Reacting to Nuclear Comments

mom said it was my turn to play in the chempit!!!

A chemistry channel becoming a reaction channel just feels right

In high-school we were doing a water vapor distillation and were instructed to bring various produce like citrus fruits and such so as to extract their essential oils. My classmates, normies, brought various oranges, grapefruits, tangerines, lavander, and such "vanilla" produce. I brought garlic. The assistant was reluctant but 8am morbid curiosity got the best of him and I was allowed to chop it up and load it in the distiller. The pleasant citrussy aromas were soon buried under the thickest most violent most insulting miasma of concentrated garlic extract dripping into a flask. My eyes were burning a bit and the whole class of 20 people was sniffing and laughing simultaneously. I covered up the output flask because the smell was getting overbearing and people were complaining, but it was more performative than useful. The whole building reeked of garlic the whole day, and other students as well as professors were disgruntedly inquiring who was responsible fot that attack on their sensed amd why were they sniffing. I, an innocent highschooler, was watching the school burn; numb to the stench. The technician who came in with a cold was now cured and his sinuses were as good as ever. Now I'm a computational chemist grad student and this is still my fondest hs memory.

I don't know what was more terrifying, the future superfund site aka the chempit or somebody hiding a strong neutron emitter somewhere.

You just know that first guy is gonna somehow be the one person who future scientists radiocarbon date and confuse the heck out of them.

Girl in my undergrad lab didn’t label her bottles correctly so instead of putting some more hexanes over her Sodium she had a bottle of water in her hands and poured half of it into the porcelain dish. It honestly took longer than I would have expected for the sodium to ignite but soon after catching fire it exploded into at least 20 smaller burning lumps of sodium (Our sodium comes in sticks about 15 cm long and 3 cm in diameter and she had a whole Stik in her dish). But wait there is more. She put out the fires with sand, which worked well, but then decided to clean up with wet shop towel igniting the leftover sodium once more.

The guy who contaminated his privates with radioactive isotopes is lucky they had a safety team on hand. Otherwise he would have won a Darwin award on a technicality (you don't need to die, rendering yourself sterile also counts).

One of my fellow students told me this: In one of the early undergrad labcourses, they had to do a reaction with chlorine. Their assistant was helping and everything was fine until a rat came through the venting system into the fume hood. That poor animal died of chlorine poisoning after it took a few steps next to the cylinder. The poor student had to burn the dead rat to ashes, because they legally could not get rid of it otherwise. That dying rat was one of the creepiest things he ever saw.

Mines generally use stench based alerts because of noise (and previously due to unreliable signals due to being in an active mine. Apparently (based on some of the MineARC product systems) they even have all clear signals as odorants (wintergreen). You can't hear alarms, but smell isn't drowned out by machinery, plus when you have forced air ventilation the message flows to the whole mine/factory without much effort.

When I toured CERN and exited the personnel elevator with my sixth form group I looked up and immediately saw an asphyxiation warning sign and as we were walking there were cabinets of escape rebreathers every 50-100 meters and it dawned on me I'd just entered one enormous array of confined spaces containing an enormous number of active superconducting magnets holding multiple tons of TNT's worth of potential energy that they'd rapidly and violently dump if quenched and tens of tons of liquid helium and other incomprehensibly large amounts of cryogenic gases. It made me sweat a little, but the tour guide distracted me with all the nice neutron probes they had hanging on the walls and there were even more GM counters hanging on the walls, and I must've walked past at least three sample storage cupboards each with a smattering of 1-20 petabecquerel sources (IIRC), and so many posters with math or physics jokes on them.

I once made the mistake of going to the bathroom after preparing a large quantity of chili peppers without gloves (I did wash my hands very well several times), I think everyone should be forced to do this as part of safety training, to respect cross contamination, and the limits of soap.

Using odors as signals is an extremely common practice in mines. Fires and cave ins are a huge risk. Radio signals don't work underground and in an emergency one can not rely on wires running along the tunnel carrying phone signals to be functional. Dumping a scent into the mine can usually spread a signal throughout the whole mine in just a few minutes. Most mines do a test of this every month or so in my experience.

I was recently etching some copper with dilute hydrochloric acid that I slowly added 3% hydrogen peroxide into whenever it stopped etching. I'm a hobbyist, so I did this outside in my family's garden since the solution has to form small quantities of (dissolved) chlorine to etch properly, which I just don't want to have inside. Everything went great and there was only the slightest hint of a chlorine-y smell, which was much less intense than even just household bleach, so I figured all was well. At least until a random bug decided that it was a great idea to drown itself in my etching bath. That little pile of nitrogen with wings of course immediately got chlorinated to hell and made the bath absolutely reek like an unhygienic swimming pool. It was terrible, but at least not particularly dangerous. Don't chlorinate insects.

