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Civil Engineering with Atomic Detonations
ThesQuid writes "I just caught
this article about China possibly using nuclear blasts to help build a hydro project in Tibet. I've always wondered why nobody has ever actually used nuclear explosives in civil engineering projects, if (and this is a BIG if) the blasts can be made reasonably radiologically clean." Several U.S. nuclear tests were devoted to exploring the feasibility of this; obviously we decided it wasn't such a great idea.
If IIRC it wasn't a resevior that the Russians made it was a natural gas storage facility. One of the very first issues of Discover Magazine had an article on this back in 81 I think complete with a picture of an engineer standing inside of one. I believe that the article also pointed out that the US had done the same back in the late 60's or early 70's. The nuke made for an ideal underground excavator: the cavern created would have walls several feet thick of rock that was made molten for a few seconds and therefore could be airtight (a huge glass bowl so to speak). What I wonder is why noone has done this on the moon yet. After venting the space it would make an ideal sealed container for colonization projects. If we had done this during some of the Apollo missions (or at least during that era) the caverns created would have had 30+ years to vent already. I know there would be some issues regarding the radioactivity afterwards but I believe that the use of a Hydrogen bomb (vs regular A bomb) would considerable bring down the level of radiation afterwards. This could be done with asteroids as well using small devices. Some scifi author had a few stories about this but I can't remember who. This could be a useful way of bringing down the quantity of nukes that had been stockpiled during the cold war but that is totally a subject for debate in and of itself.
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
"The United States looked into using nuclear devices for civil engineering in the 1950s and 1960s. For example, string a line of devices and you can make an instant shipping canal."
See "Project Plowshare".
not the Panama canal, which dates from the early part of this century, but a second canal nearby i think u mean?
to be fair to the chinese the russians and british have also sacrificed their soldier's lives to see the effects of nuclear weapons on man. states are wonderful eh?
First I am not from Kiev but I lived there for some time.
Second it is not smart to consider that you mess a lot to get a lot more. Nuclear explosions are not the same as nuclear power plants. You don't see my point. I am no pacifist and accept the use of nuclear weapons in certain cases. However I perfectly know that after making some mess with a nuclear bomb you get a whole radioactive waste field for tens or hundreds of years. Hiroshima & Nagasaki took years to get cleaned. Nevada is till now a waste field and the place takes tens of years to get cleaned. Bikini is till now a place "under question" because some places are still radioactive. But if you think this is all BS than take a trip to Lake Death in Semipalatinsk and drink a cup of water on my health.
What is dangerous here is that the use of a nuclear device will obligatory leave waste. This waste will be washed out by this new dam and fall over all Southeastern Asia. To avoid this you need to make a serious cleanup that may last tens of years. I don't think chinese will have the pacience to do this, first blow and then wait 30-40 years to build the dam.
And what considers people at my local university... Well I'm sitting right in the place where one of the first medical labs for radiation studies was created. The lab moved but people remember why it was formed... Part of the Soviet A-Bomb was planned/tested a few hundreds of meters from here... That's for the troll...
1 roentgen: the intensity of gamma radiation that will deposit 100 erg/cm2 in dry air.
this unit is really only used for X-rays. All radiation can be measured in rads. 1 roentgen of gamma radiation = 1 rad.
Rads are a measure of energy deposited.
Rem is a unit of biological damage. Different kinds of radiation will cause different ammounts of damage to a person's cells even if they deposit the same amount of energy in the body. A quality factor is used to convert rad to rem.
gamma: 1
fast neutrons/beta: 2
thermal neutrons: 10
alpha: 20
most people get 50 to 200 millirem from natural background sources every year. 30 R/hr is a very unhealthy level to be in for very long. For a comparison, the Navy considers 100 mR/hr a high radiation area.
I agree that gammas will always be there, but as long as you are inside a building during the blast, you are pretty much safe from them. High energy alphas have a range of a few centimeters in air and are stopped by the dead layers in your outer skin. Betas have a range of of several (~10) meters in air and are also stopped by clothes and skin. As I said if you happen to eat food that has byproduct isotopes in it, it's bad. For example milk has some Strontium-90 in it which came about during atmospheric testing of fission devices, fallout fell to the ground, cows ate the grass, Sr-90 got into the milk. It's still around because of its long half life. Also, the thing you were exposed to was not necessarily radioactive. It could have been some sort of other higly toxic substance, because a piece of radioactive material is unlikely to emit that strongly if it was just sitting there, because if it was it would take very little time for it to stop (because of decay).
There was also a project for the development of an intercontinental nuclear weapons delivery system (read "missile") powered by a nuclear SCRAMjet. The idea was to use it to deliver several bombs at various targets and then zig-zag around the countryside spewing radiation until it ran out of fuel - extremly nasty.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
uh read your chinese history again dude
Let's not forget the BOMARC, a surface-to-air nuclear weapon stationed here and there along
the US's borders (Upstate NY was one place, somewhere in MN was another) designed to shoot
straight out to the oncoming (Soviet) bombers, and *poof*. Even if it didn't get close
enough to destroy the bombers, it would at least blind and irradiate the crews, pretty much
ending the mission.
IIRC, they were removed from service in the 70's sometime, and some ended up at Vandenberg
AFB as radar calibration and target drones.
--Ben
--Ben
Yep, the Soviets made several gas and oil reservoirs for cities in the far east and southcentral regions of the S.U. through nuclear explosions. In present-day Kazakhstan, they built several *drinking* water reservoirs by detonating small devices a small distance under the ground, resulting in the creation of a large crater at the surface. A good source for info on nukes in civil engineering is the IAEA's bibliography booklet "Peaceful Uses of Atomic Explosions." (gosh that is a paradoxical sentence.) It's available at most UN Records Depositories (i.e. university law libraries). If you can't find it, the University of Wisconsin Physics Library has one for sure!
In the novel Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, they ground-launched an Orion spacecraft. The risk was justified, as they were trying to get up into space where they could fight the aliens that had taken over Earth -- but it did a number on Seattle in the process.
First of all, nukes are expensive, as is a trip to the moon. But...
The US Air Force did have plans to nuke the moon.
Still, it seems like a lot of hassle to make a useless hole. The engineering might also be a bit different, reducing the experimental value. Obviously the gravity is much lower. And, would the lack of umpteen tons of air sitting on top of the area make a difference?
The Genie (AIR-2) had a 1.5 KT W-25 atomic warhead. It was live fired in 1957 and 4-5 engineers and a film guy from the Army Unit that did all the atomic bomb filming stood right under it as it was command detonated at 19,000. Shot John of operation Plumbob. It was deployed on the F-101, F-89, F-106, and F-102. The Canadian Air Force also deployed them on CF-101s until the 1980s.
.5 KT W-54 warhead. That Air to Air missile that was in service before the Sparrow. Most had a conventional warhead but it could be fitted with the nuke if need be.
Falcon (AIM-26A) had a
Nike Hercules (SAM) - Carried a 20KT W-31 warhead
Talos (SAM) - carried a 5KT W-30 warhead
BOMARC (SAM) - carried a 7-10 KT W-40 warhead - US and Canada
Terrier (SAM) - carried a 1KT W-45-0 warhead
Spartan and Sprint - nuclear tipped ABMs. Sprint was really neat. It could acclerate from 0 to 3,200 feet/sec.
