I have had carbon monoxide poisoning before. Do NOT recommend! Get the damn detector. While visiting my aunt, her furnace had apparently malfunctioned in the middle of the night. I woke up one morning to find that I had a splitting headache. I have migraines, so this wasn't uncommon. I noticed that the pets had all been sick overnight too, but I was late and panicking about the exam I had first thing in the morning, so I dragged myself to school. Halfway through the first period, I got called to the office. Turns out my aunt and cousins had woken up and realized that something was very wrong, and were diagnosed with CO poisoning. They had me go immediately to the hospital for treatment. Again, DO NOT fool around with CO poisoning!
Cigarette smokers averaged 3% carboxyhemoglobin (as pct of hemoglobin). Long stop&go commutes cause retention of 1% Carbon Monoxide. Current biochem points to Carbon Monoxide being a neurotransmitter like Nitric Oxide is. Small amounts of Carbon Monoxide appear to have a natural resolution in the Human body. (Many people die yearly from using fossile fuel with limited exhaust.)
Phosgene survivor here: it has a wet/grassy smell, doesn't smell 'bad' in any overt way. I don't recall if my eyes were irritated, but I do remember that I didn't feel sick right away. Source: Thermal decomposition of chlorinated paint-remover on a stove-top. I had a light exposure, the only lasting damage was to my sense of smell.
I thought it smells like hay. I worked with Chloroform and phosgene develops in small amounts in the gas phase of containers. We had 40Liter containers in a 40C+ environment. Small amounts, but still.
My father ran into phosgene when a pipe burst that carried it. It ended up putting him into the hospital and it killed one of the other people exposed. I need to ask him for extra details, but I seem to remember there wasn't enough gas mask so they were trying to share
@@mweskamppp wow I used to work with chloroform, had no idea i was smelling phosgene too. I used to do phenol-chloroform DNA extractions of many samples at once quite close to the sash of the fume hood. All I know is I used to get nose bleeds much easier..
You need to do a full “would you rather breath in”-tournament instead of a simple tier list. There are too many factors to consider in tier lists. But having to choose between plausible life threatening accidents should be easy enough.
Yeah, stuff like ozone is not actually that bad in small quantities and is actually part of the smell of thunderstorms (formed from lightning). It's is used in small household ozone machines as an air purifier. It has a nice fresh metallic smell. In fact back when I had an electric air purifier as a kid, I would sniff the ozone after smelling something bad just to clear my nose. Above a certain concentration is when it turns nasty and starts dumping that third oxygen into everything making your lungs burn and oxidising things. That's why a place must be evacuated when a large ozone machine is running to sterilize.
Indeed. As a pharmacist I sometimes "reclassify" E and F tiers way higher. On a solely chemical structure and molecular properties, that chemist is spot on. But what happens once you ingested it is another story. The liver is a gigantic enzymatic factory. And the liver can be dumb or just doesn't care about "that weird kidney thing" 😆
H2S needs more respect, it's really quite terrifying. You can smell it at low concentrations, but it quickly kills your sense of smell at higher concentrations. I work with it a lot in petrochem, and if we get so much as a whiff of H2S we shut everything down and evacuate the building. That stuff is no joke. If you're in an area you'd expect low levels of H2S, being able to smell it is sometimes more reassuring than not being able to smell it, as it's possible that there's too much in the air to smell. Either way, I won't go near the stuff without a fitted full face respirator.
H2S has been connected with sailors being killed in the navy by entering compartments with rotting meat (or bodies) just from the amount released by the decomp. This caused numerous casualties in the Pearl Harbor cleanup.
@@mastershooter64 That is actually correct. Its required in the oil and gas industry where there is lots of H2S in natural gas to have employees wear H2S monitors full time. Back in 2019 in Odessa Texas a Gentleman was killed in a pump house by H2S. His wife noticing he was late coming home actually drove to the pump house and she was killed as well. Their son in the back seat was unharmed
I'm trying for the life of me to figure out why ozone is sitting up there with it... And HCN... And F2... Lol I'm not terrified when I smell ozone, not even scared. If I even *think* there's something like HCN in the air, I'm gone.
One day in a high school chem class we were studying your typical reactions of metals with acids. In the fume hood was a bottle of some hypophosphorous acid which my dumb 18 year old brain thought this was just some spicy phosphoric acid since I’d never come across such a reagent at the time. Me and my lab partner decided it would be a good idea to add a bunch of it to a couple of grams of zinc powder we had to do the experiments with and we thought the reaction was giving off hydrogen gas because our syllabus strictly said metal + acid = salt + hydrogen… a few minutes go by of this mixture bubbling away until our lab supervisor sees the bottle of the hypophosphorous acid and the violently frothing mixture and turns purple before putting the test tube holder at the very back of the fume hood and slamming it in shut. The fume hood remained untouched for the best part of a month with the mixture still there and after a bit of Googling what had happened I quickly discovered that the reaction didn’t produce hydrogen but instead was essentially a phosphine gas generator which scared the living sh*t out of myself and my lab partner. The morale of the story is never work with ‘spicy’ reagents until you have carefully thought out the products of what such a reaction could be instead of being a flammable gas it was horrifically toxic abomination which with our high school chem knowledge we were completely ill equipped to deal with. Please respect the reagents you work with and carefully assess the risks before mixing anything since things could have gone very t*ts up very quick that day. Myself and the 10 others in that lab that day are lucky to be alive. Chemistry is no joke and I have learned to give chemicals the proper respect they deserve. Edit: our PPE was a hoodie, some nitrile gloves and a pair of lab goggles old enough for me to call grandpa
Excellent tale. I am glad you survived and were unscathed! DO PAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO THE CHOICE OF GLOVES! Each type of material used for gloves has very different chemical properties. You cannot go simply by chemical compatibility either. The commonly available compatibility lists only tell you about how the chemical affects the glove. They DO NOT tell you about chemical permeability, or speed of permeability. That is crucial information which must be consulted along with compatibility! In some cases the time for penetration of the reagent through the gloves is as little as 7 seconds, despite the gloves being entirely chemically compatible (not dissolved) by the chemicals involved. Also, for some glove materials the speed of penetration is slower. However, it continues unabated with time even after the glove is removed from exposure. Wearing the glove later can then result in harm! Gloves also have finite lives. They may become brittle, or fail in other ways. Avoid using old gloves. Latex is a wonderful material. It is also dangerous to many people. That includes latex dust used to make donning some gloves easier. Latex can trigger a life threatening allergy directly. And prolonged exposure in genetically susceptible people can trigger latex fruit syndrome. That can result in immense dietary problems with sensitivities to a weird mix of different, fruits, veg and foods. Avoid latex when possible. Do not learn you are genetically vulnerable the hard way! Life is hard enough without that. Avoid beryllium as well. Beryllium is seldom used anymore. Some old beryllium bronze non-sparking tools still exist. These smell "sweet". DO NOT SNIFF THEM! Contact with the tools is also potentially very dangerous. People who are genetically susceptible to berylliosis should never handle or work around beryllium. It is a truly terrible disease, and entirely unnecessary to ever suffer from. Knowledge is power. Be knowledgeable. Protect yourself and others. Tell your stories. They help others to know about hazards and how to avoid them.
I think of it every time I hear of that chemical too. As well as every time I see a container of Sevin pesticide. To hell with the Union Carbide company.
I mean there died about 25000 people because of this incident, why even after 40 years, Union Carbide should get a really big punishment for the dead of all the people
@@niklas_science Besides death tolls, about 700K people were affected, either through direct exposure or other factors like pregnancy. It's expected 120-150K people survived with long term health effects.
I have breathed hydrogen selenide. It was the worst experience in my life. It feels like you lose feelings and functionality progressively from you throat down your airways, millimeter by millimeter. You just stand there and think "It will reach my lungs, and I am going to die". And I don't think there were more than 2 ppm in the air at the worst moment. I read it smells horrible but I honestly couldn't smell it at all, or was too scared to notice.
Phosgene story: While working as an HVAC tech a lifetime ago, I was tasked with repairing a pinhole in a residential AC unit line set. I used a recovery machine to evacuate the system (so I thought) and then started repairing the hole with an oxy-acetylene torch. I immediately knew something was wrong when the flame started gently blowing away from the hole and in my direction and the flame turned bright green. I moved my torch and went to move away but it was too late. I caught a bit of it while breathing and thought I was going to die. My eyes, nose, throat, and lungs felt like they were on fire and I couldn't stop coughing long enough to catch my breath. EMS arrived and gave me oxygen and after the coughing stopped they told me to follow up with my Dr. My sinus cavities, throat, and lungs were burning for a week and I coughed up sooo much phlegm. Worst experience ever.
@johnElden8760 some refrigerants decompose into phosgene when heated. That's why it's critical to pull a hard vacuum on the system to remove all traces of refrigerant before repairing leaks. HF and HCl can also form if you don't, which is bad for the compressor and everything else inside the system. You can't just pull a vacuum, you have to keep the vacuum for a while until all the refrigerant dissolved in the compressor oil boils out.
Don't forget the fact that once Radon finishes decaying it becomes Lead 206, so not only do you breathe radioactive gas but down the road all that gas becomes lead, fun stuff
@@GGPlex_You probably would be unable to have a physically significant amount of Radon gas in a given space, because it gives off so much energy from radiation that it essentially blows itself apart. If too much of it is in one spot, it’ll fizzle out of existence and burn everything nearby.
@@prasannadhopate8513 While it is true that Radon itself only has a half life of 4 days it doesnt immediatly decay into a stable element, so it has a decay chain that ends in lead and takes ~22 years to complete, you may have to deal with the radiation for way longer
The Bhopal disaster was a methyl isocyanate gas leak from a pesticide plant in the middle of a state capital in India. It injured over 500,000 (!!!!) people. Offical death-toll is 3787, but more realistic estimates are around 16000, which includes the longer-term deaths from MIC-related diseases.
Controversial opinion: Ozone smells amazingly good. Good to the point that I have probably inhaled more of it over the years than is really ideal. Those "Ionic Breeze" air purifier things were great ozone generators for getting rid of annoying odors in rooms. Also have unfortunately smelled hydrogen selenide gas that I accidentally produced when disposing of some cold bluing solution. Not the worst smell ever but the lingering I pact was pretty strange. Everything smelled/tasted slightly of garlic for at least a week afterwards (my breath didn't smell garlicky to my girlfriend though thankfully).
I agree, and I think it's just weird oddity chemists have. Ozone, naphthalene, isopropyl alcohol, and a few others are very comforting to me. Fabreeze needs to somehow imitate the smells of lab reagents without the reagents themselves.
My personal experience is that exposure to selenium doesn't make your breath smell garlicky, it mostly affects your sweat, which acquires an odd metallic smell, somewhat similar to that of your skin after touching copper.
I'm only about halfway through this, but I propose some changes. 1. Ethylene oxide. SUPER useful compound. Not only do they sterilize medical equipment with it, it's an ingredient in a lot of useful chemicals. Glycols, glycol ethers, ethanolamines, ethoxylates and acrylonitrile all contain ethylene oxide. The problem is that it's an explosion hazard and extremely flammable. NFPA rates it 3 for health, but it's pretty much at the top of 4 for flammability. Somewhere between A and S would be appropriate for ethylene oxide. 2. Mustard gas. This stuff needs to be in C tier, and here's why: During World War II the Italians had a big stockpile of nitrogen mustard at Bari, which they were holding as a chemical warfare agent. Naturally, the Allies bombed it and the populace was exposed to it. After the war the Allies went in and discovered the population had a LOT less cancer than the rest of the Italian citizenry. This, and some research into using it for cancer treatment at Yale during the war, led to nitrogen mustard becoming the first chemotherapy agent. Research since then has focused on making nitrogen mustards that are as toxic to the cancer while being less toxic to the patient and caregivers than the real agent is. 3. Silane. Oh my. S tier. Most definitely. It's pyrophoric. They use it to make silicone compounds, but a huge use of it is making solar cells - you spray silane on a substrate in a clean room with a high-oxygen atmosphere, it catches fire, and when the fire goes out you have a nice film of very pure elemental silicon. Very slick. They make this in Moses Lake, WA, at the REC Silicon factory and transport it in tube trailers clearly marked SILANE. When I see one on the road I give it an extremely wide berth. Also...sulfuryl fluoride...that's not Klapötke's lab, is it?
Silane is a tricky chemical. Toxicity isn’t the issue. Flammability and explosivity are. It has a tendency in a leak to form oxides and a white cloud as it combusts. But it can leak without combusting. At a few percent in air if ignition occurs the pressure rise is a million psi per second. The detonation wave is so powerful that it will shred an 18 gauge gas cabinet and eject it at rifle speeds. Films of gas cabinets during a detonation show the cabinet present in one frame and entirely absent in the next. At lower concentrations if you are standing in a silane cloud and reach for an ungrounded emergency off button, the resulting flash fire will cause third degree burns externally and internally. Though it is difficult to do so, it is possible to create a detonatable silane cloud. The result is terrifying beyond measure.
Correction on the Bari story: it was actually the other way around. It was an Allied stockpile of mustard gas that the Germans bombed, which was apparently being stored for use as a retaliatory measure if the Germans used chemical weapons. Apparently the US hadn't told anyone that they had a ship full of the stuff, including the British that actually controlled the town.
As far as "toxic gasses" go, I love silane. If you're not actively on fire, you're fine. Compares well to all the nasty shit that's horribly neurotoxic but you won't notice until your hands won't stop shaking and you can't form complete sentences anymore. I'd rather something that kills me instantly over something that just horribly disables me.
Vinyl chloride is really interesting : it causes very exotic cancers (liver angiosarcoma) and it's one of the very few chemicals experimentaly proved to trigger sclerodermia-like lesions.
Methyl Isocyanate might not be a gas at your lab's RT but it can be a gas at the outdoor ambient conditions of, say, India. Seriously, how the substance that caused the most lethal industrial disaster in history (Bhopal) didn't make S tier is beyond me.
You should do a tierlist of all the 4-4-4 compounds. Back in my undergrad days, we used to call those compounds "12s" and made a game out of hunting wikipedia for em.
@@helldad4689 Having pulled someone out of a 45% ammonia spray release with no safety gear where my skin turned to soap and I could neither breathe nor see and where my whole body screamed in pain; and having breathed high concentration ozone and dropped down a safety cage some 15 feet to the ground, I have a deep and abiding respect for the dangers of entering a space where the aggregate hazard is too large, and for the dangers to the fire fighters and other emergency personnel. Summing to 8 on the fire diamond is a high hazard indeed. Personally the worst placard I have seen for a building I entered was a 4-4-4 Water Reactive, Pyrophoric metal, Rad III. That is not a good sign. The worst building I ever entered had no adequate placarding. It was a warehouse in a light industrial area next door to homes. The building contained a room with grey dust all over the floor - calcium hydride, 200 pounds of it in open canisters. It was of course sprinkled. The next large room contained shelves of organic and inorganic chemicals stored alphabetically. There were in total; over 200 pounds of nitrated organics that amounted to Class I, II and III explosives. There were three five pound bottles of picric acid with crystals under the lid. And lovely things like Ammonium perchlorate, ammonium perbromate, many dozens of chemicals that were contact carcinogens, teratogens, nephrotoxins, and worse. When the bomb crew arrived, the owner had pulled out a five gallon bucket filled with bottles. I was standing with the fire marshal 50 feet away. The head of the bomb squad went over and gently turned over the top bottle. He then ever so gently set it back down. Then he came to tell us that we were way way too close. The top bottle was 500 grams of tri-nitro toluene He and his senior tech loaded the bucket into the bomb disposal rig. They hauled it a quarter mile away to an open field and detonated it. They damaged the bomb rig. It took several days to destroy the worst of the explosive chemicals. And much much more. The building was a disaster waiting to happen. I worked closely with fire crews my whole carrier. They deserve enormous respect and praise for what they do every day. They are consmate professionals who take risk very seriously. If you ever want to meet someone who viscerally understands risk - talk to a seasoned fire fighter.
@@tunneloflight what the actual f...what is the story behind that building? did the owner face charges or did he acquire it without knowing or something?
@@chir0pter the owner faced multiple criminal charges. He knew exactly what he was doing. When a ~60 ton cocaine bust went down as all of this was going on, he cancelled a very large order for various “-caines” (lidocaine, tetracaine, bupivacaine …). Cocaine + -caine becomes crack. The building was shut down and carefully emptied. The process of doing that involved multiple jurisdictions in two states, several judges, lies in court, a garage door being hacked down by a fire department for emergency safe entry to a private residence, heightened security at a major federal facility, and more. By the way, Judges ….really… don’t like being lied to. The process was difficult because of the interplay of individual liberties, the legal system, courts, cross jurisdictional issues, overwhelming the courts, saturating police resources, etc…. Even as this was going on the police set up a sting at a nearby intersection. They pulled people over for violating various traffic laws and regulations. Before the cops could even say why they pulled people over they confessed that they bought XYZ from Mr. Zzz to make crack, meth, …. They then got arrested and booked. The local PD was overwhelmed, as was the court, and the Judge ordered the Police to stop. For obvious reasons I cannot share the specifics. The points here are these: You never know what people will do. You never know exactly what you may be walking into in a facility or structure with hazardous materials. You cannot be certain (it is not safe to assume) that people are doing things right or well or legally or safely. The real world is messy and bad things happen with often complex results. The technical answers, safety answers, and legal answers may not have anything in common with one another. People don’t always agree with the laws, rules, regulations society sets. And they blatantly violate them. Often they do not understand the risks or consequences. Often they do and violate them anyway. As a result, as a first responder you have to be prepared for anything. Learn everything you can. Learn from others mistakes, missteps, blunders, failures, accidents, unfortunate events …. It is much better to learn from theirs than for you to be the case that others learn from. Oh, and by the way, the DEA knew all about the facility, but their hands were tied by lack of proof. They had spent five years trying to find an “in”. In the end what brought it all down was a zoning violation complaint, and a Fire Department response. That led step by step to the rest.
