A few years ago, upon returning home after work, my my wife told me that her mother had blown blown up her kitchen but that she was OK. (My late mother-in-law was a wonderful person BTW.)

I can be prone to inattention when my wife speaks to me but this, this got my attention. :-)

My mother in law was an antique dealer. To restore/bleach old china, she would put some (hair dresser grade) hydrogen peroxide in in/on the china in question and let it warm in the oven.

One day she did this, but for some reason, this time she used her kitchen microwave instead of the oven. While it was warming she stepped out of her kitchen (to put something in the recycle I think) and luckily escaped the blast that blew out her kitchen window and sent her microwave into the Great Beyond.

When the fire department came she, I guess, feigned ignorance of what could have caused it. She was after all, a sweet old lady.

After my wife finished telling me the story, I mentioned something to the effect that "You realize they used hydrogen peroxide in the German V2 rockets?"

A picture of the remains of the destroyed microwave was displayed at her funeral.

R.I.P. ma

Speaking of Oxygen though, I once attended a lecture/Q&A by the Myth Busters. It was pretty cool, and during the Q&A portion someone asked "Is there a myth you started, and then backed out?". They said that they won't do anything with liquid oxygen. They had a few myths about it, did some research, and realized that it can set pavement on fire. They then decided not to proceed.

Here - http://yarchive.net/space/rocket/fuels/peroxide.html - second message mentions Clark's "Ignition!" facts, and in first Henry Spencer states:

While there are some storage headaches -- the stuff decomposes slowly no matter what you do, so you must provide for tank venting -- otherwise peroxide is much easier and safer to handle. Its bad reputation is half outright myth and half the result of 1940s experience with seriously impure peroxide. To quote a friend, a rocket-propulsion professional, who investigated the matter as part of a study some years ago:

"As far as we could find out, the stories about problems with peroxide were just that, stories... Peroxide, now, seems to only very rarely do anything exciting, at all. And, even then, it seems to never do many of the things attributed to it in the stories."

Of course hydrogen peroxide can be dangerous - relatively recent explosion in Sweden (peroxidepropulsion.com) reminds us about that. At the same time significant volumes of it with more than 70% concentration are routinely used - so a chemist can calibrate the feeling.

Anyone here could recommend a book or a serie of books to get myself into shape on that subject ?

I worked as a chemist for 7 years and witnessed 4 serious accidents, 3 of the 4 due to oxidizing agents (2 of them were peroxides). Some of the folks have scars to this day because of it.

On topic I wouldn’t want to work with peroxide peroxides either :) Derek often has write up about what some of the really crazy organic chemists who work on unstable compounds do - truly eye opening for someone with a biology background like me.

Atoms are composed to two sections:

A positively charged center -- the nucleus.

A negatively charged outside -- the electron cloud.

When several atoms get together, they do so because their electron clouds start intermingling. This sharing of their electrons is fundamentally what a bond is.

A bond is strong when both of the atoms really want their electrons to intermingle. Conversely, a weak bond is when the atoms are "forced" to be next to each other and intermingle. Strong bond = opposite poles of a magnet next to each other. Weak bond = similar poles of a magnet next to each other.

Somewhat counterintuitively, it's not the fact that the bond's want to separate from each other that makes something really explosive/reactive.

To really understand what's going on, you have to take a look at the energetics (thermodynamics) of how a reaction proceeds. The tendency of the physical world is always towards disorder (entropy). Rather than becoming more ordered, every single atom in the universe wants to be more comfortable.

Think back to our magnet analogy. Magnets with the same pole facing each other really don't want to be next to each other. In fact, they'd LOVE to find another magnet with the opposite pole facing them. The magnets which have a weak bond find it really, really easy to separate. In fact, almost anything will split the connection. However, those magnets, once separated, must find another (opposite) partner for them to pair up with. The amount of energy that they release when they find their perfect mate is evidenced by the fact that the magnets will literally hop across short distances and smack together in a satisfying *crack.

What we also know in thermodynamics is that energy cannot be created, nor destroyed. Thus the net energy in any reaction must be equal on both sides. We know a couple of things:

The energy required to split the weak bond is really, really little.

The energy released when a strong bond is formed is a lot (in fact, you hear the release of energy in the form of heat and sound!).

Atoms prefer strong bonds to weak ones (entropy).

Putting everything together, when you have an molecule with extremely weak bonds (HOOOH), it takes almost no effort for those bonds to come apart. However, when those oxygens go find other molecules to bond with, that releases some energy. Thus NET ENERGY is heavily favored in the exothermic (release of energy) direction. When enough of those super weak bonds are broken, and when enough of the strong bonds are formed rapidly, you have a simultaneous release of a huge amount of heat --- an explosion.

Sorry if that's a little long, but I tried to explain your questions. (Which was a fundamentally very interesting question!)

Fundamentally, it's mostly about the electron charges on an atom which are balanced out by the number of protons in the nucleus. The proton however is a tightly packed point charge but the electrons can only exist in various energy levels (think of different shapes) around it.

You could think of it as trying to pack a bunch of magnets that have very elaborate electromagnetic field shapes into a box in a specific configuration. You might find one configuration that happens to be 'stable' until a big piece of iron is nearby and then suddenly it all snaps into a new configuration.

The rest is easy: a single atom of Oxygen is extremely reactive. If you take an O=O molecule (= means double covalent bond) and add some fuel, you get fire. At high concentrations, drop in just a bit of fuel and you can get a violent reaction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSyAehMdpyI&list=PL8dPuuaLjX...