The US Navy also had a number of anti-submarine nukes like the ASROC or the Sea Lance.
Finally someone has an idea for a worthwhile tourist attraction!
I'll pay to view the blast!
Simple, really: it's not their country... they want to blow up bits of Tibet, not China.
--
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
...especially after they say "oops, we didn't MEAN to nuke that heavily-populated city, hehehe!"
I'm surprised they would even consider trying something like this.
niceFire.com - Humor and Lego's or Lego's and Humor or Some Combination of
...are you a fan of Ozric Tentacles? If not, you're probably really confused right now. :)
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
Gaffe!
I meant the expansion or replacement of the Panama Canal. Either Popular Science or Popular Mechanics is where I first saw it as a kid, and I've seen other variations of it since. 1960's or later, but not later than the end of Reagan (and the death of the "Nukes are Safe" era).
Other posters here have corrected me. The newer route was going through some other area between North and South America. The idea was to bury nukes, then use them to push huge volumes of earth up and out of the way.
Moderate that @%#^ post down!
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
The poster to whom you refer said reasonably clean, and made it a hypothetical. It'd be fine if it only produced a little residual radiation, since small amounts of radiation are good for you and might even reduce the local cancer risk. See any book or study on radiation hormesis; radiation is one of the many things that are deady in high doses but beneficial in low doses.
Here's the medical definition of hormesis.
Here's a Japanese study verifying radiation hormesis in laboratory animals.
Here's a page on radiation hormesis in humans.
I play Nerd-Folk!
China has shown a remarkable ability to totally ignore environmental concerns with their grandiose projects; the Three Gorges dam for example, is an environmental nightmare.
--
Even smaller nulcear weapons were developed! A few weeks ago I was doing an on-line search for information on the Nike-X system, and the Sprint missle in particular. I found, in addition to what I was looking for, notes on nuclear MORTAR SHELLS! Imagine a ten-pound shell with the power of Timothy McViegh's bomb!
Jeff
uh read your chinese history again dude
Hmm, OK.
http://www.cernet.com/beijing/GreatWall.html:"It was intended by the early emperors of China to serve as a barrier against the marauding nomads of the barbarial North. Although it failed to keep out the Mongols it did establish a border within which the Chinese developed their distinctive civilization."
I realize they didn't simply walk around it, I was just kidding around about the details... the main point of my comment was quoting the geologist who claimed their irrigation tunnel was running dry before it's even started.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
What's the smallest possible size for a nuke?
If you are going to quote Zaphod (or Douglas Adams), please have the courtesy to credit the quote. BTW, that is probably my favorite line in the whole 5 book trilogy :)
.sigless
Enigma
Enigma
Enigma
Back in the '50s I believe it was, the united States did experimental research in this area. The effort was called Project Ploughshare. Below ground work and above ground may have been explored back then. The work eventually stopped due to the fact that everything near the blast area was highly radioactive.
As you mention I understand most shaped charges are used to punch holes through an intervening barrier, and thus relying on the acoustic shockwave to blow a "scab" off the other side of the material, so I wonder just what effect a shaped charge has against a truly massive and thick object, but then I'm not an explosives expert so I have no way of knowing.(I've read/heard accounts where they describe what happens inside a tank that gets hit by a shaped charge that doesn't penetrate the armor, but instead blows a chunk off the inside of the armor... quite messy.)
While they might get some better efficiency from shaped nuclear explosives, which you mention are still apparently theoretical, I still doubt that they could do this in one shot, in other words there would still have to be several nukes used and so my arguments about repairing damage done by later nukes are probably still valid. An additional thought comes to mind if they are using shaped nukes; wouldn't the explosion front tend to follow the weakest/lowest melting point rock, which might not be the same direction as you want the explosion to go?
However I believe the scale was a bit different. I think the documentary movie that came out just a hear or two showed some of the initial stupidities on all sides. And while I don't consider most "Western" nuclear nations "perfect", I think they would be way more concerned with the bad PR of having mining engineers irradiated than China seems to be. After all China is still trying very hard to stop anyone publishing anything about human rights violations... so I'm a bit more concerned about the shoddy treatment that their folks might receive.
yes, the Free Tibet movement would be most upset. Not to mention the rest of the Indian subcontinent that is dependant on the runoff.
this is truly an abomination against the gods and nature. It is said that the chinese people have many hells. I condemn the chinese government to experience each of them.
Leaving aside the technical virtues or defects, which are only engineering issues after all, I think the failure of the Atoms for Peace program had more to do with its policy incompatibility with MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), than the above mentioned tech attributes. For instance, if nukes were generally useful, then you would have a hard time playing non-proliferation policies out. MAD was an evil idea to start with and its persistence has more to do with preserving our empire than with reasonable policy imperatives. China never bought into MAD, never bought into nuclear non-proliferation, and perhaps its leadership is in some dimensions more sane than ours. I would cite aspects of the response of our elite to Reagan's much aligned "Strategic Defense Initiative" which at the root was an attempt by Reagan and others to end MAD. I would contrast this with the Chinese leadership committment to great development projects, analogous to for instance, our development of a transcontinental railroad among many others. Obviously, they will consider use of new engineering techniques. There will be dangerous problems. It is well to remember both that once upon a time in our country, bridges regularly fell down, and that now they do not.
You can read about this in a fairly good book by Dan Neil, The Firecracker Boys. An interesting look at our attempts to move beyond civil engineering and into Geographical Engineering.
Wait... you mean you still haven't joined the ACLU?
Obviusly, the Chinese aren't completely sure it's a good idea either... Otherwise, why would they do it in Tibet instead of their... umm... "mainland"?
I wonder what international "free Tibet" movement will say to this.
I gave up sigs almost a year ago.
There will be no fallout from a high air blast. By _definition_, "fallout" is material swept up into the fireball which then "falls out" of the blast. Fallout can only occur when the blast is low enough for material to be swept up into the fireball, and high air blasts are, again by definition, too high for this to be significant.
FG Powers plane was brought down by conventional explosives. He survived the blast and was eventually swapped for a Soviet spy.
Other than that, you're correct. The main idea is that you don't have to score a direct hit to bring down the bomber. You just gotta be close. As they say, Close enough for atom bombs or hand grenades.
"Bite me, it's fun!" - Crowe T. Robot
Not quite. Plowshare was killed by public opinon, and a lack of overriding need. If the US really needed to build a great canal tomrow, you bet this would be on the table. Of course, the irrational opposition would be there too.
People die digging canals but they don't have to. Weigh it up.
Oh my God, a stray alpha particle! Get a rope! There are acceptable levels of exposure. It's a shame that the rules are guided by people who are ignorant of
Anybody else remember that movie, Seven Half-Lifes in Tibet? :)
This is pretty close to the Japanese way of hunting whales for 'research' and later on marketing the meat. Now China can legitimately export the 'dam-building' technology to the 'rogue nations'.
At the intersection of computation and biology.
