>>10206756 PB

chemproffag here… ammonium nitrate all by itself is NOT a high explosive. it's an oxidant. to make a high explosive with it you need to add fuel (eg, kerosene) that gets oxidized.

however, it's not rock stable, but decomposing pure NH4NO3 by itself would NOT produce the explosion seen in the video. something else cause the massive explosion, or the NH4NO3 reportedly "stored" there WAS being mixed with some sort of fuel (reductant) to make high explosives.

the white cloud that appears to "materialize" out of thin air is exactly that, water vapor (invisible) in the air that is condensed into liquid droplets (visible) by the hypersonic shock wave from the explosion.

>>10207710

>>10207620

>>10207824

true and not true. yes, fertilizer plants do occasionally blow up. the key word was HIGH explosive. decomposition of NH4NO3 alone is a low yield explosive. of course, if you have enough of it, i suppose it would do a lot of damage. but without definite numbers to go by and accurate assessment of the blast radius and resultant damage, it's not possible to make a definitive statement as to whether NH4NO3 alone was responsible. add to that i am only a chemist, not an expert in relating the total energy released by a reaction to the structural damage caused by an explosion.