Which Chemical is the Most Risky?
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- Опубликовано: 4 июн 2024
- Which chemicals carry the greatest risks? In this episode I discuss some compounds with the highest possible NFPA ratings, and we determine which ones are the most risky!
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Speaking of risky, I have to say that molotay is remarkable.
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References:
Graduated Cylinder History Video - • Who was the real inven...
Hamilton Morris Podcast Episode - / 73789212
Methylhydrazine Mycotoxin Video - • The Science of Fungal ...
nBuLi Titration - doi.org/10.1016/S0022-328X(97...
Ether Peroxide Video - • How Peroxides Form in ...
NileRed Magnesium Silicide - • Making Magnesium Silic...
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Molecules for this tierlist - tert-Butyl hydroperoxide, cyanogen, propargyl bromide, arsine, monomethylhydrazine, diazomethane, nickel tetracarbonyl, hydrogen cyanide, tert-butyllithium, acetaldehyde, trimethylaluminum, acrylonitrile, stibine, triethylaluminum, buli, butadiene, germane, ethylene oxide, TFE, trichlorosilane, pentaborane(9), diethyl ether hydroperoxide, dichlorosilane, vinyl chloride, diborane, picric acid, diethylaluminum chloride, silane
Tierlist Playlist - • Chemistry Tierlists 
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11:58 Excuse you but, the mitochondria is the *powerhouse of the cell* ☝
Glucose be like
ruclips.net/video/_mJoJC-pYhY/видео.html
@@That_Chemist So Acetyl.CoA would be bitcoin, NADH would be gold, NADPH is silver. FADH2 would be the check grandma sent that you never actually use because I'm not going to the bank for 10 bucks. And CTP are canadian dollars. It exists, technically it has value. GTP is Euros, like ATP, but cooler. God this is all so lame. I'm sorry.
There is probably more than one powerhouse
It's just an idea. An analogy. They have to dumb it down. You probably had that in the test question in high school.
my bio professor would beat your ass for this lmaoo
Id love a 4,4,4 NFPA teir list. Were its just a teir list of 4,4,4 chemicals and how deserving of that 4,4,4 rating it is. S teir would be anything that you think transcends the 4 4 4 rating lol. Basically a list of things you'd hope to never even see irl.
That’s what this is - I could only find 4 or 5 4/4/4’s, then I researched the next closest ones
What about O2F2 and ClF3? Would these clear out the S tier or make NFPA add a 5 rating?
@@That_Chemist yeah I was worried there arent too many things out there with 4 4 4 ratings that also have a good amount of info on them.
TMTFA
teir
I literally have 0 chemistry knowledge but for some reason I find these tier lists absolutely fascinating. Love the content
Thank you :)
Keep watching and you will have knowledge 😉
Same here
It serves as a deterrent to clandestine chemistry - the more I started understanding the "connectivity" of atoms, the more I started seeing the hazards that lie in trying to make your own Rx drugs (not a drug dealer looking to make money, but trying to save money at the pharmacy). I think anyone who was suckered into an antidepressant addiction, especially after a corrupt physician deemed it "non-addictive", should be entitled to self medicate in total defiance of medical orthodoxy.
@cornholeius9350, cool name! \m/
Lol same here, it's amazing though.
would be cool to see a video on substances classified as safe that you really doubt are actually safe
this is a good idea
the fact the GHS uses the same symbol on the label for "causes eye damage" and "causes skin corrosion" makes some labelling very misleading - there's a world of difference between say, sodium levulinate, which causes eye damage but is otherwise harmless, and hydrochloric acid, but both have the same 'corrosive' symbol on the label
@@lefthandedspanner These ratings aren't originally for people working with the substances. They're for emergency services responding to an incident. Different sorts of yellow 2 are more similar when you're looking at a ceiling that might cave in on a bench, rather than considering situations where people can take sensible precautions.
@@iabervon that's certainly the case with NFPA fire diamonds (which some people mistake for a general hazard profile), but GHS stickers are definitely intended for everyday users
@@tamarinds MSG is safe though. It's functionally and chemically identical to glutamic acid that is found in many foods.
It is only bad for you in a roundabout way, it makes unhealthy foods taste too good.
As a non-chemist, if this channel has taught me anything it's this:
As dangerous as chemistry looks, it's even more dangerous than that, and taking a risk is really not an option. I work as a custodian and after I stated watching your channel I've been getting more and more careful about chemicals I work with. At this point, unless I know exactly what a chemical is and does, and even after that in many cases, I treat it like it's radioactive superdeath explodium.
Same goes for chemistry knowledge. I may know more than the average citizen, but I'm better off erring on assuming I know jack. Because misinformation is extra dangerous in chemistry.
But with all that said, of course thing go boom is fun. It's just that it's even more fun when you live long enough to enjoy it twice.
Did I pass?
I'm currently studying for my Master's degree in chemistry, and there are some chemicals that I am much less concerned about than I used to be (e.g. acetone, most common acids). I've washed my hands in acetone many times. I've accidentally gotten concentrated hydrochloric acid on my skin before, but I just washed it off after setting down whatever I had in my hands, and nothing bad happened. But concentrated sulfuric acid, on the other hand, is something I'd never want to get on me! So yeah, in general I've also learned to treat most chemicals with great respect.
