Grant Thompson does silly stuff with science and when he received a request to flush sodium down a toilet he knew who to call—the man who flushed mercury down a toilet with a hypnotic swirl. All cleaned up, the mercury toilet meets its ultimate demise in a mushroom cloud of destruction.
Sodium metal is one of the most highly-reactive metals on the periodic table and it’s pretty much a forgone conclusion that this toilet would not survive a standard flush. So, the guys played around with some other experiments first.
They start with a pinch of sodium metal about the size of a marble and demonstrate how the pressure of small wooden block being dropped on it creates enough pressure to blast the wood into the air.
Next up they try flushing a tiny bit of the metal in water which results in a modest, fiery explosion that’s somewhere along the lines of a cherry bomb.
By the time we finish with the grand finale, this commode will never flush again.