Toxic gas leaks at KAIST; no one injured

By Park Si-soo

Toxic chlorine gas leaked at a lab in South Korea's elite tech/science school KAIST in Daejeon on Tuesday. Six students were taken to hospital after inhaling the gas, but were not injured.

The accident happened at 11 a.m. at a lab in the school's department of materials science and engineering. Six graduate students were there. They detected a leak when they opened a valve linked to a chlorine gas cylinder and immediately evacuated to the building's roof.

School and fire authorities locked down the building and decontaminated it.

The school said the students initially felt nausea and showed other typical symptoms of inhaling chlorine. But they were fine after medical treatment, it said.

An investigation is under way to find the leak's cause.