Maltese-flagged Ruby is carrying 20,000 tonnes of ammonium nitrate – seven times the amount that caused 2020 Beirut port blast

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.deEnglish
    333·
    1 month 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

  • InverseParallax@lemmy.worldEnglish
    224·
    1 month 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.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      281·
      1 month ago

      It’s not intentional. They screwed up the ship and nobody wants a damaged ship full of enormous amounts of explosive material in their port.

      The ship has been seeking a port for it to dock in as it is in need of repairs, having cracked its hull after previously running aground.

      Jens Wenzel Kristoffersen, a defence analyst at Nordic Defense Analysis and a former naval officer, questioned why the ship had not been ordered to return to Russia.

      He said that its condition and cargo posed an environmental and health risk.

      “One can question whether it is at all justifiable for the ship to be allowed to sail. There are several reasons for this,” he told Danish media. “It has cracks in the hull. It has rudder problems. It can no longer sail by itself, but must be towed.”

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

      That ship in Beiruit had similar issues – it wasn’t seaworthy, so wasn’t allowed to leave, because it wasn’t seaworthy, and the owners just abandoned it in port, where (a) all the ammonium nitrate was offloaded and the port authority in Beiruit had to deal with it and (b) the sunken hull.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Rhosus

      MV Rhosus was a general cargo ship that was abandoned in Beirut, Lebanon, after the ship was declared unseaworthy and the charterers lost interest in the cargo. The 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate which the ship was carrying was confiscated and brought to shore in 2014, and later contributed to the catastrophic 2020 Beirut explosion. The vessel’s owner at the time of abandonment was Cyprus-based Russian businessman Igor Grechushkin. The ship sank in the Port of Beirut in 2018.

      The ship is still blocking Beirut port space.

      I think that a likely better concern is less that the thing is going to just blow up after reaching port – though I did read an earlier article pointing out that if repairs require welding, that it’s a risk – and more that it might wind up abandoned in port like the other ship.

      • FuglyDuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago

        I’m sure Ukraine could find a use. Maybe we tow it to a port of their choosing?

        Where’s the Black Sea fleet hiding again?

    • Agent641@lemmy.worldEnglish
      24·
      1 month 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.deEnglish
    10·
    1 month 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.worldMEnglish
      43·
      1 month 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.deEnglish
        4·
        1 month 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

  • ᗺark dor@infosec.pubEnglish
    41·
    1 month ago

    So if it went up, it would flood London, take out a chunk of North Sea wind power and dent the electric and telecoms cables connecting the UK to continental Europe. Maybe Gravelines reactors also