Better Living Through Nukes? 432
perkonis writes "So, you've got 23,000 nukes laying about and no one to use them on. What to do with them? Well, you blow up stuff for fun and profit. Some of the ideas range from good on paper (such as mining oil shale) to just downright bad (such as making a new Panama Canal). Making a big ditch by blowing up nukes — what could possibly go wrong?"
Been tried, major fail (Score:5, Informative)
It was tried back in the 60's with "project Plowshare". Blowing up new harbors, blowing up gas wells, etc, etc, etc. Did not pan out. Radioactive gas spewing into your home through the cooktop, not a big win. Radioactive dust and water from making a new harbor, not too keen either, and this was before peta and greenpeace et al.
Operation Plowshare... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Security and Radioactivity (Score:5, Informative)
And the radioactivity is really problematic for some of these tasks. For example, oil shale. That was studied a lot in the 70s, and last I saw, it was deemed infeasible because it'd leave the oil too radioactive to be usable.
Oh, and as for using any relevant amount of nuclear weapons on the surface at once -- say, the amount that would be exchanged between India and Pakistan in a nuclear war -- um, no. [wunderground.com] That would be a Bad Thing(TM).
Engineering with Nuclear Explosives (Score:5, Informative)
The classic book on this is "Engineering with Nuclear Explosives". [archive.org] I have a copy, discarded from the Stanford engineering library, and I had the Internet Archive digitize it. It has the Panama canal plan, plus several other proposed projects.
The California Department of Highways seriously considered using 22 nuclear bombs to excavate for I-40 through the mountains between Barstow and Needles. Here's the environmental impact statement: The cloud resulting from each of the two row shots would be cylindrical in shape, about 2 miles high, and 7 miles in diameter. The density of dust in this cloud might be such as to obscure vision during its passage within the first 100 miles. While radioactivity levels in the cloud would not present a hazard, it might be necessary from a traffic hazard viewpoint to close any highways in the path of the cloud during passage within the first 100 miles.
Based on the Sedan experience, it is estimated that access to the channel for limited periods of time for inspection purposes would be possible within about 24 hours. Entry for an 8-hour work day or 40-hour work week without unusual safeguards should be possible within about 4 days.
Things were so much simpler then.
Re:Been tried, major fail (Score:4, Informative)
"The natural gas work culminated in 1973 with the explosion of three 33-kiloton bombs thousands of feet underground in Rio Blanco, Colorado. The key problem was that the gas this produced had measurable amounts of radioactivity. Not surprisingly, that created political problems for the method, even though the scientists involved in the experiments claimed the radiation would not be detrimental to public health."
From one of the scientists on the project (quoted in TFA):
"For excavation, we put a lot of time and effort and money into developing nuclear explosives which had minimal fissionable material so that you could carry out a 100-kiloton cratering explosion and release the radioactivity equivalent to a 20-ton explosive of fissionable material."
Radiation is a problem, but over 2000 nuclear test have been carried out, and we haven't all dropped dead. A few more explosions that have specifically designed to minimize fallout won't kill us either.
Alaska was a hotbed of this kind of stuff (Score:5, Informative)
...back in the day.
Project Chariot [wikipedia.org] was a program to blast a new harbor near Point Hope, led by none other than Ed Teller.
Alaska was also the site of several nuclear test blasts, among them the largest one the U.S. ever conducted: Amchitka's Nuclear Legacy [uaf.edu].
- Alaska Jack
Re:I don't know if someone proposed this but... (Score:5, Informative)
I am a geology student, studying seismology, and it is a personal pet peeve when someone says that a small earthquake will relive the pressure of a large fault. The force of an earthquake is measured on the Richter scale*, which is a logarithmic scale. A difference of one magnitude on the scale is equivalent to 10 times the force. Lets say we had a fault that had built up the pressure for an 8.0. Let's also assume that with a single nuke you could create a small earthquake at a force of 3.0. This is a difference of 5 orders of magnitude, so 100 000 times the force, and you'd need 100 000 3.0 earthquakes to equal one 8.0 earthquake. Do you really wish to set off that many nukes?
