9 ms·

Things I Won't Work With: Peroxide Peroxides

128 points by joe_bleau 12y ago

idlewords 12y ago
This is a wonderful series that (rightfully) gets posted here a lot. I'd like to point out that the author's blog is also worth digging into for interesting and insightful posts about the modern pharmaceutical industry. For example: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/03/08/erooms_law.php http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/03/08/erooms_law.p... (how knowing more has actually made us worse at finding effective drugs).
- jerf 12y ago
  Indeed. Be sure to click through: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with/ http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with...
  - CamperBob2 12y ago
    This is very bad advice if you have anything else you need to do today.
    - jerf 12y ago
      On the other hand, It Might Just Save Your Life! ... though one hopes that if you were planning on doing anything for which that would save your life that you'd already have a good idea of just how likely your day was to be spent dodging rapidly moving glassware. But hey, great lede for my little reply here, right? If this programming thing ever gets old maybe I can get a job writing the 11 o'clock news.
- iSnow 12y ago
  This guy is by far the funniest blogger I know of, I regularly and literally shed tears laughing at his "things I won't work with" blog. And at the same freaking time he writes great thought-provoking posts about the serious stuff. Amazing.
danieltillett 12y ago
Derek’s blog is one of the best blog’s I have read. If you want to learn about the pharmaceutical industry and how the process of drug discovery really works (or doesn’t work) then I recommend it highly. On topic I wouldn’t want to work with peroxide peroxides either :) Derek often has write up about what some of the really crazy organic chemists who work on unstable compounds do - truly eye opening for someone with a biology background like me.
- jameskilton 12y ago
  Agreed. My favorite is still any post discussing Flouride bonds, particularly FOOF http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_wont_work_with_dioxygen_difluoride.php http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_won...
  - danieltillett 12y ago
    Yes you have to love working with something that can set sand on fire!
  - IgorPartola 12y ago
    I wonder if anyone ever did order 1 kg of the stuff.
  - ridgeguy 12y ago
    Fluorine can be so dramatic. I witnessed a test of a small (500 lb thrust) H2/F2 rocket engine. The fuel & oxidizer were fed into the combustion chamber with small turbo pumps, which was the point of the test. The native fluoride protective coating failed in the F2 turbo pump, and there was an explosion with subsequent metal/fluorine fire. Blockhouse sealed off and we all grabbed the Scott packs as a yellowish cloud of fluorine drifted by, setting fire to sagebrush as it went. Can't beat exotic propellants for excitement.
    - Robin_Message 12y ago
      I'm intrigued: what's a Scott pack? Is is just breathing apparatus? But since the gas cloud is setting organic matter on fire surely you'd need more than that? Or is it just a good pair of running shoes?
refurb 12y ago
I'm always amazed at the hazardous chemistry that some labs do! They are obviously taking the necessary precautions, but I'm not sure I'd have the guts to do it. I worked as a chemist for 7 years and witnessed 4 serious accidents, 3 of the 4 due to oxidizing agents (2 of them were peroxides). Some of the folks have scars to this day because of it.
- danieltillett 12y ago
  Actually this happens in lots of scientific fields - microbiologist and virologists work with dangerous pathogens, physicists with radiation, etc. I think people underestimate how much danger there can be in the lab if you want to do research.
- keithpeter 12y ago
  Well, at least chemical reactions fall into the "fail early and loudly" category. You know something is wrong. Radioactivity and virus work strikes me as possibly more dangerous because of the relatively silent nature of the failures.
  - cstross 12y ago
    No, some chemical reactions fail early and loudly. For absolutely no explosive lulz at all you could try for an exciting career in organic mercury compounds. (But first, I'd recommend checking out the wikipedia entry for Karen Wetterhahn: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn ) Or, did I say "no explosive lulz"? Apparently at one point the USAF considered using dimethyl mercury as a rocket fuel. (Source: buried in "Ignition: an informal history of liquid rocket propellants" by John D. Clarke, which can be found here: http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf )
