John Stumbles wrote:

Peter Parry wrote:
David Hansen wrote:
Peter Parry wrote this:-

You mean like the mercury in CFL's? :-)

How does this compare with the mercury emitted producing the extra
electricity needed to power incandescent bulbs?

Quite badly if compared with sensible generation methods such as
nuclear.

To advocate nuclear, which generates highly toxic waste which needs to
be kept out of the biosphere for orders of magnitude longer than the
pyramids have been around, while criticising the Hg in CFLs, is definitely
one for the Mote & Beam department.

Unless there is a perceived need to reprocess nuclear fuel, keeping it out of
the biosphere is absurdly simple. You just 'contain' it in a safe place !

Reprocessing was originally done in the UK to obtain the plutonium needed for
the bomb, then on a flawed belief that supplies of uranium would run out and
finally (on a profit driven basis) in order to serve an international market of
reactor users who didn't want to deal with such issues themselves.

As a result Britain did indeed become the world's 'nuclear dustbin' but it has
nothing to do with the everyday running requirements of thermal reactors !

Graham