Caustic Query

national | environment | opinion/analysis

Friday July 22, 2005 15:51

by Baywatch - Baywatchers United

Who do you trust?

A company in Cork has allowed over 250 tonnes of Caustic Soda to spill onto the foreshore of the harbour. Nobody thought the public needed to know.

“Caustic soda is a non-toxic material used in the making of soft drinks"

So says Dr Peter Cunningham in the official EPA Press Statement referring to the July 2nd ADM leak into Cork Harbour as published on the front page of the EPA website www.epa.ie Friday July 22nd.

Another view on Caustic Soda (Sodium Hydroxide) comes from the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment:

Extracts follow-

III. Major Uses and Sources
Sodium hydroxide (NaOH) is produced primarily by the electrolysis of sodium chloride solutions and also from sodium carbonate. Sodium hydroxide is used in the manufacture of chemicals, rayon, soap and detergents, pulp and paper, petroleum products, cellophane, textiles and explosives, in etching and electroplating, in metal descaling, and in batteries.

IV. Acute Toxicity to Humans
Sodium hydroxide is a strong irritant and has a marked corrosive action on all body tissues regardless of the route of exposure (Reprotext, 1993). It is also more irritating than equivalent amounts of strong acid.

Source: http://www.oehha.ca.gov/air/acute_rels/pdf/1310932A.pdf

Wonder which is correct?

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Comments (2 of 2)

We need to take more interest in Chemical transportation and disposal.

by hmmm

Tue Jul 26, 2005 17:37

All over Europe. An accident on the road to a little town called Boo, (eye catching isn't it) this morning in Cantabria, northern Spain where a tanker containing acid cholride (?) jack-knifed and resulted in a cloud of poison being released.
http://actualidad.terra.es/sucesos/articulo/controlada_boo_nube_toxica_localidad_419471.htm
The authorities have launched a plan they have for such things and its ok now they say, but it made me think of how many hazardous chemicals are transported on our roads in Europe and the ecological, worker, and (ahem)
security issues this involves.
which brought me here
http://europa.eu.int/comm/environment/seveso/

& then to keep on this thread I went and looked up sodium hydroxide, the caustic stuff the writer referred to in Cork the Euro school chemistry rules are simple. large amounts must be neutralised before going down the drain or on the beach-
http://ptcl.chem.ox.ac.uk/~hmc/hsci/chemicals/sodium_hydroxide.html

And then I discovered from the €U that the direct value of European-manufactured chlorine and caustic soda (with each tonne of chlorine comes 1.1 tonnes of caustic soda) is about EUR 3,000 million and there are serious disposal issues.

Especially if mercury is in there.
= Why would mercury be in there?

Chlorine and caustic soda (they come together) are key building blocks that underpin 60% of the Western European chemical industry turnover of EUR 380,000 million. These basic raw materials are made by passing electricity through brine. About 60% of Western European plants (55% of capacity) use mercury as the negative electrode or cathode in this process. The mercury keeps the highly reactive products apart, which is essential for safe and efficient plant operation. As mercury is a toxic metal, the industry is progressively converting chlorine plants to other technologies as they come to the end of their economic lives. Chlor-alkali manufacturing is non-dispersive and depends on the efficient and complete recycling of mercury within the plant. Today, the residual mercury emissions from the chlor-alkali industry are low. Substantial improvements have been made, with mercury emissions reduced by over 95% from 1997 to 1999. This compares with estimated global total man-made and natural emissions of 20,000 tonnes per year.

hmmmm. toxic. but most probably mercury is not in there. call a university. It all depends on where the caustic soda was made, if in Ireland no mercury, but if the ship was transporting this material from the UK, France, Netherlands or Spain there is a possibility of mercury.

The beach you are referring to is covered by European Legislation under the Paris and Oslo Comissions of the EU.

and here is the report on the first inspection
http://www.epa.ie/NewsCentre/PressReleases/ADMinspectorsreport/FileUpload,7477,en.pdf

the ship in question was carrying caustic soda, sulpheric acid, calcium chloride and molasses
(?! what a strange mix of cargo) .

The EPA are pretty concerned that the alarm went off yet pumping continued for 25 minutes. And inth ereport you can see the discolouration caused when the stuff was pumped into the sea.

read their report. Let's keep an eye on it.
http://www.epa.ie/NewsCentre/PressReleases/ADMinspectorsreport/FileUpload,7477,en.pdf

Definition of caustic

by ex-physicist

Fri Jul 22, 2005 18:06

My dictionary gives the following definition of caustic:

caustic adj. 1. capable of burning, corroding, or destroying living tissue: caustic soda.

The long term environmental risk from a caustic soda leak is pretty low: it will rapidly react with substances around it to produce mostly harmless stuff (e.g. soap).

The *short* term risks, however, are pretty horrendous. You would not want to be swimming or wind-surfing anywhere nearby when this leak happened. If there were any fish swimming in the harbour at the time, they were probably transformed into bars of instant fishy soap (caustic soda produces soap if it comes into contact with fat).

Does anyone out there know how long it would take a spill like this to dissipate and lose its causticity?

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Comments (2 of 2)