I was in the lab one day when a coworker dropped a vacuum bottle containing about 2 grams of uranium hydride. When bottle his the floor and broke and the air hit it, it literally exploded with a brilliant yellow/orange flash and a superfine whitish dust rained down. That made for a long cleanup job. I'm really amazed that I'm still alive after a few similar mishaps.

I was in an office of the Chem Dept. one night when I heard a terrific explosion, and went downstairs to find a grad student has opened one stopcock in the wrong order on his vac rack, and his silane hit a little air and exploded. There wasn't much left of his vac rack, and he had lots of glass imbedded in his face. He survived pretty well after a stay in the hospital, but though he was near the end, he never came back to finish his Ph. D.

Flourine chemists were always having explosions in their vac racs (which were Nickel, one of the few things that can survive flourine). But nickel would just burst and not send flying particles all over the place.

One of the last projects I was on was to run FTS spectra of hydrogen cyanide in a sample cell about 5 ft. long and 9 inches id at a pressure of about 5 atmospheres. That's enough HCN to kill thousands. I don't know how touchy pure H₂O₂ is. Twice I had one liter supply bottles. I'd heard a lot of horror stories, but I was always very careful with it, and never had an accident.