An entertaining article. It's strange to see cadmium described as something obscure that hardly anyone encounters. NiCad batteries were pretty common as well as CdS photo resistors for anyone doing electronics.
Chemistry is complex. Biology, even more so. You can't just say "oh, it contains cadmium", and assume that it's bad.
But of course, even for definitively "toxic" things, one must differentiate between exposure channels. I wouldn't care if I handled a piece of Greenrockite [1], but I wouldn't want to breathe the stuff in powdered form. Same with Cadmium glazes: orange pottery doesn't concern me, but I'd want to be careful if I were handling Cd-containing powdered glazes. You don't want your dry cleaner dumping used methylene chloride in the river, but it's commonly used in decaffeinating coffee.
The reason the author won't work with this particular compound isn't the fact that it contains Cadmium, but rather, that this particular compound has nasty tendencies, in addition to being toxic, that make it particularly dangerous.
This makes me think of wood dust being dangerous to inhale [1], despite wood being a perfectly safe material for furniture at home.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_impacts_of_sawdust
Lunar regolith or Arean regoliths are quite different. You were presumably talking about lunar regolith.
Particularly, wood is fairly recognizable, and almost certainly not liable to spontaneously implode into a cloud of dust. Plus, I'm fairly confident it is biodegradable (even in dust form).
Not sure the same can be said for most other materials, such as cadmium, or the parent mentioned naturally occuring compound.
> Cadmium is bad news. Lead and mercury get all the press, but cadmium is just as foul, even if far fewer people encounter it. Never in my career have I had any occasion to use any, and I like it that way.
It seems clear that he doesn’t want to work with cadmium, regardless of the compound.
I can't speak for the guy, but lots of things are "bad news", colloquially, and yet we work with them in the laboratory as an accepted everyday risk. I am not an inorganic chemist, but I'm pretty certain that they work with far riskier things than inorganic Cadmium on a regular basis.
Where was it that folks found that decaf coffee was eating into their styrofoam cups (decaf alone), so they concluded that the solvents used during the decaffeination process must have been seeping into the coffee ...
I think this is a mistake, though.
I mean, yes, exposure "channels" are absolutely important, but its the (false) assumption that one "safe channel" lowers the general risk of the other channels being an issue.
Your particular example mentions powder - what happens to the substance after it is crushed in a landfill? Or involved in a high speed collision, exposed to high heat, uv rays, microwaved, etc.
Potential harm should include the risk posed by all channels as a function how likely they are to be in that state. If the likelyhood is at 100% over any "reasonable" period of time, then you don't get to ignore the effects of that "channel".
Worse, if any of the channels are difficult to detect, then the risk should be compounded - I know about wood dust and can both easily see it and am amply aware when it is an issue and can take precautions. I'm not sure I can even identify the material you mention nor would be able to distinguish it from just "normal" dust.
A decade ago or so there was an application for RoHS exemption for the use of cadmium in displays, and their argument was that because coal plants emit cadmium, and because Oled screens with cadmium quantum dots are so much more efficient than backlit screens, that in practice allowing the use of cadmium in screens would reduce total cadmium release into the environment. It didn't pass.
Mercury is, though, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merbromin - and on the "paints & coatings" side, orange-red and anti-rust often enough used mercury salts as well. Rarely these days, fortunately.
In some ways, it's nice GaN "won" for blue LEDs. CdTe / CdSe would literally have been "twice bad".
They were pretty common.-