Extractions&Ire - 2021-07-01
I open a battery and find the horrors within. Subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ExplosionsAndFire/
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Music: \aleph_{0} https://aleph0.bandcamp.com/
Track names:
- spring song [final]
- 21 stamrex
- 01 esser 19
"Just because a project succeeds in its goals doesn't mean its not a fucking disaster"
Thanks Tom, was struggling for a final sentence to conclude my thesis but this gets to the core of it.
A little tweaking, and Tom's gone and given me my epitaph.
@Ali G Fate has some random person see your comment and remind you. No saving required kek
@Ali G It has been a year and 16 days, I am here to remind you
Good luck with your theisis
@Gary Wiens You were right
@Dani Syx Right.... Just about sums up socialism as well.
"Cadmium is extremely toxic"
10 Minutes later
"The Cadmium is somewhere I'm not quite sure"
It can't be that toxic. In high school, I tried to make my own NiCd battery and I was heating cadmium with a propane torch to shape it the way I wanted and I didn't realize not only could I melt it but its boiling point was low enough that I was boiling it too, and I certainly breathed in some of the vapors and never had any ill effects from it. Of course that was cadmium metal and oxides, they were probably not very soluble so I wouldn't have absorbed it.
That's not really how carcinogens work. Cadmium fumes can cause kind damage and kidney damage, but it's also a carcinogen.
the cadmium is LOOSE and it it out for REVENGE
@medexamtoolsdotcom That's what the romans said, and chuckled while sipping wine from their lead cups
@medexamtoolsdotcom idk if it applies to cadmium, but most heavy metals like lead accumulate over a period of time before they start causing obvious issues
"is nickel magnetic" tom has a chemistry degree and saying things like this is why we love him
@a smol bean where the fuck do you live where they teach chemistry in primary school?
As a german industrial mechanic my blood instantly spurted out of both of my ears as i heard that 😭😂😂
Physics is the only science, everything else is stamp collecting.
The more you know, the less you know you know
There's a reason scientists tend to keep books on hand, just because they're smart doesn't mean they can remember shit.
Imagine inviting a friend and they see your waste bottle of green cadmium.
"There's a lot of nickel in this cadmium, have you thought about separating it?"
it's just a prank, bro
*proceeds to chug the cadmium* ya?
"Thought about it... and decided against it."
Gotta love inorganic chemistry. Always trying to kill you, but at least there's pretty colors (and no tar!)
@LegitGopnik so if I snort coke am I then a Chemist for Organics? 🤔
And for the most part the numbers stay at sane levels
@Cody - ok mr moneybags
😅 thats 100% true
@Gordon Lawrence is black because is impure. What chemical is coal, silly? When the chemicals are purified, they arent (often) black
As part of my degree course, I went to a chemical plant that was very pleased that it had recently worked out how to replace the Cadmium electrodes they had been using, with Lead electrodes, because Lead was so much safer.
that feels like a weird sentence considering how bad lead is as well. Lesser of two evils I guess
In 2020 I worked a bit at for an electrochem project of a doctotorant as a general lab rat.
Cleaning and polishing the used cadmium electrodes was one of my jobs. I was kinda glad I had stocked up a few micro silver filter cloth masks before habd, because if the pandemic. ^^
This entire video was just the laugh of a broken and tortured man.
Top notch content, my dude.
It seems that whenever you try to get something from a battery, the question is always where’s the cobalt or where’s the lithium and you give up and never come back to it again.
That's why I stick to zinc carbon for recovering stuff. The carbon rods make half decent electrolysis rods for some purposes and I;ll be buggered with a horseshoe if I'm paying for platinum ones. Also the zinc can be useful and it's easy to clean.
@Gordon Lawrence +
@Extractions&Ire well put!
@Gordon Lawrence I was just gonna say this 🤣
“Where’s the Cadmium” is a game that has 10x more danger and fun!
"where's the cadmium?" is a scary game
@ersu and half the rest too lol
Not as fun as "Pin the Thalium on the spy"
@cwill212 fine long term too considering that cells seem to have away to adapt to dosages of radiation below 100 Millisieverts causing effectively no long term effect (see non-monotonic dosage model)
@cwill212 Curie worked with primarily radium which is much more radioactive than uranium.
@Zorro9129 my point was radioactivity as a whole and it’s dangers. Akin to smoking. Yeah smoking 2 packs per day is horrible but smoking 2 cigarettes per day is also very bad, just not to the same degree
I love the sketchyness of this video. It's like he knows just about the bare minimum to make everything work.
that's just how lab work is tbh. trust me on that one.
what's even funnier is that he has a phd
that is because I don't do youtube videos, imagine having less than the bare minimum and still trying, got an HCl plant project for about two years now, no proper glasware used, just some UV LEDs, mercury vapor lamp, halogen lamps(gotta have that warmth since people say that I'm just too cold), some drilled mini glass jars and test tubes, a lot of PTFE tape and epoxy, epoxy and PTFE tapes are everything to me.... got something going, gotta revive the damn thing after some new findings.... for what is worth, I managed to do it, I got about 1l of 5% HCl from the project, yes, all from table salt, water, heat, UV radiation and my hatred! no borossilicate needed, true men do chemistry without lab glassware.(of course, I might die earlier from an explosion or cancer, whatever comes first LOL)
Watching Tom descend into insanity Because of heavy metal poisoning is kinda funny.
