Yesterday a homeowner discovered 300 lbs of TNT sticks in their old home's basement, and first responders literally evacuated the area and detonated it in the home at 4:00 AM.
I'm just thinking there had to be better ways of responding to this problem than "Hurr hurr, dynamite go BRRRRR."
I got thinking they could dump liquid nitrogen on it to 1] introduce stability by entropic reduction, and 2] deny oxygen for the combustion reaction... instead of literally blowing up somebodies home.
I know this sounds ridiculous like it came out of a textbook, but I promise it's real news here haha
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This doesn’t seem right to me. TNT is one of the safest, most stable high explosives there is, not like dynamite. If it was dynamite, the response might be appropriate. The homeowner’s responsibility was rewarded by the destruction of his home.
Edit: the article said it was dynamite but the OP said TNT. Big difference.
But in the song, Bon Scott clearly states that "[he's] TNT, [he's] dynamite". Why would he say that if they are in fact different substances?
/s
Noted physical chemist, Bon Scott
He had pretty good physical chemistry with every woman in bed. At least, that's what his discography says.
His assertion was later confirmed multiple times by subject matter expert, and cabbie hat enthusiast, Brian Johnson.
Ref. needed
Scott. B et al, "TNT, Side 2, track 1", 1975
Comment deleted by user
Notice the /s
If it’s old nitro dynamite, it’s likely crystallized. Freezing it won’t matter. Snap a crystallized section, and it’s likely going to detonate. I’m former Army EOD.
Definitely doesn't help that the freezing temp for nitroglycerin is 55°F, after some quick reading tho your statement appears accurate solidified ng is less sensitive to detonation from the shock of an impact but crushing tamping etc is more likely to set it off and solidified ng is more likely to have a violent uncontrolled detonation.
Yeah, who’d have guessed an explosives expert knew what the fuck they’re talking about?!
Not disputing ya there lol.
We had to call yall in on several occasions back when I was a contractor with a line crew on a base back home.
Some holes we were digging with a 18" auger to set poles in for new projects being built on old ranges started billowing white smoke, come to find out after it was all cleared for us to go back and finish up a week or so later there had been an old wp shell we'd hit, on one occasion we had to replace the teeth of the auger afterwards.
And just wanna say thank you for your service sir, there's no telling how many more of our guys we'd be lose out there if it wasn't for yall.
Fuck how dare someone agree with you
We did an old barn in where they found 9 or so sticks of old nitro-dynamite. It had soaked the wood floor it was stored on, so we called the local FD, and burned the whole thing down. I had a nitro headache for about two days after. USAF EOD 89-98.
ISOTF! EOD 2000-2021, although I enlisted in 94, I didn’t change MOS until 2000.
Ice cream cure! That was the nice thing about nitro headaches and access to dfac ice cream at any given hour of the day. LOL
I used the Class 6 cure if I remember correctly.
My bad- I thought dynamite was a delivery method for TNT.
Nope! To get your TNT delivered you’d have to use Amazon or Uber Eats :)
Oof, Uber eats always charges me like 20$ extra
Man, when they say that chipotle blows up the bathroom they ain't kidding huh?
TNT= tri nitro toluene, toluene is the base ring structure, nitro is attached.
Dynamite is Nitroglycerine which goes boom when it has a bad day.
In the world of boomboom, ring structures are 1000% more stable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitroglycerin notice all the N and O?
Nitrogen really just wants to be left alone.
And yet some scientists like to set records for the most nitrogens in a molecule. To the point where sneezing a mile away makes it detonate.
Well as long as it has another nitrogen to marry and there isn't any molybdenum in the neighborhood. LMK if you don't understand the moly reference.
I mean dynamite is nitroglycerin adsorbed onto an inert solid. Fresh dynamite is pretty damn stable compared to neat nitroglycerin.
I've never heard a person ask for their NG "neat"...lol
It's always served on the (diatomaceous earth) rocks these days.
NO?
This sentence doesn't make sense. What exactly do you mean by "entropic reduction"? How would it "introduce stability"?
External oxygen isn't needed for an explosive to detonate.
In the case of TNT, the nitro groups are what serves as oxidizer.
Besides, the article states "dynamite", not TNT. They are very different substances, especially when it comes to long-term stability.
My thought was if you pull heat energy out of a system, you could reduce the entropy of the system, and increase molecular stability; reduce the chance a combustion reaction can be started through physical disturbance.
