Light Banter

My post "The end of the EZ Bake Oven" got several bits of feedback on Facebook that I would like to share here. I also would like to elaborate on some of the points made that I didn't in my original post, and correct some points that appear to be in error.

 First, the feedback. Paul notes that according to Snopes:

TRUE: CFLs contain mercury, a potentially dangerous substance.
TRUE: While mercury stays safely contained in intact CFLs, it escapes from broken CFLs into the immediate surroundings.
FALSE: The amount of mercury contained in one CFL bulb poses a grave danger to a home's inhabitants.
TRUE: The breakage of a CFL bulb needs to be handled with care and certain procedures should be followed in removing the broken bulb and its contents from a home.
FALSE: The mercury dispersed by one broken CFL bulb needs to be dealt with only by an environmental clean-up crew.

If you follow the link to Snopes you will see they recommend an elaborate 16 step cleanup process, which includes shutting off the heat or AC in the house and leaving windows open for at least 15 minutes.

 

I replied: I never claimed you needed to call in a hazmat team, but while the snopes statements may reflect EPA information, how many families are going to follow the 16 steps, or even know about them? Who's going to shut off their heat and leave the windows open for 15 minutes in a winter storm? The EPA guidelines for safe levels of mercury in a home are 20 micrograms/m^3. The 5 milligrams from one bulb will go far beyond that in a room.

Andy commented: http://www.popularmechanics.com/home/reviews/news/4217864 good article on the subject. pretty clear that the electricity needs of the old bulbs cause much more mercury (e.g. from coal power plants into the air) to be released into the environment. good info in any case.

I replied: Sorry, Andy, it is not clear at all. In fact, the opposite is clear from the link you provide.

From the article "...an incandescent would still contribute 4.65 more milligrams of mercury into the environment over its lifetime." But that assumes 100% of that electricity is produced by coal (the article itself states the real number is 50% but then they assume 100% coal for their calculations). Counting the non-coal power plants, instead of comparing 13.16 with 3.51 + 5, we should compare 6.58 with 1.75 + 5.

In other words, the amount of mercury released is similar. The difference is in the CF scenario the mercury is released in landfills around the country, and in the incandescent scenario it is at a power plant, where we can employ scrubbing technology or switch to a less polluting generation technology.

Incidentally, residential lighting accounts for 212TW of the 3873TW of electricity produced in this country, so even if it did save mercury, the largest amount of mercury that could possibly be saved is 3.6% of the total produced. Improving the power plants even slightly would save much more.

I still give CFs a big FAIL. 

To which Andy replied: cool. Still, have to figure in HVAC loading too. now if only the guys changing all those tubes in offices would quit tossing the big tubes in the dumpster breaking them in the process ;-)

Both Paul and Andy have some good points, but I don't think either is a good argument in favor of CFs. While the mercury in one CF bulb does not present a "grave danger" (in the sense that you will die) mercury poisoning is cumulative, and if the 16 step procedure isn't followed the residual mercury may sit in the room for may years until it is eventually absorbed.

 

I also noted that according to the EPA (more readable article is at the Sierra club site), US Mercury emissions from power plants must be reduced to 38 tons by the end of 2010 (25% reduction) and to 15 tons by 2018. Factoring the power plant improvements into the mercury equations above yields 4.94 for the incandescent,  1.3 + 5 or 6.3 for the CF in 2010. So the CFs actually introduce more mercury into the environment over their lifetime. By 2018 that number will be 1.98 vs. 5.53 in favor of the incandescent.

The second point Andy brings up is HVAC cooling. Every watt used by these bulbs eventually becomes heat that has to be removed if your house gets too warm. So, how does that affect things? According to Mr. Electricity a 2.5 ton AC uses 3500W of power (this is a reasonably sized central air system for a residence). 2.5 tons is 30,000 BTUs, and each watt our light bulb consumes generates 3.41 BTUs. Doing the math, each watt of heat generated by our light bulbs takes another .4 watts to remove.

