Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio Pay brain Stuff Lauren Bogle bomb here. The fertilizer explosions that have killed hundreds and injured thousands of residents in unfortunate cities like Lebanon, Beirut, Breast, France, and Texas City in the US are notable not only for their terrible outcomes, but also because explosions from fertilizer manufacturing and storage are relatively rare occurrences. For a planet that uses about two
hundred million tons of fertilizer a year, accidents are not ubiquitous. However, when ammonium nitrate, the compound linked to all of these disasters, does blow up, the effects can be devastating. On April six, ninety seven, about filled with twenty three hundred tons of ammonium nitrate and doctor near Texas City blew up as the result of a small fire on board. Nearly six hundred people were killed. That seven incident is ill one
of the worst industrial accidents in US history. The tragedy in Lebanon in August has caused at least two d and twenty deaths and five thousand injuries, and has left and estimated three hundred thousand people without homes. It was caused by some three thousand tons of ammonium nitrate exploding. So how do fertilizers, which we often think of as natural compounds that are good for the earth, explode so violently.
Let's begin with a little background on fertilizer itself. Plants need a few basic nutrients to grow, and most of them are found in the air and water and things like oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen. Of course, they also need some other elements that may or may not be rich in the soil that they're growing in. If a plant just needs a little bit of a nutrient, it's called
a micronutrient, think a boron or chlorine. If a plant needs heaps of an ingredient, it's called a macronutrient, think nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and sulfur. And that's where fertilizer comes in. It packs the dirt with the secondary elements needed to make a plant flourish. Of course, many of us home gardeners would simply classify good old manure as fertilizer, and we wouldn't
be wrong. According to the International Fertilizer Industry Association, any natural or manufactured material that contains at least five percent nitrogen, potassium, or phosphorus counts as a fertilizer. Of course, the fertilizing manufacturing industry produces synthetic or as they prefer to call them, mineral fertilizers. To manufacture mineral fertilizers, there are a few steps. First, you must collect the materials, which are in fact found in nature. Then you have to treat them to bolster
the concentration or refine the products. After that you must convert them into a form that can be used by plants, and then you may want to combine those nutrients with others. One of the main components in manufactured fertilizer is ammonium nitrate. Like we said, nitrogen is one of those macronuts rents that plants love, so a lot of fertilizers are nitrogen based. Of course, we can't just bottle up some nitrogen and
pour it on the old carrot patch. Atmospheric nitrogen has a really strong chemical bond that plants can't easily break, So fertilizer companies create nitrogen based substances that are much easier for plants to take. Apart ammonium nitrate is one such compound, and it's used for good reason. The ammonium part sticks around longer without evaporating, so it's great for hot summer fields, and the nitrate is easily used by plants even more compelling in the agricultural industry. It's inexpensive
to manufacture. You can bine ammonia and nitric acid and you're done. But what makes ammonium nitrate capable of such lethal explosions? Perhaps, surprisingly not much. Ammonium nitrate is a relatively stable compound, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. In other words, when it's just sitting quietly somewhere, ammonium n trait isn't that big of a problem because it needs a relatively high activation energy, that is, the energy
needed to cause a chemical reaction in order to explode. However, if an accident where some sort of detonation, a spark, or some other kind of energy occurs, you better believe that ammonium nitrate is deadly. The compound essentially makes its own fuel from the ammonium and oxidizer the nitrate, so its reaction is violent and long lasting. So it makes sense that a fire seems to be the cause and not the outcome of what happened in all of these
tragic explosions. It's worth repeating that although ammonium nitrate and other fertilizer explosions are terrible, they're rare, but would be remiss to not mention that fertilizer can also make a deadly intentional weapon. Timothy McVeigh, for one, used a fertilizer bomb in Oklahoma City bombing m Today's episode was written by Kate Kirshner and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is production of I Heart
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