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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

Foul-smelling as in "if you breathe it, you die".

Indeed. Household ammonia is only about a 3% solution. No big deal. 30% ammonia can give you a nosebleed if you sniff it. Break a couple bottles of 30% ammonia in a closed room, and people entering that room without an air supply will likely die. TFA doesn't mention the concentration they would use for fuel, but surely the higher the better. I wouldn't want to work on a ship running that stuff. Small leaks of various things are way too common, and ammonia is way too dangerous.

> ammonia is way too dangerous

The thought of working in the confines of a ship's engine room with such a hazardous fuel is horrifying. One reason for the widespread use of diesel oil is that it's relatively safe for human operatives.

Engine rooms on these ships have large extractors and ventilation systems.

I'd look at that as "look how large of fans we need to make diesel safe", not "we have big fans and thus can use ammonia".

Carbon monoxide is very dangerous. Removing that to replace it with the risks from ammonia could be a net improvement.

The article mentions that large amounts of ammonia are routinely transported as cargo. Storing ammonia safely isn’t easy, but it’s mostly a solved problem.

Big difference between safely storing for transport and using it as a fuel in an engine.

Gasoline vapors are pretty bad. A long time ago I had a little ski boat, and was pretty concerned about running out of gas. So I put a gallon jug of emergency gas in the boat. Now, the boat was completely open to the breeze. No matter how tightly I closed the cap on that jug (and it was a standard gas can) the fumes made me nauseous. I finally gave it up.

The same goes for filling a gas can at the station to transport to the boat to fill its tank. I would not spill a drop of gas, and driving it home I'd have all the windows open on the car and drive with my head out the window and it would still make me sick.

Funnily enough I like that smell.

It's amazing how many people came out to dispute this point -- often in the most 'I am very smrt' way possible.

Ammonia concentrated for use as fuel (or other industrial processes) is not the same thing as window cleaner, just as hydrogen peroxide concentrated for use as rocket fuel is far, far more dangerous than the hydrogen peroxide diluted for use in first aid kits.

True story: while delivering some computers to the Pittsburgh Paint & Glass refinery near Lake Charles, the guard gave me a colored hard hat and a filter. When I asked what it was for he said it was in case of an ammonia leak. He said put the filter in your mouth, use the clip to close your nose and follow anyone wearing a given hardhat color out of the plant

When I asked him some question about this potential disaster, he said "Ah don't worry about it, you'll be blind from the ammonia anyway." Yeesh.

Eh, depends on the concentration. I'm pretty sure your introductory chemistry teacher asked you to smell a dilute solution of it. And it's a common reagent in introductory chemistry classes so you've had plenty of chances of smelling it.

You can also buy ammonia solution in about every grocery or supermarket.

It also is used as a stimulant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smelling_salts:

“They are also used as a form of stimulant in athletic competitions (such as powerlifting, strong man and ice hockey) to "wake up" competitors to perform better. In 2005, Michael Strahan estimated that 70–80% of National Football League players were using smelling salts as stimulants.”

At the concentration needed to use as fuel, and in the confined machinery space of a ship, it could certainly be deadly.

It’s a fairly common household (glass) cleaning product. If you’ve used window cleaner you’ve probably inhaled ammonia. Hence the warnings on the bottle about ventilation.

I grew up on a farm in Canada and we would breathe ammonia when testing the ammonia nozzles on our air seeder.

It didn't smell great, but we didn't die.

The dose makes the poison.

Everyone who has encountered the smell of urine has inhaled some ammonia fumes too.

It is so cool that you can just squirt it into the dirt behind the plow blade, and the soil bacteria take it up so fast you can't smell anything.

What soil bacteria? Modern agriculture tills soil microorganisms to death then is forced up to make up the difference in fertility with oil-derived nutrients. Oops.

Okay I'm obviously being hyperbolic, there is still soil bacteria. But cool is not the word I would use to describe such a practice...

Regardless of misgivings about American farm practices, it is undeniably cool that ammonia-saturated water can have its ammonia fixed so very quickly by bacteria that have not in thousands of generations encountered saturated ammonia solution.

Use of ammonia fixed by local wind power should be less objectionable than numerous other common farm "inputs". In particular, injecting nitrogen deep under the surface should result in much less nitrate-saturated runoff to streams and thus, ultimately, algae blooms offshore, than we get with spraying.

That said, the tragic loss of buckwheat from world diets is a direct consequence if it not yielding more in response to fertilizers. That is tragic because it has better protein than any other grain. A buckwheat that produces more when fertilized would be a great gift to the world.

Right??

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