30 May
2010
30 May
'10
10:42 a.m.
Consdiiering
the idfiot EU Bureaucrats have banned mercury-in-glass
thermometers (I believe), I might just have to :-(
I'm sorry I have to take issue with this, in what way is banning the use
of a (resonably large amount) of hazadous material (Mercury) a bad thing ? Especially when it can be replaced with a non/less
hazadous replacement
that can do the job just as well.
There must have been a good reason for using mercury in the first place,
and it wasn;t cost ;-).And therefore I douibt the alternatives 'do the
job just as well'.
Actually, for reasons of cost, moist thermometers don't use mercury
anyway. The ones that did, did so for, I suspect, technical reasons. I
don';t beleive there was enoguh mercury used in thermomneters to be a
hazard, but when it was used, it was used because it was the best
material to use, And that's what bothers me about the ban.
But there is one plaec I would not use a mercury thermomneter. Checking
the temperature of an electromagnetic device such as a transformer or a
motor. It's quite possible to induce eddy currents in the mercury and
have the thermometer read too high.
And yes there is Mercury in other household things CFL bulbs for
example, but it is at a much lower concentration and cannot easily be
replaced by a less hazadous substance that can do the job as well.
The UV lamp in my EPROM eraser is a 6" long hot-cathode dischage tube,
similar ot a flouresecent tube with a special envelope (to transmit the
UV light) and no phosphor coating. I can see a quite a few droplets of
mercury insde that lamp when it's cold. I susepct the CFLs run at a lower
pressure, but I still suspet the total amount of mercury in use in all
the CFLs is a sizeable amount.
Oh, and don;t get me started on the lightbulb ban...
-tony