Re:U.S. To Ban Laptops in All Cabins of Flights from Europe
by IshKebab on Thursday May 11, 2017 @04:45AM
(#14314665)
TL;DR, take some sodium metal onto a plane, drop it in water. As one of the first comments said, it's not plausible:
> Not plausible. I've seen a half-pound of reagent-quality sodium dropped in a river. The sodium burned violently; the chunk shattered; the expanding gas launched broken bits out of the river, which landed back in the water and kept on burning. Nothing, however, with enough force to make me believe it would cause a full-on explosion.
> Further, sodium oxidizes in air; sodium metal fashioned into any innocuous item and exposed to air (as any innocuous metal item I can think of would be) would have reacted away a great deal of its mass in the air between packing and getting on a plane. There's a reason sodium is normally stored in kerosene or some other liquid it won't react with. Dropping oxidized sodium into water is a far less interesting reaction.
> Not plausible. I've seen a half-pound of reagent-quality sodium dropped in a river. The sodium burned violently; the chunk shattered; the expanding gas launched broken bits out of the river, which landed back in the water and kept on burning. Nothing, however, with enough force to make me believe it would cause a full-on explosion.
> Further, sodium oxidizes in air; sodium metal fashioned into any innocuous item and exposed to air (as any innocuous metal item I can think of would be) would have reacted away a great deal of its mass in the air between packing and getting on a plane. There's a reason sodium is normally stored in kerosene or some other liquid it won't react with. Dropping oxidized sodium into water is a far less interesting reaction.