In purely theoretical terms you could cool an explosive to absolute zero and it probably wouldn’t work anymore. The slowing of molecular action due to cold would have a negligible effect on most chemical explosives until you reach absolute zero (and this is to say nothing of their stability in the cold)
However actually doing that is much much harder than blowing up a house and replacing everything in it.
Don't think freezing to near absolute zero would help.
The decomposition of high explosives is caused by a shockwave created by detonator or other parts of explosive. And the shockwave carries enough energy to start the reaction.
On top of that, I'd bet that cooling it would have to be done very, very slowly - like on the order of weeks - so that it didn't cool unevenly and initiate differential crystal growth that led to internal pressures, which could easily set off NG.
Entropy is not really the energy associated with heat, it is something more abstract altogether. Though I get the gist of what you‘re saying.
I‘m no expert, but it could be that cooling down dynamite had a negligeable effect on the reaction. The reaction is already incredibly fast.
Cooling nitroglecerine down, specificaally will cause it to crystalize, which in turn puts all those carbons directly adjacent to those nitro groups so it can actually make it easier to detonate than its liquid form. Best means of dealing with Nitroglycerine is just flood it. It is water soluable, and when it gets disolved it cant detonate.
That’s good news to a lot of people using it for heart medicine
So so what's your take on flooding a basement containing 300 lb of Century old nitroglycerin with water, then flushing it down the drain/pumping it out?
Your downvotes are unwarranted, entropy is indeed directly related to heat.
It wont help this situation, though
Lol, i studied biochemistry, so I do know haha
I dont understand why people are downvoting your posit, which is correct 99% of the time if you cool something down, it will require more energy to get over the activation energy hill to go chain reaction.
TNT is a secondary explosive meaning that unless a detonator is used, things like sparks, open flames, heat, shocks, etc would not be able to detonate (it is still flammable though) so it is generally a lot safer than nitroglycerin for example. Also i'm not sure what using liquid nitrogen would accomplish, do you mean freeze it and while its still frozen extract it and take it outside? Also i'm not an expert on TNT but with nitroglycerin cooling it is incredibly dangerous as it becomes considerably more unstable due to crystal formation that if disturbed could cause detonation
Edit: just like u/Superb-Tea-3174 i found out after posting my comment that the article mentions dynamite which is nitroglycerin binded to a specific cement (that overtime can leak out and become incredibly dangerous)
Iirc TNT is so insensitive that it took 30 years for people to figure out it was an explosive and not just a yellow dye.
Imagine someone just casually crushing up an explosive in a mortar and pestle.
As long as it's a secondary explosive they'd probably be fine. Most secondaries are pretty insensitive.
It just scares me to think that tnt and plastic explosives get handled so roughly without exploding. Never knew you could melt and cast tnt into shapes though. That is a fun and scary thought.
Nobel figured it out real quick and made an astronomical amount of coin selling it to mining companies.... and the military when they got hold of it. The latter would haunt him til the end of his days and he founded the nobel prize to give back for what his invention did to/for the world.
Nobel sold dynamite, not TNT
No he didn't. That was dynamite. TNT was first synthesized by Julius Wilbrand in 1863, who thought it was a pretty cool synthetic yellow dye. No one realised it was an explosive until 1891 when Carl Häussermann discovered its explosive properties.
Yessir I forgot my history there. Woopse
There is an explosive called [HNS4](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266329749_HNS-IV_Explosive_Properties_and_Characterization_Tests). It is so insensitive my company for a while shipped small amounts as pharmaceuticals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexanitrostilbene
Generally the sensitivity of an explosive is inversely proportional to it power. With nitroglycerine being the exception.
Can you get art/textiles that weredyed in TNT? That would make a sick wall display. I mean as long as it didn't detonate.
Neat. I'm learning all kinds of things today. Thanks for clearing up my ignorance!
That's what I'm saying. I was all indignant, "why didn't they just freeze it? They blew up that lady's house!". But now, I'm edumicated ;)
Reading some of the other comments here and finding out that nitroglycerin is soluble in water makes me wonder why they didn't just slowly flood her basement and flush it out.
Lol good thing I wasn't in charge hehehe! I woulda froze it and blown everything and everyone sky high! Peace brother.
Never heard diatomaceous earth called cement before?
