The guy in the darkroom was lucky. I used to do analogue film development some 25 years ago. If they had done that with developer rather than stop bath, they would be blind. Even less than a drop in the eye will cause the cornea to cloud over and basically develop, leaving you blind or visiually impared.
@@JazzyFizzleDrummers I did both colour and B&W photography and developing/printing. I remember neither developer was good to get in the eyes. It could be a matter of concentration too. I am not sure how much is used in hair dye, but it could be low enough concentration that it is "considered safe" in hair dye.
@@Jokke13th I believe there are currently two major formulas for B&W developing currently as analogue film use has become less and less popular. Kodak D76 is the one I remember using (again, this was 25 years ago so my memory may be a bit fuzzy). Apparently the formula consists of: 2g monomethly-para-aminophenol-hemisulfate (I believe this to be the primary developing agent) 100g sodium sulfite (anhydrous) 5g hydroguinone 2g borax This makes 1l of developer liquid. I am not sure as to the exact mechanism of developing the film based on how those chemicals interact with the film. I just remember that the warning I put in my original post was made very clear to us and was posted on the door of the darkroom we used so we were reminded of it every time we went in.
Yeah, phosgene burns. I was a welder in a car parts factory, and sometimes the parts where cleaned with PERC (tetrachloroethylene), sometimes not completely removed. When you weld it, you learn quick how bad that shit sucks. Happened 3 or 4 times before they started demanding a second wash to remove it all.
@Edward Elizabeth Hitler DCM is fun. At my old job they had me using it to solvent weld acrylic lenses together. Indoors, no respirator, improper gloves (I didn't wear em because they melted), just goggles. Fuck that
Temperature control devices are used in CROs to monitor and control reactions which may be exothermic. For big reactors, they have multiple thermal detectors to detect hot spots
An important technique to teach beginners is how to test the odor of even well known materials. One doesn't jam one's nose into the container, one carefully wafts the air near the opening towards the nose with one's hand. If it's done gently, it'll save one from nose burns or possible toxic effects if a container is mislabelled or is particularly corrosive.
The UV- resin story reminded me of my resin- printer experience. My brother who lives in a very small one room flat impulse- bought a resin 3D- printer. He convinced me to let him set it up in my flat, and promised there won't be any mess, and the air filtering system will eliminate most of the fumes. So I agreed. After the first time he used his 3D printer, I just casually touched the table the printer was on, like I had always done long before it was there, and suddenly felt a sticky thing on my fingers. I immediately washed my hands, and cleaned up the table. A day later, the same thing happened again when I removed a spatula he had left outside, and I got a pretty bad allergic reaction. I than removed the printer from my room, flood- lighted the room with an UV- lamp and searched everything with a UV torch to clean up even the last bit of resin. I later set up his printer in my mother's shops storage room, with a plastic table cloth, trays, an Ethanol wash bottle and a dedicated trash can, right besides a window for ventilation. Touching anything on that table without gloves is prohibited. I actually was able to use the printer wearing a gas mask and otherwise full lab PPE.
Yeah. I own a resin printer and I consider the outsides of tools, resin bottles, wash buckets etc. contaminated with resin. Because there *will* be cross contamination because resin never dries or evaporates. I also make sure to cover the table when using it and never set anything on the bare table.
Another user of Form2s here... Those resins are pretty benign. They'd definitely irritate your skin, but not much more. However, it sounds like she somehow dipped her hands in the tank, which is ~INCREDIBLY~ stupid. If one drop of resin gets over the side of that tank, it'll find its way into the very precise, delicate printer workings and cause absolute hell. Almost all versions of breaking SLA printers start with some object going into the tank. Shoving your hands in a tank is... Bad. (PSA: I only worked with PLA resins. Your resins may be more or less hazardous. Even if it's totally benign, wearing gloves is still for the best)
Oh the dark room story reminded me of a story my analogue photography teacher told me many years ago about her own teacher. Apparently back in the day my teacher's teacher brought their dog to class often. As this was on a college campus sometime in the 80s or 90s. This dog had an awful habit of drinking the silver salt baths with apparently no short term consequences. I occasionally wonder what long term health effects that dog had.
My pathophysiology teacher told us about when he was in his 20s and handling a soil sample without gloves, ends up having his supervisor warning him about how it had some chemical in it that could cause testicular cancer, flash forward another 25 years and now he has a kid known as the 1 nut wonder since the other was removed from testicular cancer. He was a cancer researcher at the time so he was able to identify it before it became a problem, but still a great example of when in doubt, and when not, to always wear ppe
We have a form 3 printer at my workplace and let me tell you... The clear, rigid-curing polymer resin smells sooo good... Like the kind of good that would absolutely make a dumb person want to taste it.
This just reminded of a time from my childhood when my mom (a college chemistry professor) brought home some hydrogen gas to demonstrate the formation of water from the combustion of hydrogen and oxygen. She filled some birthday balloons with hydrogen, attached some matches to a couple of yard sticks, and brought us into the driveway to watch the demo. The only problem was that the balloons had "happy birthday" printed on the side in bold lettering, so after lighting a balloon on fire, a flaming piece of rubber went flying toward the house and splattered onto the side of the house while still on fire. The printed lettering had held some of the balloon together and after dousing it with the hose we were left with a big black charred spot on our siding.
That's brilliant of the photographer! We should adopt this safety rule in all labs. Work naked so if chemicals get on you, you don't lose time stripping down before jumping in the safety shower... hahaha
@@user-hv6wb5gk8p A modern chemist's take on the masquerade ball. Having heard of what other students have done in their labs off-hours , it does seem plausible that at least one research group out there has already done exactly that.
We had someone try to use a bunsen burner to directly heat a boiling tube being used for testing an organic with Tollen's reagent. They honestly need to make safety a bigger part of A level chemistry, because they genuinely didn't know either of the reasons why that was a stupid idea. The only time we were even made of chemical safety other than the basic "don't sniff or drink random things in the lab, and wear eye protection" was when we had to do risk assessments for the iodine clock experiment. They didn't even warn us about the disappearing cross experiment (which is required to pass the course) produces sulfur dioxide lol
@@That_Chemist Like, they told us to put our heads over the conical flask for the disappearing cross. It was a miracle that the only injuries I remember from that class were cuts from broken glass and a few minor burns lol.
9:38 This I can confirm: I once ran the last drying process onto a pure pharmaceutical compound, which usually took place in a "drying pistol". The substance is there exposed, onto a small porcellain "weighing-boat", to vacuum in a double-walled glass device over which the warm reflux of constantly distilled Chloroform runs. This process may take one or two days. This Chloroform was quite old, used over and over again and had already a yellowish tint. Unfortunately I forgot to run cooling water through the Dimroth condensor. After some time, there was a slight smell of rotten hay in the lab, which disappered quickly after I opened the water tab. Holding a tissue soaked into Ammonia solution resulted into white fumes of Ammoniachloride at the condensor's outlet. Maybe this was mostly due to HCl vapours, but the smell of Phosgene is quite distinctive. This incident was a quite cause of concern for the head of the lab, because we used Phosgene gas in the same lab, too.
I'm a mechanic and once I got so angry at a car that I smoked brake cleaner. I'm an occasional smoker and on this day my zippo was dry from sitting around. I was too impatient to find another lighter so I soaked the cotton in brake cleaner. Brake cleaner burns, therefore brake cleaner is fuel. When I went to light up my cigarette I saw that the zippo was putting off some thick black smoke, I was too angry to care. I smoked many more cigarettes that day with that same zippo, I was coughing a bit more than usual that day, but no lasting damage. I have no idea what was in the brake cleaner, we still have the barrel but at this point I don't want to know
A lot of them are toluene, acetone, butoxyethanol etc. in that case it’s probably carbon black that came out That’s possibly a carcinogen to some degree. If it was a chlorinated cleaner, phosgene is possible. I don’t know how much if any would actually go into the cigarette but even having it near you would be a potential problem.
If I'm remembering correctly, Plastruct's "plastic weld" glue for ABS used to be mostly chloroform with a bit of MEK. I'm pretty sure I've got a 2-oz jar of it from the 1990s around somewhere. I had no idea it might turn hazardous, so thank you for the warning!
When I was in my late teens, people at a local high school (if I recall correctly) found an old bottle of what had been a solution of picric acid, used for staining proteins. All of the solvent had evaporated, leaving dangerously-explosive crystals of picric acid. It had to be removed by trained personnel. That prompted all of the other schools to check if they had the same problem. I don't *think* any explosions occurred, but it was good that all of the old chemical bottles were checked. Many schools found bottles that were unlabelled -- some didn't seem to have ever been labelled in the first place, while others' labels had fallen off or faded with time so that they were illegible. All had to go, and had to be treated as though they were dangerous. Presumably, over the years, people had seen the unlabelled bottles and decided to leave them alone, not wanting to expend the effort to handle them, and assuming that they'd been safe so far...
Just another little medical condition thing. Migraines have come up here before when you spoke about ergotamine. I myself have used the RX dihydroergotamine (more commonly DHE or Migranal) for it. Much like asthma migraine is something very sensitive to triggers that can vary a lot and many of your own which you probably won't know because so many of them are to things you don't normally encounter. For myself I can find myself with completely unbelievable migraines from even a small whiff of certain solvents. Some of them are common ones used for household or workplace cleaning that I can ask people to warn me about. However I've worked in 1 hour photo and taking lots of bio and chem related courses for environmental engineering. Never know what new and exciting migraine trigger I'll find!
Maybe not washing, but I've rinsed my hands with acetone more often than I should have, not a great idea of course but really quite convenient (although you should not be doing it, there's taps with soap for a reason)
The darkroom story honestly gave me flashbacks from my childhood. I used to help my grandpa in his darkroom, learning the process, and we had the exact same problems. It was a darkroom built in the middle of the house basically, shut off from all windows, and since windows provided ventilation, there just wasn't any. And we used to spend hours there, in our knickers and nothing else - between the film dryer, the enlarger, the lamps and the rest, there were many sources of heat in a pretty tight space. So yeah, I can attest to that being a problem. And that reminded me of one story. We were developing slides using the E-6 process when, due to the dimly lit conditions (and the heat starting to impair my thinking) I knocked the solution for the final rinse off a shelf and thoroughly doused myself in it. This was a rather serious problem, since at that time (late 90s) it contained formaldehyde. I was rushed to the nearby bathroom and thoroughly washed with water and was apparently fine, but it made my grandpa rethink the whole concept of "teaching an almost naked 8 year old to handle chemicals". From then on, I stood in the corner and watched whenever dangerous chemicals were involved.
