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Comment by showerst | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to me how concentrated HF is just universally acknowledged as one of the 'big bads' of chemistry labs.

I've run into "Yes HF works here but SERIOUSLY DON'T" in so many different contexts and processes. Sounds like a lovely thing to keep a nice distance from!

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It makes the list of Things I Won’t Touch https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-tou...

Looks like it’s actually the first “Things I Won’t Work With” article he wrote, which seems about right:

https://www.science.org/topic/blog-category/things-i-wont-wo...

When I was a PhD student, my group were given a lab next door to our main lab. During the clear out we found a bottle of HF at the back of a cabinet. Vividly remember us crouching down to look at it all saying “nope, not touching it!”. Department technicians, understandably, weren’t willing to take it off us. In the end I think our PI got the previous lab owner to deal with it.

I remember the story of the Australian student working with concentrated HF.

He was sitting at a hood and knocked the container over into his lap. About a liter.

He was rinsed off but eventually the pain become so bad he jumped into the university swimming pool and stayed there until EMS arrived.

They ended up amputating both legs. He died anyways.

Bad stuff. I never worked with the concentrated stuff.

Apparently it was a technician and it was 100-250ml. Scary stuff.

https://www.uvm.edu/cosmolab/safety_manuals/Fatality%20due%2...

weird - can't find anything from an australian source about this

It’s also unfortunately crucial to a number of different industries ranging from uranium and rare earth metal mining to semiconductor fabrication.

It’s the reason for many a superfund site.

I would work with all that stuff, but only remote controlled.

I guess one day this will be indeed standard, but as of today, (useful) robots that could do it, are way more expensive than humans ..

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