Here is a link to a US Chemical Safety Board video summarizing several recent lab accidents. If you have never visited or heard of the CSB, here is a link to their web site. Have a look around.
This link is to the case CSB case Study of the Texas Tech explosion with nickel hydrazine perchlorate. It has a nice illustration of the Swiss Cheese Model of safety. This model was devised by British Psychologist James T. Reason at the University of Manchester in 1990.
I had an evil thought just now as I attempt to write 2 reports simultaneously. Why do we keep using that superscripted circle in front of C (i.e., ºC) that designates “degree”?
What the hell? We don’t use it for the Kelvin temperature scale. And, who knows if the engineers use it for Rankine? The thing is useless like an appendix or a titular chairman. Get rid of it!
What do you think?
There is considerable handwringing over hydraulic fracturing fluids and their potential effects on “the environment”. I use quotes in ironic fashion because I see very little parsing of the issue into relevant components. The chemical insult to the environment is highly dependent on both the substances and the extent of dispersion. But I state the obvious.
There are surface effects at the drill site and there are subsurface effects. A spill on the surface is going to be relatively small due to the limited size of the available tankage on site. I drive by these sites almost daily and can see with my own eyes the scale of the project. A surface spill of materials will be limited in scope.
The subsurface effects are complex, however, and the magnitude of consequences will depend on both the extent of the fluid penetration into aquifers and the nature of the materials in the fluid. Much criticism has been dealt, rightfully I think, over the secrecy claims on the composition of these fluids. The default reply from drillers has rested on trade secrecy. To be sure, the matter of government forcing a company to reveal its art is a serious matter. But the distribution of chemical substances into the environment requires some oversight. Especially when substances are injected into locations where they cannt be readily remediated. The remediation of an aquifer is a serious undertaking which may or may not be effective.
If you want to see what is potentially in frac fluids, go to Google Patents and search “hydraulic fracturing fluid”. A great many patents will be found. This will give the length and breadth of the compositions patented. Of this large list only a few are used in current practice. The potential carrier fluids vary from water to LPG (!). Water is a common component, but brine is said to be preferred. Additives include hydrochloric acid and surfactants. The MSDS documents may be a good source of info. Consider that a substantial threat to ground water may be that it is rendered non-potable rather than outright toxic.
Gas and oil in the ground is like money in the bank. We know where much of it is and it will only appreciate in value over time. Why are we so hasty to suck it out of the ground and burn it? Is it because we think we need it now? Extra supply will indeed drive global motor fuel prices down for a time.
A side effect of supporting continued cheap petroleum is that ever more infrastructure will be constructed that is dependent on cheap hydrocarbon energy and less infrastructure constructed for other forms of energy. Inevitably, supply will become scarce and a society constructed on a foundation of cheap petroleum energy will collapse.
This perilous proposition seems pretty simple in concept. What history shows is that a small number of highly dedicated people can swing the mood of a larger population. Many revolutions begin with a dedicated core who exploit some dissatisfaction to effect a desired change.
Right now we see a GOP that is driven by a minority of religious zealots wrapped in the flag and bent on an orgy of fratricide. What drives the Democrats is a mystery to me. They are a herd of cats.
Americans need to find meaning and a place in the world that does not involve urban warfare. We need to throttle back military spending and direct resources towards a sustainable market economy unified by peaceful common purpose. We are at a place in history where the Enlightenment is at risk of ending.
A colleague and I were discussing the Sangji case off-line and I did what I am pathologically prone to do which is to blurt out suggestions. I’m passing them along to my other friends out in the ether as a rough guideline to thinking about training and due diligence. My suggestions are merely a watered down version of a typical industrial EH&S SOP.
Due Diligence
Your university EH&S department no doubt has some some form of written policy, but having your own arrangement with your student workers will accomplish two things for you- 1) you will have written and signed documentation on having trained your students to use what you might call, if not “best practices”, then “reasonable and ordinary practices” in the lab, and 2) you will have made it perfectly clear to them what kind of expectations you have in regard to their work practices, open lab times, types of activities they may perform unsupervised by you, and your absolute dedication to lab worker safety.
In a civil or criminal action you will be under court order to surrender your documents in a process called “discovery”. Your attorney, being an officer of the court, is legally obligated to ensure that you surrender all of your documentation related to the action.
So, wouldn’t it be useful to surrender documentation of your diligence in all matters of safety?
Making a student or other lab worker’s activity in your lab contingent upon some basic operating rules is not at all unreasonable. And, if the rules are clearly written with consequences for violation of policies, then everyone knows the expectations.
No one can predict the future. But what you can do is some due diligence. Have a written training program with goals and scope. Run your research students and other coworkers through it every year and have them sign off on their attendance. Put it in a file and hope that you never have to pull it out in self-defense.
Such a program would be a solid basis for your defense attorney to argue that you went to reasonable measures to train students on escape plans, shower and eye wash use, sharps, proper PPE, fire extinguisher use, lab hygiene, proper storage, and special techniques to use when handling reactive/toxic/corrosive/flammable materials.
A policy on the amount of flammable materials you have in your lab space is a good thing as is a policy of segregating chemicals in storage according to their flammability and corrosiveness.
Get a signature from coworkers on the policies as well and file it away. I think this is critical. Give a copy of your policies and training plan to the department chairman.
Possible Blowback
Once you have given instruction on your policies, collected all of the signatures, and neatly filed them away, the hard part begins. You must be consistent in enforcing the policies. You have to tear yourself away from the word processor and make periodic safety inspections. If you’re off to a week-long NSF study session, a proxy should be appointed to monitor your labs.
