Residential gas pipeline explosions from plastic pipe use

Steel gas mains corrode after 30–40 years, leak into soil, blow up homes. Plastic replaces steel; corrosion-resistant but can fail at welded joints.

[Tom holds up a section of plastic gas pipe.] Gas pipe. They used to make gas pipes that run down the street out of steel, but after 30 or 40 years it corrodes, and now you have gas leaking into the soil and you can blow up homes. Now they use plastic — they weld plastic pipe. Very corrosion resistant, but it also fails, and it can fail at the joints. We'll talk about some of that. We talked last time about soldering. I passed around one of the semiconductor chips — an old Pentium chip from the 1995 era. I don't have the newest ones, but the technology of tape-automated bonding is the same, and we'll go through the soldering techniques.