4 ms·

Nuclear Explosion for Carbon Sequestration

43 points by energy123 1y ago

schobi 1y ago
assuming this is serious... There is no silver bullet - you can't just build a 10bn$ nuclear bomb programm and call it a day. All the other means are still needed to transition away from fossil fuel. The earlier we start the better.
- fredski42 1y ago
  Very much this! This is about removing (if it at wall will do that) without fixing the root cause. How deep can you put your head in the ground? It reminds of the Matrix where they scorched the skies to remove solar power capabilities as a way to block the enemy.
  - tito 1y ago
    Climate science consensus is we need to decarbonize and remove. We've gone too far at this point, decarbonizatin alone is no longer sufficient. So we need all the solar-y wind-y nuclear-y stuff AND all this weird removal stuff. And some other weirder stuff too.
    - burnt-resistor 1y ago
      Or, use sensible CCS methods like plankton or kelp, charring that, and sending it to the bottom of the ocean instead of resorting to absurd plans like nukes.
Duanemclemore 1y ago
To crib from Wes Anderson, "what this paper presupposes is Project Plowshare didn't go -far enough-." More seriously I'll refrain from judgment until I've read it all. But it's interesting thus far.
freeslave 1y ago
They are talking about one gigantic nuclear explosion (81 Gt). Why couldn't multiple smaller explosions achieve the same outcome?
- mattigames 1y ago
  Isn't that much more expensive and therefore less likely to be approved?
  - energy123 1y ago
    The point would be experimentation. You do a small one, measure the results, and if it aligns with theoretical predictions, you scale up. It transforms it from high risk and high reward, into low risk high reward.
  - wongarsu 1y ago
    The nukes just laying around in stockpiles are mostly in the 100-800kT range. You could use nukes that would otherwise need refurbishment (exploding old stockpiles and producing new stock instead of refurbishing old stock), or maybe even spin it as a disarmament treaty where the method of disposal are underground explosions for carbon sequestration. Or use it as an opportunity to use old nukes for a good purpose when you want to switch to a newer model (instead of needing facilities to disassemble them)
- jmpeax 1y ago
  Maybe because "We propose burying this device beneath the Kerguelen Plateau in the Southern Ocean, 3-5 km into the basalt-rich seafloor and 6-8 km below the water’s surface." would be prohibitively expensive for hundreds of nukes.
biohcacker84 1y ago
I find it interesting ever more risky way to sequester carbon are invented. Instead of making adding biochar to farm land an agricultural subsidy. A simple, extremely low risk policy, that is a local subsidy and does create international trade conflicts like other subsidies can. And it does not affect any wilderness. And in hot humid climates is proven to increase fertility. Or a bit risky we could fertilize the open ocean, very significantly increase ocean life. And it has been proven that a significant percentage of fish poop sequesters carbon in the deep ocean. Instead efforts seem to be focused on shading the sun. And new ideas using nukes....
- rocqua 1y ago
  Does biochar remain in ground for long? How quickly does it decompose and rot?
  - biohcacker84 1y ago
    7 to 10-ish years from what I recall. Which is another thing that makes it so low risk. If you stop the subsidy it goes away with a few years.
  - AngryData 1y ago
    That is pretty variable I would think due to ground composition and how complete the char burn is. In my anecdotal experience, if you do a low grade charcoal that still has a decent amount of oils in it like a lot of old-school burn wood and bury it in earth or drench in water, most of it will have broken down to invisibility after just a few years or so mixed into the ground. However charcoal that I have burned in a container sealed from air ingress and using a secondary source of heat until the wood stops venting any gases and is nearly pure carbon, I still see decent size chunks of it in my garden areas over 2 decades later, and no reason to expect it to not still be there even 50+ years from now.
  - tito 1y ago
    The current best in class methodology for biochar aims for 100+ years. There are some folks saying there are pathways to make biochar last 1000+ years. Puro methodology: https://biochar.groups.io/g/main/attachment/32853/2/Puro.earth%20Biochar%20Methodology.pdf https://biochar.groups.io/g/main/attachment/32853/2/Puro.ear... The nice thing is biochar is relatively inert. It just sits there in soil, holding onto water, making space for organisms to grow, but isn't "food", so it doesn't get eaten up and turned back into carbon dioxide. So it's a win for farmers and carbon removal.
