🚀 go-pugleaf

Hans-Marc Olsen wrote:

> Or will I create osmiumtetraoxide and poison myself?

osmium tetroxide

I TIG weld small parts in a glove cabinet filled with argon. The argon
recirculates through the torch by a pump and filter. I do it to save buying
argon.

I don't know if you can weld osmium, sorry, but if you do the above you
won't make osmium tetroxide - no oxygen.

btw, Osmium metal forms OsO4 just in the air, it doesn't need to get hot or
anything. Osmium metal is not very useful because of this, and it smells
unmistakeably unpleasant. Osmium alloys can be useful, but not pure osmium.



OsO4 is nasty stuff, but it stinks and burns the eyes far too much to kill
you, unless you have no eyes and have been snorting too much cocaine and
can't smell. It burns the lungs too.

If you can smell, even a bit, or have eyeballs, you will leave any room with
OsO4 in it _far_ more rapidly than you will get fatally poisoned.

When there was a scare about OsO4 I worked out that in order to kill people
you would need to spend about $20,000 per person, and keep them for 12 hours
in an atmoshere which would blind them in less than a minute.

It's fairly similar to sulphur dioxide in it's both its toxic exposure
levels and toxic effects. As far as we know it is not a cumulative poison
(except in that it can burn tissue that has already been burned), or a
carcinogen, or a teratogen, or a mutagen, and it does not cause heavy metal
poisoning.


But we don't know everything, and my advice would be to keep well away from
both osmium and osmium tetroxide unless you hava a real need to use them.


-- 
Peter Fairbrother