Science horror stories

[Rath]

So I'm sitting in science class, and my hungover teacher doesn't have a lesson plan, so here comes story time!

 

basically, at the first school he worked at, two kids decided to break into the science lab for fun.  So when they leave, they keep a memento, a big hunk of potassium.  There sitting at home, and then they see the cops coming down the street.  "Oh $***, better hide the evidence.  So they try to flush the potassium down the toilet.  The entire house was leveled, and they both died.

[p1t1o]

Heard this in like my first week at uni studying chemistry;

There was a chemist who worked with Fluorine gas. One day, he wondered what would happen if he stuck his thumb into a stream of fluorine gas, so (in a fume cupboard of course) he do just so. His thumb turned white but apart from that nothing much happened, but it wouldnt go back to normal so he just kinda left it and hoped it would fix itself.

He never did get to find out because 2 weeks later he was blown up in a fluorine explosion.

Moral of the story: just dont work with fluorine for any reason, simples.

[Tex_NL]

2 hours ago, Rath said:

... So they try to flush the potassium down the toilet.  The entire house was leveled, and they both died.

Science horror story. With the emphasize on story. It's an urban myth. Yes, it is dangerous and you can do some serious damage. But it's not a bomb.
Straight from the mythusters website (http://mythresults.com/viewer-special-threequel):

Quote

Alkali metals dropped into a bathtub filled with water will create a huge explosion.

BUSTED

Tory, Grant and Kari went to the Alameda County bomb range to test the myth, which is featured in an episode of the British TV show Brainiac: Science Abuse. The Brainiac experiment purported that two grams of rubidium or cesium dropped into a bathtub filled with water would cause hand grenade-like explosion. However, the MythBusters could not recreate the rubidium or cesium explosions, despite using 25 grams. Instead of an explosion, the chemical reaction caused a brief flame, and a release of hydrogen gas before fizzling out. The team also tried two other alkali metals, sodium and potassium. They dropped 2.5 kilograms (5.5 lb) of each metal into a bathtub. The reactions were violent enough to crack the bathtub, but not nearly as powerful as a hand grenade, so the myth was declared busted. The discrepancies between the MythBusters and Brainiac results arose from forged results; the Brainiac staff has admitted to using actual explosives create more spectacular programming.

 

[Rath]

Oi! Ye cheeky little bugger!  He lies!  

So either my teacher lies, or he heard it from someone else who did.

[radonek]

2 hours ago, Tex_NL said:

…dropped into a bathtub filled with water…

…providing convenient way to release pressure. This is not really comparable with flushing it into length of sealed tubing. Busted! :-)

(OTOH it shows that materiel would have to be in some container or packaging)
 

[magnemoe]

2 hours ago, Tex_NL said:

Science horror story. With the emphasize on story. It's an urban myth. Yes, it is dangerous and you can do some serious damage. But it's not a bomb.
Straight from the mythusters website (http://mythresults.com/viewer-special-threequel):

 

Note that things might be different inside an closed room, bathrooms tend to be small.
Know that gas leaks can destroy houses. People has also managed to blow up houses with while making moonshine by getting alcohol damp in the room. 
Now if the gas was released fast enough you could get over-pressure enough to do structural damage, not an real explosion so windows and doors should pop first 

[Kerbart]

2 hours ago, Tex_NL said:

Science horror story. With the emphasize on story. It's an urban myth. Yes, it is dangerous and you can do some serious damage. But it's not a bomb.
Straight from the mythusters website (http://mythresults.com/viewer-special-threequel):

 

Whenever there's a detailed account what happened before all people involved die, my alarm bells go off. “Really? Then who was there to write down what happened?” And then you check on Snopes.com of course. I agree that this one failed the sniff test.

