this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
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ELI5 plz
a base is in a sense the opposite of an acid.
They dropped a chemical that is "anti acidic"
Any base that could be dangerous enough to have to evacuate a building? When thinking about bases, I'm thinking bleach
i'm not a chemist so take my words with a grain of salt -
google says the most dangerous bases can cause skin and eye damage, and be very flammable if they were to dissolve aluminium (two different chemicals). So I guess worst case scenario you open the windows, lock the room, and come back with protective equipment to clean up your mess
you probably wouldn't handle something, that if dropped, would be dangerous enough to need a whole building evacuated outside of a dedicated room without wearing a full hazman suit and adhering to additional 100 precautions and safety measures
unless you're the sort of guy to use a screwdriver to play with the demon core, but that's not a liquid chemical base and hopefully won't happen again
You’d probably do the work under a hood too.
Only when there are guest in the lab
I was curious as well and in this article the only mention of dangerous bases is tert-Butyl lithium ("t-BuLi is very pyrophoric, it readily reacts with air catching fire, that’s why it has to be handled and stored with very special care, always under a protective inert atmosphere of pure nitrogen or argon"). But in that case you couldn't just drop it on the ground outside of a vent?
BRB, looking up the pH of chlorine triflouride....
Edit: Turns out it reacts explosively with water (so it itself can't form the aqueous solution necessary for the concept of pH to be applicable) and decomposes into two different strong acids (hydrofluoric acid and hydrochloric acid). So yeah, not a candidate for our mystery base.
Yes, this is the kind of substance that would promptly react to protons, what would be a base-like behavior if it also didn't promptly react to hydroxyl, what would be an acid-like behavior.
But given that it will consistently turn water into plasma, I guess it technically has a PH of 0.