Yo This highlights the importance of not only having Eye Wash, but also regularly testing and inspecting. Monthly at the very least for Corp big box stores, I'd think weekly for lab stuffs
5:38 I work at a nuclear research facility that’s been around since 1945. We have a lot of old laboratories dating back to the 1950’s and 1960’s. A lot of materials get left behind and orphaned when people retire. I’m an engineer responsible for maintaining these lab buildings and keeping the labs in operation. I’ve seen a lot of really sketchy, dangerous things that were orphaned, lost and/or left behind when they should have been disposed of or replaced years ago. I’ve gained a healthy distrust of laboratories, laboratory technicians and research scientists from my field experience working in these laboratory buildings. I try really hard to keep you folks safe from your own devices but it’s sort of like telling an old logger he’s not using a chainsaw safely. “Listen Sony, I’ve been using a chainsaw for 45 years without ever having an accident and I don't need some young whippersnapper telling me…”, as he saws his leg off in front of me. My hair is turning grey and I'm developing a bald patch.
"I've been doing this for 45 years and nothing has ever happened." As the Shake Hands With Danger riff starts playing in the background. (If you haven't seen the video yet, it's a certified health and safety classic for the mechanical, construction and mining trades.)
Very interesting that there are more stories of SO2 triggering asthma… during my undergrad, my close friend with well controlled asthma had the same fate during a class… the culprit was SO2 and it was the only time he had any problems with any chemicals related to his condition…
8:30, I'm pretty sure that was sulphuric acid. I once got some on a tee I was wearing and the two tiny drops ate dime sized holes in the shirt in little time.
10:50 so damn glad I got my new respirator today for arc welding as my old one was not cutting it, ngl I’m surprised that no one else in the class was wearing one besides me.
I have a fun question. What do you get when you put a bunch of inexperienced 2nd Year Chemical Engineering students in an Organic Chemistry lab at 4-7PM on a Friday night? You get a few air-headed students unintentionally inhaling HCl gas after opening (outside the fumehood 💀) a test tube with Phenol + Acetyl Chloride in it. ( ^: I mean, we WERE warned in the lab manual, to be fair. xd
Fume hoods. Industrial factories are giant fume hoods. Our employer provided uniform was OK but our cotton underwear had holes from sulfuric acid mist. We had an explosion outside "waste treatment"(they used borohydride) near the "No Smoking - Hydrogen" sign: due to cigarette addicts.
i appreciate all these chempilations, but I have a real hankering for some of the educational videos that you used to do a lot of, like IOC videos. The tierlists and chempilations are entertaining and humorous but some more substantive material every so often is duly noticed and appreciated sir
The orange tweet's follow-up is amazing. Here's the full text. When an article says "some scientists think" then remember this: I, a scientist, once thought I could fit a whole orange in my mouth. I could, it turns out, get it in there, but I hadn't given sufficient thought to the reverse operation. I should also, on reflection, have practiced in private. I had an audience, which grew as my initial satisfaction at an hypothesis well proven, slipped rapidly through stages of qualm, disquiet, then alarm (mild through severe) and ended in full blown panic. When one panics, one's muscles tense, which is of course, the opposite of what I needed here. I had been quite relaxed at the start, but now I couldn't get a finger between the orange and the very taut edges of my mouth. Above and below, the orange, which was now under some pressure, deformed to make a nearly perfect seal against my teeth. I hadn't previously been aware of how much oxygen one needs to consume an orange, but I was made aware of it now by its sudden and ongoing lack. I forgot for a moment that I had nostrils and tried to breathe in hard through my mouth. I have big lungs. When the doctor tested my lung capacity, I blew the end clean off the cardboard tube. I've always been vaguely proud of that; mostly for want of more tangible achievements and because I am, when all is said and done, the kind of person otherwise predisposed to shove a whole orange in his mouth without cause. Those enormous lungs - my pride and joy - expanding in this moment of crisis to their fullest extent, had created a hard vacuum behind the orange, which, at that point imploded. From now on, things which had been unfolding at an almost leisurely pace, started to happen rather fast. So, I will take this opportunity to say that no one had actually tried to help me up till now. This was not for lack of opportunity. Later, someone mentioned the kind of details - veins like worms scribbling incomprehensible messages across my forehead, eyes popping out as if on stalks, laced with tiny red veins - which one can only truly apprehend at a distance that wouldn't have made help impossible. But back to the imploding orange. Although it didn't diminish appreciably in volume upon implosion, the released juice vaporised, turning into a burning acidic cloud that instantly flooded my lungs. My lungs very sensibly responded by collapsing rapidly aided by an involuntary and powerful spasm from my diaphragm. The vapour and oily zest from the orange's skin mixed with mucus scoured from my lungs (that spread flat, we must remember, would cover a tennis court) as well as the last of my residual oxygen, exited now through my rediscovered nostrils as a magnificently abundant yellow foam. And, having a volume in excess of what could easily egress at speed via those narrow tubes, it also squirted out through nearby exits, including around my eyes. Even that wasn't enough and the build up of pressure finally proved too much for the orange, which left my mouth like grapeshot from a cannon, like the superluminal jets generated by matter falling towards a black hole at relativistic speed. When I finally recovered my senses and the cycle of whooping inhalation and coughing fits had exhausted itself, I was greeted not by the concern that I felt such a brush with death merited, but with a disgust that later reflection suggests may not have been wholly unwarranted. Temporarily blind and gasping in my own private world of consequences, I was unaware of the cone of devastation that I had unleashed upon the unluckier segment of my audience, occupying roughly one steradian of solid angle to my front. So, anyway, whenever you read "some scientists think", think about me and recalibrate the lower end of your expectations accordingly. Magnificent writing.
I work in a Research Lab that researches Binder Jetting 3D Printing and one of the first storys my colleagues told me when i started to work there was that one time a student tested one of the phenolic resins that glues the part together in the print process The test was to push it through a filter with the help of a syringe to check if the particles in the resin would clog up the printhead, so he got a syringe and filter and no particular PPE because what could go wrong he just needs to push a little bit of PHENOLIC RESIN through a filter right? So he pressed on the syringe full of resin, probaly as hard as he could and pushed the filter of the syringe the resin squirted everywhere and a little bit of the resin got in his eyes, so they rushed to the eye wash station called the ambulane and washed his eyes for like 15minutes till the ambulance arrived, luckily he did not damage his eyes and everything was ok in the end, he was probaly lucky that the resin was water based and water soluble and not solvent based because uncured phenolic resins are not really healthy
During my honours year the same thing happened to me, except the liquid in my case was clarified E.coli lysate (basically the cell cytoplasm dissolved in tris buffered saline). Went all over my face, super gross! Thankfully the most toxic thing in the mixture was some 2-mercaptoethanol, which did nothing for the smell but wasn't going to kill me.
Cleaned out an old Histology locker; found picric acid, bone dry, in a glass jar. Coffee Creamer jars don't make good chemical storage: hand-written label was badly faded. The steel lid was badly rusted...the Fire Department was called, they sent a 'bomb tech' to deal with it. His solution to 2 kilos of high explosive? Poked a hole in the lid and ran in some tap water. "It's perfectly safe when it's wet!"
Of course the tech was right , except maybe about the stuff the TNP made with the iron in the lid . But , with the TNP desensitized by the water , it lowered the risk exponentially .
less a chemistry story and more a general safety one: one time in middle school science class we were doing some experiment that involved a lit candle. it was towards the end of class and my classmate sat across from me. one of the candles was still lit and she had her head over the table writing some stuff down, her hair unfortunately not tied up. i looked away for one second before i heard a sound that makes your stomach drop; a slight "fwshh" as my classmate's hair caught on fire, accompanied by whiff of that delectable burnt hair smell. tiny me panicked, froze, and didn't know what to do, but thankfully the teacher saw the hair ignite and grabbed a fire extinguisher and absolutely doused my classmate in its contents. she ended up being fine with no large burns (save for some burnt hair).
Not only does chloroform react with oxygen to produce phosgene, it also produces equal parts chlorine gas as well, which is probably the only reason he didn’t get enough of a wiff to inhale a lethal does of phosgene. A concentration of only 5ppm can kill, you just have to be around it for a while, which is kinda impossible if there’s chlorine in the room as well.
couldn't the contaminated chloroform be treated with aqueous sod carbonate first (until no more relese of CO2)? That should take care of the phosgene & Cl2
@@CharlesCoderre-yv1cu it can be, but fractional distillation should be the easiest method of dealing with a large amount of rusty chloroform. properly working fumehood is required
Reminds me of something a coworker told me. As undergrad they were voluntold to help with cleaning out a storage room after one of the professors had left to volunteer themselves for a last practical study on soil biome fertilization from decaying organic matter (i.e. they had died). Among all sorts of crusty bottles from various decades of the 20th century, they found a wooden box with a chemicals supplier label that read "Thallium Metal, Rods, 1 kg" in pristine condition, obviously never touched or opened. When they carefully looked inside they found two metal rods of what from the description of the metal could have been Thallium alright. They decided not to test their lab skills (and push their luck) by trying to analyze it, and instead closed the box again very carefully, set it aside and cleaned out the rest of the room. After that was done and after some careful asking around what to do with it, they found that having it disposed professionally would cost thousands and might easily cause some waves in the press. So instead the person in charge put it back inside the room, locked the door, and effectively threw away the key. For all I know, there may still be an abandoned and locked storage room without windows at some university to this day that has a bunch of empty shelves and one wooden box with 1kg of thallium metal in it.... 😅
Years ago, it was considered proper to weld on galvanized steel as long as you drank milk first and during the process. Supposedly the fat in the milk chelated the zinc. Those guys tended to go on disability early.
Here's a quick story from me: When I was 6, I likes to mess around by the sink. I put bleach in the sink to ""save the fishies"". A few minutes after I had left the bathroom, I started to have an extreme coughing fit. My grandma noticed, and asked if I was okay. I said yes, and she checked around to see what was going on. Upon seeing the bottle of bleach open, she immediately panicked and forced me to take a bath. That somehow stopped the coughing. I had gotten chlorine gas poisoning.
