Stories & Opinions Worth Knowing but Maybe Not Quite Threadworthy 5/21

[Eupher]

This one jumped out at me because I worked for a number of years in a plant that produced cold packs, a Class I medical device.

The cold pack consisted of a plastic pouch in which a predetermined measure of ammonium nitrate was added, along with a separate water "bubble" (encased in a breakable plastic film). When a cold pack was needed for a bump or bruise, the interior water "bubble" was broken through the outer pouch, the contents were mixed, and the resulting endothermic reaction dissipated heat. A simple, cheap product.

We used somewhere between 40 and 60 tons of ammonium nitrate PER WEEK. So a single railcar loaded with 40 tons is not a huge amount -- though there is no doubt that am. nitrate, when mixed with a carbon-based accelerant like diesel fuel, can be a formidable bomb.

Anybody else worried that 60,000 pounds of explosives just disappeared off a train somewhere between Wyoming and California?

Someone call First-Openly-Gay Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and let him know that the U.S. rail network is actively losing literal metric tons of extremely dangerous material:


Some 60,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate, a chemical used as both fertilizer and a component in explosives, went missing as it was shipped by rail from Wyoming to California last month, prompting four separate investigations.

A railcar loaded with 30 tons of the chemical left Cheyenne, Wyoming, on April 12. The car was found to be empty after it arrived two weeks later at a rail stop in the Mojave Desert, according to a short incident report from the explosives firm that made the shipment.

Uh, okay. Just like that, 60,000 pounds of explosive chemicals disappear.


Just to really hammer this point home: Ammonium nitrate was most famously used by terrorists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols to perpetuate the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

That bomb was made with less than 5,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate. And it did this to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building:


So yeah, it's kinda really alarming that 12 times as much NH4NO3 is just missing.

Company Dyno Nobel, meanwhile, thinks it's figured out what happened:

"The railcar was sealed when it left the Cheyenne facility, and the seals were still intact when it arrived in Saltdale. The initial assessment is that a leak through the bottom gate on the railcar may have developed in transit," the company said through a spokesperson.

"A leak through the bottom gate" may have drained out 60,000 pounds of explosive material? Yeah we're gonna need a more fulsome explanation than that.


A Federal Railroad Administration investigation, meanwhile, points to "one of the hopper car gates not being properly closed." Well, whatever it is, figure it out, people. We need a huge team of investigators walking the entire length of that track to confirm if this is true or not. And all of that nitrate should be counted for. Don't let a dozen pounds of it get away.

https://notthebee.com/article/anybody-else-worried-that-60000-pounds-of-explosives-just-disappeared-off-a-train-somewhere-between-wyoming-and-california

[DefiantSix]

...Anybody else worried that 60,000 pounds of explosives just disappeared off a train somewhere between Wyoming and California?

It could be worrisome, but given the winter we've had here in the Galt's Gulch/Wyoming area, the fun we're having with runoff and flooding so far this spring, and ammonium nitrate's penchant for being aggressively hydrogoric (the stuff bonds with water molecules pretty readily, which degrades its usefulness as an explosive) I give it about a week before the entire rail car's completely useless to any wannabe terrorists.

[Eupher]

It could be worrisome, but given the winter we've had here in the Galt's Gulch/Wyoming area, the fun we're having with runoff and flooding so far this spring, and ammonium nitrate's penchant for being aggressively hydrogoric (the stuff bonds with water molecules pretty readily, which degrades its usefulness as an explosive) I give it about a week before the entire rail car's completely useless to any wannabe terrorists.

Well, not focusing so much on the weather aspect of it, but yeah, the author's Chicken Little approach was more than a little annoying.

Still, the asshats involved need to dig in, find out what happened, and report same while taking the damn thing seriously.

[SVPete]

Since Cheyenne is near the WY-CO border and Mojave near CA’s border with NV and AZ, the stuff is probably in CO, UT, NV, or AZ. If it really got loaded into the car.

[SVPete]

Joe Biden and the 'Impossible' Task of Refilling America's Oil Reserves

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/joe-biden-and-the-impossible-task-of-refilling-americas-oil-reserves/

“President Joe Biden in December began working to replenish the 180 million barrels he sold last year from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Nearly six months later, he still has zero barrels to show for it.

Biden's Energy Department on Monday announced its intention to purchase up to three million reserve barrels as a "continuation" of the president's "replenishment strategy." So far, however, that "strategy" has seen the Democrat fail to purchase a single barrel of reserve oil. The administration first tried to purchase three million reserve barrels in December, when Biden kicked off his "plan to replenish the SPR." One month later, Biden's Energy Department revealed it had rejected all offers it received to purchase the oil because those offers "were either too expensive or didn't meet the required specifications."

LIEden never had any intention to replenish the SPR, because buying oil would have the effect of increasing crude oil prices, and therefore raising the gas prices he used the SPR to manipulate.