Safety
Modern safety precautions recommend storing picric acid wet. Dry picric acid is relatively sensitive to shock and friction, so laboratories that use it store it in bottles under a layer of water, rendering it safe. Glass or plastic bottles are required, as picric acid can easily form metal picrate salts that are even more sensitive and hazardous than the acid itself. Industrially, picric acid is especially hazardous because it is volatile and slowly sublimes even at room temperature. Over time, the buildup of picrates on exposed metal surfaces can constitute a grave hazard.
Bomb disposal units are often called to dispose of picric acid if it has dried out.
Read more about this topic: Picric Acid
Famous quotes containing the word safety:
“Love no man in good earnest, nor no further in sport
neither, than with safety of a pure blush thou mayst in
honor come off again.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Can we not teach children, even as we protect them from victimization, that for them to become victimizers constitutes the greatest peril of all, specifically the sacrifice—physical or psychological—of the well-being of other people? And that destroying the life or safety of other people, through teasing, bullying, hitting or otherwise, “putting them down,” is as destructive to themselves as to their victims.”
—Lewis P. Lipsitt (20th century)
“Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions. The woman who rejects the stereotype of feminine weakness and dependence can no longer find much comfort in the cliché that all men are beasts. She has no choice except to believe, on the contrary, that men are human beings, and she finds it hard to forgive them when they act like animals.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)