In college for many of us analytical chemistry course was the first time we were doing something in a lab. There were many smaller incidents, like getting sprayed with iodine mixture from automatic burette, pouring some smelly organics down the sink, adding hot solution to DCM for extraction and subsequent near explosion but it all resulted in one memorable experience. One day my friend was doing extensive qualitative analysis of ions and after they finished she dumped everything into the sink. The person in charge of the lab horrified (there were a lot of Hg, Cd, Ni, As, Pb samples) gave a quick safety lecture. After that she was so shaken from that lab experience so far that at the end of the next project she asked her colleagues nearby if she can pour down the sink her waste container. They looked at her in confusion saying "are you asking if you can pour down the sink that sodium chloride solution? yes?" and then she realised. So that was kinda funny.
My standard chem story: I was in a physical chemistry lab and my partner handled concentrated sulfuric acid. I didn't touch the stuff and generally have had pretty safe habits in Lab. We finished, and I got Chicken Tikka Masala from an Indian food truck. I noticed a weird redish stain on my blue shirt and assumed I got a pretty bad spot of sauce from the food. It was until I got home that I noticed the color was a much duller purple color and upon inspection, the fibers just disintegrated like dust. No rash or anything, certainly could have been much worse but it's like finding a bullet hole in something close to you that merely has been to a gun range.
I'm not a chemist by any means, but I got a couple of funny stories with it I was doing a Technical course alongside highschool in order to be a Machinist. As we worked with metals, we had to protect them against corrosion. The most popular method was putting your part in a jar of mineral oil. But one day a genius decided to store a part he made in a fluid consisting of H2O2 and cooling solution that we used to prevent the parts from overheating, as machining metal generates loads of heat (it had mostly water in its composition). Needless to say, the usually shiny ABNT 1020 Steel was completely brown the next time he had to work on it. he had to sand all the rust off (keep in mind that the part has around 700mm in length) and he simply could not do it if his life depended on it, so the teacher got him a new, complete and rust-free part while simultaneously guillotining his grades lmao One day we learned about heat treating of parts in order to make them more sturdy, basically you heat the steel to loosen up its structures and then you cool it in a number of different ways in order to control what kind of sturdiness it got. You can heat-treat a part in tons of different ways, but the dumb adolescents only cared about one, quenching. Quenching is literally heating a sample then dumping it in water, it was in theory stupid easy to do. In theory. Fast forward to me and two of my friends with oxy acetylene industrial blowtorches heating up a cutting tool for lathes at the same time. I could swear the thing got almost white hot with the unrelenting barrage of blue flames it was receiving. When we felt like it, we dumped it in a huge reservoir of pure water. In chemistry it is supposed to increase the hardness of the steel by forming new martensite formations, but in our heads it was nothing more than "hot steel" + "cool water" = "super hard steel". Now if you heat up the sample by too much, it will harden by too much as well, and that was a problem. Super hard things are very easy to crack in pieces (porcelain is very hard for example). And we were quenching a CUTTING TOOL. USED TO CUT OTHER ALLOYS OF STEEL. Needless to say the poor thing did not last a single day as a cutting tool because as soon as we used it in a slightly harder metal than usual the whole thing just cracked in pieces and then started emitting this deathly underworld sound of hopelessness and despair white throwing sparks all over the lathe and us. I swear usain bolt was the second fastest person in the world at the moment the teacher listened to it. We got suspended, it was not worth it.
My eye-opening incident with a solvent happened when a 4L jug of DCM shattered inside a cardboard box and I was part of the spill crew. The glue, that under normal circumstances was pretty strong, was nowhere to be seen or felt. Fun fact, when cleaning up large spills of chlorinated solvents it is strongly recommended, if not required, that you wear a Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus.
Not quite chemistry related, but training to be a paramedic in a UK NHS trust that shall remain nameless (other than being in the East of England.....), we got given vials of out-of-date adrenaline to practice intramuscular injections. Apparently actual IM injection dummies are too expensive, so after 5 minutes of brief tuition, we were each issued... an orange. After demonstrating the procedure right before lunch, we of course ate said oranges, with no noticeable effects, other than a very bitter segment. One orange however did cause one of my classmates to urinate relentlessly for the rest of the day... that particular orange had been "administered" multiple vials of the diuretic Ferosemide!
Many decades ago , I went through medic training , and have a similar story about a class on IM administration of epi . Instead of giving us expired epi , we were given vials of expired Narcan , with which to torture innocent oranges . Afterwards I suggested we take the oranges to the park and hand them out to the homeless ...
Omg, the girl with a hole in a shirt is so similar story that happened in my school. Though nobody was concened much. and we knew it was one of the acids
One thing that you don't ever want to hear from anyone messing with dangerous stuff is "That isn't supposed to happen". Like i was in my bedroom removing capacitors from a old non functional N64 power supply so i can harvest the copper wires as i like harvesting valuable remains that i can either melt down or reuse in something else and copper is always useful as a conductor o used as a insulator but after i removed all the capacitors i looked down at my Nitrile exam gloves (I figured those gloves were rubber enough to withstand electrical shocks if the capacitors somehow still worked) and it was torn on my right hand so i said out loud "That isn't supposed to happen" my mom hollered back "WHAT?" and i said in reply "Nothing" as she knew i had my door open incase of an emergency. But the gloves were torn by the PCB as one hand holding it down while the other one has the pliers with a rubber grip taking the capacitors off before i can start my harvest and yes i changed gloves when i did not have to as again all of the capacitors were already taken care of But my mom was in the other room far enough away where she shouldn't be hearing me say that without selective hearing. She also told me to close my door if there were going to be fumes and i told her that if there were going to be fumes i would do it outside where it is ventilated
@@That_Chemist Well to be fair i left out the part where there is always a AC unit in my window so my room is always pretty ventilated especially on windy days as i am too lazy to remove it in the winter. But she did not think about the fumes traveling through the air vents to get to the rest of the house otherwise i would have been told to do it outside just like putting super glue on ducktape apparently gives off some fumes, according to my dad that is as he has had plenty of accidents with super glue including kids running around a table bumping into him making him super glue his eyes shut once. He was rushed to the ER and had his eyes washed out and everything was fine after but he did learn never mess with super glue with hyper ass kids around. My dad also did tell me "Since Johnny is going to do what Johnny wants to do then at least do it on a weekend when i don't work that way i can take your dumb ass to the ER or do it outside" yeah i wanted to super glue duck tape and see what happened as i don't believe him about the fumes. Yeah my parents just gave up trying to explain stuff to me a very long time ago as i never understood their explanations so i always just learn stuff the hard way by doing it and surviving if the thing was dangerous. Well minus the fact that i always wore gloves and goggles for messing with chemicals and electrical stuff as i might be a slow hands on learner but i am not stupid plus wearing those makes me feel like a scientist. That reminds me i need to buy a lab coat as i wanna start working with chemicals again but i don't want to do it without a coat you know melting down old non functional circuit boards extracting the gold from them type of stuff. No i don't sell the gold it is just a hobby collect enough to make a 18fl ounce ingot same with copper and other metals minus Uranium as i don't feel like learning the proper waste disposal/ storage or making a nuclear reactor so i won't extract it from root vegetables or Bananas till i am not lazy and actually look the proper handling up and get a hazmat suit
Hey pro tip to my fellow asthma sufferers. ALWAYS have an inhaler with you. I dont care how well you think you have it under control, bring an inhaler.
10:55 My backyard aluminum furnace used zinc-coated water piping for air intake. Luckily I managed to avoid any zinc-related ailments though, probably mostly because I only used it in open air instead of indoors.
6:09: I have an indirect story of discovering something horrifying from the last century. A few years ago, I worked at a company that occasionally distributed injectable insecticides (hypodermics for trees). One of our clients, who handled a much wider variety of pesticides, told us the horror story of how they were cleaning out their warehouse and discovered a 55-gallon drum of some nightmare mercury-based pesticide.
I could safely do the poison ivy sniff test because of my weird allergies. I'm almost entirely immune to poison ivy, having it stay on my skin for hours (not noticing obviously, I wouldn't have tested it intentionally) and barely gotten itchy, but instantly break out into extremely itchy bright red hives if I use most strong oil cutting soaps that you would use to wash off poison ivy. I also can't wash dishes by hand because of that same allergy and have to wash my hands thoroughly if I get any detergent on myself.
These crusty old bottles remind me of my high school. H2SO4, K2Cr2O7, permanganate and other solutions in glass bottles with stoppers just standing on a table in the corner for years. I did an experiment including homemade magnesium silicide and school's hydrochloric acid for an additional grade (my teacher doesn't do any experiments) and it turns out the HCl was so old that it didn't make silane gas, but probably chlorine and something with the colour of chlorine dioxide, which was done outside of the fumehood because it was out of order. So yeah, I did a gas attack on my classmates lol The following year I decided to do the magnesium+silver nitrate demonstration as a flashy way to end the school year (for those who didn't take AP chem this was their last chemistry lesson ever), this time in a fumehood. Well, it only produced a lot of NO2 instead, because the silver nitrate was around 15 years old
something that's not that bad talking about bad containers, I had iron perchlorate in a mason jar without a rubber, eventually what had to happen happened, and let's just say my white shoes are stained a "lovely" shade of orange/brown.
My school had a big jar of picric acid in the fume hood waiting for the end of days, all yellow and crusty. About 2lbs worth. If it had popped it probably would have killed anyone in the room.
The ancient can of CoF3 that literally soldered togther was rusted through and covered with multicolor fluoride crystals making a nice fuzz around it. The label and packing inside were disibtigrated as well as the intermal metal can that held the chemical. Pretty nasty.
I can sympathize with that 100k loss... I probably completely toasted a 30k electronic assembly and a technician is probably going to lose a couple days trying to fix it.
