Elemental Business: Nitrogen Explosives
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 26 July 2014
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nitrogen - the world's most abundant gas - has brought life and death to humanity on an epic scale - and tragedy to the scientists that have harnessed its power. It is seemingly inert, yet it can also blow things up.
In the first of two programmes on nitrogen, chemistry guru Andrea Sella of University College London explains to Justin Rowlatt how the forces that make this gas so stable are the same ones that make nitrogen compounds such as nitroglycerin so explosive.
Jez Smith, former head of research at the world's biggest explosives firm, Orica, talks about the shocking accuracy of modern mining detonations - all of them based on nitrogen.
And Justin travels to the headquarters of German chemicals giant BASF to learn about ammonia production from Dr Michael Mauss and Bernard Geis, and how the work of chemists Fritz Haber and Karl Bosch a century ago saved the planet from starvation.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a BBC podcast. You can get all our podcasts and our terms of use at BBCworldservice.com |
| 0:07.2 | slash podcasts. |
| 0:12.7 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily. I am Justin Rowlatt. and today we continue our quest to understand the real |
| 0:22.5 | basis of the world economy, the chemical elements that are the building blocks of everything |
| 0:27.6 | in the universe. Today's element is a paradox. It is inert yet explosive. Somebody decided that it would |
| 0:34.7 | be a good idea to close the holes and starve the fire of oxygen. |
| 0:39.3 | Unfortunately, what that does is create a very large bomb. |
| 0:42.6 | It has the power of life and death. |
| 0:44.7 | Only due to this invention we are able to feed world's population. |
| 0:49.1 | And has brought terrible tragedy to the scientists who sought to harness its hidden power. It is, you'll find out, |
| 0:56.7 | on Business Daily from the BBC. In its elemental state, our element de jour is positively boring. |
| 1:07.0 | It is the colourless, odourless gas that makes up most of the earth's atmosphere. It is |
| 1:12.7 | nitrogen. But do not be deceived. Nitrogen's apparent inertness is the secret of this element's |
| 1:19.8 | incredible power. Because for mankind, nitrogen is the bringer of life and death on an epic scale. |
| 1:28.1 | Nitrogen's story is such a big one, we've split it over two programmes. |
| 1:32.5 | First, let's go to the heart of the nitrogen paradox, |
| 1:36.2 | the surprisingly violent forces that make nitrogen so deceptively dull. |
| 1:41.5 | As always, here's our chemistry guru, Professor Andrea Seller of University |
| 1:46.0 | College London, to explain. More than 70% of the atmosphere is made up of nitrogen. We're bathed |
| 1:53.2 | in it all the time, right, and we never give it a second thought. And nitrogen itself, the element |
| 1:59.4 | made up of molecules in two, was for many years really thought of |
| 2:04.2 | as being one of the most boring elements you could imagine because it doesn't react to things. |
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