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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.'"
Bulk metallic sodium runs under a buck per pound (15 cents to a dollar), when you are buying a 300# drum. Prices in smaller lots and higher purity are slightly higher, ranging up to around $35/pound for analytical grade.
The higher purity metal makes little or no difference when you are tossing it into a highly impure natural lake.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
My dad worked for the space program on fuel cells for several years. They often had pounds and pounds of lithium to play with in the lake behind the company. They seemed to enjoy making little boats, packing them with as much lithium as they could hold, shiping them out, and throwing rocks at them until it exploded when the boat capsized. They had sodium too, but lithium made a much bigger and louder explosion.
a guy with weather baloons in a lawnchair? nope, I don't think so.
Snopes.com (an Urban Legends site) respectfully disagrees with you.
Up, Up, and Away!
I recall a story from high school (although it may be apochryphal) that a chemistry teacher at my school had been demonstrating the reactivity of various metals and had a number of small chunks of said metals arrayed along his bench in various jars.
:-)
As usual the sodium was kept in mineral oil - and in the story I heard, one of the other (presumably less reactive) metals was kept under water.
When the most trusted kid in the class was left to clean up at the end, they claimed that he'd inadvertantly placed the lump of sodium back into the jar containing water - but that it had not exploded because it was still coated with oil.
The story goes that some hours later, the oil was finally displaced by the water in the jar and the small chunk of sodium then exploded - shattering the entire row of glass jars and spreading exotic and highly reactive metal chunks all over the room resulting in hundreds of small explosions and fires.
I kinda suspect that this may not be a true story though because I can't find a reasonable candidate for the metal that would have to have been kept under water in order for this to be true. However, there was some kind of an explosion/fire in the lab because I remember chemistry classes being cancelled for about three weeks afterwards.
Chemistry classes back in the mid-1960's were much more dangerous than kids are exposed to these days. I clearly recall being given small amounts of metallic mercury to *play* with!! These days, if you so much as crack a mercury thermometer they evacuate the city for three blocks in every direction.
It's a shame, mercury is incredibly good fun to play with - until the vapours poison your brain of course! It's hard to come to terms with something so heavy that's "just" a liquid - and it's amazing how the droplets 'shatter' when you hit them with the end of a ruler.
www.sjbaker.org
Why are people getting so grumpy with this guy?
Isn't what he did funny, at worst? He didn't ruin anyone else's land... and maybe his next trick will be with sulfur or chlorine, or so... and then the lake won't be so basic.
Long live idiotic experiments! It's the unethical and moronic that make the best breakthroughs in science.. (not that I'm calling this experiment a 'breakthrough'.. I'm just saying, moronic is good when it comes to new 'experiments' or data gathering.)
---- *dog sitting next to a computer, with his beady eyes shifting left to right*
I remember reading in an OSS history book about crude time bombs that were made using wine bottles filled with water and gelatin coated tablets of Na metal and/or Potassium. The method was simple: Pop a couple of tabs in the bottle, roll it under a truck or other igniteable item, and you have a half-hour to get away before the water dissolves the tablet casing. The USAAF dropped cases to the French resistance, who used them to little or no effectiveness- not entirely unexpected French-like bevaior.
Sodium is the second lightest of the alkali earth metals. Interestingly, it is the cheapest metal money can buy. Light enough it would float on the water, if it weren't for the aforementioned explosiveness of such contact. Interestingly, the spontaneous reactivity of the alkali metals increases as a function of their weight ... cesium and francium are much more dangerous (or fun, depending on your PoV.)
compared to the barrels of magnesium that I saw during a TLC/Discovery special on fires... This company had barrels filled with magnesium in oil, and something else caught fire. So the firemen, unaware of the Mg in barrels, start spraying water everywhere. Suddenly there's this TREMENDOUS white flash and defeaning boom, I mean we're talking lightning strike in daylight. See here for just a small amount of magnesium being sprayed with water.
I've only seen this with a few grams.
If thrown on top of water it shoots around -- think of a rocket with no control. It may have melted a bit and broke apart (its a soft metal and melts at relatively low temperature), but it was inside a beaker and hard to tell. It happened fast and made a lot of smoke, smell, and noise.
If you dump the water on top (sodium in a dry beaker, then pour the water on top) the compression of the water on top of the rapid reation causes enough pressure to break the beaker (or to break a normal Pyrex beaker, anyway). You want to wear eye protection, as the broken glass explodes with pretty good force, enough to break the skin of the students sitting in the front row. Then, the chemistry teacher gets fired.
I think it would take a pretty small lake and a pretty big pile of sodium to substantially alter the pH of the lake. Guess it depends on how deep the lake is.
