If you just want to satisfy your curiosity without wading through the article:
In the end, we need a pool that is two parts water to one part chlorine and would probably burn the
eyeballs out of your sockets and make your skin peel away from your bones (this calls for a pool boy who
can only be criminally sadistic). If you and three million other people could get at this pool and unload
your pee into it before your bodies melted, before the crowd crushed you to death, and before you drowned
from the massive tidal wave of pee... yes, you could feasibly die of cyanogen chloride poisoning
originating from chlorinated water and pee.
This is actually pretty cool. I would love to see examples like this used in high school gen-chem courses. It would probably help to keep the students' interest in what could be either an incredibly dull or exciting subject, chemistry.
Scale that down, and you have 2/3 liter of water, 1/3 liter of chlorine, and one person peeing to get the same deadly concentration.
I can't base it on any even remotely scientific argument, but to me, something seems wrong with that conclusion; it just seems weird that it would be that easy to get a poisonous concentration. I guess it is that the deadly concentration is of the gas in air, across multiple inhalations. If so, one needs much more of the gas.
But as I said I simply don't know. Can anybody else?
The chlorine water solution itself would be unpleasant to deal with. Bleach is more like 10 parts water, and that is still worth handling carefully (at least, I think so).
If you were to urinate straight into off the shelf bleach, bad things would happen. For maximum drama, let the urine age for a few days to build up ammonia levels.
This article is about Uric acid + Chlorine producing Cyanogen chloride (NCCl), but a bigger concern in practice is Urea + Chlorine producing Trichloramine (NCl3). It has been suggested[1] that this reaction is responsible for the rise in asthma cases.
Also, it is responsible for some ignoble controversy around the new public bathhouse in my old home town. Apparently there was a perfect storm, in that the building both has a poorly designed ventilation system, _and_ inconveniently located restrooms which tempt people to...
No deaths so far, but several people complained about the bathhouse air making their asthma flare up, and when measured the concentration was above the health and safety limits [2].
14 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 46.7 ms ] thread[1] http://blog.xkcd.com/2014/03/12/what-if-i-wrote-a-book/
One of my favorites: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/113/the-story-of-sc...
I can't base it on any even remotely scientific argument, but to me, something seems wrong with that conclusion; it just seems weird that it would be that easy to get a poisonous concentration. I guess it is that the deadly concentration is of the gas in air, across multiple inhalations. If so, one needs much more of the gas.
But as I said I simply don't know. Can anybody else?
http://www.chemaxx.com/explosion16b.htm
Also, it is responsible for some ignoble controversy around the new public bathhouse in my old home town. Apparently there was a perfect storm, in that the building both has a poorly designed ventilation system, _and_ inconveniently located restrooms which tempt people to...
No deaths so far, but several people complained about the bathhouse air making their asthma flare up, and when measured the concentration was above the health and safety limits [2].
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pool_chlorine_hypothesis [2]http://www.sydsvenskan.se/lund/kansliga-personer-varnas-for-...