I mean, the 220,000 tons of debris are at least not a single solid object - so maybe they'd be moved by the current (if there is any) or could be pushed to the sides by smaller vessels. Then the actual cleanup can happen while the canal is already back in operation.
> the container ship __itself__ is the easiest way to move all of that debris out.
You'd need a nuclear-level explosion to blow this ship up into small, practically movable pieces that aren't connected anymore. Everything on that ship is steel. Conventional explosions would just blow a few holes in it, and deform everything enough that moving things becomes impossible.
Yup, I get it. The energy released by a thermobaric weapon is spread out over a very, very large distance. Inside the blast, people will be killed and equipment will be rendered interoperable by the extreme temperature and the over pressure. Outside the blast you have a very strong (but subsonic) blast wave. But inside the blast, the pressure will envelope stuff, and push on it from both sides. With regards to blasting away a very large ship, thermobaric weapons are not particularly effective.
I think you've overestimating how much stuff an explosion removes, as opposed to breaks. Explosions are very good at making a functional thing not function anymore, but they're not as good as you think they are at evacuating an area.
Look at the aftermath of the Beirut explosion. The metal frame of the building the explosion happened in is still lying there.
The blast radius of an explosion scales with the cube root of the energy of the explosion. So if you want to make the hole twice as big, you need eight times as much explosives. To create a hole the size of a large container ship, you'll need a nuke. A pretty big one too. The Ever Given is 400m long, the crater left by the Trinity test (22kt) was 390m across.
Because you still need to use the canal afterwards. And you need to convince the crews of the ships that the radiation won't be a problem. And the authorities of the ports they go to. And so on.
Yes, the loss of the ship and all its cargo will be immense, but that seems to be dwarfed by the damage the blocked canal causes.