I'm not a weapons designer, but to my knowledge, all current thermonuclear packages require an initiator stage consisting of 1+ "ordinary" nuclear devices (U-235 or plutonium squeeze devices). So while the main stage may not kick out a lot of (long-term) radiation, you can bet your bottom dollar the initiator device(s) will.
The earliest H-bombs got over two-thirds of their output from fission. The reaction is in three phases. First a relatively small fission bomb, inside the main bomb casing, releases X-rays which excite a medium (plastic?) to plasma; this medium is arranged as a cylinder around an inner "pusher" cylinder of U-238 (depleted uranium, from which the more readily fissionable U-235 has been separated). As the cylinder of X-ray absorption medium becomes plasma it reradiates X-rays which vaporize the outer surface of the "pusher" cylinder; the "pusher" cylinder collapses inward, compressing another cylinder nested inside containing fusion fuel (liquid deuterium on the first H-bomb, or lithium deuteride, much easier to handle as it does not require special cryogenic devices to keep it liquefied, on later ones). As the explosion progresses, the inner fusion-fuel cylinder collapses upon a rod of plutonium, the "sparkplug," compressing it to a critical mass. The central plutonium rod explodes, making a shock wave in the fusion fuel coming out from the radius of the bomb. Along the surface of that shock wave, the fusion fuel fuses, releasing helium, a flood of fast neutrons, and a great deal of energy. Those fast neutrons induce fission in the U-238 of the "pusher" cylinder. The critical mass of U-238 is > infinity, one can't get a bomb-like chain reaction in pure U-238 (in a reactor it is necessary to slow down the neutrons with a moderator like graphite or heavy water), but you can induce U-238 to fission at a bomb-like rate by flooding it with fast neutrons. Of the ten-and-a-half megaton yield of the first H-bomb, eight were contributed by fission in the U-238 "pusher." In terms of leaving radioactive waste, fusion is not clean - it emits a tremendous flood of neutrons, which when they irradiate matter in the vicinity of the explosion, turn stable nuclei into radioactive ones - but that U-238 fission leaves a tremendous residue of chemically exotic radioactive poisons.
What I describe above is the old-style multi-megaton bomb that SAC stockpiled in the fifties to deliver with manned bombers. I'm looking at a picture of the Mark-17 bomb, which weighed twenty tons and had a yield of eleven megatons. With the advent of intercontinental ballistic missile and high-accuracy guidance systems, the U.S.A. switched over to larger numbers of smaller warheads; here is a picture of a Minuteman II "warhead bus," with three conical bombs of 350 kilotons (still, about twenty times the power of the bombs which flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki). These bombs are 5.9 feet long and 21 inches in diameter at the wide end, which works out to about five cubic feet total. If their specific gravity is ten, then they weigh about a ton and a half each. There may be fundamental technical changes in the design of these bombs which the general public is not allowed to know; I couldn't estimate what fraction of their output, if any, is attributable to that third-stage U238 + n reaction.
These technical details and pictures are in a best-selling book by Richard Rhodes titled Dark Sun. Hey FBI! Yo, I'm not Chinese! So I hope this means that I don't have to expect to spend the best part of the next year shackled in solitary confinement, for "revealing" to "rogue states" information accessible in any well-stocked university library. Gee, I sure hope so. I mean, this election campaign's nearly over anyway, so we can cut the bullshit until the next time it becomes necessary to distract the voters with a phony nuke-spy panic.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
I wonder how long it will be before we start seeing experimental military technology such as beam weapons (lasers and stuff) being used for civil engineering purposes. That could be really cool, like having a laser drill to make deep holes in the earth and stuff like that.
And lets extend your logic a bit further:
...they aren't planning to use above ground explosions.
PROTESTERS- "Free Tibet!"
CHINA- "Sorry guys, we got rid of it Thursday"
Granted rights in China are very poor, but the American attitude that everybody should have guns incase you need to start blowing up the government doesn't have much fact behind it.
Was the people's recent uprising against Sloberdan M. done with guns? Or just with the support of all the people?
On the other hand, there was an uprising against the government with guns, in Fiji. Where a dicriminated ethenicity was able to be taken out of government by a gun weilding mob.
Other than the American revolution (which was about taxes not rights) little good politics have been done with guns.
It's turtles all the way down.
However, while IANAD (I am not a diplomat) I would guess that it would be something along the lines of: "If we don't use nukes you agree to stop hassling us about our occupation of Tibet/This ecologically irresponsible dam/the MSG put into your General Tsao's Chicken last week at Panda Express." or something like that.
Furthermore, I think this is also China's way of thumping its chest like an angry gorilla, reminding India and Taiwan of just how easily it can use their nuclear devices.
Thats just my opinion, of course. Its always possible the Chinese leadership has gone completely batshit and will use them. :)
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
I think you meant "epithet". I hope you didn't mean "epitath".If you really meant "epitath" then one of us needs a dictionary.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I'm quite sure is, "All generalizations are dangerous, even this one." -- Alexandre Dumas.
Of course it's a translation, so there's no perfect english.
Oink,
----------------- Oink. Moo. rarr! -----------------
Large portion of a planned channel to divert some Russian northern river south WAS completed with nuclear explotions near Ural mountains !! Also, there were test to build gaz storage in Kazakhstan, and for mining in Siberia. It has been done - probably Chinese just bought off those russian experts..
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
For what it's worth, in the novel "Richter 10" by Mike McQuay and Arthur C. Clarke, they try to use nukes in a large engineering project. One guy wants to stop earthquakes (!) by fusing the tectonic plates with nuclear explosions deep, deep down where the blast won't do any damage to life on the surface. Quite the idea.
"People are stupid."
Well it's an good post but with that "News for Gooks..." bit, it should be scored as "5, Flamebait"
There would be some practical problems, too. The most important is that in order to get one of these nice deep bubbles, you need to get the nuclear explosive deep enough under ground that it won't blow the top off your new chamber. That means a moderately large drilling project; at the very least you're going to have to make a hole 100+ meters deep to put the nuke in. There was no way that the Appolo missions could have brought along enough equipment to do that kind of drilling. The were just barely able to get to the Moon and back, so dragging along a few tons of drilling equipment was pretty much out of the question.
There were obviously some political issues, too. For one thing, even if they could get by the issue of detonating a nuke in space, this would have looked like an American declaration of interest in colonizing the Moon. That's understandable because it would have been. That probably wouldn't have sat well during the depths of the cold war. Possibly more important, as you correctly point out this is a long term project; you aren't just going to do your nuclear excavation one day and move in the next. It's going to take a decade or two for the radiation to fall to acceptable levels, and I've never particularly noticed the U.S. government to be particularly competent at planning beyond the next presidential election, much less the next decade.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Naughty Chinese, tell them to use a nuke in Shanghai.... Imagine...... a Beowulf Cluster of, what else, Slashdot! Seriously, I know this is off-topic, but I have uncovered another slashdot mirror! Yes, it's true, you can find it here Slashdot Mirror .
Nuclear excavation (at least on a planet with a biosphere) is in my "probably a bad idea" category. But there are two others I categorize as smart and dumb, respectively.
