Enter the Popular Science/InnoCentive Mercury Removal Challenge

Mercury is nasty stuff. Anyone working on this challenge should be sure to avoid handling it!

I adore the planet. Mercury that is.....;)

How times have changed.When I was in junior high,back in the sixties,the physics teacher brought in a bottle of liquid mercury,and let us pour some in the palm of our hand,just to illustrate its properties as a liquid,I seem to recall.I always remember how heavy the the small plastic bottle of mercury was.

Yea I remember how they use to have us handle mercury in grade school, just like you said. In my youth paying my way through college I worked at Amerock in Rockford Illinois as a dyecaster. It was a high paying part-time job they gave to only the right students. My job required me to dip the flashing from the casting into PCB's coolant with my asbestos gloves which saturated my hands with a greenish coolant. When the PCB's were heated the fumes turned into dangerous dioxins.

I didn't quit because of that I quit when my hand almost got caught in the dye, two of my high school friends weren't as lucky as I was they got their hands cut off in a similar machine there right before I quit, thank god they didn't regulate anything back then. In fact one of the names of the young men who got their hands cut off was Lucky, no kidding. On weekend we would go to the park and camp out on freshly sprayed DDT lawn, provided by the farmer next to the park. Boy those were the days weren't they.

Ron Bennett

@rlb2

Reminds me of the stories of the Radium Girls, antimony cups, all the radium cures, all the mercury cures, acetanilide headache powders, morphine soothing syrups,...

People transfer their hopes to new discoveries, which allows charlatans and profiteers (whether they be of the medical variety or the industrial variety) to make a few bucks at the expense of other people's health.

I just wonder how it would be today without some people arguing for consumer protection. Remember going to the gas station and having a choice of what type of gas you wanted, regular or unleaded, regular had lead in it and was cheaper. As a service to my hard working dad I help paint our house inside and out with lead paint.

Ron Bennett

Wow Ron, now the whole world knows what happened to your hair, or was it your brain?

You are a prime candidate for the job as a tobacco ad writer. Surely BP has a place for you too in their public relations department.

This is the first I have heard of mercury concentrations in natural gas. The industry has done well in keeping a lid on this considering all the discussions lately about the dangers of fracking. There is of course one solution for reckless drilling company owners that is guaranteed to work, and it is the same solution God came up with for Sodom and Gomhorra. Turn them all into salt.

Ha, the government told me I didn't need it, well with that being said there's a lot more of us out there then you think they just didn't know about it. Maybe I was conceived under a mushroom cloud like this one.

http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/19/12834002-55-years-ago-6-stood-under-atomic-bomb-blast-on-purpose?lite&__utma=14933801.1669616745.1342733223.1342733223.1342733223.1&__utmb=14933801.3.10.1342733223&__utmc=14933801&__utmx=-&__utmz=14933801.1342733223.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none)&__utmv=14933801.|8=Earned%20By=msnbc%7Ccover=1^12=Landing%20Content=Mixed=1^13=Landing%20Hostname=www.nbcnews.com=1^30=Visit%20Type%20to%20Content=Earned%20to%20Mixed=1&__utmk=142269874

Ron Bennett

suggestivesimon I thought of what you said when I found this in the news today:

France's 20th century radium craze still haunts Paris

Marie Curie's discovery was used for everything from lipsticks to water fountains, Curie herself died at 66 from her prolonged, unprotected exposure to radium:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48244261/ns/technology_and_science-science/?__utma=14933801.54903131.1342740590.1342740590.1342740590.1&__utmb=14933801.1.10.1342740590&__utmc=14933801&__utmx=-&__utmz=14933801.1342740590.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none)&__utmv=14933801.|8=Earned%20By=msnbc%7Ccover=1^12=Landing%20Content=Mixed=1^13=Landing%20Hostname=www.nbcnews.com=1^30=Visit%20Type%20to%20Content=Earned%20to%20Mixed=1&__utmk=187415848

I don't know why msnbc.com has such long links anymore maybe because they were officially taken over by NBC news, msnbc.com is not affiliated and don't have the same political agenda as msnbc news that you see on your tv.

Ron Bennett

Greetings my fellow science buffs:
For those of you that do not know, not all Mercury is created equal. Elemental Mercury, like from old thermometers and such are not really that dangerous in while in its liquid form. Elemental Mercury, for the most part, reaches toxic levels which are dangerous to living organisms when it is in the form of a gas or vapor. Playing with a mason jar full of Mercury will not pose much of a danger to an adult, or even a child, as long as one has no cuts or open wounds or bruises which would facilitate the Mercury to permeate into the skin and into the bloodstream,. All one would have to do is wash their hands really well after handling it. The following is from an article that I read which explains this very well. I found it to be a very informative article written by Heraclitus, whom I am certain is the owner of the website, www.heracliteanriver.com.
For educational purposes, I am sure that he would not be against me sharing a bit of his very well written article with you.

