Can't afford to move - my house isn't worth anything after the subprime fiasco. Its probably worth about 1/2 what it was worth 3 years ago. So far, the plume hasn't reached the river, which is where most of our water comes from.
Well, s***, so much for *that* idea SF6 will decompose to sulfur tetrafluoride and hydrogen fluoride. The most serious one is HF SF4 - sulfur tetrafluoride. SF4 will readily react with water, in high enough concentration it will react violently. You can expect toxic fluorides and sulfur oxides, and acidic solution HF - hydrogen fluoride, also known as hydrofluoric acid. HF will readily be with water. This is a pretty serious systemic poison due to how nasty the fluoride ion becomes. Fluoride ions will really bugger up blood levels of Ca (Calcium), K (Potassium), and Mg (Magnesium). So at lower levels, heart trouble. At higher levels, bone demineralization and cellular destruction A RO system with pre/post charcoal/cabon filtration *should* reduce levels below current concern. A quality distillation system with pre/post charcoal/carbon filtration will work very well
I used to work with a Cosmogenic Isotope group at Univ of Arizona. They used hydrofluoric to dissolve granite to free up CL39. HF is nasty shite and it's amazing what it will do to pulverized granite in a short period of time. It has to be handled VERY carefully. I'm glad I didn't have to go near. I was a programmer, not a lab tech!
I used to use Buffered HF to strip the oxide off of Si wafers in grad school. It is nasty stuff. We wore chemical aprons, gloves and face shields. The HF was in a polypropylene tank inside a negative pressure fume hood. Yet another reason why I never wanted to work in a fab.
Halogenated solvents (Carbon tetrachloride, trichloroethylene, etc) and chlorinated solvents (Perchloroethylene, trichloroethylene, etc) are generally bad news
We had a S. Korean bloke in our group who told us that in SK men are not allowed to handle the stuff in labs. Apparently there are sterility issues.
ick. Meth is such hienous shite it's completely beyond me how it could be an epidemic. bubonic plague is a bloody epidemic. It happens to you, you don't inflict it on yourself for Chrissakes! That said, when I was guarding airports after 9/11 the town I was in (Grand Junction, CO) had a lot of meth heads. These days it looks like the situation is improving a bit. The number of lab busts is down and, given what idiots most meth heads are, I don't think it's because the perps are getting smarter. Also, I think the Mexican cartels are bringing more of the shit into the US and that might have something to do with these numbers.
I would consider meth use just another manifestation of Darwinism, except for the collateral damage that occurs when one of the labs catches on fire or explodes.
