begin quoting Ralph Shumaker as of Tue, Sep 19, 2006 at 01:33:10PM -0700: > Stewart Stremler wrote: > >begin quoting Ralph Shumaker as of Tue, Sep 19, 2006 at 01:45:39AM -0700: > > > >>If mercury in nature (in the landfills) is such a bad thing, where the > >>hell did it come from anyway?! > > > >Mined and refined. > > From ..., nature, ... right? So how hard is it to unrefine and unmine? ;>
Un-mining is hard. Unrefining isn't always easy, especially if you have to refine it out of garbage. If a few ounces of pure mercury comes out of many tons of cinnabar[1], then making mercury safe would, presumably, result in the creation of many tons of cinnabar, and then putting it somewhere. The art community can't absorb *all* of it. This is going to be expensive, both in time, energy, and facilities; if we have to extract mercury from general trash, it's going to be even MORE expensive. And once you've extracted mercury from the general trash, why turn it back into an ore? There's a market for just about everything, once you get it extracted and refined. > >Look up Cinnabar. > > Way too much stuff comes up. Please specify or clarify. Cinnabar is an (the?) ore of Mercury. -- _ |\_ \| [1] I don't know these numbers. Uninformed as I am, I'm making 'em up. -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
