mercury in telescopes?

[kalianna]

Wow, what a response. In between the bickering I learned a lot. From what I read online, the liquid mirror telescopes are limited in their ability to move and scan, looking straight up. So now I'm wondering if CFHT and KECK still use mercury or may they have been changed to mirrors. And how the heck did you find that info about the mercury spills, randomq????

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

kalianna,
If you scroll down the link below, you’ll find a chart that lists mercury spills on Mauna Kea, and a few other discharges:
https://www.civilbeat.org/2019/08/fact-c...telescope/

[kalakoa]

First comment from the CivilBeat article:

I'm confused. 50,000 cesspools on our beautiful island.

Fun fact: burning coal (say, over on Oahu, to produce electricity) releases mercury into the environment. Unlike the telescope incidents, this is an uncontrolled release, and it's apparently not a problem because nobody is bothering to protest.

[Rob Tucker]

Best not tell kalianna about the arsenic problem.

[TomK]

Kaliana - most of the MK telescopes do not use mercury. CFHT and Keck have in the past (I don't know if they still do). The mercury was not used to coat the mirrors, it was used as a thin layer to support the outside edges of large mirrors. As randomq mentioned, there have been a few historical spills but all were contained inside the buildings and cleaned up. There are more concerning environmental issues that are a much bigger deal than any mercury that has been used on the summit.

[Obie]

"Straight Mercury is mean stuff."

In the time when our high school science teacher passed it around in a beaker and he encouraged us to play with the drops that he would put on a clean piece of notebook paper on our desks, it was probably less hazardous right ??

Those of us who were clued in brought coins to school that day.It's amazing what mercury can do to a silver coin.

72 years old and still kicking.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

Have you ever broken or thrown away a thermometer? Either indoor/outdoor or body temperature? How many have been sold over the years on Big Island, how many are in the landfill or with other garbage on the side of a road?

I’m not a betting man, but I’d bet homeowners have dumped far more mercury on the aina than all the mercury contained in all the telescopes in Hawaii.

[kalianna]

Thanks to all.

[SBH]

Mercury was in the Mauna Kea telescopes this week []

https://www.bigislandvideonews.com/2019/...imea-hilo/

[MarkP]

quote:

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Originally posted by HereOnThePrimalEdge

Have you ever broken or thrown away a thermometer? Either indoor/outdoor or body temperature? How many have been sold over the years on Big Island, how many are in the landfill or with other garbage on the side of a road?

I’m not a betting man, but I’d bet homeowners have dumped far more mercury on the aina than all the mercury contained in all the telescopes in Hawaii.

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This. On the wall of my parents house in CNY is a still functioning thermostat that uses a grape sized glass bulb filled with mercury as a switch. These switches were extremely common. Renovating? Rip it off the wall and toss it in the trash. The mercury footprint of the parents of the current protesters and of some of the protesters themselves, on an individual level, probably greatly excedes the actual amount of unrecovered mercury released by any of those documented spills because the observatories document and report such things while the average layman, of which the protesters are a particularly obnoxious and self righteous subset, blithely pollute without even acknowledging doing so. Think oil leaks from protesters' trucks and invasive ants from building materials. The observatories acknowledge those risks and have best practices in place to mitigate them. The protesters? Goodness only knows what's going through their heads but it does not appear to be such tedious concerns.