Well, one serious question to ask of this would be, "Was this the result of official work or was someone trying to use the lab to do some meth moonlighting?"
NIST in suspected 'meth lab' blast: US Congress is demanding answers
US Congress has opened an investigation into a blast at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) facility in Gaithersburg, Maryland, that is suspected to be the result of a drug-cooking operation gone wrong. "At about 7:00pm Saturday, July 18, an explosion occurred in a laboratory room on the NIST campus in …
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Friday 24th July 2015 01:06 GMT PleebSmash
lamar looks up
The incident has caught Congress' attention. Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), chairman of the US House of Representatives' Committee of Science, Space, and Technology, has issued a formal request for details of the case, saying the matter is of "great concern."
Mr. Anti-Science Science Chairman smells blood/meth in the water/air, prepares to pounce with budget-cutting axe.
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Friday 24th July 2015 02:17 GMT Mark 85
Re: lamar looks up
I think you're right. He's had a grudge with them for a long time. Not sure if it's because of his religious beliefs against science in general or maybe because the lab isn't in Texas... or he wants to pass a law to show the good folks back home that he's doing "important" stuff.
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Friday 24th July 2015 02:53 GMT phil dude
proper lab protocol...
A competent chemist can make all sorts of compounds that are restricted. The threshold for a proper lab, however, is high. Fume hoods, measuring equipment, emergency drain/wash stations, milliQ water, -80 Freezers etc...not to mention high purity base stock. This sounds ad-hoc....
I recently told someone their moonshine (I was offered) had methanol (strong enough to smell!!) in it, and got told "the old recipe is to remove the top twice". I explained we have 100% methanol and ethanol in the lab, and you can really smell the difference. I guess he's not blind...yet.
Once you work in a properly built lab, it is hard to look at "ad hoc" experiments - even homebrew!!!
P.
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Friday 24th July 2015 03:35 GMT Chris 244
Re: proper lab protocol...
He's not blind due to ethanol being an antidote for methanol poisoning. Methanol is not particularly toxic in and of itself, but is converted by alcohol dehydrogenase into formaldehyde (not good) and then aldehyde dehydrogenase converts that into formic acid (really really bad). Flooding the system with ethanol blocks this and gives the kidneys time to excrete the methanol.
Don't try to use methanol ingestion to get a free slug of ethanol at your local hospital, though. There is a specific alcohol dehydrogenase inhibitor available, so ethanol is no longer used as a medical treatment. The other treatment is dialysis, which in an emergency situation entails the placement of a temporary dialysis catheter. They are freaking huge and get shoved into blood vessels in the neck or groin with the aid of things like wires, stiffeners and dilators.
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Friday 24th July 2015 10:12 GMT Charles 9
Re: proper lab protocol...
"He's not blind due to ethanol being an antidote for methanol poisoning. "
I guess you haven't read the Depression-era stories of moonshiners getting blind or even dying due to drinking the "foreshots" that came out of their illicit stills. Moonshining with plant-based sugars mean you usually have to discard the first few ounces of the distillate (the "foreshot") which contain most of the methanol not to mention other toxic byproducts.
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Saturday 25th July 2015 19:34 GMT Alan Brown
Re: proper lab protocol...
"I guess you haven't read the Depression-era stories of moonshiners getting blind or even dying due to drinking the "foreshots" that came out of their illicit stills. "
Have you ever read up on the effects of heat and alcohol on copper?
It wasn't methanol which killed those old moonshiners. It was dissolved copper salts.
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Saturday 25th July 2015 21:45 GMT x 7
Re: proper lab protocol...
dissolved copper salts? where do you get that idea from?
have you ever seen a traditional whisky or or brandy still? They're made from copper. And how volatile do you think copper acetates are? Besides which copper salts are a lot less toxic than methanol, and a lot more obvious from colour and taste.
The problem is methanol - pure and simple.
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Friday 16th October 2015 00:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: proper lab protocol...
"Have you ever read up on the effects of heat and alcohol on copper?"
Yes, and they were A LOT less significant than they were on iron or aluminum (fermented mash is acidic), which (along with better thermal conductivity) is why copper is the traditional metal of choice for distillation. About the only metal that can be substituted for this is stainless steel, which is designed to be nonreactive but as result is more difficult to heat up.
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Friday 24th July 2015 20:55 GMT x 7
Re: proper lab protocol...
ethanol is still used as an emergency antidote........there was a court case in Scotland two weeks ago where a guy was imprisoned for doping a fellow students bottle of wine. Luckily someone at the hospital recognised the symptoms and forced a bottle of whisky down the victim. Even so he still suffered eye and kidney problems
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Friday 24th July 2015 19:46 GMT PNGuinn
Re: proper lab protocol...
High tech fume hood??
Extract in the Elementary Chemistry Lab ( O-Level - 3 rd to 5 th form): Bunsen burner stuck up the asbestos flue pipe at the top of the cupboard. (Properly installed, not a DIY bodge - this was the flagship grammar school.)