I give the "Homer Simpson award for dumb nuclear projects" to the one that would have disposed of nuclear waste by mixing it with paving material in concentrations capable of producing significant heat, and using it to pave roads in the northern tier of states. The object being to create superhighways that didn't need plowing in the winter.
On the other side: suitably encapsulating a low-level alpha or beta emitter with a flourescent material. Imagine a fluorescent light tube that didn't need electricity and lasted decades or longer. (Now imagine one that doesn't break. B-) )
The latter was apparently researched. It would have been as safe as smoke detectors - individually. (That still might not have been good enough: The "benefit" side of the cost/benefit ratio is higher for smoke detectors than for lamps.) Unfortunately, working in a warehouse full of them - at least with the original design - would have been quite another matter.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"Time for you people to seriously think about this or soon this will be News for Gooks. Stuff that mutters."
I thought that we in America had made at least a little progress away from seeing asians as the "yellow peril" I guess not.
The original poster appears to be from the former Soviet Union, not America. Furthermore it is not clear from the context that 'gook' was meant as a racial epitath. More likely the poster was groping for a generalized derogatory term and didn't realized the racial connotations.
Think before you react.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
It was indeed Project Plowshare. They fired a lot of test shots in Nevada. One of the most famous is the Sedan crater:
e s/part2.html
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/trinity/articl
I actually visited this crater on a tour of the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. It was one of the most amazing things on a mind-blowing tour. (Yes, you can go on a tour. Just call their public affairs office and represent your club or whatever. You too can stand 1000' from ground zero at an above-ground test, or look into the Sedan crater.)
The guys giving the tour -- retirees who likes to come back and play tour guide -- had a LOT of cool stories, and even more that they couldn't tell us because they are still secret. They did mention that Project Plowshare had tested a multiple-detonation channel-digging project. We didn't get to see that... I have been trying for years to find photos, but no luck.
I'm not surprised. The U.S. seriously considered using buried nukes to build/expand the Panama canal. Luckily, cooler heads prevailed.
"uhm the sun?"
Cool. You don't need the Ozone layer. You don't even need the atmosphere maybe...
well what the hell were you touching? you dont get burns like that from air contamination.
Laying on the sand... Nothing more than laying on the sand near the Dnepr river on a hot Summer Sun. When the sunburn didn't go after two weeks I got worried. And got the happy news. The place was highly radioactive and only then people noted it. One friend got it over a larger portion of the body and two others had it on the legs. As far as I know no one suffered from it longer than a year.
The principle fusion reaction is d+d -> 3He + n. The neutron then gets captured by surrounding material activating it. Short half-life products are irrelevant (they decay quickly), but long half-life components will indeed be radioactive.
I was under the impression that the waste radioactive material from a nuke detonation was actually reasonably small, and sufficient amount of material remains within about 400m of the detonation site, but that the problems really stem from the shockwave, the EMP generated, and the other high speed particles (X, Gamma)-rays generatd?
How every version of MICROS~1 Windows(TM) comes to exist.
Do the following really mean anything? SCSA MCP CCSA CCNA
--I'm not actually after an answer!
http://www.riskworld.com/Nreports/1999/jaworowski
I personally think it will help folks baseline their general understanding of some of the scientific issues regarding radiation, risks, and ethics. [Yes - there is a relationship between the rhetoric of the radiation debate and ethics]
This read should follow well the link from Zoyd above regarding the history of radiation limits by J. Samuel Walker.
I would also like folks to refer to comments posted elsewhere (sorry - I don't know how to do links yet) by MikeLRoy
For those trying to keep with the rhetoric on where the "truth" is in this complicated discussion surrounding radiation, risk, environment and regulatory issues, it is often very difficult to understand enough background to base a decision. Even the fairly straightforward issue of a simple risk analysis [based as it can be on mathematics and the experiences of human life] is a tough one and is often performed at such an unconscious level that we folks don't even perceive we are evaluating risks. For instance - some folks drive hundreds of miles to remote locations to protest the dangers of nuclear power - BUT those same folks don't for an instant consider the "risk" of the drive, the complete chain of "pollution and dependance (think Middle East)" that goes into filling their tanks, or the fact that the power plant they are going to protest at is about the only really "green" power source they will ever see in their lifetimes. All that they are are considering on their journey is the rhetoric of activism that they have embraced from some anti-environmental group with a political agenda. [ for the doubters - follow the money from your donations - and follow the scientific reasoning of the anti-environmental rhetoric]
Damn - pay particular attention to what Zoyd says, the nuclear power plant they are protesting at can even burn Nuclear Weapons into electricity, and if that is not a sword vigorously beaten into a ploughshare I don't know what is. As Zoyd further states,
I believe that in the case of using nuclear explosions to dig channels, Zoyd is possibly correct. The United States exerted considerable effort to make "clean" bombs, partly because they did not want to crap up the environment of a potential target and partly because of Project Plowshares' Civil Engineering uses (why just nuke someplace if you can't go there and use it somehow, plus folks eventually have to live there again . . . . someday).....
But, and it is a really big "but" here, imagine the value to commerce and culture if you could somehow construct a sea level passage between say the Pacific and the Atlantic, a really wide one. Especially, if you didn't have to lose all of those workers to malaria and accidents making this sea level passage. The risk analysis for this one would have been interesting to develop, potential loss of life to slight increase in background radiation versus malaria deaths and heightened accident rate for lock operation over - say about 100 years of operation....Hmmmmmm.
But all of this is - of course - not even on the table to discuss since we have so politicized, and emotionalized the rhetoric of all things radiation that a reasoned discourse is all but impossible.
Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves. -George Gordon
uh. i'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that you and your friend burned yourselves on the sand which was being heated by the "hot summer sun". sand can easily reach over 150C on a summer day, easily capable of producing nasty burns. the nuclear radiation needed to give you the burns youre talking about would have to be UNBELIEVEABLY high for a public beach and you would've almost certainly noticed other effects at the dosage necissary to create burns like that; notably hair falling out, nausea-puking your guts out, and diahreaa. you did not burn yourself on "radioactive sand" you burned yourself on hot sand.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
false. the pricipal fusion reaction is D+T=He+N+energy, the Tritium is created in situ in the bomb from Neutron irradiation of Lithium Duteride. The Li absorbs a neutron and decomposes into Tritium via alpha emission. The tremendous x-ray photon pressure/temperature then initiates the D+T reaction.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
>...fusion bombs are always ignited with a fission primer
True, but I remember reading about the Russians trying to develop a "pure fusion" bomb with something called red mecury (I think).
It's a shame they didn't succeed (or a least didn't release the technology) as large construction projects utilizing H-bombs is an interesting idea, but it's not much use if you irradiate the area while doing so. I guess it's just too difficult to get enough power out of chemical explosives
Also, we make almost everything you see in K-mart, so we don't give a shit what the US thinks - they need us more than we need them.
That's not how economics works..
