"covered in mercury, emptying it out of his shirt pocket, pulling it out of his hair." [View all]

[ensho]

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2011/dec/18/mercury-veteran-contaminated-or-not-glad-to-help/?partner=yahoo_feeds

(this took place at Oak Ridge, Manhattan Project)


Mercury veteran: Contaminated or not, glad to help my country
For Y-12 retiree, winning Cold War was worth price of contamination


Harold Cofer remembers being covered in mercury, emptying it out of his shirt pocket, pulling it out of his hair.

There were a lot of problems during the 1950s startup of lithium operations at Y-12, but the biggest problem was trying to contain the mercury within the production facilities, he said.

"One time one of the feeder lines broke, about a 4-inch line that was feeding mercury to one of the cascades," Cofer said. "As you can imagine, the mercury came flying out, pouring all over the place. You'd be saturated with it. The only way you can stop mercury from flowing is to freeze it."

-snip-

"There was one time — and it hasn't been talked about very much — we had a pretty serious explosion in the evaporator section of Alpha-4 (one of the major facilities housing the Colex processing operations)," he said. "I happened to be on the rooftop of Alpha-5 with some other supervisors. You know, just sightseeing. Looking around. We walked to this side, and heard this tremendous explosion. Well, the evaporator storage tank had generated hydrogen inside, and either a welding spark or a grinding wheel sparked the hydrogen. Boom! Well, the tank was half full of solution — lithium, mercury, I don't know what all — and men were wallowing around down there. They had walls built around the tank, but they were wallowing in that solution. So, other people who weren't involved in the explosion went in there and stripped them out of their clothes and put them under a safety shower. And I never did see a write-up on that in the paper."
-snip-
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he is now ill

just a small look at the tip of the Oak Ridge iceberg