I use to work next to the local hazmat people and ended up just gabbing with them, there was a railroad next to us and HF tank cars from Vulcan chemical came through there. They told me if one of those ever crashed we would know, because all the hazmat people screaming and running the other way.
Yeah HF will just burn through your skin like a swarm of piranhas. You don't even need to breathe it, just being in the presence of it will fuck you up.
I feel like part of the consideration should also be likelihood of exposure. CO isn't _extremely dangerous_ in and of itself, as it takes a good few hours to kill you and it's fairly easy to treat people who've been exposed; _but_ because it's an extremely common byproduct of inefficient oxidisation aka any and all processes that involve fire, rust or decomposition outside of a controlled, well-ventilated environment, risk of exposure is _super duper high_ and as a result CO poisoning kills numerous* people every year. H2S is similarly terrifying, and while from a mere toxicological standpoint it's 'only' an A, the fact that it's so hard to detect by the body (yeah you can 'smell it and live' but that window is extremely small as once you've stopped smelling it you're more than likely boned), and the fact that untrained people can and regularly do come into contact with it should catapult it to (H2)S-tier without a second thought. The sheer number of stories of "someone fell over, someone else ran over to help them, now they're both dead" as a direct result of exposure to H2S should be enough. *I tried googling statistics for how many people die of CO poisoning every year globally, but while apparently articles, foundation webpages and even a paper I found agree it's 'one of the most common causes of death as a result of exposure to a poisonous gas', _none_ of them actually gave any numbers. So, even if I had been ready to give in to confirmation bias, I couldn't because apparently statistics aren't important or something.
If likelihood of exposure is a relevant factor, then ammonia similarly deserves far more than E. Produced in vast quantities in industrial scale, used in various coolant systems and can form in various sewage systems. Corrosive and highly toxic, kills people every year.
A part of my graduate work involved using ketene in large amounts routinely to make certain exotic four-membered rings. We had a ketene generator which is basically a flask of acetone in a heating mantle equipped with a pyrolysis chamber with a electrically heated wire (of course the setup should be purged with an inert gas before turning on the power) and a condenser to remove excess unreacted acetone. The first day before actually starting to generate ketene my PI said "be REALLY careful with ketene. It is as toxic as phosgene, OR WORSE." You bubble ketene into your reaction flask with an outlet that lead to a trap with plenty of water -- this is ABSOLUTELY required to kill any excess ketene (it reacts with water to make acetic acid). A week into the project I decided to replace water with Na2CO3(aq) both to make it more reactive toward ketene and make any actual ketene leaks more distinguishable from the "false alarm" of acetic odors from gases agitating the trap solution containing acetic acid -- ketene has a very potent odor similar to acetyl chloride which serves as a good warning to run for your life (I've actually smelled tiny amounts of it a couple of times). By keeping the trap solution alkaline at all times (we had to check the pH for every ~12 hours of use) we can eliminate the possibility of the trap emitting the acetic odor. Actually the generator / reaction is pretty chill and almost on autopilot if everything is set up correctly. But guess what, you still need to take TLC samples of your reaction solution periodically! Though people had said "oh, you can just turn off the wire heating before sampling your solution." It still scared the heck out of me every time I had to sample my ketene reaction. And I quickly found turning the power off completely unnecessary and not useful as the entire setup would still contain lots of ketene anyway, and by disrupting the pyrolysis reaction (which ideally turns 1 mole of acetone into 1 mole each of ketene and methane, which based on ideal gas law would occupy twice the space given constant pressure) you risk a suck-back of your trap solution into your reaction mixture. So you take a deep breath outside the hood and hold it, open the sash to the lowest workable height, stick your arms into the hood to thread a disposable needle through the septum of your reaction flask and stick a finger-stopped capillary through it, remove the said finger for a shortest fraction of second (so that the ketene pressure doesn't shoot your reaction mixture out like a geyser), remove the needle, spot your TLC, close the hood shut, and ONLY then you can continue breathing. And oh did I mention once my ketene reaction product precipitated from the solution and clogged the ketene outlet needle. Fortunately we caught it in time before the needle would be completely clogged and the emergency release stopcock on the ketene generator would pop. That WAS scary. And when your reaction is actually done and the power/heating is off, you need to wait for everything to cool down to room temp while continuously purging the system (by bubbling Ar into the acetone) for additional 30 min before you can actually take your reaction flask off the generator. Someone once didn't purge enough before taking the apparatus apart to change the acetone (the pyrolysis is not at all clean and you get lots of junk including diketene, acetic acid, acetoacetic acid, acetic anhydride, and various aldol products of acetone that can slowly turn the acetone yellow and even brown) and the residual dissolved ketene gave him a violent headache. Fortunately he quickly closed the sash shut and was apparently fine. I would say I've probably made a total of a couple of kilograms(!!) of ketene for the entire project and would never want to work with ketene again.
I think OsO4 should be way higher in the list due to its enormous toxicity. A chemist who discovered it was hospitalised for two weeks with heavy poisoning after just a small exposure. Really terrifying thing, I’d put it together with arsin
@@pierrecurie True. But the amount of OsO4 needed to cause blindness is very small. The point is not so much the amount as that it is entirely unforgiving. Get smashed with caustic soda and damage occurs quickly. But you have a moment to react to rinse it out without going blind. OsO4 is not forgiving. Be extremely diligent with safety precautions. Not on this list, but since unforgiving is important, bis-chloromethyl ether is incredibly unforgiving. It is speculated that a single molecule can cause lung cancer. It is one of 13 (maybe more now) chemicals that are nicknamed the no-no's. The allowed exposure under OSHA is zero in any units.
Chlorine is difficult to rank, yeah it has been used and its used as a chemical weapon (a major tragedy happened very recently involving Chlorine) but its also very easy to make and nearly all major homechem youtuber has a video with a cl2 generator. It also has a weird relationship with Mexico because 2 to 4 Chlorine cylinders are stolen from a water treatment plant every year but are recovered in the majority of cases undamaged (radioactive sources are also alarmingly stolen every year) and it looks like it only happens in Mexico. They are interested only in the metalic cylinder to sell it, but why chlorine? I miss the days when just one radiotherapy machine was enough to live.
I was at a resort in Manzanillo Mexico where they had had an earthquake the year before. We were sitting around the pool when we heard a bang and then saw a yellowish cloud rolling down the hill. One of the chlorine tanks for the pools had ruptured. It was pretty dilute by the time it got to us, but because my father and myself were military history nerds we knew to wet our shirts and hold their over our mouth and nose. Nobody got injured, but even dilute chlorine is nasty on your eyes. Breathing through a wet shirt was surprisingly effective.
The bro who brought home cobalt powder and showed it to his wife, kids, and friends is a pretty sad and stupid story. Stealing shit is bad, stealing expensive glowy dust is really bad.
If there are orphaned sources going missing frequently in Mexico, I hope they make it into johnstonarchive and similar lists. The only event I’m aware of being publicized in the last decade was the Hueypoxtla theft.
Can't you make chlorine by mixing bleach and ammonia? It's like, the number one safety warning on ANY cleaners that contain either, because both bleach and ammonia are common household cleaning agents.
1:55 "F tier will still eff you up" That got me laughing. Here's something with some of these toxic chemicals you might find amusing that I've read about. During the early days of rocketry, someone had the bright idea of trying liquid ozone as an oxidiser. Has a higher density than liquid oxygen, and it has a higher boiling point. Unsurprisingly, the researchers had severe problems with keeping such large amounts of liquid ozone stable and gave up eventually. Another bright idea for a rocket fuel oxidiser was chlorine trifluoride. Yes, that ClF3. I mean, it's a very powerful oxidiser and a very energetic oxidiser, it would've made liquid ozone look tame. Then someone realised that the exhaust would be hot HF and HCl. (I read about these in a book called Ignition, an informal history of liquid rocket propellants by John D Clark, definitely worth a read)
They soon realized that cif3 is not a good oxidiser because a tanker truck moving a large amount of it spilled and burned 15 ft worth of soil and the gravel the onlooker described it as the road is on fire or something on those lines
@@samspeed6271 yep it can burn through lots of things like asbestos,thing burned by oxygen,metals( because it burns at 2500 degrees),concrete,sand,gravel,15 worth of soil.did I miss anything?
Our neighbor across the alley, at work, had an NFPA diamond of 4-4-4. I wondered how high they went, and of course it's 0 to 4. I paraphrased these as: Yellow 3: will blow up if you look at it cross-eyed. Yellow 4: it will just blow up. Blue 3: milligrams will kill you in seconds. Blue 4: micrograms will kill you in milliseconds. And of course red 3 is flash point below 100ºF, red 4, below 70ºF. (!!) They had a full-time safety officer -- I went over to ask; they made chemical vapor deposition equipment in the semiconductor industry and had some of everything their customers had -- and came away with a list of the most interesting stuff they handled. One of them said, "Smells like rotting fish" and I wondered, How did they ever find out?
Rotting fish, so an amine. If there were to be 5's, I'd go: Yellow 5: Explodes by being made. Blue 5: Nanograms will kill you in microseconds. Red 5: Ignites by just existing.
@@californium-2526 Red 5 would be flash point 77K? :-) The only one I remember was tungsten hexafluoride, which seems to be an NFPA 4-0-0 (blue). It must have been the combination of stuff that earned them the high score. I figured the local fire department had a small black circle on their map saying "go the other way".
@@jxh02 At -Blue- Red (confused the colors) 5 is stuff like triethylborane and perhaps even c(a)esium, at Yellow 5 or even 6 is 2,2'-azobis(azidotetrazole) or tetrakis(nitratomethyl)silane, and Blue 5 is where stuff like Ricin goes. Botox is a further Blue 6, and short-lived radionuclides (especially with a longer chain) like radon-222 or californium-252 (also my channel's name) will further earn a potential Blue 7 ("Please don't interact with this substance", for short-lived radionuclides).
I'm not a chemist but i know that some extra fun ones exist, mainly N14 (somehow convinced 14 nitrogen attoms to exist together without a triple bond in sight, its sensitivity can't even be measured), and ClF4 (Chlorine Tetrafluoride, aka the oxidizers even the Nazis gave up using because if you spill the barrel it will burn litterally anything including absetos, ash, glass, gravel, iron. Its containers are basically teflon or iron seared by itself to get a florine coating). Granted i only know of these through youtube, but google did confirm their existance. (ClF4 is basically just used in rocketry to my knowledge, and not very often considering its utterly terrifying, and auto ignites on contact with basically anything you can think of)
Rotting fish smell is phosphine. Deadly. Having a 4-4-4 placard means the fire department will not respond. It is far too hazardous. Any safety person worth their salt (and insurers) will require that the hazards be grouped and separated so that no area is rated with a diamond that totals more than 8, ideally 7 or lower.
11:41 I'm pretty sure no one has ever used ClF3 for circuit board etching. It would eat through the fiberglass resin composite substrate, while it would leave the copper alone due to the formation of a thin copper fluoride layer. The exact opposite of what you want. What you're thinking of is that it's used as a cleaning agent for chemical vapor deposition chambers in semiconductor manufacturing. Even though it's technically an etchant in this capacity, it's not used for patterning as far as I'm aware.
Of course diazomethane is S tier, I remember a time when someone was doing a Doyle-Kirmse, the TMS diazomethane didnt work so they had to pull out some diazald and the special diazomethane glassware. For some reason, the person thought that he would want to make a 50g batch of it so that he would not have to repeatedly distill diazomethane. So he sat the round bottom flask containing about 200ml of yellow ether solution in a tub of water with lots of dry ice as there wasnt enough water ice. He then decided that he deserved a quick break and went off with everything stoppered, secured and safe. When he came back about 15min later he found that the cold water bath has frozen over because he put too much dry ice in there and the round bottom flask was stuck in place. I dont know what went into his mind that day but he then went to yank at the flask to try to free it. He did manage to free the flask with brute force but it also resulted in the diazomethane solution sloshing around in the flask fairly violently. It was only at that point that he realised that he was just a hair away from a nasty incident and he quickly put the solution down. Knowing that sometimes people's diazomethane blow up without apparent reason, I'd say he was really quite luck
Man diazomethane is such a useful chemical, if it weren't so explosive. With the rise of flow chemistry it slowly finds its way back into industry though
It’s a neat chemical from a physics point of view - the smallest gaseous molecule with a distinct color! Molecular physics was one of my favorite areas at uni.
@@bitonic589Yeah Ozone is unhealthy. But you get away with inhaling it over a long time in low dosages as byproduct. But chlor gas? Idk what kinda amateur this youtuber is but as far as I can remember you die and enter instant shock collapse from like 1 to 10 parts per MILLION lol... idk what this guy smoked but ozone is a ton safer than chlorine and not a war crime like all the chlorine or phosphorus compounds which also steam off highly F'ed up gases and acids like some HCL freak chemicals do like superacids.
@@Rich-jk8evThis youtuber putting it into S tier while putting gas used for warfare is kinda ridicoulus lol. You wont have to worry about it, although long term damages are considered "possible", like smoking does lol.
Not a story for children: A very funny-not-so-funny story about SO2. One day I was working with sodium metabisulfite for the production of SO2 gas for the production of metal nanoparticles. During the time I had quite a bit of experience with SO2, having used the gas many times, and never having an issue. Usually, I would work with a gas mask when making any toxic gas, as my trust in fume hoods/general ventilation was tarnished at performing experiments in weak fume hoods. Anyway, whilst making the SO2 there inevitably was an unexpected amount of SO2 which had dissolved into the solution (unknown to me). Upon slight heating, massive amounts of SO2 came out of the solution making me gag at the acrid taste. I had gotten to fresh air, and there was only a small whiff. Here's the funny part. SO2 is a very, very, potent vasodilator (of which I was not aware). For some few hours after accidentally smelling the gas, I had what can only be described as one of the most notable side effects of viagra. That being, an erection that lasted hours. It did of course eventually "go down", but since that experience, I have never made any toxic gas without a gas mask "hood or not".
That's called a priapism and it's actually really dangerous. Your penis fills with blood, it isn't going anywhere and it can clot and the clot can circulate and block your brain/ heart/ lungs and kill you.
That's a funny story! I've had a few serious SO2 incidents as an antique refrigeration repair person, but not had it do anything more than make me squint my eyes closed, run away, and have a coughing and sneezing fit!
Hydroxylamine is my favorite I made on accident horrid acrid and carcinogenic. Edit: huh I really would have thought it was more volatile based on my nose. Double edit: huh in retrospect I’m really lucky I didn’t blow up my bedroom.
As a hydrochloride salt it is not that bad. If you have a base in solution where you work with NH2OH•HCl to quench the HCl gas generated when hydroxylamine is used up, it isn't that bad.
Chemistry education was much more "fun" or exciting in the 19th century. They seemed to use water-free HCN on a daily basis if one looks up old reaction protocols, for instance. I somehow regret that in my own chemistry studies I only had to work with rather less toxic things, chlorine and ammonia gas for sure, also CO from the gas bottle, potassium cyanide on a 20 gram scale, tiny amounts of HF, but nothing really bad. Well, Benzidine once. But not HCN, not phosgene, etc. I understand that it is a safety principle to not work with these things if you don't really need to, but on the other hand, who else other than chemists should work with it, and learn to work with it in a proper way?
In our tritium lab, we considered T2 gas as dangerous but manageable. You can see it with radiation air monitors and if you breathe it in, you mostly just breathe it out since it's essentially hydrogen and does not really do anything biologically. Our big scary thing is always tritiated water or tritium on dust particles. The dust can stay in your lungs which is bad. We also did the maths on pure T2O once, and getting a droplet on your skin will allow enough to diffuse into your body to give you a lethal dose. So, if you don't take care to prevent T2O formation (T2 does that on its own radiochemically when oxygen is present) or clean dust particles, you might get a nasty surprise.
OK, rather late but true story. The British government had been pumping tritium oxide into the Irish Sea for years, then we joined the EEC and had to play nice with the Irish. So they made up a lie that the safest way of disposing of tritium was to burn it and pour the result into the sea. As a result our expensive tritium disposal system (up the chimney with lots and lots of air) had to be replaced with a system for burning the tritiated hydrogen and disposing of the product into the sewage system. The tritium burner exploded resulting in large pieces of PVC pipe ending up buried in walls.
