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Comment by anon_cow1111 | Hacker News Reader

I need to ask this question for any chemical engineers currently reading this. I'm seeing people in the comments talking about how this could be applied to consumer vehicles, not just industry like cargo ships and agriculture.

If I, the consumer, had unlimited access to cheap, unregulated liquid ammonia (as common as gasoline), how many precursor-steps am I away from having access to like... a LOT of high explosives?

-asking for your friendly neighborhood crazy person with a vendetta against... whoever.

As far as I can see, it's a very similar problem to hydrogen. It doesn't matter how safe you can make it, it matters how dangerous a random nutjob can make it.

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It only needs to be as safe as fossil fuels, or even slightly less safe, if the benefits are higher.

This always bothers me. People freak out about LiIon battery failures, or hydrogen, or ammonia, or nuclear power. But here we are with an entire economy riding on an explosive, firey, dirty fuel that is already causing global climate problems.

Safety concerns should be kept on-par with what we have today. Let’s not throw out a good solution because it can be dangerous in some cases. Any high-energy-dense thing we switch to after fossil fuels is going to release that energy if handled improperly. That concern should be quite low on the list.

Fueling up with ammonia is roughly as dangerous as fueling up with concentrated pesticide, on the health risk scale. It’s much more toxic than gasoline.

And also flammable/explosive.

Synthesizing high explosives from anhydrous ammonia is not trivial and no random person would ever bother. There are easier precursors to work with and much easier ways to acquire high explosives than trying to bootstrap from ammonia.

And if someone really was bent on mayhem, well, anhydrous ammonia is nasty toxic stuff as is. You don’t need to do anything chemically to it to kill or injure a lot of people. On the other hand, it isn’t a chemical that sneaks up on you. If you are being exposed to dangerous levels, you’ll know it.

What would it matter? I can go buy as much materials to make explosives as I want today.

Or I could just purchase actual explosives at the sporting good store, like tannerite.

Yes, the difference is tannerite (by yield) is many times more expensive, and much easier to trace when someone buys hundreds of pounds of it from a sporting goods store. Similarly, a random individual buying a half ton of AN would probably trip some kind of alarm bells somewhere.

half ton? If I was headed to a friend's house who owns a farm and they asked me to pick up half a ton of farm supplies I would think nothing of it. Even my truck with its tiny payload can carry that around

If somebody asks you to buy half a ton of fertilizer on their behalf, I suggest you think twice about it. Why do they want you to buy it for them? Even if he's a farmer, with a rational use for that much fertilizer, why is he making such an unusual arrangement to receive fertilizer through his friend instead of buying it himself normally?

Who knows man, maybe feds caught him with some pot plants and now he's setting you up in some sort of bullshit anti-terror sting to cut a deal. Regardless of what kind of truck you have, casually buying half a ton of fertilizer for somebody else is an odd request that warrants some explaining.

You can buy ammonium nitrate in bulk. Much easier to turn into an explosive if that’s the point you’re making. Just say you’re opening a farm and off you go.

Well of course, but that only works once before you get traced and caught, might still be acceptable for the aforementioned crazy guy but I assume most others would rather blend in with the 50 million people buying gas on any given day.

Anhydrous ammonia is even more illegal in most places to get - apparently it’s a precursor to meth production or something?

I heard something about this too, though I omitted it for the sake of brevity. Don't know the specifics, but yes I think it's also a drug precursor. I remember some CCTV footage of people stealing ammonia from large tanks on a farm, not sure what other reason they would have other than drug production.

It is already very dangerous, no need to turn it into an explosive. It won't be given out for handling to untrained people.

Not a reasonable path.

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