A cargo ship with links to Russia packed with explosive fertiliser is floating off the Kent coast after being denied entry at other ports over safety fears.
Ruby, a Maltese-flagged cargo ship carrying 20,000 tonnes of ammonium nitrate fertiliser from a port in Russia, was ordered out of Tromso in Norway and turned away from Danish waters.
More alleged shenanigans with this craft drifting around the North Sea, ostensibly enroute to the Canaries.
Take it to Africa and drop all the stuff in the 🏜️ desert
Surely our Russian friends only ever had the best and most honest intentions with this.
Ammonium nitrate isn’t dangerous.
It’s not gunpowder, it’s not rocket propellant, it’s not liquified natural gas
you need extreme heat and fuel to make it detonate, in the Beirut case that was given by nearby stored fireworks, but otherwise it’s pretty safe to use, you can blast it with a blowtorch and it doesn’t even burn
The misconception of it being explosive comes from the fact that people buy it as fertilizer and then use it to make bombs by mixing it with fuel and other primary and secondary explosives (or just to have some fun with homemade gunpowder), and even then, usually you use potassium nitrate, a derivative of ammonium nitrate, because the ammonium nitrate is just so goddamn hard to detonate
Now, should they accept the ship? I don’t know, as far as I know Russia’s regulations might as well allow storage of ammonium nitrate inside the ship’s fuel tanks, but some simple checks would mitigate 99.99999% of risks.
That said, it’s still Russia and we shouldn’t be giving it money anyways, but I’m not gonna get into politics here
you need extreme heat and fuel to make it detonate
Wouldn’t lightning be extreme heat? The North Sea is very stormy.
The rain would quickly render it useless as an explosive, and if it was inside a container the metal would shield it
and even then, ammonium nitrate is just an oxidiser, (in layman’s terms, it makes already flammable stuff burn faster when ignited, so fast that in some cases it detonates), and without fuel it can’t do anything on it’s own
So if it went up, it would flood London, take out a chunk of North Sea wind power and dent the electric and telecoms cables connecting the UK to continental Europe. Maybe Gravelines reactors also
In Russia, even the fertiliser kills you.
