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Comment by ourmandave | Hacker News Reader

Dioxygen Difluoride

That both words start with DIe! is enough to warn me off.

Dihydorgen Dioxide. Oh no!

Not the best example. Hydrogen peroxide is actually rather nasty when highly pure. I mean, it's got nothing on FOOF, not many things do, but it's still in a class where it needs to be handled with care and shouldn't be handed to non-professionals. Don't be fooled by the fact it's sold in grocery stores at low concentrations.

Not as bad as FOOF, but still burns on contact to an open sore.

Pure hydrogen peroxide will do a lot worse than burn on contact with an open sore, unless you mean "set your sore on fire" (though it's more likely to detonate, or spontaneously dissociate into steam and pure oxygen).

Usual solutions for disinfection are 3~5%, at 35% h2o2 will bleach skin, and bite through it.

30% is non-chlorine pool shock, and readily available where I am (VT). As it happens, it's also one of the parts of two part wood bleach. The other part is a solution of NaOH (lye, available in solid form for drain opener). Works great, best used while wearing gloves and a face shield.

Read up on the Me-163 if you want to see the craziness that's involved with using high-purity H2O2 as an oxidizer. With a hydrazine/methanol mix fuel to boot.

"Ignition" was already mentioned. It has quite a few "anecdotes" about T-Stoff (then German term for 85%+ pure H2O2).

Sure. We also call it bleach :P

Bleach, when people refer to the general product you can buy in the grocery store called "bleach", is sodium hypochlorite, not hydrogen peroxide.

You can call hydrogen peroxide bleach, or a bleaching agent, but if you ask your significant other for "bleach" you're not going to get hydrogen peroxide.

Speak for yourself, we have/had a bottle of it lying around. Used for bleaching hair and as a cleaning agent. It's not Clorox, but actually says hydrogen peroxide (low dosage though).

High test peroxide is used as a rocket monopropellant, and was involved with the loss of the submarines HMS Sidon and Kursk.

Many things are used as rocket propellant not least of which O2. As in all things dose makes the poison.

You missed a prefix in monopropellant. That "mono-" is doing a lot of work that you ignored.

Oh, then add nitrous oxide. There, problem solved.

> That "mono-" is doing a lot of work that you ignored.

Ironic, given they generally produce less thrust.

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