Edited November 8, 2016 by Kerbart

[Tex_NL]

40 minutes ago, radonek said:

…providing convenient way to release pressure. This is not really comparable with flushing it into length of sealed tubing. Busted! :-)

(OTOH it shows that materiel would have to be in some container or packaging)
 

 

22 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

Note that things might be different inside an closed room, bathrooms tend to be small.
Know that gas leaks can destroy houses. People has also managed to blow up houses with while making moonshine by getting alcohol damp in the room. 
Now if the gas was released fast enough you could get over-pressure enough to do structural damage, not an real explosion so windows and doors should pop first 

Both true. But go back and re-read the quote I posted: "The reactions were violent enough to crack the bathtub, but not nearly as powerful as a hand grenade."
Enclosing the explosion will definitely intensify it. A simple glass jar is not sturdy enough to be significant. The sewer (or a well sealed bathroom) itself however would be. But this would also be true for the hand grenade. And flushing a hand grenade down the toilet won't level a house.

Edited November 8, 2016 by Tex_NL

[p1t1o]

I did hear a story once where a can of deoderant was left on top of a HiFi - the HiFi caught fire due to an electrical fault and cooked off the deoderant causing a classic BLEVE - Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapour Explosion, which lifted the roof off the house. 

It didn't "blow the roof off" but the entire roof of the house seperated from the walls, shifted several inches and fell back down. There was footage of the aftermath and the story feels legit.

Gas explosions can be deceptively powerful, the expansion ratio is nowhere near as much as a high explosive, but you often start with a far larger volume, and the pressure impulse is longer, generating more work for a given overpressure. 

Perhaps the alkali metal stories are often overblown, but I can easily imagine a situation where an ill-advised exposure to water caused a dangerous build up of hydrogen.

Edited November 8, 2016 by p1t1o

[Tex_NL]

The BLEVE I belief. And I won't doubt it can blow out the windows and/or dislocate doors and timber framed walls. But actually raising the roof I find a bit hard to belief.
I won't say it can not happen. Cans can burst from high heat and the contents are usually highly flammable. But I doubt there is enough explosive potential in a deodorant can.

[p1t1o]

23 minutes ago, Tex_NL said:

The BLEVE I belief. And I won't doubt it can blow out the windows and/or dislocate doors and timber framed walls. But actually raising the roof I find a bit hard to belief.
I won't say it can not happen. Cans can burst from high heat and the contents are usually highly flammable. But I doubt there is enough explosive potential in a deodorant can.

I did some googling to try and find some pictures, bad news is I couldnt find the specific one I was looking for, pretty sure it was in the 90s. Weird news is, there are tons and tons of similar examples! Heres one that shows that the roof is still there but no longer attached, similar to my story, but if you google variations of "deoderant can blows roof off house" you get records of lots of different events!

http://www.worcesternews.co.uk/news/11849037.Exploding_aerosols_almost_blow_roof_off_Worcestershire_house/#

Keep your pressurised containers in safe places folks!

[kerbiloid]

Once two kids had stolen a bing hunk of potassium and tried to flush it down the toilet.
Of course it exploded, of course both died, but a lot of potassium hydroxide got into sewers.

(You can say: this is just an urban legend, potassium is not a b*mb.
Sure it isn't. Until the neighbor a storey below tries to flush down a canister of petrol at the same time.)

In the next house a chemist was working with Fluorine gas. And it spreaded through the vents down to sewers.
The chemist even washed his finger with fluorine. The finger got white. Two weeks later the finger exploded because the chemist tried his chance with hydroborons.

At the same time a chemist co-worker left a can of deoderant on top of a HiFi.
HiFi cooked the deoderant. The explosion lifted off the roof of the house.

(You can say: probably it was a very large can - to lift a whole roof?
No. It was a chemical lab as you can remember, and its roof was lifted many times per week. They just had tired to nail it back every time).

Two cops were slowly going down the street. Two explosions at once shaked the street at threw them down.
"Looks like somebody flushes potassium in toilet". - said the older cop, full of aged wisdom.
"Look!..." - exclaimed his companion, pointing at a sewer rat with teeth shining like snow, which was sitting near the road and eating the lightpole.
"Potassium fluoride" - explained his chief. "Potassium and fluorine mixed in the sewers and produced potassium fluoride. Now we have a problem with sewer rats with steel teeth."