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
This will be an unmitigated disaster for the entire eastern end of asian continent. Every country with rivers seems to have hydro dam nazis in the government, unfortunately China controls the source of so many rivers. A quick glance at the map shows that in that small location is the source of four of the most important rivers in asia (the Brahmaputra, the Irrawaddy, the Mekong and the Yangze), side by side, one valley after the other. China, in the process, will single-handedly piss off India, Bangladesh, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam, let alone the long suffering Tibetans. And then, of course, there's that issue of nuclear contamination in the water supply...
It would seem that I was somewhat imprecise in my wording of the original post. /. community) I was not aware of any high-profile projects that made use of them.
I believe what I meant was more along the lines of: "How is it that none of the great marvels of civil engineering of the last half century have been made with help from nukes?" Whether or not the use of such means is a good idea, (which is highly debatable, and one of the reasons I filed the story in the first place - I wanted to get the input from the
Thanks for the feedback, Nerds. That's the Stuff that Matters.
Hmmm. They're dealing with the IMF or World Bank folks regarding the Three Gorges Dam project already, right? Hm.
I was under the impression that they did not have that many nuclear devices, but probably the estimates I've seen only counted "strategic"-scale warheads those suitable for ICBM delivery, not suitcase nukes.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
I recently saw a documentary about Project Plowshare at the Vancouver International Film Festival. The Plowshare demonstrated over its thirty-some-odd years of maniacal testing that nuclear weapons are not a good choice for moving dirt. The USSR's own project released enormous quantities of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere and never really achieved much more than creating a large crater one _might_ be lead into believing is a reservoir. The primary problem with using nuclear detonations to dig holes is that they are immensely difficult to control. Digging rough craters may be an achievable goal, but cutting neat troughs through the mountain is basically impossible. It was a flop, motivated by politics. So give it up, China. When your citizens, oppressed as they are, begin campaigning against the strontium-90 in their children's milk (by testing for it in their teeth), it will be only a matter of time before the whole thing craters out and adds another nail into the regime's coffin.
If only it were funny, China loves nothing more than to spread weapons technology to enemies of the United States, both for the cash and just to piss us off.
Later, I worked on one of the ballistic missile defense systems, Site Defense. SD and its predecessors used nuclear kill at low altitude. Originally, these systems were intended for city defense, but Congress was somehow bothered by the use of dozens of small nuclear bursts to defend a city against incoming reentry vehicles. Something about collateral damage.
If you've ever played that video game where you used missiles to defend against an attack from space, it has an interesting background. It was originally written by a friend for the Commodor Pet as a serious study of battlespace management in ballistic missile defense, based on a study I did soon after I left grad school and started work.
Or in this case, really slowly.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
you would be right if the nuclear fusion wasn't primed by a Pu detonation (which in turn is obtained with a conventional explosive blast)... Actually not all of the Pu gets consumed so your vault would be tainted by a Pu coating all over it... Pu is toxic and a powerful alpha emitter... get a crumb in your loungs and don't worry about 2/3 packs 'o smokers a day... you've had it.
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
Right now the chinese see what they view as THEIR water shooting down the mountains into india and the chinese don't like giving ANYTHING away.
The nukes are a means to an end.
They want to be able to ransom the whole of northern india if need be.
Their are no means the Beijing government would stop at to acheive their objectives. Cost is the only factor, and world sanctions are a big cost.
But better yet they can use this as a negotiating tool even if they have no intention of doing it.
"You give us trade concessions, we agree to stop this project"
Same trick the North Koreans have just pulled off
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
Robert A Heinlein wrote at least one story that you migth be referring to, The menace from Earth, in 1957. It's in the anthology The past through tomorrow.
In it is described how huge underground caverns on the moon are filled with a terran atmosphere, and the lower gravity makes it possible for people to strap on wings and fly, using only their own muscles. I've been meaning to do some feasibility calculations on the actual work required, but haven't gotten around to it. It's a fun idea, and as so often with Heinlein it's amazingly ahead of its time.
I'd like to believe that when the right woman comes along I'll have the courage to say, "no thanks, I'm married."
Why ask when it's so easy to find out?
As with all long URLs, /. may add spaces. If there are spaces in the URL, remove them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
i suggest Redmond, WA. ;)
What this is, pure and simple, is schemey way of getting around various pesky nuclear test ban treaties. It's probalby not even a nuclear test to statisfy actual research, it's most likely a purely political manuver.
They want to do it in Tibet because Tibet is nice and close to India and Pakistan, China's recently nuclear powered neighbors. China would like to remind these upstarts that they're playing in the big leauges now, and there's no better way to do that then to send some seismographs shakin in New Delhi and Islamabad.
Because China, if it were really looking for the most cost effective solution and were really looking to level a couple of mountains, would just give a few million people pickaxes and shovels and say "have at it!" They might even throw in some wheelbarrows, but only if they're in a hurry to get it done. This is how all of their other massive public works projects are done.
One of Canada's worst kept secrets was its nuclear weapons policy. Canada was prepared to use nuclear weapons right from 1945 when Canadian scientists help invent the atomic bomb to the early 1980's when we finally got rid of the the CF-104 Starfighter(nuclear bomb delivery) and CF-101 Voodoo(Genie nuclear anti-aircraft missiles). Up to that point there were nuclear weapons stored in Canadain bases but under US guards and control. We also had BOMARK nuclear anti-aircraft missiles(instead of building the Avro Arrow) and the Honest John ground to ground missile launcher. They are all gone now but if we really wanted nukes it would not take long to get them from the US and our CF-18s and Aurora aircraft are 'nuclear capable'. Even if the US did not want to loan us the nukes our many CANDU nuclear reactors produce wepons grade fissiable material. India's nuclear program would not have happened if it were not for the CANUDUs Canada sold them.
So, while Canadains like to portray themselves as virtuous, their history in training to use nuclear weapons and selling reactors to rogue nations puts them right up there with the other nuclear nations.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
A sea-level passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific huh? How about a 100 mile wide channel through the middle of Mexico? :-)
We have to remember the nature of explosives. Dynimite blows out in a liniar fassion, while a nuclear blast goes in all directions, vaporizing rock, and fragmenting rock with the shock wave. Go look at the pictures of the underground tests in Navada, where you see the shockwave and the ground rises up, and then falls in.
I would think that this is a more of an attempt in population control or genecide, perhaps that nuclear device will acidently distroy Tiwann, or kill off a good number of chinses people.
Can We Say, World War III now?
My proposed new moderator requirement:
All Slashdot moderators should have taken at least one junior-high-school course in any subject except P.E.
Now, I know this is going to sound hard, but, moderators, when you are moderating, please attempt to read and understand the candidate post. Troxey was trying hard here to let you know he was not intending to be informative or interesting. In other words, the post was...a joke. It was intended to test the moderation system. Can you dig it? Can you dig what it means when a poster includes a phrase like, "But, and it is a really big "but" here..."?
The word "rhetoric" appears five times. Hello?!? Is anyone in there inside that moderator head?!? Have you ever taken an essay exam unprepared, but decided, "What the heck. It can't hurt to try and fake it." Did you notice any similarities between what you wrote on your faked exam and what troxey wrote here? Have you ever read a peanut's strip? Marcie always B.S.s her way through essay exams. Does it remind you of something? Hmmm?!?