Sleep is for the Weak
It's a good thing I read the PTT site a few days ago linked from the IgNoble Awards, because it's slashdotted all to hell now. If it weren't for that, I'd provide you with a link to the Cesium page.
As for Francium, I think I got to read the page for every element he had, and I don't seem to recall him having any. Some of the cool stuff he did have was some Lite Salt (NaCl/KCl mixture) which was measurably radioactive (!) because of a certain amount of natural Potassium is radioactive, and a Fiestaware bowl (which used Uranium as a dye) which was significantly radioactive and for which he made a cast lead bowl in which to store it.
A little bit of trivia: more than a few of the Wolfram Research folks have purchased samples of Tungsten. Why? Tungsten's symbol is W, representing its name in German: Wolfram.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
The teacher who oversaw my senior year independant study in chem had a similar story, though not quite as dangerous. The best part was she had video! Shortly after taking over as head of the chem department she had started to clean out the supply closet of dangerous things that were no longer used (or allowed to be used in many cases) for classes. During this work she found a 2.5lb block of solid sodium in a large oil filled container. Since this was enough to cause a serious explosion she immediately removed it from the school, and after making sure that the container wouldn't leak took it out to the lake behind the adjacent elementary school. She found a .22 rifle and a video camera and made a very educational film, she set the can afloat and rowed about a hundred feet away. There she placed the camera at the bow of the boat and shot the can. About 5 seconds after the can was hit and began to sink there was a massive explosion, so violent that the boat was rocked hard enough to knock the camera back into the bottom of the boat =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I shudder to think of the danger of my middle school science teacher leaving a jar of sodium in oil around the room for the better part of the year. It just sat there, and we didn't really know anything about it until she put some in a tray filled with water then put that on an overhead projector. Anyone else curious as to how this guy managed to find an auction for sodium on eBay, the site that has a list of banned items longer than the entire list of auctions for "Star Wars" displayed on one page?
I have no idea of the actual legal standing.. but I believe the state should have a right to determine what you can put in your own lake, as that water eventually ends up in other lakes in the country, and is ultimately part of the water supply.
He probably does not have a pure sample of Francium, even though it can be found in nature, because it is short lived. Its longest lived isotope is Fr-223, with a half-life of about 22 minutes.
Francium naturally occurs because Uranium-235 has a long half life (7*10^8 years), and it can decay per: U-235 => Th-231 => Pa-231 => Ac-227 => Fr-223 => Ra-223 => etc.
That is the only significant source of Francium in nature.
On the other hand, although the only Plutonium and Technetium on Earth are manmade, he could in principle have samples of these elements, since they have isotopes with reasonably long half lives.
The most common type has a half life of only 21.8 months (that's 223Fr,
:-)
Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh. Surely you mean "21.8 minutes," Galahad2.
Seriously, it's an understandable mistake. But it is most unusual for a scientist to measure time in months, because different months have different lengths!
Everything went as planned for a few seconds, then the burning molten sodium caused the same kind of fuel/air explosion as described in the 'Sodium Party' article. The resultant shockwave took the bottom out of the glass(!!) water bath, releasing about 5 gallons of water onto the workbench, along with little bits of fizzing sodium. The gas jar (probably about 1 pound in weight) cleared the adjacent bench, landing maybe 10 feet away.
pH changes are incredibly dangerous for local wildlife and animal life (including fish, reptiles, AND mammals) who use the water as a drinking source.
-- Taken from Acid Rain and North America:
Scientists determine whether rain or lake water is acidic by measuring its pH (the measure of acidity or alkalinity of a solution on a scale of 0 to 4). A value of 7 is considered neutral, whereas values less than 7 are acidic and values over 7 are alkaline or basic. A change of one unit on the pH scale represents a factor of ten in acidity; for example, a solution with a pH of five is ten times as acid as one with a pH of six (Somerville, 1996, p.174).
-- End Quote
So for every point of pH increase, it's a factor of 10 increase in the effect.
-- Same Source
As lakes and streams become more acidic, the amount of fish, aquatic plants and animals that live in these waters decrease. Although some plants and animals can survive acidic waters, others are acid-sensitive and will die as the pH declines. Plants and animals living within an ecosystem are highly interdependent. If acid rain causes the loss of acid-sensitive plants and animals, organisms at all trophic levels within the food chain may be affected which then causes a disruption to the entire ecosystem.
-- End Quote
The same effects occur when the pH of a body of water becomes too basic. Acid-dependant creatures suffer and die. (hint: the human body requires a certain pH to exist. Raise or lower that pH to your peril!)
