Comments on: Sodium Disposal

By: Simon

Simon — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 18:16:38 +0000

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!”

By: SonOfMagicFact

SonOfMagicFact — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:35:40 +0000

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

By: Ali

Ali — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 07:07:45 +0000

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.

By: shecky

shecky — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 05:21:13 +0000

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?

By: L

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 01:10:39 +0000

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.

By: Nick

Nick — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 00:31:14 +0000

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.

By: jack ruttan

jack ruttan — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 20:46:13 +0000

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

By: algonkin

algonkin — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 17:14:11 +0000

Oops! Meg beat me to it LOL!!

By: algonkin

algonkin — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 17:13:04 +0000

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

By: meg

meg — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 15:28:17 +0000

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

By: Kevin

Kevin — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 14:59:24 +0000

cool……….

By: Miss Cellania

Miss Cellania — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 14:39:40 +0000

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.

By: Otto

Otto — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 14:39:27 +0000

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

By: JohnThorensen

JohnThorensen — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 14:29:58 +0000

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…