Some notes on some of these chemicals. Bromine has been used as a weapon alongside chlorine. Both of these react with moisture in the lungs to produce acids (HCl and HBr). They also cause damage to eyes and can even cause chemical burns on the skin. Mustard is also a vesicant (blistering agent), meaning it causes damage to the skin in form of blisters, as such gas mask only provides limited protection. Most ww1 chemical warfare causalities, were caused by mustard, but due to it's low lethality most of these weren't actully deaths (most of the chemical warfare deaths were caused by phosgene). HCN was considered for use as a chemical weapon as it had many desireble features (difficult to detect, high lethality, fast action, damage to gas mask filters, ability to penetrate some types of filters entirely), but was ultimately rejected as it dispersed too quickly to be effective in open field. The US army however did consider using against japanesse bunkers during ww2. Perflouroisobutylene is considered as potential chemical weapon (it is actully considerd a shedule 2 substance according to chemical weapons convention despite being never used or produced as such). It is considered to be 10 times more lethal then phosgene. It also lacks any smell, making it difficult to nositice at first.
so my only chemistry accident so far was a really poorly planned apparatus where i had to fill in like 20g of bromine into a pretty high-placed dropping funnel, as i am a small guy, i had some parts of my head inside the fumehood while filling in the bromine. took way to long, the vapors came down to my head pretty fast and i just happened to breath in the afternoon was pretty much ruined for me, my throat and lungs felt sore and it was just painful. plan your apparatus boys and girls to not get into these problems
Another big issue with bromine is that its massive density can sometimes break glass if shaken too hard. Definitely have been lots of cases of bromine poisoning from weak separatory funnels cracking under the pressure.
I'm not a chemist in any stretch of the term, but these vids have been pretty interesting nonetheless. I do have to consider safety in my field of work (I'm a technician that works with GIS mapping software to plan the electrical layouts of future residential areas, currently employed by the largest electrical company in my state). Makes me really appreciate the field of chemistry (plus it sometimes makes me want to educate myself on terms I'm unfamiliar with... Like the NFPA rating system, which I've probably seen the symbols before, but never really had to paid attention to them).
About AsH3: In my first undergrad inorganic lab course (generally called "ion lottery" because they give us a mixture of inorganic salts and we had to determine the elements in it), the first step was to check for acetate by giving a small quantity of the substance into a mortar an add some KHSO4 or one drop of diluted H2SO4 and then check if it smells like vineyar. Lucky me, it doesn't smelled like vineyar but somehow different. So i added one drop more of H2SO4. Then i was able to figure out that it smelled more like garlic and my thoughts went like: "It should smell like vineyar, is something wrong with my nose? - Hey they said in the lecture that AsH3 smells like garlic. - Damn, it's AsH3 and i probably shouldn't smell on it any longer, let's get this quickly under the fume hood." Later i found out by the Marsh test, that my substance indeed contained much As, so much indeed, that i contaminated my glassware and those of the people next to me with so much As, that it was detectable in later experiments (where no As should be in). Two lessons learned from this course: 1. Always work under a fume hood! Especially if it is a lab environment, in which many untrained people work with heavy metals, H2S, HCN and other bad stuff at the same time. 2. AsH3 ideed smells like garlic, but in the same way HCN smells like almonds. It is not really the same smell, but it remermbers you to it.
You are very very fortunate. The rule of thumb with arsine is that if you know what it smells like you are dead, or very soon will be. It is a blood poison requiring whole body blood transfusion.
@@thomasgarbe8354 from As2O3, that is true. (I also was able to show the presence of zinc in this sample, other reduction agents also might have been present.) From Arsenides like Zn3As2, aqueous acids are sufficient for that, for Na3As2, even Water would be enough. Sadly they didn't told us, what substances they mixed for the samples.
During my undergraduate degree, I had to prepare ketene fresh on a daily basis so that the postdoctoral researchers could zap it with a UV laser beam to create methylene free radicals (which are isoelectronic with ozone molecules; this was back in the 80's when climate scientists had discovered a huge gaping hole in the atmospheric ozone layer & we were trying to measure the speed of various atmospheric photochemical processes). I vaguely remember being told to prepare it in a fume hood & to try not to smell it as "it'll be the very last thing you ever smell" because if you're lucky enough to survive it would still knock out your olefactory sense!
@@That_Chemist I survived the experience obviously although I did explode the oxygen trap that kept my distillation under tight vacuum by removing the liquid nitrogen bath at the end of a day's synthesis without sufficiently opening the taps to allow the beautiful shimmering blue liquid oxygen enough room to escape as it boiled off! There was a loud bang as the glassware blew apart & everyone simultaneously hit the floor before I sheepishly went to discover what had happened. I assume the days ketene had been safely distanced from the apparatus but thinking back now I really can't remember so I suspect that I wasn't as aware of the potential toxicity & danger as perhaps I should've been but then I was a twenty year old & thus thought myself immortal?
Methyl isocyanate caused the Bhopal disaster, the worst industrial accident ever (as far as I know) that killed more people than Chernobyl. That makes it S tier imo. I'm not a historian so I don't know if this is 100% true, but I heard that the nazis tried using ClF3 for flamethrowers that didn't require an ignition source, but it was too dangerous. I've used anhydrous HF quite a few times, it's really goddamn scary. It's quite easy to maintain it as a liquid in the UK but boy does it fume A LOT. One fun fact a lot of people won't be aware of is that AHF has a refractive index very similar to the plastic that lab measuring cylinders are made out of, making it really tricky to see just how much you've actually poured out (you can barely see the miniscus). If you're not careful you can easily end up pouring out way too much and have AHF overflow whatever you're measuring it in to. My lab uses SF4 quite regularly, and I've used a lot of chlorine for one project. I actually prefer handling SF4 because we transfer it from the cylinder using a vacuum line and as such you're unlikely to come into contact with it unless you fuck up or something goes wrong.
You're absolutely right. Bhopal was the worst industrial accident in history and people are still dying from the effects of the MIC that they inhaled. Also, the Nazis did attempt to use ClF3 as a weapon. They definitely experimented with using it in ant-aircraft shells and they may have tried using it in a self-igniting flamethrower as well. By the end of World War II, they had produced a few tons of ClF3, along with a considerable amount of sarin nerve agent. The Germans definitely had the edge where nerve agents were concerned, but for a variety of reasons, they never deployed them on the battlefield.
12:18 Ozone poisoning survivor! I am a college student and when I went to my apartment to move in, it smelled of weed so bad that me and my roommate could not move in. The apartment owners put an ozone machine and after a week we returned. They had not removed the machine and told us we can do it, so I did. This was massively stupid of us to be compliant. I breathed in quite a bit of it in while turning off the machine, moving it outside, and then setting up a fan to vent the room through a window. Even though it was a minor exposure, I genuinely thought I was dying. I remember sitting outside while my family moved my stuff in (it was safe after it vented out) and slowly lost my ability to breathe until it was shallow and painful. Let me reiterate, that was MINOR poisoning (or at least that is what poison control said). So yeah, if your apartment building does this and tells you that you can remove it, give them the biggest middle finger and tell them to do it. Your life is not worth moving in as soon as possible. Edit: Watching him put it into S tier made my heart sink. Seriously, do not let your landlord get away with being lazy - value your life and stay away from this, especially if you are inexperienced.
Back when I first started job hunting out of college, there were jobs that had people working with HF and low level radioactive material for 15 bucks an hour.
@@That_Chemist That wasnt even the worst one, just the worst paid. The other industry job that worked with HF mainly worked with pyrophoric organometallics. Found out they had 30 violations after an investigation done after one of their workers got splattered against a concrete wall by a thick ass steel door being ripped off the hinges by an explosion. Dude didnt even work in that part of the building, was just walking through. Literal tons of chemicals being improperly stored, faulty equipment that wasnt properly maintained etc. workers being sent to the hospital due to fires caused by those violations, 5 of which happened after the explosion. Place was a safety nightmare combined with 12 hour rotating shifts.
Ammonia is pretty fun! It adsorbs onto every surface for some reason. I thought I was good after a ten-minute N2 flush through my setup, but then I smelled one of the fittings. Gave me a good olfactory slap that woke me up. I guess I was just freebasing smelling salts at that point
My grandmother had a fish shop. And although everything was always meticulously cleaned, the furniture that used to be in there, and was moved to my parents house, still smelled like trimethylamine a decade later.
I once opened a bottle which I thought contains only water or ethanol and sniffed from it the way they teach you not to do, and before my mind realized it was ammonia solution my brain had moved my head 90 degrees off the flask in the split of a second. That was pretty stupid.
I still remember the first time I saw an HF first aid kit back in undergrad, and was explained about the calcium tablet to prevent bone damage... damn, what a scary compound.
It is worse - way worse. Especially as buffered oxide etch: NH4OH + HF. That looks like water and has no warning properties. Skin exposure leads to HF absorption through the skin. Delays in treating that by injecting calcium gluconate at the exposure site(s) (lots of injections) results in tissue death and bone destruction followed by gangrene like tissue destruction. If amputation isn’t done early that spreads and leads to death.
Thanks to some dubious work done by technicians in my company ahead of me, my supervisor and I were exposed to a (relatively) small amount of phosphine while working on a site outside a metal/coatings processing facility. There was a piece of tubing that had been replaced on a oxy/acetylene torch station with copper tubing, which over time converted to a powdery red solid I assume was copper acetylide. The slightest touch of the tubing had the layer burst apart, and a short hissing sound followed as the gasses that were trapped in the segment were released. I smelled one of the more horrid things I've experienced, and watched as my supervisor sprinted away at the same time. After catching up to him and stopping coughing, he informed me exactly what we smelled. Apparently phosphine is used in dissolved acetylene as a scent marker, and when the acetylene is gone it likes to rear its ugly head. From what I understand, this is only really found in calcium carbide sourced acetylene. Definitely was a unique smell, the type to let you know real quick that you aren't supposed to smell it.
SO2 is used in the processing of Se&Te - small whiffs of that can bring you to your knees - it's ugly in the pure bulk form. A dash of CO is good if you want a skull breaking level of headache. I worked in an electrochemical copper refinery - under certain conditions AsH3 can form - That was our least favorite hazard. LiH is not a gas but as a light powder it causes the most shocking choking reaction I've ever experience - it like it informs your diaphragm to never take a breath again. EtO is terrifying in bulk due to the combustion range - it only needs a tiny amount of air to become a fuel air explosive - not toxic, but it can kill in non-toxic ways. I have anhydrous HF and HCl experience "S" teir for sure
One chemistry lecturer I had, when talking about the importance of PPE, told us about a story of him accidentally creating phosgene. He was doing some reaction (not sure which), and one of the potential products was phosgene. He made an error somewhere, and his whole face was red except for where his goggles were.
I love how chemists can just casually mention "I've made hydrogen cyanide by accident before" and move on like they didn't just talk about accidentally producing an extremely dangerous gas and as a result were likely separated from certain (and very uncomfortable) death by only a few cm and a pane of perspex.
Chemists get another feeling for the substances they work with. And while HCN is very toxic, it is not the worst thing chemists know. In salt form, as KCN, you can work with it quite without fear, unless it sees some acid.
Nice to hear your perspective of how toxic different gases are! I always check LD50 and LC50 to understand if I could accidentally die or if I have to intentionally ingest a noticable (more or less intentional) amount. Anything I can't smell before it becomes a real danger, anything that could kill me if 50mg or less is ingested and anything that could spontanously explode even if it is isolated I deem dangerous and rarely worth playing with. Thanks for great videos!!
Thanks for making this! I was having trouble thinking of a toxic gas to use as a weapon in an isekai I'm writing next year. This guide certainly helps a lot!
Honestly, in relation to dangerous chemicals, if your answer to "does it get less terrifying, the more you work with it?" gets anywhere close to "yes" - that's the moment you need to go back and brush up on your safety protocols again.
I once found a leak in the dosing line for a large bottle washing machine while taking water samples. Luckily it was a pretty open space but I felt my lung for a few hours
My PI mentioned that there was a fume hood containing, among other things, phosgene, in the lab where he did his PhD research, that the students nicknamed the "death hood." He refuses to have anything to do with it to this day.
I've smelled ozone before, I used to say that it smelled like something new. My dad used to use ozone to purify places and to kill bacteria and microbes in general. he was testing it on water, incredbly, drinking "ozoned" water could heal throataches, and i used to drink ozoned water to heal my throat when it was hurting (i don't drink it anymore because my dad doesn't have the machine to make ozone anymore). Looked like a miracle, you can put it on water and heal your throat, you could use it to kill microbes and even clean a pool, until one day when my dad was purifying a whole 2 Liter bottle of water, and i dared to put my nose on the top of the bottle and take a gooood smell of it, i can only say, that i probably would die that day. I couldn't catch a breath, my head was becoming lighter since i couldn't properly breathe, i couldn't get the ozone out of my lungs, the ozone, when i breathed it, it burned my throat and it was really really horrible, i was trying to catch an breath on the garden of my house since it wouldn't have too much ozone gas (my dad was doing the purification on a semi-closed place), but it didn't really work. Thankfully, after probably coughing for 1000 times, i could breathe again. For sure, if i took a deeper breath, i would be on hospital.
but why/how it harms the body? or tbf how any of these gases do harm exactly? they react with the body? how that +1 oxigen atom makes a difference? like o2 how can a single atom make so much difference?
@@FlareBlossom it can, you know how pure oxygen gas can ALREADY burn your lungs and probably kill you, right? So imagine breathing an air with pretty much 80%/90% ozone, it can probably damage your lung tissue and even normal tissue much more than pure oxygen gas does. About how it harms, I have no response, but probably that it's because oxygen can oxidize stuff. Sorry if I'm looking really stupid here
The scariest thing to phosgene to me is that the smell is really not bad- it very much has that "oh this is really fucking bad for me huh" smell to it, but only after you are hit with the pleasant aroma of freshly cut hay. And then you spend the next 72h watching out for pulmonary edema! At least things like H2S and PH3 have the decency of assaulting your nose.
For 2 decades I was a process eng. at a plant that made >1 billion lbs/yr of phosgene (COCl2) and you are correct that nothing about the smell tells you body this is really bad stuff. We were switching to double walled pipes and vessels prevent leaks. It is used to make most urethane foams and clear coatings. I also made hydrazine, silane, concentrated H2S, and used HF, HCl, Cl2, NH3 as raw materials in rail car volumes or from a pipeline. Looking back at my career, everthing involved toxics. But @That_Chemist did not include the gas that kills more people in the USA than any other gas. NITROGEN Every chemical used must be treated with respect.
You missed SBD gas! This one is ultra deadly! Comes when I drink beer and eat hard boiled eggs! It is quite deadly when blown loudly but is the very best when silently let out in church! :)
Hydrazine was used as an exciter for nitromethane race fuel in the early days drag racing. The characteristic green flames were a dead giveaway, and early on, you could tell who was using it because everyone wore gas masks who went near the car when it was running. It's fkn scary.
Dude, you forgot my farts after five days of eggs for breakfast. But anyway... I have an experience with chlorine. I was 13, in a hotel pool with my sister. It was indoors. In the back, I saw a bottle of HCl knocked over into a puddle of something. I'm 99% sure it was a puddle of bleach, and over time, me and my sister began coughing and wheezing. But we kept on swimming. After half an hour, the air had a noticeable green/yellow tint...and we both knew enough about chemistry to know that we need to get the hell outta there. For the next few days, we both wheezed and coughed. I'm pretty sure that wasn't ideal. I couldn't laugh without going into a coughing fit for a week. I'm still scared of chlorine gas, to this day.
I have no clue why I'm replying to myself (mobile web browser YT doesn't allow edits) but seriously though. @That Chemist was the hotel at fault, or did we make an already bad situation worse? We knew basic chemistry about we knew what happens when you mix NaOCl and acid. So with that said, were we in the wrong for continuing to swim?
@@jackbright745 i think the hotel is at fault (the bottles were open and already knocked over) but you should have gotten out of there and told staff about it. (As children you aren't expected to know better, so technically your parents should have been watching you and noticed and said something) Bleach is the primary disinfectant of pools (we call it chlorine buts it's really just bleach), and Hydrochloric acid (under the name Muratic Acid) is used to adjust PH and generally make a pool sparkle, and in normal pool conditions its fine, mixing them straight, is less so. I generally avoid indoor pools now that i know that they are basically just bleach mixed with amonia (urine and sweat both contain urea, which rapidly becomes amonia). So its both a health hazard from the amonia bleach reaction in an enclosed environment, and also just gross to know that the pool always has been peed in.
Chlorine dioxide is actually very common in backpacking water treatment kits. It’s great for killing spores and cysts in dirty water since it attacks the glycoproteins that protect them very efficiently. I should have clarified it’s made through reacting sodium chlorite with phosphoric acid in these kits.
