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Posted by David Sherman on Monday, May 05, 2008 at 18:48:43 :
In Reply to: Re: Hazardous Material posted by Don in Portland on Monday, May 05, 2008 at 17:46:08 :
It's hexavalent, not hexavent chromium (hexavalent simply means it has a valence of 6, which I don't dispute is poisonous and carcinogenic. What I dispute is that
A) The chromium out of stainless steel gets dissolved, in hexavalent form, into the solution of an electrolytic derusting solution. Note that there are lots of forms of chromium of other valences, and the others, such as the pure metal or the trivalent form, aren't particularly toxic.
and
B) That chromium (or whatever the toxic element is) has now been removed from stainless steel. If indeed the mystery element is chromium, that means that all the standard stainless steels steels (18-8, 304, 316, 410, etc) have been secretly reformulated. Everything I can find still shows them as having between 10 and 20 percent chromium, which by the way is 100,000,000,000 parts per trillion.
There might be some kernel of truth somewhere behind this rumor, but without some information about what the element is, what stainless steel it was removed from, and how it can dissolve in an electrolytic de-rusting bath, I'm going to keep doing what I've always done, using stainless as the anode.