-- Lifted from Wellness Garden:
Nothing does well in an overly acidic or alkaline pH medium, least of all the human body! Just as acid rain can destroy a forest and alkaline wastes can pollute a lake, an imbalanced pH continuously corrodes all body tissue, slowly eating into the 60,000 miles of our veins and arteries like corrosives eating into marble. If left unchecked, an imbalanced pH will interrupt all cellular activities and functions, from the beating of your heart to the neural firing of your brain... An imbalanced pH interferes with all life itself!
Although it may generally go unnoticed and undetected for years, an imbalanced pH (either consistently too acid or alkaline) leads to the progression of most, if not all, Degenerative diseases including Cardiovascular Disease (the #1 killer in the U.S.), Cancer (the #2 Killer in the U.S.), and Diabetes, as well as the never ending frustration of excessive systemic weight gain.
-- End Quote
-- cheezus_es_lard
I think you're overstating the danger by quite a bit. I've had strong (12+ Molar) NaOH solutions on my fingers a few times without much effect. We're talking concentrated solutions here, not kid's stuff. It's so strong it's syrupy. I was always quick about washing it off, but I don't remember ever being burned.
.01 molar hydroxide concentration. That gives us a pretty respectable pH of 12.
On the other hand strong nitric or sulfuric acid is nasty. I actually had a little mishap with the nitric. Some nitric acid got sucked into a pipette bulb by another student. When it was my turn, I didn't notice the bulb was wet until it started burning. Didn't take long at all. Wound up with a nasty burn on a couple fingers and a bizzare yellow callous that took a month to go away.
Back to bases...
Let's work out the problem and see how nasty this really is. Take one kilo of Na. How many moles is that? A thousand grams divided by twenty three grams per mole. Lets round up and call it 44 moles.
How many moles of hydroxide will that produce? With a one to one ratio in the balanced chemical equation, I get 44 moles of hydroxide. For someone used to working with a few grams, that sounds like a hell of a lot of hydroxide. But is it?
To find out, I need to know much water I'm jumping into. I'm well over six feet tall. Call it 2 meters even. My "wingspan" is also about two meters. Let's make it easy. I get a cube of water, two meters on an edge, to dive into. I'll jump in with my arms outstreched, hit bottom, pivot 90 degrees and touch both sides of our 'lake'. Degree of difficulty in international competition would only be about a 1.6, but we've already bribed the French judge.
No really, how much water is that in liters? A liter of water is a 1 decimeter cube. Therefore, an eight meter cube (two meters on a side, remember) holds 20*20*20 cubic decimeters. Wow, that's 8000 liters of water.
OK, so we've got 44 moles in 8000 liters. I'm feeling generous now. Lets say you dumped a 80 mole chunk into our little cubic lake. That would be about four full pounds of sodium. Eighty moles in 8000 liters is a
What else has a pH of 12? We're still in the range of common household cleaners. Wet concrete is in this range, maybe a bit higher. You can get chemical burns from wet concrete, but it takes awhile. Honestly, it's a bit higher than I'd have guessed when I started. I'd give it a shot for Angles tickets anyway.
Remember, in the real scenario we're talking about a much larger pond. Between the sodium skipping around with it's bastardized leidenfrost action and 100 kilos of Wookie jumping in, you'd see some rapid dilution.
You can get tungsten rings here.
http://www.r8w.com/trewtungstenwo.html
I almost got one for my wedding ring, but ended up buying a titanium ring. The one with the 22 karat gold looks especially nice,
I think.
Having said that, the shock waves and removal of oxygen can kill or traumatise a lot of fish and any birds near the surface. Which makes this a somewhat redneck experiment: I have no problem with people letting off big bangs, but not when they carelessly kill things in the neighborhood.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Since they didn't have any space to set up lab equipment for us in a regular classroom, we ended up having our "classroom" in the chemical stockroom that adjoined two of the science classrooms. One of my friends got a hold of the anarchist cookbook, and we tried making all kinds of stuff from it, not realizing that a lot of the recipes in there were inaccurate. We made everything from simple gunpowder to nitroglycerine. At one point we had a little mishap where one of the bowls of gunpowder ingnited while both classrooms had students in them. Since we were all honor students, we got a slap on the wrist and continued on as if we never got caught.
