No prob. I just pointed out the one because I'm in electronics and ran across it quite often.
I'm just a welder but I love learning new stuff about places I've been. Like that pesky metal beryllium. I was on a crew where we were building a tank for a processing place in Utah, not sure where it was actually mined but I presume it was somewhere close by?
The manager or overseer there also took me on a personal tour since I had stepped aside on day one to ask him a few questions. A very nice, intelligent and amiable person. He actually showed me a small ingot of the pure metal.
Going in we had to change out of our personal clothes and dress up in underwear, socks and coveralls, all stuff provided for us to dress in. Then going out we had to dump all the clothes into bins and take a shower, no exceptions. You find out things about each other doing that. Like one guy had a fake leg I never suspected.
Anyway, I never knew about this metal and how toxic it is. Then years later I am disassembling microwaves for the magnets and some of the wiring and someone told me to never fuck with the emitter since it has a tip of beryllium. Why it's used in the microwave I have no idea but it's enough to know so I don't go getting too curious about that part.
Yes, Be is pretty nasty. There are very few places in the USA that will work with it, which makes it terribly expensive to deal with. It's quite literally far more dangerous than asbestos when inhaled.
Beryllium is used (was used, it's probably aluminum oxide now because cheap) in microwaves as Beryllium Oxide (BeO) due to it's incredible thermal conduction properties. It has an immense capacity to take heat away from a source, more than most metals and just somewhat less than diamond.
Ok. So which part of the emitter is actually beryllium? I'm very concerned because I cracked open a couple of them just because I wanted to see how they were made. The coil inside I couldn't figure out what sort of metal it was and being told it was just the tip didn't compute for me as the tip looks like it's just copper.
I'm super glad I didn't get the idea to use a grinder to open one of those. But, when I was told it had beryllium in it I felt a chill of fear as I remember working at that processing place and all the clothes changing and enforced showing was a clue just how serious they were about the stuff.
So, maybe it's just more dangerous when it's being processed?
So, could elements be used for a heat sink in computers rather than those aluminum radiators on the CPU?
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