Big Bang in Beruit

[Anomalocaris]

Oh shut up.


You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.


Amfo is stable as hell....  That is a large reason for it's common use. You can set fire to it. You can pound on it with a hammer all day - and nothing will happen.

You can blow up firecrackers in it and it will not detonate. It takes a priming charge - like dynamite - to detonate.



I know. I have experience with it. 


....

That said - I saw 60 lbs of it blow a hole in sandy soil - 9 feet deep and 20 feet wide.


I suppose there is a pressure factor when you get thousands of tons with it - but I don't think a simple fire would detonate it. There was probably some other agent -  that detonated first....

An important factor when you wanna blow stuff up is the detonation velocity of the agent used. It shows how fast the chemical reaction can propagate , and this in turn influences the detonation pressure that can build up.

Agents with low detonation speed need to be put in "boxes" to give time to puild up pressure or all you have is a conflagration, kindaa fizzz. How is detonation velocity linked to detonation pressure? Detonation pressure is proportional to the SQUARE of detonation speed (roughly).

Where is Ammonium nitrate on the scale?

Gunpowder: 600 m/s
TNT: ca. 7000
Ammoniumnitrate: 2500

Its much closer to TNT than to gunpowder (which actually is a quite low rated explosive). You defnitely need no strong boxes to create a pressure wave. How does it compare to TNT? Well Detonation speed is 1/3 of TNT and so detonation pressure is 1/10 of TNT. Yet in this case detonation pressure was (still!) 1/10 of that of 3000 tons of TNT!!!!!! three.tousand.tons.of.TNT

ammonium nitrate is considered to have an “effectiveness factor” of 0.42, which means explosion of ton of ammonium nitrate is equal in destructive potential to 0.42 tons of TNT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent

So this detonation is on the order of a 1 kiloton tactical nuclear weapon.