For the complete article, in which I recommend you read in its entirety, visit: www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=246

"The Facts About Mercury Poisoning: Its (Supposed) Dangers, And When To Be Really Worried" Written by the author on August 16, 2011

'Quick quiz: rank the following three situations in terms of the danger they pose to your child.

You find your child playing outside with a drop of liquid mercury from a broken thermometer. He’s been handling it for a half hour, and you think he even ate some of it.
Your child accidentally knocks over a lamp with a compact fluorescent bulb in it, and the bulb breaks, though the shards end up out of the way so your child can’t be cut from them.
Your child loves fish, and he wants to have tunafish sandwiches for the fifth night this week for dinner. You give in.
If you answered (1) as the most dangerous, you need to read on. Situation (1) is actually by far the least dangerous of the three situations in terms of mercury poisoning. In this post, I’ll separate out myths from facts concerning liquid mercury (which isn’t very dangerous at all) versus the real dangers of mercury poisoning.

One day, a few years back, I was performing a typical simple lab experiment in an undergraduate chemistry laboratory. As usual, we were using thermometers, and they each contained a small amount (a few grams) of mercury. The student working next to me broke her thermometer. I went to tell the lab assistant. He immediately freaked out.

First he moved my neighbor away from her station. Next he found a giant container of laboratory-grade sulfur and started literally dumping it all over the floor. A few minutes later, he asked me to move, and he started wondering aloud whether masks were necessary.

I moved my experimental setup (no small task, since this was a complicated distillation experiment), but at the end of the lab period that day, I went to talk to the lab assistant about what happened. I politely showed him the safety sheets for each of the chemicals we were using during the lab (including some rather nasty organic solvents and solutions). Mercury was actually one of the least dangerous chemicals we were using that day.

Some months later I talked about the experience with my father, who had worked in a mercury room in a plant that refined and distilled mercury back in the 1960s. He had worked there for a number of years, and the safety regulations were much more lax than we’d see today. They handled hundreds of buckets of mercury every day, splashing around quite a bit.

With all of this mercury around them, you’d think that these workers would have a very high rate of mercury poisoning. But they didn’t. They only introduced significant safety measures after one worker displayed symptoms, and he had been working there for years and was notorious for being lax with things like hygiene. Within a month or two of the new regulations (which were still quite lax compared to today’s standards), this guy’s symptoms cleared up, and he lived to a ripe old age with no apparent long-term effects. My father kept up with some of his coworkers over the years, and they haven’t appeared to suffer greater than the normal population from long-term effects.

I don’t claim that my father’s experience should be viewed as conclusive, but it does suggest that mercury exposure is often not as deadly as many people believe. That said, there are some circumstances where we need to be concerned about mercury exposure, as I will discuss below. Surprisingly, lobbyists have managed to eliminate sources of mercury that were not that dangerous to humans while introducing new sources recently that carry greater risks.

Elemental mercury versus mercury compounds

Many people have heard the story about a scientist who spilled a couple drops of mercury on a gloved hand back in the 1990s and died of mercury poisoning only a few months later. I myself was told about this story by the lab director in my undergraduate chemical safety session.

The scientist in question was Karen Wetterhahn, and she was an experienced chemist and expert in toxic metals, who took reasonable safety precautions, though she chose to wear common latex gloves rather than heavier plastic ones, probably because the thin latex gave her better control and dexterity for handling the lab equipment.

While this story is certainly tragic, what most people do not know is that the chemical she spilled was not simple pure elemental mercury, but a compound called dimethylmercury. As anyone who has taken basic chemistry knows, compounds often have very different properties from their constituent elements. Table salt (sodium chloride), for example, is made up of a high flammable and potentially explosive metal (sodium) and a deadly gas (chlorine). But the resulting compound is perfectly safe in reasonable quantities and tastes really good on french fries. In fact, our bodies need a certain amount of salt to function; without it, we’d die. (Keep that in mind the next time you hear about a city wanting to ban salt — the problem is overconsumption of heavily salted processed foods, not salt itself.)

Dimethylmercury is one of the deadliest mercury compounds. Its particular form makes it easy for it to permeate the skin and get into the bloodstream, where the mercury can easily be deposited in the brain, kidneys, and other organs, resulting in acute mercury poisoning. Even in very small doses, mercury can be quickly absorbed — from a few drops, Prof. Wetterhahn experienced a blood mercury level of 4 mg/L, about 80 times higher than the threshold for mercury poisoning (0.05 mg/L).

