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Asked by ihazcookiez to Andrew, Ben, Heather, Louisa on 23 Jun 2010 in Categories: General.
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Louisa Chard answered on 23 Jun 2010:
We work with quite a lot of chemicals with different hazards associated. Acids such as hydrochloric acid and alkalis such as sodium hydroxide are very dangerous, will give you horrible acid burns. Also radioactivity is dangerous. We use all these things really carefully though so never had any bad accidents!
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Heather McKee answered on 23 Jun 2010:
At my secondary school it was lithium I remember actually using it in class. Its the most reactive chemical and tends to react explosively with water and air. Hence why we storded in in oil!!.
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Andrew McKinley answered on 23 Jun 2010:
The most dangerous I have worked with…. there’s a lot of danger out there. When I was doing my PhD I was working with things that bind strongly to DNA – these things cause mutations in DNA, and if you get them on your skin, who knows what they might do! Although that said, I was working with absolutely tiny quantities, so the chance of that is slim. I’ve also worked with 95% sulfuric acid – that is quite scary, especially when you add Hydrogen Peroxide to it to form a so-called “piranha solution” for cleaning things.
One chemical I will do my absolute best to avoid though is Hydrogen Fluoride – HF – it is a seriously scary chemical. It doesn’t quite behave in the same way as hydrogen chloride (or hydrochloric acid) – HF will go straight through your skin, and you won’t know you’ve been exposed to it until it starts to dissolve the calcium carbonate in your bones. This will cause crippling pain and results in the amputation of the affected body part! You don’t work with this unless you seriously know what you’re doing!
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Ben Still answered on 23 Jun 2010:
I don’t work with chemicals as such but we do use different types of radioactive sources to test our detectors with.
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