Talk:Mercury battery
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No dates[edit]
This entire article's use is sacrificed by poor references and not a single date.
- When were mercury batteries banned?
- By whom?
- In what places?
- By what organization?
- Was there a debate about it?
- What type and size of batteries used mercury?
- Who manufactured them?
-I like to saw logs! (talk) 02:31, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
- Found a little bit on banning in the EU and US. No sign of any debate, though I'm sure the Mallory (Duracell) and Union Carbide (Ever Ready) companies must have been put out. A Google Books search shows remarkably little discussion on "mercury battery" "ban" or "mercury battery" "substitution". One must distinguish between "mercury oxide/zinc" batteries, which this article is about, and "batteries containing mercury added in manufacture" - which is any other type using zinc as an anode. A list of sizes would be boring and pointless, but quite Wikipedic. --Wtshymanski (talk) 15:22, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
- That was a good improvement in a short time. A much more useful article now. I would say that the drop of mercury batteries must have been pretty much a non-issue, as they seem to have been niche products by the time they were banned. Alkalines and silver oxide is what I remember being dominant for the general uses I had. My only question is whether the Bhopal disaster at the Union Carbide plant in India had anything to do with this. People were starting to really look into toxic chemicals in the 80s after that incident. I like to saw logs! (talk) 18:55, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
- I'm sre the manufacturers and some users of mercury batteries complained, but seemingly to no effect (at least, no books detected by Google). I recall in my steel-making days we used big mercury battery packs, about the size of a common brick (and heavier!), to power the remote control for the overhead cranes in the mill. I'm quite sure when they were spent they went into the common trash. If mercury battery users had been motivated to dispose of them properly at the end of life, we might still be able to buy them today. --Wtshymanski (talk) 19:40, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
- In about 1960 my family had an Emerson 9-transistor radio that took four AA cells. At the time the options were carbon-zinc and mercury. The mercury AAs had the odd property that their polarity was reverse of the usual; the "button" end was negative, so the instruction manual had stern warnings about getting the polarity right for the different types of cells. (The radio used germanium transistors, which would fail just about instantly if the power polarity was wrong.) iirc, alkaline cylindrical cells didn't show up until a few years later. Jeh (talk) 20:26, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
- I'm sre the manufacturers and some users of mercury batteries complained, but seemingly to no effect (at least, no books detected by Google). I recall in my steel-making days we used big mercury battery packs, about the size of a common brick (and heavier!), to power the remote control for the overhead cranes in the mill. I'm quite sure when they were spent they went into the common trash. If mercury battery users had been motivated to dispose of them properly at the end of life, we might still be able to buy them today. --Wtshymanski (talk) 19:40, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
- That was a good improvement in a short time. A much more useful article now. I would say that the drop of mercury batteries must have been pretty much a non-issue, as they seem to have been niche products by the time they were banned. Alkalines and silver oxide is what I remember being dominant for the general uses I had. My only question is whether the Bhopal disaster at the Union Carbide plant in India had anything to do with this. People were starting to really look into toxic chemicals in the 80s after that incident. I like to saw logs! (talk) 18:55, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
Illustration needs fixing before it's returned to this article[edit]
- moved from my talk page...we should talk about articles on their talk pages
It is a solution, albeit a non-liquid one, and the diagram is based on an actual mercury battery, referenced with a textbook image to make sure I didn't have anything incorrect. If you'd prefer I can change the colors. They were only like that to distinguish different parts more easily. The Haz talk 16:46, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
- The cross section doesn't look like any of the ones I'm looking at right now in the "Handbook for Electrical Engineers" (11th edition, figure 11-71) Nor does it look like the cross sections in the 3rd edition of the LInden battery handbook. On page 11.4 Linden says "Mercuric oxide is stable in alkaline electrolyte and has a very low solubility." If you have a solid phase and a liquid phase, you don't have a solution, you have a mixture. Button batteries have a steel top cap and the mercuric oxide is in a pellet at the bottom of the can, with an amalgamated zine anote pellet at the top and electrolyte in an absorbent material between them. The anode is never a zinc container like a Leclanche flashlight battery, its always enclosed in a steel can. The illustration needs work, and the cited refernece had a cutaway of a zinc-manganese dioxide battery, not a mercury battery. --Wtshymanski (talk) 16:59, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
- It's not the colors that are the problem, it's the general wrong-ness. --Wtshymanski (talk) 16:59, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
- I commented at the PNG where you also wrote a note. If I'm wrong I'll change it; I did have the wrong source there by mistake (that was the source for the old image) which I changed. I found a better source, but will be checking some more texts to make sure I'm not crazy. The Haz talk 20:00, 12 January 2012 (UTC)