There is NO, repeat, NO reliable substitute for lead in solder yet - if there was I’d be using it and so would all aerospace and medical device makers. And the EU would not have exemptions for the use of tin-lead solder for high reliability products, would they? Of course not.

Lasky is using a false straw man analogy when he states that “millions of products are compliant and have been for years. If some of these doom and gloom predictions were true, we’d know by now.”

No, we would not. The cost of analysis is very high (as much as $3000 per failure) to do the analysis. When your PC fails, what do you do with it? You can toss it (excuse me, recycle it) or you can take it to a repair center like BestBuy. And what do you think they do with it? If there’s a board problem, they replace the board. Period. All lead free products need do is to get past the 1 year warranty period and they are home free. Any no-lead manufactured product has a very high probability of doing just that, millions do (as Lasky says). Getting past 3 years is another matter. Do you want to buy a new HDTV in 3 years? How about a new car? What do you do when 3 years from now you are driving along and suddenly the car stops (30% of automobiles today is electronics and fortunately thus far the auto industry is still (at least that’s what BMW claims) using tin-lead solder. Even if they do, can they continue to get parts that are not pure tin plated? How do they know they receive parts that are tin-lead plated? NASA knows that 3-5% of the parts they get have no lead in them. They have to do lot inspection using XRF (X Ray fluorescence).

Also, it depends on the temperature and humidity and a lot of other factors as to how fast tin whiskers grow. Just go to the NASA whiskers website and read the facts for yourself. I’m not making this stuff up; I’m reporting the facts. I remain very concerned about this problem.

Lasky wrings his hands with great worry about third world recyclers - that’s why he wants the lead out of solder. I worry about friends and relatives who have implanted pacemakers that end up being recalled. Medtronic had such a FDA recall.

How is it sensible to make electronics less reliable, so there will be many times more electronics failing sooner, to recycle? This will create a larger and larger third-world recycling industry, many more people recycling discarded electronics, and even if the statistic of “accidents and injuries per ton of electronics recycled” stays flat, we will have increasing accidents [what does “safety” mean in the context of recycling, anyway?

Do the third-world recyclers eat a percentage of what they disassemble? we should make our electronics taste bad, to discourage accidental ingestion…] and these increasing accidents will then be attributed to…what? The percentage of silver in the electronics? Something else with no scientific basis? Union labor?

The real solution is to reduce the amount of electronics to be recycled, and that will make it safer.

Thus, we should make more reliable electronics. Lead in solder has been proven to reduce mechanical-shock-failures of BGA solder joints by one to two orders of magnitude, as well as prevent whiskering.

The third-world people are not going to change HOW they recycle our junk electronics, so reducing how much junk we send them reduces the number of people employed in that electronics-recycling industry, and accidents go down, even if accidents for accidental ingestion of electronics.

Further, disassembly of electronics containing pure tin will inevitably result in inhalation of tin whiskers freed from the electronics assemblies during disassembly under third-world conditions; thus, lead-free electronics actually pose a new health-and-safety risk to third-world disassemblers that was not there in the pre-ROHS days.

I urge Lasky (and others so worried about recycling) to take a stand in eliminating this health risk to electronics disassemblers by advocating the use of tin/lead-plated electronics components which will not grow these hazardous tin whiskers.

Thank you for providing this blog post!
Recently I had a discussion with an Arabic muslim woman from Egypt (one neighbour to me; the discussion where at the train so probably several people heard it) that repeated that Israel drove out the Arabs.
In our discussions we must refer to historical documents. And we must insist that historical documentation is what shows the truth about the events.

From Anders Branderud
Follower of Ribi Yehoshua in Orthodox Judaism
http://www.netzarim.co.il

The U of M did a study on E-20/E-30 and it has better mileage than gasoline.

Could you please point us to the “U of M” study? I’ve not seen that and don’t know who U of M is. My thermodynamic adjustments above are for E-100, which cannot be more efficient than gasoline — not enough carbon atoms.

Why wouldn’t they be playing similar games today?

No doubt — though the CBO studies I’ve looked at seem straight. The problem that Roger is focused upon is the “foundation layer” of all such studies — the IPCC scenarios. That means that even my favorite energy economist William Nordhaus may be understating the costs of his DICE model projections.

Meanwhile, we can be sure that the Bootleggers and Baptists are performing their roles.

Cheers, Steve

Brian, thanks for your comments.

I second your support for the NY Review of Books piece you referenced — full of typical Dyson insights. I wrote a post based on Dyson’s article, framed by this excerpt

Whether someone is serious about tackling the global-warming problem can be readily gauged by listening to what he or she says about the carbon price. Suppose you hear a public figure who speaks eloquently of the perils of global warming and proposes that the nation should move urgently to slow climate change. Suppose that person proposes regulating the fuel efficiency of cars, or requiring high-efficiency lightbulbs, or subsidizing ethanol, or providing research support for solar power—but nowhere does the proposal raise the price of carbon. You should conclude that the proposal is not really serious and does not recognize the central economic message about how to slow climate change. To a first approximation, raising the price of carbon is a necessary and sufficient step for tackling global warming. The rest is at best rhetoric and may actually be harmful in inducing economic inefficiencies. — William Nordhaus

If this chapter were widely read, the public understanding of global warming and possible responses to it would be greatly improved. — Freeman Dyson