Yeah, reading this article I was amused with the author's writing style and reminded of the "Things I Won't Work With" blog. Lo and behold, it's the same guy.
Hydrofluoric acid, mentioned in the article, is terribly toxic stuff. I can see why he doesn't want to work with it. A drop of the concentrated liquid on the skin can kill. Unfortunately, I think it's critical to the semiconductor industry and there's nothing that could conceivably replace it.
> A drop of the concentrated liquid on the skin can kill.
A small amount of hydrofluoric acid on the skin isn't that much worse than any other acid on the skin. It gives you a chemical burn and you certainly don't want any of this stuff near your eyes, but it is by no means instant death. We're not talking dimethylmercury or arsine gas levels of toxicity.
The problem with HF is that it penetrates tissues and eats calcium so you don't get the pain reception telling you how much HF you actually just got exposed to. That is REALLY DANGEROUS. You can have been exposed to a lot of HF vapor or liquid and not know.
Consequently, you have to treat every HF exposure as potentially lethal because:
1) you might have gotten a much bigger exposure than you think
2) HF consumes your calcium which can stop your heart long after your initial treatment if you don't replenish the calcium after a large exposure.
It is quite toxic, but a drop on skin being lethal is a bit of an exaggeration. If you get any on you, you probably have to talk to experts to address it properly. If you spill a lot on yourself it is indeed a medical emergency.
What happens is your body has to neutralize the acid that very freely absorbs into you through skin contact, and hours later when/if the amount you took exceeds your (mostly) kidney's ability to maintain pH/ion balances, your nerves stop firing for lack of calcium to enable the electrical activity and your heart stops beating normally, then at all.
We know how to treat it now, but originally it was, yes, quite a bit of bad news. So much so that it was used as an esoteric murder weapon in a mystery novel.
I think part of the, hrm, atmosphere of terror surrounding it is the delayed onset of symptoms, in the rabies "by the time you can tell, you're in deep kaka" sense. That and its ability to just slide through a lot of protection.
I read that, then I saw this guys youtube channel: https://youtu.be/gQnmP7UD_zk?t=253 on the bright side I've found something I have not been desensitized to no matter how many time I've watched it.
http://www.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf