I just don't get this lethal codwallop. Lightning is only lethal, (and there not every time) if it strikes you.
My point was not that the electrons will leap across the room—the voltage is not high enough for that—but that accidental contact with a live circuit, or a charged capacitor, at these voltages can injure or kill.
We, those who build and repair amplifiers, are far more readily expose to such voltages than riders on the subway or underground. You are introducing a red herring.
High voltages are only lethal if you happen to slam a large current from one side of your body to the other through the heart area, and even then NOT ALWAYS....usually by sticking your stupid finger somewhere you shouldn't!
Accidents happen, particularly to people who work on such equipment, touch equipment where insulation breach or failure can occur, replace tubes, etc. If a tube cap, which most of those transmitter tubes have, is live, one can easily contact fatal levels of voltage.
Forty years ago I was working on a tube amplifier and grounded a hot chassis across my chest. I had touched my hand to the chassis while using a scope probe and with the other hand changed a setting on a oscilloscope and touched the metal chassis with the other hand. This was US mains voltage, so it was only 120 VAC. It was not lethal, but I learned to never trust a tube chassis. I was not being stupid,
per se, but it was an accidental contact. I learned a valuable lesson. Most people who work on tube gear have similar stories.
My British co-workers told me similar stories for 240 VAC and how much worse that was. Others have told me stories about having high voltage DC where they couldn't let go.
I've also heard stories from guitarists about live chassis because of reversed plugs or failed death caps, and read such stories which include death as the outcome.
You routinely get on metros, electric trains where power lines above or below have voltages anything between 630V DC and 23Kv AC, yet I don't see everyone swooning or dying.
This is irrelevant and a red herring. I routinely drive by substations where AC transmission lines at hundreds of kV are stepped down. So what? This is not a tube amplifier on a bench or shelf.
Again, one is not on top of this as one would be with a tube amplifier and as long as one is on the platform, not inches away, the risk is non-existent.
Somehow the mere fact a potential difference exists of up to 1KV DC seems to make the tube audio brigade pronounce "shock horror" and a cult of the extraordinarily dangerous. This is just getting STUPID.
High voltage is dangerous. Denying this doesn't change the facts.
Fukujima even, killed nobody, (but of course people totally forgot the enormous 1000s of casualties of the Tsunami!)
Fukushima Daiichi was the
worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, and vast quantities of radiation were released:
10% of the amount from Chernobyl. The ground is so contaminated that nobody will be able to live there for longer than human recorded history. The amount of contaminated seawater is unknown, but simply staggering.
Radioactive iodine and cesium were found in California waters.
The tsunami is
irrelevant to whether or not it is safe for people to own or use equipment with high-voltage transmitting tubes operating at tens of kV.
All of this is a non-sequitur and a distraction; I merely point it out to rebut your argument.
It really gets up my nose this paranoia about perfectly normal energy and ionisation, states and somehow having to "WARN, DO SOMETHING, MAKE UP SOME STORY".
I did not fabricate any claims, and my
off-hand observation remains cogent and true that 10 kVDC to 20 kVDC is a lethal voltage.
No need to be angry or hijack the thread to spout red herrings about radioactive penguins riding the subways to their jobs at nuclear-power plants. Such busy penguins, one wonders how they have time to eat, breed, or tangle with high voltage.
"Ever been to Utah? Ra-di-a-tion. Yes, indeed. You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense. Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year. They ought to have them, too."—J. Frank Parnell*
* The quote, for those of you not familiar with 80's cult films, is from
Repo Man (1984), a work of genius. The term "goggle-box" is slang for television, dating to the 1955 to 1960 period. Interesting how a minor change makes it into "google box" or computer.