    - keithpeter 12y ago
      True Charlie, I should have said most of the time... The Wetterhahn case was mentioned in the original comment thread (or one of the articles linked from the original post) and was so shocking that permanent changes in regulations and practice occurred. More mundane and work-a-day 'early failures' here... http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/02/16/when_reagents_attack.php#comments http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/02/16/when_reagent... PS: Posting this from near the site of a biological failure that claimed two lives and (I gather) inspired one novel... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Parker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Parker
revelation 12y ago
It is a bit frustrating to read this when you lack the necessary intuition. Why is a bond strong or weak, what do these atoms want to bond with and how is this all related to stuff blowing up?
- po 12y ago
  This is exactly why chemistry is so interesting and the ways in which things can combine is also why it is so difficult. Fundamentally, it's mostly about the electron charges on an atom which are balanced out by the number of protons in the nucleus. The proton however is a tightly packed point charge but the electrons can only exist in various energy levels (think of different shapes) around it. You could think of it as trying to pack a bunch of magnets that have very elaborate electromagnetic field shapes into a box in a specific configuration. You might find one configuration that happens to be 'stable' until a big piece of iron is nearby and then suddenly it all snaps into a new configuration.
- danieltillett 12y ago
  The science background expected is pretty high. Some things are hard to understand without the background, but in this case it is pretty easy. Explosive chemicals have bonds between the atoms that are under a lot of stress (think of it like a wound up elastic band). An explosion occurs when the stressed bond breaks (the elastic band is let go). A chemical like the one discussed has several bonds that are under massive stress (i.e the elastic band is huge and wound very tight). All it takes is the slightest bump or even a dirty look and the whole thing goes boom!
  - nathannecro 12y ago
    That's actually very incorrect. Bond breakage is ALWAYS endothermic. http://books.google.com/books?id=ZOm8L9oCwLMC&pg=PA202&lpg=PA202&dq=bond+breaking+endothermic&source=bl&ots=pt7qf4EpFv&sig=6YLOGt46eGg3xjg6k1LLYGVFCSY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=bcw4VPebDMPBigK1r4CwCQ&ved=0CEIQ6AEwBTgU#v=onepage&q=bond%20breaking%20endothermic&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=ZOm8L9oCwLMC&pg=PA202&lpg=P... Edit: Sorry, I hate leaving one-sentence rebuttals. The energy required to break the bonds are so low that in comparison, the energy released when the products of the reaction are formed is very high. This giant disparity in energy released at the same time creates a sharp increase of heat and light (boom). Also, your company is pretty neat. Any way for me to directly contact you?
le_meta 12y ago
I feel smarter already!
IgorPartola 12y ago
I came here to say that fluorine is even scarier in some ways. Sure enough he's covered it: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_save_you_this_time.php http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_sa.... I really wish he was my chem professor back in school. Speaking of Oxygen though, I once attended a lecture/Q&A by the Myth Busters. It was pretty cool, and during the Q&A portion someone asked "Is there a myth you started, and then backed out?". They said that they won't do anything with liquid oxygen. They had a few myths about it, did some research, and realized that it can set pavement on fire. They then decided not to proceed.
- Retric 12y ago
  That's nasty, but my favorite florene compound is still the apply named FOOF also known as "Satan's kimchi". http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_wont_work_with_dioxygen_difluoride.php http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_won... "And yes, what happens next is just what you think happens: you run a mixture of oxygen and fluorine through a 700-degree-heating block. "Oh, no you don't," is the common reaction of most chemists to that proposal" "When 0.2 (mL) of liquid 02F2 was added to 0.5 (mL) of liquid CH4 at 90°K., a violent explosion occurred." I mean how can't you love a substance that will violently detonate things at -180C.
mikeyouse 12y ago
