[sdiy] caps with PCB's in them

[anthony]

I actually know quite a bit about the chemistry & toxicology of PCB/dioxins. 
I majored in chemistry here at Indiana University and there is a sealed PCB 
dump that Westinghouse left years & years ago (and doesn't/didn't want to 
pay to clean up). The whole downstream area was an EPA Superfund site for a 
while. I thought chloracne came about through chronic exposure to the 
dioxins in the PCB's. So I guess in my case in wouldn't be chronic. I thik 
my question was mostly acedemic though, because it is quite easy for me to 
contribute every ailment I have directly or indirectly from having chronic 
pancreatitis. I had to have my spleen out because of scar tissue from the 
pancreatitis along with a whole host of other ailments that I won't get into 
here. Let's just suffice it to say that if you get pancreatitis and it 
should have killed you, it will debilitate you for the rest of your life.

> When you burn PCBs they can produce dioxins (for example: in a 
> transformer fire).
>
> Dioxins are extremely poisonous, the primary symptom of dioxin  exposure 
> is "chlor-acne" a severe and disfiguring skin ailment.
>
> If you have not burst out in plague-like skin lesions, then the PCB 
> liquid did not get hot enough to produce dioxins.
>
> On Jan 30, 2008, at 6:32 PM, anthony wrote:
>
>> A while ago I was messing with a Matsushita oil capacitor. I didn't 
>> realise that the solder blob at one end was not only soldering the  lead 
>> to the cap, but also holding the oil in. So a lot of capacitor  oil got 
>> in my desolering iron and big puffs of it went into my  face. I think 
>> this thing was in some sort of tube audio equipment,  but I can't 
>> remember for sure. I was just wondering if anyone knew  if Matsushita 
>> ever used PCB's in their caps. I ask because I have a  Matsushita 
>> motor-start oil cap that makes a point of saying that it  is NON-PCB. So 
>> this begs the question: did they at one time USE  PCB's and are making a 
>> point of clarifying for environmentally  consious end-users or 
>> constrasting older caps that weren't so. I  looked up the desccription of 
>> PCB's in my Merck Index, but it lists  the isomers separately - there 
>> doesn't seem to be an entry for the  mixture that would indubitably be 
>> used on the industrial scale in  capcitors. It kind of reminded me of 
>> what air conditioning freon  pumps smell like when you try to use them as 
>> vacuum pumps (it  works, but they overheat because there's no good way to 
>> cool them)  and that oil is some kind of heavy ester. I would expect 
>> PCB's to  smell like mothballs. I have connections at teh University who 
>> could run a sample of the oil through a GC/mass-spec., but I  thought I'd 
>> ask you guys for opinions.
>>
>> It's hard for me to speparate new physical ailments from old ones  since 
>> I've been suffering from chronic pancreatitis since 2003. But  I've had a 
>> chronic sinus infection and had to have my spleen out  subsequent to 
>> having this capacitor come open. My gut feeling is  that they are 
>> unrelated. The chronic sinus infection is chronic  because I had to have 
>> my spleen out. But still, from time to time,  I wonder...
>>
>> So what do youse guys(goils?) think?
>>
>> Oh wait - I checked and the big 3.5uF/450VAC motor-start cap with 
>> "NON-PCB" is a GE cap. The Matsushita is a 0.55uF 2300VAC microwave- oven 
>> capacitor. It says, " No PCB's" on it.
>>
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