Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Fluorinert is a super niche product. I mean, that goes both ways. At that price it will always be a super niche product, and never graduate to "plain niche". Look at the enthusiast market, there's no lack of fancy water cooling gizmos out there. They're bought by a small segment, but there's still a market for fancy gizmos to provide the best cooling for overclocked high end hardware. And that's exactly what I'm ge…
Isn't Flourinert a PFC and thus really dangerous/impactful in terms of accelerating global warming? I think we do well to keep its use to niche applications.
“As perfluorinated compounds (PFCs), all Fluorinert variants have an extremely high Global Warming Potential (GWP),[1] so should be used with caution”
That page also says
“Although Fluorinert was intended to be inert, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory discovered that the liquid cooling system of their Cray-2 supercomputers decomposed during extended service, producing some highly toxic perfluoroisobutene. Catalytic scrubbers were installed to remove this contaminant.”
Perfluoroisobutene is a schedule 2 substance, in the sense of the Chemical Weapons Convention (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Schedule_2_substances_...), so it’s a substance that “can either be used as chemical weapons themselves or used in the manufacture of chemical weapons but that have small-scale applications outside of chemical warfare and so can be legitimately manufactured in small quantities”.