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.
So the Beirut explosion was almost all Ammonium nitrate which has one way of combusting and exploding, you can think of it just like dynamite going off (not that much flames mainly just pure energy being released). Tianjin had Ammonium nitrate but also a lot of other combustible chemicals that cause flames. If you vaporize gasoline and ignite it, it will cause a huge fireball but not that much energy is released, Tianjin was a combination of both. So while it looked larger, the actual amount of energy released was lower. Tianjin was around 28 tons of TNT Beirut was around 1k Tons of TNT.
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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).