We have been in Phoenix, Arizona the last few days. The weather is quite a change from our summer in Alaska. Most days it gets up in the 90's, but cools off nicely during the night. We are visiting our sister-in law, who has had surgery and is quite ill. We nephews and nieces have come to visit her, so we are having a lot of family visiting
I forgot to mention or visit to the village of Boron, California on our way to Phoenix. Boron is the site of a large open-pit borax mine, and also has a small museum devoted mostly to borate. I knew that at one time most of the borate came from the Furnace Creek area of Death Valley,where it was mined, and refined, by dissolving it and re precipitating it, as I recall, and then transported to Mojave, California over the desert in a couple of huge waggons, pulled by the famous Twenty Mule Teams. As I understand it, the borax forms in the dry lake beds in Death Valley, by selectively precipitating from the water, as the lakes slowly evaporate.
What i did not know, was that in California, there are huge underground deposits of boron in several different chemical forms, which have been actively mined for a number of years by underground mines, which have been modified to huge open pit mines. These are said to be the second largest borate deposits in the world -- the largest are in Turkey.
I could learn nothing of the geology of these underground borate deposits, so I don't know why borate type rocks are deposited in such large quantities in just a few parts of the world.
For the chemist among you, boron is an interesting compound. As I recall it forms glasses, similarly to silicon compounds, and I believe it has an interesting chemistry of covalent compounds, similar to carbon. Of course, the most com on everyday use of boron compounds are as cleansers, such as Boraxo, and antiseptics as boric acid.
Unfortunately for me, the museum did not have too much information on the technology of using boron compounds.
We will be here in Phoenix for another day, and then we move to Albuquerque to the Balloon Festival.
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Hi Dad,
Boron is also used in nuclear reactors because it can absorb a lot of neutrons. It has a "high cross section for absorption of neutrons" as they like to say. So is is used to slow down reactions by capturing some of the slower neutrons flying around and reducing the number available for fission. It can also be using in nuclear attacks on tumors. You inject boron into the tumor and then hit it with a neutron beam. Not very easy to get a neutron beam so I think this technique has only been prototyped, and is not commonly used.
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