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| rdl:
Fixed. As long as you ship the hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide separately they're no more hazardous than any other toxic, corrosive, and/or carcinogenic industrial chemicals. They are not hypergolic with themselves. Point being, it takes two to tango. --- Quote from: wraper on April 28, 2023, 09:28:40 am --- --- Quote from: rdl on April 28, 2023, 04:35:46 am ---As long as you ship the hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide separately they're no more hazardous than many other industrial chemicals. They are not hypergolic with themselves. --- End quote --- Depends on what you mean by hazardous. Many industrial chemicals like Phosgene are very toxic like hydrazine. They may not necessarily explode but cause fatal accidents nonetheless. Potentially spilling hundreds of tons of very toxic chemical is not the best idea. --- End quote --- |
| coppice:
--- Quote from: rdl on April 28, 2023, 07:20:12 pm ---As long as you ship the hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide separately they're no more hazardous than any other toxic, corrosive, and/or carcinogenic industrial chemicals. They are not hypergolic with themselves. --- End quote --- Great. That'll make people on the transport routes feel so much more at ease. :) Most hypergolic fuels are seriously corrosive, but sit in satellites for years to do their occasional positional corrections. Does anyone know what materials they use for tanks, pipes, valves and so on to tolerate this? |
| rdl:
It would be interesting to know. Here is an interesting anecdote. I worked for most of my life in the industrial coatings business. I mostly formulated clear finishes for wood. A common finish system used for kitchen cabinets required an acid catalyst (PTSA). To ship this by air was a pain, regulations required multiple layers of packaging because it was "corrosive". One day, annoyed after having to pack and ship some of this stuff and somewhat curious, I wadded up a ball of aluminum foil (aluminum, what airplanes are made of) and dropped it in a bottle of PTSA. Nothing really happened. So I screwed the lid on and set it aside. Two years later the wad of aluminum foil was still shiny, sitting in it's bottle of "corrosive" PTSA. |
| james_s:
Doesn't mean it's not corrosive. If you put an iron nail or your finger in the bottle you might get different results. |
| rdl:
Well yeah. The point is there's degrees to everything. Don't assume because IATA says it's corrosive that it can dissolve an airplane. For the record, PTSA does almost nothing to human parts. It will leach iron into the finish which can eventually cause discoloration (your pretty white kitchen cabinets may eventually turn a bit purple). |
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