Very intense...then I think of how cell phone videos rarely do anything justice. The real thing would've been beyond terrifying. I can't even comprehend how big & overwhelming the explosion must have been.
The second blast was equivalent of 21 metric tons of TNT which is the same power as the "fat man" nuke that took out Nagasaki, fortunately it exploded on the ground and not a thousand ft in the air.
And it looks like it's still pretty risky around the blast site.
Quote:
"According to the Tianjin Tanggu Environmental Monitoring Station, hazardous chemicals stored by the company concerned include sodium cyanide (NaCN), toluene diisocyanate (TDI) and calcium carbide (CaC2), all of which pose direct threats to human health on contact. NaCN in particular is highly toxic. Ca(C2) and TDI react violently with water and reactive chemicals, with risk of explosion. This will present a challenge for firefighting and, with rain forecast for tomorrow, is a major hazard,"
Fat Man was 21 kilotons. This was 1000 times less powerful.
Really puts the power of nuclear weapons in perspective. A 1 megaton hydrogen bomb is nearly 50,000 times more powerful than this explosion. The Tsar Bomba that the USSR tested in 1961 was about 2.5 million times more powerful than the Tianjin explosion.
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I think people forget just how horrifying nuclear weapons are. I mean everyone obviously has a general understanding and "end of the world" type knowledge, but it's vague and background. I don't think people realize just how much destruction one of the standard warheads causes.
A single W88 450ish kt warhead dropped on Calgary (which is child's play in terms of yield, 12 of them can fit on one missile from a missile sub) would destroy absolutely everything in a diameter from Nose Hill to Chinook. Surviving a nuclear holocaust would be horrible, there'd just really be nothing left.
Everyone everywhere should be living in a constant state of rage that we still have thousands of these things, but people just kind of forget. Even the Iran deal probably doesn't really remind them, they just think "Yeah, nukes are bad".
When you watch that explosion and say "Holy ####, that's a massive fireball and shockwave" and then it hits you how much smaller it is than any nuke ever even successfully tested, your mind can barely process the power.
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Last edited by nik-; 08-13-2015 at 06:20 PM.
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I think people forget just how horrifying nuclear weapons are. I mean everyone obviously has a general understanding and "end of the world" type knowledge, but it's vague and background. I don't think people realize just how much destruction one of the standard warheads causes.
A single W88 450ish kt warhead dropped on Calgary (which is child's play in terms of yield, 12 of them can fit on one missile from a missile sub) would destroy absolutely everything in a diameter from Nose Hill to Chinook. Surviving a nuclear holocaust would be horrible, there'd just really be nothing left.
Everyone everywhere should be living in a constant state of rage that we still have thousands of these things, but people just kind of forget. Even the Iran deal probably doesn't really remind them, they just think "Yeah, nukes are bad".
When you watch that explosion and say "Holy ####, that's a massive fireball and shockwave" and then it hits you how much smaller it is than any nuke ever even successfully tested, your mind can barely process the power.
Tens of thousands of them.
This is a photo of an underwater atomic weapons test from 1946.
The black spot highlighted in the photo is the USS Arkansas, a battleship that held over 1000 men. It weighed over 26 thousand tons and on it's end in the photo is nearly as tall as the Calgary Tower.
They've rescued a 19 year old firefighter from the site and he's in stable condition but pretty burned. It's a borderline miracle that any of them survived that.
The death toll in the inferno in a mostly industrial area has climbed to 85, including 21 firefighters – making the disaster the deadliest for Chinese firefighters in more than six decades.
An unknown number of firefighters remain missing, and a total of 720 people were injured in the disaster in Tianjin, a key port and petrochemical hub about 120 kilometres (75 miles) east of Beijing.
Quote:
The disaster has raised questions about whether dangerous chemicals were being stored too close to residential compounds, and whether firefighters may have triggered the blasts, possibly because they were unaware the warehouse contained chemicals combustible on contact with water. The massive explosions Wednesday happened about 40 minutes after reports of a fire at the warehouse and after an initial wave of firefighters arrived and, reportedly, doused some of the area with water.
That would be sodium cyanide. Which is still spread out everywhere. It explodes in contact with water
That would be sodium cyanide. Which is still spread out everywhere. It explodes in contact with water
Sodium does but sodium cyanide does not. You can make perfectly stable solution of sodium cyanide in water. When heated those solutions can produce ammonia and sodium formate but it's a fairly slow hydrolysis and using fire hoses on it is not likely to make the situation worse. It is certainly a massive toxicity concern but I would guess the other chemicals housed at the facility are more likely to be the reason for the explosion. There was a variety of nitrates on site for instance that could come into contact with organic fuels, but if we are talking water reactivity then the the calcium carbide housed on site may be the issue as it reacts violently with water at standard conditions to form acetylene.
Last edited by ernie; 08-17-2015 at 11:30 AM.
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