[isotropy]

Yup, had this job as an undergrad, too, in a national lab on campus. Standard process was something like rinse in regular water, scrub with detergent, spray off with de-ionized water, 5-minute dunk in aqua regia, dunk in more de-ionized water, then alcohol rinse and set aside to dry.

Wore butyl gloves and apron and a face shield. Accidentally raised my hands above horizontal once and didn't notice a trickle of acid over the edge of the gloves. Next time that shirt came out of the wash the sleeves were shredded.

Our aqua regia bath was also about 10 gallons, but it was in a WW2-era fume hood and it looked like it was made of some kind of metal in a concrete shield, that had been partially eaten away. One time a cockroach the length of my thumb fell into the bath while I was working - I heard the splash, and by the time I turned my head to see what happened, it was mostly just exoskeleton. I quit that job pretty soon after that.

[julian_t]

Nasty liquids that clean the glassware is one thing... nasty liquids that would dissolve the glassware (and you) takes it up another level. I was happy when I got past that part of my experimental career.

[rubicks]

Heh. I never had the pleasure of working with aqua regia. I watched a grad student burn himself with it once. We were filling out incident forms for a week.

[ConcernedCoder]

for anyone curious, this guy uses it all the time to refine gold, it's very interesting work: https://www.youtube.com/@sreetips

[gilleain]

To save people looking it up, _aqua regia_ (wikipedia- 'literally "regal water" or "royal water"') is a mixture of nitric acid (HNO3) and hydrochloric acid (HCl) in a 1:3 ratio.

It was used by alchemists, as it can dissolve gold.

[jgamman]

niels bohr dissolved the nobel prize medals of colleagues in it and left it on his office shelf during wwII - the committee recast them after the war https://www.aip.org/history-programs/news/invisible-prize