One more question: How is cannabis this time of year? It's good, isn't it?
"dog bless"? haha excellent
If plowshare style explosions were allowed the military could test new warheads by using them in the explosions. This would allow them to violate the various test ban treaties and moratoriums which have existed over the years.
It was probably decided that the arguing which could ensue: "Was this a violation or not." was not worth the possible gains.
And now that you've posted, your moderation is undone :)
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
The United States also tried using nukes for civil purposes. The "plowshares" program tried using atomic weapons for excavation at the Nuclear Testing site in Groom Lake, Nevada.
The craters--intended for water storage or for construction--were so radioactive that they never went forward with the program beyond the test site.
Apparently the Soviets actually made some reservoirs with their bombs.
Regarding your last statement...Slashdot is going downhill. There are a lot of kiddies here who are quick to fly off the handle, or take some minor point that is insignifigant to the argument of a discussion and use it to flame a poster.
You're nuclear-free because you have a big,mean uncle that lives to the south of you. Pay credit where it's due.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Phew... what a relief! All this time I've been worried that the Chinese stole our nuclear secrets to build missiles. Silly Chinese!
--cr@ckwhore
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Not a bad idea. Besides the general disinterest in the moon for the last 30 or so years, the reasons for not doing this are probably more political than anything else. First there's a treaty outlawing the detonation of nuclear weapons in space and the last time I checked, the moon was in space.n .Exploration.and.Development.of.Space/Hu man.Space.Flight/Shuttle/Shuttle.Missions/Flight.0 31.STS-34/Galileos.Power.Supply/RTG.Fact .Sheet
Second, remember the protests against launching extremely safe plutonium RTGs on NASA probes? Just think of what the protests would be like if we tried to launch an actual bomb.
P.S. Here's the actual link, it doesn't seem to be coming out right in preview (take out the extra spaces):
http://spacelink.msfc.nasa.gov/NASA.Projects/Huma
"There is no shot you can take that I cannot simply deny." - Ertai, wizard goalie
Homer Simpson is running for President, isn't he? His dad was George Bush I, wasn't he?
we can build that craft from spiderman comics
Aside from all the water and associated political issues, which are not exactly small, just how big of a tunnel are they wanting to burrow through the mountain? Does anyone know what the geological strata are, ie. is the mountain made of granite?
From my understanding nuclear explosions such as that used by Project Plowshare are great at moving earth but even better at fracturing rock. So when they cutting that tunnel, just how are they going to avoid creating a huge fault line right through the mountain, let alone the possibility of enlarging any existing faults? And I also not that it sounds like this tunnel is going to be slanted... just where is the mountain going to slide to? (Hmmm, does this count as increasing the boundaries of Tibet? ;*} When they excavated Cheyenne mountain for NORAD with regular explosives they had to bolt the core of the mountain back together. Just how much of Mount Namcha Barwa are they going to have to bolt back together?
And they're talking about building a 10 mile long tunnel with nukes? Which means that they're going to have to light off, say 10 small nukes to excavate the tunnel? And just how are they going to secure already excavated tunnel sections against the next, and all the subsequent nuclear blasts and how many million degree plasma? Don't forget that the explosion is going follow the path of least resistance, which is going to be straight out the already bored tunnel. So doesn't that mean that you're going to have how many metric tonnes of rock forcing their way down the already bored tunnel sections, at how many kilo's an second, neatly scouring off any anchoring bolts, shotcrete or ferrocement reinforcing that you've got...? So each time they light one off, they're going to have to re-inspect or resecure how much of the already bored tunnel?
If they want any precision, they're probablly going to have to go to smaller devices, which usually means that they're going to be dirtier(in the nuclear sense), especially in closed confines. Think of the neutron pulse that the surrounding rock is going to recieve. Wanna bet that there's going to be increased radioactivity? Sure you do...
And just who are they going to convince to go work in the radioactive, dangerously fractured tunnels? Gee, I sure wouldn't want to be the ones drafted to go down there, not for several thousand years. But then of course they could always just grab a few thousand Tibetans or radiation ignorant Chinese villagers and get them to do the dirty work, after all it wouldn't out of line with their human rights policies...After all wasn't this the same government that after lighting off a test nuke, had troops go charging into the test area with only gas masks? What's a few thousand dead or dying when you've got how many billion to water?
This whole idea of theirs is foolish from several dozen angles, I sure hope it doesn't go through. If they start this I wouldn't be surprised to see another war start... between China and India, not that China wouldn't mind the additional territory.
The international community should have stopped them from invading Tibet a long time ago, now they're just paying the piper..
"Americans invariably do the right thing. After all, they have tried every other alternative" - Churchill
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
(From the N ature of Things website.)
There was an episode of the Nature of Things a couple of weeks ago called "Nuclear Dyanamite" about proposed and actual uses of nuclear bombs for civil engineering projects. Unfortunately my local CBC affliate has decided to run Walker, Texas Ranger instead of this show this season so I wasn't able to see this episode. I believe the show is also seen in the U.S. on PBS. Check your local listings.
Trickster Coyote
Even illusions are real.
Ideology is for ideots.
when we were thinking about scaring the soviets by nuking the moon, maybe we were also planning to carve out some lunar bases as well? hm...
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
The basic idea was that the radiation would mostly be contained inside the debris cone. Previous nuclear tests indicated that would happen. By modern standards, the release of radiation would have been unacceptable, but in the era of above-ground nuclear testing, this would have been considered a modest level of contamination.
Ref: 1964, "Engineering with Nuclear Explosives", Proceedings of the Third Plowshare Symposium, TID-7695, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Division of Technical Information. (Available from NTIS)
The russians used nuclear detonations to help change the path of a river, and on some other civil engineering progects. Some years ago there was an article in either Nature, or New Scientist that detailed what the russians did, and what the result were years later.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Dnepr sands, in that place were irradiating the equivalent of 30 roentgens/hour. That's how the doctor we talked with "translated" for most of us the level of radiation. Usually such types of radiation are measured with other units. Roentgensas far as I know are a measure of intensity of elctromagnetic rays but most people don't understand Beckerels & other stuff so he told us this way. - Measure was taken in place by a special team of the Medical Institute at Kiev.
The effect was much like the one you get on a 1 degree fireburn. After a few days, if I didn't touch the burn, skin forms something that looks like snakeskin. A pass of the hand through it drops the whole skin and I got back on the same reddish/pinkish area I had from start. It does not depend on time, few hours or days and I got the same. It was quite painful and sometimes it glued to my clothes (the thing layed on my upper limb, so I had to hold up). Meanwhile, around the burn, I had small deep wounds that didn't heal at all. These wounds were the last that disappeared. No medications connected to fireburns did help. Covering the area with plasters or equivalent produced quite painful results (it produced a lot of lymphatic moisture & blood). The thing started to recede by itself and after six monthes it ended. For nearly two years this area continued to produce a funny skin. I just pick it up and get a 3-4 square centimeters of skin out of my body. Now I have nothing special except that capilars grow a little weird there (they keep growing under the skin). The initial affected area was nearly 5 square centimeters.
