Nuclear Engineer Reacts to NileBlue 'Chemistry is Dangerous'

This video was sponsored by BetterHelp.

[thatJackBidenTalksAbout]

CDC hierarchy of chemistry safety:
1. Have you considered not doing chemistry at all?
2. How about microbiology? That's basically chemistry, right?
3. Fine, at least do it somewhere else.
4. Oh, now you want to be able to buy supplies? Well you'll need a license for that. What license? The, uh, "chemical buying person" license. Just ask your DMV about it, they'll totally know.
5. You actually went to the DMV and asked? Crap. Alright, fine. But you have to wear this hermetically sealed suit!

[dochollidxy]

Cooking dinner is dangerous if you don't know what you're doing

[dolphin]

I remember one of my classmates in undergrad asking me if the chemicals we were mixing in specific pairs were safe to mix in ways not indicated by our worksheet. After a second wondering why they were asking me, and a second of thought, I remembered that at the end of the lab, everything we made was to be disposed of in one container in the fume hood. So I told my classmate that, and added that it's good to be safety conscious with that kind of thing, and ask before messing around.

[matthewr]

48:36 "They included, as part of their channels, some of the goofiness..."

Oh trust me, Nile gets hella goofy as well. He just keep it mostly to his NileBlue channel.

[Unchained_Alice]

I love channels like Nile's because I love chemistry but I lack the knowledge and guts to do anything. It's just fascinating to watch.

[tmanknoll]

In my universit chemisty class i too learned the hard way to take chemistry safety seriously when i was using a pipet to measure our 1 ml of 18 Molar hydrocloric acid and the air behind the last bit of the acid formed a bubble that popped.

I still have the sweatshirt from that day in my drawer. The tiny dropplets ate through a good 15% of the front of the shirt and i still have a scar over my eyebrow 15 years later.

[simplesenpai]

Heeyy! Our guy got a sponsor!!

I understand the concerns of certain sponsors, but I just get happy when growing channels I enjoy get more compensation for their content. Keep it up your videos, Mr. Folse~

[RiversInTheSky.]

Foreign Material Exclusion event or F-ME had me laughing there at 33:22. Thanks for the video!

[tildessmoo]

I'm a mechanic, and even though the vast majority of my job isn't anywhere near as much of a public hazard as nuclear or chemical techs have to deal with, there's still a lot of personal safety stuff.

First of all, we do deal with a lot of flammable chemicals that also cause slip hazards, so we need to know fire safety, cleaning procedures, and wear slip-resistant shoes (with oil-resistant soles, if you don't want to be replacing them once a month). We don't really have a need for a shower, because the only real skin irritants we work with are gasoline, parts cleaner, and brake fluid, and the only real dousing hazard there is gasoline if you're removing a gas tank. We do, however, have the eye wash stations, and they're checked monthly both to check operation and to flush the water so it's not stagnant or moldy.

We also have a _lot_ of physical hazards, in the form of potentially-falling heavy things, splashing, flying metal shavings, flying _hot_ metal shavings, dust etc. falling while you're looking up, sharp edges in tight spaces, things unexpectedly moving, pinch hazards, etc. - and, in most cases, multiple of those at once. The main ppe for all of that is supposed to be safety glasses, hard-toed slip-resistant enclosed shoes, cut-resistant and/or chemical-resistant gloves, and lots of safety lectures about procedure. In practice, lots of people skip the safety glasses and the cut-resistant gloves (I often skip the latter as well, because they make delicate or tight jobs a lot harder), but my employer is notable for buying prescription safety glasses for any employee who requests them. I've noticed some of the younger guys (by which I mean less than forty) never wear glasses, but the older guys (in which I include myself, even though I'm not (quite) forty yet) at least put them on for more hazardous tasks, like when the cutting wheels, bench grinders, drills, and torches come out. Guess which group I've had to remind how to use the eye wash station. 🙄 I've been doing a lot of work lying on my back the last few days, and I've had safety glasses the whole time due to the basic hazard of stuff falling in my eyes.

I've set of ppe I've never actually seen used is the face shield and apron we're technically supposed to use for handling batteries. Yes, lead-acid batteries do technically carry the risk of being splashed with sulphuric acid, but it's an extremely minimal risk; the batteries are mostly sealed with only a very few venting configurations, and essentially no risk of spilling without extremely obvious damage. They can technically vent violently or even explode if shorted or improperly charged, but, again, the risk is minimal, and the worst I've seen was some brief venting when charging an internally-shorted battery; the sulphur smell was the worst part. These days I pretty much exclusively with with AGM batteries (articulated glass mat, basically a fiberglass sponge that holds the electrolyte), which are much safer even than regular lead-acid batteries.

