So my kid is taking a Chemical Engineering course called Unit Operations and the Professor asked... [View all]
...the class to contemplate a case where a customer who had been purchasing hydrochloric acid, a side product of their process, went out of business. The professor noted that environmental regulations prevented the release of the material and that waste disposal for it costs were high.
"What do you do?" the professor asked.
Someone raised his hand and said, "Pay a lobbyist to change the environmental regulations!"
Everybody laughed, including the professor.
(My son, who says that the class consists of fellow students who have a great sense of humor.)
Everybody laughed...everybody laughed...everybody laughed...
I explained to my son that this is a very real problem. Most of the world's waste hydrochloric acid waste is deep welled.
"Wouldn't that dissolve the rock and cause problems?" my son asked. "Couldn't that cause collapse?"
"Um...um...um..." I said, and went on to apologize on behalf of my generation to his. "These are the sorts of problems you are tasked to solve," I said. I apologized again.
This, by the way, is the chemical reaction that produces polysilicon:
HSiCl3 ? Si + HCl + Cl2
The solar industry, which is a trivial industry, producing trivial amounts of energy despite more than half a century of mindless cheering for it, is a huge consumer of the explosive and corrosive gas that is the reactant in this chemistry, trichlorosilane.
Have a nice "hump day" tomorrow.
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