Fortunately, dimethylmercury has few applications outside of chemical laboratories, so it is very unlikely that any member of the general population would ever be exposed to it. Using this unfortunate story of a Dartmouth professor to scare people about mercury would be like using an anecdote about a sodium metal explosion in a lab to scare people about table salt.

Elemental mercury is actually much more difficult for the body to absorb than methylmercury compounds. While dimethylmercury does not occur naturally, other methylmercury compounds can be found in natural sources, particularly large fish, who accumulate the mercury by eating smaller fish and other life forms in water that contains mercury. When we eat a fish who has high levels of methylmercury, which is soluble in fat, most of the mercury in the fish can be absorbed into our bloodstream (usually over 90%), while if we were to eat elemental mercury itself, very little of it would be taken up by our bodies — 99.99% of it would come immediately out in our waste.

This is important to note — methylmercury compounds are about a thousand times more dangerous than elemental mercury. Thankfully, we only tend to encounter them in relatively small doses, particularly in fish, though smaller amounts of mercury end up in soil and therefore are ingested in other meats, as well as grains, fruits, and vegetables.

Mercury is almost everywhere in the environment. In parts per million (ppm), state/EPA standards for mercury in safe drinking water are ≤ 0.001-0.002 ppm, while typical plant/animal sources fall anywhere between 0.0001 and 0.01 ppm. Maximum values are around: fruit ≤ 0.04, vegetables and grains ≤ 0.02, meat ≤ 0.05, rice ≤ 0.2 ppm. All fish tend to average ≈ 0.05, while tuna ≈ 0.2 ppm. Some large fish may have values in excess of 0.5 ppm.

(Keep these numbers in mind when you read about, for example, the high fructose corn syrup mercury scare, which found levels of mercury around 0.00003 to 0.00035 ppm in goods produced with high fructose corn syrup. These levels are small enough that the mercury could have come from any number of sources in the food manufacturing process. I’m not a fan of eating a lot of processed foods, but in this case, HFCS isn’t clearly the culprit for the tiny amounts of mercury in some foods.)

So far, we know that some mercury exposure is inevitable, that elemental mercury isn’t anywhere near as dangerous as methylmercury compounds, but clearly mercury sometimes is dangerous or even deadly. When should we be concerned?

When not to worry

Despite the ban on many household mercury items like thermometers and barometers in many European countries, these items are not generally a cause for concern, at least in terms of human health. The greater concern for these items is environmental, since mercury-containing items should never be simply thrown in the trash. The true hazard from thermometers and barometers is the accumulation of mercury from millions of these things being thrown into landfills, which eventually contaminates drinking water, soil, and fish. Nevertheless, this source of mercury has always been quite small compared to industrial sources, these days particularly coal-fired power plants. (Most coal contains mercury, which evaporates into the atmosphere as the coal is burned.)

“But wait,” you say, “I thought a broken mercury thermometer was a real health hazard.”

Well, in most circumstances, no.

Elemental mercury is only dangerous in vapor form. Exposure to a little liquid is unlikely to cause any harm, let alone major health effects. Many older people remember playing around with mercury from broken thermometers when they were kids; they haven’t all died.

In fact, it’s quite unlikely to get mercury poisoning from playing around with mercury in your hands or even eating it. As mentioned above, 99.99% of ingested elemental liquid mercury will be excreted right away. Studies on other animals have shown that it takes a relatively large amount of ingested mercury to cause any harm. A normal adult would have to eat about a quarter pound of mercury to approach a minimum level for lethal exposure! (I don’t encourage you to try this, but it’s important to note that small doses of mercury have been ingested for health benefits for centuries; few would have continued the practice if a small dose was likely to kill you.)

Similarly, elemental mercury is absorbed very slowly through skin; mercury vapor is absorbed about 50 times as fast through vapor in the lungs than through the skin, so unless you’re breathing through a sealed mask while bathing in pure mercury (which would be difficult, because you’d float), skin exposure is very unlikely to be significant.

Again, I’m not saying it’s a good idea to go out and play with mercury with your bare hands every day, but unless you have cuts and bruises (where the mercury could more easily permeate your skin), it’s really unlikely to cause harm to do it once in a while. It’s just as likely that chronic exposure to other household chemicals on your skin will result in health effects.

What about vapor?