It took a particularly tall chemistry teacher to be able to reach up and light it. The whole school smelt of hydrogen sulphide when the Kipps apparatus was in use.
Ah - memories - chemistry was such FUN in the '60s.
Icon - well, we DID have fun - with real chemicals too!
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Friday 24th July 2015 06:27 GMT John Smith 19
"NIST Police and Fire Departments"
You know you're in the big leagues when the site has it's own fire and police departments.
A small side question as this is a federal facility are they regular rent-a-cops or more like an auxiliary of the FBI?
I agree crystal meth cooking is far to dangerous for amateurs and should be left in the hands of professionals, like this lot
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Friday 24th July 2015 10:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "NIST Police and Fire Departments"
I think they're just internal police forces like you see in certain other large campuses, especially those removed from the local forces that would normally be called upon in an emergency. I once worked as night dispatcher for a college campus police, and I know most military bases keep an internal police force.
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Friday 24th July 2015 16:35 GMT laird cummings
Re: "NIST Police and Fire Departments"
That NIST site is literally around the corner from where I work; it's huge. It's also barricaded to a fare-thee-well; I've been on military bases with less security. The place is so large it has its own resident herd of deer... Really, if they had to wait for local agencies to thread the bottleneck at the gate, you could burn acres of buildings to the ground.
Site police are probably Federal Police - Which agency handles site policing for a wide range of facilities - though it *is* possible they have their own internal security. After all, there are something like 73 or so Federal agencies with armed agents.
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Friday 24th July 2015 17:11 GMT Charles 9
Re: "NIST Police and Fire Departments"
""The place is so large it has its own resident herd of deer..."
The place doesn't necessarily have to be very large: just with plenty of forest which is their natural habitat. The base near where I live also has a resident herd which you can sometime see in the trees past the security fence.
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Friday 24th July 2015 10:17 GMT Charles 9
1) It's not especially difficult if you exhibit laboratory levels of control and discipline. Most illicit drug manufacturers don't have that level of patience.
2) They turned to pseudoephedrine because actual ephedrine (which they turned to first) became more tightly controlled than a miser's purse: not just because of meth but also due to bad press it got from being used by athletes (combined with some deaths related to the herbal ephedra which contains ephedrine).
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Friday 24th July 2015 13:14 GMT lee harvey osmond
Re: Desperate.
"And what was wrong with using phenylephrine?" The structure's wrong. If in doubt, look at the pictures on the Wikipedia articles for methamphetamine, pseudoephedrine, and phenylephrine. While you're at it, look at the article "rolling meth lab" too.
"2) anybody with a brain would not start from pseudoephedrine..............." somebody resourceful might.
Was nobody actually -watching- Breaking Bad? Or reading what has been written about the chemistry of Breaking Bad? Only some of it was hokum. [I laughed like a drain when Jesse Pinkman said he'd used indium in the reductive amination.]
There is indeed a well known synthetic route to methamphetamine where the starting material is pseudoephedrine, and that route has one major advantage: you can obtain pseudoephedrine from cold remedies such as Sudafed which are available over the counter in pharmacies.
A rather better synthetic route to methamphetamine is the one starting with methylvinylketone and methylamine; except, those are such well-known amphetamine precursors that attempting to obtain them would likely draw you to the attention of specialist law enforcement.
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Friday 24th July 2015 18:49 GMT x 7
Re: Desperate.
if you have brain you wouldn't start from pseuodephedrine because (a) sales of the pure material are controlled (b) OTC formulations are deliberately spiked to make it hard to extract.
A real chemist would start with phenylacetone or phenylacetic acid - both controlled, but easier to get hold of via back-door routes: the Chinese or Indians will ship it to you with fake paperwork, no questions asked. Or you could go back further and start from benzyl chloride, but that means a lot more work.
The really daft thing is that the market is bigger for the ecstasy-type 3,4-methylenedioxyamphetamine series analogs, not methamphetamines, so why these guys were messing about with meth is an interesting question
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Friday 24th July 2015 13:53 GMT Ugotta B. Kiddingme
Re: what was wrong with using phenylephrine?
Because for some people, myself included, phenylephrine is ineffective. For most of the calendar year, I suffer from awful allergies and sinus conditions. Pseudoephedrine allows me to breath normally through my nose. This is especially important at night because I am unable to sleep more than an hour at a time if forced to breath only through my mouth. Breathing through my nose therefore becomes a significant quality-of-life issue. Pseudoephedrine is less expensive than other medicinal or surgical options.
I truly wish phenylephrine WOULD work for me. I am very annoyed at being treated like a criminal every time I go to the pharmacy but, my only choices are be annoyed for a few minutes every two weeks or be miserable all the time.
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Friday 24th July 2015 17:24 GMT Stevie
Bah!
Pfft!
Sometimes science goes bang. That's why we do it.
Who could stand the utter tedium of doing a titration if their very life didn't hang in the balance because of the presence of unstable, shock-sensitive chemicals or flammables with a high vapour pressure standing in a beaker next to an open flame?
If you can't stand the heat, don't break out the Bunsen burner.