The last thing you want is to have a plan that crumbles under scrutiny. You want to have a gap free history of due diligence. Former coworkers may be called to testify as to your enforcement of safety rules. Nothing rings hollow like a safety plan that was constructed only for show.
Benefit
A benefit to all of this due diligence is that you may have actually made your lab a safer place to work and have instilled a level-headed safety mentality in your coworkers. Fancy that.
Amusing.
Many readers know that research assistant Sheri Sangji died from burns sustained in a laboratory fire in the lab of UCLA professor Patrick Harran. Harran and university Regents are up on felony charges for their part in the incident. I understand that the charges are based on occupational health and safety violations related to the incident.
[The excellent blog Chemjobber has been following this story. I might add that this blog should be put on your Favorites list if it isn’t already there. The author puts a lot of work into it and it shows.]
Sangji was transferring t-butyllithium when her plastic syringe came apart and a quantity of the pyrophoric solution was splashed on her and ignited. She sustained fatal burns when her clothing caught fire and she died 18 days later.
Syringe techniques are common and the use of plastic syringes in such transfers of lithium alkyls is not unusual or automatically over-dangerous. However, some syringes have what is called a Luer tip where a syringe needle is attached solely by friction.
Another design has a Luer lock where the needle is affixed with a twist of the needle into a friction lock. The former design, with the tubular tip and no locking mechanism is prone to disconnection under tension and on withdrawl of the needle from the septum on a pressurized bottle, the needle is likely to squirt bottle contents onto the worker. The Luer lock largely prevents this type of accident.
Another failure mode is when the plunger is inadvertantly withdrawn completely from the barrel of the syringe. Minimally, this would release the contents from the barrel, possibly on the operator. If the plunger is pulled completely out while the needle is still in a pressurized bottle, a fountain of liquid may discharge, possibly on the operator.
Syringe plungers with a rubber tip are prone to swelling in organic solvents and may become difficult to move during a single use. If the plunger is pulled with great force, it might release suddenly causing it to come out of the barrel along with the contents.
Other syringes have plungers that provide a seal by plastic-on-plastic pressure. The seal depends on the elasticity of the barrel to accomodate the slightly oversized plunger. These syringes do not come with Luer locks and as such, are not forgiving of less than skillful use.
I do not know exactly what technique Sangji was using. Aldrich distributes literature on the use of a cannula in the transfer of air sensitive liquids. That is fine, but if you want 0.1 to 60 mL of RLi, a syringe is the most expeditious method for delivering a precise aliquot in my opinion.
Experimentalists are often stricken with a cowboy mentality. If you have never had a serious incident with a material, it is easy to get a bit cavalier. But handling metal alkyls is a lot like handling rattle snakes- you have to be careful every single time.
A subsequent post offers suggestions on due diligence for ressearch professors.
Pultroon University, Guapo, Arizona. A scandal has rocked the Institute of Quantum Spot Physics at Pultroon University. A graduate student and supervising faculty member stand accused of academic fraud. The office of University Chancellor Blodwin A. Gatwick has released a statement indicating the matter was under internal investigation.
Associate professor Corey Irwin was placed on administrative leave while the graduate student, Ragnar Ostrom, faces possible suspension.
Irwin and Ostrom were initially accused of falsifying results from a series of thought experiments published in Physics Expecta Acta, 2007, Section B, 256-278. However, it was later determined that the falsified thought experiment results were in fact plagiarized from a future thought experiment by Faroe Island physicists Spotsandottir and Dotsson. The two Faroe Island physicists were surprised to learn that their plans to falsify data were usurped by previous workers.
The Society of Thought Experimentation was contacted for comment but issued a press release stating the Society was still imagining what it’s position would be.
Today I found myself peering at the lovely lavender glow of opaque argon plasma through the viewing screen of a gleaming new instrument. The light-emitting 8000 K plasma sits apparently still alongside the conical metal skimmer. Somewhere a Dewar was quietly releasing a stream of argon into a steel tube that was bent in crisp military angles into and through walls and across the busy spaces above the suspended ceiling. Another cylinder quietly blows a faint draught of helium into the collision cell. A chiller courses cooled water through the zones heated by the quiet but savage plasma. Inside a turbo pump labors to rush the sparse gases out of the mass analyzer and into the inlet of the rough pump and up the exhaust stack.
Up on the roof, the heavy and invisible argon spills along the cobbles of roofing stones until it rolls off the roof onto the ground where the rabbits scamper and prairie dogs yap. The helium atoms begin their random walk into space. The argon shuffles anonymously into the breeze and becomes part of the weather.
All of the delicate arrangements; all of the contrivances and computer controls in place to tune and play this 21st century marvel. And a wonderment it is. The ICPMS obliterates solutes into a plasma state and then taps a miniscule stream of the heavy incandescent argon breath that trickles into the vacuous electronic salsa dance hall of the quadrapole. All the heat and rhythm for the sake of screening and counting atomic ions. What a exotic artifact of anthropology it is. And it all began in a rift zone in Africa millions of years ago.
The latest rev of Windows 7 and MS office is driving me freaking nuts. Used to be that I could do a graph in Excel and copy it cleanly into Word. That convenience seems to be absent in the latest rev. What fails to copy are the arrows and text boxes that I add to the graph. Not only do some of them fail to transfer, but the graph reformats and they arrive all cattywompus.
What works is to save the Excel document as a pdf and then cut out the graph and paste it into Word. Fancy that.
So, Microsoft, if I could make the dollars I pay for software change form inside your bank account, say, from dollars into Congolese francs, I’d do it this moment.
Lamentations on Chemistry 