I spent some time at the remaining facility in the country making the really interesting rocket fuel. The most fascinating thing to me (aside from the multiple armed security checkpoints required to visit the food lab we were visiting) was the setup of the buildings. Nearly all of them were ~500yds apart, set in between massive ~50ft tall, ~100ft wide earthen berms. The really interesting buildings had escape slides coming from the second floor. Each building at the roadside had the familiar NFPA diamond for response crews. I've never seen so many "4"s on that diamond in my life.
- refurb 12y ago
  I used to work at a pilot plant that did large scale synthesis of pharmaceuticals. The plant was a concrete structure with each reactor surrounded on three sides by two foot thick concrete walls. The interesting thing was that there was no outside wall to the building, just a woven steel curtain. If something did explode you wanted a path for the debris. On the outside of the building was a curved ramp, like a skateboard half-pipe. That way any explosion would be directed upward rather than outward.
  - keithpeter 12y ago
    My favourite chemical bunkers are the ones with a couple of feet deep gravel on the roof. So if there is an explosion, the resulting fire is smothered I assume.
    - arethuza 12y ago
      Another Things I Won't Work With entry: "Sand Won't Save You This Time" http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_save_you_this_time.php http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_sa...
ChuckMcM 12y ago
I was one of those kids that read that the original Bell jetpack used Hydrogen Peroxide with a silver catalyst for "fuel". I tried it on the peroxide I bought from the drug store and it didn't work. So I figured "oh it just needs to be more concentrated." My friend and I built a pretty crude still and about 10 gallons of 5% hydrogen peroxide. I don't know what the concentration was when we finished, but I do remember trying to pour some into a steel pipe which was to be our "tank" for our test rocket. To say that I was startled by the pipe being yanked out of my hand by the steam exploding out of its end would be an understatement :-) We spent the rest of the afternoon "blowing up" ant hills in the desert by pouring like a quarter up of our distillate on to them.
- Danieru 12y ago
  How? How!? How is it you always have cool and relevant stories!?
  - HCIdivision17 12y ago
    I know, right? He's like a modern Tom Sawyer. EDIT: It occurs to me this might not be taken as a compliment. I meant it as one, though: Chuck's always got some cool story to add, and I suspect his biography would be a heckuva ride.
  - ChuckMcM 12y ago
    I chalk it up to curiosity on my part and survivor bias on the stories part. Folks who have known me for a long time know that I am a very curious person and I spend an inordinate amount of my spare time reading and "investigating" things (which my wife calls puttering). But there is also a bit of survivor bias here, it only seems like it is true because I don't have any stories to share on a lot of things here and elsewhere and don't. Oh and I'm "old", so I've got a lot of time between when I started doing crazy stunts and now, so even doing only one every couple of years I've got double the number of crazy stories than a "young" guy :-). That said, I'm sad that during my high school and college years the (late 70's early 80's) it was so much easier for me to explore things, whether it was the high school district's shared mainframe, or home made high concentration HOOH than it is today. No doubt if I were one of my own kids growing up in the 90's I would have been arrested and my parents assumed to be poor examples of responsible adults.
chrisbennet 12y ago
How to Blow Up Your Kitchen With Hydrogen Peroxide. A few years ago, upon returning home after work, my my wife told me that her mother had blown blown up her kitchen but that she was OK. (My late mother-in-law was a wonderful person BTW.) I can be prone to inattention when my wife speaks to me but this, this got my attention. :-) My mother in law was an antique dealer. To restore/bleach old china, she would put some (hair dresser grade) hydrogen peroxide in in/on the china in question and let it warm in the oven. One day she did this, but for some reason, this time she used her kitchen microwave instead of the oven. While it was warming she stepped out of her kitchen (to put something in the recycle I think) and luckily escaped the blast that blew out her kitchen window and sent her microwave into the Great Beyond. When the fire department came she, I guess, feigned ignorance of what could have caused it. She was after all, a sweet old lady. After my wife finished telling me the story, I mentioned something to the effect that "You realize they used hydrogen peroxide in the German V2 rockets?" A picture of the remains of the destroyed microwave was displayed at her funeral. R.I.P. ma
