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Could sonic booms stop hurricanes? (2008)
- Synaesthesia 8y agoWow this could be fantastic, a peaceful application for what are otherwise over-engineered instruments of war.
- noetic_techy 8y agoAwesome. I don't know why they stress over the need for a skilled pilot, this could easily be a drone/AI project.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> I don't know why they stress over the need for a skilled pilot, this could easily be a drone The article was published in 2008. It’s actually neat to consider a technological solution to hurricanes that became viable in the last ten years.
- nabla9 8y ago> Edward Teller's idea to use a nuclear bomb to destroy a hurricane. But of course he did. Teller really loved the bomb. He proposed using the bomb for every problem. * build a canal. just use a H-bomb. * mining, a H-bomb. * need a new a harbor in Alaska, a H-bomb. * reflection seismology, use a H-bomb * stimulate natural gas from tight fields, use a H-bomb.
- shshhdhs 8y agoDis this man not understand radioactive fallout?
- Tuna-Fish 8y agoA very large H-bomb can be made almost arbitrarily clean, if you are willing to compromise (a lot!) on other qualities. It would be possible to use bombs for excavation work and have the resulting added radiation to be hard to distinguish from the natural background. Not that this makes using bombs for excavation a good idea...
- jgh 8y agoWhat are the kinds of compromises that would need to be made?
- Tuna-Fish 8y agoMostly, they need to be very powerful, more powerful than is practical for most use, and they need to be physically very large.
- PJDK 8y agoIs it just politics that makes this a bad idea or are there other engineering problems?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- maxxxxx 8y agoCan you provide more detail on this? I have never heard such a thing.
- throwaway5752 8y agoWith all due respect, there is a discete element to fallout. The radiation on aggregate might be at a particular (and assuming you're correct, I don't know) low/background level, but that won't help you in in inhale a small Pu particle.
- Tuna-Fish 8y agoThere is not going to be any Pu left over after you initiate fusion on 10x the mass of the primary worth of DT right next to it. The amount of fast neutrons that releases will fission every last heavy atom found in the core. This is precisely why arbitrarily large bombs can be made arbitrarily clean. As you increase the proportion of energy produced by fusion, you reduce not just the proportional fallout in relation to the size of the bomb, but the total amount of fallout. The second problem is of course those very energetic neutrons -- to make them not activate enough material to produce even worse fallout, you need to wrap the bomb in something that absorbs them and produces something benign. Also, just as a minor nit that always bothers me: Plutonium is never your problem with fallout. If a bomb goes off or a reactor burns, the other things that are released will always be many orders of magnitude more dangerous than the plutonium. No-one has ever died of, and no-one will ever die of cancer because of plutonium released in a nuclear explosion, reactor leak or a reactor failure; simply because to have enough exposure to plutonium for that to be likely, you will have developed a thousand other cancers caused by other, more dangerous isotopes that you would also have been exposed to. (People might have died cancers they got from working on plutonium for bomb, rtg or other use, but that was only possible because the plutonium was first separated from the more dangerous isotopes and well purified.)
- citrablue 8y agoI think it's likely, having just harnessed the power of the atom after growing up w/o electricity, Teller assumed the problem of fallout was a simpler one to solve than what he'd just worked on. We see the standstill, where radiation was unresolvable... but wouldn't he see it as a smaller hill after he just climbed a mountain?
- Udik 8y agoWell at least those are peaceful uses. Must be sad when your greatest invention can only be used to kill inordinate amounts of people.
- thefounder 8y agoWe use it for nuclear plants too
- foxyv 8y agoTeller is known as the father of the "Hydrogen" bomb specifically, rather than nuclear weapons in general.
- hownottowrite 8y agoSadly, Teller's 1968 "The Constructive Uses of Nuclear Explosives" is not available online, at least not in an easily accessible form. Interested folks should check out Project Plowshare. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare [1] https://www.osti.gov/opennet/reports/plowshar.pdf https://www.osti.gov/opennet/reports/plowshar.pdf To get into the mindset, give Dwight Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" a listen: "I feel impelled to speak today in a language that in a sense is new - one which I, who have spent so much of my life in the military profession, would have preferred never to use. That new language is the language of atomic warfare." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B8R-umE0s0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B8R-umE0s0
- ohiovr 8y agoIf the energy of the hurricane is not allowed to be released where does it end up?
