Friday, Feb. 23, 2007

You know you're a nerdy chemist when...


... you feel an itchy tingle on your finger and immediately wonder if you have 30% hydrogen peroxide on your hand. Even though you're at home, and it's almost 11 at night, and it's been more than 12 hours since you had the damn peroxide bottle open, when you were making reagent this morning.

I? Am deranged, I think.

For those of you who've never had the pleasure, industrial-strength 30% hydrogen peroxide on the skin is a sneaky little bastard. It looks just like water, so if there's a drop of it hanging out with the actual drops of water around the sink, you won't know it. That is, until you get it on you. It takes a minute as it absorbs in, and the little bubbles it generates as it reacts with your dermis make your skin itch like *crazy*. By this time, there's a lovely bleached-white patch wherever you've touched the stuff, and you need to rinse it off before the itchy, tingly insanity turns to pain.

And honestly? It's one of the more benign chemicals I've worked with.

My mother hates it when I talk about the various labs I've worked in, because some of them showcased some very bad-ass substances. And I don't mean illegal narcotics, though I did work at a lab that did run tests on various amphetamines and even cocaine occasionally. As you might imagine, there were a million and three rules, regulations and guidelines for any of those sorts of analyses.

But no. I'm talking about the stuff that can kill you, or blow up buildings, or set things on fire. I've worked with stuff that explodes upon contact with oxygen, and had to be handled exclusively in a nitrogen-flooded "dry box". I've worked with stuff that reacts with water to create sparks. I've singed my hair in an explosion, and caught a flask of diethyl ether on fire. And I'm an extremely careful scientist. The thing with working with these substances is that, sometimes, they just do things you don't expect. You have to respect them like they were people. People with mafia connections, a grudge against chemists and an uzi packed in their boots.

One of the most violent substances I've ever worked with was ethylene oxide. If you google it, and get a look at the molecule, it's in a tight triangle-shaped ring. Nature abhors when bonds are stretched so tight -- molecules are much happier in hex-rings and the like. But, with the tri-bonds, those suckers are ready to snap right open with the slightest provocation. Ethylene oxide is that drunk guy sitting at the end of the bar, under the cracked lamp with the light bulb burnt out, his hand shaking as it lifts his 14th glass of rot-gut to his chapped, misshapen lips. He's got no job, no friends, no life, and nothing to lose, save his mind.

In order to work with this wonderful stuff, I had to wear a badge that turned colors in the presence of EO, so I'd know if I were exposed. Exposure was a bad, bad thing, and tiny micro-whiffs of the stuff would turn my badge bright purple, telling me to get the eff out of Dodge, NOW. Fortunately, the badge I wore for 6 months while I worked on this nightmarish project never did anything other than bang against my chest every time I bent over and then straightened back up.

Also, I had to watch a video of just what might happen if EO was allowed to chain reaction out of hand. See, when one of those highly-strained bonds does break, it generates incredible energy, because it's so damn happy to be, finally!, out of that stranglehold that it gives a giant, exuberant scream of heat energy. Well, most of the time, you won't get a single molecule of EO all by itself -- it'll be floating around with a quinzillion other molecules just like it. Just as unhinged, and just as pissed off. If one molecule snaps, the energy released is more than enough for the nearest molecules to absorb and give them the wherewithall to break their own bonds... and they'll tell two friends, and so on, and so on. In the video I watched, it showed a train car that had been hauling EO, and it had been cleaned out after the transfer to be filled up with something else, but the guys who cleaned the car accidentally left, like, a tablespoon's worth of EO in a hard-to-reach corner. The car was filled up with some other substance and, unknowingly, rolled out along its merry way...

Until it blew right the fuck up.

According to what the video said, the clean-up crew was finding pieces of that railcar a quarter of a mile away. The side of the railcar was just... not there anymore. The *whole* side. Not just a hole. The car disintegrated under the force of the blast, except for the parts that got flung.

Nice. I never wanted to be a librarian more than I did at that moment. Sure, books might fall on my toes sometimes, or I might get a papercut now and then, but I won't get blown to Kingdom Come if I shelve a periodical in the wrong spot.

Anyhow, that project didn't last long, and I moved back to California not too long after. Working in the lab that I do, now, there is absolutely nothing that even approaches the instant violence of EO. The hydrogen peroxide should definitely be treated with respect, but a small spill is mostly just an annoyance. It won't kill you if you look at it cross-eyed.

Of course, *I* might kill you if you look at me cross-eyed. Remember? Deranged. And I may have mafia connections. Or at least PMS.

saturncat at 10:56 p.m.

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