- dghughes 12y ago
  Skimming comments before reading them all as I usually do it was hard not to notice the second last sentence in your comment: "A picture of the remains of the destroyed microwave was displayed at her funeral." Certainly reddit /r/nocontext material.
- ajb 12y ago
  That is really cool. Any chemists care to comment on why the peroxide would explode in the microwave but not the oven?
  - jgamman 12y ago
    microwaves are at the wavelength that 'excites' / 'wobbles' / 'resonates' (pick your analogy of ball and spring physics) the O-H bond. H2O is entirely O-H bonds (give or take) and hence microwaves heat food vicariously via the water in it (heating up day old rice from the fridge is easier/better if you put a few mL of water in it). Peroxide peroxide is H-O-O-H so plenty of O-H bonds to excite and hence decompose...
bsaul 12y ago
I realize i barely know anything in chemistry. I have zero practical knowledge and would be almost incapable of performing any kind of chemistry exercise anymore ( yet i do have a scientific background). Anyone here could recommend a book or a serie of books to get myself into shape on that subject ?
- jgamman 12y ago
  my sincere advice (as an ex-chemist) is - don't. i suspect you'll want to do something 'fun' and 'fun chemistry' can go very bad, very quick. go fast and break things has never, never been a motto in a chemistry lab (even the dragon tail stories in the manhattan project were despite advice to the contrary). most of a senior/PG chemistry degree is about learning how to work with this stuff and it's not book learnin' so much as translating what should happen, into what could happen and then what shouldn't ever ever ever happen. this is best done in a practical mentor-tutor fashion. even saying that, most uni's are really crap at protecting their chemistry students. I damn near killed myself _after_ getting my PhD and didn't really learn how to analyse the risks until i worked in industry (which leveraged 8+ years of theory)...
avmich 12y ago
I wonder why the author is so caustic in regard to hydrogen peroxide. Here - http://yarchive.net/space/rocket/fuels/peroxide.html http://yarchive.net/space/rocket/fuels/peroxide.html - second message mentions Clark's "Ignition!" facts, and in first Henry Spencer states: While there are some storage headaches -- the stuff decomposes slowly no matter what you do, so you must provide for tank venting -- otherwise peroxide is much easier and safer to handle. Its bad reputation is half outright myth and half the result of 1940s experience with seriously impure peroxide. To quote a friend, a rocket-propulsion professional, who investigated the matter as part of a study some years ago: "As far as we could find out, the stories about problems with peroxide were just that, stories... Peroxide, now, seems to only very rarely do anything exciting, at all. And, even then, it seems to never do many of the things attributed to it in the stories." Of course hydrogen peroxide can be dangerous - relatively recent explosion in Sweden (peroxidepropulsion.com) reminds us about that. At the same time significant volumes of it with more than 70% concentration are routinely used - so a chemist can calibrate the feeling.
- refurb 12y ago
  As a former-chemist, I can attest that oxidizers in general are pretty concerning. You are correct that hydrogen peroxide (even up to 70%) is pretty safe by itself, but a chemist like Derek Lowe would use hydrogen peroxide in a reaction. Since he's an organic chemist, nearly every reaction is going to involve adding that oxidizer to a reducing agent (almost every organic molecule out there). When you add an oxidizer to a reducing agent, you're creating an unstable mixture that would love to explode. Just because it hasn't exploded on people in the past, doesn't mean it won't in the future. I can remember doing some really stupid things when I was in grad school. I had a create pure m-CPBA [1] for a reaction (great! an oxidizer and reducing agent all in one molecule!!). Thinking I was smart, I purified a a lot of it, like 20 g (smart folks only purify what they need, like 1 or 2 g). To make sure it was dry I put it on a vacuum pump and then heated the flask with a heat gun. Nothing happened, but looking back I was dam lucky it didn't explode. If it had, I likely would have been seriously injured. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-Chloroperoxybenzoic_acid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-Chloroperoxybenzoic_acid

