> On the other hand, especially for people working with it, it is a harbinger of doom.
That's overstating it. We know how to work with the stuff safely, but yeah, you don't want to put it in places where unskilled people have access to it.
If we can safely work with trans-uranic compounds and things like hydrofluoric acid, we can safely work with asbestos.
We know, as a civilization, yes, but that doesn't mean we do it.
Especially in the developing world, manual workers' rights aren't very strong and plenty of people working in shipbreaking or material recycling don't have any PPEs, or barely any.
People working with trans-uranic compounds are usually lab employees/scientists, whose employers value them higher and are willing to spend more money to protect them.
> If we can safely work with trans-uranic compounds and things like hydrofluoric acid, we can safely work with asbestos.
'We'? Certainly some highly-competent people can be trusted. But 'we'?
Have you seen an average Builders in Britain? Have you witnessed the level of training of the tradesmen, the level of not not giving a flying **, and the level of cost cutting and skirting of regulations from the management?
I've seen walls that aren't straight, windows installed upside down, insulation that it outright missing - the wall was just empty. Just this week my wife was closing 'professionally installed" blinds and the mechanism fell off the ceiling and hit her on the head - the moron was too lazy to install the retaining screws.
These are not people that should be trusted with anything more dangerous than a nail gun. maybe not even that. They behave like Javascript developers!
Except you really can't, for the same reason in both cases. Asbestos is only useful if you can use it everywhere, that's it's whole value - cheap and available.
But it's literally worse then radiation because it's inert: you can't detect it easily, the dust persists and goes everywhere, and there's no way to reliably know without expensive testing if it's in a place. And once contaminated, you probably can't get rid of all of it.
My backgarden is filled with the products of people demolishing asbestos containing fiber-cement board from some time in the 70s where evidently they just tossed it all into a section of retained wall and buried it (guess how I found out? Because I had to dig up the sewer pipe, and then discovered the reason the whole area is subsiding because it didn't magically compact itself over time either).
> asbestos containing fiber-cement board from some time in the 70s where evidently they just tossed it all into a section of retained wall and buried it
I wonder if they did this out of habit or because regulations made it difficult to dispose of otherwise?
did it wind up being like a big prominence in the backyard?
I've found where the builders of my home buried tons of stuff. I have had to haul it all off myself. Thankfully most of it is just plaster and stuff. Oddly enough I think at least one employee was committing some form of sabotage, as I found a pit of never used materials like nails at one point.
The question though is do we need to safely work with asbestos? I've seen it removed properly by professionals, but I've personally witnessed too many times of people who should know better (mostly tradesmen who are working around this stuff frequently and should have proper training) doing dumb things and exposing themselves and others (one instance needing our whole 1960s era office building vacated for decontamination). This is in a country with a complete ban on new asbestos products since the '90s and strong building regulation, so it'd be even worse in countries with weaker regulation.
And why use it? My house had a lot of asbestos-cement wall sheeting (fibro), I had much of it professionally removed and the safe plaster (for general rooms) and cellulose fibre-cement sheeting (for kitchen, bathroom) is just as good or better (the new fibre cement can be jointed nicely whereas the old asbestos cement sheeted rooms had visible seams).
For insulation etc., fibreglass, rockwool, etc. can work just as well, maybe you need slightly thicker insulation but who really cares?
There are safer alternatives for basically every application of asbestos, so why bother using something that is dangerous at every step (mining, transport, processing, manufacture, modifications (drilling, cutting, etc.), disposal) instead of alternatives?
> That's overstating it. We know how to work with the stuff safely, but yeah, you don't want to put it in places where unskilled people have access to it.
Which includes everyone renovating their home. I recently backed out of a purchase because the sellers couldn't find out if there was asbestos used in the tile glue. If there were asbestos, it would have added a significant cost and especially >> 3 months of delay in moving in because people certified to work on that shit are more rare than gold.
> If we can safely work with trans-uranic compounds and things like hydrofluoric acid, we can safely work with asbestos.
The compounds you list are generally highly regulated, very difficult to get your hands on if you can't prove why you have a legitimate need for it, pretty expensive, and you won't find them outside of places that need to have it.
As for asbestos, there are enough "jack of all trades" type handymen who don't give a fuck about safety - neither their own nor those of their client. That's why it got banned in the EU even for theoretically harmless usages.
The US produced ~31.5 megatons of asbestos between 1900 and 2003,[1] where it was widely used in construction, manufacturing, industrial processing, clothing, and even film sets and Christmas decor.[2]
The US produced less than 112 tons of plutonium,[3] the principle trans-uranium element used industrially or militarily in the US, between 1944 and 1994.[4] This was, absent nuclear testing and grossly misguided military handling, not casually spread throughout the environment and most especially not in manufactured and constructed artefacts. And where plutonium contamination did occur it's been a multi-billion-dollar, multi-century environmental catastrophe.
Your argument is specious and utterly disconnected from reality in the context of asbestos's past and present uses and distribution.
3. Others include curium, used in RTG "nuclear batteries"; americium-241, used in smoke detectors; and californium-252. All are effectively produced in trace quantities, on the order of kilograms at best, rather than tonnes.
I mean, we can work with, say, plutonium, in extremely small amounts, in extremely controlled circumstances, and there are still problems. That’s very different to how asbestos was used, though. It used to be used _everywhere_.
The R101 was a British hydrogen airship with 50 passenger cabins and a smoking room (despite being filled with hydrogen) - but the smoking room was lined with asbestos for safety.
On one hand, it really helped to reduce frequency of devastating fires in the late 19th and early 20th century. Many lives saved.
On the other hand, especially for people working with it, it is a harbinger of doom.