presents more of a blog variant
23 June 2005
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On personal experience with mercury My father worked 41 years for a large chemical company. Instead of scholarships, the way his outfit gave employee sons help for college expenses was to put them to work in the plant during between semester breaks. After my freshman college year, in the summers of 1966-8, I worked for them in a mercury cell dominated part of the factory, which produced high quality chlorine and caustic soda (NaOH). The chlorine was the thing I worried about at the time; everybody involved knew it as one of the poison gases during the first World War, among the original, all too widely used, 'Weapons of Mass Destruction', which then brought about realistic and otherwise fears. My dad told me that I’d learn a new way to breathe out in the plant, which I thought was funny, but turned out to be true. The first year, I was a night watchman, and once had to help with a guy who’d “gotten a snootful”, by walking into one of the invisible pockets of gas when not paying proper attention. It wasn’t nice. We wore gas masks around our necks at all times, and quickly learned to sniff slightly before inhaling deeply. If there was a touch of gas, just flip the mask up. Within a couple of weeks, it became automatic. There were a lot of chlorine leaks. But the joker awaiting was the mercury, which wasn’t considered to be a serious safety threat at the time, though one was supposed to be a little careful around it. The Solvay building was about the size of a football field, with meter (3 feet) wide metal boxes running its entire width, on girders one story up above an open concrete floor. Each “cell” contained about 3 tons of mercury (as I remember it), over which ran brine, while 50,000 amps of electricity (at a small fraction of a volt) ran through the mercury, which acted as an electrolytic cathode. The results of the interaction were a very pure form of sodium hydroxide (a very much stronger version of household oven cleaner), hydrogen, and chlorine gas. The latter two had to be carefully kept apart; they got together at one of the company’s other plants one night, and the whole place basically vanished, very suddenly. The hydrogen was piped to another building, to be distilled with water into highly concentrated peroxide, literally to be used as rocket fuel, in another spectacularly dangerous process. The magnetic fields around the cells were incredible, while the air temperature in the building I once measured to be 50° C (130° F). All metal in that awesomely corrosive environment tended to soften and break up, so that the mercury from a cell would regularly crash down to the floor below, where it would form shining pools maybe 10 meters (30 feet) in diameter and a couple of centimeters (an inch) deep. Part of my job as a day laborer the second summer, whenever one of those breaks happened, was to use an ordinary water hose to wash these toxic pools into channels cut into the floor, where wooden boxes were supposed to separate it from the washing water, which ran on into a neighboring creek. Anyone who knows chemistry can imagine the amount of mercury that moved into the air with a place that hot, and then into workers, including me (where it was absorbed into our bones, to keep on poisoning slowly throughout life). At the end of many work days, my 10 Karat gold high school ring would be amalgamated to a silvery hue from mercury on its surface, just from what it picked out of the air. One of mercury’s earliest uses has been to separate gold from ores, which continues where laws are lax. The regular guys who worked in that plant were tested weekly, and would be furloughed when the amount of mercury in their urine got to be above a certain level. This was done not out of charity, but because that amount correlated with getting too crazy to function, even at the low level that they were expected to. Mercury, after all, is what made the mad hatter(s) that way, back when it was used as sizing for felt, and hatters did their work by hand. I have to shake my head when I see all the worry now over the amount in things like thermometers. Of course, I, like a lot more others, have big mercury amalgam fillings in my teeth, too, from the same “what, me worry?” period. For counterpoint, the guidelines about how mercury should be treated were discussed in an AP report. The contemporary extreme paranoia about a spilled few drops, or even the presence of a contained ounce, should put exposure to literally tons into perspective. That Solvay plant was “losing” 160 pounds of mercury a day, which pissed me off at the time not yet environmentally, but because the stuff cost $500 for an 80 pound “flask”, so they were wasting the equivalent of my whole summer salary every 4 days. With that, and the other stupidities I saw, it amazed me how the chemical industry ever made any money. One night, for example, a guy opened the wrong valve, and 10,000 gallons of the pure caustic went down the creek. There were minor compensations. Carrying one of those full flasks, which were steel cylinders about the size of a 2 liter bottle of soda, but weighing a total of 40 kg (90 pounds), along the huge electrical input bars that ran open alongside the walkway, was quite entertaining. The mercury would slosh weirdly inside, and the metal canister would be drawn intensely towards the open conductor bars. I weighed all of 60 kg (125 pounds) at the time, so balance was not a trivial issue. It certainly added to my appreciation of the practical usefulness of basic physics. One could easily