When explaining the effects of a supervolcano (I went through a long phase of being a disaster science and survival nerd), I tell people that if one went off, I know exactly how I'd be spending the ten years or more after it went off; coughing and hacking in asthmatic misery because of the sulpher dioxide. Such an eruption throws sulpher dioxide into the upper stratosphere. It takes a decade or more to settle out and takes that opportunity to spread world wide causing global cooling and serious lung issues. Likewise, I tell people that in the event we have to use geoengineering to mitigate climate change, that I will strenuously object to the mass release of sulpher dioxide in an attempt to create an artificial volcanic winter, as it is theorized we might do. And if the rest of the world doesn't like it, fuck them all. My lungs come before covering up for their not giving a fuck about the environment. In that scenario, they could have done something, they chose to prioritize the economy over doing the right things, now society is going to shit, they don't get to subject me to years of hacking up a lung just because they couldn't be bothered. No no no no no. I get very anxious about not being able to breathe, please chemists and roboticists, please come up with working respirocytes QUICKLY so that I don't have to worry about death by suffocation ever again. And curse you Yellowstone Caldera for giving governments ideas about how to use science to be lazy about ethics!!!! 💢💢💢💢💢💢💢💢💢 On a slightly related note, for burning the amazon, Bolsonaro can tongue kiss an open beaker of sulpher dioxide.
0:23 isn't this literally the exact same story you had in a video a few weeks ago? I'm wondering if some people are just copying other's stories to tell you...
I don't remember that. Are you sure you're not thinking about that one where sodium caused an explosion inside a fume hood and there was a video of that? (Of course, it's possible that I've just forgotten the story you're referring to.)
I have mixed feelings from these stories. On one hand I'm glad that I did not do anything more dangerous than spilling some PCB etching solution and sodium hydroxide curing agent on me, oh and a student of mine dissolving my precision tweezers in ferric chloride. On the other hand I'm sad, because the reason why I did not do stupid things is that we were only taught theory in high-school. Nothing more than crude theory, and latter on I pursued electronics engineering. Maybe it's time for an old phd fart to buy some personal lab equipment and brush up on that lost organic knowledge...
I'm a metal worker and cringe everytime I see a youtube video with someone welding galvanised steel. Zinc vapours are toxic, long term exposure will leave you dying prematurely after suffering years of health problems. Nasty white fumes and a white powder on the work piece are a tell tale.
Ah yes. SO2. Sulfur dioxide by itself isn't so bad. Trouble is, in your lungs there's plenty of O2 and H2O on a very large surface (Should be obvious, no?). 2 SO2 + O2 -> 2 SO3, SO3 + H2O -> H2SO4. Aka, sulfuric acid. Yeah, sulfuric acid in yer lungs. If you've ever seen sulfuric acid in action, you know what that can do. As an aspiring nerd with a chemistry set, I tried a few experiments with molten sulfur. I was just fascinated with allotropes of sulfur, esp. the solid, plastic-ly one. It always caught fire. Trouble is, sulfur burns like alcohol. Nearly invisible, small blue flames exuding SO2. By the time you (or at least, I) smell the stuff, it's too late. On the next inhalation you get lungs full of sulfuric acid. Not to belabor the point, but: I grew up in NJ a few miles away from what was then the world's biggest petroleum refinery. There's sulfur in natural petroleum and it has to be removed before cracking the oil to get smaller hydrocarbons. I don't know how, but they do this; and when they do, it's extracted in molten form and pumped into large, open containers where it's allowed to solidify into huge blocks for transfer to barges and ships for transfer to consumers of sulfur. When the ship arrives, the blocks of sulfur are melted and the melt is poured into shipboard compartments. Just like my chemistry experiments, this molten sulfur occasionally caught fire, infusing the NJ skis with industrial quantities of SO2. Especially in summers, which in NJ are warm and quite humid, this means that the air one breathed contained real or potential sulfuric acid. I used to distance run, even in summers when HS was out. When atmospheric H2SO4 was plentiful, I would return from a run wheezing and coughing until I could expel the acid from my lungs. I still don't understand how I could run a couple of miles without feeling it. Maybe all those endorphins? Later in life, I would visit my mom back in my home town. One day I saw this white powder in cracks in her driveway that looked like snow. I asked her about this and she replied that residents were told that the dust was sprayed from a plane. "They" said it was harmless. Really? I guess the chemtrails of white stuff was something that absorbed SO2, etc;. And you thought that's only a conspiracy theory, no?
3:02 lol yeah photo chems are fun, they're very good at making orange compounds, which by all accounts are absolutely pure evil. Though as someone who suffers contact dermititus care of the petro chemical industry I always wear gloves when doing any bulk handling and use tongs for everything else. Though I also wear gloves when working the pato tank because that bitch leaks all the time staining my photograpgy table all kinds of weird shades of orange. Could be worse thou, we could be doing photography in the medieval times with silver nitrate or is it nitride? not knowing the difference here probably means I wouldn't have survived long in that era 🫠
Yo This highlights the importance of not only having Eye Wash, but also regularly testing and inspecting. Monthly at the very least for Corp big box stores, I'd think weekly for lab stuffs
Concerning old bottles in chemical storage rooms: I started my PhD in Inorganic Coordination chemistry last year and during that time there was a big cleaning up of old chemicals (bought or synthesised, so you deal with "real" bottle and flasks which hopefully have some labels intact) in our institute. When I started my Bachelor's at this very university a professor of the Inorganic department died and he (with he I mean his pupils) left a lot of chemicals everywhere which were the main target of this cleaning up. And when I mean "everywhere", I mean EVERYWHERE: - 2-3 freezers (these big ones with 2 m height) full of these flasks - every other freezer in the whole institute designated for chemicals had at least 2/3 flasks - the storage facility downstairs had 3/4 packages with up to 10-15 flasks each - ... Until now we're making fun of that by saying that even more flasks will appear, when you get rid of the initial flasks in your cabinat or they will appear from the ceiling if you lift up the ceiling plates. Of course cleaning up s*** of other people is annoying in its own right. But here comes the catch: The professor was working on organometallic compounds, mostly weird Li-organyls, Silanes and P/B/As-compounds (among others there are sealed flasks with condensed gases like AsH3, BH3) which will ignite as soon they see one molecul of H2O or O2. So there you are with hundreds of flasks (not even exaggerating) with absolutely scary shit which will catch fire and most likely poisons you. But the really 'funny' part is that organometallic chemist from the 70s and 80s didn't just make a few 100 mg of their compounds. No, during that time period apparently no one believed your synthesis unless you can synthesise 10 g of that shit at once which makes dealing with that shit even worse. But the best part: Many flasks are soo old that the label is either unreadable or not there anymore. So a recap: - hundreds of flasks containing dangerous compounds (igniting upon contact with air and probably very toxic) - all flasks contain grams (!) of that s*** - for most you can't even read what's in there. The good things is: The chemist who were working on these compounds did a really good job. The compounds are still active as heck. Our designated safety-dude had to clean some flasks and one flask exploded in his hands while cleaning. Fortunately, he wasn't injured besides some cuts in his hand from the flying glass. Since this accident, we are not mandated to get rid of any old chemicals we didn't order or synthesised ourselves.
He just described the process in detail to you. They essentially didn’t bother to identify any of it and left it up to the professors’ successors to deal with.
@@humphreybumblecuck5151 -- That much I understand. I'm asking someone to explain *what process* the university is using to identify and safely dispose of all these flasks. Not everyone who watches this channel is a trained chemist. Most of us can get away with just throwing stuff in the trash or dumping it down the sink.
@@RO_Tim -- Good Lord. So they're a) storing flasks full of random explosive compounds indefinitely. -and- B) disposing of the ones they do find in an irregular and frequently unsafe manner.
I really wonder what sort of stories happen at chemical waste disposal plants, people who handle all the byproducts and failed experiments from a lot of laboratories. Some uranium salts here, some agar with a nasty strain of bacteria there, ancient chloroform, a flask of nitroglycerine that got some students expelled, must be a fun job.
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The guy in the darkroom was lucky. I used to do analogue film development some 25 years ago. If they had done that with developer rather than stop bath, they would be blind. Even less than a drop in the eye will cause the cornea to cloud over and basically develop, leaving you blind or visiually impared.
I'm guessing specifically color film? CD4 is a problem for sure, but CD2 is used in hair dye sometimes
@@JazzyFizzleDrummers I did both colour and B&W photography and developing/printing. I remember neither developer was good to get in the eyes. It could be a matter of concentration too. I am not sure how much is used in hair dye, but it could be low enough concentration that it is "considered safe" in hair dye.
@@JazzyFizzleDrummers CD3 and CD4 both contain sulfuric acid; I wouldn't want that anywhere near my eyes honestly.
What chemicals do those solutions contain, apart from sulfuric acid apparently? I'm not well educated in film development as you can tell.
@@Jokke13th I believe there are currently two major formulas for B&W developing currently as analogue film use has become less and less popular. Kodak D76 is the one I remember using (again, this was 25 years ago so my memory may be a bit fuzzy).
Apparently the formula consists of:
2g monomethly-para-aminophenol-hemisulfate (I believe this to be the primary developing agent)
100g sodium sulfite (anhydrous)
5g hydroguinone
2g borax
This makes 1l of developer liquid. I am not sure as to the exact mechanism of developing the film based on how those chemicals interact with the film. I just remember that the warning I put in my original post was made very clear to us and was posted on the door of the darkroom we used so we were reminded of it every time we went in.
"Make sure your pp has ppe" once again That Chemist slams me over the head with words
Hahaha
I want that on a safety poster
Family planning for chemists.
I lost it at that part LMAO
that's called pants.
Yeah, phosgene burns. I was a welder in a car parts factory, and sometimes the parts where cleaned with PERC (tetrachloroethylene), sometimes not completely removed. When you weld it, you learn quick how bad that shit sucks. Happened 3 or 4 times before they started demanding a second wash to remove it all.
@Edward Elizabeth Hitler what's DCM ? Does DCM stand for dichloromethane ?
@Edward Elizabeth Hitler DCM is fun. At my old job they had me using it to solvent weld acrylic lenses together.
Indoors, no respirator, improper gloves (I didn't wear em because they melted), just goggles.
Fuck that
Safety Idea: Flash freeze button to slow down reactions by freezing everything into a very cold solid.
