A ship carrying 2000 tons of nitric acid sank South of Seoul. They don't expect much environmental impact?

Question

Do you believe that? I live inland. Anybody ever had occasion to mix concentrated nitric and sea water, even on a small scale? I don't know what it'll do but I doubt it'll be good.

I doubt it will cause a global catastrophe, but since it will be concentrated and then have to spread out to be buffered, I think it'll be of Exxon Valdez scale. Off the top of my head, it might kill a couple of thousand square miles of ocean. I'm also curious about it does when mixed with salt water. I read that submariners used to fear what happened when seawater reached their batteries, because it would release free chlorine gas. This is nitric, not sulphuric so I'm not sure. I do know that mixing nitric, sulphuric and hydrochloric releases chlorine. The position given was inexact. If it releases a cloud of chlorine anybody close might be in trouble.

I'm going to let this one go for voting, as I can't believe this happened and there aren't enviromentalists boating all over the site to see the results.

Answer 1

The oceans are very large, and have considerable "buffering capacity".

The effect is insignificant compared to the acidification caused by emissions of CO2 from burning fossil fuels. While CO2 is much less acidic than HNO3, it is slightly acidic and the amount of CO2 _added_ to the atmosphere is about 15,000,000,000 metric tons a year. Even for the oceans, that's a big problem.

http://royalsociety.org/document.asp?id=3249

MT ZION - You and I each made one error. It's "only" 15,000,000,000 metric tons. I used the number of kg and said metric tons, sorry. But you mixed up days and years.

That's 3 metric tons/year/person, or about 0.1 metric tons per day. Which happens to be right. For a citizen of an industrial country, of course, it's more like 10-20 metric tons/person/year.

Answer 2

2000 tons of nitric acid weighs out to be 500,000 gallons. As it will leak slowly into the adjacent sea, the currents will mix the acid with seawater and move it away from the shipwreck.

Yes, it is completely plausible that there will be a minimum impact from this release.


Nitric acid = HNO3

SeaWater = H20 with some NACL

Although I stank at chemistry, I do not see where the seawater will go boom because of the infusion of Nitric acid.

Answer 3

Bob, let's do math.

15,000,000,000,000 metric tons of CO2 per year?

Assuming, for the sake of making the math easier, there are five billion people on earth--not too far off.

15,000,000,000,000 divided by 5,000,000,000 is three thousand. Therefore, each man, woman and child produces an average of three thousand tons of CO2 per day. That's about eight tons of CO2 per day per person, according to your figures.

Answer 4

I will assume that it didn't collide with that tanker carrying 1,000 tons of glycerine. We would have heard that clear over here.