For cleaning chemicals particularly, most of them are not very dangerous by themselves but can become really dangerous when mixed. Sodium hypochlorite in particular creates nasty products with acetic acid, hydrochloric acid, ammonia, and hydrogen peroxide and should never be mixed with anything else unless you're in a lab and you know what you're doing. Even just having an open bucket of ammonia water and an open bucket of sodium hypochlorite solution standing next to each other can create lethal fumes in the wrong circumstances.
@@wasmic5z often the more dangerous part about non-household cleaning chemicals is they generally come very concentrated. I've had a generic spray disinfectant that comes with a pH of 13. I no longer work at that company and a big part of it was bad safety involving that exact chemical.
But even when diluted, they tend to be a cut above household chemicals. Most terrifying thing is when somebody else grabs something from the closet or cart, because they often don't know what chemical is what. We naturally have some chemicals designed to remove organic material very fast. And your average office worker very well might mistake it for a regular disinfectant that doesn't need rinsing.
tbh as som1 who failed chemistry horribly due to low attention span, these videos have taught me more than my school. Sadly. But props to the creator.
im currently working to be a welder and yeah, im mostly the same. so many chemicals are given off and used while we work, and i try my best to ventilate and keep as much away from myself as possible. more so after hearing about some of the stuff thoes fumes give off
This comment chain brought back memories of my high school chemistry nerd friend. I just remember how he and his other chemistry friends loved to talk about fluorines... if that's the right word.
I wonder how he's doing after so many years.
I'd love to see a tier list on theorized chemicals. ie, chemicals that have only been theorized to exist but have never been synthesized. An example would be Octaazacubane.
Wasn't explosions & fire working on that or some other exotic cubanes?
@@SentientDMT Cubane-1,4-dicarboxylic acid is what he was working on.
@@californium-2526 Thanks, I knew he had a whole series on cubanes. I just couldn't remember exactly what it was.
Hell yes!!
Picral is a (formerly) popular etchant used in metallography containing Picric Acid. I work at a site that has been established since the 1940s and while moving one of the old labs, someone found a jar of crystallized Picric Acid. The guy who was called to safely move it only had one arm.
Picric acid is nasty stuff…. Caused a huge lab fire in my college’s chemistry lab…. The AP high school students were doing some experiment that required a small amount of the stuff to be added to water; no big deal. Problem arose when they discarded the spilled powder in what they thought was a trash can but it wasn’t. It was a can underneath a leaky sink! Fortunately a grad student was still in the building when the fire started after it blew a hole in the work bench (just so happened to be my work station) and called the fire department. The whole lab had to be closed and redone; it was a hot mess
@@erikawanner7355 If there's one thing I've learned from Chemistry RUclips/Twitter, it's that that every institution in the world has, or has had at some point, a crusty bottle of picric acid that's older than I am lurking at in back of a cabinet.
We found a jar of crystalized picric acid when we recieved a complaint of some dude that was storing explosives in his home. Safe to say when me and my coworkers found it in his shed, we all backed away slowly.
I remember when I was in undergrad school, they found a dried bottle of Picric acid in a lab being cleaned out after a retirement. It was fun to watch the bomb squad bring it out and set it off in a explosion proof drum on the lawn of the chemistry building (from a safe distance of course).
@@erikawanner7355 How much styphnic acid have they needed lol
'US Stock exchange of the cell' - That's a new one
EDIT: Seeing Picric acid reminded me of something I was told recently by one of my teachers. This happened at my secondary school, before I was there but I heard this my from chemistry teacher. One of the chemistry teachers and a technician made a batch of Picric acid, not sure why they did, but they did. They must not have known either, as a few years later the bottle was discovered and understandably, no one wanted to touch it. The school ended up having to get a specialist in to detonate it safely.
Today I learned they should have just filmed 1000 ways to die at a semiconductor facility as a bottle movie.
I nominate chlorine trifluoride for an honorary mention. Sure it's technically on 4-0-4 but oh what wonderfully vigorous reactions it has with, well, nearly everything that hasn't already been fluorinated. Oh and hydrolysis produces HF :)
404 flammability not found
That 0 is because everything else is on fire, it just happens to be the reason
I was honestly trying to identify it on his list, before realizing it had not qualified. The 0 being that ClF3 is not flammable itself... because it reacts with EVERYTHING before it has a chance to burn.
@@That_Chemist I think that hydrogen fluoride gas or concentrated Hydrofluoric acid is worth mentioning in this list
Let's not forget FOOF as well, but yes, both HF and ClF3 really should be in this list.
A few years back i worked for a waste disposal company that dealt with hazardous waste. My job was to categorize and prepare chemicals for safe transport. The mention of picric acid brought back countless memories of forgotten, crystallized and crusty containers that had to be carefully "watered". Also the amount of time bombs i encountered in universities and schools smh.... Chem teachers, professors and pharmaceutical lab assistants are sometimes pretty sloppy in the maintenance of such stuff. Also had to deal with many containers with other lethal/dangerous stuff. Work was intense and interesting (and lowkey life threatening). Pay was way too low tho (about 1600€ net per month ) Dunno why i worked for whole two years there.
