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.