Does anyone know from which supplier you can purchase Nishimura's catalyst (Rh2O3/PtO2 xH2O; Bull. Chem. Soc. Jpn. 1961, 34, 1544) in the US? Sigma's supplier Umicore has discontinued it, and it's not in Fisher, Strem, or TCI's catalog. All other attempts at contacting specialty suppliers have failed, and I'm assuming they want someone to be ordering industrial quantities (I just would like it for academic research).

Looking to rant and hear any advice. Make sure I'M not the crazy one.

Started a new job on Monday. Unfortunately, due to "confidentiality," I had no idea what chemicals I'd be working with during the interview process. Today, I found out that my lab works with HF at least weekly. Now, I've worked with HF before. I certainly don't love it, but I had to use it occasionally at my last job in small, dilute amounts. We used it infrequently and I felt comfortable with the controls we had in place, and I knew my co-workers take safety as seriously as I do.

I have big concerns around the use of HF at my new lab. First, the lab does not have calcium gluconate. I asked my manager about this and he told me that the previous lab manager "went up the chain" saying that the lab needed calcium gluconate and was told no. ... wtf? The "plan" in case of exposure is to use the safety shower and then go to the campus nurse. I have no idea where the nurse's office is, and who's to say my co-workers do? How do we even know the nurse has calcium gluconate? Apparently the safety shower triggers medical care to come to you ... so we have to tell them it's an HF exposure and to bring the calgonate? and hope they have it, know where it is, and can find our lab quickly in this massive campus?

I'll buy my own calcium gluconate if I have to, but I'm just extremely concerned by the way this has been handled so far. It makes me worry that other important safety aspects regarding HF have been overlooked, too. My lab manager said "just be careful" and "it's never happened while I've been working here." 'Just be careful' is not an exposure control plan!

There's more ... the way the lab is set up, the HF operator would need to cross the lab space to go from the fume hood to the instrument. The HF fume hood and the instrument are right at the entrance of the lab ... so anyone walking through the lab to get to other instruments (and may not be dressed in an acid-resistant apron, etc) has the potential to collide with the HF operator as they're turning around to get to the instrument. I hope that description of our layout makes sense. Ideally there would be some sort of a buddy helping to make sure that wouldn't happen but who even knows at this point! My manager did say no one works with HF alone, but I'm not sure if that means there's a designated safety buddy role in place or just "make sure someone else is around." Feel like I can't trust anything after knowing there's no calcium gluconate on hand and the company literally denied the request.

I am planning on asking my manager a lot more questions about HF safety and controls. Is there even a spill kit? Any documentation / SOPs? I'm also planning on going to the company safety officers / EHS. Hopefully they're more helpful than whoever said "no" on the calcium gluconate.

We use the recommended, bio-compatible PP solvent bottles from Agilent for our LC-QToF systems for oligo workflows. Does anyone can recommend an alternative to the original bottles? We generally think 80 dollars for a plastic bottle seems a bit expensive, but we are also worried that we introduce some leachables, if we use standard PP bottles (around 10 dollars). If you would have any tested recommendation for a vendor or even a product number, that would be awesome. Ty!