Mercury!

[beige_alert]

Back when I was a little kid, I read in a book of some kind about a higher-efficiency power plant that was to use a mercury-vapor topping cycle combined with a regular steam bottoming cycle. Mercury would be boiled at high temperature but low-ish pressure, used to run a turbine (that's got to be a weird turbine design) and then condensed back to liquid at still quite high temperature, boiling water to steam in the mercury condenser. That steam would then run a normal steam turbine and be condensed at ambient temperature in the usual way. Now, even as a small child, this didn't seem like a great idea to me. By this time, back in the early eighties, safety had been invented. Giant mercury boiler? You'd be better off living downwind of an RBMK.

It was with delight that just yesterday I encountered the weird and wonderful website The Self Site with its Museum of RetroTech. It turns out that several such power plants were actually built, back in the days before safety had been invented. There are even photos of what's left of one in the Mercury page.

Comments

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

I find it interesting that mercury has apparently become several orders of magnitude more toxic since I was in high school. Back then, breaking a mercury thermometer was an occasion for everyone in the science class to play with the drop of mercury. Now, I suspect it's not even legal to own a mercury thermometer, and if you break one they evacuate the buiding and call in the hazmat team.

Perhaps the reason the world is so screwed up today is that I actually did die of all the hazardous substances I was exposed to as a child that everyone freaks out about today. In addition to mercury, there was asbestos, and the time I diluted hydrochloric acid the wrong way (adding water to the acid) and got a faceful of HCl(g), and burning myself on the glass tubing we got to shape over Bunsen burners, and I don't know what all else. Not to mention all the chemicals we could just reach into the cabinet and use. Dangerous stuff, chemicals, you know; these days high school students study them on video. And this is hell.

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

Well, even back in the old days the mercury power turbine cycle was regarded as a toxicity hazard. Literally tons of the stuff in circulation at high temperatures. You could have a pretty exciting accident, and even the routine leakage would have to be pretty significant. But the current alarm over the milligram in a lightbulb is rather overblown. On the other hand, if you worked in a fluorescent bulb recycling facility every day all day, you'd be wise to be concerned about how you're handling it.

I think we've got three changes in attitude. The idea of "poison" has been broadened from 'causes you to keel over dead on the spot' to also include cumulative effects. The realization that after the stuff goes up the stack or out the pipe, it doesn't really go 'away' but goes somewhere and adds to the stuff from every one else's stacks and pipes. And the just plain panic over anything that somehow gets into the 'panic' category rather than the 'stuff to ignore' box. Mercury fits into all three of those.

Things are different in the schools now. Wouldn't want anyone to get hurt, or be afraid of getting hurt. Unless they are afraid of getting hurt by the other students beating them up. That's fine, of course. They can all risk getting smashed in car crashes on the way to school, too, because car wrecks, like bullies, are too boringly familiar to be considered harmful. Only weird stuff could be harmful.

I was doing real organic synthesis in high school, with all the heating of flammable toxic liquids that entails.

I have a drawer full of mercury thermometers here in the lab. I try to avoid using them, because I don't want to have to deal with it when we break one. Easier to use the ones with the green stuff inside.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

I bet over a million homes in the US still use mercury switches in their thermometers. (Shh! don't let them know.)

Another part of the equation is that as we as a culture have matured our risk threshold has dropped: we're much less likely to accept people getting injured. (I think at least part of that is because we're increasingly secular and people don't worry as much about someone getting injured or dying if there's a Heaven.) We increasingly use lawyers to punish companies that do bad things, rather than looking to the government for regulation, and a side-effect of that is that anyone who lets anything bad or dangerous happen, or thinks that through inaction, harm may come to someone, tries to avert that situation through any means possible. I think a total surveillance/nanny state is practically inescapable once litigation is considered a reasonable method of self-defense.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

We increasingly use lawyers to punish companies that do bad things, rather than looking to the government for regulation,

This is not due to any lack of regulation, but rather a lack of willingness on the part of the government to actually do its job from the point of view of the people. We have a ridiculous amount of regulation and bureaucracy, but put "pro business" Replublicans in the political appointee slots and all that regulation and bureaucracy ends up doing is making the system more incomprehensible and perpetuating the bureaucracy without actually protecting the environment, workers, or consumers.

The litigiousness of society, however, is not in my view a product of ineffective government regulation (except within the court system itself). A court culture where lawyers are allowed to bring any action, no matter how ludicrous, before a judge without facing any penalty, and to bring such actions on a contingent fee basis where if they win, even if it's a long shot, they get 30% of an enormous damage award, creates an enormous oversupply of parasitic lawyers who actively encourage clients to file suits in cases that should never have gone to court. And a society that has been trained in the idea that any time something bad happens, it's always somebody else's fault and their responsibility to fix it provides eager customers for said parasites.

When they make me king of the world, I'll fix it by mandating two things. First, adding a fundamental principle to the Constitution: just because something bad happens does not mean you're entitled to blame someone else for it; you must prove the other party actually did something blameworthy before you can claim damages or convict them of an offense. In short, "shit happens." Second, serious penalties for wasting the court's time with frivolous garbage, beginning with full responsibility for the cost of the wasted time and rising to disbarment of the lawyers involved and criminal punishment for repeat offending plaintiffs.

[dan-ad-nauseam.livejournal.com]

And the use of the tort system for deterrence, to a large extent, predates noncriminal regulation.