128 points by joe_bleau 12y ago

This is a wonderful series that (rightfully) gets posted here a lot. I'd like to point out that the author's blog is also worth digging into for interesting and insightful posts about the modern pharmaceutical industry. For example: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/03/08/erooms_law.php http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/03/08/erooms_law.p... (how knowing more has actually made us worse at finding effective drugs).

jerf 12y ago
Indeed. Be sure to click through: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with/ http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with...
- CamperBob2 12y ago
  This is very bad advice if you have anything else you need to do today.
  - jerf 12y ago
    On the other hand, It Might Just Save Your Life! ... though one hopes that if you were planning on doing anything for which that would save your life that you'd already have a good idea of just how likely your day was to be spent dodging rapidly moving glassware. But hey, great lede for my little reply here, right? If this programming thing ever gets old maybe I can get a job writing the 11 o'clock news.
iSnow 12y ago
This guy is by far the funniest blogger I know of, I regularly and literally shed tears laughing at his "things I won't work with" blog. And at the same freaking time he writes great thought-provoking posts about the serious stuff. Amazing.

danieltillett 12y ago

Derek’s blog is one of the best blog’s I have read. If you want to learn about the pharmaceutical industry and how the process of drug discovery really works (or doesn’t work) then I recommend it highly. On topic I wouldn’t want to work with peroxide peroxides either :) Derek often has write up about what some of the really crazy organic chemists who work on unstable compounds do - truly eye opening for someone with a biology background like me.

jameskilton 12y ago
Agreed. My favorite is still any post discussing Flouride bonds, particularly FOOF http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_wont_work_with_dioxygen_difluoride.php http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_won...
- danieltillett 12y ago
  Yes you have to love working with something that can set sand on fire!
- IgorPartola 12y ago
  I wonder if anyone ever did order 1 kg of the stuff.
- ridgeguy 12y ago
  Fluorine can be so dramatic. I witnessed a test of a small (500 lb thrust) H2/F2 rocket engine. The fuel & oxidizer were fed into the combustion chamber with small turbo pumps, which was the point of the test. The native fluoride protective coating failed in the F2 turbo pump, and there was an explosion with subsequent metal/fluorine fire. Blockhouse sealed off and we all grabbed the Scott packs as a yellowish cloud of fluorine drifted by, setting fire to sagebrush as it went. Can't beat exotic propellants for excitement.
  - Robin_Message 12y ago
    I'm intrigued: what's a Scott pack? Is is just breathing apparatus? But since the gas cloud is setting organic matter on fire surely you'd need more than that? Or is it just a good pair of running shoes?

refurb 12y ago

I'm always amazed at the hazardous chemistry that some labs do! They are obviously taking the necessary precautions, but I'm not sure I'd have the guts to do it. I worked as a chemist for 7 years and witnessed 4 serious accidents, 3 of the 4 due to oxidizing agents (2 of them were peroxides). Some of the folks have scars to this day because of it.

danieltillett 12y ago
Actually this happens in lots of scientific fields - microbiologist and virologists work with dangerous pathogens, physicists with radiation, etc. I think people underestimate how much danger there can be in the lab if you want to do research.
keithpeter 12y ago
Well, at least chemical reactions fall into the "fail early and loudly" category. You know something is wrong. Radioactivity and virus work strikes me as possibly more dangerous because of the relatively silent nature of the failures.
- cstross 12y ago
  No, some chemical reactions fail early and loudly. For absolutely no explosive lulz at all you could try for an exciting career in organic mercury compounds. (But first, I'd recommend checking out the wikipedia entry for Karen Wetterhahn: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn ) Or, did I say "no explosive lulz"? Apparently at one point the USAF considered using dimethyl mercury as a rocket fuel. (Source: buried in "Ignition: an informal history of liquid rocket propellants" by John D. Clarke, which can be found here: http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf )
  - keithpeter 12y ago
    True Charlie, I should have said most of the time... The Wetterhahn case was mentioned in the original comment thread (or one of the articles linked from the original post) and was so shocking that permanent changes in regulations and practice occurred. More mundane and work-a-day 'early failures' here... http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/02/16/when_reagents_attack.php#comments http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/02/16/when_reagent... PS: Posting this from near the site of a biological failure that claimed two lives and (I gather) inspired one novel... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Parker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Parker

