A price I've seen somewhere for pure isolated plutonium using current (Purex) technology is on the order of $1000/kg.
This is actually a very low price in terms of energy, since a kg of plutonium fully fissioned represents 80 trillion joules, the equivalent of 680,000 gallons of gasoline (@ 120 million joules per gallon) and thus represents a price of less than one cent per gallon, gasoline equivalent.
By appeal to Sherwood plots, given its concentration in used nuclear fuel is on the order of 1%, one might easily imagine that this price could be very close to two orders of magnitude lower, but the added cost is probably associated with the toxic mysticism of anti-nukes and their bizarre and immoral calculation that the risk of death of anyone one person from radiation, justifies thousands of deaths from dangerous fossil fuel waste.
Also by appeal to Sherwood plots, I've estimated that the price of pure technetium metal should be on the order of $50/kg. Since rhenium at current prices runs at about $2800/kg, and since technetium, owing to the lanthanide contraction is a very close analogue of rhenium, and can perform all of the the functions of rhenium nearly as well and sometimes better (as is the case of technetium catalysts in the Meerween-Verley-Pondorf oxidation), the isolation can save huge expense. (I have been very interested in technetium superalloys, particularly refractory and chemoresistant tungsten for nuclear energy applications. The addition of technetium (or rhenium) to tungsten greatly increases the machinability of this refractory element. Some of these alloys were prepared in the 1960's and they are very, very, very cool.)
HCl, by contrast, is well under a buck a kilo. As is the case with glycerol - a compound with tons of uses - from the so called "renewable" biodiesel industry, the cost of shipping it seldom justifies the price it will command at the point of sale; often one has to lose money to do this. Despite many elegant schemes to utilize it, for example in the synthesis of acrolein, or (my favorite) soketal, it is still most often land filled.
In your assumption that one needs only to find the competitor who drove the previous customer out of business, you have missed the point. If the plant is located in Arkansas and the competitor is in Malaysia, it makes no sense to approach that potential new customer.
In addition you have not considered the possibility that the bankrupt company was driven out of business by a process change. My curiosity piqued by the three responses in this thread, I took a quick superficial look at actual waste HCl issues recorded in industrial journals. Even where waste HCl is utilized (recycled) there have been many process changes involving it. For example, HCl can be obviously converted to chlorine gas, which is done where its economically viable. The most widely utilized process is straight up electrolysis; however there are also chemical procedures for the oxidation of HCl to chlorine gas. Since electrolysis is energy intensive and requires huge losses of energy, one can easily imagine a chemical process replacing the electrolysis process, wherein the electricity supplier will face reduced demand.
I'm a regular reader of the journal Energy and Fuels, which has all kinds of disturbing articles about EOR and EGR, Enhanced Oil (or Gas) Recovery - fracking. I generally avoid actually reading EOR and EGR papers unless I'm in the mood to get sickened, since I oppose the use of all dangerous fossil fuels. From those whose abstracts I've scanned, or felt I just had to read to get a feel for how unimaginably insane this all is - I wrote a post in this space about a particularly odious approach using perfluorinated organics - I haven't seen HCl, but it makes sense, since many oil reserves as I understand it are found in carbonate rocks. If it is indeed so used, it's easy to see why oil and gas extraction can cause surface collapses and earthquakes, which was the point.
Thanks for your comment.
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