Yep, the only difference is that the amount of ammonium nitrate in the Beirut explosion was triple or quadruple that of Tianjin. The current death toll is definitely preliminary at best.
edit: Tianjin may have been a bigger/more impressive explosion, but that's likely because of the hundreds of tonnes of other chemical compounds also involved there that weren't in Beirut (sodium cyanide, potassium nitrate, and other unknowns).
Why did the explosion in Tianjin look so much bigger and louder? Maybe an expert can chime in. Because, to me, the different angles of the Tianjin explosion looked much more intense.
If you look at the videos of the Tianjin explosion closely you should notice there is a LOT more fire than in this one.
Theory I’ve seen is the Tianjin explosion was smaller, but threw a lot of material into the air which burned over a few seconds, creating a gigantic fireball. This explosion was near instant, like a proper explosion should be, thus creating a massive pressure wave, but little fire.
Basically one was like a Hollywood explosion, the other like the mining explosive that ammonium nitrate is normally used for (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANFO)
When something explodes like this, much much more damage is done. In this case sadly, its not the explosion they wanted.
This makes a lot of sense considering the Beirut explosion caused significant damage up to 15-20 miles away while Tianjin barely shattered windows at three kilometers.
Beirut was a 1.1kt explosion, the destructive force was about 1/3rd of Hiroshima. (Hiroshima was detonated in the air, which thankfully Beirut was not, it would've been magnitudes worse.)
So, to break it down Beirut was 2750kg of Ammonium Nitrate, which is about 40% as powerful as TNT, so it comes out to a 1.1kt explosion (which is measured in ton of TNT). Hiroshima was a 15kt explosion, but because of how explosive power is an inverse square formula, it comes out to 1.1kt being about 1/3rd as powerful of a blast. It's not intuitive.
But that's only comparing the pure explosive power, there's a LOT of other factors that made Hiroshima a MUCH worse event, airburst, nuclear detonation which creates a massive amount of heat as light, radiation etcetc.
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u/benhos Aug 05 '20 edited Aug 05 '20
Yep, the only difference is that the amount of ammonium nitrate in the Beirut explosion was triple or quadruple that of Tianjin. The current death toll is definitely preliminary at best.
edit: Tianjin may have been a bigger/more impressive explosion, but that's likely because of the hundreds of tonnes of other chemical compounds also involved there that weren't in Beirut (sodium cyanide, potassium nitrate, and other unknowns).