Temperature control devices are used in CROs to monitor and control reactions which may be exothermic. For big reactors, they have multiple thermal detectors to detect hot spots
2017: they did surgery on a grape
2022: they tried reusing chlorophorm with *🅿️hosgene*
An important technique to teach beginners is how to test the odor of even well known materials. One doesn't jam one's nose into the container, one carefully wafts the air near the opening towards the nose with one's hand. If it's done gently, it'll save one from nose burns or possible toxic effects if a container is mislabelled or is particularly corrosive.
The UV- resin story reminded me of my resin- printer experience. My brother who lives in a very small one room flat impulse- bought a resin 3D- printer. He convinced me to let him set it up in my flat, and promised there won't be any mess, and the air filtering system will eliminate most of the fumes. So I agreed. After the first time he used his 3D printer, I just casually touched the table the printer was on, like I had always done long before it was there, and suddenly felt a sticky thing on my fingers. I immediately washed my hands, and cleaned up the table. A day later, the same thing happened again when I removed a spatula he had left outside, and I got a pretty bad allergic reaction. I than removed the printer from my room, flood- lighted the room with an UV- lamp and searched everything with a UV torch to clean up even the last bit of resin. I later set up his printer in my mother's shops storage room, with a plastic table cloth, trays, an Ethanol wash bottle and a dedicated trash can, right besides a window for ventilation. Touching anything on that table without gloves is prohibited. I actually was able to use the printer wearing a gas mask and otherwise full lab PPE.
Yeah. I own a resin printer and I consider the outsides of tools, resin bottles, wash buckets etc. contaminated with resin. Because there *will* be cross contamination because resin never dries or evaporates. I also make sure to cover the table when using it and never set anything on the bare table.
Another user of Form2s here...
Those resins are pretty benign. They'd definitely irritate your skin, but not much more. However, it sounds like she somehow dipped her hands in the tank, which is ~INCREDIBLY~ stupid.
If one drop of resin gets over the side of that tank, it'll find its way into the very precise, delicate printer workings and cause absolute hell. Almost all versions of breaking SLA printers start with some object going into the tank. Shoving your hands in a tank is... Bad.
(PSA: I only worked with PLA resins. Your resins may be more or less hazardous. Even if it's totally benign, wearing gloves is still for the best)
"PLA" resin is not actually PLA. If you look at the MSDS it's just the usual suspects (various acrylates)
Oh the dark room story reminded me of a story my analogue photography teacher told me many years ago about her own teacher. Apparently back in the day my teacher's teacher brought their dog to class often. As this was on a college campus sometime in the 80s or 90s. This dog had an awful habit of drinking the silver salt baths with apparently no short term consequences. I occasionally wonder what long term health effects that dog had.
Did it turn blue a bit perhaps?
"silver salt baths" ??? could you mean the fiexer?
fixer, sorry
@@CharlesCoderre-yv1cu this sounds correct, its been over a decade since I read about the chemistry of photography. 😓
My pathophysiology teacher told us about when he was in his 20s and handling a soil sample without gloves, ends up having his supervisor warning him about how it had some chemical in it that could cause testicular cancer, flash forward another 25 years and now he has a kid known as the 1 nut wonder since the other was removed from testicular cancer. He was a cancer researcher at the time so he was able to identify it before it became a problem, but still a great example of when in doubt, and when not, to always wear ppe
👀👀👀
We have a form 3 printer at my workplace and let me tell you... The clear, rigid-curing polymer resin smells sooo good... Like the kind of good that would absolutely make a dumb person want to taste it.
And when you add color it looks like a piece of candy
This just reminded of a time from my childhood when my mom (a college chemistry professor) brought home some hydrogen gas to demonstrate the formation of water from the combustion of hydrogen and oxygen. She filled some birthday balloons with hydrogen, attached some matches to a couple of yard sticks, and brought us into the driveway to watch the demo. The only problem was that the balloons had "happy birthday" printed on the side in bold lettering, so after lighting a balloon on fire, a flaming piece of rubber went flying toward the house and splattered onto the side of the house while still on fire. The printed lettering had held some of the balloon together and after dousing it with the hose we were left with a big black charred spot on our siding.
That's brilliant of the photographer! We should adopt this safety rule in all labs. Work naked so if chemicals get on you, you don't lose time stripping down before jumping in the safety shower... hahaha
Sensitive skin areas have to be covered. I am proposing that everyone wears nothing but a full face gas mask, pasties and a condom.
@@user-hv6wb5gk8p A modern chemist's take on the masquerade ball. Having heard of what other students have done in their labs off-hours , it does seem plausible that at least one research group out there has already done exactly that.
@@user-hv6wb5gk8p Condoms might be undesirable when dealing with conc. nitric acid lol
We had someone try to use a bunsen burner to directly heat a boiling tube being used for testing an organic with Tollen's reagent. They honestly need to make safety a bigger part of A level chemistry, because they genuinely didn't know either of the reasons why that was a stupid idea. The only time we were even made of chemical safety other than the basic "don't sniff or drink random things in the lab, and wear eye protection" was when we had to do risk assessments for the iodine clock experiment. They didn't even warn us about the disappearing cross experiment (which is required to pass the course) produces sulfur dioxide lol
Wtf
@@That_Chemist Like, they told us to put our heads over the conical flask for the disappearing cross. It was a miracle that the only injuries I remember from that class were cuts from broken glass and a few minor burns lol.
9:38 This I can confirm: I once ran the last drying process onto a pure pharmaceutical compound, which usually took place in a "drying pistol". The substance is there exposed, onto a small porcellain "weighing-boat", to vacuum in a double-walled glass device over which the warm reflux of constantly distilled Chloroform runs. This process may take one or two days. This Chloroform was quite old, used over and over again and had already a yellowish tint. Unfortunately I forgot to run cooling water through the Dimroth condensor. After some time, there was a slight smell of rotten hay in the lab, which disappered quickly after I opened the water tab. Holding a tissue soaked into Ammonia solution resulted into white fumes of Ammoniachloride at the condensor's outlet. Maybe this was mostly due to HCl vapours, but the smell of Phosgene is quite distinctive. This incident was a quite cause of concern for the head of the lab, because we used Phosgene gas in the same lab, too.
I'm a mechanic and once I got so angry at a car that I smoked brake cleaner. I'm an occasional smoker and on this day my zippo was dry from sitting around. I was too impatient to find another lighter so I soaked the cotton in brake cleaner. Brake cleaner burns, therefore brake cleaner is fuel. When I went to light up my cigarette I saw that the zippo was putting off some thick black smoke, I was too angry to care. I smoked many more cigarettes that day with that same zippo, I was coughing a bit more than usual that day, but no lasting damage.
I have no idea what was in the brake cleaner, we still have the barrel but at this point I don't want to know
Jesus CHRIST 😬
Phosgene baby 👌
👀
A lot of them are toluene, acetone, butoxyethanol etc. in that case it’s probably carbon black that came out That’s possibly a carcinogen to some degree.
If it was a chlorinated cleaner, phosgene is possible. I don’t know how much if any would actually go into the cigarette but even having it near you would be a potential problem.
If I'm remembering correctly, Plastruct's "plastic weld" glue for ABS used to be mostly chloroform with a bit of MEK. I'm pretty sure I've got a 2-oz jar of it from the 1990s around somewhere. I had no idea it might turn hazardous, so thank you for the warning!
When I was in my late teens, people at a local high school (if I recall correctly) found an old bottle of what had been a solution of picric acid, used for staining proteins. All of the solvent had evaporated, leaving dangerously-explosive crystals of picric acid. It had to be removed by trained personnel. That prompted all of the other schools to check if they had the same problem. I don't *think* any explosions occurred, but it was good that all of the old chemical bottles were checked. Many schools found bottles that were unlabelled -- some didn't seem to have ever been labelled in the first place, while others' labels had fallen off or faded with time so that they were illegible. All had to go, and had to be treated as though they were dangerous. Presumably, over the years, people had seen the unlabelled bottles and decided to leave them alone, not wanting to expend the effort to handle them, and assuming that they'd been safe so far...
Just another little medical condition thing. Migraines have come up here before when you spoke about ergotamine. I myself have used the RX dihydroergotamine (more commonly DHE or Migranal) for it. Much like asthma migraine is something very sensitive to triggers that can vary a lot and many of your own which you probably won't know because so many of them are to things you don't normally encounter. For myself I can find myself with completely unbelievable migraines from even a small whiff of certain solvents. Some of them are common ones used for household or workplace cleaning that I can ask people to warn me about. However I've worked in 1 hour photo and taking lots of bio and chem related courses for environmental engineering. Never know what new and exciting migraine trigger I'll find!
One of my university classmates washed his hands with acetone at the lab. Our teacher didn't like that idea.
Maybe not washing, but I've rinsed my hands with acetone more often than I should have, not a great idea of course but really quite convenient (although you should not be doing it, there's taps with soap for a reason)
The darkroom story honestly gave me flashbacks from my childhood. I used to help my grandpa in his darkroom, learning the process, and we had the exact same problems. It was a darkroom built in the middle of the house basically, shut off from all windows, and since windows provided ventilation, there just wasn't any. And we used to spend hours there, in our knickers and nothing else - between the film dryer, the enlarger, the lamps and the rest, there were many sources of heat in a pretty tight space. So yeah, I can attest to that being a problem.
And that reminded me of one story. We were developing slides using the E-6 process when, due to the dimly lit conditions (and the heat starting to impair my thinking) I knocked the solution for the final rinse off a shelf and thoroughly doused myself in it. This was a rather serious problem, since at that time (late 90s) it contained formaldehyde. I was rushed to the nearby bathroom and thoroughly washed with water and was apparently fine, but it made my grandpa rethink the whole concept of "teaching an almost naked 8 year old to handle chemicals". From then on, I stood in the corner and watched whenever dangerous chemicals were involved.
Yo
This highlights the importance of not only having Eye Wash, but also regularly testing and inspecting.
Monthly at the very least for Corp big box stores, I'd think weekly for lab stuffs
5:38 I work at a nuclear research facility that’s been around since 1945. We have a lot of old laboratories dating back to the 1950’s and 1960’s. A lot of materials get left behind and orphaned when people retire. I’m an engineer responsible for maintaining these lab buildings and keeping the labs in operation. I’ve seen a lot of really sketchy, dangerous things that were orphaned, lost and/or left behind when they should have been disposed of or replaced years ago. I’ve gained a healthy distrust of laboratories, laboratory technicians and research scientists from my field experience working in these laboratory buildings. I try really hard to keep you folks safe from your own devices but it’s sort of like telling an old logger he’s not using a chainsaw safely. “Listen Sony, I’ve been using a chainsaw for 45 years without ever having an accident and I don't need some young whippersnapper telling me…”, as he saws his leg off in front of me.
