weekend_editor

weekend_editor, 3 days ago

@cstross @mmby @nyrath @pauldrye

It sure LOOKS like a cloud of NO2 -- at sufficiently high temperature, it has that red/orange color. No fun to breathe, as it makes nitric acid from water in lung tissue.

A fertilizer plant would plausibly be working with ammonia, which can produce NO2 by the Ostwald process (used for making nitric acid, and this apparently was a plant that did that):

4 NH3 + 7 O2 -> 4 NO2 + 6 H2O

Or a fertilizer plant might also have nitric acid around, and some knucklehead didn't understand to keep it away from copper fittings:

4 HNO3 + Cu -> Cu(NO3)2 + 2 NO2 + 2 H2O

Those are the ones that come to mind as bulk reactions likely to be in a fertilizer plant. There are others, but then you have to figure out why a fertilizer plant might be doing that.

But the spokesperson who said it was "nitrous oxide" (which is transparent) or the reporter who mis-heard it need to have a word with some industrial chemists.