Re: Mercury in coal airborne impacts

["ruth_weiner" <ruth_weiner@email.msn.com>]

I suspect that the mercury in coal ash would have been oxidized to mercuric
oxide or reacted to mercuric chloride, neither of which are particularly
volatile.  I don't recall ever seeing metallic mercury in fly ash.  And even
if it all went into the fly ash, and none partitioned to the bottom ash,
that would be about 96 pounds a year from a moderately controlled plant.

I lived in a community that has a chlor-alkali plant (Georgia Pacific, in
Bellingham, WA), and these do emit (metallic) mercury vapor into the air as
well as into the water.

Ruth Weiner
ruth_weiner@msn.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Susan Gawarecki <loc@icx.net>
To: Multiple recipients of list <radsafe@romulus.ehs.uiuc.edu>
Date: Tuesday, August 08, 2000 11:20 AM
Subject: Re: Mercury in coal airborne impacts


>The problem with mercury is that it is a very volatile metal.  Most of
>it goes out the stack in a gaseous form.
>
>Ruth wrote:
>
>> If the Hg is 1 ppm by weight, and the coal is 10% ash, and
>> assuming all the Hg in ash goes into fly ash -- a bad assumption -- the
Hg
>> emitted would be
>>
>> 6E6 tons coal/yr * 160 lb ash/ton coal * 1E-6 lb Hg/lb ash = 960 lb
Hg/year
>>
>> or about half a ton.  Now, since uranium (that I happen to know about)
>> partitions 75% in bottom ash, 25% in fly ash, I would assume
conservatively
>> that mercury would at least partition 50/50, so an uncontrolled plant
would
>> emit about 1 quarter ton per year.
>
>--
>==================================================
>Susan L. Gawarecki, Ph.D., Executive Director
>Oak Ridge Reservation Local Oversight Committee, Inc.
>136 S Illinois Ave, Ste 208, Oak Ridge, TN 37830
>Phone (865) 483-1333; Fax (865) 482-6572; E-mail loc@icx.net
>==================================================
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