Some 'fun' stories from a kilo lab. In a kilo lab environment, liquid transfers are done almost exclusively by pressure. Either pushed with a pump (diaphragm, peristaltic, ect) or pulled by vacuum. I learned the fun way that when transferring by pump, you need to put hose clamps on all the joints. Once while transferring 45L of some pharmaceutical solubilized in ethanol/H2O, I had a line disconnect and spray me. Thankfully I was wearing a full face respirator and went quickly to the shower. There have also been several times when the bottom outlet valve(BOV) of a 100L clogs following a crystallization. If the material inside is potent (ug levels of occupational exposure or less) that means suiting up in Tyvek or Tychem bunnysuits and climbing underneath there with a screwdriver to take off the BOV and a bucket to catch the product. A fun story that didn't happen to me revolves around being cognizant of exotherms. When my Coworker started, he was running a batch that had a really bad exotherm. It started off at 30C, then started ramping up past the spec of 60C over a span of 10 minutes. For reference it takes the jacket of a factor to heat or cool a batch 30C over an hour. Called up the bench chemist who designed the reaction and asked him what he did when it exothermed for him. "Oh yeah that happens, the product is stable at high temp. I would just toss the round bottom flask into an ice bath". Meanwhile my coworker is standing there like, "there is 40L in that reactor, I can't do that." If I can request one thing of bench chemists, document your temperature changes. Endotherms too are an issue and I've heard stories of stir shafts breaking when the batch suddenly begins to freeze.

Undergrad lab: Working with fuming HCl. Accidentally knocked over the cup with about 100 ml or so. Before starting the clean grabbed some pH paper to check when the hood would be clean enough. About 3 meters removed from the hood the paper already turned bright red. Old fume hood :)

Stories from my PI: During his grad student years, another grad student tried (and failed) to out-suck a roughing pump. It collapsed his lungs and he was taken next door to the medical center. Another grad student was found unconscious next to an empty bottle of xenon. Putting one and one together, the guy who found him lifted up his legs to let the xenon out. My PI pranked his advisor by inhaling Helium-4 and saying, "Wow! Helium-3 really does make your voice higher pitched than Helium-4!" The joke being that 3He is extremely expensive. More recently, a professor was making ammonia at his home using the Haber-Bosch process. This is flowing H2 and N2 at 100 bar over iron powder at around 500°C. His house exploded, killing himself and a neighbor walking their dog.

For anti-fog, we use some stuff called "Sea Drops". It's meant for dive masks, but it works OK but not perfectly on safety glasses and goggles.

One more story: my lab partner helped some other student to clean up at the end of the day. He told her to get some acid to neutralize a beaker with some (to my lab partner unknown solution). He did so with half concentrated HCl. As the first splash of acid hit the beaker a loud ‚fomp‘ sound could be heard and my partner stood there drenched in liquid. It turned out the beaker was full of conc. NaOH and H2O2 (still warm from when it was used) the loud fomp sound was the stuff evaporating instantly. My lab partner did the right thing and washed his eyes and then himself immediately after the shock. His safety glasses were milky everywhere the liquid went and he had red spots all over his face for a few weeks. This should be a reminder of two things: 1. safety measures are not to be taken lightly, everything has its use and you can never know when you need protection unexpectedly 2. label your stuff. All of it. Especially if you have someone else using it or working with the same stuff. Loosing your product is the least of your concerns if someone looses his eyesight because of you.

Way back when I was a kid (mid 70's), I decided to make some Chlorine gas in my little garage lab. The experiment went well, and I got a nice flask full of gas and did a few simple tests with it. During clean up, after rinsing my flask with just a little water from a wash bottle, I had the dumb idea to hold it up and look inside through the neck. Of course the flask was still practically full of gas which conveniently poured out into my face while I happened to breath in. Fortunately I had done my research (back then you had to do something like go to a library to learn how to do chemical reactions) and I had some dilute ammonia on hand which I tried to inhale in between coughing my lungs out and crawling around on the floor and ground outside for the next half hour. I was working alone at home after school, and that was scary. My other favorite cautionary tale involves nitric acid and ethanol. Our neighborhood backed up against an industrial park with a little bit of woods in between. Some other kids in the neighborhood had raided an outbuilding that was used for chemical storage - they stole (I was not involved!) gallon jars of all sorts of reagents. Being complete idiots, they then played around randomly mixing stuff. So they filled a test tube about 3cm with pure HNO3, and then started to add ethanol...the test tube blew up, liquids were blown up onto the ceiling and then dripped down onto the participants. Afterwards a little research was done and we discovered that we had inadvertently made hypergolic rocket fuel. Good times.

During my master's thesis, we found a dead earwig that crawled into one of the NMR tubes. When I showed it to my mentor he looked me dead in the eye and said: "Deuterate that fucker"