The pool of tears .... wonderland-style: Ok the following may be venturing way down into the rabbitt hole of Alice, so it is worth prefeacing these remarks as being generally unrelated to the prior discussion about thermite - such as used in demolition.
Question to the Cheshire Cat: What do the most lethal weapons in the US arsena have in common - i.e. such as "cave-buster bomb" which has up to 10 time the detonation force per pound as conventional bombs (such as the older "daisy cutter" or MOAB mother of all bombs)? Answer from a cat-like smile: Doh! from the subject line, you should be able to guess it. Basic Thermite is comprised of aluminum powder and iron oxide powder and does not explode on its own. So far so good. When the powders are ground to “ultra-fine grain” in a vacuum chamber and are less than 100 nm in diameter, then nano-thermite is formed. When they get down to 10 nm, quien sabe? Even 100 nm changes the situation qualitatively and quantitatively and the result is not just an incendiary – it is a weapons grade explosive. This nanomaterial may well be one of the so-called ballotechnics, such as the infamous "red mercury" was once thought to be. In fact there are a few who will say that this is, and always was, the true identity of that strange material ... ... if it were not fully composed of red herrings, that is ;-) In one of Dr Steven Jones' papers he says: "Researchers can greatly increase the power of weapons by adding materials known as superthermites that combine nanometals such as nanoaluminum with metal oxides such as iron oxide, according to Steven Son, a project leader in the Explosives Science and Technology group at Los Alamos. "The advantage (of using nanometals) is in how fast you can get their energy out," Son says. Son says that the chemical reactions of superthermites are faster and therefore release greater amounts of energy more rapidly... Son, who has been working on nanoenergetics for more than three years, says that scientists can engineer nanoaluminum powders with different particle sizes to vary the energy release rates. This enables the material to be used in many applications, including underwater explosive devices… However, researchers aren't permitted to discuss what practical military applications may come from this research." Dr Son has now apparently been silenced by the powers that be, and has no further comment. Kevin Ryan’s paper connects the dots of all of this hocus-pocus with the feared connection of thermite --> nanothermite and beyond to a few bigwigs at NIST who DO NOT want this connection to be known (he was fired from UL at the insistence of NIST following his revelation that UL had actually test a model with the same steel used in WTC7 and certified that it would not fail). It is Ryan's contention that had NIST investigated thermite at all, it would open up the Pandora's box of nano-thermite, ballotechnics and red-mercury and probably a few mad-hatters. Look for Ryan to be "Vinced" very soon, if this story ever gets a foothold in the national press. As for me, I'm late / I'm late / For a very important date... No time to say "Hello" / Goodbye