A dawn was humbly raising above the town...

[p1t1o]

@kerbiloid You've got a TV series brewing right there!

[Shpaget]

This one's nasty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byford_Dolphin#Diving_bell_accident

Then there's the one (among several) involving accidental criticality:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#Criticality_accident

[Bill Phil]

16 hours ago, Tex_NL said:

Science horror story. With the emphasize on story. It's an urban myth. Yes, it is dangerous and you can do some serious damage. But it's not a bomb.
Straight from the mythusters website (http://mythresults.com/viewer-special-threequel):

 

There's also the possibility of secondary reactions. Note the flames produced by the reactions. Could've burned down the house. Either that, or the story went through too many games of telephone.

[DDE]

Did someone say "fluorine"?

Quote

So ClF3 it had to be. Otto Ruff had discovered the stuff in 1930 (as he had also discovered the majority of the compounds listed above) and the Germans had done a little work with it during the war, and so quite a lot was known about it. The efflorescence of fluorine chemistry sparked by the Manhattan Project led to studies in this country, and the Oak Ridge people, among others, investigated it exhaustively during the late 40's and early 50's. So it wasn't exactly an unknown quantity when the rocket people started in on it.
Chlorine trifluoride, ClF3, or "CTF" as the engineers insist on calling it, is a colorless gas, a greenish liquid, or a white solid. It boils at 12° (so that a trivial pressure will keep it liquid at room temperature) and freezes at a convenient —76°. It also has a nice fat density, about
1.81 at room temperature.
It is also quite probably the most vigorous fluorinating agent in existence—much more vigorous than fluorine itself. Gaseous fluorine, of course, is much more dilute than the liquid ClF3, and liquid fluorine is so cold that its activity is very much reduced. All this sounds fairly academic and innocuous, but when it is translated into the problem of handling the stuff, the results are horrendous. It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem.
It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water —with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals — steel, copper, aluminum,
etc. —because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminum keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to
reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a
metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended
a good pair of running shoes. And even if you don't have a fire, the results can be devastating enough when chlorine trifluoride gets loose, as the General Chemical Co. discovered when they had a big spill. Their salesmen were awfully coy about discussing the matter, and it wasn't until I threatened to buy my RFNA from Du Pont that one of them would come across with the details.
It happened at their Shreveport, Louisiana, installation, while they were preparing to ship out, for the first time, a one-ton steel cylinder of CTF. The cylinder had been cooled with dry ice to make it easier to load the material into it, and the cold had apparently embrittled the steel. For as they were maneuvering the cylinder onto a dolly, it split and dumped one ton of chlorine trifluoride onto the floor. It chewed its way through twelve inches of concrete and dug a threefoot hole in the gravel underneath, filled the place with fumes which corroded everything in sight, and, in general, made one hell of a mess. Civil Defense turned out, and started to evacuate the neighborhood, and to put it mildly, there was quite a brouhaha before things quieted down. Miraculously, nobody was killed, but there was one casualty — the man who had been steadying the cylinder when it split. He was found some five hundred feet away, where he had reached Mach 2 and was still picking up speed when he was stopped by a heart attack.
This episode was still in the future when the rocket people started working with CTF, but they nevertheless knew enough to be scared to death, and proceeded with a degree of caution appropriate to dental work on a king cobra. And they never had any reason to regret that caution. The stuff consistently lived up to its reputation.

There's also the testimony of another witness:

Quote

THE CONCRETE WAS ON FIRE!!!

 

[kerbiloid]

Fuel of dreams

[p1t1o]

30 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Fuel of dreams

Challenge issued - find a research paper involving fluorine that *doesn't* also include an explosion

**edit**

More fodder - what happens if you stick your head in a particle accelerator:

https://www.wired.com/1997/12/science-2/

NB - spot the hilarious-in-a-physicist-sorta-way mistake

Edited November 9, 2016 by p1t1o

[DDE]

5 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Fuel of dreams

Interesting. Materials I looked up indicated that Glushko's HOOH-decaborane motors were expected to be a lot more efficient.