Please do not say that a smallish earthquake is going to prevent a large one. To a geologist, this makes you sound about as stupid as the people who believe that California is going to fall off into the ocean the next time we have a large earthquake. http://www.usgs.gov/faq/list_faq_by_category/get_answer.asp?id=152 [usgs.gov]
*We use the moment magnitude scale for the most part these days, but most non-geologist are more familiar with the Richter scale. MMS is 30 times the force for one degree of magnitude.
Re:Security and Radioactivity (Score:3, Informative)
The civilian sector already uses military grade controlled explosives for civilian uses. They just do so by asking the military to allow them to do so and to provide the materials and expertise to pull it off.
Just because a civilian use for it exists, doesn't mean that you let civilians do it themselves.
The final catch is that nuclear fuel is a finite resource, just like oil. You can just run around using it for all sorts of silly things unless you intend to run out of it. The main difference between petroleum and nuclear fuels is that there is a A LOT more petroleum. Many countries have already stopped mining uranium because its no longer economical to do so. Seawater is full of it, but you spend more energy getting it out of the seawater than you get back in a power plant.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining [wikipedia.org]
While we're not running out tomorrow, and there are alternatives that can be used in reactors, its still rare enough that governments aren't going to just let it be used for any random thing.
Re:Horrible idea. (Score:4, Informative)
Ignorance is bliss, isn't it?
Detonated far enough below the surface results in almost no environmental damage.
Right, and the house and city you live in, they haven't changed the environment at all. Nor do the roads, rail and seaports that get you the PC you use to talk to slashdot, or the power plants that power that PC.
Unless you're living in a cave that already existed, pretty much everything about modern civilized human life changes the environment in a long term way. What you do in that cave will forever change the enviroment in the cave. The planet is constantly changing. New species are coming into their own, and others are disappearing. This is the way its always been and the way it always will be, regardless of how special you think you are, we're not doing anything that wasn't done long before we existed, nor will it stop when we cease to exist. Wind and rain change the environment, destory mountains, make valleys and change shorelines, are you going to stop them as well?
You don't believe this, or your just a twit, not sure which really. If you had a clue and believe it you wouldn't be using a PC or electricty in general as it has massive effects on the enviroment, from the mines that the coal comes from to the pollution produced, to the power lines cutting across the country side right down to the heat used to cool and warm your home. You sir are a hypocrite.
You really need to get some perspective. Change will happen regardless of what we do. Our children can not possibly inherit the planet in the exact same state as we did. It is not possible for you to live on the surface of the planet without changing it. If you truely believe what you say, you need to kill yourself now otherwise you are just perpetuating the problem, that too will change the planet however.
I really can't stand this level of ignorance. You have no clue and live in a dream. Building a dam does not destroy the environment, it changes it. Its going to change no matter what happens. By building a dam we can actually help protect areas of the river downstream from the change that results from massive floods. We can prevent the deaths of people due to those floods. We can provide a more consistent source of water for everything involved in the rivers ecosystem.
I grew
Re:Security and Radioactivity (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I don't know if someone proposed this but... (Score:3, Informative)
There are however hundreds of other reasons why a nuclear bomb won't work. One of the biggest being that as powerful as our batteries and pushbuttons are, they aren't shit compared to the energy released in a nuclear explosion of any size. Oh...wait....
There's no physical law that says releasing stored potential energy will require a comparable amount of activation energy. That's not to say that the activation energy required in this case will be small, nor is to say that it would be easy (or even possible) to predict where that activation energy should be applied. (I know I can prevent a hurricane in Florida by killing a butterfly in China -- but I'll be damned if I can figure out which butterly it is that I need to whack.) But an argument based solely on the relative amounts of energy involved in the two processes - nuke versus quake - doesn't hold water.
Re:A weird weapon, it only works if you don't use (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This is an old idea (Score:3, Informative)
Not on a scale of tens of thousands of years.
Morbo says: Half-lives do not work like that!
The stuff that'll be around for "tens of thousands of years" is not that radioactive. It's the stuff that only hangs around for a few years that puts out a really dangerous amount of radiation. But, then, it's only dangerous for a few years.
