Quote:
Originally Posted by tadd
Stuff is constantly found.... Found plenty of containers of picric acid that had crystalized over time.
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Aaahhh picric. Beautiful stuff until it blows your face off. Even in the '90s we used it as an etchant/colorant for metallography at school. That lab bench was soaked with half a century of the stuff (and metal picrates are even more sensitive). I always wondered what a good whack with a hammer would do.
(We also used a lot of HF with little training or PPE, but that's another story. As well as my wife's experiences with hydrazine and that one time they cooked off a selenium PVD target)
Prepping for a renovation I had a summer job cleaning out the 1930s-era chemistry building at a mining school. It was interesting but thankfully not "exciting". Got to see the Golden CO bomb-squad more than a few times, crusty rusty-lidded jars of picric acid being the cause of many of them. Then there was the yellowcake. So much uranium!
Good times, I'll keep sticking to the less-squishy side of science. Viruses and bugs are no friend of mine.