The explosive chemistry of nitrogen, phosphorus and urine. Animals (humans are animals) must dispose of the nitrogen from their body when they break down proteins. Nitrogen is excreted in the urine as urea (CO(NH2)2). Bacteria convert, the nitrogen present in urea, into new products such as ammonia (NH3), ammonium ions (NH4+) and nitrate ions (NO3-). Not only are these nitrogen compounds very important as fertilisers but they are also very powerful oxidants. It is hard to believe that many of the ingredients for explosive mixtures, such as potassium nitrate, ammonium nitrate and phosphorus, were originally manufactured from putrefied urine.
I thought they were going to go the ammonium nitrate route but that would have involved less casual chemistry to get their from urine. You would need nitric acid, at which point it wouldn’t be a shock that you can make explosives.
I sometimes forget that gunpowder qualifies as an “explosive.”
I think there was an article on ‘real’ explosives made from urine, too. I mainly wanted to give people ideas on what to search without the FBI knocking on my door. I consider it a bit like “Leading a horse to water…”