Fun and slightly terrifying fact, back in the 1960s, some enterprising drag racing teams experimented with mixing hydrazine and nitromethane for their racing fuel. It went about as well as you would expect.
I love how MMH is super scary to work with in a lab and yet people fill dozens of tons of this stuff into rockets, sometimes with people on top :) also fun fact, TEA is sometimes used as an igniter fluid in rocket engines.
Yes!
@@That_Chemist
If MMH is scary wait until you hear about asymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine. That stuff it’s even worse.
Also: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_venom
@@cezarcatalin1406 how worse? just curious
@@derrickhageman1969
Idk exactly, it’s apparently acutely toxic (even though an exact LD hasn’t been reported), it’s a very potent carcinogen and more corrosive towards polypeptides and stuff.
@@cezarcatalin1406 UDMH is one of the nastiest chemicals used in spaceflight
*COOH, as in Carboxylic Acid:* Mr Incredible is content
*COOH, as in Organic Hydroperoxide:* Mr Incredible becomes uncanny
There's a difference though, in carboxylic acid, one of the Oxygen is a double bond to the carbon and the same carbon is attached to the other oxygen
If you do it in a different matter, you can turn it to something much more scary
Back in the early 80s my buddy was the deputy chief of security for a well know explosives company. He was trying to recruit me because I was both a firefighter and EMT. When he gave me a tour of the facility we came to a building where there was as NFPA 4 4 4 sign with the bottom block showing the symbols meaning no water and no foam .He obviously forgot I could read the sign. That and the fact that the lab bunkers had roofs with Jack's so that they could jack them back down after an accident convinced me to decline his offer.. The chemical was pure lead azide
Working in the semiconductor industry, I have seen buildings designed with walls that are open air slats, so that when there's a huge explosion inside it won't demolish the building.
Silane was once included as a chemical in UK A level prep classes.
At the end of the course, only two students out of a class of twenty or thirty turned up for the final prep class, I was one of them. Much against the rules, we were left to complete the last class prep on our own.
We manufactured a whole class worth of magnesium silicide, before realising our mistake. We tried to flush the excess evidence down one of the lab sinks.
Later, as part of a different experiment, we emptied a titration tube of HCL down the same sink. In those days the sinks were fitted with a heavy wooden lids, with a small hole in it for the tap hoze rubber tube to drip through.
After a few seconds of adding the acid, the sink wooden lid was blown into the air with a loud bang, denting the ceiling tiles, and bending the tap.
The lab supervised rushed into the room to investigate the bang. She was extremely annoyed, and we received a serious telling off, as she thought we were trustworthy chemistry students , but she was unable to take the matter further, as we were not supposed to be left unattended.
I can only assume that soap in the sink allowed the siliane to build up to an explosive concentration before ignition. There was none of the usual popping sounds prior to the explosion, just one very loud bang.
(Thinking about it, the explosion was most likely the result of hydrogen being generated from the unconsumed magnesium powder, the siliane just provided the ignition source.)
MgSi doesn't just make silane, it also produces hydrogen gas in the presence of water. As does NaSi and KSi. Fortunately hydrogen only has an explosive mixture between 18-59%vol, so much better than silane :P B tier.
Glad everyone was ok in the end with no injury but seriously....What the hell was in your head though....Flushing down product in the sink to hide it instead of notifying....You try to hide shit like that in a lab and disaster can follow. Should have owned your mistake up...Someone else could have paid for your mistake when using that sink.
@@clientcomun1958 at the time, early 1970s, disposal of these chemicals down the lab sink was an allowed procedure. I assume that the lab had filters fitted. I was not aware of any other collection procedure.
It is where the powder would have ended up anyway.
I would have been 17 at the time, so somewhat inexperienced.
In Grade 8 we had a real pyro teacher that was showing us Some Copper I and Copper II compounds and I can't remember exactly what he was doing but it went bang. I’ve always had a soft spot for the Blue stuff since then. 😂
I did a chemistry project on arsine- it’s so terrifying. They say you should call your ER In advance if working with it cause “your local ER will most likely not be capable of treating you.” The only known thing to help you when you breathe it in is still not confirmed as actually helpful
Jesus Christ. Remind me to run away from anyone talking about arsine.
How fast does it ignite on contact with air?
@@planetoforts not at all. Arsine is simply beyond poisonous to the human body. Generally, most arsenic compounds don’t tend to be great for you but Arsine was a chemical weapon in WW1.
"I like the smell of this." "its also a known carcinogen"
its not that bad of a carcinogen to be fair
I've found that a lot of horrible toxic things smell petty nice. Was standing in a room with an ozone machine with a coworker. We both were like "this smells nice and clean!" The next morning he showed my the label on the machine saying "don't use in occupied spaces".
Fun fact about silane: it etches your glovebox and makes it completely opaque!
