Fertilizer that fizzles in a homemade bomb could save lives around the world | Hacker News Reader

Fertilizer that fizzles in a homemade bomb could save lives around the world

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50 pointspwg27 comments

Most people don't have Alkaline soil. That's why you put lime on fields, because it is too acidic.

We don't use Iron Sulfate as a fertilizer because it is absorbed by the plants and in things like corn the increase in Iron can make the things raised in the soil poisonous to Children and pets.

This isn't "new". And and it isn't patentable because it is a chemical that has been used for fertilizer in Kale and Spinach for 100+ years.

Thanks for this. Anyone who's grown up near farms knows that Alkaline soil is hardly ever a problem. Lime is as much a part of fertilizing crops as the fertilizer itself.

I did not know about this being use for spinach and kale though. Pretty interesting.

I don't understand why everyone in this thread keeps missing this. It doesn't matter what soil "most people" have, the place where they have all the IEDs has highly alkaline soil that could actually benefit from this change.

IANAF, but it seems to be suggested that once land starts getting used for agriculture, the breakdown in organic compounds you will see in farming tends to make the soil more acid, less base.

So there are already factors that deal with the issue. Which, hey, makes the fertilizer great for bootstrapping a farm I would guess. Not for what the article suggests though.

It might also cost many more lives than it saves. For example, if governments outlaw conventional fertilizer but the new one is more expensive to manufacture, then the cost of food could rise, causing starvation in poverty-stricken areas.

The article is pretty explicit about it being as cheap to produce and more effective.

"iron sulfate, a readily available compound that steel foundries throw away by the tons."

"Fleming said iron sulfate in fertilizer adds iron and acidifies soil. “It does good things for soil health. It takes alkaline soil and makes it more neutral, closer to an ideal pH level,” he said. “The closer you get a neutral pH, the more crops grow. Crop yield would improve significantly.

“And iron-containing fertilizer added to the soil would be taken up in crops and help fight anemia and other iron deficiencies in people who eat them.”

The soil in Afghanistan is alkaline with a high pH, and could benefit from an ammonium nitrate/iron sulfate fertilizer, Fleming said. “What they use now, ammonium nitrate with calcium carbonate — which makes soil more alkaline — doesn’t make sense,” he said."

"But he said there are some ideas about how to get the non-detonable formula, which would not cost more to produce, into the marketplace. “We could give the formula to a neutral party and let them work with the Afghans, Pakistanis and others,” he said. “They could set up side-by-side demonstrations to see which fertilizer works better. Prove it to them gradually."

"Iron sulfate, a readily available compound that steel foundries throw away by the tons."

It won't be free for long. Once there's a demand for it, steel foundries will sell it to the highest bidder. That effect has already happened with municipal recycling: NYC once had to pay to have its recycled paper carted away. Now there are companies that will pay good money to receive the recyclable paper that the residents of NYC throw away. (And it's valuable enough that NYC tries to prevent rogue collectors from stealing it off the curbs before the city's garbage trucks can get to it.)

I think that'd be a bad policy costing lives, not this invention.

Plants need nitrogen in much greater quantities (10-100x) than they need iron. For this fertilzer to not be used as an explosive it would have to contain much more iron than would ever be used by plants. Too much iron can be toxic to plants, make plants poisonous for humans to eat and cause other problems. Another issue is that most soil is not alkaline, it's acidic, especially if it has been used for agriculture. The sulfur in this "fertilizer" will further acidify the soil, making it more difficult for many plants to absorb nutrients through their roots (and in a vicious cycle, requiring more use of fertilizer). I'm sure the people involved had their hearts in the right place, but this development doesn't solve anything and by reducing crop yields could lead to many hungry people.

The soil in Afghanistan extremely alkaline, adding the iron sulfate brings it closer to a neutral pH (good for food crops, bad for things like Opium poppies). The low iron content of the soil also leads to a high occurrence of Iron Deficient Anemia.

1. It wouldn't surprise me if much of the virgin soil in Afghanistan is alkaline, soil in arid areas often is. Once soil is used in agriculture and is cultivated and/or irrigated, it tends to become more acidic due to the breakdown of organic matter.

2. Opium poppies may be better able to tolerate alkaline soil, but they do not require require it. You may be surprised by this, but Papaver somniferum is still widely grown in the US as a garden ornamental, and in all kinds of soil, alkaline, neutral and acidic.

