Montedison. Scheduled to come on stream with commercial quantities of LLDPE available in the first half of 1982, the plant will be small compared to other low-density polyethylene plants. It will have an annual capacity of about 25 million lb. However, if it is successful, El Paso probably will build a larger facility. Montedison likely will wait to see how successful the Odessa plant is before committing to build its own plant. Union Carbide and Dow Chemical already have processes producing commercial quantities of linear, lowdensity polyethylene. •
Bids thicken in battle to take over Conoco The biggest U.S. corporate takeover battle of all time moved through act two last week. In this development stage, more of the significant players in the Conoco drama (C&EN, July 13, page 6) moved up in the wings, and the actors already on stage intensified their roles. Soon, all the important characters were expected in view. Du Pont and Canadian distiller Joseph E. Seagram & Sons both increased their bids for Conoco, and rival bids loomed from Mobil and possibly other oil giants such as Texaco and Standard Oil of California. How the upcoming war might end is unknown. Du Pont has the advantage of Conoco's blessing, Seagram the advantage of little antitrust trouble, and the oil companies the advantage of money. The crucial decision might come eventually from the U.S. government, which must rule on antitrust implications. Although the Reagan Administration has seemed much more friendly toward business combination than were preceding Administrations, the oil-to-oil connections would still be a major antitrust test. However, if Washington interprets antitrust law too stringently, it risks seeing the ninth largest U.S. oil and second largest U.S. coal company taken over by the Canadian firm. The result probably won't be known for several weeks, even if the bidding reaches stratospheric levels. Besides government scrutiny, stock tender offers and stockholder meetings will force delays. In the latest action, Du Pont raised its offer from an initial $7.3 billion to $7.5 billion. Du Pont increased its cash bid for Conoco stock from $87.50 per share to $95 per share for about
40% of Conoco's shares. And Du Pont increased its stock swap offer for the remaining Conoco shares from 1.6 to 1.7 shares of Du Pont stock for each Conoco share. To finance all this, Du Pont got an additional $1 billion in bank credit for a total of $4 billion. Du Pont will need the approval of its shareholders, in a meeting scheduled for Aug. 17, to issue the 89 million new shares of Du Pont stock in the stock swap. This is the same date Du Pont's tender offer for Conoco stock, already begun, is scheduled to expire. Meanwhile, Seagram increased its cash tender offer begun June 25 for 51% of Conoco's stock from $73 per share to $85 per share. This offer is scheduled to expire July 24. The Du Pont and Seagram offers were expected to be joined soon by another from Mobil. Mobil chairman Rawleigh Warner Jr. did nothing to hide his interest. In an initial statement on the matter, Warner said, "Conoco is a great company with fine resources and excellent personnel.... Preliminary studies indicate that a Mobil-Conoco merger would not create difficulties under existing antitrust guidelines." Mobil was arranging bank credit for its own offer. Separately, a number of other oil companies reportedly have arranged multibillion-dollar lines of bank credit, either for offers or defense. •
OSHA to use four-step in setting standards Despite the recent Supreme Court decision in the cotton-dust case that barred the Occupational Safety & Health Administration from balancing costs against benefits in setting health standards protecting workers from toxic substances, the agency's director Thorne G. Auchter says OSHA can comply with President Reagan's regulatory reform efforts by using cost-effective analysis. Auchter says that the court's ruling will not hamper the agency's timetable for promulgating cotton dust, lead, and hazardous materials standards. "What it has done is to outline more clearly the steps we should take in the promulgation of health standards," he explains. As a result of the court's decisions in the benzene and cotton-dust cases, and its refusal to hear the lead case, OSHA has developed a four-stage process for drafting and publishing health standards. First, because of the
Auchter: use least costly method
language found in the Supreme Court's benzene decision, OSHA must establish that a "significant risk" to workers exists. Second, the agency must show that the risk will be reduced by compliance with the proposed standard. Third, the agency must consider all relevant technical, medical, and economic data in setting the appropriate, feasible exposure limit. Economic feasibility applies to a whole industry, not a single company. And fourth, once that limit is determined, the agency must decide the most cost-effective means of achieving it. Cost-effectiveness determinations are not new to OSHA. Under OSHA's former director Eula Bingham, the agency followed President Carter's directive to assess the cost of compliance imposed on industry using the mandated protection—engineering controls, personal protective equipment, or medical removal or monitoring—as well as the cost of alternative means of compliance. Some segments of organized labor, however, are not certain that the present powers at OSHA know the difference between the two types of analyses, and thus are willing to embrace cost-effectiveness, the Supreme Court cotton-dust ruling notwithstanding. "Comparison of incommensurables is inappropriate and not cost-effective analysis," says Sheldon Samuels, health director of AFLCIO's industrial union department. "Regardless of the Supreme Court decision, we know that OSHA is going ahead with cost-benefit analysis in writing standards," Samuels tells C&EN. July 20, 1981 C&EN
7
News of the Week Auchter would deny this. However, he has said the agency may use costbenefit analysis in other nonstandard-setting areas. For the moment, Auchter believes that OSHA can assure worker protection, and by "using the least costly method possible" still comply with Reagan's goal of regulatory relief without resorting to amendments to the Occupational Safety & Health Act. But the President's Taskforce on Regulatory Relief is still reviewing the implications of the cotton-dust decision, and legislative changes to the act are still an option. D
