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NNadir

(35,149 posts)
2. I heard this "mad hatter" story differently with respect to the use of mercury.
Sat Oct 19, 2024, 08:39 AM
Oct 2024

I always thought it was from the practice of using mercury to brighten hat pins, with the mercury sometimes being spread over the surface by use of the hatter's lips. I'm not sure if that's true though; your explanation seems more likely.

Metallic mercury needs to be oxidized to exhibit toxicity as I understand it. Thus the toxicity of metallic mercury is likely to be accumulated over the long term, not immediately, as the mercury is oxidized to the Hg(II) oxidation state.

Mercurous chloride, an Hg(I) salt, Hg2Cl2 is only very sparingly soluble, of course, and was once used as a therapeutic agent for gastrointestinal disorders, called calomel. I believe my parents may have had some. I do know as a child, when thermometers broke, my parents, neither of whom graduated from high school - my father barely graduated from junior high school - allowed me to play with the mercury on the floor before they swept it up. Whether this had neurological effects on me is unclear to me; I am who I am.

It has been proposed - I'd do things differently since I don't consider fission products to be waste - to sequester radioactive 129I as the Hg(I) salt, Hg2(127+129)I2 salt, one of the most insoluble salts known. In most commercial regimes now or previously utilized to reprocess used nuclear fuel, it's simply been released into the environment, because of it's extremely low radiotoxicity did not justify the cost of recovering it. Over tens of millions of years, the decay of 129I would slowly release metallic mercury, preventing oxidation over all of the element to the soluble Hg(II), since Hg(II) is reduced to Hg(I) by the metal.

I wrote a sardonic essay about this over at DKos where I was ultimately banned for telling the truth, that opposing nuclear power kills people:

Radioactive Isotopes from French Commercial Nuclear Fuel Found In Mississippi River.

An excerpt:

One might ask why those nasty French don't stop releasing radioiodine or whether they could do so if they wished. The answer probably is that they could probably capture all of their iodine, but to do so might be expensive. "Pay any expense!" you say, "It's radioactive!

Bullshit. I contend that if the number of people who have died from French radioiodine is not zero, it is very, very, very, very close to zero. Suppose that to prevent the release of radioiodine we required those nasty French to spend 100 million dollars to capture and contain all of their iodine. How many lives would be saved? One, maybe two, if that. Now ask yourself how many lives could be saved by donating 100 million dollars to an AIDs prevention program in Zimbabwe. I am morally averse to putting a 100 million dollar price tag on one life just because that life might be injured by a nuclear related event.


Personally, I'm rather fond of 129I and can think of better uses for it than dumping it, in particular as a source of valuable xenon. That isotope, 129I, has some interesting nuclear properties.

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