[Jewelry making - Article 00413] - Re: [Orchid] Bombing recipes?

[Peter W . Rowe]

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>     I've been told (or maybe read somewhere) that the addition of
>     ammonia water to cyanide neutralizes it. 

    check that data before doing it. My recollection was bleach, not
    ammonia, and it also, for safe working, required the cyanide to be
    highly diluted. The process I recall was for neutralizing about a
    quart of spent cyanide plating solution, and as i recall, one used
    about a 20 or 20 gallon trash can filled with water, to which one
    added the plating solution. The bleach was then added to this very
    dilute solution, and allowed to sit. Presumably, though I'm no
    chemist, the bleach oxidizes the cyanide to cyanate, which is roughy
    the same thing that happens to most of the cyanide when bombing. The
    highly diluted cyanate solution was then safe to dispose of. But
    there was a good deal more to all this, as I recall. Metals had to be
    removed from the solution too, before one could dispose of it, though
    the bleach might have done that too, converting them to chlorides?
    Dunno... So don't rely on this post for more than a clue as to what
    to look for. By the way, before automatically reacting to the toxic
    nature and reputation of cyanide, don't assume that all wastes or
    reaction products must be so nasty. Remember that cyanide itself is
    merely the combination of carbon and nitrogen, both pretty innocent
    elements, when not combined into cyanide. It's cyanide's ability to
    mimic oxygen in the way it can bind to hemoglobin and in some other
    processes, that makes it so nasty. In other forms, it's not. We
    don't, for example, shudder and think of instant death when using
    super glue, which also includes cyanate ion within it's formula,
    giving a very different chemical... 

Peter
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