I would recommend Ignition by John Drury Clark as a highly entertaining (even for non-chemists) history of the development of liquid rocket propellants. It has a lot of the most dangerous chemicals that were rarely even touched by anyone before or since.
"The concrete was on fire."
Great book
Knowing NFPA ratings is part of my bread and butter and I routinely deal with many chems with ratings of 4 in many categories, though none of these chems. Probably the scariest that I deal with a lot is White Phosphorus, which has a rating of 4, 4, 2. Phossy jaw is scary looking as f*ck and it's one of my main concerns, along with horrible burns on the skin, that I constantly think about and work hard to prevent. Another I worry about that I deal with a lot is 50%+ HF, which has a rating of just 4, 0, 1 and is still pretty damn scary.
Phosgene has a 4, 0, 1 rating too
@@DingDingTheRUclipsBuddy I'm a chemical distributor and elements of the periodic table dealer. I routinely have to deal with the feds and have to let them do occasional inspections of my storage and manufacturing facilities. Now, these facilities are small and we don't make a lot of our own stuff. We order it from other companies that won't sell to individuals and turn around and offer it all to individuals (homeschool teachers, amateur chemistry enthusiasts, element collectors, small businesses, etc) for a small profit to keep it going. From what I can remember, over the last 4 or 5 years we've gotten around 7 or 8 visits from the feds (the FBI) for inspections, for them to ask questions about some of our products, to make sure that we're stealing everything correctly and safely, etc. You are right though. Many things that I sell can bring their attention to you and I really don't recommend getting large quantities of such things without being a business that deals with them or a school or something. Now, small amounts that can be used for an experiment or two should be fine. They understand that some people need these things for certain things that are totally legal and understand that people need a resource to get such things and get them safely. That's where I step in and how I've been able to do this and keep it going for nearly half a decade now with the feds.... Well.... I don't want to say that they don't care. Rather, they only care enough to make sure I'm doing things safely and in accordance with all of the laws and regulations to do with the products that I sell. I just have to keep records of sales of certain items for two years and report any suspicious activity or people that approach me about certain things, is all.
@@noahater5785 indeed. I don't deal with phosgene. That's one I refuse to work with.
@@BackYardScience2000 I'm gonna have to order some WP from you sometime. Absolutely no HF though, lol.
Fun triethylaluminum fact: TEA is used in making thickened pyrophoric agent, which is just napalm but worse.
9:20 I know this isn't what they mean by fulminating (quick-progressing in this context) but if someone told me I had EXPLOSIVE PNEUMONIA I think my heart would give up right then and there
I think "explodes on contact with drywall" is now my favourite weird effect of a chemical ^^
Wait till you see ClF3 then. It's much more exciting. It sets fire to dry sand asbestos. Wet sand it explodes. If there is a baryonic matter that it is not hypergolic with the substance has yet to be found. It can only be safely stored in perfectly clean prefluoridated stainless steel nickel or copper vessels otherwise it sets fire to them too
There's a great Chemcial Safety Board video on an accident with ethylene oxide at a sterilization plant. The operators were fooling around with process changes and caused a huge ethylene oxide/air explosion in the sealed chamber, which sent this big bank vault type door flying through many walls of the facility. I always liked that one because somehow no one got hurt.
Ethylene Oxide (or Propylene Oxide) is the fuel used in most US Thermobaric (fuel-air explosive) bombs including MOAB or Mother Of All Bombs.
ruclips.net/video/_2UnKLm2Eag/видео.html CSB videos are great!
That accident was local to me. The boneheads running the plant were in a hurry to finish a test cycle and overrode the control system. As a result a mixture of roughly 50% ethylene oxide in air was sent to a thermal oxidizer (open flame) that was only supposed to ever see _trace_ EO in purge gas (air + extra N2). Big boom, plant demolished. Amazing nobody died.
(EO has an LEL of 3% and for all practical purposes there is no UEL)
I just watched that video, ironically. Amazing luck there were zero fatalities considering how much damage was done.
What chemicals are most annoying to work with tier list? ie ones that are super moisture/air sensitive, solids that are super hygroscopic, shock sensitive solids, light sensitive molecules etc.
grignard reagents
@@giansieger8687 grignards are super easy to make in situ though, and even then they're way less techy than either of the butyllithiums
@@dextmo6890 sure organolithium compounds are (obviously) worse but saying grignard reactions are „super easy“ when the reagent is created invitro is a glorification. getting the damn thing to work at all, and then at the correct rate to not fuck up the whole reaction… yeah
Anhydrous magnesium chloride. It's so hygroscopic that if you try making a solution from it the heat of solvation makes the water boil.
Also trichloroacetic acid, purely because even the tiniest amount of it removes the printed label areas on falcon tubes.
I'm surprised dimethylmercury is not on this list. When you've got a cmpound that can kill you if a few drops get on your glove, that sounds pretty risky to me.