My hair is turning grey and I'm developing a bald patch.
"I've been doing this for 45 years and nothing has ever happened." As the Shake Hands With Danger riff starts playing in the background.
(If you haven't seen the video yet, it's a certified health and safety classic for the mechanical, construction and mining trades.)
Very interesting that there are more stories of SO2 triggering asthma… during my undergrad, my close friend with well controlled asthma had the same fate during a class… the culprit was SO2 and it was the only time he had any problems with any chemicals related to his condition…
I definitely recommend finding and reading the rest of the orange tweet thread
I thought the title meant that they used phosgene to recycle chloroform.
8:30, I'm pretty sure that was sulphuric acid. I once got some on a tee I was wearing and the two tiny drops ate dime sized holes in the shirt in little time.
I lost a number of trousers by unwittingly dropping concentrated sulfuric acid on them...
It's hard to make a guess with so little information. Plenty of chemicals, acid or not, could eat a hole through a shirt that quickly.
@@rarebeeph1783 Very true, it would just make sense given the high school setting.
10:50 so damn glad I got my new respirator today for arc welding as my old one was not cutting it, ngl I’m surprised that no one else in the class was wearing one besides me.
I have a fun question.
What do you get when you put a bunch of inexperienced 2nd Year Chemical Engineering students in an Organic Chemistry lab at 4-7PM on a Friday night?
You get a few air-headed students unintentionally inhaling HCl gas after opening (outside the fumehood 💀) a test tube with Phenol + Acetyl Chloride in it. ( ^:
I mean, we WERE warned in the lab manual, to be fair. xd
"Always store Permanganate and Peroxide in the "Oxidizer" area to be safe" in plant operations manual.
I laughed way too much at the ppe for the pp
Fume hoods. Industrial factories are giant fume hoods. Our employer provided uniform was OK but our cotton underwear had holes from sulfuric acid mist.
We had an explosion outside "waste treatment"(they used borohydride) near the "No Smoking - Hydrogen" sign: due to cigarette addicts.
I have asthma and it's so unpredictable. You can smoke cigs and be fine and then you smell an incense and you're wheezing like an octogenarian.
i appreciate all these chempilations, but I have a real hankering for some of the educational videos that you used to do a lot of, like IOC videos. The tierlists and chempilations are entertaining and humorous but some more substantive material every so often is duly noticed and appreciated sir
The orange tweet's follow-up is amazing. Here's the full text.
When an article says "some scientists think" then remember this: I, a scientist, once thought I could fit a whole orange in my mouth. I could, it turns out, get it in there, but I hadn't given sufficient thought to the reverse operation.
I should also, on reflection, have practiced in private. I had an audience, which grew as my initial satisfaction at an hypothesis well proven, slipped rapidly through stages of qualm, disquiet, then alarm (mild through severe) and ended in full blown panic.
When one panics, one's muscles tense, which is of course, the opposite of what I needed here. I had been quite relaxed at the start, but now I couldn't get a finger between the orange and the very taut edges of my mouth.
Above and below, the orange, which was now under some pressure, deformed to make a nearly perfect seal against my teeth. I hadn't previously been aware of how much oxygen one needs to consume an orange, but I was made aware of it now by its sudden and ongoing lack.
I forgot for a moment that I had nostrils and tried to breathe in hard through my mouth. I have big lungs. When the doctor tested my lung capacity, I blew the end clean off the cardboard tube.
I've always been vaguely proud of that; mostly for want of more tangible achievements and because I am, when all is said and done, the kind of person otherwise predisposed to shove a whole orange in his mouth without cause.
Those enormous lungs - my pride and joy - expanding in this moment of crisis to their fullest extent, had created a hard vacuum behind the orange, which, at that point imploded.
From now on, things which had been unfolding at an almost leisurely pace, started to happen rather fast. So, I will take this opportunity to say that no one had actually tried to help me up till now. This was not for lack of opportunity.
Later, someone mentioned the kind of details - veins like worms scribbling incomprehensible messages across my forehead, eyes popping out as if on stalks, laced with tiny red veins - which one can only truly apprehend at a distance that wouldn't have made help impossible.
But back to the imploding orange. Although it didn't diminish appreciably in volume upon implosion, the released juice vaporised, turning into a burning acidic cloud that instantly flooded my lungs.
My lungs very sensibly responded by collapsing rapidly aided by an involuntary and powerful spasm from my diaphragm.
The vapour and oily zest from the orange's skin mixed with mucus scoured from my lungs (that spread flat, we must remember, would cover a tennis court) as well as the last of my residual oxygen, exited now through my rediscovered nostrils as a magnificently abundant yellow foam.
And, having a volume in excess of what could easily egress at speed via those narrow tubes, it also squirted out through nearby exits, including around my eyes.
Even that wasn't enough and the build up of pressure finally proved too much for the orange, which left my mouth like grapeshot from a cannon, like the superluminal jets generated by matter falling towards a black hole at relativistic speed.
When I finally recovered my senses and the cycle of whooping inhalation and coughing fits had exhausted itself, I was greeted not by the concern that I felt such a brush with death merited, but with a disgust that later reflection suggests may not have been wholly unwarranted.
Temporarily blind and gasping in my own private world of consequences, I was unaware of the cone of devastation that I had unleashed upon the unluckier segment of my audience, occupying roughly one steradian of solid angle to my front.
So, anyway, whenever you read "some scientists think", think about me and recalibrate the lower end of your expectations accordingly.
Magnificent writing.
I work in a Research Lab that researches Binder Jetting 3D Printing and one of the first storys my colleagues told me when i started to work there was that one time a student tested one of the phenolic resins that glues the part together in the print process
The test was to push it through a filter with the help of a syringe to check if the particles in the resin would clog up the printhead, so he got a syringe and filter and no particular PPE because what could go wrong he just needs to push a little bit of PHENOLIC RESIN through a filter right?
So he pressed on the syringe full of resin, probaly as hard as he could and pushed the filter of the syringe the resin squirted everywhere and a little bit of the resin got in his eyes, so they rushed to the eye wash station called the ambulane and washed his eyes for like 15minutes till the ambulance arrived, luckily he did not damage his eyes and everything was ok in the end, he was probaly lucky that the resin was water based and water soluble and not solvent based because uncured phenolic resins are not really healthy
During my honours year the same thing happened to me, except the liquid in my case was clarified E.coli lysate (basically the cell cytoplasm dissolved in tris buffered saline). Went all over my face, super gross!
Thankfully the most toxic thing in the mixture was some 2-mercaptoethanol, which did nothing for the smell but wasn't going to kill me.
Chloroform… with Phosgene… what could go wrong
Easily the most chaotic title to a video i have ever seen
Cleaned out an old Histology locker; found picric acid, bone dry, in a glass jar.
Coffee Creamer jars don't make good chemical storage: hand-written label was badly faded.
The steel lid was badly rusted...the Fire Department was called, they sent a 'bomb tech' to deal with it.
His solution to 2 kilos of high explosive?
Poked a hole in the lid and ran in some tap water.
"It's perfectly safe when it's wet!"
Of course the tech was right , except maybe about the stuff the TNP made with the iron in the lid .
But , with the TNP desensitized by the water , it lowered the risk exponentially .
Might be better to use distilled water next time. That way, it won’t form salts that will make it even more unstable if it dries again.
less a chemistry story and more a general safety one: one time in middle school science class we were doing some experiment that involved a lit candle. it was towards the end of class and my classmate sat across from me. one of the candles was still lit and she had her head over the table writing some stuff down, her hair unfortunately not tied up. i looked away for one second before i heard a sound that makes your stomach drop; a slight "fwshh" as my classmate's hair caught on fire, accompanied by whiff of that delectable burnt hair smell. tiny me panicked, froze, and didn't know what to do, but thankfully the teacher saw the hair ignite and grabbed a fire extinguisher and absolutely doused my classmate in its contents. she ended up being fine with no large burns (save for some burnt hair).
Not only does chloroform react with oxygen to produce phosgene, it also produces equal parts chlorine gas as well, which is probably the only reason he didn’t get enough of a wiff to inhale a lethal does of phosgene. A concentration of only 5ppm can kill, you just have to be around it for a while, which is kinda impossible if there’s chlorine in the room as well.
That was what I was wondering since I was taught the "golden rule" of phosgene was if you smell fresh cut grass - it's too late.
couldn't the contaminated chloroform be treated with aqueous sod carbonate first (until no more relese of CO2)? That should take care of the phosgene & Cl2
@@CharlesCoderre-yv1cu it can be, but fractional distillation should be the easiest method of dealing with a large amount of rusty chloroform. properly working fumehood is required
Reminds me of something a coworker told me. As undergrad they were voluntold to help with cleaning out a storage room after one of the professors had left to volunteer themselves for a last practical study on soil biome fertilization from decaying organic matter (i.e. they had died). Among all sorts of crusty bottles from various decades of the 20th century, they found a wooden box with a chemicals supplier label that read "Thallium Metal, Rods, 1 kg" in pristine condition, obviously never touched or opened. When they carefully looked inside they found two metal rods of what from the description of the metal could have been Thallium alright. They decided not to test their lab skills (and push their luck) by trying to analyze it, and instead closed the box again very carefully, set it aside and cleaned out the rest of the room. After that was done and after some careful asking around what to do with it, they found that having it disposed professionally would cost thousands and might easily cause some waves in the press. So instead the person in charge put it back inside the room, locked the door, and effectively threw away the key. For all I know, there may still be an abandoned and locked storage room without windows at some university to this day that has a bunch of empty shelves and one wooden box with 1kg of thallium metal in it.... 😅
Ah yes, casually opening chloroform outside the fume hood 😍😍
Years ago, it was considered proper to weld on galvanized steel as long as you drank milk first and during the process. Supposedly the fat in the milk chelated the zinc. Those guys tended to go on disability early.
