True.
Over three quarters of the air we breath consists of "nitrogen vapors".
Posted on 11/12/2013 1:23:39 PM PST by BenLurkin
Reports coming out of Russia say that two people were killed at the Plesetsk space launch facility last week while doing routine work cleaning out a propellant tank. The Russian newspaper Ria Novosti said that on November 9, 2013, two workers were killed and three others were hospitalized after being exposed to poisonous nitrogen vapors while doing maintenance at the facility. Officials from the Russia Defense Ministry were quoted as saying the accident appeared to have been caused by failure to follow safety regulations.
The Plesetsk cosmodrome is located in the northwestern Arkhangelsk province. The facility has been undergoing refurbishing to take over a majority of the launches as Russia looks to reduce reliance on the Baikonur cosmodrome, which it leases from the former Soviet nation of Kazakhstan.
(Excerpt) Read more at universetoday.com ...
Nitrogen asphyxiation is a very common industrial accident.
Poisonous nitrogen vapors? Uh... probably a translation error there. Sure, a pure nitrogen environment would be anoxic and deadly, put not actually poisonous.
Thank goodness our atmosphere doesn't have nitrogen in it < /S >
They should outlaw like they did with carbon dioxide. They should do something about oxygen dihydride too
From the article.
“...and in October of 2002, a Soyuz-U carrying the ESA Foton-M1 project failed to launch and exploded, killing one.”
Here’s the video of the launch. It looks similar in explosive force to a tactical nuclear bomb.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hl9u-h_btBo
(warning: some bad language)
I don’t know if it’s poisonous per se, but obviously, it eliminated the ability of these workers to get oxygen (hence, the asphyxiation part of it).
These are very common tank and boiler cleaning accidents. When I was a child, the super in my building used to hire us kids (for 25 cents!) to stand outside the boiler when he went into it to clean it. This was a yearly process and could only be done after a couple of days without hot water, since the interior of the furnace had to cool down enough for a human being to enter it.
He would then chip the clinkers off the wall, while we waited outside and talked to him all the time so we were sure he was alive and breathing. We were supposed to run immediately for the police if he stopped talking (although, of course, he would have been dead already).
Horrible job. We were always so happy when we heard him coming up the ladder and saw him appear at the furnace door.
Lack of O2 is the problem.
True.
Over three quarters of the air we breath consists of "nitrogen vapors".
BTW, both nitrogen tetroxide and hydrazine are very toxic/poisonous.
Do you mean Di-hydrogen monoxide?
Obviously the next AlGore crusade :)
Yah, and it was admittedly a little nitpicky of me. But it likely wasn’t the presence of nitrogen so much as the absence of oxygen that was the problem. Unless it was some other actually toxic nitrogen-based compound it sounds like a tank asphyxiation case. They happen all the time any time there’s tanks or voids that need people working inside them from time to time. Eventually somebody forgets to ventilate or mask up properly.
Obviously the next AlGore crusade :)
Add that to the list!
It's hard to lock-out / tag-out gaseous atmosphere.
Ya guys still aren’t listening.
N204 is the poisonous gas they are talking about in the article.
You don’t store di-atomic, gaseous or liquid nitrogen in rocket fuel storage tanks. The only thing that would be in there is N204, nitrogen tetroxid, which is very poisonous.
Here ya go!
MOSCOW — Russia’s Defense Ministry says two officers died and three servicemen were hospitalized after cleaning rocket fuel tanks at a military launchpad.
The ministry said Tuesday that the officers appeared to have violated safety rules during the regular cleaning of the fuel tanks at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northwestern Russia.
The three servicemen were hospitalized after breathing toxic nitrogen vapors on Saturday and their lives were not in danger, the ministry said in a statement. It did not specify how the officers died.
I had to fix electrical problems when the line went down. I had a life-line rope, gas meter, breathing pack tank, and a radio where a person outside maintained constant speech with me. If I started to not sound right the attendant would pull me with the line out of the room.
All you get is about 20 seconds and out you go in a zero oygen environment. Three minutes and you're dead. Almost three minutes and you'll never be the same if you do survive. You'll drool a lot and be spoon fed.
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