Re: ebay caps

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: Ed Phillips <evp-at-pacbell-dot-net> 

"Although PCBs in the soil can devalue your property, they arent such a
great
health risk as long as you keep them sealed up in that capacitor. The
only
problem is, you can never get rid of them cheaply unless you have stupid
garbagemen. If you ever see a piece of old electric equipment with a
price
too good to be true, its probaly got PCBs."

	A number of years ago there was a note in QST about handling leaking
capacitors with PCB in them.  [A lot of older capacitors with CHLORINAL,
PYRANOL, etc. tend to leak a bit around the terminals.]  The author was
a doctor with some familiarity with PCB toxicity.  His recommendation
was that, if you washed your hands after handling and before sticking
them in your mouth, there was no health hazard at all.  Getting rid of
them is another problem.  I personally suspect a lot of the furor over
PCB's is due to unreasoning fear rather than factual data (seems to me
some of the real problems came when PCB contaminated oil was sold as
cooking oil somewhere in North Africa).  Thank god the public has yet to
become aware of TC's!

Ed