I just realized that during my childhood I was repeatedly exposed to ozone. My mother used to use an old Soviet "face care" lamp which produced ozone whenever it was on and the smell of it was nearly unbearable after 10 minutes. After about 5 years when I was 10 it finally broke and I was very happy to not smell more of that nasty gas. I don't know how much ozone it produced or if it caused harm but I hope no other such lamp exists anymore. It also produced a ton of UV light but I never stood in the way of it.
Unfortunately, "air ionizers" designed to make "negative ions" are in reality just polluting the air with a small amount of ozone There is a small but insane group of people who buy into pseudoscience and poison themselves
Glad to see ketene on the list. It's tempting to run a ketene lamp to produce your own glacial acetic acid and acetic anhydride, but I would only operate one remotely and down wind from me in the middle of nowhere.
I’m not a chemist, and I never took chemistry, but in the field I work in, we interact with some incredibly strong chemicals. There’s been more than one incident involving 30% hydrogen peroxide and 100% isopropanol soaked wipes being thrown away in the same garbage can. We’ve had a couple fires resulting from this. A few hydrogen peroxide spills resulting in burns, some moron drank deionized water out of a silicone wafer wet sink and contracted a flesh eating virus, chemical spills resulting in full fab evacuations, and my favorite, not one, but TWO incidents involving Tetrakis Dimethylamido Titanium (TDMAT). We have metal ampules full of it that’s used for certain processes, and occasionally they need swapped out for new ones as the old TDMAT gets used up. TDMAT ampules are supposed to be heavily supervised and always under the watch of someone when not in storage. They are either in storage, on their way to the machine, or on their way from the machine to storage. They also require a full suit and respirator to install, as well as a 2+ man team who are also equipped with respirators. Well the first incident involves one guy who decided that the ampule on one of the machines had been sitting long enough (it was overdue for being changed, and thus the machine wasn’t running) and despite having NO RESPIRATOR and NO TEAMMATES he decides to change out the ampule by *holding his breath while near it*. Amazingly nobody found out except the other team members and he didn’t get fired somehow. The next incident took place years ago, after a TDMAT ampule was changed out, the old one was taken back to storage. Eventually however an employee, while looking through the shelves of parts for the machines, discovered a bag containing something cylindrical. Having no part number and not being labeled, curiosity got the better of them and they unbagged it. It turned out to be the ampule that had been changed out a couple weeks prior, which had actually never been taken back to storage. It had been sitting on a parts shelf in the room where everyone worked for almost 3 weeks or so. I hope I never have to handle a TDMAT ampule directly, but if I do I’m gonna put on some big thick heavy gloves and a respirator that actually fits me. So yeah, fun times while making microchips
I'm not sure if H2Se is a plasticizer, but in the lab that handled H2Se where I worked, all of the plastic and rubber was either sticky or melted pretty much
I’ve experienced bromine, chlorine, chloramine, and phosgene. All are not fun. Phosgene is the scariest by far because all the other ones smell super strong and you want to leave typically before you get a good lung full. Phosgene is just menacing
Therapist: 4th wall-breaking That Chemist can't hurt you, he doesn't exist. 4th wall-breaking That Chemist: 12:16 Love it that you are actually going through the list methodically instead of randomly selecting a compound. Also, maybe you can use RTP (or some equivalent) to determine the ranking of compounds at certain states (e.g. Solid)
I once got a two week “internship” (was basically a tour) at a large corporation’s industrial facility. We covered the basic ins and outs of how a lot of the chemicals there got made. During one of my days there I got to follow someone working there as he did his shift in the ethylene oxide plant. After a few hours going around we got to the part where samples of the manufactured EO were taken. It seemed fine, bomb gets placed, purged with N2 and then filled with EO. Shortly after it started though it dripped liquid EO that quickly evaporated. Knowing what I do now I’m glad that the procedure of the person that I was following was to stand a few feet away while the bomb was being filled.
I used to work at a lab for ppe testing, before i started there one of the people working there got a chemical burn from pure HF gas. The glass tube used to connect te cilinder corroded till a hole formed. He had not noticed this and wend to close the valve. As you can understand a very bad time. Wile working there I was more scared of the HF than the Fosgene.
Thank you for mentioning about the monoxide alarms. The number of customers' houses i go to to do gas work and either don't have monoxide alarms or don't understand the need for one. For the sake of £30 it saves your life
I want to petition for arsine to be put into S. I once had a desk job at a little semiconductor equipment manufacturer who mounted a pipe on the wall above my workstation, length of the room. Contents: arsine (run I guess through a pipe to a tank in the back parking lot). I was told that an earthquake would probably finish us on the spot, and that no one has ever actually smelled arsine - kills you before the message about the smell can get to and be processed by the brain. Were they having me on?
Organical synthesis, second year, i think. I had an alkaline trap for HCl that was produced during the reaction... however, during last minute of reaction and my glass-connections started to leak - poor reaction system building from my behalf. Was way back when, safety was not an issue at that point and we did not have enough fume-hoods. Well i tried to secure the system - saw a white cloud of gaseous material moving towards me and took a deep breath. Too deep, it seemed - HCl in lungs even at low concentrations is hell! For a week or so.
@@chrisbradshaw649 Yeah, was kind of a painful experience, do not recommend. Another memory from late 90's - we did not have the siphons for glass pipettes. Again, health and safety and... pipetting with mouth, was a common thing. Until i managed to pull quite a sip of mildly concentrated Fe2SO4 solution into my mouth. Well, let's say that for next three weeks I kept my mouth shut and breathed through my nose exclusively. No hot drinks nor cold ice-cream - teeth were so-ooouch! tender. Urgh! But the teeth were white and bright! :D
In the Inorganic Chemistry course, we needed to get chlorine to make sure it was yellow-green in color and we got about 5-6 liters and I had to wash the dishes after this experience. After that I poured water into a Drechsel flask all the chlorine went up (because chlorine is pretty heavy it doesn't fly away in a fume) and I inhaled it, it was terrible I coughed for about half an hour and had trouble breathing for about a week. So I think chlorine deserves a rank B.
Ozone has a pleasant smell in smaller amounts. I made my own generator which I used to get rid of smells and stuff. If you produce enough, it's slightly blueish
Another tritium story! I don't remember it too well though. When my boss's boss was new and working at some secret place, they had a buildup or something of tritium gas. His superiors told him to crack open the vent valve to (slowly) release it into the atmosphere. He instead opened it all the way releasing too much too quickly. His superiors panicked and had to get planes to fly around to help disperse the gas.
Ahh, yes, the atmosphere is nature's waste bin. Also: the solution to the problem of pollution is dilution. Btw, that's probably the best solution for all the slightly tritiated water from Fukushima as well. Dump it into the ocean to dilute it far enough that it doesn't matter compared to the natural background radiation.
@@alexandermarsteller7848 helps that water's decent at blocking radiation. Dilute it enough and most of the radioactive stuff winds up shielded by miles of H2O.
The USCSB an S-tier UA-cam channel and government agency. I work in an office, but watching their videos inspired me to put CONFINED SPACE, NO FLAMMABLE STORAGE signs in all of the places where we keep landscaping supplies.
recently did a hydrothermal reaction with aqueous hcl as my solvent!! apparently the autoclave wasn't tightened enough though bc when i took the autoclave out of the oven, the sour smell of hcl immediately filled my nose 😅 didn't kill me or anything though, just a lesson about always remembering to fully tighten my autoclave
17:06 You know what's fun about H-Cl vapor? Well it's a colorless gas, and when it's dry stays that way, but when the humidity is high it makes for distinct white fumes, literal acid fog. I encounter this when adding acid to my pool on a high humidity day. If I'm doing this at night with my patio light on when it's high humidity, it's particularly visible and spooky. There's nothing quite like pouring 8oz of 30% HCl into a measuring cup, and watching this white fog constantly wafting out of the top.
I checked my CO detector and it turned out i was getting poisoned, it was calibrated in presence of CO and it did not go off, i took it outside, calibrated, went inside and it started beeeping right away, my heater was fucked and it was spewing CO. Thank you, if i went to sleep i had a chance i would not wake up, insanity, you are the reason im alive, i have no idea what to say, simple thank You is not enough, the world is WILD, thank you, bless you, i pray for your wellbeing everyday for the rest of my life, You are a hero for me ❤️ No death for me this time 💀💀💀
@@einar8019 Gas heaters have a higher temperature gradient, and thus do the job better while leaving the home with a cozy feeling. Electric heaters constantly turn on and don't produce the radiant warmth that most people enjoy. Therefore, you'll spend more energy trying to heat your home with electric.
15:09 I live very close (about a block away) from a company that produces large amounts of merchant phosgene. There used to be a public road adjacent to the main structure that included a bridge over a local creek, and my parents used to use it as a shortcut coming back from shopping, work, etc. After 9/11 the city closed this road at both ends and added high electrified fencing. They do siren drills every month and after a while you get used to it.
Ammonia, you missed the big one, fertilizer. It is injected directly into the ground as anhydrous. You rent the equipment and buy the pressurized liquid at coop or farm supply. Those big white tanks are not propane. Those big red letters saying ANHYDROUS mean pressurized liquid ammonia.
I prepared HN3 recently and found out that my fumehood bleeds air into the air conditioner of my lab somehow. I found this out since another student asked me what that smell in the lab was and that she had a feeling of pressure in her head. Since i had a full-face respirator on i couldn't smell anything. Moral of the story never trust fumehoods, always have multiple layers of control to the risk.
That is one of the most terrifying things i've ever read Imagine working with more dangerous stuff in that hood Edit: read NH3 instead of HN3 This story just got a whole lot worse
I work regularly with methyl isocyanate, and I think it's not that bad if you handle the stuff properly with full face gas mask and enough ice on the closed container (you definitely don't want to place it on open container, methyl isocyanate smell is extremely irritating and panic inducing). My senior once forgot returning a closed screw cap bottle of methyl isocyanate inside a fume hood back to its ice container. In a short time it exploded, sending away pieces of glass everywhere and succeeded in evacuating the whole building for hours until the tear gas cleared up. Not that horrible to work with but definitely give the substance your full respect.
"Methyl isocyanate has been the culprit of Bhopal gas leak, which was an industrial disaster that happened in India in 1984. Estimates vary for death toll, but initial DT is 2-3 thousand and over half a million injured"
@@That_Chemist Making 30 tons of methyl isocyanate and burying it underground where water spillover is possible is utter disrespect and just asking for trouble! We make them in situ at our producion plant with maximum 30 kilos allowed to exist at the pipes and they quickly converts to product without any unneccessary buildup. I honestly think it's a crime for humanity for storing methyl isocyanate in large amounts like that :(
Used to work security at a place that shipped anhydrous HF in by the train load. I was pretty chill around the tanker cars cuz if anything happened I probably wasn’t going to live long enough to worry.
It's funny you mention perfloroisobutalyne. I work in plastics machining, and often with teflon. When we run ptfe on our routers, which have no coolant or enclosure, it stinks up the whole shop, and i'm certain there may be trace amounts of this present. Other nasties that decompose into unpleasant gasses are acetal, acrylic, and pvc. Our entire 30,000sqft building can smell when these go on the routers.
Methyl isocyanate has been the culprit of Bhopal gas leak, which was an industrial disaster that happened in India in 1984. Estimates vary for death toll, but initial DT is 2-3 thousand and over half a million injured
A town near where I grew up has a cholorine process paper mill and is prone to shallow inversions. The smell of chlorine dioxide is unmistakably awful.
I wouldn't put ozone on S tier, because you can smell it and not die, and you can smell it, compared to stuff like carbon monoxide. I get that it's about toxicity, but not smelling nor seeing it imo makes anything much more deadly. Also ozone disinfection is a thing. Edit: looking at the concentrations needed to be harmful, it's a bit more scary, but usually it's not at high enough concentrations that you can't go outside and be fine, as most acute effects are reversible and happen at smellable levels.
@LabRat Knatz from what I read lethal doses are under 100ppm, and even 10ppm can be lethal, but ozone isn't encountered at high concentration most of the time, and unless you die right away the effects are usually reversible.
Hydrogen sulfide: At lower concentrations you can smell it but at higher concentrations you do not know you are about to die until people around you start dropping dead. Apparently doesn't care what air fuel mixture to detonate and is highly corrosive. When they started transporting crude high in hydrogen sulfide they had to replace all the valving in transport cars because they were leaking. The refineries thought they could handle this stuff but apparently standard oil of Richmond forgot to replace a pipe.
A chemical engineer specialising in design of Odour and Toxin removal systems using various means, I find this video both fascinating and horrifying in equal measure. I'm dealing with a lot of the compounds listed here on a daily basis and you almost treat it as second nature in working with them. I would add three items to the list. Dimethyl Sulphide and Dimethyl Disulphide are fairly nasty (NFPA rating 2). They do occur in nature mainly if you have sullage tanks holding waste for a long periods of time. The other one is oxygen, or at least the absence of. Case study after case study in entering confined spaces has shown people asphyxiating when entering an area without checking the air first. Get instruments you can trust and then trust them.
Extra respect for actually using the biohazard symbol correctly, literally, everyone I've checked on youtube uses both the radioactive and biohazard symbol for toxicity.
I have had carbon monoxide poisoning before. Do NOT recommend! Get the damn detector.
While visiting my aunt, her furnace had apparently malfunctioned in the middle of the night. I woke up one morning to find that I had a splitting headache. I have migraines, so this wasn't uncommon. I noticed that the pets had all been sick overnight too, but I was late and panicking about the exam I had first thing in the morning, so I dragged myself to school. Halfway through the first period, I got called to the office. Turns out my aunt and cousins had woken up and realized that something was very wrong, and were diagnosed with CO poisoning. They had me go immediately to the hospital for treatment.
Again, DO NOT fool around with CO poisoning!
My goodness did you end up getting to take your exam?
Cigarette smokers averaged 3% carboxyhemoglobin (as pct of hemoglobin). Long stop&go commutes cause retention of 1% Carbon Monoxide. Current biochem points to Carbon Monoxide being a neurotransmitter like Nitric Oxide is. Small amounts of Carbon Monoxide appear to have a natural resolution in the Human body. (Many people die yearly from using fossile fuel with limited exhaust.)
And DO NOT place the CO detectors at head height!
Place the damn things as low down as you can get away with!
@@AkinaDinghonestly, I don't remember! I did get a lot of tests at the hospital though ...
@@lancer2204 why is lower better? Doesn't it tend to rise with smoke?
Phosgene survivor here: it has a wet/grassy smell, doesn't smell 'bad' in any overt way.
I don't recall if my eyes were irritated, but I do remember that I didn't feel sick right away.
Source: Thermal decomposition of chlorinated paint-remover on a stove-top.
I had a light exposure, the only lasting damage was to my sense of smell.
I thought it smells like hay. I worked with Chloroform and phosgene develops in small amounts in the gas phase of containers. We had 40Liter containers in a 40C+ environment. Small amounts, but still.
Weaponized Phosgene killed 85% of the total gas deaths in all of WW1...
I'm very glad you're okay!!
Yeah, I would describe the odor as "fresh cut grass" If you smell it, Leave The Area!!!
My father ran into phosgene when a pipe burst that carried it. It ended up putting him into the hospital and it killed one of the other people exposed. I need to ask him for extra details, but I seem to remember there wasn't enough gas mask so they were trying to share
@@mweskamppp wow I used to work with chloroform, had no idea i was smelling phosgene too. I used to do phenol-chloroform DNA extractions of many samples at once quite close to the sash of the fume hood. All I know is I used to get nose bleeds much easier..
You need to do a full “would you rather breath in”-tournament instead of a simple tier list. There are too many factors to consider in tier lists. But having to choose between plausible life threatening accidents should be easy enough.
Yeah, stuff like ozone is not actually that bad in small quantities and is actually part of the smell of thunderstorms (formed from lightning). It's is used in small household ozone machines as an air purifier. It has a nice fresh metallic smell. In fact back when I had an electric air purifier as a kid, I would sniff the ozone after smelling something bad just to clear my nose. Above a certain concentration is when it turns nasty and starts dumping that third oxygen into everything making your lungs burn and oxidising things. That's why a place must be evacuated when a large ozone machine is running to sterilize.
that would be an atrocity to the participants! FBI OPEN UP!
“Ladies and Gentlemen, we got him”
Indeed. As a pharmacist I sometimes "reclassify" E and F tiers way higher. On a solely chemical structure and molecular properties, that chemist is spot on. But what happens once you ingested it is another story. The liver is a gigantic enzymatic factory. And the liver can be dumb or just doesn't care about "that weird kidney thing" 😆
H2S needs more respect, it's really quite terrifying. You can smell it at low concentrations, but it quickly kills your sense of smell at higher concentrations. I work with it a lot in petrochem, and if we get so much as a whiff of H2S we shut everything down and evacuate the building. That stuff is no joke. If you're in an area you'd expect low levels of H2S, being able to smell it is sometimes more reassuring than not being able to smell it, as it's possible that there's too much in the air to smell.
Either way, I won't go near the stuff without a fitted full face respirator.
I guess everyone working there would definitely need to have a H2S detector tied around their neck like a necklace lol
H2S has been connected with sailors being killed in the navy by entering compartments with rotting meat (or bodies) just from the amount released by the decomp. This caused numerous casualties in the Pearl Harbor cleanup.
