re: #50 FFL (GOP Delenda Est)

Saw a story in my feed that they discovered in/near Pittsburgh that an underground electrical transmission line had leaked about 12,000 gallons of “dielectric fluid” and the utility company was still trying to locate and stop the leak. It stated that the fluid was non-toxic, not flammable, and only dangerous to marine life in higher concentrations. (Implies that the leak is probably in or under one of the local rivers.)

So I looked up “dielectric fluid” on Wikipedia. They are used as insulators for high voltage transfer lines. Which makes sense since as a liquid they would help quench any sort of accidental discharge as well.

The wiki article also listed a bunch of the chemicals used for this purpose, including in transformers and capacitors. In the olden days* this included PCBs and/or benzene. A number of the chemicals are flammable. Most of the rest are synthesized fully-fluorinated organic ketones or esters that appear to be formulated to reduce environmental impact.

* - And I expect that if the regulations were ever relaxed along with lawsuit protection these chemicals would come right back into use due to being cheaper than the current synthetic replacements.

One of my summer intern jobs while in college in the 80s involved going out in the field a few times to work on electrical substation maintenance. There were stickers on the side of the transformers about PCBs. I don’t remember the numbers but it was something like a green sticker if tested less than 1 part per million, a yellow sticker for between 1 and 5 parts per million, and a red sticker with the number written in sharpie. All had red stickers and numbers were thousands per million. Maintenance crews thought I was crazy to be concerned. It was the “ we’ve been working with this stuff for years”.