Here's a quick story from me:
When I was 6, I likes to mess around by the sink. I put bleach in the sink to ""save the fishies"". A few minutes after I had left the bathroom, I started to have an extreme coughing fit. My grandma noticed, and asked if I was okay. I said yes, and she checked around to see what was going on. Upon seeing the bottle of bleach open, she immediately panicked and forced me to take a bath. That somehow stopped the coughing. I had gotten chlorine gas poisoning.
In college for many of us analytical chemistry course was the first time we were doing something in a lab.
There were many smaller incidents, like getting sprayed with iodine mixture from automatic burette, pouring some smelly organics down the sink, adding hot solution to DCM for extraction and subsequent near explosion but it all resulted in one memorable experience.
One day my friend was doing extensive qualitative analysis of ions and after they finished she dumped everything into the sink. The person in charge of the lab horrified (there were a lot of Hg, Cd, Ni, As, Pb samples) gave a quick safety lecture. After that she was so shaken from that lab experience so far that at the end of the next project she asked her colleagues nearby if she can pour down the sink her waste container. They looked at her in confusion saying "are you asking if you can pour down the sink that sodium chloride solution? yes?" and then she realised. So that was kinda funny.
My standard chem story: I was in a physical chemistry lab and my partner handled concentrated sulfuric acid. I didn't touch the stuff and generally have had pretty safe habits in Lab. We finished, and I got Chicken Tikka Masala from an Indian food truck. I noticed a weird redish stain on my blue shirt and assumed I got a pretty bad spot of sauce from the food. It was until I got home that I noticed the color was a much duller purple color and upon inspection, the fibers just disintegrated like dust. No rash or anything, certainly could have been much worse but it's like finding a bullet hole in something close to you that merely has been to a gun range.
Yeah I was told that zinc coated screws are dangerous when you heat them up. Not that we didn't do that anyway...
I'm not a chemist by any means, but I got a couple of funny stories with it
I was doing a Technical course alongside highschool in order to be a Machinist. As we worked with metals, we had to protect them against corrosion. The most popular method was putting your part in a jar of mineral oil. But one day a genius decided to store a part he made in a fluid consisting of H2O2 and cooling solution that we used to prevent the parts from overheating, as machining metal generates loads of heat (it had mostly water in its composition). Needless to say, the usually shiny ABNT 1020 Steel was completely brown the next time he had to work on it.
he had to sand all the rust off (keep in mind that the part has around 700mm in length) and he simply could not do it if his life depended on it, so the teacher got him a new, complete and rust-free part while simultaneously guillotining his grades lmao
One day we learned about heat treating of parts in order to make them more sturdy, basically you heat the steel to loosen up its structures and then you cool it in a number of different ways in order to control what kind of sturdiness it got. You can heat-treat a part in tons of different ways, but the dumb adolescents only cared about one, quenching.
Quenching is literally heating a sample then dumping it in water, it was in theory stupid easy to do. In theory.
Fast forward to me and two of my friends with oxy acetylene industrial blowtorches heating up a cutting tool for lathes at the same time. I could swear the thing got almost white hot with the unrelenting barrage of blue flames it was receiving. When we felt like it, we dumped it in a huge reservoir of pure water. In chemistry it is supposed to increase the hardness of the steel by forming new martensite formations, but in our heads it was nothing more than "hot steel" + "cool water" = "super hard steel".
Now if you heat up the sample by too much, it will harden by too much as well, and that was a problem. Super hard things are very easy to crack in pieces (porcelain is very hard for example). And we were quenching a CUTTING TOOL. USED TO CUT OTHER ALLOYS OF STEEL.
Needless to say the poor thing did not last a single day as a cutting tool because as soon as we used it in a slightly harder metal than usual the whole thing just cracked in pieces and then started emitting this deathly underworld sound of hopelessness and despair white throwing sparks all over the lathe and us. I swear usain bolt was the second fastest person in the world at the moment the teacher listened to it.
We got suspended, it was not worth it.
My eye-opening incident with a solvent happened when a 4L jug of DCM shattered inside a cardboard box and I was part of the spill crew. The glue, that under normal circumstances was pretty strong, was nowhere to be seen or felt. Fun fact, when cleaning up large spills of chlorinated solvents it is strongly recommended, if not required, that you wear a Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus.
No matter what never have a person put his mouth on a tube stuck in something poisonous.
6:30 all storage leaks under the right conditions. Ever seen superfluid dripping through glass?
Welding galvanized material also is a breathing zinc risk.
"Make sure your PP has PPE" made me laugh out loud at 2am
Not quite chemistry related, but training to be a paramedic in a UK NHS trust that shall remain nameless (other than being in the East of England.....), we got given vials of out-of-date adrenaline to practice intramuscular injections. Apparently actual IM injection dummies are too expensive, so after 5 minutes of brief tuition, we were each issued... an orange. After demonstrating the procedure right before lunch, we of course ate said oranges, with no noticeable effects, other than a very bitter segment. One orange however did cause one of my classmates to urinate relentlessly for the rest of the day... that particular orange had been "administered" multiple vials of the diuretic Ferosemide!
Many decades ago , I went through medic training , and have a similar story about a class on IM administration of epi .
Instead of giving us expired epi , we were given vials of expired Narcan , with which to torture innocent oranges .
Afterwards I suggested we take the oranges to the park and hand them out to the homeless ...
What is it with this channel and Phosgene all the time? Is this "Warcriminals Anonymous"?
Great video as always :)
Thank you :)
Omg, the girl with a hole in a shirt is so similar story that happened in my school. Though nobody was concened much. and we knew it was one of the acids
One thing that you don't ever want to hear from anyone messing with dangerous stuff is "That isn't supposed to happen". Like i was in my bedroom removing capacitors from a old non functional N64 power supply so i can harvest the copper wires as i like harvesting valuable remains that i can either melt down or reuse in something else and copper is always useful as a conductor o used as a insulator but after i removed all the capacitors i looked down at my Nitrile exam gloves (I figured those gloves were rubber enough to withstand electrical shocks if the capacitors somehow still worked) and it was torn on my right hand so i said out loud "That isn't supposed to happen" my mom hollered back "WHAT?" and i said in reply "Nothing" as she knew i had my door open incase of an emergency. But the gloves were torn by the PCB as one hand holding it down while the other one has the pliers with a rubber grip taking the capacitors off before i can start my harvest and yes i changed gloves when i did not have to as again all of the capacitors were already taken care of
But my mom was in the other room far enough away where she shouldn't be hearing me say that without selective hearing. She also told me to close my door if there were going to be fumes and i told her that if there were going to be fumes i would do it outside where it is ventilated
Bro, your mom asked you to keep the fumes in your room…
@@That_Chemist Well to be fair i left out the part where there is always a AC unit in my window so my room is always pretty ventilated especially on windy days as i am too lazy to remove it in the winter. But she did not think about the fumes traveling through the air vents to get to the rest of the house otherwise i would have been told to do it outside just like putting super glue on ducktape apparently gives off some fumes, according to my dad that is as he has had plenty of accidents with super glue including kids running around a table bumping into him making him super glue his eyes shut once.
He was rushed to the ER and had his eyes washed out and everything was fine after but he did learn never mess with super glue with hyper ass kids around. My dad also did tell me "Since Johnny is going to do what Johnny wants to do then at least do it on a weekend when i don't work that way i can take your dumb ass to the ER or do it outside" yeah i wanted to super glue duck tape and see what happened as i don't believe him about the fumes.
Yeah my parents just gave up trying to explain stuff to me a very long time ago as i never understood their explanations so i always just learn stuff the hard way by doing it and surviving if the thing was dangerous. Well minus the fact that i always wore gloves and goggles for messing with chemicals and electrical stuff as i might be a slow hands on learner but i am not stupid plus wearing those makes me feel like a scientist. That reminds me i need to buy a lab coat as i wanna start working with chemicals again but i don't want to do it without a coat you know melting down old non functional circuit boards extracting the gold from them type of stuff. No i don't sell the gold it is just a hobby collect enough to make a 18fl ounce ingot same with copper and other metals minus Uranium as i don't feel like learning the proper waste disposal/ storage or making a nuclear reactor so i won't extract it from root vegetables or Bananas till i am not lazy and actually look the proper handling up and get a hazmat suit
Hey pro tip to my fellow asthma sufferers. ALWAYS have an inhaler with you. I dont care how well you think you have it under control, bring an inhaler.
i have a brick of zinc ive been gradually adding to with pennies that I melt on my kitchen stove
bad
10:55 My backyard aluminum furnace used zinc-coated water piping for air intake. Luckily I managed to avoid any zinc-related ailments though, probably mostly because I only used it in open air instead of indoors.
Should have included the whole thread for that first tweet. It really goes places.
Fun Fact: J. K. Rowling's Chamber of Secrets was inspired by her old chemistry lab at school.
videos like these make me reconsider my idea of doing chemistry.
6:09: I have an indirect story of discovering something horrifying from the last century. A few years ago, I worked at a company that occasionally distributed injectable insecticides (hypodermics for trees). One of our clients, who handled a much wider variety of pesticides, told us the horror story of how they were cleaning out their warehouse and discovered a 55-gallon drum of some nightmare mercury-based pesticide.
💀
I could safely do the poison ivy sniff test because of my weird allergies. I'm almost entirely immune to poison ivy, having it stay on my skin for hours (not noticing obviously, I wouldn't have tested it intentionally) and barely gotten itchy, but instantly break out into extremely itchy bright red hives if I use most strong oil cutting soaps that you would use to wash off poison ivy. I also can't wash dishes by hand because of that same allergy and have to wash my hands thoroughly if I get any detergent on myself.
I had nitric acid vapors burn holes in a green cotton shirt, and on the edges of the holes the dye turned purple
Next up: *They suggested using a nuclear bomb to recover gold*
Guy could teach me how to make a bomb out of soil
These crusty old bottles remind me of my high school. H2SO4, K2Cr2O7, permanganate and other solutions in glass bottles with stoppers just standing on a table in the corner for years. I did an experiment including homemade magnesium silicide and school's hydrochloric acid for an additional grade (my teacher doesn't do any experiments) and it turns out the HCl was so old that it didn't make silane gas, but probably chlorine and something with the colour of chlorine dioxide, which was done outside of the fumehood because it was out of order. So yeah, I did a gas attack on my classmates lol
The following year I decided to do the magnesium+silver nitrate demonstration as a flashy way to end the school year (for those who didn't take AP chem this was their last chemistry lesson ever), this time in a fumehood. Well, it only produced a lot of NO2 instead, because the silver nitrate was around 15 years old
Aqueous bicarb wash 😉
something that's not that bad talking about bad containers, I had iron perchlorate in a mason jar without a rubber, eventually what had to happen happened, and let's just say my white shoes are stained a "lovely" shade of orange/brown.
