Interesting find - glass in furnace slag?

[TMM]

I was taking a walk along the river with my girlfriend, near where some old factory or something used to be. on the riverbank (i assume it used to be the waste dump back in the day) we found some interesting pieces of greenish glass, some with ash-like cinders layered on:







i found it pretty interesting. i couldn't find much info online about it, i guess because no one cares about it as much as i do. 

anyone know anything else about this stuff? is it just from coal or some other process? sure is cool.

have fun

tmm

[gunsmith]

looks like coal to my untrained unprofessional eyes

[Azrael256]

The wife says it looks like a brownie.

Personally, I think it's probably radioactive as hell.  It's somebody's souvenir Trinitite, and you're going to glow in the dark now.

Other than wild speculation, I have no idea.

[Nick1911]

Hitting it with a Geiger counter probably isn't a bad idea.  Also, be careful handling something like that without gloves.

I have no clue what it could be from.

[RoadKingLarry]

Could be scrap from glass making even but there is some potentialy nasty stuff to be found in any old industrial waste like that.

[Brad Johnson]

Any kind of silica in the furnace feed would create glass slag.  A little sand in the overburden when they pulled out the coal, a little blown in detritus from a windstorm, some leftover crud in the rail car, anything.  Heck, you can make your own at home with some playground sand and a rosebud tip on your torch.

Brad

[vaskidmark]

Where perzackly did you find it?

Slag from various and sundry industrial furnaces used to be used as fill to create land out of marshes and other spots that were not yet suitable for building on.  As an example the South Side of Chicago was filled in with slag from the steel mills of Gary, Indiana, then had some leftover black dirt from somewhere heaped on top for about 3 or 4 feet so lawns and gardens could be created.

Most folks were not aware of the fact until the oil refinery in Whiting caught fire and several tops of oil tanks flew away like giant frisbees and landed in residential neighborhoods.  Pulling them out of the ground revealed the slag fill.

stay safe.

[Viking]

I've found similar when I was young. The site was at my uncle's huge truck garage. There had been an earlier one there, that burnt down. I always assumed the fire created them, what with the various chemicals stored in there.

[Stand_watie]

Found similar growing up in Maine. My dad calls em coal clinkers (clinkahs). Wicked good for snowball fights.

[TMM]

hmm, interesting. well, i'm sure that it isn't coal. it is significantly different from coal, mainly those bubbles and glassy appearance. coal is black, shiny, opaque, etc...

radioactive huh? what makes you think that? isn't glass something that traps radiation or something like that? i remember seeing at the national atomic museum that vitrification of dangerous waste created a harmless glass.

i found it on a riverbank. there wasn't a whole pile of the stuff, but a significant amount. bunch of little pieces on the surface and probably more underground and washed into the river. some were all glass, some were composed of layers of glassy substance, clinker/ash/cement stuff, etc.

there's a factory maybe a hundred yards away that is abandoned now, but i looked in one of the windows and there was what looked like a boiler (big steel drum with many horizontal tubes running through it)

tmm

[brimic]

i remember seeing at the national atomic museum that vitrification of dangerous waste created a harmless

You can't make radioative things unradioactive by melting it into a glass. You can however make it so that it doesn't slough off any radioactive dust.

My bet is on coal clinkers.

[HankB]

radioactive huh? what makes you think that? isn't glass something that traps radiation or something like that? i remember seeing at the national atomic museum that vitrification of dangerous waste created a harmless glass.

Many years ago, thorium was used as an additive to some optical glass to adjust the refractive index. Some of these glasses were unstable, taking on a brownish tint in a few decades.

As for glass making radioactive material harmless . . . not really. If you've got something like an alpha emitter, it certainly will stop the radiation . . . but for alphas, a couple of inches of air will do the trick. Gamma emitters? Not much shielding, unless you're using leaded glass. The MAIN advantage of putting radioactive waste in glass is that the glass stabilizes it chemically - it won't leach out into the soil or contaminate the water table. (And there's a LOT of research into how to make the glass itself stable.)

[280plus]

Definitely glass. Either remains of an actual glass making plant somewhere or the byproduct of heat and silica in some sort of industrial furnace involved in some other process. To me it looks like glass factory remains and closely resembles what they would discard from the furnace at the end of the day or end of a batch. I dug on an old glass factory a few times. We found a lot of stuff that looked like that.

[280plus]

Somehow at first look I got the impression it was green. Now it looks black. Is it green or black? Green would probably be glass factory waste, black would most likely NOT be glass factory waste but some other form of waste from an industrial furnace. Coal slag looks more like light brownish red spongy rock and would not appear shiny like that.