Assuming we run our air conditioner 3 months of the year (yes, in the south it will be more, but in the north we may not use AC at all, and some bulbs will be outdoors or in non-air conditioned areas), I estimate each watt of lighting consumes another 0.1 watts on average. Factoring this into the above equations, we get 5.4 vs. 6.4 in favor of incandescents in 2010, 1.98 vs. 5.58 by 2018.

As I noted originally, improving power plants even slightly makes a much bigger improvement. Plus that improvement is carried across all electrical usage, not just residential lighting. All of the comparisons I was able to find use the flawed logic of the Popular Mechanics article to justify the use of CF bulbs. The fact is that these bulbs increase the amount of mercury released into the environment, even in the USA, which has more coal fired electrical production than any other nation.

Thanks to all who have responded with feedback, both here and on Facebook and Plurk. I hope these articles have been informative. They certainly were for me.

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The Global Warming Scam

H/T Adrienne's Corner:

No doubt due to my excellent arguments in my blog post "Science, I think not!", Professor Emiritus of physics Hal Lewis of the University of California at Santa Barbara resigned from the American Physical Society, stating (emphasis mine):

For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

You can read about it in the Telegraph, the San Diego Examiner or on CBS News.

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A busy week

I've been too busy to do much blogging, but I wanted to keep you up to date on the progress of the fall 2010 40 Days for Life campaign I've been involved with. Of course, the 40 Days web site has a daily blog that gives summaries of some of the highlights of each day, but with so many places participating they can't list everything. I can speak about the places I have been.

Last week I spent some time talking to the other members about how thins were going. According to the coordinator, this has been a bad fall, with fewer than normal people turning up [N.B. there were 6 people there when I was, which is "normal" for the times I usually go - I try to pick times when they have fewer people signed up]. The reason, he thinks, is that most of the churches (both Catholic and Protestant) at which he would normally announce the event refused to let him speak this fall! He is at a loss to explain why, and so am I, but I think I can posit a guess. There has been a lot in the media about abortion being an issue in the 2010 elections, and I think many pastors fear that they will be seen as taking sides in a political race. Now, of course that's completely backwards thinking, but that's the best reason I can guess. Anyone who has a better idea, I'd love to hear it.

Despite the lower than normal turnout, the campaign has been successful. Last week quite a few hearts and minds were changed. On Saturday alone, four women approached the 40 days members and told them they had changed their minds and canceled their abortions. Hopefully there were many more who didn't stop to say thanks.

This week I witnessed a young man who was trying to convince his woman (not sure if it was a girlfriend or wife) not to go through with the abortion. I don't know the outcome, but I pray she had a change of heart. Another couple at the clinic was arguing animatedly, although from a distance we couldn't tell who wanted the abortion and who didn't. They did leave without having one, which was a good sign.

It angers me when people talk about a woman's "free choice" to have an abortion. Perhaps there are such people, but none of the women I've seen at these places seemed to think she had a choice. Women go these because they are choiceless. They see no other way to "solve" what they perceive as a "problem". If only they could understand that abortion doesn't "solve" anything, and that what is inside them is a human being who loves them, not the cause of whatever problems they face.

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In case you missed this

From New Advent:

Pope Benedict XVI, a study by Michael Noakes

... and from Rome Reports Chile's trapped miners send a flag to the Pope

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Real Climate Research

If you recall my recent post "Science? I think not!" I presented links to data showing how climate was affected by solar radiation way more than any human controlled factors. Well, more evidence is on the way. According to NASA scientists in the article "Getting to the SORCE of Climate Change":

...the phenomenal interconnectedness of each aspect of our world leads to misconceptions and incomplete notions regarding climate change. On Jan. 25, 2003 NASA will be launching the SOlar Radiation & Climate Experiment, or SORCE spacecraft...

