Why did Praxis explode?

Why did Ceti Alpha Six explode?
It seems that Trek planets are just plain unstable.

"After years of fighting with reality, I am pleased to say that I have finally won out over it."

They who? Why can't Praxis' explosion just be from over-mining? Why does it have to be some goofy conspiracy to make it blow up?

Perhaps Praxis was not a dilithium mining station.

Perhaps Praxis was a power generating facility which generated power and beamed it to other planets in its solar system or even to planets in other solar systems. Perhaps there was mining on Praxis to supply the fuel for the power generating.

What would the fuel be? Hydrogen to be fused into helium in fusion reactors? Unfortunately there is no known way to get any kind of fusion reactor - at least any which has been imagined by Earth's most brilliant nuclear physicists in the last seventy years -- to explode.

Decades of research and billions of dollars have not yet developed fusion reactors which can produce more energy than they use, or run for sustained periods without shutting down. It will be enough of a struggle to develop fusion reactors which generate a lot of energy and are absolutely safe and cannot possibly explode, without going farther and inventing dangerous fusion reactors which can explode.

However dangerous fusion reactors which can overload and explode like fission reactors do seem to exist in the Star Trek universe due to some as yet known discovery which would revolutionize nuclear physics if made in real life.

Even so, why mine hydrogen on Praxis, when hydrogen is the most abundant material in the universe?

Possibly unknown aliens who isolated and collected a vast amount of deuterium, or heavy hydrogen, which is easier to fuse, stored it on Praxis, where it may not have mixed with regular hydrogen due to some factors which kept the two isotopes separate. The Klingons may have mined veins of gaseous, liquid, or solid deuterium which were actually the storage system of the ancient aliens.

The Klingons possibly generated power in massive orbiting power stations. They may have used a lot of that power to make antimatter, the most concentrated power storage imaginable, to fuel their starships, and some of those facilities may have orbited Praxis to be closer to the power generators.

And the orbiting power generators and the orbiting antimatter factories might have been attached to the surface of Praxis by space elevators to bring up the mined deuterium easier.

As the Klingons mined the deuterium they may have piled up vast heaps of slag which may have been ices of water, methane, ammonia, etc. all mixed together. Heaps of ices which were dangerously steep even on a low gravity world like Praxis.

All powered activity, such as mining, tends to produce waste heat. Waste heat might melt some of the ices in the slag heaps to liquids which would lubricate the ices remaining solids. When enough of the ices were melted into liquids, a slag heap would become liquified and act like mud - it would collapse.

Molasses flows slowly under most normal conditions, but during the Great Molasses Flood in Boston it surged faster than people could run smashing everything in its path like a tsunami of mud. A slag heap could undergo sudden catastrophic failure and suddenly smash the mining facilities. Perhaps it would smash into some of the space elevators and pull them down toward Praxis.

When the orbiting powoer generators and antimatter factories smashed into Praxis, the unsafe Star Trek fusion reactors would explode and the stored antimatter would explode in gigantic explosions. These might trigger the deuterium deposits to explode, which might be enough to start the ordinary hydrogen throughout Praxis fusing into helium, resulting is a sufficiently gigantic explosion.

[deleted]

Well, no, I wasn't trying to say that "if it was a matter/antimatter reaction it would necessarily have destroyed the whole thing," just that the amount of antimatter that they may have had on hand for a posited M/ARA to power defenses could have produced a much bigger explosion than, say, a starship exploding, because the moon offers more mass to react with.

Supplemental to that idea, while I know that antimatter doesn't interact destructively with dilithium, I wonder if the energy liberated by its interaction with all the other matter present would have destroyed the dilithium being mined, or if the only debris left in the giant gouge the blast took out would be bits of dilithium that went untouched by the exploding antimatter.

Anyway, that remains my best guess: a 'warp core' (as opposed to the arguably safer fusion reactors they might have used on a less vital facility) hooked up to no engine but a buttload of shield generators and disruptor banks to keep threat forces from ganking Qu'onos' main powerplant. And the irony is not lost.

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