But the biggest part of our safety stuff is definitely procedures (we even have a shadowing process for using the lifts and driving in and out of the service bays). We have one hazards I'm pretty sure you've never had to deal with, which is customers. (Well, fleet managers and drivers, these days, but dealing with them is basically customer service.) We have rules for them, too, like no entry unless accompanied by a tech or manager, no open-toed shoes, no unaccompanied minors, no preteens at all, etc. The problem is, you can't fire a customer for disobeying the safety rules (at least, not at a corporate-owned shop), so there's not a whole lot you can do if they just walk in, if they start poking around their car in the air (look, I get it's the most expensive thing you own, but right now it's a couple thousand pounds of sharp, hot, and pinching bits dangling just overhead and surrounded by potential tripping hazards and dangerous equipment, maybe you could wait outside until I can help you navigate this area safely?) and such. I've seen a guy come to chat with a tech and have his 8-year-old daughter sit on the scissor lift in the meantime (one of the few times I've seen that manager actually yell at someone). Once someone tried to walk in to look at the underside of his car while I was still lifting it; probably the only time _I've_ straight-up yelled at a customer, you do _not_ touch a vehicle in motion, and that's on top of not just walking in unannounced, but moving a safety chain to do so.

And, of course, we can't forget waste streams. Oils, different types of brake fluid, cleaners and solvents (lots of hexane and toluene), washer fluid (methanol), glycol (coolant), various metals and plastics (plus the ceramic of a catalytic converter), aerosol cans, contaminated mop water, oil dry, rags... Oh, yeah, here's a safety tip you might not know: rags soaked in oils and/or organic solvents can spontaneously combust. We actually have metal fire buckets specifically to contain our dirty rags. Then we have to separate recyclable materials from other recyclable materials (lots of scrap metal recyclers won't take lead, and some things like batteries have to go to specialists), separate our liquid waste (luckily, our waste management company is willing to take oil with a lot of contaminants and chemically separate it themselves; not chlorine, though, so we can't use chlorinated parts cleaner) into oil, glycol, and contaminated water, figure out what to do with nonrecyclable contaminated solid waste... It's complicated everywhere, I guess.

[edwinrollins]

Regarding corrective lenses, when working with chemicals, it's usually not a good idea to wear contacts, because if you get splashed in the eye, or even from fumes absorbing into the water in your eyes, the chemicals can get trapped in between the contact lense and your eyeball, potentially causing more severe eye damage, and they also of course interfere with eye washing.

[Xnoob]

oh god he's been found by better help
people have been hating this sponsor

[berkkarsi]

I highly recommend you watch more NileBlue. His videos in NileBlue are slightly less serious and more fun, like cooking/baking.

[danielthemangrande]

The only time a hardhat is not required at a construction site is you are a roofer and there is nothing overhead and it's 100 degrees and 99% humidity, and that hardhat is now a safety hazard due to it cooking your head. If there is something overhead you suck it up and deal with it, but there is only so much water can do. Have ever tried sweating when its 100% humidity and almost 100% dewpoint? Sucks to suck.
While doing my roofing apprenticeship, which lasted 4 years, the first year involved 0 actual on the job work skills.
100's hours of safety training was year one.

[mat-gweirdedbeardo]

Something I learned the hard way working with poisonous fumes from high performance paints. The fumes can burn your ears. 😮

[thelumpofdirt]

as a welder, I've been in places that require the full 9 yards (hard hat, eye pro, ear pro, jacket, gloves, spats, respirator) and places that ban steel toe boots because it's more safe just to leave them at home. that place also didn't require glasses other than specific areas just because it wasn't a hazard. I usually wear thicker gloves than what's needed so I have more flexibility in positioning, but I've seen some guys go thinner so they have more dexterity using pliers

[Sai_aR]

"F-ME" = foreign material exclusion, yeah right...tell me it's not intentional lol

[robinkelly]

Aged care worker here. Wearing multiple layers of gloves can lead to cross contamination of the hands when removing the glove layers. For this reason it is a strictly enforced prohibition that can lead to dismissal

[Taygetea]

one really important thing to think about for something like amateur chemistry is, nigel is right, there are many things you cant do *safely* but you can do them *safer*. if youre aware of your own risk tolerance, and you're re-evaluating that when you decide what to do and how to do it.. well, you can still decide to distill sulfuric acid in your backyard. you can think it though and plan it out and judge how much you really need highly pure sulfuric acid against the risk. people die randomly in car accidents all the time, but the rate of deaths for safe conscientious drivers is significantly lower. that latter rate is what to keep in mind, i think. having that in mind will also help you come up with new safety measures for your situation. even nuclear and lab safety arent "zero risk tolerance" though - otherwise we would do absolutely everything through teleoperation! the institutional risk tolerance is just much lower than you can decide for yourself as an individual.

[emperorxenu]

There's a list of common incompatibilities because a lot of them are just non obvious. You wouldn't necessarily expect it just looking at the basic chemistry between them. It's one of those things you just have to check.

[ZeL-iqsf]

Check out styropyro making a long range laser