More info about the SORCE (SOlar Radiation & Climate Experiment) satellite can be found at NASA's web site. A good summary is found at Ar Technica's post about a recent paper in Nature [link to the paper is with the article but you have to pay to read it - boo]:

In a recent issue of Nature, Joanna Haigh and colleagues report that the largest deviation from predicted activities of the solar cycle occurred between 2004 and 2007, when the Sun’s activity was in a decline. Data from the Spectral Irradiance Monitor (SIM) instrument showed a four- to six-fold larger decrease in ultraviolet irradiation, and an increase in visible irradiation, compared to predictions from a leading solar model. A second instrument on the SORCE satellite, the Solar Stellar Irradiance Comparison Experiment (SOLSTICE), also observed the drastic variations in the ultraviolet region.

The wavelength of solar irradiation determines what part of the atmosphere is affected the most. Ultraviolet irradiation leads to chemical reactions that produce more ozone in the stratosphere and warm up the stratosphere and mesosphere. Irradiation in the visible wavelengths penetrates further, leading to heating of the Earth’s surface, troposphere, and lower stratosphere.

Of course, this is still data gathering, but it will be nice to have some actual facts inserted into the climate debate, rather than computer simulations.

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A New Hope

If you recall my award winning blog post, "The end of the EZ Bake oven" about the evils of compact Fluorescent (CF) bulbs, things looked pretty beak at the end.

However "there is another". In fact there are several others. According to the article quoted in my last post:

General Electric Corp., the world’s largest maker of traditional bulbs, said that by 2010, it hoped to have on the market a new high-efficiency incandescent bulb that will be four times as efficient as today’s 125-year-old technology. It said that such bulbs would closely rival fluorescent bulbs for efficiency, with no mercury.

How can you improve on what is essentially a piece of wire? Well, according to this article, the filament can be pitted with a laser to make it more efficient. Additionally, reflective coatings inside the bulb can direct infrared photons back to the filament, requiring less energy to keep it hot. Well, here it is, the end of 2010 and we haven't seen these bulbs hit the streets, but there are other promising technologies.

Plasma bulbs have very high efficiencies, approaching 14%, but it is difficult to make them operate at low enough power to operate in the home. For instance, the lowest power plasma bulbs made are 100 watts, which in light output is like a 1000 watt incandescent bulb! In addition plasma bulbs require quite a bit of electronics to operate. The bulb is essentially a microwave oven, heating a noble gas until it becomes a plasma.

Most other technologies have bigger problems that make them unsuitable. The two really promising technologies in development right now are LED and OLED lamps. Note that these are "lamps" and not "bulbs", since they are solid, not hollow. Despite the fact that both have "LED" in their name, they are quite different in many respects.

An LED, or Light Emitting Diode is, well, a diode that emits light. A diode is a device that passes an electric current in one direction only. Because of the nature of semiconductors, all diodes emit some light, but it takes some tweaking to do it efficiently and make that light visible. And LED is about 15-20% efficient in emitting visible light, making them far better than either incandescents of CFs. However, that light is monochromatic, meaning one color. Because of this, they are perfect for applications where the light is supposed to be colored, such as auto tail lights or traffic lights (or perhaps not).

There are two ways to get usable (white) light for household use. One is to use several LEDs of different colors. In fact, by manipulating the brightness of three or more LEDs we can make a lamp that can change color to fit the homeowner's mood. A simpler (though less efficient) way is the so called "white LEDs" that are used in flashlights. This is an LED that emits ultraviolet light, coated with phoshors, just like the fluorescent tube. It is superior to a fluorescent tube in that the LED is more efficient, doesn't contain mercury, isn't breakable (under normal circumstances) and lasts pretty much forever (50,000 hours or more).

So why don't we see them used everywhere? Heat. Ironically, although an LED produces very little heat compared to an incandescent bulb, since it is monochromatic the heat isn't being given off as infrared radiation. It sits inside the LED and can destroy it if it gets hot enough.