John7878781 1y ago
What if exploding nukes on the seafloor has the opposite effect and actually _releases_ already sequestered carbon? IMO, this idea is very poorly thought out.
perihelions 1y ago
There's zero technical analysis in this paper. Is there no better source for this discussion? edit: It doesn't even make much sense. It asserts, without any engineering rationale, that a large fusion bomb will efficiently pulverize 4 trillions tons of basaltic rock—the volume of a sphere of basalt 20 km (!!) in diameter—into a fine silt. So many strange assumptions going into that.
LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
Nukewards Ho!
zihotki 1y ago
I'm getting similar vibes from this to the Soviet's idea to reverse nothern rivers flow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_river_reversal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_river_reversal They were also planning to use nukes for that. Thankfully it never happened
AngryData 1y ago
81 gigaton bomb?! Holy cow! It sounds like a planet buster! It seems to be the energy equivalent somewhere around an 8.5 magnitude or higher earthquake if the internet is to be believed?
- burnt-resistor 1y ago
  No, the fireball size is proportional to the cube root of energy released, which is why giant nukes are generally wasteful compared to many smaller ones.
  - AngryData 1y ago
    But the goal isn't to make a giant fireball, the goal is to bury it 7 kilometers under the seafloor bed at detonate it, pulverizing a massive volume of rock. Nearly all of the energy is being captured by rock and water, not being blasted out into space. Im not sure why you started talking about military nukes when half the point of this thing is how completely infeasible it is for military usage.
    - pfdietz 1y ago
      The 7 kilometers is the hard part.
      - tatersolid 1y ago
        We have drilled many oil wells deeper than 7km. We will just need a wider bore to fit that chubby nuke down the hole.
        pfdietz 1y ago
        This borehole would effectively be a mineshaft. High yield nuclear weapons achieve around 5 Mt/ton, so a 81 Gt device would have a mass of 16,200 tons, about 1/3rd the displacement of a WW2 Iowa class battleship. The deepest mine (a gold mine in South Africa) reaches a depth of 4 kilometers.
achille 1y ago
Also see: https://www.vice.com/en/article/nuclear-bomb-earths-crust-geoengineering/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/nuclear-bomb-earths-crust-ge...
- cubefox 1y ago
  Good article!
readthenotes1 1y ago
Worst case scenario: nuclear winter, humanity dies out. Problem solved
- flanked-evergl 1y ago
  Nope, not a potential outcome.
- Klaster_1 1y ago
  The nuclear winter premise is that burning cities will produce enough smoke to cover the sun for temperature to drop. AFAIK, there are no cities in deep ocean floor and even if there were, you'd have a little bit of a problem starting fire there.
lejalv 1y ago
This would only give a 30yr break on just one factor of the ecological collapse. I get it's tempting to think of a technological fix (even one as risky as an Earth-shattering nuclear explosion), but we have to question ourselves more.
- aydyn 1y ago
  There's no fix other than a technological one. Modifying the collective behavior of 8 billion people is just not going to happen.
  - khalic 1y ago
    The problem will fix itself when we lose food security. The only other way is to curb the carbon emission by stopping the burning of hydrocarbons. It’s always been the solution, and will always be
    - arresin 1y ago
      > The problem will fix itself when we lose food security. But then you’re still relying on the world at large connecting the cause and effect correctly.
      - khalic 1y ago
        You’re talking about the perception, I’m talking about famine
    - Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 1y ago
      > The problem will fix itself when we lose food security. Except the highest producing people are the ones who will lose food security the last
- wongarsu 1y ago
  A 30yr break on an exponential process with dangerous tipping points seems like an awesome deal Of course it doesn't work as the only fix, and there is the danger that it could be used as an excuse to slow down necessary changes. But the situation we currently find ourselves in is one that moves in the right direction (per-capita CO2 emissions peaked in the late 80s in the EU-27 and the 00s in the US, and many lower-emission solutions now have better economics than their established counterparts) but inertia an an ill-timed increase in the standard of living of China and India mean we are not moving nearly fast enough. More time is one of the most valuable things we can get in this situation
