[Borek]

Could be it will not make its way to papers outside of Poland.

Graduate student lost today both hands and had his face burnt when conducting experiments. He was working on his PhD in explosives at WAT (Wojskowa Akademia Techniczna - Military University of Technology) in Warsaw. He was alive and conscious on arrival to hospital.

That's all information available at the time. As far as I know WAT has pretty good facilities and labs prepared for this kind of work. Even that is not always enough

Seems like accidents are the only kind of my posts in News section 

[Mitch]

Do have a link? An English link would be even better.

[Borek]

Only in Polish so far.

http://www.dziennik.pl/wydarzenia/article124246/Student_stracil_dlonie_na_uczelni.html

[hmx9123]

That sucks.  It depends on the safety controls in place, perhaps they were not enough, but sometimes s#*$ happens and it was unforseeable.  I wish the best for the guy.

[Borek]

I am browsing news services here but nothing else surfaced yet.

[hmx9123]

If you find out any more, I'd be interested to hear the root cause of the explosion.

[Borek]

His PhD thesis was something like "Nanostructural explosives". From other sources - not clear whether he lost both hands or one, not clear whether he has not lost one eye.

I'll keep you posted, but you know how it goes - explosion is news, slow recovery is boring...

[hmx9123]

Nano explosives are the rage, but the problem is that there is a very real limit to the size of an explosive before it becomes non-functional (critical mass).  A shockwave must propagate through a certain amount of material (i.e., there is a 'run time') for it to fully form, and without this, it doesn't go bang.  Now, on the nanoscale, this won't fly, so they have to go for materials that do detonate on the nanoscale, and you are unfortunately left with primary HEs.  Those are dangerous monsters, and some are even point detonants.  One material I saw was a true point detonant; 8 mcg completely destroyed a DSC pan and analyzer (or whatever that name of the thing the pan sits in).  Had to buy a new part for the instrument.  Suck.

Point being (heh, no pun intended), if he was doing nano explosives, he may have been working with VERY sensitive and powerful material.  Not a good combination.

[hmx9123]

Here's a C&EN article on it:

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/86/i09/8609news3.html

[lipesa]

Am very sorry about the incident. Is there a possibility that the burns were caused by chemicals reactions or its thermal heat?