The safety dance
A little lab explosion and it’s health and safety gone mad…
As far as ‘worst days of my PhD’ goes, this is easily in my top ten. Our group was quenching its sodium solvent stills – purification systems containing a reactive metal to mop up residual water. These require an annual quench and de-gunking. It’s not a trivial operation. Most of us will have seen the demonstration of sodium placed into water, fizzing and sparking aggressively behind a thick safety shield; this was the same thing only on an industrial scale. The risk of a sodium fire was real.