A cargo ship with links to Russia packed with explosive fertiliser is floating off the Kent coast after being denied entry at other ports over safety fears.

Ruby, a Maltese-flagged cargo ship carrying 20,000 tonnes of ammonium nitrate fertiliser from a port in Russia, was ordered out of Tromso in Norway and turned away from Danish waters.

More alleged shenanigans with this craft drifting around the North Sea, ostensibly enroute to the Canaries.

  • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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    5 months ago

    “This is a ship that nobody wants, but that nobody can get rid of.”

    20,000 tonnes of ammonium nitrate

    i see something resembling a solution, right there

      • itslilith
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        5 months ago

        Remember the Beirut explosion? Yeah, that

        • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
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          5 months ago

          Remember the Beirut explosion?
          Now realize that it was caused by around 1/10th as much ammonium nitrate that is on this ship (2750 vs 20000 tonnes)

          • itslilith
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            5 months ago

            yeah, you really don’t want that ship anywhere near people or infrastructure

  • InverseParallax@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    It’s a thing they do, bit mafia-esque, they sail a mostly un-seaworthy hulk full of oil, minerals, heavy metals, in this case fertilizer, off the coast of a picturesque port of yours, and say “here’s your order, you better pay to pick it up!”.

    Either you wait for the ship to go aground and destroy the local environment, or you buy the stuff, offload it, and pay them to tow the ship “outside of the environment”.

    It’s their way of forcing sales and trying to break their way back into markets in a fairly threatening way.

    • Agent641@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Just tie it up right next to a diesel oil freighter and let it bask in the London Thames for a bit.

  • isolatedscotch@discuss.tchncs.de
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    5 months ago

    Ammonium nitrate isn’t dangerous.

    It’s not gunpowder, it’s not rocket propellant, it’s not liquified natural gas

    you need extreme heat and fuel to make it detonate, in the Beirut case that was given by nearby stored fireworks, but otherwise it’s pretty safe to use, you can blast it with a blowtorch and it doesn’t even burn

    The misconception of it being explosive comes from the fact that people buy it as fertilizer and then use it to make bombs by mixing it with fuel and other primary and secondary explosives (or just to have some fun with homemade gunpowder), and even then, usually you use potassium nitrate, a derivative of ammonium nitrate, because the ammonium nitrate is just so goddamn hard to detonate

    Now, should they accept the ship? I don’t know, as far as I know Russia’s regulations might as well allow storage of ammonium nitrate inside the ship’s fuel tanks, but some simple checks would mitigate 99.99999% of risks.

    That said, it’s still Russia and we shouldn’t be giving it money anyways, but I’m not gonna get into politics here

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      you need extreme heat and fuel to make it detonate

      Wouldn’t lightning be extreme heat? The North Sea is very stormy.

      • isolatedscotch@discuss.tchncs.de
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        5 months ago

        The rain would quickly render it useless as an explosive, and if it was inside a container the metal would shield it

        and even then, ammonium nitrate is just an oxidiser, (in layman’s terms, it makes already flammable stuff burn faster when ignited, so fast that in some cases it detonates), and without fuel it can’t do anything on it’s own