revelation 12y ago

It is a bit frustrating to read this when you lack the necessary intuition. Why is a bond strong or weak, what do these atoms want to bond with and how is this all related to stuff blowing up?

po 12y ago
This is exactly why chemistry is so interesting and the ways in which things can combine is also why it is so difficult. Fundamentally, it's mostly about the electron charges on an atom which are balanced out by the number of protons in the nucleus. The proton however is a tightly packed point charge but the electrons can only exist in various energy levels (think of different shapes) around it. You could think of it as trying to pack a bunch of magnets that have very elaborate electromagnetic field shapes into a box in a specific configuration. You might find one configuration that happens to be 'stable' until a big piece of iron is nearby and then suddenly it all snaps into a new configuration.
danieltillett 12y ago
The science background expected is pretty high. Some things are hard to understand without the background, but in this case it is pretty easy. Explosive chemicals have bonds between the atoms that are under a lot of stress (think of it like a wound up elastic band). An explosion occurs when the stressed bond breaks (the elastic band is let go). A chemical like the one discussed has several bonds that are under massive stress (i.e the elastic band is huge and wound very tight). All it takes is the slightest bump or even a dirty look and the whole thing goes boom!
- nathannecro 12y ago
  That's actually very incorrect. Bond breakage is ALWAYS endothermic. http://books.google.com/books?id=ZOm8L9oCwLMC&pg=PA202&lpg=PA202&dq=bond+breaking+endothermic&source=bl&ots=pt7qf4EpFv&sig=6YLOGt46eGg3xjg6k1LLYGVFCSY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=bcw4VPebDMPBigK1r4CwCQ&ved=0CEIQ6AEwBTgU#v=onepage&q=bond%20breaking%20endothermic&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=ZOm8L9oCwLMC&pg=PA202&lpg=P... Edit: Sorry, I hate leaving one-sentence rebuttals. The energy required to break the bonds are so low that in comparison, the energy released when the products of the reaction are formed is very high. This giant disparity in energy released at the same time creates a sharp increase of heat and light (boom). Also, your company is pretty neat. Any way for me to directly contact you?

le_meta 12y ago

I feel smarter already!

IgorPartola 12y ago

I came here to say that fluorine is even scarier in some ways. Sure enough he's covered it: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_save_you_this_time.php http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_sa.... I really wish he was my chem professor back in school. Speaking of Oxygen though, I once attended a lecture/Q&A by the Myth Busters. It was pretty cool, and during the Q&A portion someone asked "Is there a myth you started, and then backed out?". They said that they won't do anything with liquid oxygen. They had a few myths about it, did some research, and realized that it can set pavement on fire. They then decided not to proceed.

Retric 12y ago
That's nasty, but my favorite florene compound is still the apply named FOOF also known as "Satan's kimchi". http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_wont_work_with_dioxygen_difluoride.php http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_won... "And yes, what happens next is just what you think happens: you run a mixture of oxygen and fluorine through a 700-degree-heating block. "Oh, no you don't," is the common reaction of most chemists to that proposal" "When 0.2 (mL) of liquid 02F2 was added to 0.5 (mL) of liquid CH4 at 90°K., a violent explosion occurred." I mean how can't you love a substance that will violently detonate things at -180C.

