So that was fun

[trinityvixen]

I'm so mad at myself. If I'd just remembered, like I kept reminding myself to do all last Friday, to fill my liquid nitrogen storage, I wouldn't have gone in to do it today. Which means I might have gotten liquid nitrogen out of the not broken, leaking, and possibly explosively pressurized tank.

To give you an idea of how badly off this tank was? It seemed to form a half-a-centimenter-thick layer of ice around the top (where the leak must be) inside of the five minutes I spent struggling to attach the hose to it. The strongest dude here could only barely twist open the spigot. And the storage tank that usually takes me three-five minutes to fill was spewing liquid nitrogen all over inside of ten seconds.

TEN SECONDS.

PANIC!

No, just mild alarm. And a lot of calling around to our Environmental Health and Safety folks and the company that makes the tank. (This would be the company that told another tech here that the hissing that sounded odd to him was fine.) Blargh.

Comments

[six-demon-bag.livejournal.com]

Holy crap! It's fear of something like this happening that makes me extremely hesitant to mess with anything fragile, unstable or potentially dangerous.

Is everything OK?

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Nothing has exploded yet?

At this point, I'm just glad I got my tank filled, even if it got over-filled because the hose nearly blew up.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of trying to get liquid nitrogen out of the enormous tank behind the chem building at UF. In the humidity and heat, as soon as you started you'd be engulfed in a cloud bank. You'd know you'd filled your dewer when you could hear the nitrogen spit as it hit the ground. Fun times!

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Normally, I'd think playing in liquid nitrogen was cool. Got a lesson about why that's wrong.