What happens when you dip a light bulb in hydrofluoric acid?

boing
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That’s why such things should be stored in a container together with some sort of a scavenger for the vapors. If it leaks, it gets reacted away.

I’d reckon yes. The stuff is common in semiconductor plants and the workers aren’t dropping like flies. In the plant mom worked, it was respected (and it earned respect by some bad burns) but not outright feared. It’s one of the chemicals with worse reputation than reality. (On the other hand, the other way would be more dangerous.)

You can even survive a self-administered enema of that thing, and that speaks volumes.

That’s my favorite! The prose is so colorful a rainbow is solid grey in comparison!

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Pointless or not, I’ll still argue that something like ClF3 is far scarier. At least HF can be diluted down to less terrifying concentrations. You can’t dilute ClF3 because there’s nothing you can dilute it with that won’t won’t make it go all 4th of July.

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Speaking of light bulbs and harsh chemicals, I suddenly recall that when we first learned about alkali metals way back in high school, the teacher mentioned that elemental cesium could be used to make frosted glass, i.e. because it’s just that reactive. It occurs to me that in all the intervening years I have not investigated whether that is actually a thing as described.

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You mean something like this? As always, Jim Henson got there first.

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You can handle it in gas phase, and dilute it with argon or other inert carrier gas. (Or, when dumping into atmosphere, with nitrogen.) Such gas mixtures are used for etching silicon in semiconductor industry.

Quite a lot of unpleasant (and fun) stuff goes into making our cellphones. (I am thinking about a way for small labs to produce the stoffs “online” from less unpleasant-to-have-around precursors and purify it in a mass spectrometer before introducing into the work space; the purification step would also make it much cheaper as the ultrapure things are Expensive.)

And if you want to dilute it in liquid phase, you can use liquid hydrogen fluoride as a solvent. That dealing with liquid HF is an improvement is itself quite telling about the hell-in-a-drop nature of the material.

Also, for your collective pleasure, a handling manual for ClF3 from Rocketdyne, 1961.
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=AD0266121
Note the need to passivate the fuel system with gaseous fluorine. Such a friendly chemical it is.

A quote by John D. Clark, author of " Ignition! - An informal history of liquid rocket propellants" (which I heartily suggest to read cover to cover):

”It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.”

On a side note, the no ignition delay is quite a safety feature. The last thing you want with a rocket engine is a delayed ignition, when you have the chamber full of fuel-oxidizer and it all starts reacting at once, instead of orderly as-introduced fashion. That thing is called a “hard start” and can lead to… well, to use a term from borrowed from Li-ion battery industry, “rapid spontaneous disassembly”.

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You can also dissolve glass in molten sodium hydroxide.

Molten sodium or potassium hydroxide has lots of uses, e.g. when you need to solubilize a rock or glass or ceramics for analysis (or for resource extraction).

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self-administered hydrofluoric acid enema.

It seems Doctors have more important questions to ask than “Why?”

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I think the comorbid cocaine intoxication provided them with enough of an answer.

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It’s not just for destroying evidence!

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I’m much more afraid of dimethylmercury than I am of hydrofluoric acid. For one thing hydrofluoric acid is so reactive it doesn’t last long in the natural environment.

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Alright - here’s my half-baked theory: HF would be considered safer if it were more dangerous.

It is a dangerous chemical, but its utility frequently outweighs the (not quite insane) risks, so it racks up a death toll out of proportion to its objective riskiness because it gets used way more often than something like dimethylmercury

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post pix or gtfo

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That’s not a trivial injury, however. Mortality for emergency Hartmann’s procedure is close to 10%, never mind the added trauma of the sigmoid colectomy. Plus the added morbidity and mortality risks from reversing the colostomy later on down the track (which most people prefer to undergo, rather than crapping into a bag for the rest of their life).

The guy in the case report may have survived, but getting over his moment of madness and back to approaching his previous level of function probably took well over a year — and he’ll never be quite the same again.

The acute emergency management of a Hydrofluoric Acid exposure is also rather unpleasant and the stuff scares the crap out of me!

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As interesting as this is (and it is interesting), whenever I’m about to see a video involving electricity and acid, I’m just a little disappointed that there wasn’t either a loud noise, violent bubbling, or someone in the back going “woah!”

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One of my most vivid memories is related to HF. I was young process engineer in electronics manufacturing over 25 years ago. Long story but very amusing…now.

I was the primary HazMat response member responding to an incident where someone tried to solidify a barrel of liquid acid for transport. For whatever reason, our waste hauler lost his ability to take it in liquid form. This particular barrel was a 3/4 full 55 gallon mixture of concentrated nitric and HF acids (used to etch circuit materials resistant to etching in any other way). Some genius decided to solidify it by adding sawdust. Wait, what?! Yeah, sawdust, not vermiculite which is at least recommended (but still a mistake for that mixture).

They had just added a few pounds of highly flammable sawdust and this 55 gallon barrel of nastiness was heating up, smoking out the bungs, and generally scaring the pants off anyone who saw it (in a fenced yard but at a public street corner). I get suited up in a full Tyvek bunny suit and respirator and I’m shortly standing in front of this thing with my boss. His idea was to add an acid neutralizer to this mixture. I told him that might be a bad idea, that it would create a lot more heat and probably not make it safer. He said do it anyway. So after I poured about a few gallons into the drum and stood back a few feet. That was just-in-time because a fair portion of the barrel’s contents came shooting out the bungs, hit the 10’ tall steel ‘shed roof’ over our heads, and rained down on us.

Then the orange fumes of nitric/nitrous compounds started up in earnest. We evacuated a few square city blocks. I got a nice decontamination by the local fire department, followed by a pointed interview by the fire chief (in front of a local news crew), and a free trip to the hospital for dessert.

I can honestly say Tyvek probably saved my life. After some corporate sharks investigated the following week some employees were canned. I got a commendation. Our waste hauler tried solidifying one of these in HIS yard with vermiculite and… it also blew up. We changed haulers, lol.

Oh, and don’t let your kids grow up to be HazMat team members. I have another story about me moving a fizzing 5 gallon carboy of accidentally-made nitroglycerin from inside a building to the shipping dock.

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But that’s using the chemist’s definition of “strong” acid (full dissociation in solvent), rather than the everyday definition (will etch its way through almost anything).

I’ll leave it there, since people have gone and posted all the links about absurdly dangerous chemicals that I thought of as soon as I saw the post.

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Just gonna leave this here…

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That happens in better families. See the case of using wheat-based organic kitty litter for immobilizing of radioactive waste, instead of using inorganic clay-based one. With radioactilicious results.

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Thought. How do you think the affordable thermal cam cellphone attachments will help the hazmat people? I would say the ability to remotely assess a vessel temperature could be pretty priceless.

(Also, wouldn’t it be better to cool the drum well from the outside, then carefully dilute the content? What would, now in retrospect with the 20/20 hindsight, be a better way to handle the Smoking Drum Affair?)

Ouch. How did that happen? Why not neutralize it in situ?
Accidentally made organic peroxides are also fun.
(It’s generally a good idea to be prepared for a mishap. Even in small scale home lab settings. Of course such lofty goal is somewhat difficult to achieve, and then there is the issue with becoming complacent and lose the preparedness for the unexpected.)

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All the calcium gluconate available, IIRC.
IANAChemist, but I was a printer for a while. One print run we dealt with was the labels for a range of hazardous chemicals. In most cases the name of the contents was spelled out in WHOPPING BIG BLACK LETTERS. For the HF labels, we had to reduce the name to about half that size, because all the warnings and the descriptions of emergency first-aid were all competing for space.

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