broken light bulbs. (Score:3, Funny)
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?
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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?
Ho-ho-ho. Have an internet.
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He didn't mention -- he fell off the ladder while removing the bulb and fell 12 feet (cathedral ceilings!) and hit his head on the edge of his Steelcase desk from the 50's (the ones that a lot of Cop shows have on the set). But, I'm pretty sure it was the mercury that had that remarkable effect, not the anxiety of if mercury was harmful or the concussion and blood loss.
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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
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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.
At a concentration level similar to the ones you're likely to see in the few moments after breaking a lightbulb, symptoms of acute mercury inhalation exposure require "a few hours" of exposure [nih.gov] to develop. The patients in this review [nih.gov] each absorbed a dose similar to the complete mercury contents of a typical CFL; it seems unlikely that an accident of the type described would result in more than a few percent of this amount of absorption, as the instinctive response to the bulb breaking - closing your eyes a
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I can confirm that a broken CF bulb is nasty. I had one break while hot, it stank to the high heavens and also gave me a headache. Had to ventilate the room for hours. Given that mercury is odorless [ca.gov] (pdf), I suspect some other chemical. In any case, if the cold bulbs have a similar odor I think it would be very unlikely for someone to get mercury poisoning from these, and there is also the matter of the mercury emitted by coal power plants to consider.
Overall I am pleased with CF bulbs, but one day hope to
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Not much:
http://earthtechling.com/2011/... [earthtechling.com]
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.
mercury in CFLs is a net good (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Best not to assume that LEDs are better:
http://www.gizmag.com/led-bulb... [gizmag.com]
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This is exactly the same profile as any other e-waste. I'm fine with treating LED bulbs as such.
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You obviously know nothing about electronics and magic smoke
Good point -- it's been a while since I've had a puff of that, if you know what I mean...
Seriously, though, I'm picturing a scenario where you accidentally drop a CFL or LED. Besides the mercury vapour issue, it's also nice that one of these stays fully functional after a drop.
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You obviously know nothing about electronics and magic smoke
You obviously know nothing about LED power supplies vs. electronic ballasts for CFLs.
Re:And don't forget mercury in the CFLs... (Score:5, Informative)
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: ... [instructables.com]
How much Mercury is in Compact Fluorescent ( CFL ) bulbs , watch
Of course LEDs are better, do you have an argument against those?
Re:And don't forget mercury in the CFLs... (Score:5, Informative)
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
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There is nothing anti-science about having slaves and
Of course that is anti-science. Any economist would tell you that it is much cheaper to just get rid of minimum wage and overtime laws and then put your workers in a company town than it is to import, purchase and maintain slaves.
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Or did you think Lincoln was a Democrat?
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Nixon or even Daddy Bush are closer to being Democrats than Republicans in the current situation, let alone Lincoln.
It's a bit misleading to compare the political parties of back then to now since the values have changed so much.
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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?
Re:Enlighten me (Score:4, Informative)
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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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
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Aren't we really just sending it home?
Actually we sent it to a farm where it can run free and be happy...
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Just remember, mercury has a half-life of about 10^28 million years [wikipedia.org] or longer, so don't expect it to just go away.
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It's an approximation. Maybe the order of magnitude will be off by 50%. Sure, mercury has more protons but on average the protons in it have less potential energy than free protons (ie, you can get energy by fusing protons into mercury), so I expect that to make up for some of that. Mainly, it's a jab at people who get terrified for no reason about anything to do with radioactivity or half-life.
Re: Misleading Headline (Score:5, Funny)
one can produce elmental mercury from ore with alchemy. At least that's what I'd assume you'd call it.
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I blame all that mercurochrome my mom put on my cuts when I was little.
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Actually, it's all the non-compact fluorescent light bulbs. Nobody ever read the disposal instructions for those, and they're great for swinging around like light sabers, especially if you stand under a transmission line so the EM field lights them up.