Sodium + Private Lake = Fun

travisbean writes "This should be enough to pique your interest. Add to the story that the guy has his own pond and I think we can all see where this is going... 'The first step was the procurement, through eBay, of three and half pounds of solid sodium metal for about a hundred dollars. This is a decent price for a small quantity like this. Small being a relative term: It's used by the ton in industry, but anything more than a few grams is a dangerous quantity if found in your home. Three and a half pounds is enough, for example, to blow your home to bits under the right conditions.'"

Comments

And we wonder

[TheOste]

Why many of the fun toys are banned for sale on EBay... Quit making this stuf so public :D

Chem classess are still fun

[Sycraft-fu]

And you still get to play with things you shouldn't, if you have the right teacher. I've got a couple good stories from AP Chem at my high school, in 1996 and 1997.

A favourite activity of kids in that class was filling balloons with oxygen, hydrogen and something else flamable, methane I think but I can't remember for sure. At any rate in 1996, year before I took it, the kids were doing this I believe as a prep for the magic show we put on for the elementry kids (we did it in 1997 too). Well they happened to set it up right under a sprinkler and it set it off, drenching them and setting off the fire alarm. The video of it (they were taping) was quite amusing.

So in 1997 when I was there we did a few different things. One related to this whole sodium discussion. Allt he metals from that group were placed, in a very small quantity, in water to show the increase in reactivity. All were stored as small chunks in oil. Lithium just fizzed a little, sodium kind of half burned and exploded and so on up. However the Cesium was rather more reactive than the teacher expected, or perhaps she just grabbed too big a lump. IT ended up blowing the whole 2 litre beaker apart and scaring the shit out of everyone, her espically.

She also told us that her son managed to make himself nice and sick to his stomach by drinking some fairly concentrated (like 6 molar) hydrochloric acid. See she used the little plastic chem bottles for water bottles in her house. For some reason, she had some HCl there one day, in the same bottle (storing acid was a common use for them in the lab). He didn't look at the lable and took a nice swig. Now HCl won't burn you like some, it's stomach acid, but that concentrated will cause a fair amount of dsicomfort.

Theory for why the bucket burst

[mrflip]

Quoth the author:

This theory would imply that only a minimal shock wave should be transmitted into the water, since the explosion would be happening well above the surface, as the picture seems to show. Unfortunately that theory is not supported by the fact that the metal bucket was split at the seams, even though less than an inch of rim extended over the level of the water.

Water is (nigh) incompressible -- so a small shock wave goes a long way. Since air has such a small bulk modulus (large compressibility) lots of energy can be stored in compressing the air and in adiabatically heating it. Since the water has a huge bulk modulus, there is no opportunity for the downward portion of the shock wave to dissipate -- that is, until it reaches the seams of the bucket and causes it to bust (dissipating energy as plastic deformation of the metal).

This is also why lighting and flushing a cherry bomb is so enjoyable for non-janitors: the shock wave goes into plumes of water and wrecking the sewer system, not harmlessly into the air.

flip

Re:The OSS used sodium metal & potassium tabs

[kiwimate]

The USAAF dropped cases to the French resistance, who used them to little or no effectiveness- not entirely unexpected French-like bevaior.

Enough already!

Everyone knows the French are cowards, yada yada yada. Did you read that bit in the newspaper a few days ago where the French rescued all the Westerners (including several Americans) from the Ivory Coast? (And, by the way, the article fails to point out that the French had been there for several days before the American forces turned up.) Would it surprise you to learn that the French, prior to WWII, had one of the proudest and most effective resistance records in the world? Drop it, for crying out loud.

And no, I have no affinity to France. For what it's worth, I'm from one of the few countries which has felt the effects of official state-sponsored French terrorism in the past few decades. (The bombing of the ship "Rainbow Warrior" in Auckland, New Zealand, 7 July 1985, ordered by the French Secret Service to dissuade Greenpeace from protesting continued nuclear bomb testing at Mururoa Atoll.)

But enough with the xenophobic hatred. Considering the real wars and battles currently being fought by more than half the nations in the world, don't you think that leaving off these snide and childish insults might be rather a good idea?

Re:Business..

[harborpirate]

Not sure why this keeps getting modded up in every single thread..

Moderators, I think its time we declared this the new All Your Base/Hot Grits/Natalie Portman/etc "Slashdot catch phrase" (TM). It should be modded down as such. After all, its only funny the first couple hundred times.

Please check the following link for information on how Slashdot catch phrases (TM) and other Memes work: http://totl.net/Cool/

You may now continue your regularly scheduled productivity draining activity.