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Most gun owners use lead ammunition, yet half don’t practice hygiene behaviors after shooting (hsph.harvard.edu)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/science@lemmy.world
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[–] 1 point 2 days ago (6 children)

Does the lead in the exhaust come down into the air we breathe? Lead is heavy. Would probably be more in cities with airports and under flight paths. Diluted of course, but repeated every day... Perhaps a tin hat or mask would help.

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  • [–] -2 points 2 days ago (4 children)

    Atmospheric dispersion is usually actually concerning good not bad, so it should dilute across the globe fairly quickly.

    Air pollution usually becomes an issue when something like nuclear waste reaches the atmosphere, cause we ALL get to breathe in that nuclear waste.

    But honestly some (probably large) percentage of meteors are lead deposited right to the atmosphere, cause its so atomically stable nearly everything decays to it.

    So no matter what there's some lead in the soup, and I can't see jet fuel being a large contributer (to an already small amount)

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  • [–] 6 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    Well jet exhaust would be a very large contributor if it were leaded, but luckily it isn't. It's just piston powered prop planes that use leaded "avgas", anything with a turbine uses an unleaded jet fuel.

    As it is, it's pretty bad, but it could be a lot worse. Airborne lead is really quite bad for many aspects of biology. If small planes stopped burning leaded fuel today, I'm quite sure we would be able to track a measurable difference in health and educational outcomes within a decade.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago (1 child)

    Thats a good point, not even turboprops are leaded if I remember right.

    Obviously it'd require a lot of study to definitively say the impact of the lead, but I'm convinced the impact wouldn't be able to compare to natural levels in that atmospheric environment. Like we love our planes, but its still energetically really difficult for us to get them up there - but space rocks can have a hard time NOT burning up in our atmosphere. And lead is a larger than uniform part of our universe because its atomic stability, so odds are (IMO) atmospheres relatively lead-y, but have been for centuries.

    That and the difficulty creating hotspots in such a turbulent environment makes it required to increase the entire atmosphere's lead content to increase any one area to dangerous levels.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 days ago

    Well honestly, I have to admit, I'd never previously considered the amount of lead added to the atmosphere by meteors. But considering it now... only about 6% of meteors are the metallic variety. I had to look up what the average chemical makeup of these is like, but it appears that they're mostly iron and nickel, with lead making up a small percentage of the remainder, probably less than 1%. So all and all, it doesn't seem like they actually deposit all that much lead.

    Conversely, the connection between the use of leaded gasoline and lead levels in the environment is really very well documented and clear. We know that eliminating it from standard gasoline has made a profound difference. The volume of exhaust from small planes is of course dwarfed by the volume from cars and trucks, so the damage that's still occurring is significantly less, but it's still meaningful.

    So... I don't have any solid data for you here, but my intuition is that a handful of meteors probably can't add close to as much lead to the atmosphere as millions of vehicles burning leaded gas.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 days ago*

    lol no. Lead in the atmosphere is a problem, because if it's in the atmosphere, you are breathing it. Remember that next time you see a gas plant spewing out exhaust.

    Nuclear power plants will not exhaust anything except water vapor unless things go terribly wrong. Things going terribly wrong basically cannot release radiation with modern designs unless you were to bomb the core directly, with large bombs to defeat the containment building and massive amounts of stuff surrounding them...

    Fossil fuels are infinitely worse for everyone than nuclear, with or without lead.

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