mikeyouse 12y ago

I spent some time at the remaining facility in the country making the really interesting rocket fuel. The most fascinating thing to me (aside from the multiple armed security checkpoints required to visit the food lab we were visiting) was the setup of the buildings. Nearly all of them were ~500yds apart, set in between massive ~50ft tall, ~100ft wide earthen berms. The really interesting buildings had escape slides coming from the second floor. Each building at the roadside had the familiar NFPA diamond for response crews. I've never seen so many "4"s on that diamond in my life.

refurb 12y ago
I used to work at a pilot plant that did large scale synthesis of pharmaceuticals. The plant was a concrete structure with each reactor surrounded on three sides by two foot thick concrete walls. The interesting thing was that there was no outside wall to the building, just a woven steel curtain. If something did explode you wanted a path for the debris. On the outside of the building was a curved ramp, like a skateboard half-pipe. That way any explosion would be directed upward rather than outward.
- keithpeter 12y ago
  My favourite chemical bunkers are the ones with a couple of feet deep gravel on the roof. So if there is an explosion, the resulting fire is smothered I assume.
  - arethuza 12y ago
    Another Things I Won't Work With entry: "Sand Won't Save You This Time" http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_save_you_this_time.php http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_sa...

ChuckMcM 12y ago

I was one of those kids that read that the original Bell jetpack used Hydrogen Peroxide with a silver catalyst for "fuel". I tried it on the peroxide I bought from the drug store and it didn't work. So I figured "oh it just needs to be more concentrated." My friend and I built a pretty crude still and about 10 gallons of 5% hydrogen peroxide. I don't know what the concentration was when we finished, but I do remember trying to pour some into a steel pipe which was to be our "tank" for our test rocket. To say that I was startled by the pipe being yanked out of my hand by the steam exploding out of its end would be an understatement :-) We spent the rest of the afternoon "blowing up" ant hills in the desert by pouring like a quarter up of our distillate on to them.

Danieru 12y ago
How? How!? How is it you always have cool and relevant stories!?
- HCIdivision17 12y ago
  I know, right? He's like a modern Tom Sawyer. EDIT: It occurs to me this might not be taken as a compliment. I meant it as one, though: Chuck's always got some cool story to add, and I suspect his biography would be a heckuva ride.
- ChuckMcM 12y ago
  I chalk it up to curiosity on my part and survivor bias on the stories part. Folks who have known me for a long time know that I am a very curious person and I spend an inordinate amount of my spare time reading and "investigating" things (which my wife calls puttering). But there is also a bit of survivor bias here, it only seems like it is true because I don't have any stories to share on a lot of things here and elsewhere and don't. Oh and I'm "old", so I've got a lot of time between when I started doing crazy stunts and now, so even doing only one every couple of years I've got double the number of crazy stories than a "young" guy :-). That said, I'm sad that during my high school and college years the (late 70's early 80's) it was so much easier for me to explore things, whether it was the high school district's shared mainframe, or home made high concentration HOOH than it is today. No doubt if I were one of my own kids growing up in the 90's I would have been arrested and my parents assumed to be poor examples of responsible adults.

chrisbennet 12y ago

How to Blow Up Your Kitchen With Hydrogen Peroxide. A few years ago, upon returning home after work, my my wife told me that her mother had blown blown up her kitchen but that she was OK. (My late mother-in-law was a wonderful person BTW.) I can be prone to inattention when my wife speaks to me but this, this got my attention. :-) My mother in law was an antique dealer. To restore/bleach old china, she would put some (hair dresser grade) hydrogen peroxide in in/on the china in question and let it warm in the oven. One day she did this, but for some reason, this time she used her kitchen microwave instead of the oven. While it was warming she stepped out of her kitchen (to put something in the recycle I think) and luckily escaped the blast that blew out her kitchen window and sent her microwave into the Great Beyond. When the fire department came she, I guess, feigned ignorance of what could have caused it. She was after all, a sweet old lady. After my wife finished telling me the story, I mentioned something to the effect that "You realize they used hydrogen peroxide in the German V2 rockets?" A picture of the remains of the destroyed microwave was displayed at her funeral. R.I.P. ma