Even as a hobbyist I'm very scared of the small amount of NG i have on my backyard freezing at night so I keep it in a metal vault inside my house, imagine how much that amount of dynamite could've been sweating this whole time
Typical old dynamite "sweats". Meaning it seeps out of the absorbent and forms little beads of the liquid. It is really touchy in the condition. I have disposed of old dynamite. We carefully took the cases out of the explosive magazine and detonated it in an open field.
Do not fuck with old dynamite.
OP said its TNT, not dynamite (stabilized nitroglycerin)
Yes, but the actual news article says it was two big boxes full of sticks of old dynamite.
then OP is clueless spreading misinformatin in times such as these, despicable
Could be a real problem if the police dealing with this specific discovery of dynamite are thinking of reading Reddit and then traveling back in time to deal with it differently to how they already did.
Not really, it would sound ridiculous if it came out of a textbook, because neither cooling to liquid nitrogen temp nor removing oxygen would stabilize TNT.
True. I've learned a lot today :)
Explosives don't need external oxygen
Back when my dad was teaching EOD school at Dalhart, he’d liven up things in the barracks by ridding a chunk of TNT on top of the red-hot potbelly stove. People would dive for the floor, and the TNT would just melt and then burn with a hot blue flame. It’s HARD to get TNT to actually explode.
so, let's think that through. how would you do it? you go up there, throw liquid nitrogen on it, and then..... what? what do you think will happen a few seconds later? cold stuff doesn't stay cold, and a warming up thermal shock doesn't sound like a very stable situation to me.
or would you want to be the guy who picks up the cold explosive potato to dunk it in a second bucket of nitrogen?
Well that WAS my thought process before other people here explained why the chemistry doesn't work for that.
The only remaining question I have is why these first responders decided they absolutely MUST detonate it at 4AM; It was sitting there for at least a century. I would have liked to not have slept through the explosion lol.
three reasons i'd guess - 1) they were already there, leaving and coming back later is too expensive 2) it's now a known active threat and they're responsible. If they were to leave and something, although the chance is small, would go wrong, they'd be royally fucked. 3) you don't want to leave active ordnance unaccounted for, anyone might take it away and do something nefarious with it.
"A little discouraged because apparently it was a thing that was known for ten hours and it would have been nice to be notified a little earlier. It was a little freaky, but you do what you can."
So the fire department knew about it for at least ten hours before they gave the homeowner an hour to evacuate. For dynamite that had been passed down for generations.
Bet this will make other homeowners want to come forward in future rather than trying to deal with it themselves when they find old explosives grandpa left in the basement.
Lol agreed. I hope the guy was able to evacuate his belongings.
Article says they were given one hour and the photo looks like a literal bomb went off (obviously) with papers and debris strewn about. I really feel those folks, what a shitty situation.
TNT = trinitrotoluene, pure, insensitive secondary explosive
Dynamite = mixed explosive product, nitroglycerin (best classified as a primary sensitive explosive) and an absorbant medium - like cat litter.
Mixing liquid NG with an absorbant stabilizes it and makes it easy to control. When Dynamite gets old it starts to "sweat" pure NG, which makes it sensitive and unstable.
Freezing a sensitive explosive might actually have an opposite effect, since large crystals of primary explosives are some of the most sensitive things around. Not sure if the low temperature would offset this.
Acetone peroxide is another sensitive primary explosive favored by terrorist organisations, and leaving this in a container for long can lead to crystals forming around the lid (through sublimation), etc. which then subsequently go premature allahu ahkbar when handled
Yeah there's no way I'd handle acetone peroxide. It doesn't even make a good explosive because it's hard to contain, and impossible to compress in a container to make a good explosion. Like you can't make pipe bombs with it, it's super sensitive and reactive to metals.
I dont think you are comprehending just how much dynamite 300lbs of dynamite is.
Thats a whole lotta problem.
Yep it certainly is!
😆😂
It's a substantial fraction※ of the size of the bomb that wrecked the Alfred P Murrah Building, I think, isn't it. I was surprised it was even possible to perform the controlled detonation without wrecking surrounding properties! I suppose, with it being in a cellar, the walls of the cellar would take the brunt of the blast going directly sideways, & the house atop the cellar would absorb a lot of the upward -directed energy … but still, I'm surprised there wasn't more damage to immediately adjacent properties.
Maybe it's a sparse neighbourhood. And it's also possible that there was some damage & that the Authorities 'stepped-up' to suppress reporting of it. It's pretty well-know that, where explosions are concerned, Authorities do sometimes 'step-up' to degree that might be found a tad sinister !