As a pharmacy student I'd love more medchem content! I could help with ideas as well :)
Awesome! Thank you! You are welcome to suggest stuff in our awesome Discord :)
@@That_Chemist I'll have to check it out! I love fun facts like how the treatment for CN tox is hydroxycobalamin which incorporates the CN and makes vitamin B12
My fave is Dimethylcadmium. 4-4-2-W. But it only has that 2 by technicality, because the liquid is fairly stable. However, the oxidized solid it forms over time when in contact with air is an *extremely* friction-sensitive explosive, and the decomposition products include fine cadmium particulate which is extremely toxic and incredibly carcinogenic. Explodes violently on contact with water, too.
Cadmium toxicity is no joke. Look up "itai, itai" - I learned about it in the (audio)book Tale of 7 Elements.
The lab I used to work in did a lot of research into UV transparent polymers for semiconductor resists. Turns out in the deep UV, the only organic polymers with any transparency (which you need for good imaging performance) have a LOT of fluorine. Consequently, my professor was collaborating with another researcher at a different university who specialized in TFE and fluoropolymer chemistry. His group had a special extraction apparatus to remove the stabilizers from TFE monomer and one requirement of the college EHS group was it had to be built against an exterior wall. Why? So the outward facing section of the TFE purification apparatus could be built with a wooden “relief” surface. If there was an explosion, the blast would punch out the wood panel and not blast everyone in the lab to kingdom come.
Did I mention this professor was missing 3 fingers?
The real question: did he lose those three fingers in one accident, or was it two, or even three separate accidents?
Or was it a necessary sacrifice of flesh to get his product to crystallize? XD
@@geoffreyentwistle8176 I never had the balls to ask him. I often wonder how profs doing research like that get ANY grad students. They obviously do, but it must be difficult.
That’s metal as hell bro wtf
@@Grak70 You can learn from their mistakes instead of having to go that far yourself
@@tailnowag8753 the lesson I learned is to stay TF away from TFE chemistry.
Vinyl chloride is currently important, as the railroad accident in East Palestine, Ohio included a traincar of vinyl chloride, currently still burning and polluting the environment. People are reporting chickens and farm animals dying. It also can cause a rare form of liver cancer.
I posted a video on it yesterday!
I just interrupted my chemist girlfriend playing The Sims In bed at 12am to ask how bad peroxides with COOH linkers were. She’s not happy with me but said peroxides are quite explosive on their own and I need to shut up ☹️
Picric acid is like very calm, in the lab where I worked (Latvia) we stored large amounts of picric acid DRY. I once dropper the bottle with picric acid prom about 30cm and my lab supervisor said that there is absolutely no reason to stress.
There are much worse chemicals than picric acid
Pure picric acid is fairly benign, as primary explosives go (did I really just write that?). The real danger comes when it reacts with metals in the environment, because metal picrates are generally much more-sensitive to shock and friction. This is especially problematic given that picric acrid is volatile.
So its a high explosive, then?
I've seen a jar explode when the cap was turned. But compared to many things its not bad.
just don't let it get near fire; the Low Moor fire of 1916 was caused by an ignition in a picric acid store of a munitions factory, and it was the worst industrial disaster in British history, gutting not just the factory but several streets around it
Picric acid caused an explosion/fire in my college chemistry lab. Nasty stuff
I worked at a precious metals refinery and one of my jobs was to dissolve gold scrap using cyanide. After the gold had been extracted we "dropped out" the gold of solution (using powdered zinc) I took a small sample of the liquid (50ml IRC) and then slowly heated the sample in the fume hood. Then I slowly added sulphuric acid to the liquid. Good times!
I'm at work right now...I'm an operator at an Acrylonitrile plant and one of our main by-products is Hydrogen Cyanide. When we're running full rate we make about 120,000 lbs a day of Cyanide.
@@maaronsmith Lucite? Beaumont tx
@@maaronsmith serious question, what do you do with it all?
@@WineScrounger We sell all of it to a chemical company right next to us in the same complex. It all goes through a pipeline loop that is constantly circulating between our storage tanks and their plant, they just draw off of it as they need it. If they shut down their plant for awhile or can't keep up with what we're making and our tanks get too full, we burn it in our flare and they still have to pay for it. They use it to make EDTA, look it up, it's in everything from your shampoo and toothpaste to Mountain Dew 😅
@@texasslingleadsomtingwong8751 Nope, I live in Ohio
Ah ethylene oxide, my dad used to work at a company where they make polyethylene glycol surfactants and had massive train tanker cars filled with ethylene oxide, pumping hundreds or thousands of litres around to reactors and all.
so scary!
Most toxic chemicals in common products tier list would be cool!
If we're talking acute toxicity, toothpaste would be one, but all depends on the concentration of course. You would have to eat a ton of tubes of toothpaste to die from sodium fluoride poisoning. Can't think of many others off-hand, rat poison obviously, maybe certain over-the-counter insecticides, although the most toxic ones like metal phosphides and arsenic compounds have all been pulled from the market. It's all relatively harmless (for humans, not bees) pyrethroids now. You might still encounter them in third world countries though.
How can sharp edges cause chemicals to explode? It would be awesome if you did a video explaining how that works, because I've never even heard about that before watching this!
