How is it you always have cool and relevant stories!?
EDIT: It occurs to me this might not be taken as a compliment. I meant it as one, though: Chuck's always got some cool story to add, and I suspect his biography would be a heckuva ride.
The interesting thing was that there was no outside wall to the building, just a woven steel curtain. If something did explode you wanted a path for the debris. On the outside of the building was a curved ramp, like a skateboard half-pipe. That way any explosion would be directed upward rather than outward.
A few years ago, upon returning home after work, my my wife told me that her mother had blown blown up her kitchen but that she was OK. (My late mother-in-law was a wonderful person BTW.)
I can be prone to inattention when my wife speaks to me but this, this got my attention. :-)
My mother in law was an antique dealer. To restore/bleach old china, she would put some (hair dresser grade) hydrogen peroxide in in/on the china in question and let it warm in the oven.
One day she did this, but for some reason, this time she used her kitchen microwave instead of the oven. While it was warming she stepped out of her kitchen (to put something in the recycle I think) and luckily escaped the blast that blew out her kitchen window and sent her microwave into the Great Beyond.
When the fire department came she, I guess, feigned ignorance of what could have caused it. She was after all, a sweet old lady.
After my wife finished telling me the story, I mentioned something to the effect that "You realize they used hydrogen peroxide in the German V2 rockets?"
A picture of the remains of the destroyed microwave was displayed at her funeral.
R.I.P. ma
Certainly reddit /r/nocontext material.
Any chemists care to comment on why the peroxide would explode in the microwave but not the oven?
These guy tested the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide across a range of microwave frequencies.
Since hydrogen peroxide decomposes when heated, I'm guessing it's just due to the microwaves heating the mixture.
And at the same freaking time he writes great thought-provoking posts about the serious stuff. Amazing.
Speaking of Oxygen though, I once attended a lecture/Q&A by the Myth Busters. It was pretty cool, and during the Q&A portion someone asked "Is there a myth you started, and then backed out?". They said that they won't do anything with liquid oxygen. They had a few myths about it, did some research, and realized that it can set pavement on fire. They then decided not to proceed.
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_won...
"And yes, what happens next is just what you think happens: you run a mixture of oxygen and fluorine through a 700-degree-heating block. "Oh, no you don't," is the common reaction of most chemists to that proposal"
"When 0.2 (mL) of liquid 02F2 was added to 0.5 (mL) of liquid CH4 at 90°K., a violent explosion occurred."
I mean how can't you love a substance that will violently detonate things at -180C.
Here - http://yarchive.net/space/rocket/fuels/peroxide.html - second message mentions Clark's "Ignition!" facts, and in first Henry Spencer states:
While there are some storage headaches -- the stuff decomposes slowly no matter what you do, so you must provide for tank venting -- otherwise peroxide is much easier and safer to handle. Its bad reputation is half outright myth and half the result of 1940s experience with seriously impure peroxide. To quote a friend, a rocket-propulsion professional, who investigated the matter as part of a study some years ago:
"As far as we could find out, the stories about problems with peroxide were just that, stories... Peroxide, now, seems to only very rarely do anything exciting, at all. And, even then, it seems to never do many of the things attributed to it in the stories."
Of course hydrogen peroxide can be dangerous - relatively recent explosion in Sweden (peroxidepropulsion.com) reminds us about that. At the same time significant volumes of it with more than 70% concentration are routinely used - so a chemist can calibrate the feeling.
You are correct that hydrogen peroxide (even up to 70%) is pretty safe by itself, but a chemist like Derek Lowe would use hydrogen peroxide in a reaction. Since he's an organic chemist, nearly every reaction is going to involve adding that oxidizer to a reducing agent (almost every organic molecule out there). When you add an oxidizer to a reducing agent, you're creating an unstable mixture that would love to explode. Just because it hasn't exploded on people in the past, doesn't mean it won't in the future.
I can remember doing some really stupid things when I was in grad school. I had a create pure m-CPBA [1] for a reaction (great! an oxidizer and reducing agent all in one molecule!!). Thinking I was smart, I purified a a lot of it, like 20 g (smart folks only purify what they need, like 1 or 2 g). To make sure it was dry I put it on a vacuum pump and then heated the flask with a heat gun. Nothing happened, but looking back I was dam lucky it didn't explode. If it had, I likely would have been seriously injured.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-Chloroperoxybenzoic_acid
Anyone here could recommend a book or a serie of books to get myself into shape on that subject ?
most of a senior/PG chemistry degree is about learning how to work with this stuff and it's not book learnin' so much as translating what should happen, into what could happen and then what shouldn't ever ever ever happen. this is best done in a practical mentor-tutor fashion. even saying that, most uni's are really crap at protecting their chemistry students. I damn near killed myself _after_ getting my PhD and didn't really learn how to analyse the risks until i worked in industry (which leveraged 8+ years of theory)...
