Talk:Potassium chloride

Untitled
Added information about KCl as beta radiation source. Requires further editing of details

(10.72% decays by electron capture, EC, and the majority of these decays (10.55%?) are accompanied by 1.46 MeV gamma. There is also a tiny fraction of beta+ decay) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 150.227.15.253 (talk) 08:18, 13 August 2015 (UTC) w. User:Helmut Wabnig

KCl is available from different suppliers. The selected ones are not a neutral selection. More points:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:213.188.227.119

Best regards

Template messed up?
Looks like someone's messed up the chembox template. The top half of the page is displaying wiki code and comments. Anyone have the time to fix it? -Khedron (not logged in; 200.71.231.95 15:10, 26 October 2007 (UTC))

Table of values—what are the values?
In the table in Physical properties, what are those values? Are they the conductivity values (what units?) in the carefully-prepared solutions (what concentration?) mentioned in the preceeding sentence? Are they solubility values (what units, what temperature)? Something else? DMacks 16:11, 17 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Looks like someone had vandalised the table - I got the header from an older version of the article. Walkerma 16:40, 17 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Hadn't had a chance to look deeper into what went wrong. DMacks 16:42, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

hey buddies how to take lethal injection.how much is sufficient to stops heart?

--117.99.24.5 (talk) 03:28, 6 April 2008 (UTC)sumit


 * The solubility data doesn't mention if it's w/w or w/v. Also, it doesn't agree with the data given at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solubility_table. Somaeye (talk) 07:10, 29 October 2016 (UTC)

WikiProject Food and drink Tagging
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LD50

 * "Orally it is toxic in excess; the LD50 is around 2500 milligram/kg (meaning that a person weighing 75 kg (165 lb) would have to consume about 190 g (6.7 ounces) which is equivalent to 38 tea spoons; table salt is about as toxic)"

suffers from a basic problem in that it does not say what the result of this would be. First, many readers have no idea what LD50 means. Second, for those that do, it is left to the reader to assume the result is death - and assume wrongly. LD50 is the dosage at which 50% mortality occurs, significant mortality occurs well below this dose (and 100% mortality well above it). Therefore dosages with risk of death are in fact much lower than the quoted LD50 figure. Its worth bearing in mind that all sorts of people use wiki for all sorts of things.

I have clarified this by stating what the result of this action would be in the article. Hopefully this statement will then be correctly understood by many more readers. Jeff G then reverted it and requested " if you believe the edit was constructive, ensure that you provide an informative edit summary. " so I've put this explanation here for you all to decide. 86.4.152.167 (talk) 20:35, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Building on what was already said, I've clarified the LD50 somewhat. LD50 is determined on a population basis, and the prior wording ("for a 50% chance of death") made it seem like a given individual would have a 50% chance of mortality. Not true - if that individual is somewhere lower on the curve, they'd have a 100% chance of mortality, 100% of the time. Again, since people use wiki for all kinds of things, it's better to be specific.--- Lawt3 20:29, 5 December 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lawt3 (talk • contribs)

LD50 is linked (at least now) so it is easy for the ignorant reader to find out! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 150.227.15.253 (talk) 08:21, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

melts and sublimes?!
in the chembox it has a melting point and a boiling point. next to the boiling point, it says "(sublimes)" how can a liquid sublime. maybe it only melts under abnormal pressures. clarification is definitely needed. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.39.190.212 (talk) 19:51, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

I was just heading here to ask the same thing. Sublimation is a phase change from solid to gas, and a liquid cannot sublime. Perhaps they meant that the salt begins to dissociate into potassium vapor and chlorine gas rather than boil at those temperatures. Would someone with a better knowledge of the thermal stability of this salt please correct this glaring error? 160.94.47.16 (talk) 18:23, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
 * My wild guess this is something to do with an archaic definition of sublimation. KCl is no different to other salts (e.g. NaCl) in terms of melting/boiling. Removed. Materialscientist (talk) 00:40, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

E508
Please add to appropriate section (+LD50, if E508 limits exist) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_food_additives,_Codex_Alimentarius "508 A E potassium chloride mineral salt" (85.156.218.108 (talk) 17:47, 7 October 2012 (UTC))

Refimprove tag deleted
Why? The first three sections of this article, after the lead section, contain lots of technical information with no citations whatsoever.

Coconutporkpie (talk) 01:44, 14 November 2014 (UTC)

Assessment comment
Substituted at 03:17, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Infobox solubility has changed for the worse, now has ambiguous units.
On the 24th of April 2016 (last year) the infobox was changed from showing solubility in water as grams/Litre, to mass %. I'm not convinced this is a positive change for a number of reasons.