However, elemental mercury is not a safe substance. As already mentioned, mercury vapor is the most easily absorbed form. The vapor pressure of mercury is relatively low, which (in layman’s terms) means that if you set out a bunch of liquid mercury in an enclosed space, enough of it will eventually evaporate to lead to dangerous levels of vapor.

This leads to the first rule of mercury safety: Don’t expose mercury in an enclosed space. Be sure to ventilate any area well during and after mercury is exposed.

How much ventilation is required? It depends on how much mercury is exposed, what form it’s in, and how long it’s exposed. The volatility of mercury at room temperature (68 degrees F) is 0.056 mg/hr-cm², which means 0.056 milligrams of mercury vapor will evaporate per hour for every square centimeter of surface area. Suppose you have one medium drop of mercury sitting out with an area of 1 square centimeter (a little less than half the size of a dime), which would be roughly the size of a drop from all the mercury in two or three medical thermometers (or one lab thermometer). About 0.056 mg of mercury would evaporate from that drop within an hour at room temperature.

Is that a dangerous quantity of mercury vapor? Probably not. As mentioned above, the blood-mercury level for minimum toxicity is considered to be 0.05 mg/L. A typical adult has about 5 liters of blood, meaning it would take a minimum of 0.25 mg of mercury to lead to basic poisoning levels. If the space was well-sealed (not ventilated at all) and you stood over that drop of mercury and breathed deeply to absorb all the fumes for an hour, you’d take at most 0.045 mg into your body. (Only about 80% of mercury vapor breathed in is actually absorbed.) It would take quite a few hours of intensely breathing in mercury fumes above a drop of mercury before you could even approach poisoning levels, and that is in a closed room. If you ventilate the space even minimally, it’s very unlikely that a small amount of mercury like this will lead to poisoning through vapor.

But don’t take my word on it. Someone did an actual peer-reviewed study where they put two drops of mercury — one a bit smaller and one a bit larger than the one I assume here — in an office and let them sit uncovered for a few months. The office wasn’t ventilated in any special way; it was just a typical office. The rate of evaporation was measured frequently by weighing the amount of mercury that remained in each drop, and the mercury levels in the air around each drop were measured with a meter. At no point did the mercury levels even approach dangerous levels; in fact, they were always well over a hundred times lower than the OSHA limit for toxic mercury exposure in the workplace. The study estimated that it would take 500 to 2000 such drops from broken thermometers, all sitting around in a small office, to exceed the limit for toxic mercury exposure from the vapor given off.

Of course, children have a smaller amount of blood, which means that mercury they breathe in will be more concentrated. But again, unless they are deliberately inhaling the vapor in an enclosed space, a small amount of mercury is unlikely to cause significant harm. If you find your child playing with a tiny bead of mercury from a broken thermometer outside, you probably have no need to worry. Just tell them to wash their hands, and unless they spilled it on their clothes, that’s all they need to do. Even if they ate some on a dare, there’s no cause for alarm.

Rule #2 of mercury safety: In enclosed spaces, keep mercury exposure times short. Avoid long exposure times or frequent exposure unless you have good ventilation.

Playing with a large quantity of mercury in a small enclosed space, of course, is a different story. But even larger quantities of mercury in bulk are unlikely to emit enough vapor to accumulate if the space is ventilated properly.

Note that I say in bulk. That is important, because so far we’ve been considering mercury in a single drop. When you split mercury up into smaller drops or tiny microscopic droplets, the surface area increases. Remember that the volatility depends on the amount of time the mercury is exposed and its surface area.

A large drop or even a large puddle of mercury (even a pound or more) is unlikely to be a health hazard in a minimally ventilated space. But if you break up mercury into smaller drops, the surface area increases greatly, leading to much more rapid evaporation. Having tiny drops instead of one large drop could increase the evaporation rate by tenfold or more. Tiny droplets could increase it to 25 times the evaporation rate of a single large drop. Instead of taking many hours or days for vapor levels to reach a dangerous level in an enclosed space, a mist of tiny mercury droplets could evaporate to poisonous levels in less than an hour, or even within minutes if the quantities are large enough.

Rule #3 of mercury safety: Large drops or puddles of mercury aren’t usually a problem. Lots of tiny drops are more of a problem. A mist of tiny droplets is almost always a potential hazard.'

NOTE: There are more than just 3 safety rules when handling mercury, so please follow up and real the entire article at www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=246

This is a very well written article of which I have rightfully and correctly given the true author 100% credit for his work, and I only copy a part of it here on this website for reasons of educating some of my fellow members of whom have no real knowledge of the issues described within the article. I hope that the moderators of this site allow the above without hesitation, and I thank them all in advance. Knowledge is powerful, but what really gives us power is to learn from one another! JohnVincentGI