you do deal with anything dangerous at work?

Question: you do deal with anything dangerous at work?

Asked by anon-201558 to Sophia, Sarah, Meirin, George, Emily, Andy on 12 Mar 2019. This question was also asked by anon-201559.
- George Fulton answered on 12 Mar 2019:
  
  Neutron irradiation beryllium is probably the most dangerous thing I have worked with. This is a highly toxic, carcogenic and radioactive substance. We are very careful to check that this material doesn’t get around and into the environment and we have dedicated rooms for beryllium cleaning.
- Andy Buckley answered on 13 Mar 2019:
  
  @George: beryllium, awesome. Scary stuff: we considered making mirrors from it once, but the idea of a spontaneous toxic fire was a bit offputting 😉
  
  In my work I don’t really have my hands on dangerous substances very often. Probably the radioactive sources, high-voltage power supplies, lasers and liquid nitrogen in our university teaching labs are the most dangerous!
  
  I do have access to several high-energy particle colliders in Geneva, and have worked on “test beams” there as well as on the Large Hadron Collider itself. That is very dangerous, but as a result there are lots of safety systems: access to the LHC is by access card *and* iris scanner, and for the smaller accelerators you could only get into the beam-line by taking a key, and then there was an “interlock” system so the accelerator couldn’t be started until you were back outside the fence and had put the key back in place. Very sensible, and makes you feel like you’re doing “proper science”!
- Sophia Pells answered on 14 Mar 2019:
  
  There are things that could be dangerous if proper care was taken but there are so many rules we have to follow to make sure no one is in danger.
  
  For example, I sometimes work around radioactive solutions but they are never very high activities and we have to wear suits over our clothes and shoes when we are around them and then scan ourselves to make sure we aren’t contaminated before we can leave the room. Some of the detectors we use need to be cooled with liquid nitrogen which can explode if you don’t use it properly and can cause nasty freezer burns so I had to do a training course of how to be around it before I could use it.
- Meirin Oan Evans answered on 14 Mar 2019:
  
  On top of what @Andy has said, our experiment is 100m underground, so you have to go through a lot of steps to get there (not actual steps, you can take a lift). It’s not dangerous at all when you’re above ground nor when you’re underground and no particles are being smashed together. When there are particles being smashed together, there are several safety procedures to stop you from going underground.
- Sarah O'Sullivan answered on 14 Mar 2019:
  
  While I do handle uranium and technetium, they present very small hazards if handled correctly and I don’t ingest them or get them on me directly. The most dangerous thing I deal with will either be the ammonia gas, which is in a pressurised cylinder and is toxic at very low concentrations, or the work I do with sodium amide. Sodium amide is very picky. If it gets exposed to oxygen it forms an explosive and if it gets wet, it forms a nasty alkali solution that then dries to an explosive. I keep that in a special glovebox so it doesn’t explode and anything that touches it, I clean with ethanol to make it split into less hazardous products (NaOH and NH3) that are easier to clean

Question: you do deal with anything dangerous at work?

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