@@mastershooter64 That is actually correct. Its required in the oil and gas industry where there is lots of H2S in natural gas to have employees wear H2S monitors full time. Back in 2019 in Odessa Texas a Gentleman was killed in a pump house by H2S. His wife noticing he was late coming home actually drove to the pump house and she was killed as well. Their son in the back seat was unharmed
@@justinbyers1725 The USCSB video on that was quite chilling
I'm trying for the life of me to figure out why ozone is sitting up there with it... And HCN... And F2... Lol
I'm not terrified when I smell ozone, not even scared. If I even *think* there's something like HCN in the air, I'm gone.
One day in a high school chem class we were studying your typical reactions of metals with acids. In the fume hood was a bottle of some hypophosphorous acid which my dumb 18 year old brain thought this was just some spicy phosphoric acid since I’d never come across such a reagent at the time. Me and my lab partner decided it would be a good idea to add a bunch of it to a couple of grams of zinc powder we had to do the experiments with and we thought the reaction was giving off hydrogen gas because our syllabus strictly said metal + acid = salt + hydrogen… a few minutes go by of this mixture bubbling away until our lab supervisor sees the bottle of the hypophosphorous acid and the violently frothing mixture and turns purple before putting the test tube holder at the very back of the fume hood and slamming it in shut. The fume hood remained untouched for the best part of a month with the mixture still there and after a bit of Googling what had happened I quickly discovered that the reaction didn’t produce hydrogen but instead was essentially a phosphine gas generator which scared the living sh*t out of myself and my lab partner.
The morale of the story is never work with ‘spicy’ reagents until you have carefully thought out the products of what such a reaction could be instead of being a flammable gas it was horrifically toxic abomination which with our high school chem knowledge we were completely ill equipped to deal with. Please respect the reagents you work with and carefully assess the risks before mixing anything since things could have gone very t*ts up very quick that day. Myself and the 10 others in that lab that day are lucky to be alive. Chemistry is no joke and I have learned to give chemicals the proper respect they deserve.
Edit: our PPE was a hoodie, some nitrile gloves and a pair of lab goggles old enough for me to call grandpa
Excellent tale. I am glad you survived and were unscathed!
DO PAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO THE CHOICE OF GLOVES!
Each type of material used for gloves has very different chemical properties. You cannot go simply by chemical compatibility either. The commonly available compatibility lists only tell you about how the chemical affects the glove. They DO NOT tell you about chemical permeability, or speed of permeability. That is crucial information which must be consulted along with compatibility!
In some cases the time for penetration of the reagent through the gloves is as little as 7 seconds, despite the gloves being entirely chemically compatible (not dissolved) by the chemicals involved.
Also, for some glove materials the speed of penetration is slower. However, it continues unabated with time even after the glove is removed from exposure. Wearing the glove later can then result in harm!
Gloves also have finite lives. They may become brittle, or fail in other ways. Avoid using old gloves.
Latex is a wonderful material. It is also dangerous to many people. That includes latex dust used to make donning some gloves easier. Latex can trigger a life threatening allergy directly. And prolonged exposure in genetically susceptible people can trigger latex fruit syndrome. That can result in immense dietary problems with sensitivities to a weird mix of different, fruits, veg and foods. Avoid latex when possible. Do not learn you are genetically vulnerable the hard way! Life is hard enough without that.
Avoid beryllium as well. Beryllium is seldom used anymore. Some old beryllium bronze non-sparking tools still exist. These smell "sweet". DO NOT SNIFF THEM! Contact with the tools is also potentially very dangerous. People who are genetically susceptible to berylliosis should never handle or work around beryllium. It is a truly terrible disease, and entirely unnecessary to ever suffer from. Knowledge is power. Be knowledgeable. Protect yourself and others.
Tell your stories. They help others to know about hazards and how to avoid them.
When you mention methyl isocyanate, you really need to bring up Union Carbide and the slaughter it still hasn't been held responsible for in Bhopal.
I checked the company wikipedia page and HOLY SHIT THEY KILLED SO MANY PEOPLE AND GOTTEN AWAY WITH IT
I think of it every time I hear of that chemical too. As well as every time I see a container of Sevin pesticide. To hell with the Union Carbide company.
Exactly
I mean there died about 25000 people because of this incident, why even after 40 years, Union Carbide should get a really big punishment for the dead of all the people
@@niklas_science
Besides death tolls, about 700K people were affected, either through direct exposure or other factors like pregnancy. It's expected 120-150K people survived with long term health effects.
I have breathed hydrogen selenide. It was the worst experience in my life. It feels like you lose feelings and functionality progressively from you throat down your airways, millimeter by millimeter. You just stand there and think "It will reach my lungs, and I am going to die". And I don't think there were more than 2 ppm in the air at the worst moment. I read it smells horrible but I honestly couldn't smell it at all, or was too scared to notice.
Yikes!!
Well thats horrifying
I feel like it would've been a smart idea to get out of there as fast as possible.
Phosgene story:
While working as an HVAC tech a lifetime ago, I was tasked with repairing a pinhole in a residential AC unit line set. I used a recovery machine to evacuate the system (so I thought) and then started repairing the hole with an oxy-acetylene torch. I immediately knew something was wrong when the flame started gently blowing away from the hole and in my direction and the flame turned bright green. I moved my torch and went to move away but it was too late. I caught a bit of it while breathing and thought I was going to die. My eyes, nose, throat, and lungs felt like they were on fire and I couldn't stop coughing long enough to catch my breath. EMS arrived and gave me oxygen and after the coughing stopped they told me to follow up with my Dr. My sinus cavities, throat, and lungs were burning for a week and I coughed up sooo much phlegm.
Worst experience ever.
where did that come from?
Feels like world war one
@johnElden8760 some refrigerants decompose into phosgene when heated. That's why it's critical to pull a hard vacuum on the system to remove all traces of refrigerant before repairing leaks. HF and HCl can also form if you don't, which is bad for the compressor and everything else inside the system. You can't just pull a vacuum, you have to keep the vacuum for a while until all the refrigerant dissolved in the compressor oil boils out.
Quite a few older buildings have plant rooms where refrigeration equipment is located next to boilers etc.
Don't forget the fact that once Radon finishes decaying it becomes Lead 206, so not only do you breathe radioactive gas but down the road all that gas becomes lead, fun stuff
As of being radiated wasn’t enough, Radon in all forms really is just destruction in every sense of the word.
@@GGPlex_You probably would be unable to have a physically significant amount of Radon gas in a given space, because it gives off so much energy from radiation that it essentially blows itself apart. If too much of it is in one spot, it’ll fizzle out of existence and burn everything nearby.
BTW Radon has got half life of about 4 days. So along with the lungs cancer, you can quickly get heavy metal poisoning as well!
@@prasannadhopate8513 While it is true that Radon itself only has a half life of 4 days it doesnt immediatly decay into a stable element, so it has a decay chain that ends in lead and takes ~22 years to complete, you may have to deal with the radiation for way longer
The Bhopal disaster was a methyl isocyanate gas leak from a pesticide plant in the middle of a state capital in India. It injured over 500,000 (!!!!) people. Offical death-toll is 3787, but more realistic estimates are around 16000, which includes the longer-term deaths from MIC-related diseases.
Controversial opinion: Ozone smells amazingly good. Good to the point that I have probably inhaled more of it over the years than is really ideal. Those "Ionic Breeze" air purifier things were great ozone generators for getting rid of annoying odors in rooms.
Also have unfortunately smelled hydrogen selenide gas that I accidentally produced when disposing of some cold bluing solution. Not the worst smell ever but the lingering I pact was pretty strange. Everything smelled/tasted slightly of garlic for at least a week afterwards (my breath didn't smell garlicky to my girlfriend though thankfully).
My nose is actually very sensitive to the smell of ozone, so much that I can detect an approaching thunderstorm a few hours to a day in advance
Ozone smells like rain but better
It really does! Always reminds me of walking outside after heavy rain and thunder, so it’s unreasonably relaxing haha
I agree, and I think it's just weird oddity chemists have. Ozone, naphthalene, isopropyl alcohol, and a few others are very comforting to me. Fabreeze needs to somehow imitate the smells of lab reagents without the reagents themselves.
My personal experience is that exposure to selenium doesn't make your breath smell garlicky, it mostly affects your sweat, which acquires an odd metallic smell, somewhat similar to that of your skin after touching copper.
I'm only about halfway through this, but I propose some changes.
1. Ethylene oxide. SUPER useful compound. Not only do they sterilize medical equipment with it, it's an ingredient in a lot of useful chemicals. Glycols, glycol ethers, ethanolamines, ethoxylates and acrylonitrile all contain ethylene oxide. The problem is that it's an explosion hazard and extremely flammable. NFPA rates it 3 for health, but it's pretty much at the top of 4 for flammability. Somewhere between A and S would be appropriate for ethylene oxide.
2. Mustard gas. This stuff needs to be in C tier, and here's why: During World War II the Italians had a big stockpile of nitrogen mustard at Bari, which they were holding as a chemical warfare agent. Naturally, the Allies bombed it and the populace was exposed to it. After the war the Allies went in and discovered the population had a LOT less cancer than the rest of the Italian citizenry. This, and some research into using it for cancer treatment at Yale during the war, led to nitrogen mustard becoming the first chemotherapy agent. Research since then has focused on making nitrogen mustards that are as toxic to the cancer while being less toxic to the patient and caregivers than the real agent is.
3. Silane. Oh my. S tier. Most definitely. It's pyrophoric. They use it to make silicone compounds, but a huge use of it is making solar cells - you spray silane on a substrate in a clean room with a high-oxygen atmosphere, it catches fire, and when the fire goes out you have a nice film of very pure elemental silicon. Very slick. They make this in Moses Lake, WA, at the REC Silicon factory and transport it in tube trailers clearly marked SILANE. When I see one on the road I give it an extremely wide berth.
Also...sulfuryl fluoride...that's not Klapötke's lab, is it?
It’s Glenn Sammis’ lab
Ethylene oxide is also used in thermobaric weapons.
Silane is a tricky chemical. Toxicity isn’t the issue. Flammability and explosivity are. It has a tendency in a leak to form oxides and a white cloud as it combusts. But it can leak without combusting. At a few percent in air if ignition occurs the pressure rise is a million psi per second. The detonation wave is so powerful that it will shred an 18 gauge gas cabinet and eject it at rifle speeds. Films of gas cabinets during a detonation show the cabinet present in one frame and entirely absent in the next. At lower concentrations if you are standing in a silane cloud and reach for an ungrounded emergency off button, the resulting flash fire will cause third degree burns externally and internally. Though it is difficult to do so, it is possible to create a detonatable silane cloud. The result is terrifying beyond measure.
Correction on the Bari story: it was actually the other way around. It was an Allied stockpile of mustard gas that the Germans bombed, which was apparently being stored for use as a retaliatory measure if the Germans used chemical weapons. Apparently the US hadn't told anyone that they had a ship full of the stuff, including the British that actually controlled the town.
As far as "toxic gasses" go, I love silane. If you're not actively on fire, you're fine. Compares well to all the nasty shit that's horribly neurotoxic but you won't notice until your hands won't stop shaking and you can't form complete sentences anymore.
I'd rather something that kills me instantly over something that just horribly disables me.
Vinyl chloride is really interesting : it causes very exotic cancers (liver angiosarcoma) and it's one of the very few chemicals experimentaly proved to trigger sclerodermia-like lesions.
"exotic cancers" sounds interesting
@@That_Chemist A reason for vinyl chloride to be at least A tier - exotic kinds of cancer!
Exotic cancers
And yet we polymerize and use it for pipes
ever so interesting!
Methyl Isocyanate might not be a gas at your lab's RT but it can be a gas at the outdoor ambient conditions of, say, India.
Seriously, how the substance that caused the most lethal industrial disaster in history (Bhopal) didn't make S tier is beyond me.
I had a similar thought. Just from watching every USCSB video on UA-cam I instantly thought MIC had to go into the "terrifying" group.
You should do a tierlist of all the 4-4-4 compounds. Back in my undergrad days, we used to call those compounds "12s" and made a game out of hunting wikipedia for em.
The fire response rule of thumb is to add the digits. If it is over 8 do not enter. Let it burn.
@@tunneloflight Sounds to me like some brainwashed fire marshals trying to cheat all of those brave firefighters out of the ultimate high.
@@helldad4689 Having pulled someone out of a 45% ammonia spray release with no safety gear where my skin turned to soap and I could neither breathe nor see and where my whole body screamed in pain; and having breathed high concentration ozone and dropped down a safety cage some 15 feet to the ground, I have a deep and abiding respect for the dangers of entering a space where the aggregate hazard is too large, and for the dangers to the fire fighters and other emergency personnel.
Summing to 8 on the fire diamond is a high hazard indeed.
Personally the worst placard I have seen for a building I entered was a 4-4-4 Water Reactive, Pyrophoric metal, Rad III. That is not a good sign.
The worst building I ever entered had no adequate placarding. It was a warehouse in a light industrial area next door to homes. The building contained a room with grey dust all over the floor - calcium hydride, 200 pounds of it in open canisters. It was of course sprinkled.
The next large room contained shelves of organic and inorganic chemicals stored alphabetically. There were in total; over 200 pounds of nitrated organics that amounted to Class I, II and III explosives. There were three five pound bottles of picric acid with crystals under the lid. And lovely things like Ammonium perchlorate, ammonium perbromate, many dozens of chemicals that were contact carcinogens, teratogens, nephrotoxins, and worse.
When the bomb crew arrived, the owner had pulled out a five gallon bucket filled with bottles. I was standing with the fire marshal 50 feet away. The head of the bomb squad went over and gently turned over the top bottle. He then ever so gently set it back down. Then he came to tell us that we were way way too close. The top bottle was 500 grams of tri-nitro toluene
He and his senior tech loaded the bucket into the bomb disposal rig. They hauled it a quarter mile away to an open field and detonated it. They damaged the bomb rig. It took several days to destroy the worst of the explosive chemicals. And much much more. The building was a disaster waiting to happen.
I worked closely with fire crews my whole carrier. They deserve enormous respect and praise for what they do every day. They are consmate professionals who take risk very seriously. If you ever want to meet someone who viscerally understands risk - talk to a seasoned fire fighter.
@@tunneloflight what the actual f...what is the story behind that building? did the owner face charges or did he acquire it without knowing or something?
@@chir0pter the owner faced multiple criminal charges. He knew exactly what he was doing. When a ~60 ton cocaine bust went down as all of this was going on, he cancelled a very large order for various “-caines” (lidocaine, tetracaine, bupivacaine …). Cocaine + -caine becomes crack.
The building was shut down and carefully emptied. The process of doing that involved multiple jurisdictions in two states, several judges, lies in court, a garage door being hacked down by a fire department for emergency safe entry to a private residence, heightened security at a major federal facility, and more. By the way, Judges ….really… don’t like being lied to.
The process was difficult because of the interplay of individual liberties, the legal system, courts, cross jurisdictional issues, overwhelming the courts, saturating police resources, etc…. Even as this was going on the police set up a sting at a nearby intersection. They pulled people over for violating various traffic laws and regulations. Before the cops could even say why they pulled people over they confessed that they bought XYZ from Mr. Zzz to make crack, meth, …. They then got arrested and booked. The local PD was overwhelmed, as was the court, and the Judge ordered the Police to stop. For obvious reasons I cannot share the specifics.
The points here are these:
You never know what people will do.
You never know exactly what you may be walking into in a facility or structure with hazardous materials.
You cannot be certain (it is not safe to assume) that people are doing things right or well or legally or safely.
The real world is messy and bad things happen with often complex results. The technical answers, safety answers, and legal answers may not have anything in common with one another.
People don’t always agree with the laws, rules, regulations society sets. And they blatantly violate them. Often they do not understand the risks or consequences. Often they do and violate them anyway.
As a result, as a first responder you have to be prepared for anything. Learn everything you can. Learn from others mistakes, missteps, blunders, failures, accidents, unfortunate events …. It is much better to learn from theirs than for you to be the case that others learn from.
Oh, and by the way, the DEA knew all about the facility, but their hands were tied by lack of proof. They had spent five years trying to find an “in”. In the end what brought it all down was a zoning violation complaint, and a Fire Department response. That led step by step to the rest.
I use to work next to the local hazmat people and ended up just gabbing with them, there was a railroad next to us and HF tank cars from Vulcan chemical came through there. They told me if one of those ever crashed we would know, because all the hazmat people screaming and running the other way.
Yeah HF will just burn through your skin like a swarm of piranhas. You don't even need to breathe it, just being in the presence of it will fuck you up.
There are reddit chemistry threads about lab accidents, it was definitely the most memorable, dissolves bone iirc
Fun fact: Most ghost sightings in America can be traced to mild cardon monoxide poisoning in older houses.
Ghost sightings and hallucinations are two separate things.
