Following up about cadmium zinc sulfide

[nancylebov]

I posted recently about the US army spraying a poor St. Louis neighborhood with cadmium zinc sulfide, and a possible cancer cluster.

The spraying was Operation LAC, a nationwide informal experiment[1] to learn something about how wind disperses fine powders. Cadmium zinc sulfide is florescent, which made it easier to see where it landed. Some of it went all the way to Canada.

Powdered cadmium is poisonous, but it's not clear whether the quantities people may have inhaled or ingested were high enough or enough different from background levels to cause cancer or other diseases.

The original link starts off with cancers that were earlier than Operation LAC.

I would be curious to know what neighborhoods were chosen for getting sprayed with cadmium zinc sulfide.

[1] It isn't exactly an experiment, but I'm not sure what to call it. An effort at meticulous exploration?

There some discussion of these matters here, starting with comment 15.

Comments

[chickenfeet]

I'd be wary of attributing a cancer cluster in inner city St. Louis to any one cause. There are a number of"interesting" industrial facilities there including the Mallinckrodt plant that invented the molecular distillation process for Uranium Hexafluoride and manufactured the enriched Uranium for the Manhattan project. It still makes fluorine derivatives as well as handling vast amounts of cocaine and heroin.

[nancylebov]

Yes, I was wondering if there might be something else carcinogenic in that neighborhood. Thanks for the details.

[siderea]

Why would you not call it an experiment?

[nancylebov]

I think of an experiment as a little more formal, with a hypothesis and maybe a control. It's not "let's throw some dust in the air and see where it goes", though it's plausible that we need more observation of that sort.

[siderea]

The term "controlled experiment" is not a redundancy; there's more than one kind of experiment. What was the control for the first manmade nuclear reaction? (One of the hypotheses was "Will ignite the atmosphere and we'll all die". Ah, those were the days.)

[nancylebov]

I thought that setting off a bomb to see whether it would work was called a test rather than an experiment.

[madfilkentist]

There's a big difference between how poisonous a compound is and how poisonous its constituent elements are. Sodium and chlorine are each quite toxic; sodium chloride, much less so. How poisonous is cadmium zinc sulfide? Does it tend to produce free cadmium?

[nojay.livejournal.com]

Cadmium runs about 0.1 parts per million in coal burned in power stations, and typically about 1% of it will escape the stack and be deposited downwind. The US burns about 800 million tonnes of coal a year so about 800kg of cadmium is dumped on the land around the power station stacks every year, and of course this has been going on for decades.

Mercury's a lot worse -- coal power stations in the US emit about 50 tonnes a year, and again that rate of release has been going on for decades. The EPA wants to reduce this to only 16 tonnes of mercury a year but the coal mining industry abetted by their biggest customers the power generating companies are fighting the planned new regulations tooth and nail. They claim the current administration is engaged in a "War on Coal" although the coal industry has been killing and poisoning Americans for decades without any declaration of hostilities on their part.