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NEAL LANGERMAN

ADVANCED CHEMICAL SAFETY, Inc.

PO Box 152329

SAN DIEGO CA 92195

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Neal, you know I have the utmost respect for you as well.

In semiconductor production, where the potential for contact with miscellaneous organics is already relatively low, I will agree with you and David that the risk is manageable.  But this is not the situation I was was addressing, and I should have made that more clear.   It's one thing to clean a few atomic layers off a couple of glass or metal substrates, but it's another thing to clean buckets of flasks and frits encrusted with myriad organic and metallic contaminants (catalysts).

In almost any routine academic chemistry laboratory where organics are used and where the accident rates are *dozens* of times higher than in production facilities, it is sadly clear that despite everyone's best efforts, risk management of hazards fails on a frighteningly routine basis.   In most universities I have been at, the PI enters the lab rarely, if at all, except for their first few years of tenure.  I had colleagues at MIT who saw their advisor once every several months, and that was during scheduled meetings in his office.  Housekeeping is generally quite poor, and lab procedures are handed down in a game of Telephone while wonderfully thoughtful SOP's gather dust.  I have seen professors nod their heads in faculty meetings about the need for safety, professors whose own labs were filled with hoods cluttered with equipment and multiple bottles of unlabeled and uncapped waste.

I wish every laboratory could be the utopia in that (otherwise wonderful) video.  I wish I just once had a professorial colleague that rational and safety-oriented.  But in my experience, academic chemistry research labs are on the far side of the planet from that ideal.   So unless a lab is specifically set up for semiconductor research and has procedures to segregate organics, I have to stand by my treatise.

You raise an interesting point about telling a PI "no".  If a PI insists on using a process/method when  far less hazardous and much less risky procedures are available, it is incumbent upon us to offer/explain those alternatives and have him justify the need, just as we saw after the UCLA incident with the push to raise awareness about the safer alternatives to t-Butyllithium (which some folks may still need to use, of course, which is where we really step up as you indicated).   It's a fine line between being seen as the obstructionist Safety Police versus a thoughtful Safety Partner at times, indeed.

Rob

Neal and Rob,
As a semiconductor process engineer for 40+ years, I must say I agree with
Neal on this one. The IC industry has safely used both acidic and basic
piranha at temperature of 100-150 C. with very few significant incidents in
the lab.  The few times we have had problems with it were due to improper
disposal (failing to wait for it to cool properly) of the waste solution
into improper plastic waste containers with tight lids...Piranha can be
managed safely if people are properly trained to assess the risks in their
use/waste procedures and demand accountability of themselves and those
around them.  

David