Goodbye to Mercury

Rhe element, not the planet. As part of thinning stuff we do not need in preparation for our move, a few items have turned out to be harder to dispose of then I expected.

Back in the 1960s, mercury was something with which most kids had some chance to play. It is incredibly dense (13x water; lead will float in it), very standoffish from almost everything, and with a weird negative meniscus.  Unlike water which will slightly rise on the inside of a container, mercury will do the opposite. 

It was not generally considered a particularly risky material to have on your hands. We always washed thoroughly after handling it and we all knew it did not belong in our bodies.

Somewhere in the 1970s or 1980s, the worryworts turned mercury into thr great hazard. My recollection from chemistry classes turns out to be what EPA says: mercuric organic compounds are terrible neurotoxins and represent a serious hazard in your body including through cuts in the skin and seafood. Mercury vapor is a serious hazard and letting it heat is a bad idea. But elemental mercury is not terribly dangerous to handle.

From the procedures required to dispose of it, you would think that it requires a haz-mat suit and air cover. We are having a hard time finding somewhere that will take it. 

The uranium seems to be even harder to properly discard. This is radiation meter test sample, bought on Amazon, and delivered in normal mail, not a leadlined van. It is not uranium metal but a thumbnail sized piece of uranium ore.

It is an alpha particle emitter. Alpha particles are low energy and are stopped by a sheet of paper, your skin, or the metal can in which thus uranium sits. Like mercury, you do not want in your body, where even the short range of alpha particles can be a carcinogen.

Heck, small amounts of uranium show up in ground water in the Boise area. Yet that word radioactive causes worrywort paranoia, even at the very low levels and intensities of alpha particles.

Anyway, I do not need either the mercury or the uranium sample. I just need to get someone to accept them. The difficulty in finding a place to properly dispose of them suggests that for all the worrywortism, the powers that be want this stuff in a landfill.

There Are Lots of Chemistry Videos on YouTube

And only some of them are instruction on making things that go boom! I ran into this video that is full chemistry nerddom. "The densest element on Earth has almost no uses." Osmium of course. I knew it was used at one time for ballpoint pen balls, although apparently no longer. It was however used for fountain pen nibs. I am old enough to have used a fountain pen. Of course, I am old enough to have learned on a manual typewriter  

Wow! Resistance to Corrosion

I was looking for M3 PTFE set screws.  I need low coefficient of friction but this description of its corrosion resistance:

"Polytetrafluoroethylene has excellent chemical stability and corrosion resistance. It is one of the best corrosion-resistant materials in the world today. It can withstand all other chemicals except molten alkali metals, chlorine trifluoride, chlorine pentafluoride and liquid fluorine. It does not change even when boiled in aqua regia."

You can see why DuPont invented it for the uranium hexafluoride gas diffusion plant at Oak Ridge.

Your Worst Chemical Nightmare

YouTube video titled "the Best Performing (and most dangerous) Chemical Rocket Ever."  Rocketdyne experimented with a liquid lithium metal and fluorine gas rocket with liquid hydrogen thrown in to improve performance.  This video has some truly dazzling video (spraying cold fluorine gas on brick, for example).  I am glad NASA never gave Rocketdyne a contract to make this engine.  

Pure Scientific Research

This article describes how some chemists figured out how to extract rare earth metals from coal ash, making it environmentally cleaner as it did so.  Less dependent on China and a way to dispose of pollution. 

History/Chemistry/Climatology Video: Heaven

 

Another Nerddom Special

 Making Toilet Paper Moonshine.  He uses an enzyme called cellulase that breaks cellulose into sugars.  The rest of the process is obvious.  Priceless comments:

Moonlight io 2 days ago

i wonder if he knows how to make meth with Sudafed

 sergio tapia 2 days ago

@Moonlight io he can prolly make meth outta oreos

A Lot of Smart People With Time on Their Hands

Extracting potassium metal from bananas. 

