CENtral Science

Friday round-up

Before we get started, a topic for discussion: There’s a video here (click on “House fire worried one man the most”) that shows one of the neighbors of the explosives-laden house in San Diego county. He says that he heard about a half-dozen explosions coming from the house in the previous four months or so. Would you have called the police? The guy doesn’t say what he thought was going on.

Now moving on to our usual collection of chemical health and safety news from the past week:

• In the Pipeline flags an air-stable, non-runaway reactive fluorinating reagent (in JACS)
• The Big Picture blog has a stunning set of nighttime photos of the the sulfur mine in the crater of the Kawah Ijen volcano in Indonesia; last year the blog had an equally arresting daytime set
• The draft National Nanotechnology Initiative Environmental, Health, and Safety Research Strategy is now open for public comment (there’s a bit of commentary and a promise of more to come over at 2020 Science)
• The National Institute of Occupational Safety & Health is also seeking comment on a draft exposure limit for carbon nanotubes: 7 micrograms of carbon nanotubes or carbon nanofibers per cubic meter of air as an eight-hour, time-weighted average, respirable mass concentration
• 57 more Hanford buildings to be demolished in Washington for radiological and hazardous chemical contamination; the buildings were used to support chemical separation of nuclear fuel
• The U.S. Chemical Safety & Hazard Investigation Board is set to recommend new chemical plant safety regulations for Kanawha County, W.Va., site of the fatal Bayer CropScience explosion in 2008
• Olin Chemical to end use of mercury in chemical processing
• Pacific Functional Fluids fined $21,000 for not disclosing hazardous materials; 10,000 pounds or more each of ethylene glycol, potassium hydroxide and acetic acid
• C&EN Coal ash spill in Tennessee still a problem: downstream sediments are polluted with arsenic(III)
• C&EN EPA sets standards to compare chemicals’ safety (subscription required)
• C&EN Russian facility will scrap chemical arms (subscription required)

Fires and explosions:

• C&EN Something at AL Solutions, which reprocesses titanium and zirconium in West Virginia; two killed
• Packs of highly concentrated aluminum chloride and sodium nitrite, illegally stored, in a shop next to an internet cafe in southwest China; seven killed and 37 injured
• Something and then aniline at a pesticide factory in China; seven injured
• Chemicals from refinishing floors were disposed of improperly, burning down a $1.7 million building at Boy Scout Camp Belzer in Indiana
• Something at Alabama A&M University

Leaks, spills, and other exposures:

• Can you imagine buying a new home and then discovering 13 Mason jars full of mercury? “Troy police and fire officers from the hazmat team responded and tested the air in the home and determined that it exceeded safe levels and was unsafe for human occupancy.”
• Anyhdrous ammonia in Minnesota; 200 gallons, resulting in 50 people hospitalized and 1,000 evacuated
• Sulfuric and chromic acids at Gardner Aerospace, in the U.K.
• Mercury at an abandoned wastewater treatment plant in the U.K.; it has been used as a bearing lubricant in an aeration arm of a settling tank
• A shelf of chemicals in a safety cabinet in the genome sciences building at the University of Washington, when the shelf broke; about 6 L of stuff mixed together and one person wound up in a safety shower
• Tetrahydrofuran at the Unviersity of South Carolina
• Ammonium hydroxide at Kansas University
• On roads and railways: magnesium bisulfite, drilling fluid, methanol, sulfuric acid