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
Men will do anything but vote for a carbon tax
- curtisblaine 1y ago
  ...men?
  - wk_end 1y ago
    They’re riffing on the “Men will do anything but go to therapy” meme.
mangecoeur 1y ago
The lengths people go to not to make walkable cities (and insulated buildings, fast trains.. you know, all the stuff that actually exists and works)
- beeflet 1y ago
  cities are made of concrete and steel, both of which emit carbon in their production. nearly everything from pharmaceuticals to clothes to computers is made with petrochemicals. It's not just a matter of civil design, and we don't have the answers.
  - khalic 1y ago
    We don’t have the answers to what?
    - beeflet 1y ago
      The highest function of ecology is understanding consequences.
      - khalic 1y ago
        Ok… what about the question I just asked you?
  - EGreg 1y ago
    We do have the answers. Pigovian taxes. Government and industry work together to distract people so they don’t organize to demand the actual answers be implemented. 1) Universal basic income funded by taxes at the point of extraction or emission. See: Alaska (Permanent Fund) 2) Use the taxes to pay down the debt, give UBI since you’ll have to print money anyway. 3) Also raise taxes on non biodegradeable plastics and forever chemicals. UBI can shift the Overton window from people protesting raising taxes on fossil fuels (eg Yellow Vest protests) to actually embracing them. Rather than telling individuals they cant have a bag or a straw, the government should put the pressure on bottling companies and clothing companies which continue to use plastics and PFAS everywhere… “recycling” is just another scam to keep individuals distracted. It turns out they were just shipping it all to China for decades.
khalic 1y ago
What a stupid idea
MindSpunk 1y ago
Well time to revive the Gnomon/Sundial weapon project. Edward Teller would be pleased.
clemensm_elix 1y ago
I believe Sabine Hossenfelder did a video about this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGPKpx6pMko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGPKpx6pMko
tito 1y ago
fascinating. Ignoring the ecological questions, I admire the "outside the box" thinking. For the sake of the calculation: $10^10 for 10^12 tons is an implied cost of one cent per ton. So three orders of magnitude cheaperish than current approaches around $100 per ton. The long term value of this paper may twofold - 1. to spark other ideas. This illustrates that carbon removal might be able to be done for orders of magnitude cheaper, even if just on the back of a napkin (most napkins today point to $100/ton). 2. to demonstrate the scale and seriousness of the carbon removal issue. yes, we need to do this, and yes, maybe there are better/safer ways. For folks pointing out "we need to decarbonize": yes, we do. However, carbon removal is also needed at this point alongside decarbonization. We have to reduce emissions and clean out what's already in the air. Without decarbonization and carbon removal together, there's no pathway to stay below 2˚C of warming. (and given that both decarbonization and removal aren't growing quickly enough, we also need to cool the planet too, which is another whole topic) also: http://airminers.com/connect http://airminers.com/connect - we have a Slack channel of 3,000 people focused about removal solutions. come join!
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
burnt-resistor 1y ago
This is insane shit. Some CCS is needed, probably using biomass, possibly using oceanic life, but this absurd like nuking the moon or using nukes for dam construction.
pfdietz 1y ago
This would likely be less damaging if the bomb could be largely based on H-11B fusion rather than DT or DD fusion. The latter inevitably produce large numbers of neutrons. At gigaton scales, thermonuclear devices become easier to build in a sense, because the assembly has more time to react as it expands. More stages are needed to compress that very large final stage, though. The argument reminds me of Freeman Dyson's H bomb propelled interstellar concept, which exploited the fact that per unit of energy output, deuterium was (at the time of publication, in 1968) thousands of times cheaper than fossil fuels.
tim333 1y ago
An 81 Gt nuclear device would seem rather risky and expensive being greater than the world's nuclear arsenals combined. However trying it on a smaller scale could combine nuclear disarmament with an interesting experiment which could help reduce global warming. Win win.

