At 03:13 PM 12/12/2012, Jed Rothwell wrote:
This is a popular song published by Metro Trains of Melbourne, Australia:
<http://dumbwaystodie.com/>http://dumbwaystodie.com/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2012/nov/28/dumb-ways-to-die-video
There have been some notably dangerous cold fusion experiments.
Abd's whacking at beryllium comes to mind.
Well, I didn't "whack" at beryllium. I considered it, very briefly,
and very quickly rejected the idea. However, there is more to the story.
I bought a piece of beryllium from a seller on eBay who said it was
"a solid chunk bar" from a "BIG Name Scientific Company."
$37 for 5.85 grams. Turns out that someone is selling pieces of foil,
for $10 initial bid for about a cm^2, that might have been fine for
me. After all, the alphas can't penetrate more than a very thin layer
of Beryllium. But, grasshopper here had jumped for the piece. I'll be
able to resell it when I'm done, I'd think.
When it arrived, after handling it a bit, I noticed what appeared to
be some "grime" on two edges. Some rubbed off on my finger. After
washing my finger, I rubbed some off onto a piece of tissue paper,
and looked at it under a microscope. Fine particles, looks like metal powder.
So I wrote the seller. He said that the grime was probably burnt oil
from cutting. Ah. It was cut! After a bit of back and forth where he
was a tad defensive, i.e., if you are worried, just send it back, he
finally explained to me that the material had been cut by a friend,
who had a vacuum hood cutting system keeping the material wet with
oil. That might be beryllium-safe, if proper displosal is followed.
However, by now I knew, with high likelilood, that this could be
beryllium dust clinging to this piece. (It could also be contaminant
metals from other cutting operations.)
He had obviously purchased bar stock beryllium, and was cutting it
down into pieces. Not a bad idea, especially given that he had his
friend cut it. I was, after all, thinking of using a hacksaw (I did
know that beryllium was toxic, but, hey, I'd be careful! Well, I read
a lot more....)
Supposedly, he had cleaned the oil off the pieces with solvent. But
that might leave dust, which, after all, would not dissolve in the
solvent, he'd have to rub it off mechanically. Or clean it off
thoroughly with clean oil and then use solvent.
It's a tiny quantity. If someone was handling something like this
every day, yeah, this could be worrisome.
However, people should know what they are getting. As I advised him,
he added a warning about beryllium hazards to his listing, he is
selling more pieces. It advises people that beryllium can be
dangerous and to research beryllium. I hope he is more careful to
clean the pieces before shipping them.
So what do I do with the bit of tissue I have with a tiny amount of
what may well be beryllium dust on it? And how do I clean the piece
of metal, so that it is safe to handle? The risk of inhaling a toxic
level of beryllium from this small amount of dust is quite low. I
tried to find minimum total amounts of beryllium to be exempt from
hazardous waste regulations. No luck so far.
The particles are under ten microns, I think. Beryllium is 1.85
g/cm^3. A particle may then weigh roughly 2 x 10^-12 g per cubic
micron, or under 2 nanograms for the 1000 cubic micron particle size.
I might have a thousand such particles, so I come up with a total
guesstimate of 2 micrograms. I'd never be able to weigh this. (My
best scale has 10 mg resolution.)
In the U.S. the peak exposure limit is 25 micrograms/m^3. All of that
dust would have to become airborne and yet be concentrated in a small
volume to be a serious problem. Skin or oral exposure aren't nearly
so dangerous. Acute berylliosis, though, is not the seriously
dangerous disease, it would be the chronic form, which requires,
generally, extended exposure (to smaller amounts) for long periods,
as with employment processing beryllium. Russia has very tight
standards for routine beryllium exposure, it's 10 nanograms/m^3.
However, the U.S. standards for *drinking water* are 200 nanograms per liter.
As to emissions in air, the U.S. standard is a maximum amount of 2
g/hr or 10 g/day. If I had some industrial operation going on here, I
could be pumping out the amount of beryllium dust I've got over 100
times per second, as long as the air concentration did not rise above
the g/volume limit.
If I wash this down the drain, it will be dispersed and remain
dispersed, to way, way below hazardous levels. Until the waste water
is processed, it would not be able to become airborn in any quantity.