@@goldfieldgary
I feel like part of the consideration should also be likelihood of exposure. CO isn't _extremely dangerous_ in and of itself, as it takes a good few hours to kill you and it's fairly easy to treat people who've been exposed; _but_ because it's an extremely common byproduct of inefficient oxidisation aka any and all processes that involve fire, rust or decomposition outside of a controlled, well-ventilated environment, risk of exposure is _super duper high_ and as a result CO poisoning kills numerous* people every year.
H2S is similarly terrifying, and while from a mere toxicological standpoint it's 'only' an A, the fact that it's so hard to detect by the body (yeah you can 'smell it and live' but that window is extremely small as once you've stopped smelling it you're more than likely boned), and the fact that untrained people can and regularly do come into contact with it should catapult it to (H2)S-tier without a second thought. The sheer number of stories of "someone fell over, someone else ran over to help them, now they're both dead" as a direct result of exposure to H2S should be enough.
*I tried googling statistics for how many people die of CO poisoning every year globally, but while apparently articles, foundation webpages and even a paper I found agree it's 'one of the most common causes of death as a result of exposure to a poisonous gas', _none_ of them actually gave any numbers. So, even if I had been ready to give in to confirmation bias, I couldn't because apparently statistics aren't important or something.
If likelihood of exposure is a relevant factor, then ammonia similarly deserves far more than E. Produced in vast quantities in industrial scale, used in various coolant systems and can form in various sewage systems. Corrosive and highly toxic, kills people every year.
A part of my graduate work involved using ketene in large amounts routinely to make certain exotic four-membered rings. We had a ketene generator which is basically a flask of acetone in a heating mantle equipped with a pyrolysis chamber with a electrically heated wire (of course the setup should be purged with an inert gas before turning on the power) and a condenser to remove excess unreacted acetone. The first day before actually starting to generate ketene my PI said "be REALLY careful with ketene. It is as toxic as phosgene, OR WORSE." You bubble ketene into your reaction flask with an outlet that lead to a trap with plenty of water -- this is ABSOLUTELY required to kill any excess ketene (it reacts with water to make acetic acid). A week into the project I decided to replace water with Na2CO3(aq) both to make it more reactive toward ketene and make any actual ketene leaks more distinguishable from the "false alarm" of acetic odors from gases agitating the trap solution containing acetic acid -- ketene has a very potent odor similar to acetyl chloride which serves as a good warning to run for your life (I've actually smelled tiny amounts of it a couple of times). By keeping the trap solution alkaline at all times (we had to check the pH for every ~12 hours of use) we can eliminate the possibility of the trap emitting the acetic odor.
Actually the generator / reaction is pretty chill and almost on autopilot if everything is set up correctly. But guess what, you still need to take TLC samples of your reaction solution periodically! Though people had said "oh, you can just turn off the wire heating before sampling your solution." It still scared the heck out of me every time I had to sample my ketene reaction. And I quickly found turning the power off completely unnecessary and not useful as the entire setup would still contain lots of ketene anyway, and by disrupting the pyrolysis reaction (which ideally turns 1 mole of acetone into 1 mole each of ketene and methane, which based on ideal gas law would occupy twice the space given constant pressure) you risk a suck-back of your trap solution into your reaction mixture. So you take a deep breath outside the hood and hold it, open the sash to the lowest workable height, stick your arms into the hood to thread a disposable needle through the septum of your reaction flask and stick a finger-stopped capillary through it, remove the said finger for a shortest fraction of second (so that the ketene pressure doesn't shoot your reaction mixture out like a geyser), remove the needle, spot your TLC, close the hood shut, and ONLY then you can continue breathing. And oh did I mention once my ketene reaction product precipitated from the solution and clogged the ketene outlet needle. Fortunately we caught it in time before the needle would be completely clogged and the emergency release stopcock on the ketene generator would pop. That WAS scary.
And when your reaction is actually done and the power/heating is off, you need to wait for everything to cool down to room temp while continuously purging the system (by bubbling Ar into the acetone) for additional 30 min before you can actually take your reaction flask off the generator. Someone once didn't purge enough before taking the apparatus apart to change the acetone (the pyrolysis is not at all clean and you get lots of junk including diketene, acetic acid, acetoacetic acid, acetic anhydride, and various aldol products of acetone that can slowly turn the acetone yellow and even brown) and the residual dissolved ketene gave him a violent headache. Fortunately he quickly closed the sash shut and was apparently fine.
I would say I've probably made a total of a couple of kilograms(!!) of ketene for the entire project and would never want to work with ketene again.
I think OsO4 should be way higher in the list due to its enormous toxicity.
A chemist who discovered it was hospitalised for two weeks with heavy poisoning after just a small exposure. Really terrifying thing, I’d put it together with arsin
Also add on the effect that it can stain your cornea permanently and cause blindness
Any exposure at all to the eye results in blindness. There is no leeway with OsO4.
@@tunneloflight A single molecule is not causing blindness...
@@pierrecurie True. But the amount of OsO4 needed to cause blindness is very small. The point is not so much the amount as that it is entirely unforgiving. Get smashed with caustic soda and damage occurs quickly. But you have a moment to react to rinse it out without going blind. OsO4 is not forgiving. Be extremely diligent with safety precautions.
Not on this list, but since unforgiving is important, bis-chloromethyl ether is incredibly unforgiving. It is speculated that a single molecule can cause lung cancer. It is one of 13 (maybe more now) chemicals that are nicknamed the no-no's. The allowed exposure under OSHA is zero in any units.
@@tunneloflight If what you say is true, then I pity the fool who determined that bis-chloromethyl ether has an "unpleasant suffocating odour"
Chlorine is difficult to rank, yeah it has been used and its used as a chemical weapon (a major tragedy happened very recently involving Chlorine) but its also very easy to make and nearly all major homechem youtuber has a video with a cl2 generator.
It also has a weird relationship with Mexico because 2 to 4 Chlorine cylinders are stolen from a water treatment plant every year but are recovered in the majority of cases undamaged (radioactive sources are also alarmingly stolen every year) and it looks like it only happens in Mexico. They are interested only in the metalic cylinder to sell it, but why chlorine? I miss the days when just one radiotherapy machine was enough to live.
I was at a resort in Manzanillo Mexico where they had had an earthquake the year before. We were sitting around the pool when we heard a bang and then saw a yellowish cloud rolling down the hill. One of the chlorine tanks for the pools had ruptured. It was pretty dilute by the time it got to us, but because my father and myself were military history nerds we knew to wet our shirts and hold their over our mouth and nose. Nobody got injured, but even dilute chlorine is nasty on your eyes. Breathing through a wet shirt was surprisingly effective.
The bro who brought home cobalt powder and showed it to his wife, kids, and friends is a pretty sad and stupid story. Stealing shit is bad, stealing expensive glowy dust is really bad.
If there are orphaned sources going missing frequently in Mexico, I hope they make it into johnstonarchive and similar lists. The only event I’m aware of being publicized in the last decade was the Hueypoxtla theft.
Can't you make chlorine by mixing bleach and ammonia? It's like, the number one safety warning on ANY cleaners that contain either, because both bleach and ammonia are common household cleaning agents.
@@Nachiebree im not a chemist in the slightest but I think that makes chloramine which is also some gnarly shit you don't want to breath.
1:55 "F tier will still eff you up"
That got me laughing.
Here's something with some of these toxic chemicals you might find amusing that I've read about. During the early days of rocketry, someone had the bright idea of trying liquid ozone as an oxidiser. Has a higher density than liquid oxygen, and it has a higher boiling point. Unsurprisingly, the researchers had severe problems with keeping such large amounts of liquid ozone stable and gave up eventually.
Another bright idea for a rocket fuel oxidiser was chlorine trifluoride. Yes, that ClF3. I mean, it's a very powerful oxidiser and a very energetic oxidiser, it would've made liquid ozone look tame. Then someone realised that the exhaust would be hot HF and HCl.
(I read about these in a book called Ignition, an informal history of liquid rocket propellants by John D Clark, definitely worth a read)
They soon realized that cif3 is not a good oxidiser because a tanker truck moving a large amount of it spilled and burned 15 ft worth of soil and the gravel the onlooker described it as the road is on fire or something on those lines
@@derrickhageman1969 ClF3 is a good oxidiser... A very good oxidiser... Too good an oxidiser...
@@samspeed6271 yep it can burn through lots of things like asbestos,thing burned by oxygen,metals( because it burns at 2500 degrees),concrete,sand,gravel,15 worth of soil.did I miss anything?
@@derrickhageman1969 reacts explosively with water and with glass as well.
@@samspeed6271 ok that is terrifying
Our neighbor across the alley, at work, had an NFPA diamond of 4-4-4. I wondered how high they went, and of course it's 0 to 4. I paraphrased these as: Yellow 3: will blow up if you look at it cross-eyed. Yellow 4: it will just blow up. Blue 3: milligrams will kill you in seconds. Blue 4: micrograms will kill you in milliseconds. And of course red 3 is flash point below 100ºF, red 4, below 70ºF. (!!) They had a full-time safety officer -- I went over to ask; they made chemical vapor deposition equipment in the semiconductor industry and had some of everything their customers had -- and came away with a list of the most interesting stuff they handled. One of them said, "Smells like rotting fish" and I wondered, How did they ever find out?
Rotting fish, so an amine.
If there were to be 5's, I'd go:
Yellow 5: Explodes by being made.
Blue 5: Nanograms will kill you in microseconds.
Red 5: Ignites by just existing.
@@californium-2526 Red 5 would be flash point 77K? :-) The only one I remember was tungsten hexafluoride, which seems to be an NFPA 4-0-0 (blue). It must have been the combination of stuff that earned them the high score. I figured the local fire department had a small black circle on their map saying "go the other way".
@@jxh02 At -Blue- Red (confused the colors) 5 is stuff like triethylborane and perhaps even c(a)esium, at Yellow 5 or even 6 is 2,2'-azobis(azidotetrazole) or tetrakis(nitratomethyl)silane, and Blue 5 is where stuff like Ricin goes. Botox is a further Blue 6, and short-lived radionuclides (especially with a longer chain) like radon-222 or californium-252 (also my channel's name) will further earn a potential Blue 7 ("Please don't interact with this substance", for short-lived radionuclides).
I'm not a chemist but i know that some extra fun ones exist, mainly N14 (somehow convinced 14 nitrogen attoms to exist together without a triple bond in sight, its sensitivity can't even be measured), and ClF4 (Chlorine Tetrafluoride, aka the oxidizers even the Nazis gave up using because if you spill the barrel it will burn litterally anything including absetos, ash, glass, gravel, iron. Its containers are basically teflon or iron seared by itself to get a florine coating). Granted i only know of these through youtube, but google did confirm their existance. (ClF4 is basically just used in rocketry to my knowledge, and not very often considering its utterly terrifying, and auto ignites on contact with basically anything you can think of)
Rotting fish smell is phosphine. Deadly. Having a 4-4-4 placard means the fire department will not respond. It is far too hazardous. Any safety person worth their salt (and insurers) will require that the hazards be grouped and separated so that no area is rated with a diamond that totals more than 8, ideally 7 or lower.
Some unmentioned, but really toxic gases (or volatile substances):
- boron trichloride and tribromide
- silicon tetrafluoride and tetrachlorude
- phosphorus halogenides
- titanium tetrachloride
- uranium hexafluoride
UF6 is the worst: EXTREMELY toxic, flammable, and radioactive to boot. Fun times.
11:41 I'm pretty sure no one has ever used ClF3 for circuit board etching. It would eat through the fiberglass resin composite substrate, while it would leave the copper alone due to the formation of a thin copper fluoride layer. The exact opposite of what you want.
What you're thinking of is that it's used as a cleaning agent for chemical vapor deposition chambers in semiconductor manufacturing. Even though it's technically an etchant in this capacity, it's not used for patterning as far as I'm aware.
It's not used for etching circuit boards, it's used foe cleaning VPD apparatus to remove really hard to remove metal deposits.
Of course diazomethane is S tier, I remember a time when someone was doing a Doyle-Kirmse, the TMS diazomethane didnt work so they had to pull out some diazald and the special diazomethane glassware. For some reason, the person thought that he would want to make a 50g batch of it so that he would not have to repeatedly distill diazomethane. So he sat the round bottom flask containing about 200ml of yellow ether solution in a tub of water with lots of dry ice as there wasnt enough water ice. He then decided that he deserved a quick break and went off with everything stoppered, secured and safe. When he came back about 15min later he found that the cold water bath has frozen over because he put too much dry ice in there and the round bottom flask was stuck in place. I dont know what went into his mind that day but he then went to yank at the flask to try to free it. He did manage to free the flask with brute force but it also resulted in the diazomethane solution sloshing around in the flask fairly violently. It was only at that point that he realised that he was just a hair away from a nasty incident and he quickly put the solution down. Knowing that sometimes people's diazomethane blow up without apparent reason, I'd say he was really quite luck
Man diazomethane is such a useful chemical, if it weren't so explosive. With the rise of flow chemistry it slowly finds its way back into industry though
That is terrifying
Weaton sold a Diazomethane glassware kit with smooth silica joints, no ground glass joints because rough sutfaces can detonate diazomethane.
It’s a neat chemical from a physics point of view - the smallest gaseous molecule with a distinct color! Molecular physics was one of my favorite areas at uni.
@@janetsbrick I thought diatomic fluorine would be the smallest gaseous molecule with a colour?
"If you smell it and you can escape with your life, it can't go into S-tier" LOL
i smell ozone all most every day and im still alive
Then Radon shouldn't be there.
@@Rich-jk8ev How are you exposed to it? It's extremely toxic and unhealthy to be around
@@bitonic589Yeah Ozone is unhealthy. But you get away with inhaling it over a long time in low dosages as byproduct. But chlor gas? Idk what kinda amateur this youtuber is but as far as I can remember you die and enter instant shock collapse from like 1 to 10 parts per MILLION lol... idk what this guy smoked but ozone is a ton safer than chlorine and not a war crime like all the chlorine or phosphorus compounds which also steam off highly F'ed up gases and acids like some HCL freak chemicals do like superacids.
@@Rich-jk8evThis youtuber putting it into S tier while putting gas used for warfare is kinda ridicoulus lol.
You wont have to worry about it, although long term damages are considered "possible", like smoking does lol.
Not a story for children: A very funny-not-so-funny story about SO2. One day I was working with sodium metabisulfite for the production of SO2 gas for the production of metal nanoparticles. During the time I had quite a bit of experience with SO2, having used the gas many times, and never having an issue. Usually, I would work with a gas mask when making any toxic gas, as my trust in fume hoods/general ventilation was tarnished at performing experiments in weak fume hoods. Anyway, whilst making the SO2 there inevitably was an unexpected amount of SO2 which had dissolved into the solution (unknown to me). Upon slight heating, massive amounts of SO2 came out of the solution making me gag at the acrid taste. I had gotten to fresh air, and there was only a small whiff.
Here's the funny part. SO2 is a very, very, potent vasodilator (of which I was not aware). For some few hours after accidentally smelling the gas, I had what can only be described as one of the most notable side effects of viagra. That being, an erection that lasted hours. It did of course eventually "go down", but since that experience, I have never made any toxic gas without a gas mask "hood or not".
That's called a priapism and it's actually really dangerous. Your penis fills with blood, it isn't going anywhere and it can clot and the clot can circulate and block your brain/ heart/ lungs and kill you.
That's a funny story! I've had a few serious SO2 incidents as an antique refrigeration repair person, but not had it do anything more than make me squint my eyes closed, run away, and have a coughing and sneezing fit!
Hydroxylamine is my favorite I made on accident horrid acrid and carcinogenic. Edit: huh I really would have thought it was more volatile based on my nose. Double edit: huh in retrospect I’m really lucky I didn’t blow up my bedroom.
Yeah I could have included that one - I tend to forget it exists until someone needs to make an oxime
As a hydrochloride salt it is not that bad. If you have a base in solution where you work with NH2OH•HCl to quench the HCl gas generated when hydroxylamine is used up, it isn't that bad.
Why are so many people doing chemistry in their bedroom ffs
I was surprised - in all my years as a chemist I've only worked with nine or ten of these. Another great video, TC!
Thank you :)
Chemistry education was much more "fun" or exciting in the 19th century. They seemed to use water-free HCN on a daily basis if one looks up old reaction protocols, for instance. I somehow regret that in my own chemistry studies I only had to work with rather less toxic things, chlorine and ammonia gas for sure, also CO from the gas bottle, potassium cyanide on a 20 gram scale, tiny amounts of HF, but nothing really bad. Well, Benzidine once. But not HCN, not phosgene, etc. I understand that it is a safety principle to not work with these things if you don't really need to, but on the other hand, who else other than chemists should work with it, and learn to work with it in a proper way?
In our tritium lab, we considered T2 gas as dangerous but manageable. You can see it with radiation air monitors and if you breathe it in, you mostly just breathe it out since it's essentially hydrogen and does not really do anything biologically.
Our big scary thing is always tritiated water or tritium on dust particles. The dust can stay in your lungs which is bad. We also did the maths on pure T2O once, and getting a droplet on your skin will allow enough to diffuse into your body to give you a lethal dose. So, if you don't take care to prevent T2O formation (T2 does that on its own radiochemically when oxygen is present) or clean dust particles, you might get a nasty surprise.