suspend very large hammers in mid air over the anodes, too, and we did that for entertainment sometimes. Although the amperage was huge, and the environment damp, they weren’t instantly deadly, because the voltage was so low. One could actually touch them; they just felt warm and strange. Doing so wasn’t good for watches (and probably for nerves or other body cells), though. The Minimata stories about catastrophic poisoning of children in Japan by an industrial plant very similar to the one I worked in started coming out a few years later, with W. Eugene Smith’s memorable photographs, and the Solvay plant became one of the original Superfund sites. No compensation, as far as I know, has ever been even proposed for any of us who worked there, or in sister plants. It was only the first of the experiences that have led me to be so doubtful of government or industry protestations about how safe things are, and so critical. I won’t bore anyone with my own symptoms, which differ from those who encountered it as children, but I am very regularly reminded of this poison in my body, as are those who are around me when the anger it enhances surfaces most obviously. |
PS -- 11 September 2007 |
The automatic flipping up of the gas mask in response to the smell of chlorine retains a residual for me, too. Learning to do it was a matter of life and death, literally. Almost all pesticides and herbicides are based on, have measureable quantities left unreacted in their mixtures, and break down freeing chlorine gas. I still react instinctively to very small quantities, and that warning remains correct. The closely associated poisons used in silly places like lawns, or in massive quantities on our foodstuffs, may not be as immediately deadly, but cumulatively they are anything but harmless to humans, to other species, and to our planet. Cancer and other disease responses to pesticides is yet one more by product of human impatience, ignorance, and greed that has killed more Americans than al-Qaida...and little or nothing is being done to stop the toll from building further. |
PPS -- 1 November 2007 |
| From another's, but related, perspective about smaller local quantities, |
| "This year I spent some lazy late-summer days watching loons patrol a wilderness area lake I'd backpacked to. I should have been totally relaxed and enjoying this gorgeous and remote spot in the Adirondacks, but I couldn't help wondering if these birds had succeeded in hatching a brood, with no sign of little ones about. A friend at the Biodiversity Research Institute had told me of a paper they were soon publishing, which demonstrated the negative impacts of methyl mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants in the Midwest on loon behavior, physiology, survival, and reproductive success in the Northeast. The most impacted pairs David et al studied showed signs of lethargy and aberrant behavior (crazy loons), and they also "fledged" 41 percent fewer young. The birds' body burden of mercury increased 8.4 percent each year during the study." Erik Hoffner |
The beating goes on: an update of an original posting on 31 January 2009 |
Mercury's further penetration into American's lives Tom Philpott reported a few days ago that a problem I thought, with good reason, would have long ago been laid to rest, but instead has beome actually even more invisibly pervasive. It surprised to me to find that chlorine/caustic production based on multi-ton mercury cells continues even in the United States, albeit with much more carried on in places that are even less concerned about either poisoning workers or the future. However, one of the largest users of products from this process apparently has long been polluting not just the planet, but also contaminating America's favorite sweetener, i.e., high fructose corn syrup. That inadequately nutritive stuff (another "edible food-like substance", according to Kurt Michael Friese) has thereby not just been making the country fatter, but mentally more defective, too. The personal horror story that will follow happened more than 40 years ago. How this same health destroying process would be continuing in so many locations, and would have been allowed to enter the heart of the most common food supplies, boggles the mind. When I worked in one of those manufacturing plants, the caustic was used to etch circuit boards, and that facility was closed, largely for its inherent toxicity, but also lack of profitablility, more than 30 years ago, in 1977. I have linked the scientific article that Philpott pointed out about the continuing presence of chlorine-caustic production via mercury cells, along with some indications of its previously hidden presence in the food supply. If these are accurate, there will be others found, whenever someone bothers to look. There seems likely to be an awfully big puddle of sludge hidden under this rock! Those of us who have come to avoid industrial food products have all the more reason to be thankful for our choice. Once more, taking the trouble to be more careful seems useful, even if (or perhaps because) heavy metals have been and continue to be distributed so widely by other means. Many of their exposure effects are cumulative, through lifetimes, and essentially irreversible. In nature, they were not highly concentrated, or at least not chemically unbound, and therefore unavailable to interact with living systems. The primary reason, as for so many other toxins, that their inappropriate appearances have not been noticed directly is that no one has thought to look for enough of them in places like the stuff on grocery store shelves. |