Dangerous chemicals laying around?

[jdurg]

Have any of you ever been in a chemistry lab or a store-room and saw something lying around that just made you go at the sight of it? It's happened to me a couple of times.

 

High School: A half gallon of bromine in the chemical room. Yeah it was sealed and heavily wrapped, but still, a half gallon?

 

125 gram lump of white phosphorus.

 

Various unlabelled chemicals of varying colors which we were never able to identify and too nervous to touch.

 

College: Old biology closets where VERY old specimens were in jars of picric acid which had evaporated into a dangerous yellow crust. (Bomb squad had to come in and remove the jars and subsequently detonate them).

 

Platinum/palladium beakers and trays lying around with various other 'scrap' metal. (Boy I wish I could have gotten one of those )

 

1 kg jars of NaCN and KCN stored around other thiocyanate salts.

 

VERY old and encrusted bottle of perchloric acid in the waaaaaaaaaay back of a fume hood cabinet.

 

And perhaps the scariest one I ever came across was in my toxicology lab. There were some old bottles and jars of chemicals in the back shelving area of the lab. Some of which were still used, and many of which had just been there for quite a while. I noticed one small bottle on the bottom shelving area which had an incredibly bright green substance in it. The substance looked like a rock candy but was almost neon green in color. The bottle was about 3 inches high and an inch in diameter. The neon green crystals inside filled it up about 3/4, and there was a fine powder of it that filled up the bottom 1/4 of the bottle. I got closer to it and looked at the label: Uranyl Acetate!!!!!!!!!! I quickly moved away from that area. Not only is that stuff incredibly toxic due to its high solubility, but it's also incredibly 'hot' in terms of radioactivity because of the massive quantity that was there. I can only imagine what would happen if the jar fell off the shelf and shattered on the floor.

[budullewraagh]

worst thing i ever came across was the 25 year old liter of muriatic acid in my basement. that's it actually...altho in bio earlier this year we added 3%H2O2 to 6M H2SO4...so i guess we could have made a small amount of pirahna bath. people didn't care AT ALL and i sorta laughed at it.

[Crash]

Hydrofluoric acid laying around on some back benches in teh chem room is probably my worst,