Anhydrous redistilled hydrogen fluoride? No thanks!
Mind you: this is the stuff that, on skin contact, doesn't just burn you. It will immediately move through your skin to fuck up your nervous system, your organs, and your electrolyte balance to give you a heart attack.
If this synthesis were to kill me somehow, I'd rather blow myself up than get sprayed with HF.
Refer to [1] for more, unless you're easily disgusted...
> HF has actually been used right out of the cylinder for a long time in Merrifield peptide synthesizers. It's the traditional way to cleave the peptide off the resin at the final step, so there are actually a lot of people who've used the stuff. But it's in a dedicated apparatus that is (that had better be) well sealed, and people treat it with due respect. At a former employer of mine, there was an accident with one of these machines right before I joined the company. The shout "HF LEAK!" went out into the halls, and I'm told that the whole area set a never-to-be-equaled evacuation record.
Last night I somehow dreamed I had a hydrofluoric acid burn. Reading this thread I remembered there was this rust stain remover product on US Amazon that is 3% HF. https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B000LNQNM0/
It's got great reviews (and I'm inclined to believe that this product will do the job). There's one 1-star review that stands out though: "Simply put. It doesn’t work and it was shipped leaking." Yikes!
Who knows what was left of that 3% HF after it was shipped leaking... Maybe it was just mildly spicy water when delivered, and the poor amazon warehouse workers got to have most of the fun.
I’m sure they have all the equipment on hand to provide proper first aid for the vast multitude of chemicals they stock. They would never sell anything unsafe, right?
I thought surely you must be joking when I clicked on the link. Then I thought, ok, I'm a high school flunky, and I must be confusing this with the "don't go within a million miles of" substance that Walter White used to dissolve corpses and the one that I've read about repeatedly over the years that is immediately poisonous to human life even if you spill it only on a fingertip. But nope the 1-star reviews make it clear that I'm not confused. Then I start wondering how this can even be shipped with regular parcel services...
I finished up by thinking "he linked to the reviews, because the product is no longer for sale". So I click through the link, nope. $11/bottle. And not soem Engrishy label, looks like I could find it on the shelf at Home Depot or Walmart. Seriously, wtf.
Some fire suppression systems are not intended to save the lives of the people in the place where the fire is. E.g. in the ammunition store on a warship. They are intended to stop the fire before it triggers something much worse (like an explosion)
My dad had some interesting-acid stories, when he was a young chemist. They both involve cleaning glassware. The era is around 1970.
One was something he said resembled a wok full of the usual suspects of strong acids. Overnight, the mixture was hygroscopic, so they'd start it heating up in the morning to dehydrate it and increase the concentration. To test if it was ready, they'd throw in a small piece of wood, about the size of a match. If it disintegrated on contact, it was ready. Then you could dip your glassware to clean it.
But, in another lab, they would use a small bottle of hydrofluoric acid at the bench, taking a layer off the glass at the same time. While the dangers of large exposures were well known, he did mention the nerve damage and it being highly annoying and painful if trace amounts got under your fingernails, a somewhat common injury of the lab that everyone simply tolerated.
He thought the latter was a more convenient arrangement.
I'm a student in college studying cybersecurity but I have an interest in computer engineering.
I also have an interest in energetics. Florine is one of those chemicals you just got to respect. I know HF is used in the photoresist etch, and I'm interested in doing my own chip design. I realized that if I ever spilled HF on my, and the calcium cream didn't work, I'm better of just dying to anything other than HF. Iv heard its horrific to get on you in concentrated doses.
The price we pay for the small feature sizes on the wafer, and the increased density, in paid for in the usage of harsh chemicals.
Mind you: this is the stuff that, on skin contact, doesn't just burn you. It will immediately move through your skin to fuck up your nervous system, your organs, and your electrolyte balance to give you a heart attack.
If this synthesis were to kill me somehow, I'd rather blow myself up than get sprayed with HF.
Refer to [1] for more, unless you're easily disgusted...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrofluoric_acid_burn