Nitpicking here maybe but this does not look like a 3 kiloton blast to me. Neither the size of the core explosion or the apparent shock wave damage correspond to that magnitude from a surface blast. Guessing here but I'd say closer to 2 kilotons at most.
Amazingly, the massive, hollow grain silo right next to the detonation itself remained standing afterwards.
I don't understand why i'm being downvoted or why there's anything wrong with analytical speculation of this type, even about a tragedy.
If anything, this very site and its comments are loaded with exactly that kind of commentary, done mostly in good spirit and tolerance for those who do it. No, i'm not an explosives expert or professional with detailed knowledge of blast yields, but like many of you, I have something of a strong curiosity in a topic irrelevant to my professional occupation. So, based on educated guesstimating, I decided to share a polite opinion about it, like so many others regularly do on HN. Chill.
I posit that it's definitely above 1 kiloton though. I base this on the radius of damage it caused (from photos compared to Google satellite images of the area around the explosion site) and by comparing the explosion's apparent magnitude with that of the PEPCON blast, which was fairly carefully estimated to have been roughly 1 kiloton. This blast looks bigger and spread its impact further than the PEPCON blast..
A few hours before you made this comment, you made a nit-picky objection on a different HN post about Intel i5 versus Intel i7. Someone responded to you saying that i5 and i7 are marketing terms that most consumers interpret as an indicator of performance. You replied, "I guess this isn't really 'hacker news' then, because I would expect just about any 'hacker' would know the difference."
Then, you came to this HN post and described a bunch of people as "nerds" for trying to interpret the magnitude of the blast by observing what was captured on video.
The contrast between these two simultaneously held attitudes is so bizarre that I am chuckling to myself as I try to grasp your underlying thought process.
(You could easily have switched your approach to the two threads, criticizing the Intel i5-vs-i7 nerds while doing some napkin math to come up with your own estimate of the Beirut explosion in TNT terms.)
This whole thread is full of debate about diverse details about this event and things related to it, so yeah, it's perfectly normal to debate claims like a headline's subject, Nobody thinks it literally matters too much, They do it out of intellectual curiosity.. It's not just a "nerd" thing.
Amazingly, the massive, hollow grain silo right next to the detonation itself remained standing afterwards.