Terrorists like acetone peroxide because it's the rare explosive that doesn't contain nitrogen, the key ingredients bomb detectors search for. It's also cheap, easy to make at home and so unstable that sometimes people accidentally blow themselves up when they're still putting their bombs together.
As a British newspaper reported in a 2008 article about the substance: "In the occupied Palestinian territories, you can tell who the 'engineers' are: they are the ones covered in burn marks who might be missing fingers, or even a whole hand."
Which is all a long way of saying that acetone peroxide probably isn't the best substance to use for a children's science experiment.
At the Hockaday School, the private, 101-year-old college prep institution in Dallas, a school staffer was cleaning and noticed some acetone peroxide in atrash can.
School's currently not in session, though the campus is being used for a summer camp. Is one of the campers secretly evil? No, officials say. There was just some sort of class science experiment and afterward, the acetone peroxide "was not properly disposed of," according to the Dallas fire department.
Hazmat crews and the bomb squad had to come to the campus. "Because it was here, because we were at a school, we had a field across the street, we had a good place to blow it up or to dispose of it properly so that's what we used," Lt. Joel Lavender with Dallas Fire Rescue told CBS.
That's convenient. Now let's never do that project again.
