Thread: HV PSU Question
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Old 16th Feb 2018, 8:50 pm   #21
Al (astral highway)
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Join Date: Nov 2006
Location: London, UK.
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Default Re: HV PSU Question

Hello

With these sorts of tiny currents, the wire inside is unlikely to be repurposeable. It’s what is described as ‘hair wire’ in the copper recovery business, where I worked at a senior level for five years when I was younger ( a major refining group) . It breaks very easily and is literally as fragile as human hair.

As far as ‘poisonous’ oil is concerned, older EHT equipment was immersed in oil containing polychloronated biphenols / dioxin. This is toxic to aquatic life and also produced by combustion in levels where is possible for it to be transported thousands of miles, only o concentrate at a low level of the food chain and work its way up. I did a major study of a felony corporate environmental crime and prosecution in the USA as an investigative journalist and studied this inside and out.

It isn’t mortally dangerous to work around with gloves but you don’t want to be throwing it down a drain, as if present, it is hazardous waste. I say if present. It’s hard to know, so maybe assume that it is. Nor do you want to ingest it or burn it. It becomes problematic up the food chain where it kills cetaceans and is teratogenic. It was also found in the breast milk of the indigenous people of Nunavut , 5,000 KM from the point source. It had ‘grass-hoppered’ over the USA, from smokestack emissions of one secondary copper and lead refinery in particular. Finally, it had landed on lichen ingested by reindeer and then killed and eaten as a staple by the first peoples living there. The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants has improved things somewhat since. I’ll stop there !
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