I'm really glad you made this video. I've been contemplating the extraction of cadmium from NiCd batteries for a couple years now as a means to add elemental cadmium to my element collection. You have made it quite apparent to me that ebay prices really aren't that bad xP
"Where did the Cadmium go?" is not a question anyone wants to hear...
I think "where did my right arm go" is the worse
Question nobody ever asked: Where did the piranha go?
"Where did the Caesium-137 go?" is a spicy question
@Vincent Schumann Average anti-nuclear 'tard.
Yall aren't thinking scary enough. Where did the Silane go? It was right next to the phosgene which is now... empty... anyone else smell musty hay?
Battery disposal industry: Incinerating batteries is absolutely fine (1)
References
1. Explosions and Fire et al: "The Atmosphere Is Nature's Bin". YouTube, 27 March 2020, 5:58
🔥🔥🔥
@Extractions&Ire lit
Got the 666th like for a devilishly toxic atmosphere!
@ᴠᴧᴨᴛᴧᴃᴌᴧcᴋ I know, right? Et al has got to be one of the greatest scientists of all time, look how many papers he's published. He should get together with Dr. Pending, who is clearly the greatest inventors of all time, obviously, what with how many patents he has.
@ᴠᴧᴨᴛᴧᴃᴌᴧcᴋ yknow I got to do a Collab with Mr. et al for my student selected component at uni myself, really nice guy, provided some nice and significant data, 10/10 would work with them again lmao
"Just because a project succeeds in its goals doesn't mean its not a fucking disaster." I need this on a T-Shirt. It's going to be my slogan for life now.
20:20 "I'm getting really sick of this"
You know, you might not want to be saying that around good old cadmium...
I appreciate the honesty of showing us the failures as well as the successes. I fear traditional publishing does not publish the failures so we never hear the reality.
Seeing that cadmium just PLUMMET out of solution was amazing. Good work!
So, is green your "new" yellow? And, yes, nickel is ferromagnetic.
I know I'm late to this party but the H2S is probably reacting to make some Sulfuric acid as it bubbles through the solution, dropping the PH and increasing the solubility of the cadmium in solution. This would explain why it seems the reaction stops after a certain amount of time. To keep it constantly going you would probably need to adjust the PH back to slightly acidic when the reaction stops.
Way late to the party but one of NiCad’s best uses is airplanes. The weight to power to “explosivety” is vastly favored over lithium since fire protection for NiCads is a lot lighter than what’s needed to try and stop a lithium fire
Dude, I love your videos, I know very little about chemistry and will never try any of this, but it is truly fascinating. Keep it up and don't get cancer or melt your face off.
Have you ever had things go property-damage bad? Or hospital bad? Or police-called-on-me bad?
Viewer questions video in the future?
Thanks mate!
This was a wild episode of Cadmium Pranks!
Gotta love when what was expected to be a 5 minute project takes months!
discovered this channel a couple days ago, can't stop watching. the commentary is mostly what makes it interesting for me. despite the lack of tar.
The production quality has become quite a lot better, well done mate :)
So you saw a noticeable difference with having a slightly acidic environment when bubbling the H2S. The reaction you showed for the cadmium had a product of nitric acid. Is it possible that the solution acidifies the more cadmium you precipitate out? If that’s the case, the cadmium might get redissolved and leaves you with less yield, especially if you leave it for a week(I am also a culprit of leaving reactions for a week because I just cba).
I always thought that the main reason LiPo's are so volatile compared to other batteries is simply because they are have so much energy density compared to other batteries. Like, it does not even matter what kind of chemistry it uses, but if you short a battery, then all of its energy is quickly released in a runaway reaction and the main difference about LiPo's is that they simply have way more energy stored than most other batteries.
Greeting from a new subscriber!
This was the first video i watched and let's just say that I really enjoyed it.
Please keep up the good work. Love the enutisiasm, anger xD and how you make "not-so-fun" scenarios fun (cleaning for example).
thank you man and if you see this I wanna wish you a safe day ^^
Thanks mate!!
I like how things aligned so that you ended up with really pretty colors all around. Even the yellow looked okay next to the green and blue.
I've always been curious how you dispose of hazardous waste from a home lab that doesn't have a service - are there locations you can drop it off at in Australia?