I think that a bare "%" is an amazingly ambiguous unit. is it percent by mass, volume, or m/v? Is that a percentage of the solvent's mass, or the solution after the salt is added? Based on the original editor's comment, and comparing those variations to the original g/L values, I'm pretty confident it's the mass of salt / mass of solution (water+salt). That's a fine thing to measure, but I don't think % is the unit that best communicates this combination. Mass fraction (chemistry) seems to indicate that m% or wt% are less ambiguous ways to communicate this measurement.

I've looked at 10 other simple salts, and I haven't found any other instance of mass %, it's usually g/100mL and g/kg. Interestingly, Lithium chloride has both g/100mL and g/kg, I guess it's because the sources had different units. Certainly we can have unusual units, but why change from a normal unit (g/L) to an unusual one?

Finally, I'm confused by the discrepancy between the old and new values. Converting the mass % to g/L, I'm seeing about 5% error at 100 °C, even after correcting for the varying density of pure water with temperature. I'm not a chemist so I don't know what else could influence the solubility of two pure substances. Did the experimenters really lose 27 grams?

For this table I converted the weight % to g/L, accounting for the density of water. I derived the expression $$\frac{w*p}{(1-p)}=s$$, where $$w$$ is the density of water (g/L), $$p$$ is the given percentage to convert, and $$s$$ is the resulting amount of salt, in g/L. This formula accounts for the unknown final density of the solution.

Hopefully someone with a bit more knowledge in this area can make a quick decision and either change units to wt% or m%, change sources, or decide it's good as-is. Thanks for your time, 2001:8003:6078:4B00:20F1:425A:335F:6830 (talk) 23:39, 3 May 2017 (UTC)


 * Hey, I've updated the solubility to look more like the other pages. It seems like somebody took your percentages and simply wrote the wrong units next to them. I hope this version has it right. Scythe33 (talk) 20:37, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

Potassium chloride "harmless in food" claim
User:Doc James recently contested the claim that potassium chloride is harmless in food. Since it is uncited and I can see it being problematic to a layman ("harmless" is a much stronger claim than "not lethal"!), I could see a further verification/citation as a good thing. This is not at all an area of my expertise, so a priori I don't know anything about the claim save the existence of salt substitutes.

I can't look much further into this or edit the article at the moment—I might come back later to do so, but if anyone else wants to, I've found the following that seems relevant at a glance:


 * FDA opinion on KCl
 * Salt substitutes are often KCl-centric
 * Van Buren, L., Dötsch-Klerk, M., Seewi, G., & Newson, R. S. (2016). Dietary Impact of Adding Potassium Chloride to Foods as a Sodium Reduction Technique. Nutrients, 8(4), 235. http://doi.org/10.3390/nu8040235

Laogeodritt [ Talk 18:55, 20 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I have removed the sentence in question. Would need a ref to say it is harmless before we should. Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 21:06, 21 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Have adjusted it based on the FDA source you found above. Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 21:10, 21 June 2017 (UTC)

Opaque Wording
This article as of 2020.10.01 carries this: "While SOP typically sells at a premium to MOP, the vast majority of potash fertilizer worldwide is sold as MOP." The first part of this sentence is a complete mystery to me. Is it a British expression? South African? What does it mean? Can someone translate it into more common English? Is it intended to say "While SOP is cheaper than MOP..." etc. ? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Friendly person (talk • contribs) 22:13, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

Merger proposal
Should we move Sylvite into Potassium chloride? I think that the content in the sylvite article might be explained in the context of potassium chloride, and the sylvite article is of a reasonable size that the merging of sylvite will not cause any problems as far as article size is concerned. However, I am not sure. What do you think? Firestar464 (talk) 07:14, 13 October 2020 (UTC)
 * They seem fine as separate articles and cover the topics well. Randy Kryn (talk) 10:28, 22 October 2020 (UTC)
 * The central difference between the two articles seems to be that sylvite is potassium chloride in mineral form. Is that enough to constitute separation? In any case, I am going to add sylvite as another name for potassium chloride, because it seems like the two terms could potentially be used almost interchangeably. Redcoat05 (talk) 21:03, 25 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose. If anything, we should be splitting more articles for chemical compounds and chemical elements that are also natural minerals. The infobox for one emphasizes quite different properties than the infobox for the other.--Kent G. Budge (talk) 01:31, 3 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Oppose, per Kent G. Budge. Firejuggler86 (talk) 20:46, 2 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Closing, given the consensus not to merge. Klbrain (talk) 20:22, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

Addendum: Having article for allotropes is common; Halite for Sodium Chloride, Diamond for Carbon etc. Klbrain (talk) 20:22, 24 April 2021 (UTC)