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Comment by lazide | Hacker News Reader

Have you ever dealt with metallic sodium? You are dramatically underestimating how dangerous it is at scale. Hard no.

I do love GP's excitement about the energy potential of violent exothermic reaction upon contact with water ... and the proposal mere sentences later to ship industrial quantities thereof on creaky old ships

Beirut would like a word about "any old warehouse"

That, at least, needed only to keep out heat and combustion, and could have been extinguished with water had there been enough, and in time.

Instead, consider the absolute PITA that is an EV fire, but worse, and floating in an ocean of the only thing that could make it worse.

Hey, if it explodes then no more worries about trying to put it out?

Which stands out because it is now uncommon. I'd expect warehouse tragedies to be more common in the past?

They have been quite common - they just aren’t typically in the middle of a major metro with 1000 cameras on them, because most governments aren’t that dysfunctional.

Notably, metallic sodium at scale would be way worse than this [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_City_disaster].

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Fertilizer_Company_explos...].

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEPCON_disaster]

I’m not aware of anyone crazy enough to stockpile pure metallic sodium to anything like this scale. Here is the gov’t dumping a barrel of it in a lake though [https://youtu.be/HY7mTCMvpEM?si=aSJ2dPLrXsUuGOOJ].

Love that disposal - lucky the lake has no fish. Here's the link without the tracking (ShareInsights &si)

"The Disposal of Sodium, 1947 Washington" 20000 lbs of Sodium

https://youtu.be/HY7mTCMvpEM

As I said, H2 has violent exothermic reaction potential just the same.

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