My school had a big jar of picric acid in the fume hood waiting for the end of days, all yellow and crusty. About 2lbs worth. If it had popped it probably would have killed anyone in the room.
Why stop there ? Why not add fluorine gas ?
The ancient can of CoF3 that literally soldered togther was rusted through and covered with multicolor fluoride crystals making a nice fuzz around it. The label and packing inside were disibtigrated as well as the intermal metal can that held the chemical. Pretty nasty.
I can sympathize with that 100k loss... I probably completely toasted a 30k electronic assembly and a technician is probably going to lose a couple days trying to fix it.
Any sentence with the words chloroform and phosgene in them are automatically a bad idea.
When explaining the effects of a supervolcano (I went through a long phase of being a disaster science and survival nerd), I tell people that if one went off, I know exactly how I'd be spending the ten years or more after it went off; coughing and hacking in asthmatic misery because of the sulpher dioxide. Such an eruption throws sulpher dioxide into the upper stratosphere. It takes a decade or more to settle out and takes that opportunity to spread world wide causing global cooling and serious lung issues.
Likewise, I tell people that in the event we have to use geoengineering to mitigate climate change, that I will strenuously object to the mass release of sulpher dioxide in an attempt to create an artificial volcanic winter, as it is theorized we might do. And if the rest of the world doesn't like it, fuck them all. My lungs come before covering up for their not giving a fuck about the environment. In that scenario, they could have done something, they chose to prioritize the economy over doing the right things, now society is going to shit, they don't get to subject me to years of hacking up a lung just because they couldn't be bothered. No no no no no. I get very anxious about not being able to breathe, please chemists and roboticists, please come up with working respirocytes QUICKLY so that I don't have to worry about death by suffocation ever again. And curse you Yellowstone Caldera for giving governments ideas about how to use science to be lazy about ethics!!!! 💢💢💢💢💢💢💢💢💢
On a slightly related note, for burning the amazon, Bolsonaro can tongue kiss an open beaker of sulpher dioxide.
Always add some ethanol to chloroform.
i think that theres a reaction called the chloroforming reaction that includes using phosgene as a catalyst or something?
Would I take it that the excess liquid on the plastic is a byproduct of whatever initial solidification occurs during printing?
it is probably unreacted monomer - these don't usually have solvents
This thumbnail is next level shit
thanks!
💀
Talk about dextromethorphan
cool
what do you think about m5 fiber or polyhydroquinone-diimidazopyridine
0:23 isn't this literally the exact same story you had in a video a few weeks ago? I'm wondering if some people are just copying other's stories to tell you...
I don't remember that. Are you sure you're not thinking about that one where sodium caused an explosion inside a fume hood and there was a video of that? (Of course, it's possible that I've just forgotten the story you're referring to.)
I have mixed feelings from these stories. On one hand I'm glad that I did not do anything more dangerous than spilling some PCB etching solution and sodium hydroxide curing agent on me, oh and a student of mine dissolving my precision tweezers in ferric chloride. On the other hand I'm sad, because the reason why I did not do stupid things is that we were only taught theory in high-school. Nothing more than crude theory, and latter on I pursued electronics engineering. Maybe it's time for an old phd fart to buy some personal lab equipment and brush up on that lost organic knowledge...
Do you think N2O5 can be called dinitrogen pentoxide?
Yes
@@That_Chemist Thanks, someone was trying to convince me that it can't, now I can show them your comment as a professional chemist's opinion! 👍
I'm a metal worker and cringe everytime I see a youtube video with someone welding galvanised steel. Zinc vapours are toxic, long term exposure will leave you dying prematurely after suffering years of health problems. Nasty white fumes and a white powder on the work piece are a tell tale.
2 words that sounds pretty bad.
Is that thumbnail AI generated??
*perhaps*
PpPPE
Ah yes. SO2. Sulfur dioxide by itself isn't so bad. Trouble is, in your lungs there's plenty of O2 and H2O on a very large surface (Should be obvious, no?). 2 SO2 + O2 -> 2 SO3, SO3 + H2O -> H2SO4. Aka, sulfuric acid. Yeah, sulfuric acid in yer lungs. If you've ever seen sulfuric acid in action, you know what that can do. As an aspiring nerd with a chemistry set, I tried a few experiments with molten sulfur. I was just fascinated with allotropes of sulfur, esp. the solid, plastic-ly one. It always caught fire. Trouble is, sulfur burns like alcohol. Nearly invisible, small blue flames exuding SO2. By the time you (or at least, I) smell the stuff, it's too late. On the next inhalation you get lungs full of sulfuric acid.
Not to belabor the point, but: I grew up in NJ a few miles away from what was then the world's biggest petroleum refinery. There's sulfur in natural petroleum and it has to be removed before cracking the oil to get smaller hydrocarbons. I don't know how, but they do this; and when they do, it's extracted in molten form and pumped into large, open containers where it's allowed to solidify into huge blocks for transfer to barges and ships for transfer to consumers of sulfur. When the ship arrives, the blocks of sulfur are melted and the melt is poured into shipboard compartments. Just like my chemistry experiments, this molten sulfur occasionally caught fire, infusing the NJ skis with industrial quantities of SO2. Especially in summers, which in NJ are warm and quite humid, this means that the air one breathed contained real or potential sulfuric acid. I used to distance run, even in summers when HS was out. When atmospheric H2SO4 was plentiful, I would return from a run wheezing and coughing until I could expel the acid from my lungs. I still don't understand how I could run a couple of miles without feeling it. Maybe all those endorphins?
Later in life, I would visit my mom back in my home town. One day I saw this white powder in cracks in her driveway that looked like snow. I asked her about this and she replied that residents were told that the dust was sprayed from a plane. "They" said it was harmless. Really? I guess the chemtrails of white stuff was something that absorbed SO2, etc;. And you thought that's only a conspiracy theory, no?
3:02 lol yeah photo chems are fun, they're very good at making orange compounds, which by all accounts are absolutely pure evil.
Though as someone who suffers contact dermititus care of the petro chemical industry I always wear gloves when doing any bulk handling and use tongs for everything else. Though I also wear gloves when working the pato tank because that bitch leaks all the time staining my photograpgy table all kinds of weird shades of orange.
Could be worse thou, we could be doing photography in the medieval times with silver nitrate or is it nitride? not knowing the difference here probably means I wouldn't have survived long in that era 🫠
Yo
This highlights the importance of not only having Eye Wash, but also regularly testing and inspecting.
Monthly at the very least for Corp big box stores, I'd think weekly for lab stuffs
Concerning old bottles in chemical storage rooms: I started my PhD in Inorganic Coordination chemistry last year and during that time there was a big cleaning up of old chemicals (bought or synthesised, so you deal with "real" bottle and flasks which hopefully have some labels intact) in our institute. When I started my Bachelor's at this very university a professor of the Inorganic department died and he (with he I mean his pupils) left a lot of chemicals everywhere which were the main target of this cleaning up. And when I mean "everywhere", I mean EVERYWHERE:
- 2-3 freezers (these big ones with 2 m height) full of these flasks
- every other freezer in the whole institute designated for chemicals had at least 2/3 flasks
- the storage facility downstairs had 3/4 packages with up to 10-15 flasks each
- ...
Until now we're making fun of that by saying that even more flasks will appear, when you get rid of the initial flasks in your cabinat or they will appear from the ceiling if you lift up the ceiling plates.
Of course cleaning up s*** of other people is annoying in its own right. But here comes the catch: The professor was working on organometallic compounds, mostly weird Li-organyls, Silanes and P/B/As-compounds (among others there are sealed flasks with condensed gases like AsH3, BH3) which will ignite as soon they see one molecul of H2O or O2. So there you are with hundreds of flasks (not even exaggerating) with absolutely scary shit which will catch fire and most likely poisons you. But the really 'funny' part is that organometallic chemist from the 70s and 80s didn't just make a few 100 mg of their compounds. No, during that time period apparently no one believed your synthesis unless you can synthesise 10 g of that shit at once which makes dealing with that shit even worse. But the best part: Many flasks are soo old that the label is either unreadable or not there anymore.
So a recap:
- hundreds of flasks containing dangerous compounds (igniting upon contact with air and probably very toxic)
- all flasks contain grams (!) of that s***
- for most you can't even read what's in there.
The good things is: The chemist who were working on these compounds did a really good job. The compounds are still active as heck. Our designated safety-dude had to clean some flasks and one flask exploded in his hands while cleaning. Fortunately, he wasn't injured besides some cuts in his hand from the flying glass. Since this accident, we are not mandated to get rid of any old chemicals we didn't order or synthesised ourselves.
So how does the university safely identify and dispose of all of these organometallic compounds the departed professor left behind?
He just described the process in detail to you.
They essentially didn’t bother to identify any of it and left it up to the professors’ successors to deal with.
@@humphreybumblecuck5151 -- That much I understand. I'm asking someone to explain *what process* the university is using to identify and safely dispose of all these flasks.
Not everyone who watches this channel is a trained chemist. Most of us can get away with just throwing stuff in the trash or dumping it down the sink.
@@Grizabeeblesthey aren't using a safe process.
A safe process would be to pay a trained professional specialized in that type of cleanup.
@@RO_Tim -- Good Lord. So they're a) storing flasks full of random explosive compounds indefinitely.
-and-
B) disposing of the ones they do find in an irregular and frequently unsafe manner.
If you're naked under the lab coat you don't have to take off anything that isn't designed for quick removal.
I really wonder what sort of stories happen at chemical waste disposal plants, people who handle all the byproducts and failed experiments from a lot of laboratories. Some uranium salts here, some agar with a nasty strain of bacteria there, ancient chloroform, a flask of nitroglycerine that got some students expelled, must be a fun job.