OLEDs, or Organic LEDs, are a newer technology. Yes, they are LEDs, but instead of using semiconductive crystals of materials like Gallium Arsenide Phosphide the use thin films of polymers (plastic), as thin as 50nm (a human hair is about 100,000nm thick). Because they are so thin, there is a high ratio of surface area to mass, meaning the light doesn't have to travel far before it is out of the LED and free to go out and light up the room. It also means there is more surface to cool off the device.

Unlike LEDs, OLEDs do wear out. They have a life span of about 14,000 hours before they degrade to 80% of their original brightness. On the other hand, they are up to twice as efficient as LEDs (or 20x as efficient as incandescents), which is why they are often found in cell phones, where battery life is important. One OLED technology, Phosphorescent OLEDs (PHOLEDs) claims it can reach up to 50% efficiency. And of course they are made without mercury or other toxic substances.

So when can I buy my OLED light bulb? According to this post we should see them starting to hit the market within the next year or two. However, if this roll out is like most in the tech industry, don't hold your breath. I'm sure they will be very expensive at first, but the technology can be printed with inkjet-like printers, which means once factories are tooled up they have the potential to be much cheaper than CFs. So perhaps the best course of action for the environment is to stock up on incandescents to make it to 2014 or so.

In researching these two posts I learned a lot about lighting technologies, the problems involved, the innovations taking place and tradeoffs in various designs. It was illuminating. No doubt I'll be posting more on the subject.

One final note. I'm sure "green" people and government will be touting how their regulation produced this lighty goodness. However, it should be known that OLEDs have been aggressively developed since before this legislation, and not because they would "save the Earth" but because they would increase the battery life of cell phones and media players. Here's a case where market forces alone produced innovation.

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The End of the EZ Bake Oven

Congress hath decreed that we must all give up incandescent light bulbs by 2014. That led to the recent closing of the last light bub factory in America. We will now be importing all our incandescent bulbs. Yay us.

My first thought was to stock up, so I can keep my EZ Bake over going if the bulb in it fails. Seriously, this is yet another case of inappropriate use of ("green") technology. Let's take a look at the technologies involved.

The old standard incandescent bulb is very similar to the bulb Thomas Edison invented in 1879. Prior to that the "best electric light bulb was the carbon arc lamp, which had been invented around 1800. The carbon arc was more efficient, but wasn't very appropriate for household use, and only lasted 100 hours (Edison's original bulbs only lasted 40, but were soon improved to last longer, with modern bulbs lasting about 1,000 hours).

An incandescent bulb works by passing an electric current through a filament made of tungsten until it glows from the heat. Tungsten is used because of its properties at high temperatures. The filament is encased in a glass bulb filled with argon, to prevent the filament from burning, which it would do in air. Argon is a chemically inert gas, and the third most common gas found in our atmosphere (after nitrogen and oxygen).

The down side of the incandescent bulb is that it only emits about 2% of the energy it uses as visible light. The rest of the energy is emitted as infrared radiation. That is a plus if you are trying to keep your chickens warm in the hatchery, or baking a cake in your EZ bake oven, but is a nuisance in a factory, where the waste heat must be removed by air conditioning.

Because of this most offices use fluorescent lighting. Fluorescent light bulbs are about four to five times as efficient as incandescent bulbs (about 9% of their energy is turned into visible light) at first. I say at first because they begin to degrade very quickly in use to about 75% of their original light output. That still makes them about three times as efficient as incandescent bulbs.

Fluorescent bulbs work by passing a high voltage through a low pressure mixture of mercury and a "noble" gas (argon, krypton, neon or xenon). The gas becomes a plasma and emits ultraviolet radiation, which causes a coating on the inside of the tube to fluoresce (hence the name) and emit light.

Until recently, fluorescent bulbs haven't been very popular in the home. First off, the bulb does not emit a "full spectrum" of light (even bulbs that say "full spectrum" on them), but emit certain colors only. So even a bulb that appears white to the eye (because it emits the right amount of red, green, and blue colors) will make colors look "odd" (because the color of the object doesn't match the color the bulb emits). The result can make food look unappealing (a boon for dieters), skin tones appear wrong, colors that appear to match in their light will look wrong in daylight or incandescent light, etc.

