FAQ #8: What Is Nanothermite? Could It Have Been Used To Demolish The WTC Skyscrapers?
 As shown above, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) created nano-thermite composite materials with explosive properties by adding gas-releasing components |
In order to understand what nanothermite is, we first must understand what ordinary commercial thermite is. Thermite is a mixture of a metal and the oxide of another metal, usually aluminum (Al) and iron oxide (Fe2O3), in a granular or powder form. When ignited, the energetic Al-Fe thermite reaction produces molten iron and aluminum oxide, with the molten iron reaching temperatures well in excess of 4000° F. These temperatures are certainly high enough to allow cuts through structural steel, which generally has a melting point of around 2750° F.
There is also a variant of thermite known as
thermate, which is a combination of thermite and sulfur, and is more efficient at cutting through steel. This form of thermite is
believed to have been used in the demolition of World Trade Center Building 7. Although conventional thermite has the capability to cut through structural steel, it is technically an incendiary and not an explosive.
Nanothermite (also known as
superthermite), simply put, is an ultra-fine-grained (UFG) variant of thermite that can be formulated to be explosive by adding gas-releasing substances. A general rule in chemistry is that the smaller the particles of the reactants, the faster the reaction. Nanothermite, as the name suggests, is thermite in which the particles are so small that they are measured in nanometers (one billionth of a meter). The authors of the peer-reviewed
Active Thermitic Materials paper, which documents the discovery of these materials in the WTC dust, explain:
Available papers [by
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and others] describe this material as an intimate mixture of UFG aluminum and iron oxide in nano-thermite composites to form pyrotechnics or explosives. The thermite reaction involves aluminum and a metal oxide, as in this typical reaction with iron oxide:
2Al + Fe2O3 ? Al2O3 + 2Fe (molten iron), ?H = -853.5 kJ/mole.
 According to Randy Simpson, director of the Energetic Materials Center at LLNL, “since these ‘nanostructures’ are formed with particles on the nanometer scale, the performance can be improved over materials with particles the size of grains of sand or of powdered sugar” |
The public announcements of the development of nanothermite composite materials as explosives date back several years before 9/11. As Dr. Frank Legge
points out , “ researchers were describing methods of preparing nano-sized particles, using them in superthermite, and calling such material ‘explosive’ in 1997. It would therefore not be correct to assert that by 2001, four years later, they would be unable to utilize the material in demolition.”
One of the critiques of theories that
thermite was used to destroy the World Trade Center skyscrapers asserts that thermite preparations don’t have
sufficient explosive power to account for the observed features of the buildings’ destruction. This criticism seems to be uninformed by knowledge of some of the aluminothermic preparations known to exist – particularly those being researched for military applications.Indeed, as 9/11 researcher Kevin Ryan
has shown, there is substantial documentation detailing how nanothermite has been formulated to be explosive. For example, a
summary report released at the 2008 AIChE conference by chemists at the University of Houston describes how nano-thermite composites can be engineered to create explosives:
Nanoenergetic thermite materials release energy much faster than conventional energetic materials and have various potential military applications, such as rocket propellants, aircraft fuel and explosives. They are likely to become the next-generation explosive materials, as they enable flexibility in energy density and power release through control of particle size distribution, stoichiometry and choice of fuel and oxidizer.
Some critics have also claimed that neither thermite nor nanothermite has ever been used to demolish steel structures. Even if this assertion were true, it would not be proof in and of itself that these materials could not be used in demolition. As Dr. Legge
notes :
It could be true, and probably is true, that the three buildings which came down on 9/11 were the first in which some variation of the thermite reaction was used in demolition. It is however not logical to say something cannot have happened merely because it had not happened before: there has to be a first time for everything. It is certainly true that thermite had been used many times in arson attacks prior to 9/11.
To read more about the thermitic materials that were involved in the destruction of the three World Trade Center towers, see the
AE911Truth Evidence webpage and our
original article about the discovery of these composites in the WTC dust.
