Sodium Disposal

1. JohnThorensen
   November 1st, 2007 at 9:29 am

   To be fair, the newsreel states that the lake was already alkali and uninhabited by aquatic creatures. Sounds like a decent place to ditch the stuff to me…

2. Otto
   November 1st, 2007 at 9:39 am

   Well if the lake wasn’t alkali, it is now.

3. Miss Cellania
   November 1st, 2007 at 9:39 am

   True, it seems rather harmless. I was mainly impressed with the explosions! I also wonder if anyone can shed light on the chemical effect of mixing sodium with alkalai. It seems like something I should remember, but I don’t.

4. Kevin
   November 1st, 2007 at 9:59 am

   cool……….

5. meg
   November 1st, 2007 at 10:28 am

   I love the hyperpatriotic music that accompanies all these old newsreels…it goes so well with blowing up hazardous chemical waste

6. algonkin
   November 1st, 2007 at 12:13 pm

   Back then they used fanfare type music to make it seem like it’s not that big a thing. Annoying isn’t it?

7. algonkin
   November 1st, 2007 at 12:14 pm

   Oops! Meg beat me to it LOL!!

8. jack ruttan
   November 1st, 2007 at 3:46 pm

   Uninhabited … Yeah right. Good way to wake up slumbering giant monsters.

9. Nick
   November 1st, 2007 at 7:31 pm

   Holy shit, I live in Washington and fish lake Lenore whenever I’m in the East Side of the state. Incredibly, it has a very large population of huge fish. I can’t believe that they’d do something like this, alkali lakes can and do support aquatic creatures.

10. L
    November 1st, 2007 at 8:10 pm

    Sodium? Okay. But once you give permission for sodium, what’s next? I don’t care if there’s fish in there or not. There are other problems that can result from haphazardly dumping hazardous waste.

11. shecky
    November 2nd, 2007 at 12:21 am

    Hmm…

    They dump it in a lake because no carrier will deliver it to a purchaser? If they could deliver it to a lake, why couldn’t they deliver it to a purchaser?

12. Ali
    November 2nd, 2007 at 2:07 am

    Miss Cellania, it is not the mixture of Sodium (Na) with Alkali, because Sodium is an Alkali Metal (which is basically all of the Elements on the most left side of the table; Sodium, Cesium, etc.), it is the mixture of Sodium with water (H20).
    2 Na + 2 H2O —> 2 NaOH + H2. Which is basically, 2 moles of Na and 2 moles of H20, yields Sodium Hydroxide (Lye) and Hydrogen Gas.

13. SonOfMagicFact
    November 2nd, 2007 at 11:35 am

    That’s so awesome, I can’t even believe it. Oh, how I do love me some big explosions.

14. Simon
    November 2nd, 2007 at 1:16 pm

    You can just picture the nerds (in the good sense) back in the day, sitting around a table figuring out the most fun way to get rid of this stuff.

    “Let’s find a lake we can roll these barrels of sodium into! It’ll be wicked cool!”

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