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?"
I don't know if someone proposed this but... (Score:5, Interesting)
blowing up geological faults to 'ease the tension'. Better a small slip than a full-blown earthquake.
Or maybe if it's just for fun, give it to the Mythbusters.
Not really 23,000 nukes (Score:5, Interesting)
The majority of the "23,000 nukes" have essentially been deactivated and are only counted because they have not been fully disassembled yet. The link itself says only 8,000 are operational globally. On the other hand, if you count plutonium cores, trigger assemblies, and miscellaneous spare parts lying around that could be engineered into a functional weapon if required there are significantly greater than 23,000 potential nukes.
What does or does not constitute a nuclear weapon for accounting purposes does not necessarily match common sense understanding.
Can't they be used as non-explosive fuel? (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't there some way to use the fissile material in there as non-explosive fuel? Build a nuke plant in Panama and use specialized electrically powered earth-moving equipment to dig. Then when you're done you have a clean new canal and a nuke plant instead of a toxic canal.
Or better yet, build several of the same types of reactors they use on aircraft carriers, and install them in enormous digging machines. Retired naval personnel could even be used to run the nuke operations on the diggers. Then when you're done you have several small reactors and a clean canal.
How about Orion? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Global cooling (Score:3, Interesting)
This solution was proposed in a short scifi story several decades ago, in fact. In the story involving the USA and USSR, one side was visiting the other and no one noticed that a colonel from the entourage stepped aside and pulled a counterpart aside and they spoke briefly. A year later there were two accidental launches, one from each side. Political tensions eased when it became clear that the two small nukes landed in the deep ocean, and sent up huge plumes of water vapor with little radiation. Not too long after, global warming was solved.
And not too long after that, the ice age started.
I think it was by Elison....?
Re:I don't know if someone proposed this but... (Score:5, Interesting)
"When" can be "after we have warned everybody in the surrounding 300 miles incessantly for the past 6 months".
Just like the digital tv transition! Oh wait...
Re:Been tried, major fail (Score:3, Interesting)
The referenced article mentions the project name and claimed that it was a technical success. They didn't bother to mention several technical failures, including unexpected releases of radioactive dust (some of which drifted into Canada, in contravention of a treaty), and a general inability to predict the outcome of their explosions. One of their experiments attempted to create a hill, but ended up with a crater. Another experiment did the opposite. They tried to connect two natural gas cavities, and not only failed to do so, but made the gas too radioactive for safe use. This is only a success in some weak sense, where we can move the goalposts to some relatively trivial problem, like that of making explosions underground. See also: this article [wikipedia.org].
Teller's vision of reshaping the crust to our will has a strong appeal, especially since conventional earth-moving is still expensive 50 years later. Geological structures still strongly affect the development of cities and the economy of nations, and the idea that many of the problems that arise from this can be made to disappear makes this project very compelling to those who don't consider the unexpected costs. Before we can do this well, I think our technology needs to progress to the point where we can not only produce large amounts of energy such as that produced by a fusion bomb, but also direct it in a controlled way, and we still seem to be relatively far from that goal.
Re:Security and Radioactivity (Score:1, Interesting)
You people criticizing this idea have no sense of adventure or play.
The average guy dreams about having one of those little earthmover things to play with. He watches Mythbusters and those demolition documentaries because blowing things up is cool!
Dreaming about what/who to blow up with your very own personal nuke. Come on, admit it. That would be so awesome!
Don't take life so seriously. You aren't going to get out alive, so at least TRY to have some fun. ;)
Re:Security and Radioactivity (Score:3, Interesting)
radio active waste hasn't stopped coal power plants, I would think as clean as we are able to burn oil now, sepearte out any heavy metal at the end would be easier than coal. Actually just mixing it into a pipeline seams pretty safe from what the article says about the lack of radioactivity in the low fissionable material bombs should make this a non-issue.
Coal-burning plants are particularly noted for producing large amounts of toxic and mildly radioactive ash due to concentrating naturally occurring metals and radioactive material from the coal. [wikipedia.org]
Is this bad enough? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I don't know if someone proposed this but... (Score:4, Interesting)
And there's not much energy involved in a shout or explosion that sets off a avalanche, compared to the energy released during one. We already deliberately set off avalanches early in order to either limit the damage or to prevent loss of life by having it happen at a controlled time.
The general idea would be that having a 5.0 annually is better than a 6.0 once a decade.
Still, the science is nowhere developed enough. Problems I can think of off hand:
1. Need to identify the point under the 'most' strain, and how much extra energy is needed, where, to break that point. Or even find a lesser point that, once broken, will break more points, ending in an ultimately lower energy potential.
2. Need to ID just HOW strong the resulting earthquakes would be under this - we need to release enough energy to matter, but not so much we level the area. Preferably, the shocks would be minimal to no damage.
3. Along with 2, we need to ID where the new strain points are going to be, and the stress they'll be under, to verify that the chances of a dangerous earthquake will actually be reduced by our action. After all this, you'd resurvey, and start modeling again for the next shot.
All in all, it says to me that we need much improved maps of the earth in the area, and good supercomputer modeling programs.
We're a long way away from having to worry about where we'd get a nuke from to do this.
Re:Security and Radioactivity (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.nuclearwasterecycling.com/ [nuclearwas...ycling.com]
Thank you for calling me uninformed. Now go read it.
Reality Check (Score:3, Interesting)
Coal contains trace amounts of uranium, typically at around 3ppm.
However ordinary soil contains trace amounts at concentrations ranging from between 1-5ppm.
Re:This is an old idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Pumping it into the ground 1500 feet down into the earth's crust in the middle of a tectonic plate and far below any water tables is perfectly safe. Leaving it above ground waiting for some weird freak accident to allow contaminates to somehow get into the water table is a tiny bit less so.
It should be noted though that the casks they use at US nuclear power plants to store spent rods are really really freakin' tough. So it's really more just a problem of the stuff taking up space and not having a permanent home. That, and uneducated hippies hearing "nuclear" or "radioactive" and going off their rockers.
Re:Security and Radioactivity (Score:1, Interesting)
How many people do you know that are dumb enough to try to steal shit from the Russian Military?!?
Plenty of people that work for it. I live in Finland and know people that are interested in military gear and visit Estonia often. They say that there are many Russians that steal all military shit they get their hands on and sell it there. Estonia is making enormous progress towards a more westernized society but there's still plenty of lawlessness - pirated CDs and DVDs are trivial to find and stolen Russian military gear isn't hard at all either. Once I went along just out of curiosity when I was visiting Estonia anyway and was pretty quickly offered a helmet with built-in night vision goggles - intended for a tank driver!
Supposedly even more stuff is for sale in Russia but fewer people buy it there because it's harder to import because customs monitor travellers much more strictly.