Utopia Talk / Politics / 2 30kt explosions in the med

Sam Adams rank	Wed Mar 04 00:04:49 Atmospheric data suggests a Russian LNG carrier detonated in the med, with 2 cells exploding perhaps 20 mins apart. Rumor has it she was trying to evade sanctions and got blown up. How sad :(
Sam Adams rank	Wed Mar 04 00:05:23 These are likely the largest manmade non nuclear explosions ever.
williamthebastard rank	Wed Mar 04 00:08:32 But which one of the village people do you like to dress up as, csam?
TheChildren rank	Wed Mar 04 00:18:34 rofl fake news
murder rank	Wed Mar 04 02:21:42 Was it caught on video? -
Sam Adams rank	Wed Mar 04 03:19:37 There are some shots from other ships but weather satellites are the big one. Two large sudden clouds appear that extend up to about 35,000 feet. Then by looking at some weather model data you can take a guess at the energy required to create such disturbances.
murder rank	Wed Mar 04 04:17:12 Wouldn't the first blast of that size just obliterate the entire ship? -
Sam Adams rank	Wed Mar 04 05:26:14 Well ya I can't imagine the ship is afloat any longer. I wouldn't have thought that one cell would have survived intact long enough to produce a second distinct explosion but the satellite evidence of that is indisputable. Perhaps the ship had broken in 2 and separated. Perhaps the natural gas ignited into more of a "very rapid fire" rather than a true detonation, and with the heat rising so rapidly, the blast was not quite as sharp as a proper bomb.
Sam Adams rank	Wed Mar 04 05:30:05 It's worth noting Chernobyl also had 2 explosions. Krakatoa had 4. Big explosions are not something we get to study much :(
jergul rank	Wed Mar 04 05:30:21 It would not be a blast in that sense. A burn-off is a better descriptor. Why there would be two distinct clouds on weather data is just wierd. Natural gas needs O2 to burn like most everything else. Liquid natural gas is stable until vapourised naturally enough. Great for Norway. LNG is a globalized commodity. Supply disruptions anywhere effect pricing everywhere. Europe will have to start importing Russian NG again if stuff like this and Qatar production falls out.
jergul rank	Wed Mar 04 05:37:47 Its just a few thousand tons of natural gas burning off in other words. An impressive flare-out to be sure.
Sam Adams rank	Wed Mar 04 05:40:06 "Natural gas needs O2 to burn like most everything else." Agreed. We figure that such a "blast" would be slow and inneficient as you cannot expose all of it to oxygen at once. Turbulent mixing, even at those temperatures, might take 10s of seconds to mix in enough O2 to burn it all. The total heat of all that nat gas, assuming she was full, is actually about 1mt. We cut that number by 13x to account for the slow burn. Perhaps even less went into shock wave. Perhaps the best way to refer to it is the largest manmade non nuclear fire(discounting large forest fires of course which are much much higher heat content than any nuke... But the trees get some credit for that)
Sam Adams rank	Wed Mar 04 05:42:33 Somewhere between a blast and a fire.
jergul rank	Wed Mar 04 06:16:58 The situation is way less stable if the tanks were not full. LNG would vapourise to fill the rest of the tank with NG. That may be what happened. It would explain the relatively modest burn-off (though a significant amount of gas would disperse in any event. NG needs both the correct concentration of oksygen and a fire source to burn).
jergul rank	Wed Mar 04 06:19:03 As such, it may just have been an accident. Tanks full of an NG-LNG mix are inherently more volitile.
jergul rank	Wed Mar 04 06:22:41 How could that happen? Well, LNG carriers lose about 1% of their cargo per day do vaporation from ambient heating. Delivery delays due to sanctions could quickly cause significant cargo loss and give tanks with a NG-LNG mix (NG takes up way more volume than LNG at 1 atmo pressure. We make LNG to compact NG for transport basically).
jergul rank	Wed Mar 04 06:24:14 Mystery solved I think. At least this is the most probable narrative.
Sam Adams rank	Wed Mar 04 06:28:58 Well they said they were hit by drones but it could indeed just be Russian incompetence. I mean if I set 75,000 tons of LNG on fire by smoking in the wrong place if blame drones too. The explosion-fires, whatever you want to call it, were not modest. The mushroom clouds were larger than the ones over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Smaller than the big multi megaton tests. Way smaller than the big vei 5+ volcanos. Somewhere in the vei 3 to 3+ range if you want to use volcano scales.
Sam Adams rank	Wed Mar 04 06:35:46 So take one of her cells... A metal ball with say, about 20,000 tons of LNG that really wants to heat and expand into NG and pop the ball. Now light the whole thing on fire so it heats up inside that pressure vessel real fast. Now pop it and rapidly/turbulently add oxygen. Muhahaha. Where there was a ship you now have a temporary sun. I see why all the weenies tried to ban these things from populated ports... Maybe they were right...
jergul rank	Wed Mar 04 06:45:05 There is no oksygen in the mix to set it on fire inside the "metal ball". Fire is only possible where NG is leaking out. It will also not heat up very fast as the NG cap insulates LNG and a decent amount of energy is required to phase shift a liquid to vapour anyway. Hence pictures of large flare outs, not massive explosions - and the crew getting rescued from lifeboats.
jergul rank	Wed Mar 04 06:48:19 There are ways. A torpedo would cause a ludicrous explosion. Rupturing the hull and tank below the waterline would allow water to vapourize the LNG incredibly fast. Then add a spark to the rapidly dispersing NG and say hello to the biggest air-fuel bomb man has ever seen.
jergul rank	Wed Mar 04 06:50:48 The disaster scenario is an "oil-spill" event in other words. Something that exposes the LNG in tanks directly to seawater at a significant scale.
murder rank	Wed Mar 04 06:51:11 "Somewhere between a blast and a fire." Deflagration?
Sam Adams rank	Wed Mar 04 06:55:00 The crew abandoned ship to survive. She was burning for hours before the blasts.
Sam Adams rank	Wed Mar 04 06:58:30 This is not the sun! https://pb...UAAHg6D?format=jpg&name=medium
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