All your base are belong to Coke

[bunsen_h]

There was an item on CBC Radio this morning about an accident involving a transport truck carrying a load of potassium hydroxide hitting a pole in Niagara Falls. Faced with a possible hazardous-materials problem, the firefighters had to prepare for a spill... so they went to a nearby store and picked up 40 2-L bottles of Coca-Cola. They poured the soft drink over the (apparently-released) material to neutralize it, and were then able to mop up the mess with kitty litter.

My immediate reaction was that this was quite a clever idea. "Official" HAZMAT handling would probably have involved a lot of fuss and bother and expense. KOH isn't that hard to deal with safely, if you know what you're doing. The soft drink would be an effective neutralizing agent not so much because of ingredients such as phosphoric acid (which would help, of course) but because of the carbon dioxide. This would react with the potassium hydroxide to give potassium carbonate -- not completely neutral, but safe enough to dispose of by normal means. (The author of a newspaper blurb and article about the spill and cleanup appears to be under the impression that KOH is a strong acid and a bleach, and that carbonated drinks are bases which can neutralize acids. Sigh.)

My later reaction was... that something wasn't quite right. Something didn't add up.

So I did a bit of digging and figured out the problem. The numbers don't add up.

Carbonated beverages only contain so much CO₂. I found one website which claims that a 454-mL bottle of Pepsi was measured to contain 2.2 g of CO₂. (Of course, the author also claims that he could feel the pressure in the unopened bottle increase when he shook it, so the article can't be considered highly reliable. Nevertheless...) Running the numbers: the 80 L of beverage would neutralize roughly 1 kg of KOH, assuming that none of the CO₂ was lost to the air. Probably quite a bit less than 1 kg in practise, since a large part of the CO₂ would escape.

A clever idea, but not clever enough...

There was probably much more safety effect simply due to the dilution by the volume of liquid than due to the chemical neutralization. Using the soft drink was probably much cheaper than using more usual neutralization methods, but also much less effective. The firefighters might have tried using a CO₂ fire extinguisher on the material, along with a bit of water; that would at least have provided more neutralization.

Oh well, at least there's no mention of anyone having been hurt.

Comments

[popelaksmi.livejournal.com]

Only a chemist would think like this. :)

Miss you!

[kattale.livejournal.com]

This is *so* exactly like the things you used to talk about in school. Can i be amused and delighted at the same time as impressed by your observation?