07-04-2008
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#1 (permalink) |
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Allah Akhbar
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: salisbury, mass.
Posts: 8,658
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say good bye to your flat screen t.v.
Friday, July 04, 2008
• Share: • • • • • Toshiba The Toshiba 37HL67 REGZA 37-inch LCD high definition television. Booming demand for flat-screen televisions could have a greater impact on global warming than the world's largest coal-fired power stations, scientists warn. A greenhouse gas called nitrogen trifluoride, used to make the TVs, is 17,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide, said Michael Prather, director of the environment institute at the University of California, Irvine. But no one yet knows how much of it is being released into the atmosphere by industry, a report in Britain's The Guardian said. Prather's research shows production of the gas, which remains in the atmosphere for 550 years, is "exploding". It is expected to double by next year, from the current 4,000 tons produced annually. But unlike other key greenhouse gases — such as carbon dioxide, sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) and perfluorocarbons (PFCs) — emissions of the gas are not restricted under the Kyoto protocol or similar agreements, The Guardian report said. Prather and his colleague Juno Hsu — writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters — said this year's production of nitrogen trifluoride is equivalent to 67 million tons of carbon dioxide. That meant the gas has "a potential greenhouse impact larger than that of the industrialised nations' emissions of PFCs or SF6, or even that of the world's largest coal-fired power plants". Air Products, which produces the gas for the electronics industry, told New Scientist that very little nitrogen trifluoride is released into the atmosphere. But Prather raised concerns about companies being careless with the gas, given the lack of a regulatory framework. |
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07-04-2008
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#4 (permalink) |
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lost on fifth
Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: PDC
Posts: 13
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Another reason for saying goodbye to flat screen TVs and monitors - Element Extinction
As it happens, we are building a lot of flat-screen TV sets and computer monitors these days. Gallium is thought to make up 0.0015 percent of the Earth’s crust and there are no concentrated supplies of it. We get it by extracting it from zinc or aluminum ore or by smelting the dust of furnace flues. Dr. Reller says that by 2017 or so there’ll be none left to use. Indium, another endangered element—number 49 in the periodic table—is similar to gallium in many ways, has many of the same uses (plus some others—it’s a gasoline additive, for example, and a component of the control rods used in nuclear reactors) and is being consumed much faster than we are finding it. Dr. Reller gives it about another decade. Hafnium, element 72, is in only slightly better shape. There aren’t any hafnium mines around; it lurks hidden in minute quantities in minerals that contain zirconium, from which it is extracted by a complicated process that would take me three or four pages to explain. We use a lot of it in computer chips and, like indium, in the control rods of nuclear reactors, but the problem is that we don’t have a lot of it. Dr. Reller thinks it’ll be gone somewhere around 2017. Even zinc, commonplace old zinc that is alloyed with copper to make brass, and which the United States used for ordinary one-cent coins when copper was in short supply in World War II, has a Reller extinction date of 2037. Slashdot | Supplies of Rare Earth Elements Exhausted By 2017 |
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07-04-2008
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#5 (permalink) |
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Canada Dry
  Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada
Posts: 27,151
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Boy....come onnnnn NASA....find us some gallium and hafnium on Mars already
 On the bright side, we got lots of uranium.  So we won't be watching TV but we can be warm in the winter.  For a few more decades at least.
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07-08-2008
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#8 (permalink) | |
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Canada Dry
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada
Posts: 27,151
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Quote:
yeah...he probably has 5 kids or something too, right Scott?  I noticed you didn't say anything about too many goats.... |
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07-08-2008
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#9 (permalink) | |
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HMWHTC President
   Join Date: Jul 2003
Location: Body in San Marcos Tx....Tankah in my mind
Posts: 31,108
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