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Comment by darth_avocado | Hacker News Reader

Until big fertilizer lobbies to make decentralized fertilizer illegal. Insert national security, wrong hands blah blah

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> Insert national security, wrong hands blah blah

That isn't a big reach.

Ammonium nitrate is already controlled in several parts of the world

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANFO

ANFO is explosives made with ammonium nitrate(Ammonium Nitrate Fuel Oil), however ammonium nitrate is by itself rather energetic and will explode when store improperly. The most recent memorable incident would be 2020 Beirut: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Beirut_explosion

Imagine one of these units left somewhere, slowly filling a tank that has not been sealed, water evaporating back out leaving a nice ammonium nitrate powder behind....

I'm no chemist so someone will have to explain to me how ammonia sitting around by itself, without water, just becomes ammonium nitrate.

There's a ton of water in the air for it to react with

NGL, it would be an easy sell. You are just a hop/skip and a quack away from turning that decentralized fertilizer into a decentralized bomb making system.

A hop, skip, quack, jump, and fairly obvious high-energy distillation process away. The national security angle probably isn't a concern here for the same reason that this process doesn't produce good fuel.

Ammonium nitrate is made from ammonia and nitric acid (which is also made from ammonia). Therefore, ammonia is the only necessary direct precursor to ammonium nitrate, which is probably the most relevant oxidizer in improvised explosives today.

Not saying that it should be regulated on the basis of national security, but it’s not like there isn’t a potential security concern.

What happens when your decentralized fertilizer mixes with someone's copyrighted/trademarked fertilizer? Do you have to pay them their dues?

If you think this is outlandish, you must not be familiar with Monsanto

That is an exaggeration. The only time Monsanto did anything was cases of intentional mixing.

> you must not be familiar with Monsanto

It has been out of business for almost seven years now. Who is putting any energy into remembering them at this point?

It's not out of business. It merged with Bayer. It's a change in ownership, and to some degree a change in upper management, but large swathes of the company are unchanged.

Its assets were sold to Bayer and BASF and some former Monsanto workers may have begun working at those other businesses, that is true. That kind of scenario is true of all businesses that close down, though, at least unless they truly have no remaining assets to sell or workers wanting new jobs, both of which are unlikely for anything beyond the simplest of sole proprietorships. By your logic, there is almost no business in history that has ever gone out of business.

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