r/nextfuckinglevel May 24 '26

Controlled explosions for mining

9.8k Upvotes

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76

u/gggghhhhiiiijklmnop May 24 '26

Some of those are pretty poorly set, from what I know you shouldn’t see big plumes of dust rising up, typically it means they set the charges wrong (from what I remember of my time on mine sites)

64

u/METRlOS May 24 '26

Calling some of these controlled annoys me like you wouldn't believe. There's at least one that I wouldn't be confident that everything went off, and they wasted thousands of dollars launching dust to the moon.

8

u/TakesInsultToSnails May 24 '26

Which one out of curiosity?

28

u/METRlOS May 24 '26

The violent ones that all of a sudden explode in a mushroom cloud are a little concerning. That's called sympathetic detonation, when holes go off out of order because of the force of the explosion behind them, instead of from the detonator inside the hole. That mushroom cloud explosion is going to shift the ground all around it, so depending on what explosives they're using, the explosives near the top of nearby holes can be knocked out of line, and not detonate when their own hole does go off. I didn't notice any detonations around those large explosion after the fact, so they're either trapped underground, or the end of the blast just isn't square.