Time-bombing the future | Rebecca Altman [2019]
▻https://aeon.co/essays/how-20th-century-synthetics-altered-the-very-fabric-of-us-all
Sur l’histoire de la production des #PFAS et notamment ses liens avec le #projet_Manhattan
Meanwhile, Simons would split his time between Oak Ridge – the secret Atomic City that the Manhattan Project built in eastern Tennessee – where he worked on fluorinated war gases, and Pennsylvania, where he endeavoured to develop a safer method for producing fluorocarbons. He worked in parallel with the Manhattan Project, and at a fever pitch, as if the future of humanity hung in the balance. His kids rarely saw him. His health would soon plummet. What he achieved didn’t look like much, just a covered cauldron – a clunky, awkward metal vat ‘about as unimpressive as a washtub’, as Popular Mechanics put it. But it could brew up complex batches of fluorocarbons to help the cause.
In the end, the chemists in Manhattan developed other techniques to make the fluorocarbons that built the bomb that razed Hiroshima. Simons took his process to #3M. By 1944, the company had licensed it, and readied it for factory production in Hastings, Minnesota, along the upper Mississippi River.
Though the bomb sped fluorocarbons into development, it was another Manhattan Project-funded technology, polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), the then-new fluorinated plastic best-known as #Teflon, that helped to broadcast them into the environment. Like Simons’s fluorocarbons, PTFE had been an inadvertent innovation. The #DuPont chemist Roy Plunkett had been studying refrigerants, looking for an alternative to Freon, when in the spring of 1938 one candidate, a fluorocarbon called tetrafluoroethylene (TFE), spontaneously polymerised in Plunkett’s storage canisters. The molecules that made up the gas had self-assembled into a solid: white, flaky and most unusual.