By the way, any rocket involving beryllium (e.g. RD-550) belongs to this thread, as does

 

[kerbiloid]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentaborane

Quote

Problems with this fuel include its toxicity and its characteristic of bursting into flame on contact with the air. Furthermore, its exhaust (when used in a jet engine) would also be toxic. Long after the pentaborane was considered unworkable, the total United States stock of the chemical, 1900 pounds, was destroyed in the year 2000, when a safe and inexpensive means for doing so was finally engineered. The process used hydrolysis with steam, yielding hydrogen and a boric acid solution. The system was nicknamed "Dragon Slayer"

 

[Kerbart]

The particle accelerator had taken 23 years to be completed, not counting the bureaucracy and red tape that preceded it. But here it was. The Accelerator To End All Accelerators. Of course there were rumors that it would create an all-consuming black hole. But scientists were certain, certain, that such pulp-fiction non-sense would not happen.

A small group of scientists had collected around a big red "start" button, specifically made for this event. Of course, normally you'd just operate the thing through computers, and with a well tested script, but someone figured that if billions and billions of taxpayer money were at stake, there had to be something... visual. And so, out of some open-source electronics and a big alarm button acquired at the local army dump, they had something the press would just love, and never question its validity or function. All it really did was just replicate pressing the "enter" key, and a pre-programmed script would take over from there.

“Are you SURE the world will not end?” asked one of the journalists. He was visibly excited, his tentacles squirming all over the place. Dwar 'Ev Plonki replied: “We can absolutely assure you that there is nothing, NOTHING in physics as we know it, that would cause something like that to happen.” Another journalist brought up: “But didn't you advertise this instrument as a means to, and I quote, ‘Uncover the physics previously hidden from us’?” Laughter arose from the crowd. “Good point, but we're pretty sure about this! now, if you'll excuse me, I have a button to press!”

Dwar 'Ev Plonki pressed the button and they could hear the Quantum Defibrillators starting to hum in the distance. “See, nothing of that end of the world stuff is happe...”

13.7 billion years later, the inhabitants of the newly created universe still try to figure out what caused that catastrophic explosion they called “the big bang”

[kerbiloid]

16 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

A small group of scientists had collected around a big red "start" button

The most creepy photo ever seen by the Universe.

Spoiler

 

[p1t1o]

17 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

The most creepy photo ever seen by the Universe.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

You know what they say: the right man in the wrong place...

[Shpaget]

10 hours ago, p1t1o said:

Challenge issued - find a research paper involving fluorine that *doesn't* also include an explosion

I'll pass on this particular challenge, but do a corollary.

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_wont_work_with_dioxygen_difluoride

Quote

... run a mixture of oxygen and fluorine through a 700-degree-heating block ...

... elemental fluorine has commanded respect since well before anyone managed to isolate it, a process that took a good fifty years to work out in the 1800s. (The list of people who were blown up or poisoned while trying to do so is impressive). And that’s at room temperature. At seven hundred freaking degrees, fluorine starts to dissociate into monoatomic radicals, thereby losing its gentle and forgiving nature. But that’s how you get it to react with oxygen to make a product that’s worse in pretty much every way. ...

 

[KerikBalm]

That explosion would be different if you had the metal in a bunch of little pellets instead of one solid chunk.

There's a sort of similarity to A-bombs here: when the reaction starts, it blows itself apart before all the fuel can be consumed. Weapon design involves trying to get as much of it to react as possible within a very short time frame.

When that chunk goes in, the water vaporizing around it pushes away the rest of the water. The water only flows in around the escaping gas at a certain rate, and the "fuel" doesn't releast all its energy at once.

Reshape that chunk of potassium into something with more surface area and launch it into the water (a powder would probably not be as effective as the gas release could blow away other powder.... little pellets like birdshot in a shotgun shell would probably be the best) and you should get a much more intense explosion.

It would probably destroy the toilet though.

Droping it in a tub of liquid bromine should also give .... interesting results