May 7th, 2010 • 05:05
Friday round-up
Chemical health & safety stories from the past week:
- A new entry in In The Pipeline‘s “Things I won’t work with” category: Small, smelly isocyanides
- Several stories on the toxicity of the chemical dispersants being used to combat the Gulf of Mexico oil spill: ProPublica, Associated Press, Wired Science, New York Times, Grist, and others
- Solvent-type chemical caused small explosion at UC Davis lab (my sources say methylmethacrylate, probably incompletely polymerized when the jar was sealed)
- Fuel-laden 18-wheeler explodes at Texas refinery
- Micron worker burned in flash fire (at the station “where waste chemicals used in the semiconductor process are rendered safe for transport”)
- Chemical spill in downtown Charleston, S.C. (Rhodia Chemical, phosphorus trichloride)
- Fire crews battle factory blaze at K & H Surface Technologies in Dandenong, Australia
- Two People Burned In Redstone Arsenal, Ala., Explosion Die Of Injuries (dismantling military explosives)
- No injuries in chemical cloud in Sioux City, Iowa (bromine + a glycol)
- Fire damages chemical plant in Dalton, Ga. (Polystar Chemical)
- C&EN CSB seeks advice on safe substitutes for methyl isocyanate
- C&EN Army destroys recovered chemical warfare material
- C&EN Deoxofluorination reagents proliferate (“easily handled and significantly more stable than the current workhorse reagents”)
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