43 points by energy123 1y ago

assuming this is serious... There is no silver bullet - you can't just build a 10bn$ nuclear bomb programm and call it a day. All the other means are still needed to transition away from fossil fuel. The earlier we start the better.

fredski42 1y ago
Very much this! This is about removing (if it at wall will do that) without fixing the root cause. How deep can you put your head in the ground? It reminds of the Matrix where they scorched the skies to remove solar power capabilities as a way to block the enemy.
- tito 1y ago
  Climate science consensus is we need to decarbonize and remove. We've gone too far at this point, decarbonizatin alone is no longer sufficient. So we need all the solar-y wind-y nuclear-y stuff AND all this weird removal stuff. And some other weirder stuff too.
  - burnt-resistor 1y ago
    Or, use sensible CCS methods like plankton or kelp, charring that, and sending it to the bottom of the ocean instead of resorting to absurd plans like nukes.

Duanemclemore 1y ago

To crib from Wes Anderson, "what this paper presupposes is Project Plowshare didn't go -far enough-." More seriously I'll refrain from judgment until I've read it all. But it's interesting thus far.

freeslave 1y ago

They are talking about one gigantic nuclear explosion (81 Gt). Why couldn't multiple smaller explosions achieve the same outcome?

mattigames 1y ago
Isn't that much more expensive and therefore less likely to be approved?
- energy123 1y ago
  The point would be experimentation. You do a small one, measure the results, and if it aligns with theoretical predictions, you scale up. It transforms it from high risk and high reward, into low risk high reward.
- wongarsu 1y ago
  The nukes just laying around in stockpiles are mostly in the 100-800kT range. You could use nukes that would otherwise need refurbishment (exploding old stockpiles and producing new stock instead of refurbishing old stock), or maybe even spin it as a disarmament treaty where the method of disposal are underground explosions for carbon sequestration. Or use it as an opportunity to use old nukes for a good purpose when you want to switch to a newer model (instead of needing facilities to disassemble them)
jmpeax 1y ago
Maybe because "We propose burying this device beneath the Kerguelen Plateau in the Southern Ocean, 3-5 km into the basalt-rich seafloor and 6-8 km below the water’s surface." would be prohibitively expensive for hundreds of nukes.

biohcacker84 1y ago

I find it interesting ever more risky way to sequester carbon are invented. Instead of making adding biochar to farm land an agricultural subsidy. A simple, extremely low risk policy, that is a local subsidy and does create international trade conflicts like other subsidies can. And it does not affect any wilderness. And in hot humid climates is proven to increase fertility. Or a bit risky we could fertilize the open ocean, very significantly increase ocean life. And it has been proven that a significant percentage of fish poop sequesters carbon in the deep ocean. Instead efforts seem to be focused on shading the sun. And new ideas using nukes....

rocqua 1y ago
Does biochar remain in ground for long? How quickly does it decompose and rot?
- biohcacker84 1y ago
  7 to 10-ish years from what I recall. Which is another thing that makes it so low risk. If you stop the subsidy it goes away with a few years.
- AngryData 1y ago
  That is pretty variable I would think due to ground composition and how complete the char burn is. In my anecdotal experience, if you do a low grade charcoal that still has a decent amount of oils in it like a lot of old-school burn wood and bury it in earth or drench in water, most of it will have broken down to invisibility after just a few years or so mixed into the ground. However charcoal that I have burned in a container sealed from air ingress and using a secondary source of heat until the wood stops venting any gases and is nearly pure carbon, I still see decent size chunks of it in my garden areas over 2 decades later, and no reason to expect it to not still be there even 50+ years from now.
- tito 1y ago
  The current best in class methodology for biochar aims for 100+ years. There are some folks saying there are pathways to make biochar last 1000+ years. Puro methodology: https://biochar.groups.io/g/main/attachment/32853/2/Puro.earth%20Biochar%20Methodology.pdf https://biochar.groups.io/g/main/attachment/32853/2/Puro.ear... The nice thing is biochar is relatively inert. It just sits there in soil, holding onto water, making space for organisms to grow, but isn't "food", so it doesn't get eaten up and turned back into carbon dioxide. So it's a win for farmers and carbon removal.