Atoms are composed to two sections:
A positively charged center -- the nucleus.
A negatively charged outside -- the electron cloud.
When several atoms get together, they do so because their electron clouds start intermingling. This sharing of their electrons is fundamentally what a bond is.
A bond is strong when both of the atoms really want their electrons to intermingle. Conversely, a weak bond is when the atoms are "forced" to be next to each other and intermingle. Strong bond = opposite poles of a magnet next to each other. Weak bond = similar poles of a magnet next to each other.
Somewhat counterintuitively, it's not the fact that the bond's want to separate from each other that makes something really explosive/reactive.
To really understand what's going on, you have to take a look at the energetics (thermodynamics) of how a reaction proceeds. The tendency of the physical world is always towards disorder (entropy). Rather than becoming more ordered, every single atom in the universe wants to be more comfortable.
Think back to our magnet analogy. Magnets with the same pole facing each other really don't want to be next to each other. In fact, they'd LOVE to find another magnet with the opposite pole facing them. The magnets which have a weak bond find it really, really easy to separate. In fact, almost anything will split the connection. However, those magnets, once separated, must find another (opposite) partner for them to pair up with. The amount of energy that they release when they find their perfect mate is evidenced by the fact that the magnets will literally hop across short distances and smack together in a satisfying *crack.
What we also know in thermodynamics is that energy cannot be created, nor destroyed. Thus the net energy in any reaction must be equal on both sides. We know a couple of things:
The energy required to split the weak bond is really, really little.
The energy released when a strong bond is formed is a lot (in fact, you hear the release of energy in the form of heat and sound!).
Atoms prefer strong bonds to weak ones (entropy).
Putting everything together, when you have an molecule with extremely weak bonds (HOOOH), it takes almost no effort for those bonds to come apart. However, when those oxygens go find other molecules to bond with, that releases some energy. Thus NET ENERGY is heavily favored in the exothermic (release of energy) direction. When enough of those super weak bonds are broken, and when enough of the strong bonds are formed rapidly, you have a simultaneous release of a huge amount of heat --- an explosion.
Sorry if that's a little long, but I tried to explain your questions. (Which was a fundamentally very interesting question!)
Bond breakage is ALWAYS endothermic. http://books.google.com/books?id=ZOm8L9oCwLMC&pg=PA202&lpg=P...
Edit: Sorry, I hate leaving one-sentence rebuttals.
The energy required to break the bonds are so low that in comparison, the energy released when the products of the reaction are formed is very high. This giant disparity in energy released at the same time creates a sharp increase of heat and light (boom).
Also, your company is pretty neat. Any way for me to directly contact you?
Fundamentally, it's mostly about the electron charges on an atom which are balanced out by the number of protons in the nucleus. The proton however is a tightly packed point charge but the electrons can only exist in various energy levels (think of different shapes) around it.
You could think of it as trying to pack a bunch of magnets that have very elaborate electromagnetic field shapes into a box in a specific configuration. You might find one configuration that happens to be 'stable' until a big piece of iron is nearby and then suddenly it all snaps into a new configuration.
The rest is easy: a single atom of Oxygen is extremely reactive. If you take an O=O molecule (= means double covalent bond) and add some fuel, you get fire. At high concentrations, drop in just a bit of fuel and you can get a violent reaction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSyAehMdpyI&list=PL8dPuuaLjX...
I worked as a chemist for 7 years and witnessed 4 serious accidents, 3 of the 4 due to oxidizing agents (2 of them were peroxides). Some of the folks have scars to this day because of it.
Radioactivity and virus work strikes me as possibly more dangerous because of the relatively silent nature of the failures.
For absolutely no explosive lulz at all you could try for an exciting career in organic mercury compounds. (But first, I'd recommend checking out the wikipedia entry for Karen Wetterhahn: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn )
Or, did I say "no explosive lulz"? Apparently at one point the USAF considered using dimethyl mercury as a rocket fuel. (Source: buried in "Ignition: an informal history of liquid rocket propellants" by John D. Clarke, which can be found here: http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf )
On topic I wouldn’t want to work with peroxide peroxides either :) Derek often has write up about what some of the really crazy organic chemists who work on unstable compounds do - truly eye opening for someone with a biology background like me.
"There's a recent report of a method to make a more stable form of it, by mixing it with TNT. Yes, this is an example of something that becomes less explosive as a one-to-one cocrystal with TNT."
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/11/11/things_i_won...
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_won...
I witnessed a test of a small (500 lb thrust) H2/F2 rocket engine. The fuel & oxidizer were fed into the combustion chamber with small turbo pumps, which was the point of the test. The native fluoride protective coating failed in the F2 turbo pump, and there was an explosion with subsequent metal/fluorine fire.
Blockhouse sealed off and we all grabbed the Scott packs as a yellowish cloud of fluorine drifted by, setting fire to sagebrush as it went. Can't beat exotic propellants for excitement.
