I Had a Dream

Good morning, I had a dream last night. In it, I was playing with dynamite in Washington State. But I never blew myself up, because I knew how dynamite worked. Actually, it may have been ammonium nitrate. That would make a lot more sense. I'm guessing you saw the dramatic explosion that took out Beruit (if not, drop everything and watch it now). I ended up down the Google rabbit hole reading about ammonium nitrate, and was aghast to find that similar ammonium nitrate explosions have happened dozens of times throughout history. In fact, so many have happened recently that there are 3 or 4 caught on camera, like Beirut or Tiangjin.... The Beruit explosion was 2750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate. The Oklahoma City bombing was 0.18 tonnes of the same. The biggest nitrate explosion, however, happened in 1921 in post WW1 Germany, at 4,500 tonnes. So I started reading about that... In WW1 Germany, they used ammonium sulfate for artillery, but we're running out of sulfur. So they started making a 50/50 cocktail of ammonium sulfate/nitrate. Well, when those chemicals are stored together they liquify and harden, becoming a solid resembling plaster or dry wall. Since it was stored in silos, it was very difficult to retrieve because they had to mine it out with pickaxes. Until they found a quicker method: blowing up the silo with dynamite (that is 100% true look it up). They literally were using dynamite to blow out their bomb reagants. Now, the Germans had sworn up and down that this was safe, and done tests to show that as long as it'll less than 60% nitrate it WONT blow up. In fact, throughout WW1 they used the dynamite method 20,000 times to retrieve their explosives, without anything bad happening. But their tests were flawed, it's not the composition that mattered for stability, it was humidity of the substance. As long as it's above 2% humidity, it won't blow up, and as it came out of the factory it was 3-4% so it didn't. Until it had six years to dry in the silos, then it was below 2% humidity, and they dropped an actual dynamite charge into a 4,500 tonnes silo of explosives. Boom. The Germans no longer use dynamite in conjunction with their explosives. And from what I can tell, the Lebanese no longer store their confiscated explosives in Hangar 12 of the port.