Question:
Be is toxic when in particulate form, I think. The machining of Be and BeO is heavily OSHA-regulated; only a few companies do it. The finished products seem to be regarded as safe (unless they get abraded and make Be dust).
I worked at one of those places. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Be (besides its dimensional stability) is that if you have a cut on your finger, and happen to get Be in it, it WILL NOT heal!! Mark <o===6
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Be is toxic when in particulate form, I think. The machining of Be and BeO is heavily OSHA-regulated; only a few companies do it. The finished products seem to be regarded as safe (unless they get abraded and make Be dust).
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Some comments. The Ga that was "melting" in the person’s hand was not
Not ‘"melting"’. Melting. Its melting point is < 100 degrees F. — "I would give the Devil benefit of the law for my own safety’s sake." –from _A_Man_for_All_Seasons_ by Robert Bolt
That doesn’t stop the Devil from being convicted in the end. — Daniel R. Levy * uunet!tellab5!mtcchi!levy * These views not on behalf of MTC So far as I can remember, there is not one | … therefore be as shrewd as word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.| serpents [see Gen. 3] and harm- — Bertrand Russell [Berkeley UNIX fortune] | less as doves — JC [Mt. 10:16]
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Some comments. 1) Be is not a "heavy metal". 2) Ga v. Be toxicity comparison by the poster was not valid. I don’t know the actual answer but it is incorrect to judge from the non-appearance of Ga in the quoted table that it is not toxic. The Ga that was "melting" in the person’s hand was not being ingested so that example doesn’t tell us much. The Ping Eye-2 golf club is made of an alloy of Be. It is my understanding that golfers are not dropping dead from Be poisoning — the chief danger in golf being lightening or errant golf balls (or being brained by a club). — "I would give the Devil benefit of the law for my own safety’s sake." –from _A_Man_for_All_Seasons_ by Robert Bolt
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From the 9/14/90 Los Angeles Times (pg. A26) Soviet Union Blast Rips Nuclear Plant; Several Hurt An explosion and fire at a nuclear fuel production plant in the Soviet
From this, you’d think it was plutonium concerned. Tass said an explosion ripped through the Ulba plant’s cellar workshop producing beryllium, a highly toxic heavy metal used to fuel nuclear reactors.
Beryllium is not a nuclear fuel, it is a neutron reflector. It is toxic chemically but has no more to do with "nuclear fuel" than oxygen (for uranium oxides) or zirconium (for cladding). This article is a symptom of nuclear hysteria. Had the blast occurred at a beryllium-handling plant not associated with the nuclear industry, this would not be news. — Russ Cage Ford Powertrain Engineering Development Department Work: itivax.iti.org!cfctech!fmeed1!cage (Business only, NO CHATTY MAIL PLS) I speak for the companies I own, not for the ones I don’t.
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Well, it looks like there were some translation or transcription errors somewhere in here. Beryllium is certainly not a heavy metal. It has an atomic number of 4, and a relatively low density in its solid state. With an atomic number of 4, it certainly cannot be used as the fuel in a fission reaction…
It could have been used in the manufacture of PuBe neutron sources, used for starting up nuclear reactors, but it seems unlikely they’d have so much on hand that it would be a problem in an explosion. More likely, I think Be has a nice (n,2n) cross section, so they might have been using it as a neutron multiplier. — | Chuck Henkel | | | N.C. State University | Curious about evolution? | | Department of Nuclear Engineering | Read Stephen J. Gould. |
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So, what we seem to have here is the chemical contamination by an industrial material which happens to have happened at a plant which refines it for the soviet nuclear industry. Would there have been as much interest if an explosion had blown gallium out of a chip manufacturing factory in the Soviet Union?
I doubt that the general public would be very interested, since beryllium is quite a bit more toxic than gallium.[see note below] However, the scientific community and the U.S. military would probably be very interested to learn that the Soviets were making chips with gallium. Note: Excerpt from the CRC Physics and Chemistry Handbook, in the table of Limits for Human Exposure to Airborn Contaminants… Beryllium and beryllium compounds, 8-hour time weighted average — 0.002 mg/m^3 (ANSI Z37.29-1970) Arsenic and its compounds 0.5 mg/m^3 whereas Gallium is not even listed. I have a photo in an old textbook of someone holding a block of metallic gallium, melting in their bare hand. Paul Shields
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From the 9/14/90 Los Angeles Times (pg. A26) Soviet Union Blast Rips Nuclear Plant; Several Hurt An explosion and fire at a nuclear fuel production plant in the Soviet Far East injured several people and threatened to contaminate the region’s air and water, the official Tass news agency said. The blast in Kazakhstan sent gas clouds over a region near the Soviet borders with Mongolia and China. Tass said an explosion ripped through the Ulba plant’s cellar workshop producing beryllium, a highly toxic heavy metal used to fuel nuclear reactors. The Agency said that early tests indicated that beryllium and beryllium compounds were at twice the permitted level in the air and water.
Response:
From the 9/14/90 Los Angeles Times (pg. A26) Soviet Union Blast Rips Nuclear Plant; Several Hurt Tass said an explosion ripped through the Ulba plant’s cellar workshop producing beryllium, a highly toxic heavy metal used to fuel nuclear reactors.
Well, it looks like there were some translation or transcription errors somewhere in here. Beryllium is certainly not a heavy metal. It has an atomic number of 4, and a relatively low density in its solid state. With an atomic number of 4, it certainly cannot be used as the fuel in a fission reaction. Fissioning beryllium consumes energy, it doesn’t release it. This stuff is also quite a bit harder to fusion than a deuterium-tritium mix. So, for how long has the Soviet Union had third generation nuclear fusion power plants? I might believe that some isotopes of beryllium might be used in fusion bombs, but I’d be surprised if that were the case. I don’t think even fusion bombs fuse anything heavier than Li7. Now, the neutron interaction with beryllium, if I remember correctly, makes it convenient in some shielding or moderating contexts (this from a very fuzzy memory), but that isn’t fuel by any stretch of the imagination. So, what we seem to have here is the chemical contamination by an industrial material which happens to have happened at a plant which refines it for the soviet nuclear industry. Would there have been as much interest if an explosion had blown gallium out of a chip manufacturing factory in the Soviet Union? — Christopher Neufeld….Just a graduate student | "The pizza was just a "Don’t edit reality for the sake of simplicity" | hams…." Downtown Brown