FYI, the anti-aircraft missile was called the Genie, and was meant to be carried by the F-102 or the F-106 (it may be one or the other, or both, I forget). I remember seeing a picture of some of the workers on the project standing at "ground zero" during a test. I'd be curious to see how they fared over the years. Fallout probably wouldn't be much of a problem with the Genie since the explosions would have been at high altitude. EMP might be another matter.
Some additional devices were a nuclear howitzer meant to destroy Red Army armored columns (just be sure the shells don't land short...) and spacecraft propulsion. I think that project was called Orion (don't hold me to that) and the idea was to toss out one small nuke after another from the back of the spacecraft, using the kick from each detonation to gain velocity.
a roentgen is sort of a "raw" measure - depending on they type of radiation, 1rg == 1rem for most (and it's rems that matter). for NEUTRON radiation, 1rg == 10 rads - so 'trons are Bad News(tm)
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
They've been bringing up the spectre of using Nukes every 3 or 4 years for some project, and the international community panics and gives them money to do the project with more conventional methods. The easiest way in the world to get funding for your project.
"Well, if we had more money, we would just hire dam builders, but since we don't have any, and we have all of these explosives laying around..."
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
We can't have nuclear powered space crafts because the use these would violate treaties against 'weapon' platforms in space. That according to Carl Sagen in his "Cosmos" series. I would be seriouly surprised if 'civil' (draw your own conclusions to the use of that term ;) use would also violate some treaty.
The name doesn't ring a bell, so I don't think it is...at least not intentionally.
Sounds like Edward Teller has been passing information onto the Chinese.
To be less flippant- Edward Teller has been a prominate advocate of 'peaceful' uses of the devices he helped develop. Besides thermonucelar bombs and their 'peaceful' uses, his resume also includes selling Reagan on SDI.
Also, it is "easy" to determine what damage a vial of nytroglycerine will do, harder if you put 20, the imprecision scales with the damage done. So it's probably better to do the work with small, controlable charges than with large somewhat unpredictable ones.
To answer the last part, I'm no physicist but AFAIK, a H-bomb does not generate radioactivity.
I think "controllability" is really the key there...
One shall speak only if what one has to say is more beautiful than silence
This would seem to be a horrifically bad idea.. the Three Gorges project is bad enough, but even dispite the use of nuclear blasts, this could create a massive ecological disaster, not just in china, but throughout much of asia. And, if for example china goes and floods out vietnam, whats stopping vietnam from retaliating with weapons. So.. whos side does the US join when its Vietnam VS China? And then.. whos side does Russia join.. hooray for world war iii! grrr
Not to mention the fact that running water thats being used for hydration of crops and therefore most likely also for drinking water through tunnels that were created with nuclear explosions would seem... bad. Very bad. Radiated water supplies do not do good things to the environment.
Just my opinion on the matter, I'm not an engineer nor an ecologist.
pro: - it looks good?
- the explosives fit in a small car?
con: - price
- safety
- lot's of angry people
The U.S. gave up on a project to blast a harbor into park of Alaska using nuclear explosives.
a riot/chariotindex4.html
http://arcticcircle.uconn.edu/VirtualClassroom/Ch
Yeah, you're right. Let's get the CIA right on that.
Check out stratfor.com for some actual intelligence.
I had the impression he was from China... still, I don't think he meant the news for gooks the way that Milkyman thinks he did...
Intolerant people should be shot.
IIRC, it's been used by the USSR to help make a reservoir.
It's use has been explored by the U.S., but, obviously, they decided against it.
There are some concerns about radioactive fallout, but I believe they are overblown -- the risks would be overshadowed by the rewards.
The problem is, limits for radiation exposure are too low. Coincidentally, there is a new book out on the history of radiation limits: Permissible Dose: A History of Radiation Protection in the Twentieth Century, by J. Samuel Walker. I haven't read it, but I know Walker is an outspoken critic of current radiation policy and I know he knows his stuff.
Unbiased it won't be, but this book is almost guaranteed to give you an education.
Have you ever seen a map of the great wall? It's over 6000 Kilometers long. There is no walking around it. The great wall sucessfully repelled many enemy invasions. Those that did get through were usually aided by Chinese traitors.
We note with great interest that you have revived your program to divert waters from the Brahmaputra River. We note with similar interest that your Three Gorges Dam is nearing completion. You may care to note our recent success in joining the nuclear club. Allow me to explain how these are related:
Assuming your diversion project even works without a hitch, we have grave reasons to be displeased with it. Although Assam and Bangladesh usually do not lack for water, they will suffer several adverse consequences: you plan to retain these waters during dry spells and let them spill in their original course during we spells. This lets you stabilize your water supply. But it gravely destabilize ours, and we have enough trouble with flooding in the region as it is. Furthermore, your foolish idea will cause Bangladeshis to be increasingly reliant on their artesian waters, which are contaminated with arsenic. I'm sure that your PR flaks will bombard the Western media with promises that China would never, ever, use her dams in a way that would adversely affect India or Bangladesh. However, we note that your dams on the Mekong River have been quite the curse for Vietnam.
We don't need this. We're an emerging economic power, and after a long struggle for this we just this year became a net exporter of cereals. Now, the world is a little upset that we just developed a nuclear capacity. But the world will forgive us, especially the West, because we just had an orderly transfer of power from the Congress Party to the BJP, and the BJP has just made fools of many Chicken Littles who described India's new rulers as being to the right of Atilla the Hun. The world will note that an orderly transfer of power has not happened in your country's entire history.
Back to nukes. Wouldn't it suck if one of those things fell near the Three Gorges Dam? We think it would.
Call me up, Zhang, and we'll discuss better ways we can cooperate over water issues. We know how bad the water situation is in northwestern China, we know that people there have such salty water that they don't bother with table salt. We sympathise, we are not heartless. But don't be a fool.
Regards,
Vajpayee.
Yeah, I know, we're trying to suck-up to the moderators by poking fun at Microsoft.
But it's tasteless to do so in the context of a story that may lead to the ecological destruction and death or illness for thousands of people. Not to mention the diplomatic turmoil.
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
I can't think of why it would be of any use aside from destroying a path through the mountains. Consequentally, if they do it right, they could have a nice countryside very similar to thisBR> If you annihilate it, they will come....
I have the chinese government on the phone right now. They are really sorry, China will leave Tibet alone, and it won't happen again. Well, they are cooperative.
Digging a new Panama Canal with nuclear bombs. Blasting out an instant harbour. Launching a giant rocket with nuclear explosions. Science fiction? No. Actual plans.
Between 1957 and 1988, American and Soviet scientists used nuclear bombs in more than 150 civilian engineering experiments around the world.
Edward Teller, co-inventor of the H-bomb, had the most effective blasting service on the market. And he was looking for business. He promised prospective clients bang for their buck, "to reshape the land to their pleasure." The idea was to use atomic bombs to carve out harbours from Arctic coastline, to divert rivers, even to blast a new Panama Canal through Central America using 300 megatons of nuclear explosives.
Filmmaker Gary Marcuse combines newly discovered footage and interviews with key Russian and American scientists, including Teller, to document these atomic mega-projects and the environmental movement that emerged in opposition to them.
