Video

Video by Airman 1st Class Michael Richmond

Silver Recovery

9th Intelligence Squadron

June 25, 2020 | 1:33

Silver recovery can occasionally be a really intensive process as far as time and and manpower to move the canisters which can weigh 60 pounds or more when they are filled with silver. But fortunately based on our workload for processing missions, we normally only have to change out our canisters and actually go through that physical labor process on a monthly basis and then we only have to take the product after it's dried completely in the canister resulting in just the filter and silver being within those containers to give them to the big Air Force once every quarter or so.

Silver Recovery is a huge responsibility and I would say that to train somebody into it as long as they are dedicated shouldn't really take all that long but it does take somebody who's dedicated an really pays attention to the details there are a lot of little things that can go wrong in the silver recovery process so you just have to keep an eye out for it and since it's sort of a linchpin for the entire process down here if something does go wrong it can mean mission failure so that person just really needs to be educated on the in's and outs of how silver recovery works how to solve problems when silver recovery isn't working and who might be available to assist if mechanical issues happen in the silver recovery program or who may be able to assist as far as getting the product the end result of silver and canister filter through the DRMO process.

So silver recovery is just a lot of little moving parts that you have to keep track of and it's very important to the mission down here Fortunately it's something that does not require a lot of people on a regular basis the whole team pulls together to help move the canisters when it is time to do that or to dispose of the silver shred that resides in the basement of the larger building that we work out of here so I would say for the most part that it really only takes one person making sure that they have all those parts together and organized and time correctly and two or three other people to help us back up to ensure that everyone is covering silver recovery and processing silver during missions

Really important process down here without recovering the silver we would be left with a program that creates a lot of hazardous material as defined by the EPA that would be going back into our water resources there's no way for us other than in the silver recovery program with our special filters to eliminate silver from our chemistry so while chemistry we can evaporate and separate the chemistry from the water we can't do the same with silver so without silver recovery this program the entire FPC would no longer be able to operate

silver recovery is a program that was established to help the air force to reclaim the silver which has come off of the film during all of our missions. So silver recovery is a process in addition to what we do processing the film we also process the silver coming off of the film so silver recovery is twofold it is actually getting the silver back into the hands of the Air Force and also taking the silver off that film and then properly processing it so that it no longer has chemicals intermixed with the silver particles at the end

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