[TMM]

The MAIN advantage of putting radioactive waste in glass is that the glass stabilizes it chemically - it won't leach out into the soil or contaminate the water table.

ahh, that must have been what i was thinking of.


280, the color is a very dark "forest green", almost looks black until the light catches a corner or if you look closely at a fragmented area. it's pretty much opaque, and has a bunch of small inclusions, air bubbles, etc.

i thought it might be really old coal slag, that had been sitting in the bottom of the furnace for long enough that the impurities had coalesced into a glassy substance. i did find some of the brown bubbly coal clinker that you mentioned too. it seemed that some of the brown coal clinker was one of the layers on the larger pieces of this stuff.

i'm gonna see if i can research what factory was there...

tmm

[charby]

I wonder if it is a by product of a coal gassification plant.

[280plus]

i'm gonna see if i can research what factory was there...

Probably your best bet. While I get the "I've seen this before" feeling in relation to the factory I dug I can't be sure either way. It does give me the feeling of being related to glass manufacturing rather than just remains of an industrial furnace. Find the local historians or historical society, they'll know right away. 

[230RN]

Probably some worker threw his jug into the furnace when the foreman was approaching.

But seriously, when I got old and strong enough to handle it, my Pop made me the furnace tender  for the coal-fired steam  heating plant in our house.  This was the late forties to mid-fifties.

He taught me how the furnace worked, how to watch the glass, how to add feedwater, how to shovel in the coal nice and even, how to bank the fire for the night, and all kinds of things.  He even ran it up to overpressure so I wouldn't get scared if it "popped off" and let steam (and lots of it) out of the safety valve, and what to do when it happened. (POP! SHSHSHSHSHshshshshshshshissss and the basement would fill with steam.)

I virtually became a stationary engineer by the time I was 10 or 12.  Talk about child labor! :)

He even taught me about welding steel in a coal fire, blacksmith-style.

 On shaking down the clinkers and shoveling out the cinders, I 'd find all kinds of stuff in there that looked similar.  Sometimes some rocks and what-not would be included in the ton of coal we had delivered to the house and they would melt and sometimes I would put stuff in there like small bottles and other junk just to watch it melt.  I'd recover the mass from the clinkers and look it over.  It sometimes looked similar to what you found.  Sometimes if they wouldn't go through the grates I'd have to break them up during down-times with a big iron rod to get them through to the ash pit.  Stuff like that was unremarkable after a while, and finding junk like that lessened when we went from  bituminous to anthracite coal, and then to coke.

I doubt if it is radioactive, except from the normal radioactivity from where-ever-it-came-from.

Did you know that Remington and Winchester made (and probably still do) special shotgun shells and shotguns for breaking up clinkers in industrial coal furnaces?  (Among other things.)

Terry, 230RN

REF:
http://www.google.com/search?sclient=psy&hl=en&safe=off&site=&source=hp&q=clinker+guns&btnG=Google+Search

Note this under the Wiki article:

In Australia and the Netherlands, these tools are classed as firearms, since they fire a projectile with potentially lethal force. As such, their ownership and use is regulated in Australia and the Netherlands. The owner has to register the tool, and an operator of one of these tools is required to have a license and to have undergone training in their use. These laws are in keeping with Australia's and the Netherlands' extremely strict firearm laws.

Makes you wonder when was the last time someone robbed a bank with one of these things.

[brimic]

You should try knapping that stuf into spearpoints.

[HankB]

Did you know that Remington and Winchester made (and probably still do) special shotgun shells and shotguns for breaking up clinkers in industrial coal furnaces?  (Among other things.)

I vaguely recall seeing some of these back when I was in high school - IIRC, I was told they were 8-gage shells, and were used to clear out the vats in a steel mill.

[Azrael256]

radioactive huh? what makes you think that?

Nothing in particular.  I guess if it's coated in coal ash, it might be mildly radioactive. It might have some nasty heavy metals in it.  Probably shouldn't eat it.  There's always the outside chance that somebody accidentally recycled a radiation source with other scrap metals.

Put it in a plastic bag and go hang out in front of the nuclear medicine department at a local hospital and see if anybody's pocket starts beeping.

[280plus]

Of course, if you do go to the local historical society and ask one of the old folks it could be upwards of 3 hours before they stop talking.

[230RN]

^ Hmmmmm......

[280plus]

Not you, not you...  

(Besides, I didn't say it wouldn't be interesting. Just be prepared is all I'm getting at.  )

[griz]

We found similar stones at this spot: [ http://www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?marker=15892 ], which is an abandoned iron furnace from the Civil War.  They ranged from black to almost a clear green, with some mixed together.  I'll post a pic later.