- marcosdumay 8y agoDo hurricanes release enough energy to cool down the ocean?
- ohiovr 8y agoWell I have read that it is a heat engine of at least the 12th power so there must be some accounting of where all that energy goes.
- CapitalistCartr 8y agoHurricanes transfer heat energy from the Tropics to the temperate North. Suppresion of them would cause the energy imbalance to build up, making the next storm worse. Directing the storms away ftom land would be safer.
- mrfusion 8y agoI’d need to see a source for the claim it would make the next storm worse. Sounds logical but weather is complicated. For example maybe trade winds and currents simply speed up a bit if there’s no storm.
- newsbinator 8y agoWhat would be some examples of ways to redirect a hurricane?
- CapitalistCartr 8y agoAnd that is the 64 dollar question.
- Someone 8y agoHuge walls aka “mountain ranges”.
- tzs 8y agoI've wondered if you could do something like that at airports that have problems with crosswinds. Could you build tall walls on both sides of the runway to block crosswinds? I'd expect there would be turbulence around the entrance to the walled area which might be dangerous, but that could probably be addressed be having the walls flair out near and beyond the end of the runway, and also past the end have the height ramp down to 0 instead of just stopping abruptly.
- mikeash 8y agoI fly out of an airport that used to have a lot of trees along one side of the runway. It had both of the effects you mention, of moderating the wind but also causing turbulence. The problem isn’t just the ends, but also the top, as the wind curls over. Overall I think the benefit is fairly small, and you’re a lot better off building perpendicular runways if you can.
- pnenp 8y agoThere's a more recent thread [1] where the consensus seems to be that no, it's not possible to stop hurricanes this way, or with nukes. According to the thread, the energy in a hurricane is simply too great. 1: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/165281-hurricane-dispersal-by-supersonic-booms-implications-of-building-real-life-star-destroyers/&do=findComment&comment=3167822 https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/165281...
- mrfusion 8y agoI think pumping cold water to the surface from lower depths could be very effective. I wish we’d try it out. Edit. Bill gates actually filed a patent on this.
- mbreese 8y agoI doubt that you’d be able to do this at a large enough scale to make it worthwhile. And any storm is a moving target, so you’d need to have pumps all over the ocean.
- mrfusion 8y agoStorms actually move fairly slowly. I would suggest placing the pump boats in the eye as it’s forming before it gets to hurricane strength. Remember you’d just be moving already cold water which takes orders of magnitude less energy than cooling the water.
- NegativeK 8y agoIf a nuclear bomb is a trivial amount of energy compared to a hurricane, I think we can say with confidence that the amount water you're going to have to pump around will be absurd, as will be the environmental impacts.
- throwaway5752 8y agoAnd you'd be pumping warm water lower, thereby making the next storm worse.
- mrfusion 8y agoI’d need to see a source on that. I’m not sure how you can assume that.
- throwaway5752 8y agoI will not provide you with a source, I don't have the time. I consider what I said basic, first-principles stuff. We two layers deep discussing an idea that is not feasible, anyway. Here is a source that the pumps will not work: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/08/28/hurricanes.gates.gray/ http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/08/28/hurricanes.gates....
- rossdavidh 8y agoAs has been variously pointed out, this is extraordinarily unlikely to work. But, the discussion did get me wondering if it is possible to _cause_ a hurricane (or tropical storm). If you could cause them to happen on a more frequent basis, presumably each one would have a lot less energy. In other words, if the energy built up in the temperature imbalance of warm water on the surface is more regularly dispersed by storms, perhaps you could reduce the chance of a level 4 or 5 hurricane ever forming. The "only" problem being you're creating hurricanes, of whatever size, and they will eventually hit somewhere, and that's not a neighborly thing to do. :)