The Iranian Fordow Facility “Has Got to Be Utterly Destroyed”

Professional engineer Casey Jones estimates that using engineering and scientific principles, The Fordow facility in Iran was “utterly destroyed. He includes an in-depth analysis in his report below, but here’s the key section.

“I think almost all of the destructive force occurred at great depth, so that there was essentially very little surface expression. So there’s a term specific to that type of detonations called camouflet, a mine so charged in place that its detonation will destroy enemy mining tunnels, an underground or subsurface explosion of a bomb or shell that leaves a sealed pocket of smoke and gas.

“So basically, a charge that is designed to go off deep underground. There’s no formation of a surface crater in this instance. So I did some rough calculations to try and estimate the volume of granitic rock that was likely fractured as a result of these detonations of the GBU 57 granite is a very hard rock, has unconfined compressive strengths of over 200 megapascals, or around 30,000 psi. So that’s very strong indeed, but it can certainly be fractured using explosives.

“And the term for estimating how much rock can be broken with a given amount of explosives is called a powder factor. And so in this case, just doing some research online, I estimated that the powder factor for this granite would be about .3 kilograms per cubic meter, or one half pound per cubic yard.

For perspective, you would need 13,000 truckloads to haul away the amount of rock destroyed.

“So one half pound of explosives would be expected to fracture one cubic yard of granite rock. So if you go through the calculations here, I come up with an estimated maximum of around 100,000 cubic meters, or 130,000 cubic yards of granite that was fractured.

“And that’s a lot of material. And to put that into perspective, you could take this 10 yard truck, you would need over 13,000 truckloads to haul that amount of fractured rock. So the fact that there was very little surface expression, and we know tens of thousands of pounds of explosives were detonated, the damage was extensive, undoubtedly at great depth below the ground surface at this facility.

“And I would tend to believe the government assurances that the devastation at this facility was total, although they’ll certainly let the intelligence community weigh in on it. Over the coming weeks and months, there’ll be a lot of information gained by observing satellite imagery in terms of activity at the site, but I think based on just very straightforward engineering estimates, this facility has got to be utterly destroyed. …”

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