Eventually, we progressed to reading old chemistry teaching manuals and looking for experiments that were discontinued. Many were discontinued because the components were carcinogenic, but some were because they were deemed too dangerous. Thermite was one of them, Triiodide was another. If I remember right, NI3 is amazingly simple to make, I think you just mix Potassium Nitrate with crystallized iodine in a water (or was it alcohol?) solution, then filter out the precitpitate. As you mention, it's incredibly sensitive when dry, but if I remember correctly, is a fairly low power explosive. It doesn't put off the huge vapor ratios of your more common bomb ingredients, so aside from the surprise of setting it off, it's mostly harmless in small quantities. It is fun when it pops though, as it gives off a little *crack* sound and a little cloud of purple smoke from the iodine (probably semi-poisonous iodine gas, but unless you're deliberately sniffing it, it dilutes itself quickly enough to not be a real problem).
Anyway, one day after playing around with it a couple times, we made a batch of this stuff after school had let out and while it was still wet smeared it in little patches all over the floor and chairs of the chem classroom that we had for our first period. The next day as people walked in the room, the were random cracks and pops as these tiny puffs of purple kept showing up on all around the classroom. Everyone was quite amused, but aside from the four of us, nobody knew what it was or where it came from. Eventually, at the end of the year right after we graduated we came back and told our chem teacher about all the crap we had done and explained the triiodide on the floors. He gave us a knowing little smirk and surprisingly didn't chastise us at all. 'Course he then proceeded to regale us with all his stories of college chemistry adventures...
All in all, it was a pretty unique confluence of circumstances and provided far more consequence-free fun than I ever would have expected a bio class could.
Since your calculations were pretty much the best (though an AC did correct your final molar results), I'll reply to yours, rather than one of the other 8 people yelling at me. ;p
.13 ppm.) So yeah, even less. I can't think of a single freshwater fish that can't acclimate (easily) to a teaspoon of salt per gallon.
The thing is, you're assuming distilled water. I admit to saying distilled water, but I wasn't really assuming his lake was distilled (for obvious reasons) but I meant that if you combined x sodium with y distilled water, you would end up with a z ppm solution.
A real lake, however, ain't.
I really do believe with the concentration of tannic acid, decaying organic material, and soil interaction of any normal lake, a PH measurement of a lake before throwing in a nice sodium rock and another PH measurement the day after would show a change of 0. It's amazingly hard to change the PH of organic rich water. I don't really have math to back this up, but I do have extensive fishkeeping experience. PH up and PH down are pretty much bunk as products, unless used *very* regularly, as the PH will find its way back to where it started really, really fast. And that's only in 30-100 gallons of water.
And yeesh, as far as excess salinity... I have to dump 7 pounds of salt into 25 gallons of water to recreate the ocean. That's a little bit more than 2 ppm. (though someone with the actual dimensions of his lake worked out
Do you really believe a PH of 8.26 would result? Because... that's just wacky.
One isotope of Francium (223Fr) has a half life of 22 minutes. It's still the most unstable of the first 103 elements though.
Just on the outskirts of the small Indiana town I grew up in (go Trojans), there is a pond in the woods that is easy to spot by the lack of trees within about an eigth of a mile.
The story goes (as told to us by my high school chem teacher a few years later), two "former" students of the high school stole a large quantity of sodium from the chemistry store room (several pounds...it had been there since the 50's stored in a big glass jar filled with, I think, kerosene). They took the jar to the pond, got in a rowboat, and dropped the sodium out in the middle. Apparantley it took some time for the reaction to start, because they had enough time to get to the shore and pop open some beers.
The explosion leveled trees over a wide area, shattered windows for miles, and knocked a house off it's foundation a few hundred yards away. This happened in the early eighties and the local authorities though we had been nuked.
They found some of the boys about a mile away. The good news was that they probably died from inhalation of the gases before the explosion.
Oh, my home town has also had someone die from a beer keg explosion (he put it in the freezer. They found his head down the street), and a gas main explosion that was visible from the shuttle (I got a call from my mom to look east. You could see the glow from over a hundred miles away).
And my family wonders why I moved.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Back in college, a ChemE friend of mine called me down to his dorm room to show me the sodium trick. His setup consisted of a ceramic bowl filled with water into which he dropped small pellet-sticks of sodium (removed from a separate oil filled jar). ..err... "experiments" we had conducted before. So I offered my suggestion to pour some magnesium granules into the water and see what happens.. and so he did.
.. which in turn vaporized the water .. ejecting 1000 DEGREE BALLS OF FIRE upward and in every direction. These meteors bounced off the walls, ceiling, and floor leaving holes + scorch marks in everything... the stereo, mattress, monitor, and his roomate's rare collectible $5 bill from 1891.
The reaction was someone impressive but not nearly as some of the other explosives
To our surprise, what followed involved more physics than chemistry...
He dropped in the sodium, which fizzed around for a few seconds, burst into bright flames.. igniting the magnesium granules
Luckily my body was protected by the door and my face with a plastic report cover.. heh heh heh.
Kids don't try this at home.