Re: Volcanic fumes kill teenage campers

Gary Reichlinger wrote:
On Tue, 10 Jul 2007 18:35:50 -0500, Jo Schaper

Dissolution of CaCO3 is highly dependent upon the pH of the dissolving solution. Even a partially buffered, alkaline solution (pH 7-8) can (and does) dissolve 400 tons of CaCO3 out of a spring supply system flowing 286 million gallons of water a day.

True, but he was adding lime to the water which would make it
strongly alkaline. In the case of the sodium carbonate production
system, chlorine (or HCl) is removed from salt water (electrolysis
cell) resulting in a very alkaline sodium hydroxide solution. The
reaction with CO2 to produce sodium carbonate also takes place under
alkaline conditions. In either case, if you remove the carbonate end
product from the solution, you have eliminated any route toward
reversibility. If it was not the plan to remove it from solution,
sodium carbonate is much more soluable than CaCO3 and would make a
better sequestering agent.

So...being of a practical bent, of what use could we make of enormous quantities of sodium carbonate? I know it is used as washing soda, and as flux...Wiki says it's used in glass, but so many bulk uses of glass are declining for various reasons, I don't know if we could absorb the additional production. It is the carbonate in polycarbonate plastic?

My only experience with it was as washing soda means you buy it in a box, and by the time you go to use it in Missouri, it's clumped and stuck together (from ambient humidity) to the point that you need a screwdriver to break up the pseudo-rocks. So I quit buying it a long time ago.
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