The Three Fatal Flaws in Bazant’s WTC Concrete Pulverization Calculations and Why His Calculations Really Support Nuclear Demolition

Bazant’s WTC concrete pulverization calculations can be found here.  Basically, he calculates that 7% of the total “gravitational potential energy” (GPE) is required to pulverize all of the concrete in the WTC towers.

His three fatal flaws are:

1) he significantly under-estimates the size of the particles that result from concrete pulverization (as detailed here)– thus significantly under-estimating the energy needed to pulverize the WTC.

2) he does not take into account the complete pulverization of all interior contents of the towers– interior walls, furniture, computers, filing cabinets and PEOPLE– thus significantly under-estimating the energy needed to completely pulverize the WTC.

3) he does not take into account the EFFICIENCY of the “gravitational potential energy” in pulverizing all of the concrete.  There is no way this process is even close to 100% efficient!  Think about the actual mechanics involved in a collapse: a heavy set of floors is dropping ten feet onto a lower floor filled with interior walls, furniture, and the bottom concrete slab is covered with some padding and carpet.  There is simply no way that the floor slab concrete is going to be significantly pulverized in this way.  Some concrete will be crushed by breakage of the floors slabs and by steel columns being forced downwards at irregular angles, but it is difficult to imagine that more than 10% of the concrete being crushed in this way, and much of this crushing will not result in micron-sized particles.  A heavy weight dropping ten feet onto a furniture and carpet-covered floor is thus going to have an efficiency of concrete pulverization of 10% at most.  Not to mention that after a few floors are crushed down, there is going to be a build up of crushed material from the previously crushed floors, which will act as a buffer and decrease the efficiency of further crushing.  Thus, to simply equate “gravitational potential energy” with the energy required to pulverize concrete, as Bazant does, is incredibly flawed, bad science.

Some corrected energy calculations would be as follows:

1) extra energy to pulverize concrete from Bazant’s alleged 10 micron smallest dust size just to 2.5 micron size, as found in the “EHP study”, was calculated with Bazant’s equations, by Anonymous Physicist, to have needed 14% of total GPE”. This is a VERY conservative assumption because, as explained by Anonymous Physicist, it is very likely a vast amount of even smaller particles were created during WTC destruction, which would require several times more energy than Bazant’s 7% (even assuming 100% efficiency of pulverization).

2) extra energy to pulverize interior building contents not including the concrete– this will use less energy than pulverizing the concrete, as these materials were not as strong on average as concrete, but we can estimate this will still use another 7% of total GPE conservatively to convert these items into micron-sized particles.

3) extra energy required to overcome the inefficiency of concrete pulverization– conservatively 10 times 14% of GPE– thus 140% of GPE.  For the sake of argument, we will assume that interior building contents are pulverized at 100% efficiency, which is probably not the case, but is the conservative argument.  This gives a rough CONSERVATIVE total of 147% of GPE to pulverize the concrete and the interior building contents to micron-sized particles.

In fact, with these three factors taken into account, it should be clear, using conservative assumptions, that the energy required to pulverize the concrete and everything inside the WTC is much greater than the total “gravitational potential energy”– and this does not even include the massive energy that would be required to destroy the steel super-structure of the towers!

So what would produce this amount of energy, without the impractical course of pre-loading of the towers with thousands of tons of explosives? Nuclear energy.