Silver atomic weight value raises questions When chemists at the National Bureau of Standards remeasured the atomic weight of silver with a fivefold improvement in the accuracy of their measurement, they uncovered a problem: Some of the most fundamental constants of atomic physics don't match up properly. Many of the fundamental constants of nature such as Avogadro's number, the mass of a proton, and the Faraday constant, can be related to each other by simple mathematical formulas, explains Barry N. Taylor, chief of NBS's electrical measurements and standards division. However, in the past few years experimental measurements of the Faraday constant (the amount of electric charge needed to react with 1 mole of a univalent reactant) have given values that are higher than the calculated value based on other physical constants. The significance of this difference was not clear because the uncertainty of the Faraday constant was relatively high (6.8 ppm in the best silver experiment). The new measurement of the atomic weight of silver, combined with a new measurement last year of the electrochemical equivalent of silver, allows the Faraday constant to be determined with an uncertainty of only 1.4 ppm (at the 68% confidence level, the level used for this type of physical constant determination). The more accurate Faraday value is indeed too high to match the calculated value. The discrepancy between the two values is about 7.3 ppm or about four standard deviations—too much not to be important, Taylor says. The silver atomic weight was determined by chemists Lura Powell, Thomas Murphy, and John Gramlich 8
C&EN July 20, 1981
using a combination of thermal ionization mass spectrometry and gravimetric analysis. A key procedure was calibration of the mass spectrometer using mixtures of the two principal isotopes of silver, 107Ag and *09Ag. The scientists determined the absolute abundance of each of the isotopes in their reference sample of natural silver and were able to calculate the atomic weight of natural silver. Their value is 107.86815 with an accuracy of 0.5 ppm at the 68% confidence level. The significance for chemistry and most technological applications of the discrepancy in the Faraday constant is probably not too great, since most chemistry is not done with partsper-million accuracy, Taylor says. The impact on physics, however, is more critical. "Either we are underestimating the uncertainty involved in these measurements, which means we don't really understand what we are doing when we make the measurements, or we have made a mistake, which also means we don't understand something," he says. Either way, the next step is to try to get more accurate measurements for the ampere and Avogadro's number, two constants that are closely related mathematically to the Faraday constant. •
Solar energy used to produce process steam Development of solar energy technology for generating industrial process steam passed a milestone last week with dedication of a demonstration system in the Northwest. The system is installed at an Ore-Ida Foods' potato-frying operation at the company's plant in Ontario, Ore., near Boise, Idaho. The system was designed and developed by TRW Inc., Redondo Beach, Calif., in conjunction with the Department of Energy and Ore-Ida. It uses water instead of oil, which TRW says adds to its attractiveness in the food processing industry. But TRW views the system's potential as going well beyond food processing. The company says it expects that 75% of energy-intensive businesses—which use 65% of all energy consumed by U.S. industry—are potential solar system users. Specific industries cited by TRW include textiles, paper and pulp, chemicals and allied products, petroleum and coal, and glass, stone, and clay products.
New candidates on slate for ACS elections Three new names have been added to the list of candidates for positions to be decided in this fall's American Chemical Society national election. Fred Basolo, professor of chemistry at Northwestern University, has been nominated by petition as candidate for president-elect. He will face Pauline Newman and David C. Young in a three-way race. For director from Region VI, Alan C. Nixon, who challenged ACS in the courts after his narrow loss for this same post in 1978, has been nominated by petition to face Richard M. Lemmon (the incumbent) and Edward M. Eyring. And for director-at-large, James D. D'lanni, the society's immediate past-president, has withdrawn from the race, and in his place the Committee on Nominations & Elections has nominated Roy L. Whistler, Hillenbrand Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry at Purdue University. Also running for director-at-large (two will be elected) are Clayton F. Callis, Alan L. McClelland, and Peter E. Yankwich. The slate for director from Region III remains unchanged—Phillip S. Landis will run against Warren D. Niederhauser.
The Ore-Ida system uses 10,000 sq ft of collectors—single-axis, tracking, parabolic trough units built by Suntec Systems using a design tested and validated by Sandia National Laboratories to outlet temperatures of up to 600 °F. Mounted in a north-south orientation, they focus the solar energy onto narrow receivers, heating pressurized water to 480 °F. The pressurized water enters a steam flash tank, where steam is produced at 417 °F and 300 psi. Steam then flows to the potato-frying operation, where it is mixed with steam from a gas-fired boiler. Condensate from the flash tank is returned to the solar receivers at about 125 psi and 353 °F. Design of the control system is such that when the volume of solar-generated steam increases, demand from the gas-fired boiler automatically decreases, and vice versa. The system now will undergo extensive operational evaluation, TRW says. During this time it will provide 1.9 X 10 9 Btu per year of steam— about 2% of the plant's steam requirements. TRW expects that within the very near future, production quantities of these systems could be installed for $35 per sq ft. It is looking for about a $20-per -sq-ft cost by 1990. •
