Hey Mike, I had a similar experience to you when I got a rad counter. I was pretty surprised to find fireplaces had 3-5X background level of radiation, prolly exceeding NRC regs. It was explained to me that trees concentrate airborne radioactive particles from rain, and being heavy they tend to concentrate in the fireplace on burning of the wood. I hold Fred Sparber personally responsible for that enviromental debacle (grin). You and your atomic weapons, Fred, sheesh. Now my mom has an unlicensed nuclear reactor in her living room.
I've been lurking some after a big development push in summer. I know what you mean about the MSDS, when I used to order chemicals I got a nice stack of 'em. Kind of silly, but I've come to find that there are so many idiots out there, that people do in fact need to be told in grotesque detail about the risks associated with this stuff. I think we both can agree that the real issue is quantifying risk, and acting accordingly. Clearly you have a point that the low exposure numbers aren't very realistic when compared to the natural production. As you say, I wish they would focus on more pressing problems, but you must concede that industry has a disproportionate effect on EPA legislation than the birky and sock crowd. Follow the money. K. -----Original Message----- From: Michael Foster [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, October 05, 2005 2:25 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: Methyl Chloride Keith wrote: > So presumably as you go inland, the levels drop off. > How fast do they do so? And what numbers did you measure? I never made any inland measurements. I just got a bug up my *** one day when I was taking my boat out and took the chromatagraph with me. I was damn lucky I didn't drop it over the side. I'll have to fire up the old air sucker again to see what I can measure inland. I wish I'd thought of it when the fires were burning and the air around my house was difficult to breathe. I have to keep the chromatagraph attached to its original laptop running Win98. When I try to run it on a later operating system, I get some strange error relating to clock speed. Hope it still functions well. > To be clear, most sources ( including the EPA ) back > your claim. Here for example, the evil socialists of Sweden (grin) say... >>Methyl chloride (CAS No. 74-87-3) is released mainly to air >>during its production and use and by incineration of municipal >>and industrial wastes. How ever, natural sources, primarily >oceans and biomass burning, clearly dominate over anthropogenic sources. >http://www.inchem.org/documents/cicads/cicads/cicad28.htm > I'm also sure that the burning biomass in your backyard > has released a slew of toxic chemicals. Should we > revise the numbers to make these levels acceptable because > they occur in nature? I do agree that folks are generally > paranoid about chemical exposure, but if animal studies > show harm with low concentrations then harm will > be caused by low concentrations, regardless of the source. You point out why I'm so concerned with this. Methyl chloride, while I have no use for it, has become my personal poster boy for why environmental extremists and government agencies have got it all wrong. There are serious toxic substances about that need highly watchful regulation. But you can't do a good job of it if you try to act as if everything is dangerous. Case in point, if you buy sodium chloride from a chemical company, it comes with an MSDS sheet, ditto SiO2. If vast government agencies and industrial enterprises have to waste time and resources telling us that salt and sand are dangerous, there's precious little left to address real problems. Furthermore, this sort of thing is a needless drain on the economy and yet another source of income for lawyers. BTW, Keith, good to know you're still lurkin' out there. M. _______________________________________________ Join Excite! - http://www.excite.com The most personalized portal on the Web!