3. For plants, iron is a micronutrient, nitrogen is a macronutrient. A typical fertilizer such as Miracle Grow is 0.15% iron for example. High iron concentrations, such as those that would be necessary to make ammonium nitrate non-explosive would be toxic to most crop plants.

I have a Chemical specialization in the secondary school (but we obviously didn't study too much about explosives).

There are some details that I don't like. The ammonium nitrate is good to make explosives because it has many nitrogens and many oxigens, IIRC it is not important that the ammonia is "bounded" to the nitrate (it's even only an ionic bound).

The mix that they are proposing doen't solves this problem, the nitrogens and oxigens are still there. For example, the potassium nitrate is an oxidizer and can be used to make explosives ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium_nitrate#Oxidizer ). The iron nitrate is an oxidizer too ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron(III)_nitrate ) but I really don't know whether it can be used to make explosives.

My concern is that they tested that after the chemical reaction, there is no remaining ammonium nitrate. But apparently they didn't test if it was still useful to make explosives. (Note: This test can be dangerous, don't try this at home.)

err, well the Idea here i think is that the reason ammonium nitrate makes a good oxidizer for explosives is because of its weak bonds. The exchange of atoms lowers the chemical energy, and lowers the fertilizer's efficacy as an oxidizer.

I would of thought it would of lowered the fertilizer's efficacy as a fertilizer as well... I'm not a chemist though.

It's more complicated. Nitroglycerine has strong bounds.

damn it.

I hate chemistry.

Ireland (Which has heaps of money and time to waste unlike Pakistan which has aid programs to run) tried something like this years ago, the IRA just developed a way around it.

I suspect like all self made security experts they have created a product they can't crack but bomb makers quickly would.

They say they're not patenting the mixture - does anyone have more details on the chemistry?

It sounds like they've found a way to prevent the nitrate-sulfate substitution from occurring directly in the fertilizer, which is very interesting if true.

Well, the compounds themselves are typically in solid phase. I would assume that the mix is just composed of an adequately well mixed combination of iron sulfate and ammonium nitrate crystals. If you make them have pretty much the same size, and sufficiently small, then you make mechanical separation unlikely/impossible.

That's certainly a possibility. I'm just wondering if Sandia has provided more details themselves.

Al Qaeda and similar militants use potassium chlorate and sulfur for bomb and IED making. I don't see how the fertilizer blockade on those countries has made any difference in the amount of deadly explosions that happen in Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria on a weekly basis.

I'm hopeful we'll be able to look back in 30 years time and see this development as pivotal in helping to curb the use of explosives where diplomacy would be more suitable.

If you're functioning on a level where diplomacy is a viable option, you're capable of building explosives without abuse of mundane fertilizer. Nobody serious about killing a lot of people for political gain is going to go "gosh darn it, we can't get IED-suitable fertilizer from the local gardening store, guess we'll actually have to talk to our enemies."

Explosives are some of the easiest things to make, you can't put that genie back in the bottle. Attempts to do so that come at a high incidental cost should be regarded with extreme skepticism.

The Boston bombers apparently disassembled fireworks to make their bombs, for example. But even if you take all the obvious choices off the table (gunpowder, anfo, etc.) it's still so very easy to make your own explosives. We live in an industrial age, and one consequence of that is easy access to processes and materials that can be used to do seriously dangerous things. An ordinary drug or hardware store is like a candy shop to someone with sufficient knowledge and motivation to make bombs. You can't just take one thing off the shelf, or ten things, or a hundred things to change that.

You can easily but saltpetre and sulfur in a pharmacy then go to a hardware store to get charcoal. I made some bad fireworks as a stupid kid, I'm lucky I didn't lose my fingers.

"... where diplomacy would be more suitable."

What do you mean by that?

I think he means that this development would encourage the use of diplomacy over explosives. I initially read it the other way (diplomacy being more useful than this development).

People organised enough to address their grievances through the political system are capable of building vastly more powerful explosives, ammonium nitrate doesn't compose a critical part of their supply chain. For those who it's not an option, or for those who find the option unpalatable, it's highly questionable whether not being able to get the right kind of fertiliser's going to stop them - especially when you consider how easy ammonium nitrate, and other precursors to more significant explosives, is to make.

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