alt Hacker Newswhen I hear of industrial uses of phosphorus my ears prick up since phosphorus is a key limiting factor for life.
A world where this actually became industrially very successful combined with a lack of recycling could potentially add large new sink for phosphorus.
In general, be careful when creating a process which locks meaningful amount of phosphorus out of the biosphere.
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> industrial uses of phosphorus
There seems to be a memory hole about what follows. Probably not the "key limiting factor for life" you had in mind.
There have been various incidents where soldiers or people generally in third world countries have developed neurological diseases when machine oil contaminates (or is mistaken for) cooking oil. This isn't new, it's been happening for 100 years. There have also been cases of pilots becoming, or allegedly becoming, disabled due to inhalation of jet engine lubricants which find their way into the cabin air supply (passengers are notably not mentioned in most reporting).
Although intentional use of the more toxic compounds is generally avoided, machine oils are subjected to harsh environments and compounds can change, new compounds created. Kind of like dioxin contamination in herbicides, I don't see much evidence that oil additives are rigorously tested for unusually toxic compounds incidentally occurring during the manufacturing process.
I'm glad they're burning that shit under an exhaust hood in the picture in the article, hope it's turned on!
Apropos the memory hole remark above, here are some articles I found briefly looking around although none of them were ones I remember previously seeing / reading (such as the "famous" case of the British machinegunners in North Africa).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_soldiers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organophosphate_poisoning
https://www.machinerylubrication.com/Read/30448/know-lubrica...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11254977_The_Toxici...
I think that was a core plot point of a series of books by Niven I think. Humans are on a planet that has almost no phosphorus or maybe potassium in it's biosphere. Humans have to take it artificially by sprinkling a special salt on every meal. But it's very limited and expensive and so a significant part of the population are mentally handicapped to lesser or greater degrees, generation after generaion.
Ah, Destiny's Road, and it was Potassium.
"...dooming humanity to a slow mental extinction."
Great.
I can't imagine this approaches how much is used in agriculture for fertilizer.
When a general study was made back in the 1970s of the limits of substitutability and recyclability of mineral resources, it was found phosphorus likely dictates the minimum amount of mining needed in steady state. It occurs at an average concentration of about 0.1% in the continental crust.
I worry just a bit about this in reference to LFP batteries.