This really needs to go viral. Christopher Busby is a British chemist who's dedicated himself to assuring scientific accuracy in media reporting. He played a major role in getting the media to begin telling the real severity of the Fukishima disaster, for example. Now, in an article published on Russia Today's website, he points out that there is are two shortcomings with the official explanations of the fertilizer plant explosion, one minor and one of dramatic implications: first, the focus upon the presence of non-explosive anhydrous ammonia gas, which really presented only minor threats to public safety, and the second, that the real explosive material was ammonium nitrate which is extremely difficult to detonate with only a simple fire. Follow me below the billowing cloud of orange ammonia gas for more details.
The article is titled "Media 'steered away' from explaining true detonation in Texas". Busby begins:
It always amazes me (and many others I expect) that no-one asks the right questions in these affairs. I was asked by RT to give my “expert analysis” of the health risk from the fumes produced by the explosion. [...] whilst I waited for my slot on the RT news, I found certain critical facts entirely missing. The explosion was of a fertilizer plant producing Ammonium Nitrate. The astonishing thing for me, in listening to the interviewees, including establishment experts, was that no-one explained that Ammonium Nitrate was, in itself, an explosive. Indeed it was employed as such at one time, as the ingredient of the high explosive “amatol”.
Busby wonders aloud as to why this simple fact has been avoided. Although he doesn't mention it, one obvious answer is that with the heightened tension after the Boston bombings, which by all reports used low-yield gun powder as an explosive, nobody wants to remind any malevolent elements which might be out there in the general public that easy-to-obtain fertilizer can be used to great enhance the destructive power of any home-made explosive device, as was so aptly demonstrated by the Oklahoma City bombing. Busby's more technical explanation implies a more sinister aspect to the situation:
To labor the point: the severity of the explosion and its devastating effect was not due to the failure of a tank of liquid ammonia. It was due to the detonation of the product, Ammonium Nitrate, which is a high explosive in its own right. There have been several such massive accidents in history. There was the famous one at Oppau in Germany in 1921. There was even one in Texas in 1947. So why not say so?
I believe the answer is that for ammonium nitrate to explode, it has to be detonated with a detonator or with some major explosion. And this raises the question, in the week of the Boston bombings, of some individual having placed such a detonator into the store of ammonium nitrate. And the establishment absolutely do not want to start that particular hare running.
Indeed, according to the Wikipedia pages on both Ammonium Nitrate and Ammonium Nitrate Disasters, it is highly unlikely that a fire alone can cause an ammonium nitrate explosion. Almost all past disasters have been caused either by detonation of other explosives, fire in combination with pressurized containment, or mixture with other highly combustible materials or fluids, such a diesel fuel.
It may well be that the West plant was simply an unfortunate accident, but considering the timing and the location of the disaster, the possibility that this was a product of domestic terrorism must by taken seriously and rigorously investigated. So far, as Busby points out, nobody even wants to begin to think about what that might mean.