For how little i care about chemicals, I find this video very cool!
Glad to hear it :)
“Mitochondria is the US Stock Exchange of the cell”
-That Chemist 2022
I think the flammability remarks are missing context. Most of the common organic solvents have flash points way below room temperature. If you're doing chemistry, you approximately always need to take specific action to avoid building up flammable vapors--that's one of the reasons fume hoods are a thing.
About a year ago, someone at the University of Hamburg found some old crusty container with the label "picric acid" in a storage cabinet. The entire faculty was evacuated until the bomb squad had dealt with the picrates.
You should cover the chemicals found in Love Canal. US Army dumped there along with Hooker Chemicals. I was stationed in Ft. Leonard Wood and the chem corps trained there. Scary stuff.
I worked as an Instrument tech at a silane chemical plant. TCS and DCS were always hazards that everyone was aware of as we had releases/exposures pretty frequently, but silane kind of lulled everyone into a false sense of security as silane releases were so rare. But once you see liquid silane dripping from a pipe and turning into a little ball of flame as it falls towards the ground, and then truly grasp that the giant 50,000 gallon silo your working next to is filled with the stuff… It’ll earn your respect real quick. After that, it made sense to me why they built the plant in the middle of nowhere and were required to have a 6 mile blast radius around the plant where nobody/nothing could be. They also had an R&D lab that produced disilane, but I never really got the chance to work around that stuff. Huge fan of the channel and stoked to listen to the Hamilton podcast with you!
I work with a 10% solution of ter. Butyhydroperoxid on a daily basis and when I looked it up on Wikipedia, I had a little heart attack. No one told me in advance that it could get pretty dangerous.
My supervisor didn´t know either. Glad I didn´t distill it like a paper called for.
Yeah that was one of the main reasons I made the video - I was surprised too
Never try to distill a peroxide in normal pressure!!
Try to separate the water from the peroxide with hexane or heptane.
Thank use a vakuum-destillation to separate the hexane.
But only If it is unavoidable!
There are several peroxides with such a low SADT, that this way ist dangerous too.
Near my city, there is an old abandoned factory, which is infamous of having tons of leaking chemical drums. The most sketchy ones are acrylonitrile and CS2. It's really concerning.
Carbon disulfide has a flash point below zero. If it catches alight its a pain to put out! A student was using carbon disulfide to recrystalise a product and it caught alight on the hot plate. I emptied an entire carbon dioxide extinguisher on it.
I'm so grateful for this channel. I studied in 5 faculties in university but one subject I never touched is chemistry. I've been trying to start learning it. Your passion and excitement is captivating and motivating.
I've always appreciated the saying "If you are close enough to read a 4 in a fire diamond, you are too close"
In biochem, I feel the most risky thing is the priciness of safer compounds (AEBSF as a substitution for PMSF, GelGreen/GelRed as a substitution for EtBr etc.) Also, some concentrated intercalating agent dissolved in DMSO really scares me.
I do remember recently learning how any intercalating agent is a carcinogen in my genetics class 😅
IMO the worst things most biochem labs handle in significant quantities are acrylamide/bis (for PAGE gels, neurotoxic and probably a carcinogen) and Phenol/chloroform mixtures for DNA preps.
The group we share our lab with also does a lot of UV-Vis work, and they clean their cuvettes with chromic acid. Nasty stuff, I wish they'd stop putting it in the bases section of our corrosives cabinet...
I love your videos. I have no idea what any of this stuff means, but you make it so interesting. I think I’ve watch all your videos almost. I even went on to the old channel. I really wish I had learn this stuff back in school. Super interesting
Absolutely loved the tier list although I was surprised to not see chlorine trifluoride included
Yeah - there’s a whole Sci Show episode on Chlorine Triflouride. Great line from that one: “when the Nazis are like whoa” !
@@billnickless Thank God it was never used during the war, and let's hope it never ever will.
@@billnicklessAnything that scares people too much to actively use in WAR should be taken very, very seriously.
Regards of their intrinsic hatred of some groups of people and general belligerence, Nazi germany still had a healthy sense of self-preservation.
I learned about cyanogen from the movie dragnet. It burns the eyes the throat the nose the lungs and if continuously inhaled death.
I almost never like or comment on videos. I almost never remember. This video and its similar videos are INSANELY interesting and informative and makes chemistry understandable for this neophyte. It's amazing to compare the wildly different structures of each of these.
Thank you!