In addition, the bulb does not stay lit continuously. It blinks on and off 60 times a second with the household AC current. Thus while it appears to be a constant light to the eye, it can cause headaches and visual stress.

But the biggest problem is the environmental impact. In addition, almost everything in the bulb is toxic. A broken fluorescent bulb provides not only broken glass, but various phosphor compounds that are toxic and worst of all, mercury. attempts to clean up the glass and phosphor dust with a vacuum will spread the mercury around. Mercury, being a heavy liquid metal at room temperature, is very difficult to get rid of and will stay in your house until it is absorbed into your body. Assuming you don't break your bulb, when it fails you need to take the bulb to a hazardous waste center - putting it in the garbage, or even recycling is a no no, as most recycling centers don't have the facilities to properly handle the mercury.

Enter the compact fluorescent (CF) bulb. I was once a big fan of CF bulbs, converting most of my household to using them over the last few years.I crowed over the fact that I was saving "40 dollars a year" off my electric bill (um yeah, I don't see that on my bill). I liked the fact that I could put a 27 or 36 watt bulb in one of those cheap "60 watts or less" lamp fixtures and get a decent amount of reading light for my ancient eyes. However, reliability issues have caused me to rethink that, especially for bulbs in unheated areas. They light dimly, if at all, and constantly need replacing. The more research I did the less impressed I was by them.

The compact fluorescent bulb is a fluorescent bulb that has been bent into a "U" shape or a coil so that it takes up less space. It was invented in China, and China continues to produce most of the CF bulbs in the world. The more "popular" ones you see in stores have an "edison base" (they screw into a socket made for incandescent bulbs) and have an electronic ballast that helps with the slow turn on and flicker issues.

However, the electronic ballast does not work at low temperatures, and cannot stand up to weather. Although the bulb claims to have ten times the life of an incandescent bulb (10,000 hours) they often fail to live up to this because of the number of components in the ballast that can fail. The phosphors have been changed to make the bulb appear the same color as an incandescent bulb, but it still has the same problems of unnatural colors as "standard" fluorescent bulbs.

Most importantly, it has all of the ecological down sides of a fluorescent bulb, and more. The electronics contain lead and other hazardous compounds. The production of the bulbs is quite "dirty", using environmentally hazardous solvents. This is the basic reason why the bulbs are made in China.

According to this MSNBC story:

Manufacturers and the EPA say broken CFLs should be handled carefully and recycled to limit dangerous vapors and the spread of mercury dust. But guidelines for how to do that can be difficult to find, as Brandy Bridges of Ellsworth, Maine, discovered.

“It was just a wiggly bulb that I reached up to change,” Bridges said. “When the bulb hit the floor, it shattered.”

When Bridges began calling around to local government agencies to find out what to do, “I was shocked to see how uninformed literally everyone I spoke to was,” she said. “Even our own poison control operator didn’t know what to tell me.”

The state eventually referred her to a private cleanup firm, which quoted a $2,000 estimate to contain the mercury. After Bridges complained publicly about her predicament, state officials changed their recommendation: Simply throw it in the trash, they said.

So while we are saving some energy we are putting poison in our landfills and homes. In order to save how much? The number look large, but consider that the US consumes 29 PWh, while residential lighting accounts for 212 TWh of that. That means if all of the US residential lighting was incandescent (which it isn't), and all of it was converted to CF, then the US would save 140 TWh/year, or in other words would reduce our energy needs by approximately 0.48%.

To save this 0.48% we will introduce deadly mercury into our homes, and eventually into landfills and waterways. Congress has set the precedent that they can ban a product from the US not because it is dangerous or because it is bad for us, but because they feel like it.

Thus the award for inappropriate use of technology in the home goes to the compact fluorescent bulb.

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