No burning tritium plz
Exploding a tritium Balloon would be a great video tho
OK, rather late but true story. The British government had been pumping tritium oxide into the Irish Sea for years, then we joined the EEC and had to play nice with the Irish. So they made up a lie that the safest way of disposing of tritium was to burn it and pour the result into the sea.
As a result our expensive tritium disposal system (up the chimney with lots and lots of air) had to be replaced with a system for burning the tritiated hydrogen and disposing of the product into the sewage system.
The tritium burner exploded resulting in large pieces of PVC pipe ending up buried in walls.
Some notes on some of these chemicals.
Bromine has been used as a weapon alongside chlorine. Both of these react with moisture in the lungs to produce acids (HCl and HBr). They also cause damage to eyes and can even cause chemical burns on the skin. Mustard is also a vesicant (blistering agent), meaning it causes damage to the skin in form of blisters, as such gas mask only provides limited protection. Most ww1 chemical warfare causalities, were caused by mustard, but due to it's low lethality most of these weren't actully deaths (most of the chemical warfare deaths were caused by phosgene). HCN was considered for use as a chemical weapon as it had many desireble features (difficult to detect, high lethality, fast action, damage to gas mask filters, ability to penetrate some types of filters entirely), but was ultimately rejected as it dispersed too quickly to be effective in open field. The US army however did consider using against japanesse bunkers during ww2. Perflouroisobutylene is considered as potential chemical weapon (it is actully considerd a shedule 2 substance according to chemical weapons convention despite being never used or produced as such). It is considered to be 10 times more lethal then phosgene. It also lacks any smell, making it difficult to nositice at first.
so my only chemistry accident so far was a really poorly planned apparatus where i had to fill in like 20g of bromine into a pretty high-placed dropping funnel, as i am a small guy, i had some parts of my head inside the fumehood while filling in the bromine.
took way to long, the vapors came down to my head pretty fast and i just happened to breath in
the afternoon was pretty much ruined for me, my throat and lungs felt sore and it was just painful. plan your apparatus boys and girls to not get into these problems
Yikes!
Another big issue with bromine is that its massive density can sometimes break glass if shaken too hard. Definitely have been lots of cases of bromine poisoning from weak separatory funnels cracking under the pressure.
@@science_and_anonymous oh really? that never happened to me. sounds terrible
They put bromine in american "food"
I'm not a chemist in any stretch of the term, but these vids have been pretty interesting nonetheless. I do have to consider safety in my field of work (I'm a technician that works with GIS mapping software to plan the electrical layouts of future residential areas, currently employed by the largest electrical company in my state).
Makes me really appreciate the field of chemistry (plus it sometimes makes me want to educate myself on terms I'm unfamiliar with... Like the NFPA rating system, which I've probably seen the symbols before, but never really had to paid attention to them).
About AsH3: In my first undergrad inorganic lab course (generally called "ion lottery" because they give us a mixture of inorganic salts and we had to determine the elements in it), the first step was to check for acetate by giving a small quantity of the substance into a mortar an add some KHSO4 or one drop of diluted H2SO4 and then check if it smells like vineyar. Lucky me, it doesn't smelled like vineyar but somehow different. So i added one drop more of H2SO4. Then i was able to figure out that it smelled more like garlic and my thoughts went like: "It should smell like vineyar, is something wrong with my nose? - Hey they said in the lecture that AsH3 smells like garlic. - Damn, it's AsH3 and i probably shouldn't smell on it any longer, let's get this quickly under the fume hood." Later i found out by the Marsh test, that my substance indeed contained much As, so much indeed, that i contaminated my glassware and those of the people next to me with so much As, that it was detectable in later experiments (where no As should be in).
Two lessons learned from this course: 1. Always work under a fume hood! Especially if it is a lab environment, in which many untrained people work with heavy metals, H2S, HCN and other bad stuff at the same time. 2. AsH3 ideed smells like garlic, but in the same way HCN smells like almonds. It is not really the same smell, but it remermbers you to it.
You are very very fortunate. The rule of thumb with arsine is that if you know what it smells like you are dead, or very soon will be. It is a blood poison requiring whole body blood transfusion.
Acetylene is another chemical that's kinda like garlic but not quite right.
You cannot liberate AsH3; you have to liberate it by reduction with nascent hydrogen.
@@thomasgarbe8354 from As2O3, that is true. (I also was able to show the presence of zinc in this sample, other reduction agents also might have been present.) From Arsenides like Zn3As2, aqueous acids are sufficient for that, for Na3As2, even Water would be enough. Sadly they didn't told us, what substances they mixed for the samples.
During my undergraduate degree, I had to prepare ketene fresh on a daily basis so that the postdoctoral researchers could zap it with a UV laser beam to create methylene free radicals (which are isoelectronic with ozone molecules; this was back in the 80's when climate scientists had discovered a huge gaping hole in the atmospheric ozone layer & we were trying to measure the speed of various atmospheric photochemical processes). I vaguely remember being told to prepare it in a fume hood & to try not to smell it as "it'll be the very last thing you ever smell" because if you're lucky enough to survive it would still knock out your olefactory sense!
Terrifying
@@That_Chemist I survived the experience obviously although I did explode the oxygen trap that kept my distillation under tight vacuum by removing the liquid nitrogen bath at the end of a day's synthesis without sufficiently opening the taps to allow the beautiful shimmering blue liquid oxygen enough room to escape as it boiled off! There was a loud bang as the glassware blew apart & everyone simultaneously hit the floor before I sheepishly went to discover what had happened. I assume the days ketene had been safely distanced from the apparatus but thinking back now I really can't remember so I suspect that I wasn't as aware of the potential toxicity & danger as perhaps I should've been but then I was a twenty year old & thus thought myself immortal?
Methyl isocyanate caused the Bhopal disaster, the worst industrial accident ever (as far as I know) that killed more people than Chernobyl. That makes it S tier imo.
I'm not a historian so I don't know if this is 100% true, but I heard that the nazis tried using ClF3 for flamethrowers that didn't require an ignition source, but it was too dangerous.
I've used anhydrous HF quite a few times, it's really goddamn scary. It's quite easy to maintain it as a liquid in the UK but boy does it fume A LOT. One fun fact a lot of people won't be aware of is that AHF has a refractive index very similar to the plastic that lab measuring cylinders are made out of, making it really tricky to see just how much you've actually poured out (you can barely see the miniscus). If you're not careful you can easily end up pouring out way too much and have AHF overflow whatever you're measuring it in to.
My lab uses SF4 quite regularly, and I've used a lot of chlorine for one project. I actually prefer handling SF4 because we transfer it from the cylinder using a vacuum line and as such you're unlikely to come into contact with it unless you fuck up or something goes wrong.
You're absolutely right. Bhopal was the worst industrial accident in history and people are still dying from the effects of the MIC that they inhaled. Also, the Nazis did attempt to use ClF3 as a weapon. They definitely experimented with using it in ant-aircraft shells and they may have tried using it in a self-igniting flamethrower as well. By the end of World War II, they had produced a few tons of ClF3, along with a considerable amount of sarin nerve agent. The Germans definitely had the edge where nerve agents were concerned, but for a variety of reasons, they never deployed them on the battlefield.
absolutely based pfp holy hell
12:18
Ozone poisoning survivor!
I am a college student and when I went to my apartment to move in, it smelled of weed so bad that me and my roommate could not move in. The apartment owners put an ozone machine and after a week we returned. They had not removed the machine and told us we can do it, so I did. This was massively stupid of us to be compliant. I breathed in quite a bit of it in while turning off the machine, moving it outside, and then setting up a fan to vent the room through a window.
Even though it was a minor exposure, I genuinely thought I was dying. I remember sitting outside while my family moved my stuff in (it was safe after it vented out) and slowly lost my ability to breathe until it was shallow and painful. Let me reiterate, that was MINOR poisoning (or at least that is what poison control said).
So yeah, if your apartment building does this and tells you that you can remove it, give them the biggest middle finger and tell them to do it. Your life is not worth moving in as soon as possible.
Edit: Watching him put it into S tier made my heart sink. Seriously, do not let your landlord get away with being lazy - value your life and stay away from this, especially if you are inexperienced.
Back when I first started job hunting out of college, there were jobs that had people working with HF and low level radioactive material for 15 bucks an hour.
Yikes!
@@That_Chemist That wasnt even the worst one, just the worst paid. The other industry job that worked with HF mainly worked with pyrophoric organometallics. Found out they had 30 violations after an investigation done after one of their workers got splattered against a concrete wall by a thick ass steel door being ripped off the hinges by an explosion. Dude didnt even work in that part of the building, was just walking through. Literal tons of chemicals being improperly stored, faulty equipment that wasnt properly maintained etc. workers being sent to the hospital due to fires caused by those violations, 5 of which happened after the explosion. Place was a safety nightmare combined with 12 hour rotating shifts.
Ammonia is pretty fun! It adsorbs onto every surface for some reason. I thought I was good after a ten-minute N2 flush through my setup, but then I smelled one of the fittings. Gave me a good olfactory slap that woke me up. I guess I was just freebasing smelling salts at that point
Yeah amines in general tend to stay adsorbed to metal surfaces - it is definitely a pain to get rid of every last trace
My grandmother had a fish shop. And although everything was always meticulously cleaned, the furniture that used to be in there, and was moved to my parents house, still smelled like trimethylamine a decade later.
I once opened a bottle which I thought contains only water or ethanol and sniffed from it the way they teach you not to do, and before my mind realized it was ammonia solution my brain had moved my head 90 degrees off the flask in the split of a second. That was pretty stupid.
You should do a tier list on the areas of chemistry you can get a PhD in
I second this
How would anyone know? Nobody has done it.
I still remember the first time I saw an HF first aid kit back in undergrad, and was explained about the calcium tablet to prevent bone damage... damn, what a scary compound.
It is worse - way worse. Especially as buffered oxide etch: NH4OH + HF. That looks like water and has no warning properties. Skin exposure leads to HF absorption through the skin. Delays in treating that by injecting calcium gluconate at the exposure site(s) (lots of injections) results in tissue death and bone destruction followed by gangrene like tissue destruction. If amputation isn’t done early that spreads and leads to death.
@@tunneloflight HF is worse for its effects on enzymes and Ca levels in your body. You are pretty much dead already before your bones dissolve.
Thanks to some dubious work done by technicians in my company ahead of me, my supervisor and I were exposed to a (relatively) small amount of phosphine while working on a site outside a metal/coatings processing facility. There was a piece of tubing that had been replaced on a oxy/acetylene torch station with copper tubing, which over time converted to a powdery red solid I assume was copper acetylide. The slightest touch of the tubing had the layer burst apart, and a short hissing sound followed as the gasses that were trapped in the segment were released. I smelled one of the more horrid things I've experienced, and watched as my supervisor sprinted away at the same time. After catching up to him and stopping coughing, he informed me exactly what we smelled. Apparently phosphine is used in dissolved acetylene as a scent marker, and when the acetylene is gone it likes to rear its ugly head. From what I understand, this is only really found in calcium carbide sourced acetylene. Definitely was a unique smell, the type to let you know real quick that you aren't supposed to smell it.
Man, videos like this just make me feel both so terrified and like I know absolutely nothing at all.
Lol. You made me install the smoke detectors last week. You beat tech ingredients to it.
SO2 is used in the processing of Se&Te - small whiffs of that can bring you to your knees - it's ugly in the pure bulk form. A dash of CO is good if you want a skull breaking level of headache. I worked in an electrochemical copper refinery - under certain conditions AsH3 can form - That was our least favorite hazard. LiH is not a gas but as a light powder it causes the most shocking choking reaction I've ever experience - it like it informs your diaphragm to never take a breath again. EtO is terrifying in bulk due to the combustion range - it only needs a tiny amount of air to become a fuel air explosive - not toxic, but it can kill in non-toxic ways. I have anhydrous HF and HCl experience "S" teir for sure
One chemistry lecturer I had, when talking about the importance of PPE, told us about a story of him accidentally creating phosgene. He was doing some reaction (not sure which), and one of the potential products was phosgene. He made an error somewhere, and his whole face was red except for where his goggles were.
I think a tier list on c-c forming reactions would be neat
I love how chemists can just casually mention "I've made hydrogen cyanide by accident before" and move on like they didn't just talk about accidentally producing an extremely dangerous gas and as a result were likely separated from certain (and very uncomfortable) death by only a few cm and a pane of perspex.
I didn’t make large amounts - and I told the story in another video already
Lol I've made bromine by accident
Chemists get another feeling for the substances they work with. And while HCN is very toxic, it is not the worst thing chemists know. In salt form, as KCN, you can work with it quite without fear, unless it sees some acid.
Nice to hear your perspective of how toxic different gases are!
I always check LD50 and LC50 to understand if I could accidentally die or if I have to intentionally ingest a noticable (more or less intentional) amount. Anything I can't smell before it becomes a real danger, anything that could kill me if 50mg or less is ingested and anything that could spontanously explode even if it is isolated I deem dangerous and rarely worth playing with.
Thanks for great videos!!
Idk why am i watching a poison gas tier list since I'm not a chemist and have never been interested in it. Still a great video, was fun to watch
Thanks :)
Thanks for making this! I was having trouble thinking of a toxic gas to use as a weapon in an isekai I'm writing next year. This guide certainly helps a lot!
Honestly, in relation to dangerous chemicals, if your answer to "does it get less terrifying, the more you work with it?" gets anywhere close to "yes" - that's the moment you need to go back and brush up on your safety protocols again.
The lab will humble you, but it’s better if it doesn’t have to
I had a really bad chlorine dioxide exposure a few years ago. Ended up in the hospital and took months for my lungs to recover.
I once found a leak in the dosing line for a large bottle washing machine while taking water samples. Luckily it was a pretty open space but I felt my lung for a few hours
My PI mentioned that there was a fume hood containing, among other things, phosgene, in the lab where he did his PhD research, that the students nicknamed the "death hood." He refuses to have anything to do with it to this day.
Terrifying
I've smelled ozone before, I used to say that it smelled like something new. My dad used to use ozone to purify places and to kill bacteria and microbes in general.
he was testing it on water, incredbly, drinking "ozoned" water could heal throataches, and i used to drink ozoned water to heal my throat when it was hurting (i don't drink it anymore because my dad doesn't have the machine to make ozone anymore).
Looked like a miracle, you can put it on water and heal your throat, you could use it to kill microbes and even clean a pool, until one day when my dad was purifying a whole 2 Liter bottle of water, and i dared to put my nose on the top of the bottle and take a gooood smell of it, i can only say, that i probably would die that day. I couldn't catch a breath, my head was becoming lighter since i couldn't properly breathe, i couldn't get the ozone out of my lungs, the ozone, when i breathed it, it burned my throat and it was really really horrible, i was trying to catch an breath on the garden of my house since it wouldn't have too much ozone gas (my dad was doing the purification on a semi-closed place), but it didn't really work.
Thankfully, after probably coughing for 1000 times, i could breathe again. For sure, if i took a deeper breath, i would be on hospital.
Terrifying
@@That_Chemist yeah, it was scary
Yes. I have an 8g/Hr ozone generator and use it to fumigate "Musty" rooms. BTW, I placard the rooms as Poison Gas when it's in use.
but why/how it harms the body? or tbf how any of these gases do harm exactly? they react with the body?
how that +1 oxigen atom makes a difference? like o2 how can a single atom make so much difference?
@@FlareBlossom it can, you know how pure oxygen gas can ALREADY burn your lungs and probably kill you, right? So imagine breathing an air with pretty much 80%/90% ozone, it can probably damage your lung tissue and even normal tissue much more than pure oxygen gas does.
About how it harms, I have no response, but probably that it's because oxygen can oxidize stuff. Sorry if I'm looking really stupid here
The scariest thing to phosgene to me is that the smell is really not bad- it very much has that "oh this is really fucking bad for me huh" smell to it, but only after you are hit with the pleasant aroma of freshly cut hay. And then you spend the next 72h watching out for pulmonary edema! At least things like H2S and PH3 have the decency of assaulting your nose.
For 2 decades I was a process eng. at a plant that made >1 billion lbs/yr of phosgene (COCl2) and you are correct that nothing about the smell tells you body this is really bad stuff. We were switching to double walled pipes and vessels prevent leaks. It is used to make most urethane foams and clear coatings. I also made hydrazine, silane, concentrated H2S, and used HF, HCl, Cl2, NH3 as raw materials in rail car volumes or from a pipeline. Looking back at my career, everthing involved toxics.
But @That_Chemist did not include the gas that kills more people in the USA than any other gas. NITROGEN Every chemical used must be treated with respect.
The reason Arsine was rejected as a chemical weapon is it is too volatile. Super flammable and breaks down in atmosphere IIRC.
You missed SBD gas! This one is ultra deadly! Comes when I drink beer and eat hard boiled eggs! It is quite deadly when blown loudly but is the very best when silently let out in church! :)
Hydrazine was used as an exciter for nitromethane race fuel in the early days drag racing. The characteristic green flames were a dead giveaway, and early on, you could tell who was using it because everyone wore gas masks who went near the car when it was running. It's fkn scary.
