Shake and pray

There is a pop-chem procedure on YouTube that I find astonishing – it beats the Diet Coke and Mentos trick hands down:

A guy loads NaOH dry solid pellets, about 1 inch high, into a plastic bottle, and adds about 2-3 inch thick layer of dry ammonium nitrate granules. Then he fills the bottle with ethyl ether and adds a good chunk of lithium metal foil. He screws the cap on and swirls the mix around. God have mercy.

This man is not building a home-made ANFO for roadside bombing. It is not going to be a Molotov cocktail enhanced with a metal/oxidizer, or perhaps a crude rocket. He is making a batch of meth by the Shake and Bake method. As he ads a pack of ground pseudoephedrine pills, he squirts in a small amount of water, caps the bottle and starts shaking real fast. The water initiates a vigorous and pretty much uncontrollable reaction of the lithium metal with ammonium nitrate. The solids in ether gradually liquify and become a bottom layer sludge – this all is accompanied by evolution of  copious amounts of ammonia and hydrogen. So he shakes this thing by hand and he periodically vents the ammonia by loosening the cap  when the plastic bottle bulges up too much. Eventually the reaction slows down, the majority of lithium metal gets dissolved and the leftover lithium pieces floating on top of ether attain a bronze/copper hue, this marks the completion of the reduction. The ether layer is decanted into a small plastic bag, saturated with HCl gas (evolved from another soda bottle with sulfuric acid and NaCl) and the hydrochloride salt crashes out and is collected on coffee filter and dried. The yield is about 1-2 grams of a hilbilly-grade crank in form of a white powder, from one large pack of pseudoephedrine pills, about 2 hours start to finish. No glassware anywhere.

The method does not scale – attempts at running bigger batches end in self-immolation. A common error is adding too much water at the beginning, which leads to uncontrollable takeoff:  the whole ether/ammonia/NaOH/NH4NO3/Li brew squirts out. One can try and keep the lid on an a bulging soda bottle by a sheer force but as the Li metal floats on top and fast reaction makes the chunks of lithium pretty hot,  they tend to burrow through the plastic wall and an impressive stream of flaming goodness rushes out with them, delivering bright red and yellow-colored ether flames accelerated by ammonium nitrate and lithium metal all over the place. As one skin graft patient observed “I haven’t seen stuff burning this fast before”.

The Shake and Bake meth is a twist on the classic method using Li metal with anhydrous liquid ammonia/ether. The outdoor storage ammonia tanks are now getting watched and additives are introduced into agriculture-grade NH3(l) so as to ruin its usefulness for dissolved metal reduction. Hence the soda bottle modification for ammonia generation in situ. No need to go to fields, now you can cook in the safety of your home…

Note: It would be easy for a manufacturer to add some organic soluble iron compound like Fe(acac)3 or ferrocene to the ether-based starter fluid  and likewise a small pinch of FeSO4 to the ammonium nitrate in cold packs and lye/drain opener. A finely divided iron promptly decomposes Li metal solution in ammonia to lithium amide and so it would make these materials useless for home brewing.