I love this channel! Gives me a glimpse at chemistry and processes Ive never studied
Watching these videos, which often seem a bit frustrating, I’m impressed at his tenacity as well as the humor. Starting to sound a bit bit like a ‘mad’ laugh over time.
Would that indicate he’s becoming a ‘mad scientist’?
Very entertaining, thanks!
Hey Tom! When are you guys expecting to release a new album?! Love what you've done with The Cameraman so far, can't wait for more!!
just so you know, the target product weight would be between 6% and 18% of the raw cell weight. What was the original weight of one cell?
I used to open batteries on my free time back in like 2012, I found a ton of different materials used but I did it for the little button batteries you often found. There was a black colored powder, slight yellow fluid, and once the cadmium. I never had any bad experiences, so never thought about why i shouldn't. Now I now that cadmium batteries exist and are highly toxic.
Tom, you can probably increase the yield if you bubble H2S through a longer tube and for longer period of time. It looks like your tube was just in the solution and H2S does not have enough surface area to react with the solution. Love the videos, keep them coming :)
I love that you're coming back I hope everything with your phd went very well
Tom: I'll do some inorganic chemistry to get a break from the yellow
sulphur: allow me to introduce myself
I was susprised to see these are still used in most airsoft rifles. I used to hate the nickel batteries as a kid , I'd never wait until its fully charged and end up with a battery that only ever took half a charge.
I think I know what it happened through your process. Firstly, the layer you thought was cadmium was cadmium and it can be physically separated. You can see these batteries have a layer of cadmium and a layer of nickel hydroxide.
And when you thought your cadmium sulfide was redisolving, you were right again. Like any sulfide, acidic solutions attack them, releasing back hydrogen sulfide (same as if you throw a chunk of pyrite in acid). You should have filtered straight away after precipitating with your hydrogen sulfide generator instead of letting it sit with an acidic solution, or at least neuatrlising that solution, and you would have been more happy with your yield ;)
I could never do anything like this it scares me to heck. You videos are a great way for me to act like I am a smart scientist and I am with you in the lab. Bravo on the content and who you are as a person
I've got a couple of old NiCd batteries for RC cars I had, and they still work after 25 or 30 years. I've been saving them for cadmium extraction for my periodic table collection. I can easily purchase cadmium in a vial as I do with some things like arsenic and thallium, but I'm going to handle the cadmium myself as I have with cobalt.
When stuff goes wrong on this channel it's actually good because we get to learn more cool stuff!
I think a lot was stuck in your filter and on the glass. My copper nanoparticles always color a whole flask deep red to purple, but once settled it is a match head sized pile. Any glass it coats does tend to get very dense coating compared to the light powdery fluff that settles. Kinda like fluffy snow compared to ice on a window. When I need large quantities, I just go very heavy on copper sulfate and citric acid which gives great yield but larger particles compared to a lean mix using surfactants and ph to control the reaction.
I'm glad we found out *where is the cadmium*, that was quite the emotional rollercoaster. Also I believe, but am not certain, that you actually did get a good yield. The cadmium is trace amounts, deposited on the graphite foam. Batteries are all about surface area, not mass. But I'm a software engineer, so don't trust a fucken word I say.
I worked at Radio Shack for 6 years... I've handled thousands of NICAD packs... All of which were recycled (when returned to us at least). Cordless telephone battery packs were huge business... Cost the store $3-$4 each, sold for $20-$25. But we'd find the correct battery, install it into the phone and recycle the old one for that price.
The new camera looks amazing, love your stuff as always
Hi, Greetings from Brazil!
I took a chemical technician course along with high school back in the day. There I had a chemical analysis class that was all about metallic cations separation and identification. For group II cations, in the Cd(II) identification step, we first added some KCN (I don't remember why). After that, we used thioacetamide as a source of the hydrogen sulfide, and the yellow precipitate would form.
Nowadays I think it's funny how we used some dangerous reagents just to see a toxic metal turn yellow.
This was fascinating! Thanks for the awesome content
Extractions&Ire - 2021-07-01
If you enjoyed the music in this video, it was by an artist called \aleph_{0} ( https://aleph0.bandcamp.com/ )
For the last few years I've been using the uncredited Aphex Twin soundcloud tracks for these video. They've been great but I'm keen to branch out. If you're an artist who makes music with the same vibes as the previous videos (so electronic music, no vocals), DM me up on Twitter to be involved if you wanna! I'm slow at replying, and quite picky with the music I choose, but I'm super keen to feature some cool beats in future videos. Thanks!!
planetrob555 - 2022-01-14
@Héphaïx Anon Sounds maybe?
Donald Royal - 2022-02-02
First time watching your videos. That was very entertaining.
Jared Brewer - 2022-03-18
What you were looking for at 18:41 is "We've done the lord's work today."
George Styles - 2022-04-06
I thought your music had aphex twin vibes... I now know why :)
Nathan Pfleuger - 2022-10-05
Heck yeah Science female dog