dghughes 12y ago
Skimming comments before reading them all as I usually do it was hard not to notice the second last sentence in your comment: "A picture of the remains of the destroyed microwave was displayed at her funeral." Certainly reddit /r/nocontext material.
ajb 12y ago
That is really cool. Any chemists care to comment on why the peroxide would explode in the microwave but not the oven?
- jgamman 12y ago
  microwaves are at the wavelength that 'excites' / 'wobbles' / 'resonates' (pick your analogy of ball and spring physics) the O-H bond. H2O is entirely O-H bonds (give or take) and hence microwaves heat food vicariously via the water in it (heating up day old rice from the fridge is easier/better if you put a few mL of water in it). Peroxide peroxide is H-O-O-H so plenty of O-H bonds to excite and hence decompose...

bsaul 12y ago

I realize i barely know anything in chemistry. I have zero practical knowledge and would be almost incapable of performing any kind of chemistry exercise anymore ( yet i do have a scientific background). Anyone here could recommend a book or a serie of books to get myself into shape on that subject ?

jgamman 12y ago
my sincere advice (as an ex-chemist) is - don't. i suspect you'll want to do something 'fun' and 'fun chemistry' can go very bad, very quick. go fast and break things has never, never been a motto in a chemistry lab (even the dragon tail stories in the manhattan project were despite advice to the contrary). most of a senior/PG chemistry degree is about learning how to work with this stuff and it's not book learnin' so much as translating what should happen, into what could happen and then what shouldn't ever ever ever happen. this is best done in a practical mentor-tutor fashion. even saying that, most uni's are really crap at protecting their chemistry students. I damn near killed myself _after_ getting my PhD and didn't really learn how to analyse the risks until i worked in industry (which leveraged 8+ years of theory)...

avmich 12y ago

I wonder why the author is so caustic in regard to hydrogen peroxide. Here - http://yarchive.net/space/rocket/fuels/peroxide.html http://yarchive.net/space/rocket/fuels/peroxide.html - second message mentions Clark's "Ignition!" facts, and in first Henry Spencer states: While there are some storage headaches -- the stuff decomposes slowly no matter what you do, so you must provide for tank venting -- otherwise peroxide is much easier and safer to handle. Its bad reputation is half outright myth and half the result of 1940s experience with seriously impure peroxide. To quote a friend, a rocket-propulsion professional, who investigated the matter as part of a study some years ago: "As far as we could find out, the stories about problems with peroxide were just that, stories... Peroxide, now, seems to only very rarely do anything exciting, at all. And, even then, it seems to never do many of the things attributed to it in the stories." Of course hydrogen peroxide can be dangerous - relatively recent explosion in Sweden (peroxidepropulsion.com) reminds us about that. At the same time significant volumes of it with more than 70% concentration are routinely used - so a chemist can calibrate the feeling.

refurb 12y ago
As a former-chemist, I can attest that oxidizers in general are pretty concerning. You are correct that hydrogen peroxide (even up to 70%) is pretty safe by itself, but a chemist like Derek Lowe would use hydrogen peroxide in a reaction. Since he's an organic chemist, nearly every reaction is going to involve adding that oxidizer to a reducing agent (almost every organic molecule out there). When you add an oxidizer to a reducing agent, you're creating an unstable mixture that would love to explode. Just because it hasn't exploded on people in the past, doesn't mean it won't in the future. I can remember doing some really stupid things when I was in grad school. I had a create pure m-CPBA [1] for a reaction (great! an oxidizer and reducing agent all in one molecule!!). Thinking I was smart, I purified a a lot of it, like 20 g (smart folks only purify what they need, like 1 or 2 g). To make sure it was dry I put it on a vacuum pump and then heated the flask with a heat gun. Nothing happened, but looking back I was dam lucky it didn't explode. If it had, I likely would have been seriously injured. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-Chloroperoxybenzoic_acid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-Chloroperoxybenzoic_acid