[Americanwolfsbrother]

Ammonium nitrate is generally pretty difficult to work with in the sense that it is very hard to get a sustained detonation without the proper setup...

Unless you let the mixture sit around to long, then the slurry can become very unstable.AWB

[tortoise]

Unless you let the mixture sit around to long, then the slurry can become very unstable.

Eh? What is in your slurry that makes it unstable? AN in its various basic forms is very, very stable for long periods, hence its popularity. It is used as filler for gelpacks and slurries because it is very cheap, but AN is not the only ingredient in those.

They frequently spike slurries with other less stable explosives precisely because AN is a pain to set off, particularly in small charges. Raw AN is often classified as a tertiary explosive because it takes a fat high-explosive booster to get something resembling a proper detonation.