※ Actually - now I check
- not really a substantial fraction: a factor of 16 disparity! In sheer gross mass , that is: there's the facts to be factored-in of the difference in the explosive used (nitrogylcerine versus ammonium nitrate + fuel-oil + nitromethane); & whether that quoted 300lb was the gross mass of the dynamite or the mass of its nitoglycerine content, with, entering-in, even whether some of it had evaporated. I doubt that latter item will be easy to find-out, though. The press will be happy just to keep lobbing-out their
¡¡ 300 lb !!
😱🥶
, & the goodly bomb disposal gentlemen/ladies will, per what I put above about 'Authorities', probably not be particularly forthcoming as-to such nuances!
Explosive engineer for 30 years. Typically, most of the NG will have seeped out of the cartridges by now. The sticks themselves are likely not even cap (#8) sensitive. The NG can soak into the box or container in which the sticks are stored. The typical method for disposal is to get a pallet, cover the pallet with 6” or so of straw, place the container and cartridges on the straw and burn them. The straw keeps the NG from pooling and reaching critical mass required for detonation.
That being said, this isn’t a procedure I would recommend a homeowner to try. Get in touch with a local explosives distributor (dm me if you need help) and have them dispose of the material. While it isn’t common, it happens from time to time a homeowner will give us a call.
Edit: look for Dyno Nobel, Austin Powder or Orica distributorships near you. They are the biggest three suppliers in the US. Maxam and Enaex are also in some places.
I've read that an effect that greatly increases the sensitivity of long-stored explosives is the presence of metal & opportunity for that metal to undergo some chemistry with the explosive, as the metal salts (or combinations with a metal, if not strictly 'salts') of the stuff are typically far more unstable than the stuff itself. Certainly, looking through documentation about explosives, the ones listed as extremely sensitive seem generally to be compounds of metal with the ergiferous entity: fulminating gold, mercury fulminate, lead/silver azide, copper acetylide, & lead styphnate being ones that occur to me offhand. What's your take on that?
And down a cellar of a house rather than in a proper storage location, there's certainly the possibility of such corrosion having occured!
Update
I've just thought, aswell: if they were leaking, wouldn't most of the nitrogylcerine have evaporated after all that time? Isn't one of the hazards of handling of nitrogycerine that the vapour acts as a volatile vasodilator, somewhat as that ghastly 'poppers' stuff that some folk deliberately inhale as a brief intoxicant (wouldn't touch that stuff myself so-much as with a bargepole !) does!?
Maybe it had , & that's part of the reason for lack of talk of damage to adjacent properties.
WAY different chemicals.
Nitroglycerin's base is glycerin, a thick liquid (at room temperature) that is stable and won't evaporate much. It might lose some water and become more viscous, but not by much.
"Poppers" are commonly amyl nitrate, a thin solvent that evaporates like acetone or some light, thin petroleum solvents at or around room temperature.
The thing I'm referencing, though, as 'something I read' said that if there's some explosive, encased in metal in a corrosive environment, it can form combinations of the explosive with the metal that are extremely sensitive in the way that the ones I've cited are. Yep: not form specifically the ones I've cited , those being ones that are made intentionally - but (if you will) 'wild' combinations with the metal of the casing, or whatever other metal is present, that are unstable for a reason similar to the reason for the sensitivity of those intentionally-made ones.
I saw what you said about actually being professionally into explosives for 30year, & acknowledge it: I'm just 'running past' you what I read in some text, that I've near zero chance of refinding in any short time. I'm not presuming ¡¡ oh but I know this happens !!, or anything like that.
One article I read more recently, though, about that ghastly Beirut explosion, is that something similar might've happened with the ammonium nitrate that exploded on that occasion: that other stuff in the warehouse, that might've been put carelessly next to it or on-top of it (or underneath it - whatever), might've slowly seeped-out & gotten-into the ammonium nitrate, & brought-about something along those lines, increasing its sensitivity.
It's dead-easy, though, to find stuff about the vasodilation properties of nitroglycerine: eg
Medscape — David Warmflash (!!৺) — Nitroglycerin: How An Explosive Became a Cardiac Drug , &
International Chemical Safety Cards — NITROGLYCERIN .
(৺ What a name
😆
, considering what he's writing about!)
And it's had literally decades to evaporate from the dynamite in that cellar.
