Also Europe is trying to reduce its dependence on the russian natural gas, so they are building LNG terminals all over.
LNG tankers are freaking scary though, they are like mini-nukes, approaching 1 megaton equivalent.
LNG tankers are freaking scary though, they are like mini-nukes, approaching 1 megaton equivalent.
[1] http://www.mhpa.co.uk/uploads/Marine_docs/lng_carriers.pdf
So it's nothing to do with vapor cloud detonation, that's pretty much irrelevant compared to the destruction of the rapid phase transition from liquid to gas.
Maybe you start with a minor eruption/earthquake, and the LNG disaster breaches a larger magma chamber to cause a larger eruption? Then you can blanket Europe in ash and start up the typical disaster movie plot, where you follow the Chicken Little and their family as they try to escape the disaster radius.
It happened in Brenham, Texas, in the 90s.
http://www.theeagle.com/blogs/fajitas_for_one/salt-dome-expl...
> Vapor cloud detonation has never been considered particularly likely, and never documented as far as I know
This is an example of a vapor cloud detonation. I'm just pointing out that it's happened, so I'm not sure why you're saying it's never been documented. Unless you just meant in the context of a tanker, but that's not how you phrased it.
As it happened, I lived in the area at the time (about 40 miles away on the back side of Cypress, Texas). I didn't think so much about it being an earthquake, but instead thought a large airplane had crashed nearby. I ran out into the street expecting to see fire and explosions and whatnot within a block or few of my house ... only for there to be _nothing._
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_East_Ohio_Gas_explos...
The industry has every incentive to do a careful job with the safety features of these ships and the terminals they unload into, but the trouble with ships is that things sometimes run into them... sometimes really big things.
It's a pretty awesome way to carry around a lot of portable energy, though.
I find the fear of flammable gasses to be irrationally excessive. Sure there's more stored potential energy than the batteries under the floor of your Prius or the smartphone in your pocket but by nature of being compressed the storage tank is very robust and unlike batteries they do not include their own ignition source.
The result would be a cloud of gas that burns violently for several minutes, depending upon wind and the speed of the leak. Not the instantaneous, crater-making release of energy that a thermonuclear device produces.
If the vaporising gas was ignited, some of the heat from that combustion would certainly be transmitted to the pool of cold, liquid gas by radiation which would increase the vaporisation rate. The net result would still be a release of energy into the surroundings over probably tens of minutes (as opposed to microseconds in the case of a nuclear bomb).
https://web.archive.org/web/20001204191400/http://www.lhpo.o...
and specifically:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010215034409/http://www.lhpo.o...
"2.3 Gas installation:
The LHPO runs only on propane, at full bottle pressure (that is, five to ten bars, depending on ambient temperature).
The LHPO may be run from either a bank of propane bottles feeding into a manifold and then proceeding along a main gas pipe to the organ, or from a single propane tank with either liquid or gas feed. If liquid feed, a gasifier must be provided with sufficient peak capacity (see below).
If a single tank, the tank must have at least a three ton filled capacity, to provide enough thermal mass for the required gas delivery rate (see below). The tank connection must be at least 1 1/2 inch inside pipe diameter, to provide for sufficient gas delivery rate.
If a multiple tank installation, at least 28, 33kg capacity bottles are needed. The bottles may not be all close packed into a rectangular array, but must be in one or two rows, with adequate air circulation around the bottle area to provide for heat transfer to the bottles.
If a liquid phase system and a gasifier are to be used, the system must be able to deliver the peak delivery rate (see below) for at least ten minutes continuously."
I guess a big enough rocket could blow the liquid out of the tank, or rupture a large hole in the hull of the ship causing the LNG to dump into the (relatively) warm water and boil off faster. But at some point the real question is: How did the bad guys fire rockets into a secured unloading station?
http://www.transelectrica.ro/widget/web/tel/sen-harta/-/hart...
hmm, wind is quite slow today, normally blows about 1.5gw. biomass is a nice surprise.
I guess this is down to the inclusion of solar power which was cursory a few years back. Do they now aggregate all of the roof top solar and add that in?
Snooping around Glastonbury and my great Aunt's old town I've noticed a number of Solar farms in the countryside:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent
1000 kg of natural gas has a lower heating value of 47.1 gigajoules, much greater than the 4.18 gigajoules per 1000 kg TNT equivalent.
The lower heating value of 67,000,000 kg of natural gas is 3.16 * 10^15 joules:
http://hydrogen.pnl.gov/tools/lower-and-higher-heating-value...
So more like 750 kilotons TNT equivalent.
There are multiple factors that give rise to natural gas's much greater energy density:
- TNT carries its oxidizer internal to the molecule instead of getting it "free" from air
- TNT equivalent energy does not include full combustion of the oxygen-deficient detonation products, only instantaneous energy release during detonation
- TNT has a lower hydrogen:heavy atom ratio than natural gas
For those interested, Hiroshima was ~20Kt. Modern nuclear bombs are ~20Mt, with the biggest at 100Mt.
I'm more worried about the glasshouse effect of so much LNG.
IIRC US (and other Western ones as well I guess) ICBM warheads are about 300Kt, Russian ones about 1Mt.
The Russian did test a 50Mt device (Tsar Bomba) during the cold war (technically, there's apparently no upper limit how big you can make them), but such large devices are not really militarily useful to the point of justifying their bulk/weight/expense.
IIRC, the biggest the US ever deployed operationally was 9Mt, and those have since been retired. The common strategic warheads now deployed are, IIRC, 100-350kt range.