In the June 4, 2007 issue of Chemical & Engineering News (which is behind a paywall accessible only to ACS members and those with institutional subscriptions, I'm afraid) there's an article on how college and university labs may be impacted by the interim final regulation on chemical security issued recently by the Department of Homeland Security.
In a nutshell, that impact looks like it could involve thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single university to comply with the rules, even if the chemicals they use fall into those specified by DHS as being at the lowest level of risk. As you can imagine, the colleges and universities are kind of freaked out.
You may be interested in checking out the list of "chemicals of interest" to the DHS. They may look exotic to your average citizen, but to people doing science in university labs (including those taking laboratory courses), some of them are pretty mundane. It's worth noticing that while some of these chemicals are deemed worth tracking only above a certain threshold amount, others are to be tracked in any amount.
That in itself might not be such a challenge but for the fact that universities don't typically keep all their chemicals in a single secured stockroom, nor do their chemicals all get used in a single secured laboratory. Rather, there are numerous individual labs -- recall that each faculty member in a chemistry department generally heads his or her own lab -- each of which the DHS rule would treat as a separate facility requiring compliance with the rule (and the attendant paperwork). For example, the C&E News article talked to the senior director for environmental health and safety at Ohio State University, Michael St. Clair, who
estimates that his university possesses about "100 of the chemicals of interest, located in over 900 different buildings and over 2,000 laboratories."
Compliance with the rule might be easier if universities could somehow reconfigure themselves more like industrial chemical facilities, but that wouldn't be easy to do given what universities are trying to do:
[Lawrence M.] Gibbs [associate provost for environmental health and safety at Stanford University] points out that "a free and open environment" is a necessary condition for academic institutions to carry out their teaching and research functions. "Colleges and universities can secure the room or area where a significant quantity of a high-risk chemical is located," he says. But "facility-wide perimeter security, access control, background checks, and the other described security measures are antithetical to institutions of higher education."
Because the DHS rule looks like it could have a tremendous impact on the ability of colleges and universities to do (or even teach) any science, the Campus Safety, Health & Environmental Management Association's (CSHEMA) Government Relations Committee has sent the DHS a response to the rule, including suggestions about how to stay within the spirit of what DHS is trying to achieve without saddling colleges and universities with an impossible compliance task.
DHS has shown signs of being open to revision the rule to minimize the negative impact on academic labs. However, it seems DHS also wants some say in how universities vet teaching assistants and student researchers who would have access to the chemicals on the list. How much fun could that be when you're making TA assignments, or when graduate students are trying to find research labs?
The feeling from the campuses as reflected in the article seemed to be that for all the cost (in time and money) that it would take to comply with the rule as currently formulated, it would do little to nothing to improve the nation's chemical security. In the process, of course, that time and money would be diverted away from actual teaching and research.
We'll see how responsive DHS is to the CSHEMA comments and where the rule ends up.
Ladies and gentlemen, possession or use of air is now illegal without proper DHS authorisation.
I see at least two gasses in the "any ammount" catagory that occur naturally in the atmosphere.
Anyone found anything else ubiquitous in, say, drinking water, the ocean, or the atmosphere?
'Any amount' of Carbon Monoxide? Love to see a proposal to police that...
Geez, they left out a few. I notice the conspicuous absence of Dihydrogen oxide.
The DHS is not about security, the DHS is about control. The agency is run by people who think that if they can control everything, then everybody will be safe. Thus you can see the damage done by over-protective parents.
Whoa!
Good Catch. Let's hope this does not come to pass.
This is nuts (and several of the chemicals are also ubiqutous in biology labs, and not even molecular biology!).
This reminds me of the SNL skit about the 3oz of liquids or gels rule.
Okay, so the 2000-pounds-and-up wouldn't be such a problem, but the 'any quantity'... are they insane? (Yes, yes, I know they are.) Any amount of FLUORINE??? PHOSPHOROUS?? CYANIDE? Do you know how much cyanide my lab has sitting around? We have thirty years worth of chemicals. Triethanolamine, which is used as a common phase-transfer catalyst in organic synthesis? Seriously, a lot of these things, including the silanes, are very common in syntheses.
It reminds me of their last crazy proposal: that anyone born in [long list of foreign countries] had to register for each piece of restricted equipment they ever used, including high-speed centrifuges. Without which, of course, one cannot do biology.
I hope for the same response: large universities, especially private universities and including Snooty U, will go have a nice little talk with the people down in Washington, and the requirement will never be enforced.
Let me get this straight. It's OK to have a ton of nitroglycerine on hand, but you don't dare fart in the lab because it will produce "any amount" of hydrogen sulfide. (Not to mention that using natural gas in your bunsen burners will be verboten because natural gas can contain up to 28% hydrogen sulfide.)
Somebody at DHS needs a wee bit of common sense.
You can tell they had industry in mind, since the smallest quantified amount is 750 pounds.
Simply bumping the "anys" up to 100 kg- or even 100 lbs (since they seem to like stone-age units) would solve most of the academic problems.
Huh, so carbon monoxide is restricted in any amount. I guess that lab back in high school on incomplete combustion, where Mrs. Broderick filled a soda bottle in the fume hood with CO and demonstrated that it could still burn would require a whole bunch of paperwork.
Meanwhile, you can keep a ton of nitroglycerin around. On the plus side, I bet chem lab could get a lot more exciting if we took them up on that.