While I'm here, there's something I'd like to ask you. When, as young kids, we first learned of nitroglycerine, we'd make jokes about folk blowing themselves up just by shaking a bottle of nitroglycerine. Later-on, though, I was told that no : nitroglycerine isn't so unstable that it can be set-off just by shaking a bottle of it! . But since then, I've been warned that one absolutely must not shake a bottle of nitoglycerine!! , because if there's a bubble in it, or a bubble forms as a result of air entrained by the shaking, then those bubbles can collapse in essentially the same way as bubbles collapse during the 'cavitation' phenomenon that eats-away @ ships' propellers, & that the shock from that can easily be enough to trigger detonation.
And also, by a similar token, manufacturers of that rubbery solid rocket-fuel (as is in Space-Shuttle SRBs, & also is used by amateur rocket enthusiasts) need to ensure that there are absolutely no bubbles in it. 'By a similar token': in that case, it's not so much by the collapsing of the bubbles that the stuff can ignite if it receives an impact, but rather just by the gas inside it very briefly, but very sharply, heating-up as it undergoes adiabatic compression.
Put it this way: if I ever encounter a bottle of nitroglycerine (which I'm not expecting ever to happen!) I will definitely definitely not shake it!
Poppers are definitely amyl nitrate, as someone else mentioned. Nitro Glycerin does have medical uses as a vasodilator, and some folks with cardiac problems carry tablets. I have no experience or information with respect to the medical use.
HOWEVER… anyone who has ever walked into a powder magazine without venting it first will ABSOLUTELY attest to its effectiveness as a vasodilator. A “powder headache” is a real thing and is about the worst headache you will ever have.
Dynamite is not nearly as common as it used to be. It has largely been replaced by packaged emulsion products. Only one dynamite factory remains in the US. It’s owned by Dyno Nobel (with whom my company is a joint venture) and located in Carthage Missouri.
In response to NG forming explosive salts, there are lots of things that can “combine” with metal to form explosive salts, many of which are far less stable than NG. For obvious reasons, I’m not going to list them here but Breaking Bad had a couple of scenes that were more or less accurate.
The Beirut event isn’t unique. Similar events have happened for quite some time (look up Texas City, Texas). Ammonium nitrate is an oxidizer. All it needs is fuel and under the correct circumstances it can detonate.
So noting that the way it was dealt with in the news article involved a massive explosion, do you think that was mostly the dynamite or did they add other explosives to make sure it exploded?
What you're saying makes sense to me as a way of minimising the damage but it sounds like there was a lot of damage in this case.
They absolutely used additional explosives to detonate whatever was there.
My favourite thing about TNT is that we know it sometimes takes a shock-sensitive form, exhibiting piezoelectric polymorphism.
My 2nd favourite thing about TNT is that we have absolutely shit loads of the stuff and we don't really know how much of it is in which form.
At least we will know eventually.
Now that we're all clear that it's dynamite, not TNT:
Bomb disposal teams have used liquid nitrogen to reduce the danger from bombs before. Most high explosives are less explosive when very cold, and nitroglycerin follows that pattern. However...
OLD nitroglycerin is famously-unstable, and I think that's the more relevant issue here. Any stress on the nitroglycerin caused by freezing could set the whole thing off. Given the setting in the basement of a single-family home, and the low amount of explosives (30-35 pounds) blowing it up in place was likely the right call.
A larger bomb in a more-valuable building, made with more-stable explosives, you might want to try freezing it.
Someone nearby has commented
to the effect that freezing of nitroglycerine increases its instability.
There's another one here
to that same effect.
Oh wow: someone's answered that one to the effect that that's not certainly so! IDK …
🙄
… one'd think they'd just know something like that, wouldn't one!? It's like how after that notorious explosion of ammonium perchlorate @ the PEPCON facility in - where was it now, Nevada , was it? - there was contradictory information all-over the place as to whether ammonium perchlorate alone is known to be able to detonate.
Yep: near Henderson, Nevada — 1988-May-4th :
Clark County NV — The PEPCON Explosion .
I think if you go back and re-read those other comments, especially the response to the second one, you'll see that we're actually agreeing. Lowering the temperature of NG makes it less energetic, but might make it more sensitive.
But yes - for 100 year-old dynamite, in a "safe" location, I definitely would not want to risk it. Dynamite, in particular, has the issue that it separates over time, and it's actually been made with a bunch of different materials over the years. It's difficult to know what the "inert" parts are going to do as they cool down.
A block of TNT is going to be mostly TNT and will be homogeneous, and it starts out as much less sensitive than NG to start with.