Re:Security and Radioactivity (Score:4, Informative)
I really want to see a Nuke and have been dissapointed my entire life that I never have gotten the opportunity to see one.
It's not a Nuke, but Paks Nuclear Power Plant [atomeromu.hu] is open for viewing. AFAIK that's the only one on Earth where they actually let you see the reactor and the 70's style control room. It's kind of fun to see Soviet technology still working as intended.
Al Gore (Score:5, Informative)
Al Gore has made many millions of dollars off of fearmongering.
Al Gore has also made a lot from oil. He has had a long relationship and been an investor in Occidental Petroleum [ratical.org].
Falcon
Yes. It's called "Megatons to Megawatts" (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program [wikipedia.org]
The Megatons to Megawatts Program is the name given to the program that implemented the 1993 United States-Russia nonproliferation agreement to convert high-enriched uranium (HEU) taken from dismantled Russian nuclear weapons into low-enriched-uranium (LEU) for nuclear fuel.
From 1995 through mid-2005, 250 metric tons of high-enriched uranium (enough for 10,000 warheads) were recycled into low-enriched-uranium. The goal is to recycle 500 metric tons by 2013. Much of this fuel has already been used in many nuclear power plants in the U.S., as it is indistinguishable from normal fuel.
problems with nuclear power (Score:3, Informative)
2) nuclear waste remains deadly for 10,000 to 100,000 years.
I'll oppose nuclear power until it can be proven to be environmentally friendly, which I doubt will ever happen, but by reprocessing nuclear waste into more fuel the amount of waste and the length of tyme needed to store it can be significantly reduced.
Falcon
Project Orion ! (Score:4, Informative)
Let's resurrect Project Orion [islandone.org], and use this stuff to put a few 100 people on Mars and prospect the main belt asteroids.
After all, this was one of the original rationales for Orion [wikipedia.org]. In all of this time, I don't think that anyone has come up with any better ideas, and we sure aren't getting into the solar system very fast with chemical rockets.
the Soviets created a lake with it (Score:4, Informative)
Lake Chagan [google.com] was created [wikipedia.org] by a nuclear blast purposely sited so its crater lip would dam the river, which created both a lake upstream of the river (and prevented downstream flooding), and a lake in the crater itself. Downside: the lake is still radioactive, 40+ years later.
Re:Security and Radioactivity (Score:3, Informative)
Is this the recycling scheme proposed by Ruggero Santilli, the "hadronic mechanics" theorist?
The same guy who invented MagneGas and MagneHydrogen, which are made of magnecules?
This is a person who was criticised by other scientists as having;
Many serious misinterpretations, and misunderstandings of the "data" presented... [the paper] creates some doubt as to whether [the author] actually knows the difference between a gas chromatograph (GC) and a mass spectrometer (MS).
Are you suggesting his method of recycling high-level nuclear waste is a credible solution to the waste problem?
If so, you're not merely uninformed. You're as crazy as a loon.
Unclear to Nuclear Physics (Score:5, Informative)
Things like radon that are radioactive, and created by uranium have a shelf life of 2 days. So basically if you separate out leftover uranium, in 2 days I would expect your extracted oil would be radiation free.
Sorry but this is completely wrong. First uranium itself is not very radioactive (although it is toxic). The half-life for U235/238 (what you find in a Uranium bomb) is 0.7/4.5 billion years respectively. This means that even in large non-critical lumps the radiation is low. Secondly radioactivity after a nuclear explosion comes from the fission products of Uranium (or what they very rapidly decay into) like Strontium, Xenon, Caesium etc. which have varying but generally medium half lives (of order decades). Radon is a decay product of Uranium (after several steps), not a fission product.
Finally radioactive nuclei, particularly heavy ones, usually decay into other radioactive nuclei. Hence the fact that one isotope of radon has a short half-life does not mean that "all the radioactivity" will be gone because there is a decay chain. For example Radon-222 which has a half-live of 3.8 days (there is no Radon isotope with a 2d half-life that I could find) will eventually decay into Lead-210 which has a half life of 22.3 years.