The Ultimate "Do Not Try This At Home, Kids" Video

From uranium ore to metallic uranium in some guy's home lab:



And you thought a website showing pronouns having sex was unlikely.  You can find anything on the Internet.  Remember Doc Brown having to buy plutonium from Libyans for his repurposed DeLorean?  I suspect if you look long enough, you can find some guy showing the used uranium fuel to plutonium process on his kitchen table.  Okay, it might be one of his last videos.

More Democratic Party Civil War

9/1/17 Los Angeles Times:

At a time when the Democratic base is more restive than it has been in decades, Sen. Dianne Feinstein ignited a firestorm earlier this week when she refused to back the impeachment of President Trump and instead called for “patience” over his presidency.

The statements — provocative in Democratic circles and near-heretical in her hometown of San Francisco, where she made them — reflected a moderation and pragmatism that have been hallmarks of Feinstein’s career. But these qualities, after proving politically advantageous for decades, could become an albatross because of the state’s shifting demographics and political leanings as the 84-year-old decides whether to seek a sixth term.

Potential rivals are already circling.

Senate President Pro Tem Kevin De León lashed out at Feinstein’s remarks hours after she made them Tuesday at the Commonwealth Club, saying that women, children, people of color, immigrants and members of the LGBTQ community had little time for patience in the face of the president’s policies.

Feinstein, to be blunt, is not one of my favorite politicians, but behaving like an adult in the party of the perpetual toddlers is risky business.

How Can I Keep Up?

When I was in elementary school, I was the only kid I knew who knew the symbol and name of every element (or even thought that was cool).  A bunch more to remember:

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry has announced these proposed names:

• Nihonium and symbol Nh, for the element 113

• Moscovium and symbol Mc, for the element 115

• Tennessine and symbol Ts, for the element 117

• Oganesson and symbol Og, for the element 118

Today's Silly Question

Back when I was young, I learned that chlorine kills bacteria in drinking water not directly but by breaking up water molecules, releasing free oxygen, which is the actual bacteriacide.  But when I look at the electronegativity of chlorine (3.0) and oxygen (3.5), I don't see how chlorine could replace oxygen in a water molecule.  Can someone who has taken freshman chemistry recently than me explain this?

An Impressive Reconstruction of Recent Solar Activity

This is a most impressive paper reconstructing solar activity over the last several millennia based on a variety of proxies. It is long, and like any scientific paper based on proxies, subject to the limitation that proxies sometimes include assumptions that are not warranted. Nonetheless, I greatly enjoyed reading it.

TNP?

I saw that a jury convicted a Saudi student of planning a terrorist attack in Texas (alliterative headline for the ensuing civil suit if he had set off the TNP-based bomb: "Texas terror TNP torts today").  From June 27, 2012 USA Today:

Khalid Ali-M Aldawasari, who was legally in the U.S. on a student visa, was arrested in February 2011 after federal agents secretly searched his apartment near Texas Tech University in Lubbock and found bomb-making chemicals, wiring, a hazmat suit and clocks.

Authorities also discovered Aldawsari's journal, handwritten in Arabic, in which he wrote he'd been planning a terror attack in the U.S. for years and that it was "time for jihad," or holy war, court documents show.

Part of what led the FBI to investigate, including using one of those secret searches that caused panty-twisting for many people after passage of the PATRIOT Act, was that he ordered $435 of TNP from a chemical supply house, Carolina Biological Supply, who immediately informed the FBI that the order was suspicious.

Separately, Con-way Freight, the shipping company, notified Lubbock police and the FBI the same day with similar suspicions because it appeared the order wasn't intended for commercial use. 

Congratulations to both companies for noticing the suspicious nature of the order, and informing the FBI.  But what is TNP?  I did not recognize the acronym--until I looked it up, and discovered it was a chemical that I know well, 2,4,6-trinitrophenol, under its older name, picric acid.  If you took organic chemistry in college (or were just a hopeless explosives nerd, as I was in high school), you will recognize from the IUPAC name that it is a close relative of TNT, but with phenol instead of tolulene as the aromatic ring to which the nitro groups are attached.

What made picric acid so fascinating to me long ago was that while a decent high explosive in its own right, when placed in contact with most metals, it produces an even more unstable salt--an interesting way to render common objects dangerous.