Thank you Sam o' Nella for teaching me about fire diamonds, made this video really easier to understand
Ran a MOCVD machine that used all sorts of gnarly chemicals one of which was arsane. Also used PH3 H3Sb Et3Ga Me or Et3Al H4Sn H4Ge H2Se Me2Te Et4Pb and several other ones that were stupidly toxic. The heavier elements made longer wavelength laser wafers, while the lighter ones made shorter. For example PbInTe made lasers that worked at LN2 temperatures and emitted a few dozen miliwatts at 4.5 to 6.8um. InGaAlAs was used for making 1.3 and 1.5um telecom lasers while GaAlAsP was used to make red lasers from about 830nm to about 635nm. One time the dosing pump accidently fired a couple extra shots of Et3Al in the chamber and since it was so close to done we decided to just let it run and cap as normal. The resulting wafer lased at 612nm at up to 500mw per die which is a perfect haloween orange 😁🤓❤
vinyl chloride is actually non-hazardous according to the US railways, sorry bud 💀
Aw yes, 12:37 A.M. time for some midnight chemistry
Speaking of vinyl chloride, they just spilled thousands of gallons of it in Ohio 🙃
I wanted you to know someone who has used pentaborane and diborane. The good thing is we did everything under vacuum in millimolar quantities, so the rocket fires were much smaller than anything you organics do in your labs. On the pentaborane, a good read is found in the Richmond, VA newspaper where some men died when they did not know the cylinder they were dealing with was pentaborane. Around 1984 or 1985, while I was in graduate school at UVA.
How about a blursed tier list? Things that are ridiculous but still really cool
YAY!!! Another tier list!!! I love these!
:)
I have had to self teach myself much chemistry recently for my self taught work/hobbies, and it's really interesting to learn about the extremely harmful chemicals/reactions I've been dead sure to stay away from. I teach myself better than anyone else, so I opted to not go to college and get straight into teaching myself Trig, GR, and QM before the practical electrical/mechanical engineering I am making money doing now. I really do want to save up enough money to build a lab and buy/store all the chemicals I need, but the entry cost is just too high compared to fixing electronic and restoring jewelery rn. I can't what till that day though, watching advanced chemistry has always looked so fun, and I do enjoy working in relatively high risk/high concentration/high effort situations.
Ahhh, the memories of working at a silane plant as well. My first job after college. Starting with chlorosilanes and reacting them with Trimethyl orthoacetate (TMOA). You'd get a mix of substitution products, so your giant-size silver-jacketed column, filled with saddles was a must since the distillation was quite tedious.
I don't believe they sold it anymore at the time, but they'd cool Silane down overnight in dry ice and pour it off as a liquid to fill orders. Smoked like a wildfire from what I heard :)
Only subbed yesterday but this channel is already one of my favourites on RUclips ❤
Awesome video. I deal with a lot of these chemicals when I go to hazwaste facilities. You explained everything quite well.
Thanks!
I'd argue cyanogen should be S tier tho
Ive used all of these compounds. In undergraduate work we made picrates all the time and made naphthalene - picric acid pi complexes (precipitate). Ive distilled tbutylhydroperoxide several times and we used diazomethane in analytical labs for years. Diazomethane can decompose on ground glass joints and I've seen people making the stuff with standard quickfit gear and declaring it safe (until the inevitable happens. I can say we still have people using ozone as a reagent, (and the whole lab stinking of "garlic", with bosses saying its safe!!!
Kinda cool that I found your channel (and this video) while I'm at work. I am an operator at an Acrylonitrile plant and our by-products are Hydrogen Cyanide and Acetonitrile. When we're running full rate we make around 120,000 lbs a day of Hydrogen Cyanide 🥳
I am suspecting in the future we'll see a community post "What chemicals should I absolutely not ever make a video about and for good reason?" and then subsequently a tier list "Which Chemical In This List Will Upset Viewers Most?" Ok I'm joking although that would be entertaining if it actually happened. I'm sure you have more entertaining things planned than I'd come up with anyway! Thanks for another vid! Your channel is such a nice combination of "for people with serious STEM education or career knowledge/experience" and silly humor. I love it.
27:10 *"If you avoid working with it, you'll probably be fine."* ーThat Chemist, 2022.
I myself really enjoyed tBuLi. Used it in a synthesis reaction during my bioorganic synthesis course. Was working under nitrogen atmosphere to prevent exposure to oxygen. The vial I used was nearly empty though, so when I finished I had to neutralise the vial before it could be disposed of by slowly exposing it to oxygen in the fume hood. I will never forget the smoke coming out of the needle poking in the cap of the vial.
i loved hearing you and Hamilton on his podcast, my two favorite chemistry creators collabing :D
My thermochem prof gave us an example where he was paid to calculate if an ethylene oxide leak from a factory would do any harm to swimmers a couple km away. When he told us that, I didn't know how toxic and dangerous it was but after this video... Let's say I understand why he censored the company's name when showing their mail. Luckily the concentration was low enough to be of no harm to swimmers, and he made a good buck for calculating vapour pressure.
Concern also depends upon the volume, concentration, and carrier. That is one reason I think you move some up or down. Also is sensitivity of the nose and how much time you have to run from smelling it.
Agreed. Traincrash in Wetteren, Belgium, involving tanker railcars containing AN; HF-alkylation-units at your local refinery; H2S, which will incapacitate your smell in small concentrations giving you a false sense of safety... Good point!
No knowledge in the chemistry field, but these are so interesting to learn about. Thank you man
I can’t remember where or when but a train car of vinyl chloride burst and flooded a town with the stuff. There’s pictures of a fog hugging the ground in the streets. Very spooky
Me, thinking of "Risky Chemicals": HF, Ethers, acetylene, H2S...
