Anyone who had metal amalgam fillings as a child will recall the weird sensation of accidentally getting a piece of aluminium sweet wrapper in your mouth. The saliva was acting as the electrolyte solution. The metal filling and foil were acting as the two different metals, and we were being electrocuted by our very own mouth battery.
Walt's explanation is fairly accurate but unfortunately such a simple battery would only provide a tiny amount of the power required to turn over an engine.
Jesse has been swindled and beaten up by psychopathic gangster Tuco. Walt confronts Tuco in his office, offering him more crystals but insisting on being paid immediately. Tuco starts to get nasty but Walt has a plan. The bag of meth crystals he has just given Tuco were in fact "fulminate of mercury". He throws a crystal on the ground which detonates, creating an almighty explosion. We see Walt walking victoriously from the smoking remains, clutching his bag of money.
But could a small crystal really do so much damage? Mercury fulminate is a very unstable and explosive compound that can only be safely made in very small crystals, but it is something that a high school teacher could make. Crystals larger than a few millimetres in size are very tricky to handle. Snappits, the children's toy that you throw on the ground to create a small crack, contain small amounts of silver fulminate.
Walt's crystals are rather large and a bag of them would not be stable enough to walk around with and handle as we see in the programme. They would, however, theoretically create a very powerful explosion. But the shockwave would no doubt have detonated the other crystals in the bag on Tuco's desk. If Walt and Tuco had miraculously survived the explosion, they would not have been able to hear much for a long while.
Walt and Jesse burn out a lock in a heavy duty door to get access to an industrial chemical store. Walt describes the process they are using - the thermite reaction - to Jesse. Here you mix a metal oxide for example iron oxide with a reactive metal powder such as aluminium and it produces iron metal and aluminium oxide. Even when dilute it will etch glass and ceramics, but it won't dissolve or burn flesh. I once saw a demonstration where a lecturer showed this by spilling some dilute hydrofluoric acid on his hand and then onto a glass surface.
The surface was frosted, his hand unharmed he was very careful to wash the acid off quickly and take appropriate precautions and I don't recommend trying this at home! Its danger to people is its toxicity, not its ability to burn: it insinuates itself into the body and destroys connective tissue and bone slowly by interfering with anything containing calcium. Its danger is worse because it doesn't cause immediate damage and you may receive a dangerous dose without noticing.
So it is scary but not corrosive. Other alternatives are better. Concentrated alkalis such as Sodium Hydroxide are readily available and are very good at dissolving flesh which is why they are commonly used as drain cleaners. But alkalis don't do a good job on bone. Concentrated sulfuric acid is even better as it does a good job on flesh and will, eventually, dissolve the bone as well.
Murderers have used both methods to try to dispose of evidence. So I think the answer is that HF solutions are not a good choice for body disposal as it probably doesn't work well compared to known alternatives. A lot of the above is theory but good scientists do experiments. So Periodic Videos decided to test this very idea using chicken legs as a model. The HF was the least impressive for flesh-dissolving characteristics, though it did seem to cause other, more subtle damage, to the components of the flesh.
See the actual results here. Here in Mexico, a guy was arrested a couple years ago for "dissolving" more than bodies killed by the cartels. They found gallon drums around town with a sludge in it, usually with a note to warn other.
His recipe? A gallon drum, several bags of lye, add body, fill with h20, and build fire beneath drum. Sorry, I got caught up In the comments.
And I'm New to this and all bulletin boards? I am no chemist, but it is my understanding, that when acids burn the skin the results are the same for both Fire and chemicals burns both rapidly dehydrate the body, destroying it. But is in a sealed container, that water can only go to the lid. Stopping the process. I bet any acid will destroy a body.
When you're in the bath or pool too long you get those wrinkles, I've heard of people with wet feet in boots for weeks, remove their boots, and literally stripping the flesh off their feet to the bone.
The issue is how long will it take like the method used in here in Mexico and another post, boiling seems to be an important component.
And again I'm guessing and vegetarian , the heat tenderizes the meat, helping the acid along, but also the rolling of the water stirs it. If you were to put a piece of meat in acid that was stagnant, the acid might react, dissolve some meat, as the dissolved meat dilutes the acid depending on the makeup.
Think layered shots. Or a unflushed end toilet that has had time to settle. Hydrofluoric acid will eat thru skin, google it. So that would be a slow process, and fluoride, as we know, preserves teeth, by extension bones.
And for hydrofluoric acid burns, the standard treatment is calcium. So it would be very slow, very likely stop, possible preserve the bones, making the resistant to rotting and harden them, but as your, we'll my fingers have less meat than most parts of my body, it would get to bone faster, ossicle dissolving some calcium, then render all the acid useless.
Again I am not a chemist but have self-studied chemistry for years, I would be very interested to hear anyone else's opinions on my determinations! I know this is an old question, but it gets viewed a lot so I thought I would update with the fact that this experiment was actually done on the first Mythbusters Breaking Bad special, episode There is a description of the results of the episode inside that link.
It is even less successful at decomposing the actual flesh than the materials. See this question for details about its reactivity with glass. Mythbusters notes that a fiberglass bathtub actually would've behaved similarly to what we see in Breaking Bad, but over a much longer timescale. Hydrofluoric acid is classified as a weak acid because of its lower dissociation constant compared to the strong acids. It ionizes in aqueous solution in a similar fashion to other common acids:.
It is the only hydrohalic acid that is not considered a strong acid, i. Hydrogen fluoride gas is an acute poison that may immediately and permanently damage lungs and the corneas of the eyes. Aqueous hydrofluoric acid is a contact-poison with the potential for deep, initially painless burns and ensuing tissue death. By interfering with body calcium metabolism, the concentrated acid may also cause systemic toxicity and eventual cardiac arrest and fatality, after contact with as little as cm 2 25 square inches of skin.
Breaking Bad Wiki Explore. Breaking Bad. Better Call Saul. El Camino. BCS Season 5. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? Hydrofluoric acid. View source.
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