1. I am working with a small company that manufactures a closed loop system that utilizes chilled water from the building chilled water supply to cool a secondary loop which cools your reaction. The heat exchanger uses only 16 ounces of secondary fluid so spills like that are a thing of the past, and the setup can save hundreds of thousands of gallons per year of water (and sewer fees) if deployed on a large campus.  They are just finishing up their first major install at a major chemistry department and hope to be rolling this out on a much larger scale, but they are still scaling up their production capability. Please contact me off-list if you are interested and I can set you up information and more.

2. When I was at MIT a research group in the chemistry department popped a condenser one night.  The water flooded the floor and reached the Pedatrol (floor controller for inflate/deflate) on the nearby glovebox. This shorted the Pedatrol on "inflate", causing the glovebox gloves to explode.  The group came in the next morning to discover a flood, the flayed gloves of their glovebox handing limp, an empty liquid N2 Dewar that fed the box, and I presume man-years worth of chemicals in the box lost.  Plus the toasted reaction.

3. Again when I was at MIT, I was working in the lab late one night when my eyes beheld an eerie site (some of you will get that reference).  Water was dripping from the ceiling above. I started thinking about whose lab was above that lab and quickly realized it was a hot lab - one using radioactive isotopes.  I raced upstairs, confirmed the leak, called someone out of bed at 1 or 2 AM to come in, suit up, and painstakingly soak it all up. She spent several hours collecting the water from our laboratory into buckets and swipe testing all of it. And her lab mates cleaned up a similar mess in their own space.  The lab upstairs had been used for research during the Manhattan project and was currently being used for Tc research, so it had virtually every isotope known leaching out into that water, all of which had to be collected and disposed of.  Incidentally, I was told that when they renovated the lab several years later they had to jackhammer out the concrete floors and dispose of it all as radioactive waste.

Rob Toreki