In April 2013 an explosion happened in a fertilizer production plant in Texas which had huge impact. It looks like it was ammonium nitrate which exploded. This is used for producing fertilizer. But it is also quite explosive and can be used in pure form or mixed with other substances as explosive. The worst known accident with ammonium nitrate happened in 1921 in the Oppau-plant of BASF in Germany.
For feeding the current earth population the nitrogen holding compounds that are generated by natural processes and become available to the plants are not sufficient. Therefore it is necessary to rely at least for part of the agriculture on chemical fertilizers, implying the need of production, transport and storage of these substances, of which ammonium nitrate is an important example. So it should be better to make the plant working with ammonium nitrate safer than to refrain from working with this substance.
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