The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) is an international nonprofit organization dedicated to the prevention of fire related incidents. The have recently pitched a set of regulations as NFPA 400 pertaining to the storage of hazardous materials. The comment period is long over and soon the rules will be issued as a published document. While the NFPA is not a regulating body, their rules are widely adopted by government organizations and promulgated.
If you have not taken the chance to review some of these documents, it is well worth your time as a chemical professional to do so. Why? Because the practice of chemistry is being dramatically necked-down in terms of the kinds of chemistry that can be practiced and the manner in which materials are stored. Not only is your local fire marshal packing a stack of NFPA based fire codes, but a whole host of federal regulators are armed with regulations from Homeland Security, EPA (i.e., TSCA), DOT, REACH, and an alphabet soup of regulatory coverage aimed at every conceivable substance.
Organizations that oversee chemical operations include the chemical industry, hospitals, agriculture, mining, and academia. All organizations are under the obligation to provide a safe workplace for the employees. It makes sense to minimize employee exposure to risk. But the web of applicable regulations for any given chemical operation is expanding by the day.
Not only is an organization obliged to conduct business in compliance, but quite often there is the requirement of self-reporting of noncompliance. An organization finding itself out of compliance is an organization in need of legal representation. The nuances relating to most any kind of regulation are such that your average company president will generally be unwilling to settle the malfeasance with the regulatory agency without the help of an attorney. This is the point where a jet of cash starts flying out of the company coffers.
So, the question of the effect on academic chemistry arises. Academic chemistry departments are seeing increased coverage under the regulatory umbrella as well. Should academic research labs have some sort of dispensation given the nature of the activity? Given that OSHA regulations may not be applicable to students, academic labs are already under somewhat less scrutiny. More to the point, how much government intrusion should researchers accept in relation to the kinds of chemicals they work with and store and the kinds of risks that are taken during research?
This is important for a very good reason. The issuance of proposed rules by organizations like NFPA results in regulatory pressures that eventually find their way to individual researchers. But the researchers don’t hear about it directly from NFPA. The University Health and Safety department hears about the regulations (or guidelines) and they apply requirements on chemistry departments. Faculty being faculty, they’ll perform a gritching ritual and eventually comply.
Generally, the arrival of new regulations results in new constraints. The end result is that the department has to spend more to operate the labs and students receive less experience with interesting chemistry. This whole unfortunate trend of increasing government oversight of all things chemical will eventually neuter US chemical education and industry leaving a bland and uncompetitive culture averse to risk.
I hate to be critical of fire safety people. But I also hate to see chemical education and research hamstrung by well intended parties who have devised highly detailed and extensive rules that will seep into every aspect of the chemical sciences. I am aware of absolutely no pushback of any kind when it comes to this matter.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
It’s funny that you think those NFPA regulations will be enforced by most colleges. Particularly in situations where a college is the life-blood of a community, local fire departments work hand in hand with administrators to overlook lets say deviations from normal procedures.
At many smaller colleges this sometimes means a complete absence of those procedures. They’ll usually hire one person “the EHS guy” to take the fall for the college when all goes south, despite the fact they were informed of the proper protocols. The college officers will then moan how they were misled.
But all that aside, we’ve got bigger problems:
http://tinyurl.com/9be3qh
Hi Viola,
These things take many years to filter into the hinterlands. If there is a lab fire, you can bet that when the mess is cleaned up and the bandages are removed, administrators will get religion.
1) All chemistries shall be performed in aqueous solution.
2) Water containing at least one added chemical shall be deemed “hazardous waste”.
3) No employee shall be exposed to hazardous waste.
Expand to 400,000 words and CFR it. Lawsuit to follow concerning whether adding deicer to snow or ice constitutes adding a chemical to water. Supreme Court rules that meterological occurances of water phase transitions are excluded from the “hazardous waste” rule, but not snow cones. Federal detention centers rapidly fill with raspaderos and granizaderos.
Hey Gaussling –
Thanks for the heads up.
I’m not sure where I fall in all this. I remember an office at a college in San Antonio that only had one door and that led into the lab. God knows what I would have done if the lab went up in smoke… I’m glad someone will come in and say it is not acceptable anymore to build like that.
Likewise, I remember the first time I fired up the ancient Hg diffusion pump in my last lab. It had at least a liter of Hg and I’d heat it up to boiling – it still gives me the Hee bee Gee Bees(?)
That said, kids now are not get the lab training they used too. All kinds of reasons, more new technology to learn and new techniques – when was the last time you did a sodium-fusion in your lab. I have not done one since undergrad and I can’t justify teaching it.
So, let the pendulum swing, it will swing back…
I wouldn’t be so quick to halt Na fusions. OK, so you reserve it for advanced level organic lab. It shows important phenomenology and to the extent that we witness such kinds of reactions, the greater is our individual judgement.
This is why I lament the virtual extinction of organic qualitative analysis lab. We have all of these bloody instruments, but we have fewer and fewer people who have personally run qual tests to narrow down functionality. The act of making derivatives is the act of developing handling skills for synthesis. Identifying a group of unknowns provides an opportunity to do actual experimenting in undergraduate lab.
Not so long ago I was trying to hire a recent BA/BS person to do some simple synthesis. I eventually gave up because, while they had all marched thru the ACS curriculum, none professed to be more than an analyst. They could run the goddamned GC, but they couldn’t tell me how to make an ester from RCOOH. Not one in 6. Sigh.
“We have all of these bloody instruments, but we have fewer and fewer people who have personally run qual tests to narrow down functionality”
Who cares? ACS has guaranteed an unlimited number of foreign H1b visas or L-1 visas to do the job for you.
And who really cares about results anymore. Destroy the competition, make yourself a monopoly and serve them junk.
It doesn’t matter? Don’t you get it. Make your riches and run off to Fiji!
That’s the American way!
abc123- Profession chemists seem to be perpetually isolated from the business end. The nature of the curriculum seems to repel future captains of industry. Chemistry students don’t arrive for their freshman year with dreams of starting or running a chemical plant. That is the dream of an engineer or a business major.
The people who control the resources control everything. The result is that practitioners of the chemical sciences tend to be sample clerks and white collar laborers.
Don’t confuse cynicism with analysis. If you feel so strongly about it, make your voice heard.
It amuses me that every time the ACS states the demand for bachelor chemical engineers is higher than for bachelor chemists none of the academic mandarins think about why that is. However, I have noticed that most chemical engineers don’t do what they were trained for as chemical engineers. I think chemists could also fill those roles if they were trained in a broader fashion than in the ACS sequence. But how do we convince the ACS to advocate for those changes? I could see how to make a professional degree from chemistry out of a liberal arts degree, but it would seem the academic resistance to change would be arrayed against it.
This is important for a very good reason!