University College London – Factbox: What’s ammonium nitrate, the chemical that blew up Beirut?

(Reuters) – Lebanese authorities stated 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate had been saved for years at the Beirut port without safety measures. That stockpile exploded on Tuesday, killing more than 150 of us, injuring hundreds and causing frequent damage.

Under are minute print of ammonium nitrate and educated comment:

Ammonium nitrate is an industrial chemical typically weak in fertilisers and as an explosive for quarrying and mining. It is miles believed of moderately protected if uncontaminated and saved neatly. But it’s very unhealthy if execrable, mixed with gasoline or saved unsafely.

A large quantity of ammonium nitrate exposed to intense heat can explode. Storing the chemical shut to massive gasoline tanks, in bulk and in a poorly ventilated facility could perchance perchance blueprint off an enormous blast. The better the amount, the increased the disaster this could perchance detonate.

“On a scale, this explosion is scaled down from a nuclear bomb in its set aside of up from a dilapidated bomb,” stated Roland Alford, managing director of Alford Applied sciences, a British company that specialises in disposal of explosive ordnance. “Right here is perchance up there amongst the largest non-nuclear explosions of all time.”

Consultants bag famed the colour of the smoke and “mushroom cloud” seen in photos of Tuesday’s blast as characteristic of ammonium nitrate explosions.

“Video photos of the incident shows initial white-gray smoke followed by an explosion that launched a large cloud of crimson-brown smoke and a large white ‘mushroom cloud’. These present that the gases launched are white ammonium nitrate fumes, poisonous, crimson/brown nitrous oxide and water,” stated Stewart Walker from the college of Forensic, Environmental and Analytical Chemistry at Flinders University. 

“Whenever you invent ammonium nitrate explosive, you shouldn’t get that brown plume. That tells me the oxygen balance used to be no longer handsome – so it wasn’t mixed as an explosive,” he stated. “The Beirut blast appears fancy an accident, unless it used to be arson.”

PAST ACCIDENTS

A few of the arena’s deadliest industrial accidents were attributable to ammonium nitrate explosions:

In 1921, an explosion of ammonium sulphate and nitrate fertiliser at the Oppau plant in Germany killed 565 of us.

In 1947, a hearth detonated around 2,300 tonnes of the chemical aboard a vessel in the U.S. port of Texas City, causing a tidal wave. A minimal of 567 of us were killed and more than 5,000 injured.

In Toulouse, France in 2001, an explosion at an ammonium nitrate depot killed 31 and injured 2,500.

Ammonium nitrate saved at a Texas fertiliser plant detonated in an explosion that killed 14 and injured about 200 in 2013.

In 2015, explosions at a warehouse storing ammonium nitrate and other chemicals in the Chinese port of Tianjin killed as a minimal 116 of us.

Andrea Sella, professor of Inorganic Chemistry at University College London, stated of the Beirut blast: “The foundation that one of these quantity would were left unattended for six years beggars belief, and used to be an accident waiting to happen.”

USE IN BOMBINGS

Ammonium nitrate could perchance perchance even be mixed with other substances to invent a bomb. It used to be weak in Irish Republican Military bombings in London in the 1990s, the 1995 explosion that blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 of us, and the 2002 blasts in Bali nightclubs wherein more than 200 died. Tons of the homemade bombs that were weak in opposition to U.S. troops in Afghanistan contained ammonium nitrate.