if nitrogen is everywhere, why is it a big deal if there is a nitrogen leak?
In: Chemistry
If it’s in an enclosed area it can displace the oxygen in the room and then it’s a suffocation hazard
The nitrogen itself isn’t poisonous, but lack of oxygen will kill you. If enough nitrogen leaks out, it will push away all the normal air full of oxygen and fill the air surrounding the leak with pure nitrogen, which has no oxygen essential for your survival, causing you to essentially drown.
When we suffocate, the reason we feel like we have no air *isn’t* because of lack of oxygen, it’s because of a buildup of CO2 in our blood.
Nitrogen displaces air, so if you enter an enclosed space that has slowly been filling up with nitrogen and pushing out the oxygen, you literally wouldn’t know it until you got lightheaded and passed out. Then you’d be unconscious in a room without oxygen, which isn’t going to end well💀
It depends, we use nitrogen as a shield gas in plastic welding. It leaks out in a continuous stream to keep the oxygen in the air out of the weld. Nitrogen leaks in a confined are can be bad, as others have stated, because you can breathe nitrogen without side effects and without oxygen mixed into it you can die.
Adding the scenario where you are worried about a nitrogen leak would make a more specific question that might get better answers.
Humans need about 20% of the air we breathe to be oxygen (at sea level). The other 80% can be any inert gas, but is usually nitrogen.
Nitrogen containers are *not* 1/5 oxygen. That would be very inefficient.
If you empty a sufficiently large nitrogen container into an enclosed space, some of the original air gets flushed out through vents and openings. So, if half the room’s air is replaced with new nitrogen, there is now half as much oxygen in the room (10.4 percent).
If you don’t have enough oxygen, you will pass out and then die. In pure nitrogen, an untrained person will probably pass out in 2-4 minutes and start suffering irreversible brain damage within 8.
It’s not as bad as fluorine (which causes *water* to violently combust and turn into acid), or carbon monoxide (which actively shuts down your red blood cells by filling the space oxygen would occupy and refusing to leave), but enough nitrogen *will* kill you just by getting between your lungs and the stuff you need.
If it’s liquid nitrogen, you might end up like T1000 from terminator 2 or Boris from goldeneye. And you probably wouldn’t like that.
Water is everywhere, in the ground, in the air, all around you. You’re breathing it in right now. It’s gonna be a big deal if you’re completely submerged in it for a long period of time, though. Same with CO2, and to a small extent, CO.
Concentration is everything.
Air has nitrogen and oxygen. If it’s at regular normal levels there’s enough oxygen and you don’t care about nitrogen.
If there’s *too much* nitrogen then you’re going to have *not enough* oxygen. Then it’s a problem.
nitrogen will displace the oxygen in the air you breath with out oxygen youndie.
thatbsaid this technique is used as a food preservation technique by removing o2 and other gasses
this wiki article talks more about the technique
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_atmosphere
the general idea is mold, insects and pests (rats and mice) die in these conditions
Was a chem major. Liquid nitrogen is usually stored in a large tank in a closet. Several students have suffocated due to oxygen displacement. If N2 is leaking in an enclosed space, O2 is dropping, and you die.
See tv show burn notice s2e2 for example.
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