John7878781 1y ago

What if exploding nukes on the seafloor has the opposite effect and actually _releases_ already sequestered carbon? IMO, this idea is very poorly thought out.

perihelions 1y ago

There's zero technical analysis in this paper. Is there no better source for this discussion? edit: It doesn't even make much sense. It asserts, without any engineering rationale, that a large fusion bomb will efficiently pulverize 4 trillions tons of basaltic rock—the volume of a sphere of basalt 20 km (!!) in diameter—into a fine silt. So many strange assumptions going into that.

LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago

Nukewards Ho!

zihotki 1y ago

I'm getting similar vibes from this to the Soviet's idea to reverse nothern rivers flow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_river_reversal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_river_reversal They were also planning to use nukes for that. Thankfully it never happened

AngryData 1y ago

81 gigaton bomb?! Holy cow! It sounds like a planet buster! It seems to be the energy equivalent somewhere around an 8.5 magnitude or higher earthquake if the internet is to be believed?

burnt-resistor 1y ago
No, the fireball size is proportional to the cube root of energy released, which is why giant nukes are generally wasteful compared to many smaller ones.
- AngryData 1y ago
  But the goal isn't to make a giant fireball, the goal is to bury it 7 kilometers under the seafloor bed at detonate it, pulverizing a massive volume of rock. Nearly all of the energy is being captured by rock and water, not being blasted out into space. Im not sure why you started talking about military nukes when half the point of this thing is how completely infeasible it is for military usage.
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    The 7 kilometers is the hard part.
    - tatersolid 1y ago
      We have drilled many oil wells deeper than 7km. We will just need a wider bore to fit that chubby nuke down the hole.
      - pfdietz 1y ago
        This borehole would effectively be a mineshaft. High yield nuclear weapons achieve around 5 Mt/ton, so a 81 Gt device would have a mass of 16,200 tons, about 1/3rd the displacement of a WW2 Iowa class battleship. The deepest mine (a gold mine in South Africa) reaches a depth of 4 kilometers.

achille 1y ago

Also see: https://www.vice.com/en/article/nuclear-bomb-earths-crust-geoengineering/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/nuclear-bomb-earths-crust-ge...

cubefox 1y ago
Good article!

readthenotes1 1y ago

Worst case scenario: nuclear winter, humanity dies out. Problem solved

flanked-evergl 1y ago
Nope, not a potential outcome.
Klaster_1 1y ago
The nuclear winter premise is that burning cities will produce enough smoke to cover the sun for temperature to drop. AFAIK, there are no cities in deep ocean floor and even if there were, you'd have a little bit of a problem starting fire there.

lejalv 1y ago

This would only give a 30yr break on just one factor of the ecological collapse. I get it's tempting to think of a technological fix (even one as risky as an Earth-shattering nuclear explosion), but we have to question ourselves more.

aydyn 1y ago
There's no fix other than a technological one. Modifying the collective behavior of 8 billion people is just not going to happen.
- khalic 1y ago
  The problem will fix itself when we lose food security. The only other way is to curb the carbon emission by stopping the burning of hydrocarbons. It’s always been the solution, and will always be
  - arresin 1y ago
    > The problem will fix itself when we lose food security. But then you’re still relying on the world at large connecting the cause and effect correctly.
    - khalic 1y ago
      You’re talking about the perception, I’m talking about famine
  - Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 1y ago
    > The problem will fix itself when we lose food security. Except the highest producing people are the ones who will lose food security the last
wongarsu 1y ago
A 30yr break on an exponential process with dangerous tipping points seems like an awesome deal Of course it doesn't work as the only fix, and there is the danger that it could be used as an excuse to slow down necessary changes. But the situation we currently find ourselves in is one that moves in the right direction (per-capita CO2 emissions peaked in the late 80s in the EU-27 and the 00s in the US, and many lower-emission solutions now have better economics than their established counterparts) but inertia an an ill-timed increase in the standard of living of China and India mean we are not moving nearly fast enough. More time is one of the most valuable things we can get in this situation