That Chemist: hold my beaker.
Haha
Never been this early before
same
I love chemistry, and intend to have a career in it, but knowing that one slight mess up can cause you to be set on fire, dying because of poisoning, failing to breathe, have all of your nerves spasming and have broken bones from an explosion all at once (I imagine the reactants or products required to meet all of these criteria is very specific or not possible, but the point still stands). I want to do chemistry anyway though.
back in third-year undergraduate labs, I used triethyl aluminium as an initiator for a Ziegler-Natta polymerisation
having seen the pyrophoricity of alkyl aluminiums demonstrated in a lecture, I was a little concerned about handling it, but having thoroughly flushed both the bottle and the apparatus with nitrogen as per instructions, the addition and the reaction itself went perfectly smoothly
carelessly handled alkyl aluminiums in the research labs were the number one cause of fire alarms on site, though
But what if Fukinone is mixed with Assoanine…
Arsine definitely belongs in S tier!
fun fact: arsine is used in the production of semiconductors. There have been multiple deaths of people working in semiconductor fabrication related to it.
Don't forget TMAH, Germane, phosphine etc.
@@sauercrowder It's a scary job! They work with some very sus chemicals.
I almost forgot HF
Ooooh how I rue the day I've dropped the Picric acid flask on the lab floor. I tried everything to get rid of that yellow color and likely, after 10 years, the lab still might have some yellow hues due to that event. But it didn't explode or killed anyone due to toxicity. It's a pretty chill yellow powder. It was stored in those old glass flasks with a cork atop of it.
Hey Joey, another fire tier list! 🔥 Can you please do a tier list of the most dangerous radioactive isotopes? Thanks 😄
^!
The ones like cobalt-60 and cesium-137 that might go in a "salted bomb"?
Just listened to the podcast with Hamilton - have been subscribed to both of you for a while, I was supprised to see your name pop up on his podcast feed!
recommendations are weird thank you for having this tierlist even though i dont know anything about chemicals
I work with TMS diazomethane all the time….always wondered why it got wrapped up like a bomb when they shipped it to us….now I know….and I think I need a raise
Pyrophoric t-butyl lithium scare me, as well as HF
It was very pleasant to hear you on Hamilton's podcast!
The HCN description gave me PTSD flashbacks of having to memorize the Krebs cycle in undergrad 😮💨
Professor: The chemicals you're working with today can kill you.
Me: No eye protection, no gloves... that's the goal.
Looked into the Tert-butyllithium death, the lab training was pretty callous all around being that they all didn't seem to know where the shower was which was right in front of them, that being said she was more interested in going to law school which is a bad sign. The safety stuff starts from the first chemistry class, they just got too comfortable.
Yikes
Well guess who didn't go to law school.
I'm so glad I found your channel, dude.
Hi it’s Mott the HAZMAT manager again.
Before I watched your presentation I wrote down the names of the chemicals you listed and created my own tier list. I was just curious to see how much in agreement we would be.
After I completed my tier list I watched your presentation and at an initial glance it didn’t appear we agreed with much.
Then when I took a further look I had created my list where all the shock sensitive chemicals were placed on my S tier. My rational was that I placed the chemicals that could detonate because you look at them funny as the highest risk chemicals you can work with.
When I combined my S and A tiers together though I found we were largely in agreement. When I did that there were only 4 chemicals where I disagreed with you but that was only by like one level.
Though a word of caution. All but one of the chemicals you listed except one I would rank as a EHM (extremely hazardous material) that could easily kill you if the proper precautions are not met.
My point being is even when you rank them by hazard you certainly don’t want to be complacent when handling them as you picked some really nasty chemicals!
I'm never going to a lab again
Some not on here - Dimethylmercury, Dimethylcadmium, and Mercury Cyanide.
Those are good ones - I’m surprised the instability is so high for dimethylmercury
@@That_Chemist It has been proposed as a rocket fuel with fuming nitric acid as the oxidizer. Though chlorine trifluoride might give it even a bit more kick.
While I worked on an oil rig in North Dakota one of my rig mates would taste/smell every single chemical. Watched him huff up an extreme deoxidizer amd pass out immediately.
East Palestine, Ohio is being doused with some bad chemicals.
Fun fact about picric acid: It used to be a very common reagent for the staining of tissues in biology labs. When I was a biochem undergrad a prof who had been in the department for like 40 years retired and they discovered an old 1-litre bottle of picric acid that had been stored in just a regular cabinet under a sink for probably 30 years. Chemical safety has not always been a high priority for many research labs I guess. Apparently the picric acid had sublimated and left crystals all over the outside of the bottle and on the walls of the cabinet. They had to evacuate 1500 people from the bioscience building and call the bomb squad to dispose of the picric acid and clean up the cabinet.
I'm surprised there's no oxidizing agents on this list, you don't need to be flammable if you're the one setting stuff on fire... :P
Chlorine Trifluoride is a popular one I remember for it's use in rocket fuels.
I'm pretty sure Chlorine triflouride was trialled as a rocket fuel but rejected because it was too damn hard to work with, particularly in it's liquid form.