The drinking water standard would allow 2 micrograms to exist in 10
liters of water. I would be at that level if I'm merely running the
faucet as I wash the piece, and it would continue to disperse
further. That procedure, washing it off, is less likely to create
airborne dust, and it looks like the waste water will remain safe. So
I'll probably do that. And then I'll have a nice clean piece of
beryllium to whack with some alpha particles.
(I might have been looking at obsolete standards. But there are so
many fudge factors in my analysis that I'm still not concerned.)
Next someone is going to get hysterial about generating neutrons in
my apartment. I wish I'd get enough to actually worry about (in which
case I'd control the effect to keep the levels very safe). But I
won't, the levels of alpha radiation from my Am-241 source are way
too low. I'll be lucky if I can detect them above background.
Stan Gleeson and his partner died young. McKubre described their
experiment as "hair raising" they were so hazardous. Gleeson thought
they were reducing radioactivity but McKubre thinks they were
vaporizing radioactive material and breathing in the particles.
Could be.
Mizuno was afraid to go into the room where Ohmori conducted his
experiments. Mizuno's own high temperature experiments seemed
dangerous to some experts I consulted with, who said that his
stainless steel cells were probably embrittled with hydrogen, and
close to the breaking point.
Rossi's devices look dangerous to me. They are scaled up 2 to 5
orders of magnitude larger than they need to be for any rational
business purpose.
I do not understand why people take unnecessary risks.
Well, it might be foolish sometimes, sometimes there is an issue
about "necessary." What's that? Is it "necessary* for me to generate
a few neutrons. No, but it's way cool, I happen to think. People even
jump out of airplanes because they think it's cool. My kids did. Life is risky.
Rossi's devices, if they work, were being operated sometimes under
conditions that seemed quite dangerous. However, the large "devices,"
i.e., the megawatt reactor, are merely highly multiplied small
devices, which is a relatively safe approach. I'd worry about the Hot Cat!
People handled beryllium for many years, with practically no
precautions. Because we don't get sick immediately, unless it's a lot
of beryllium and we are something like 2-5% of the population that is
particularly sensitive, it simply doesn't present an appearance of
danger. (And it takes some substantial exposure to develop acute
berylliosis.) The eBay seller handled these pieces and didn't seem to
be aware of how dangerous Beryllium can be, and yet he might be just
fine, as long as he doesn't do this day in and day out for years. It
is not *perceived* as a high danger, I pretty much had to force
myself to take this seriously.
If I'd concluded that this was a serious disposal problem, I'd have
had some difficult choices to make. I still have some *legal* risk
with what I've written. Supposedly one does not dispose of beryllium
in a waste water system without the permission of the treating
agency. However, this is de minimus. Essentially, I'm deciding that
the amount is so low that it's not worth their time to consider the
matter. Beryllium is in lots of things, and ambient air may have up
to 0.2 picograms/m^3 of beryllium. Beryllium normal concentration in
soil is stated in one source at 6 ppm. So my 2 micrograms of
Beryllium, to put this into perspective, would match that in a third
of a gram of dirt. I'm getting less and less worried. We don't treat
a muddy pair of pants as hazardous waste, we toss it in the washing machine....
(Beryllium-contaminated clothing is not supposed to be laundered,
that's in the standards. However, they are contemplating far higher
levels of contamination. On the other hand, there are procedures for
disposing of broken beryllium windows at the Advanced Photon Source
that end up being very conservative.
http://centraldocs.aps.anl.gov/policy_procedures/user/docs/APS_1191124.pdf.
However, they have the resources in place to do this. It is not
necessarily "insanely" conservative. Routine environmental beryllium
is suspected of being a *routine carcinogen.* So the goal is to
reduce exposure as much as possible. At some point, though, there is
a diminishing return, where the exposure is below routine
environmental exposure. They actually say that no dangerous Beryllium
has been detected from broken beryllium windows, from actual
sampling, but ... they proceed to treat it as quite dangerous. They
justify this because a broken window is not considered a "finished
article," which isn't considered hazardous. Yeah, technically. What I
notice with my piece of cut beryllium is that the edges are a bit
fractured. This stuff, when it breaks, can break roughly, it appears.
So ... maybe ... sometimes.)
