Talk:Sodium nitrate

message: It is still being mined in Chile and in Argentina. jj
My can of SPAM lists sodium nitrite as an ingredient, not sodium nitrate.   Can someone with more chemistry background clarify the reference to SPAM in this article?  Thanks.  Samw 01:53 30 Jun 2003 (UTC)
:OK, thanks for removing the SPAM reference. Samw 17:57, 2 Sep 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: My grandfather told me that during WWII (he was stationed in Alaska) the Army put Saltpeter into the food in order to reduce the libido of the troops. I looked at the article for a confirmation of this use and it doesn't mention anything about that potential side effect.
Saltpeter can also refer to potassium nitrate, which specifically says that's nonesense. 69.140.156.40 21:24, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Sexual Inhibitions

message: sodium nitrates, according to many migraine drug companies and migraine prevention websites, have been found to cause migraines. These sources also say this chemical can be found in deli meats cheese and therefore pizza.
* Unless you have any real source, I wouldn't believe this for a second.  People make all kinds of spurious correlations without any real data, and this is made especially more difficult to believe when the nitrate anion (NO3-) is present in most vegetables as well.  Migraines are a poorly understood phenomena and without proper study (meaning, real sources) this is nothing more than anecdotal fluff. Ψαμαθος 10:26, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  migraines 

message: Isn't NaNO3 used as fertilizer?  If you can confirm, please add to applications. ike9898 19:26, 29 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Fertilizer

message: Evaluation of regenerative phase change drywalls: low-energy buildings application
K. Darkwa, International Journal of Energy Research Volume 23, Issue 14 , Pages 1205 - 1212--Stone 14:50, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Phase Change Material

message: The substance Sodium Nitrate, and the related Sodium nitrite are not themselves carcinogenic; they are in fact antioxidants, like a few of the vitamins. However, when foods containing them are cooked at very high temperatures, compounds called nitrosamines, which are carcinogenic, are formed. (That page linked to above is nothing but an inflammatory advertisement for a book, and also strangely doesn't even mention nitrate or -ite.) Now the problem I am having is that this is rather off-topic, so I don't really want to add it to the article, along with the citation I have (below, and the same as the one at Curing (food preservation)), but misinformation of the form "NaNO3 causes cancer" keeps cropping up. Does anyone have any advice here? Should I just put the off-topic stuff on to prevent the bad stuff?
*National Academy of Sciences - National Research Council Academy of Life Sciences. "The Health Effects of Nitrate, Nitrite and N-Nitroso Compounds". Washington DC: National Academy Press, 1981.
Josh Caswell 24.41.69.134 06:57, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Carcinogenic Potential

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thread_title: [[WP:FOOD|WikiProject Food and drink]] Tagging

message: I added a sentence about an event in 1825. I think it is important to understand when in history Chile saltpeter was important. The sentence about 1825 has a source, but there are several problems with this source. I hope somebody can replace it with more reliable sources and more information. --LA2 (talk) 14:08, 16 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  History 

message: Sodium nitrate must be first converted to nitrite to form nitric acid?   Nonsense.
First of all, nitric acid can be easily distilled from a mixture of sodium nitrate and sulfuric acid in vacuum with no production of nitrogen oxides.  Second, sulfuric acid is an excellent polar solvent and dissolves sodium nitrate forming free sodium and nitrate ions.  Sulfuric acid is also an excellent source of protons (it is an acid after all), so in the mixture of sulfuric acid and sodium nitrate there is an equilibrium concentration of nitric acid, which is the least ionic of all the species present.
Distillation of sodium nitrate with sulfuric acid at one bar (atmospheric pressure) results in some thermal decomposition of nitric acid to form mixed nitrogen oxides and oxygen:
: 4 HNO3 → 4 NO2 + 2 H2O + O2
: 2 NO2 → 2 NO + O2 
Due to the importance of the industrial synthesis of nitric acid, this system has been well studied and a considerable volume of literature exists about the mechanisms of the reactions. 
This section of the article does not properly represent the characteristics of an ionic solute dissolved in an ionizing solvent and needs to be cleaned up to bring the text more into agreement with what is actually happening in a complex chemical system.
In the absense of negative commentary, I will make these changes in mid-June 2016. Norm Reitzel (talk) 13:03, 28 May 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: I've written the nitric acid via nitrite route out, there isn't doubt.  I will notify the contributor. Ambix (talk) 19:51, 28 May 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Nitric acid via Sodium Nitrite