Dude, you forgot my farts after five days of eggs for breakfast. But anyway...
I have an experience with chlorine. I was 13, in a hotel pool with my sister. It was indoors. In the back, I saw a bottle of HCl knocked over into a puddle of something. I'm 99% sure it was a puddle of bleach, and over time, me and my sister began coughing and wheezing. But we kept on swimming. After half an hour, the air had a noticeable green/yellow tint...and we both knew enough about chemistry to know that we need to get the hell outta there. For the next few days, we both wheezed and coughed. I'm pretty sure that wasn't ideal. I couldn't laugh without going into a coughing fit for a week. I'm still scared of chlorine gas, to this day.
I have no clue why I'm replying to myself (mobile web browser YT doesn't allow edits) but seriously though. @That Chemist was the hotel at fault, or did we make an already bad situation worse? We knew basic chemistry about we knew what happens when you mix NaOCl and acid. So with that said, were we in the wrong for continuing to swim?
@@jackbright745 i think the hotel is at fault (the bottles were open and already knocked over) but you should have gotten out of there and told staff about it. (As children you aren't expected to know better, so technically your parents should have been watching you and noticed and said something)
Bleach is the primary disinfectant of pools (we call it chlorine buts it's really just bleach), and Hydrochloric acid (under the name Muratic Acid) is used to adjust PH and generally make a pool sparkle, and in normal pool conditions its fine, mixing them straight, is less so.
I generally avoid indoor pools now that i know that they are basically just bleach mixed with amonia (urine and sweat both contain urea, which rapidly becomes amonia). So its both a health hazard from the amonia bleach reaction in an enclosed environment, and also just gross to know that the pool always has been peed in.
Holy sh!t that's terrifying!
Chlorine dioxide is actually very common in backpacking water treatment kits. It’s great for killing spores and cysts in dirty water since it attacks the glycoproteins that protect them very efficiently.
I should have clarified it’s made through reacting sodium chlorite with phosphoric acid in these kits.
It's also extremely common in large-scale water treatment and in large bottle washing machines. I think it's more unpleasant than SO2
I just realized that during my childhood I was repeatedly exposed to ozone.
My mother used to use an old Soviet "face care" lamp which produced ozone whenever it was on and the smell of it was nearly unbearable after 10 minutes. After about 5 years when I was 10 it finally broke and I was very happy to not smell more of that nasty gas. I don't know how much ozone it produced or if it caused harm but I hope no other such lamp exists anymore. It also produced a ton of UV light but I never stood in the way of it.
Yikes
Unfortunately, "air ionizers" designed to make "negative ions" are in reality just polluting the air with a small amount of ozone
There is a small but insane group of people who buy into pseudoscience and poison themselves
Glad to see ketene on the list. It's tempting to run a ketene lamp to produce your own glacial acetic acid and acetic anhydride, but I would only operate one remotely and down wind from me in the middle of nowhere.
I’m not a chemist, and I never took chemistry, but in the field I work in, we interact with some incredibly strong chemicals. There’s been more than one incident involving 30% hydrogen peroxide and 100% isopropanol soaked wipes being thrown away in the same garbage can. We’ve had a couple fires resulting from this. A few hydrogen peroxide spills resulting in burns, some moron drank deionized water out of a silicone wafer wet sink and contracted a flesh eating virus, chemical spills resulting in full fab evacuations, and my favorite, not one, but TWO incidents involving Tetrakis Dimethylamido Titanium (TDMAT). We have metal ampules full of it that’s used for certain processes, and occasionally they need swapped out for new ones as the old TDMAT gets used up. TDMAT ampules are supposed to be heavily supervised and always under the watch of someone when not in storage. They are either in storage, on their way to the machine, or on their way from the machine to storage. They also require a full suit and respirator to install, as well as a 2+ man team who are also equipped with respirators. Well the first incident involves one guy who decided that the ampule on one of the machines had been sitting long enough (it was overdue for being changed, and thus the machine wasn’t running) and despite having NO RESPIRATOR and NO TEAMMATES he decides to change out the ampule by *holding his breath while near it*. Amazingly nobody found out except the other team members and he didn’t get fired somehow. The next incident took place years ago, after a TDMAT ampule was changed out, the old one was taken back to storage. Eventually however an employee, while looking through the shelves of parts for the machines, discovered a bag containing something cylindrical. Having no part number and not being labeled, curiosity got the better of them and they unbagged it. It turned out to be the ampule that had been changed out a couple weeks prior, which had actually never been taken back to storage. It had been sitting on a parts shelf in the room where everyone worked for almost 3 weeks or so. I hope I never have to handle a TDMAT ampule directly, but if I do I’m gonna put on some big thick heavy gloves and a respirator that actually fits me. So yeah, fun times while making microchips
as a water/wastewater operator. Cl2 is extremely common. along with sO2. both can drop you if you screw up without ppe.
I'm not sure if H2Se is a plasticizer, but in the lab that handled H2Se where I worked, all of the plastic and rubber was either sticky or melted pretty much
it probably unlinks polysulfide crosslinking - this is really interesting tho
Ozone, as anyone who follows Explosions and Fire knows, is best created using a hellmachine.
I’ve experienced bromine, chlorine, chloramine, and phosgene. All are not fun. Phosgene is the scariest by far because all the other ones smell super strong and you want to leave typically before you get a good lung full. Phosgene is just menacing
Therapist: 4th wall-breaking That Chemist can't hurt you, he doesn't exist.
4th wall-breaking That Chemist: 12:16
Love it that you are actually going through the list methodically instead of randomly selecting a compound.
Also, maybe you can use RTP (or some equivalent) to determine the ranking of compounds at certain states (e.g. Solid)
I’m not sure what that is
I once got a two week “internship” (was basically a tour) at a large corporation’s industrial facility. We covered the basic ins and outs of how a lot of the chemicals there got made.
During one of my days there I got to follow someone working there as he did his shift in the ethylene oxide plant.
After a few hours going around we got to the part where samples of the manufactured EO were taken. It seemed fine, bomb gets placed, purged with N2 and then filled with EO. Shortly after it started though it dripped liquid EO that quickly evaporated.
Knowing what I do now I’m glad that the procedure of the person that I was following was to stand a few feet away while the bomb was being filled.
H-F should also be an honorary G tier because it's a hypothetical substitute for water in astrobiology. Same goes for ammonia.
I used to work at a lab for ppe testing, before i started there one of the people working there got a chemical burn from pure HF gas. The glass tube used to connect te cilinder corroded till a hole formed. He had not noticed this and wend to close the valve. As you can understand a very bad time.
Wile working there I was more scared of the HF than the Fosgene.
Thank you for mentioning about the monoxide alarms. The number of customers' houses i go to to do gas work and either don't have monoxide alarms or don't understand the need for one. For the sake of £30 it saves your life
And maybe the lives of others!
I want to petition for arsine to be put into S. I once had a desk job at a little semiconductor equipment manufacturer who mounted a pipe on the wall above my workstation, length of the room. Contents: arsine (run I guess through a pipe to a tank in the back parking lot). I was told that an earthquake would probably finish us on the spot, and that no one has ever actually smelled arsine - kills you before the message about the smell can get to and be processed by the brain. Were they having me on?
All grass is 100% deadly, it's why we wear shoes. Telling someone to touch grass is telling them to commit die.
Organical synthesis, second year, i think. I had an alkaline trap for HCl that was produced during the reaction... however, during last minute of reaction and my glass-connections started to leak - poor reaction system building from my behalf. Was way back when, safety was not an issue at that point and we did not have enough fume-hoods. Well i tried to secure the system - saw a white cloud of gaseous material moving towards me and took a deep breath. Too deep, it seemed - HCl in lungs even at low concentrations is hell! For a week or so.
HCl lung is no laughing matter. Got a nice breath of it when my syringe failed and dumped chlorosulfonic acid into my ice bath. Was coughing for days.
@@chrisbradshaw649 Yeah, was kind of a painful experience, do not recommend. Another memory from late 90's - we did not have the siphons for glass pipettes. Again, health and safety and... pipetting with mouth, was a common thing. Until i managed to pull quite a sip of mildly concentrated Fe2SO4 solution into my mouth.
Well, let's say that for next three weeks I kept my mouth shut and breathed through my nose exclusively. No hot drinks nor cold ice-cream - teeth were so-ooouch! tender. Urgh! But the teeth were white and bright! :D
I have NO IDEA about chemistry but I do like your funny words, magic man
Ketene is wicked scary. It reacts instantly with everything.
Why is every analogue of water so horrific, but water itself is the friendliest compound in existence
It isn't. Just because our bodies contain 75% it is not harmful or smelly to us. Otherwise it would be.
In the Inorganic Chemistry course, we needed to get chlorine to make sure it was yellow-green in color and we got about 5-6 liters and I had to wash the dishes after this experience. After that I poured water into a Drechsel flask all the chlorine went up (because chlorine is pretty heavy it doesn't fly away in a fume) and I inhaled it, it was terrible I coughed for about half an hour and had trouble breathing for about a week. So I think chlorine deserves a rank B.
Ozone has a pleasant smell in smaller amounts. I made my own generator which I used to get rid of smells and stuff. If you produce enough, it's slightly blueish
Another tritium story! I don't remember it too well though.
When my boss's boss was new and working at some secret place, they had a buildup or something of tritium gas. His superiors told him to crack open the vent valve to (slowly) release it into the atmosphere. He instead opened it all the way releasing too much too quickly. His superiors panicked and had to get planes to fly around to help disperse the gas.
Ahh, yes, the atmosphere is nature's waste bin. Also: the solution to the problem of pollution is dilution. Btw, that's probably the best solution for all the slightly tritiated water from Fukushima as well. Dump it into the ocean to dilute it far enough that it doesn't matter compared to the natural background radiation.
@@alexandermarsteller7848 helps that water's decent at blocking radiation. Dilute it enough and most of the radioactive stuff winds up shielded by miles of H2O.
The USCSB an S-tier UA-cam channel and government agency. I work in an office, but watching their videos inspired me to put CONFINED SPACE, NO FLAMMABLE STORAGE signs in all of the places where we keep landscaping supplies.
Haha - you may have saved people!
recently did a hydrothermal reaction with aqueous hcl as my solvent!! apparently the autoclave wasn't tightened enough though bc when i took the autoclave out of the oven, the sour smell of hcl immediately filled my nose 😅 didn't kill me or anything though, just a lesson about always remembering to fully tighten my autoclave
17:06 You know what's fun about H-Cl vapor? Well it's a colorless gas, and when it's dry stays that way, but when the humidity is high it makes for distinct white fumes, literal acid fog. I encounter this when adding acid to my pool on a high humidity day. If I'm doing this at night with my patio light on when it's high humidity, it's particularly visible and spooky. There's nothing quite like pouring 8oz of 30% HCl into a measuring cup, and watching this white fog constantly wafting out of the top.
I checked my CO detector and it turned out i was getting poisoned, it was calibrated in presence of CO and it did not go off, i took it outside, calibrated, went inside and it started beeeping right away, my heater was fucked and it was spewing CO.
Thank you, if i went to sleep i had a chance i would not wake up, insanity, you are the reason im alive, i have no idea what to say, simple thank You is not enough, the world is WILD, thank you, bless you, i pray for your wellbeing everyday for the rest of my life, You are a hero for me ❤️
No death for me this time 💀💀💀
Just use electric heating ffs, its mich better for the enviroment(unless you have a shitty electric provider that uses coal)
@@einar8019 Not particularly true.
@@pearsonbrown6740 its 100% true unless you live in a shithole that uses coal power
@@einar8019 Gas heaters have a higher temperature gradient, and thus do the job better while leaving the home with a cozy feeling. Electric heaters constantly turn on and don't produce the radiant warmth that most people enjoy. Therefore, you'll spend more energy trying to heat your home with electric.
@@pearsonbrown6740 thats only if you use resistive heating not if you use a heat pump wether it be air to air type or a ground to radiator
15:09 I live very close (about a block away) from a company that produces large amounts of merchant phosgene. There used to be a public road adjacent to the main structure that included a bridge over a local creek, and my parents used to use it as a shortcut coming back from shopping, work, etc. After 9/11 the city closed this road at both ends and added high electrified fencing. They do siren drills every month and after a while you get used to it.
Ammonia, you missed the big one, fertilizer. It is injected directly into the ground as anhydrous. You rent the equipment and buy the pressurized liquid at coop or farm supply. Those big white tanks are not propane. Those big red letters saying ANHYDROUS mean pressurized liquid ammonia.
It’s crazy
Awesome video! You mentioned that NO2 is produced endogenously, but i think you got it mixed up with NO 🙂
I prepared HN3 recently and found out that my fumehood bleeds air into the air conditioner of my lab somehow. I found this out since another student asked me what that smell in the lab was and that she had a feeling of pressure in her head. Since i had a full-face respirator on i couldn't smell anything. Moral of the story never trust fumehoods, always have multiple layers of control to the risk.
That is one of the most terrifying things i've ever read
Imagine working with more dangerous stuff in that hood
Edit: read NH3 instead of HN3
This story just got a whole lot worse
@@Peter_Schluss-Mit-Lustig If you smell bitter almonds, you run. (Not that I know the smell of bitter almonds.)
@@sydhenderson6753 i do in fact know the smell but always thought cyanide
Azide too?
I work regularly with methyl isocyanate, and I think it's not that bad if you handle the stuff properly with full face gas mask and enough ice on the closed container (you definitely don't want to place it on open container, methyl isocyanate smell is extremely irritating and panic inducing). My senior once forgot returning a closed screw cap bottle of methyl isocyanate inside a fume hood back to its ice container. In a short time it exploded, sending away pieces of glass everywhere and succeeded in evacuating the whole building for hours until the tear gas cleared up. Not that horrible to work with but definitely give the substance your full respect.
"Methyl isocyanate has been the culprit of Bhopal gas leak, which was an industrial disaster that happened in India in 1984. Estimates vary for death toll, but initial DT is 2-3 thousand and over half a million injured"
@@That_Chemist Making 30 tons of methyl isocyanate and burying it underground where water spillover is possible is utter disrespect and just asking for trouble! We make them in situ at our producion plant with maximum 30 kilos allowed to exist at the pipes and they quickly converts to product without any unneccessary buildup. I honestly think it's a crime for humanity for storing methyl isocyanate in large amounts like that :(
Used to work security at a place that shipped anhydrous HF in by the train load. I was pretty chill around the tanker cars cuz if anything happened I probably wasn’t going to live long enough to worry.
👀
@@That_Chemist they made refrigerants there.
It's funny you mention perfloroisobutalyne. I work in plastics machining, and often with teflon. When we run ptfe on our routers, which have no coolant or enclosure, it stinks up the whole shop, and i'm certain there may be trace amounts of this present.
Other nasties that decompose into unpleasant gasses are acetal, acrylic, and pvc. Our entire 30,000sqft building can smell when these go on the routers.
Methyl isocyanate has been the culprit of Bhopal gas leak, which was an industrial disaster that happened in India in 1984. Estimates vary for death toll, but initial DT is 2-3 thousand and over half a million injured
yeah :(
very terrible :(
A town near where I grew up has a cholorine process paper mill and is prone to shallow inversions. The smell of chlorine dioxide is unmistakably awful.
I wouldn't put ozone on S tier, because you can smell it and not die, and you can smell it, compared to stuff like carbon monoxide.
I get that it's about toxicity, but not smelling nor seeing it imo makes anything much more deadly.
Also ozone disinfection is a thing.
Edit: looking at the concentrations needed to be harmful, it's a bit more scary, but usually it's not at high enough concentrations that you can't go outside and be fine, as most acute effects are reversible and happen at smellable levels.
@LabRat Knatz from what I read lethal doses are under 100ppm, and even 10ppm can be lethal, but ozone isn't encountered at high concentration most of the time, and unless you die right away the effects are usually reversible.
Hydrogen sulfide: At lower concentrations you can smell it but at higher concentrations you do not know you are about to die until people around you start dropping dead. Apparently doesn't care what air fuel mixture to detonate and is highly corrosive. When they started transporting crude high in hydrogen sulfide they had to replace all the valving in transport cars because they were leaking. The refineries thought they could handle this stuff but apparently standard oil of Richmond forgot to replace a pipe.
A chemical engineer specialising in design of Odour and Toxin removal systems using various means, I find this video both fascinating and horrifying in equal measure. I'm dealing with a lot of the compounds listed here on a daily basis and you almost treat it as second nature in working with them. I would add three items to the list. Dimethyl Sulphide and Dimethyl Disulphide are fairly nasty (NFPA rating 2). They do occur in nature mainly if you have sullage tanks holding waste for a long periods of time. The other one is oxygen, or at least the absence of. Case study after case study in entering confined spaces has shown people asphyxiating when entering an area without checking the air first. Get instruments you can trust and then trust them.
they also exist as some of the main smells in truffles! I hate the smell of both of them lol
Extra respect for actually using the biohazard symbol correctly, literally, everyone I've checked on youtube uses both the radioactive and biohazard symbol for toxicity.