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago

Men will do anything but vote for a carbon tax

curtisblaine 1y ago
...men?
- wk_end 1y ago
  They’re riffing on the “Men will do anything but go to therapy” meme.

mangecoeur 1y ago

The lengths people go to not to make walkable cities (and insulated buildings, fast trains.. you know, all the stuff that actually exists and works)

beeflet 1y ago
cities are made of concrete and steel, both of which emit carbon in their production. nearly everything from pharmaceuticals to clothes to computers is made with petrochemicals. It's not just a matter of civil design, and we don't have the answers.
- khalic 1y ago
  We don’t have the answers to what?
  - beeflet 1y ago
    The highest function of ecology is understanding consequences.
    - khalic 1y ago
      Ok… what about the question I just asked you?
- EGreg 1y ago
  We do have the answers. Pigovian taxes. Government and industry work together to distract people so they don’t organize to demand the actual answers be implemented. 1) Universal basic income funded by taxes at the point of extraction or emission. See: Alaska (Permanent Fund) 2) Use the taxes to pay down the debt, give UBI since you’ll have to print money anyway. 3) Also raise taxes on non biodegradeable plastics and forever chemicals. UBI can shift the Overton window from people protesting raising taxes on fossil fuels (eg Yellow Vest protests) to actually embracing them. Rather than telling individuals they cant have a bag or a straw, the government should put the pressure on bottling companies and clothing companies which continue to use plastics and PFAS everywhere… “recycling” is just another scam to keep individuals distracted. It turns out they were just shipping it all to China for decades.

khalic 1y ago

What a stupid idea

MindSpunk 1y ago

Well time to revive the Gnomon/Sundial weapon project. Edward Teller would be pleased.

clemensm_elix 1y ago

I believe Sabine Hossenfelder did a video about this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGPKpx6pMko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGPKpx6pMko

tito 1y ago

fascinating. Ignoring the ecological questions, I admire the "outside the box" thinking. For the sake of the calculation: $10^10 for 10^12 tons is an implied cost of one cent per ton. So three orders of magnitude cheaperish than current approaches around $100 per ton. The long term value of this paper may twofold - 1. to spark other ideas. This illustrates that carbon removal might be able to be done for orders of magnitude cheaper, even if just on the back of a napkin (most napkins today point to $100/ton). 2. to demonstrate the scale and seriousness of the carbon removal issue. yes, we need to do this, and yes, maybe there are better/safer ways. For folks pointing out "we need to decarbonize": yes, we do. However, carbon removal is also needed at this point alongside decarbonization. We have to reduce emissions and clean out what's already in the air. Without decarbonization and carbon removal together, there's no pathway to stay below 2˚C of warming. (and given that both decarbonization and removal aren't growing quickly enough, we also need to cool the planet too, which is another whole topic) also: http://airminers.com/connect http://airminers.com/connect - we have a Slack channel of 3,000 people focused about removal solutions. come join!

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

burnt-resistor 1y ago

This is insane shit. Some CCS is needed, probably using biomass, possibly using oceanic life, but this absurd like nuking the moon or using nukes for dam construction.

pfdietz 1y ago

This would likely be less damaging if the bomb could be largely based on H-11B fusion rather than DT or DD fusion. The latter inevitably produce large numbers of neutrons. At gigaton scales, thermonuclear devices become easier to build in a sense, because the assembly has more time to react as it expands. More stages are needed to compress that very large final stage, though. The argument reminds me of Freeman Dyson's H bomb propelled interstellar concept, which exploited the fact that per unit of energy output, deuterium was (at the time of publication, in 1968) thousands of times cheaper than fossil fuels.

tim333 1y ago

An 81 Gt nuclear device would seem rather risky and expensive being greater than the world's nuclear arsenals combined. However trying it on a smaller scale could combine nuclear disarmament with an interesting experiment which could help reduce global warming. Win win.