A feature-length version of Nuclear Dynamite played at the Vancouver International Film Festival (2000)
You can get more info on the documentry from the [Canadian] National Film Board: Nuclear Dynamite
Free as in "the Truth shall set you..."
>This is why the fallout from a military target like missle silos was always assumed to be much worse because the device would have to detonate at or near ground level as opposed to miles up for a "soft" civilian target like a city.
:)
It bears noting: both the United States and the Soviet Union subscribed to a doctrine that mandated tactical (military) and not strategic (population & infrastructure) targeting. By the mid-sixties, the US had begun to develop sufficiently small, targetable warheads to point-target facilities in the SIOP (single integrated operations plan) list. This is why there were so many warheads developed -- as I remember, Moscow had 54 different targets for warheads, and this was a *good* thing, compared to using one warhead to destroy the whole city.
Both total warhead and targeting statistics were used by activists to "demonstrate" that the arms race was insane. It wasn't (in the sense they mean): it was designed to achieve set military objectives with a minimum of collateral consequences. The same activists now oppose the development of tunnelling or directed nuclear armaments, despite the fact that these armaments could allow the destruction of facilities such as bunkers while producing much less, and much more contained, radiation.
For the issue above: yes, it is possible to build limited, directed explosives. The chance they'll work is fairly high (90%?). The 10% chance they'll either explode at a much higher tonnage, or not be controlled in direction, seems unacceptable in a civil project.
Anyone for a revival of Project Orion ("Jupiter by '88!", as Dyson put it)?
And some miscellany:
>anti-tank mines,
The Eastern NATO front is extensively mined with nukes, which need to be activated in case of invasion. Nuclear munitions were also available for theatre (3-5 mile) use. Backpack nukes (for sneaking to bridges etc.) were also created. My favorite (non-implemented) was the nuclear bullet, guaranteed to kill the target and his whole neighborhood
The US studied the feasability if using nuclear devices for peaceful uses in the 60's - the Plowshares program it was called.
The Russians (read: Soviets) actually HAVE used nuclear devices dozens of times for use in excavation, natural gas extraction/storage, and siesmic study (to name a few uses).
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
These are both great insights into this subject, but what seems to be left out the most is the fact that you are *blowing up* a part of the earth. First gunpowder, then dynamite, then plastic explosives, now nukes - do civil engineers as a whole (not the individuals) have no natural conscience? Wake up, people! That mountain is there for a reason; if you want to go around it, go around it, and if you want to go across it go across it, but fa crissakes don't *blow* the durn thing up!
Sorry for ranting, I know it's bad, but look - you've got mabye fifty, sixty years left before you all do something really stupid and blow this planet to hell. With any luck, I'll be gone by then.
"I am so cool, you could keep a side of meat in me for a month
io hymen hymnaee io
io hymen hymnaee
Is your sig a quote from "Schizopolis"?
Canada is a nuclear free country ONLY by virtue of the fact that the United States would, bound by treaty and common sense, respond in kind with it's own vast nuclear arsenal were Canada ever attacked by weapons of mass destruction by another nation. I wouldn't get too morally superior if I were you. Remember kids, NORAD is a JOINT command, the vice-commander has always been a CANADIAN general since inception, and there's talk that the next commander will be Canadian. Check out http://www.peterson.af.mil/norad/ Now also remember that there's a difference between NORAD and STRATCOM. Unlike what you saw in Wargames, NORAD doesn't push the button. They just warn that the sky is falling and vector CF-18s and F-15s onto bomber targets. And now they vector the Coast Guard onto drug flights from Central and South America. Hey, you might as well use those expensive radar chains and C3I facilities for SOMETHING, lest Congress cut your budget now that Russia's bomber force consists of aging Bears that would be on one-way suicide missions and a handful of Blackjacks. And since Congress just loves to throw military money at the drug problem, you just bought yourself a new mission and a new lease on life.
Delete the string DELETE in my email to reach me. Florist to the Kings.
Only a government which views millions of its own people - and of course millions of its neighbors - as expendable would dream of using fission devices in light of what's now known about the cumulative effects of low-level radiation.
Dave
"Time for you people to seriously think about this or soon this will be News for Gooks. Stuff that mutters." I thought that we in America had made at least a little progress away from seeing asians as the "yellow peril" I guess not.
There is also the Nyke surface to air missles, of which there is a decommissioned but preserved battery just right outside of San fransico.
The US also deployed so called tactical nukes in Europe as a countermeasure to the numerically superior Soviet forces. These weapons were the target of numerous protests, especially by German activists. These weapons were also the reason why the United States doesn't have a first strike policy- i.e. the U.S. promising to not launch their nukes first.
The idea behind an Hbomb anti-aircraft missile is kind of simple. If a bomber is flying too fast or high or both for conventional weapons, use a nuke. If the plane isn't torn apart by the blast (and planes that fly that high and fast are usually made light, not sturdy), then the EMP will probably make it real hard to fly. As for fallout, its so high that its as likely to hit them as it is us (assuming it actually leaves the atmosphere). And do we really care about a little fallout if it is a necessary byproduct in taking down an enemy bomber that is carrying a nuclear payload?
I'm not sure if this was what took out Francis Gary Power's U2, but the Russian SA-5's did carry nuclear weapons. The SA-5 was a big momma jamma surface to air missile that was a major concern for those U2 missions over Russia.
Troll Like a Champion Today
Actually US had a personal "tactical" nuclear rockets. The idea was infantry will dig up holes go into the holes and launch a small nuclear device two miles ahead and wipe out the red army. Of course, this was not a good idea and good thing that it was never used.
Well it seems I achieved the heat I wanted. But I think I should explain a pair of things.
First I'm living near Asia. and I have a lot of asian friends. Btw I have a son living near the place supposed to benefit from this project.
Second the context of the phrase was racial. The way I use the word gooks may carry a taste of Russian idiomatics that may not fit well in the American context. News for Gooks - why? Well try to follow my line. This project is supposed to help a desertic and less populated region of China. Meanwhile this same project affects directly or indirectly the basins of three major rivers: Mekong, Yangtse and Brahmaputra. If something gets wrong it is the people living in these basins that will suffer most. It would be like calling gooks to everyone living in there.
News for Gooks. News about a new Wonder of the World that discares the welfare, health and future of billions of Asians (that's exactly what you see - billions). What is the fate of these gooks in front of a Super-dam made with nukes? Who cares about people with leukemia, deformed limbs, tumors and laking eyes when we face a new technological progress?
Frankly even during the discussion here I noted that people concentrated more on the local problems the dam may cause and benefits/dangers of the objective. However I saw little about the consequences that will happen when this nuclear trash will follow down the rivers. So tell me if this is not news for gooks: "Ok gooks, we are having here some funny time nuking mountains, so wait for the trash..."
I am curious how any one could endorse this. There are indeed serious political and environmental side effects that will need to be dealt with, however, explosives grade ammonium nitrate fuel oil (ANFO) is cheap. Granted one will have to use a hell of lot of it to equal an atomic blast, but it stands to reason that post explosion excavation would be a hell of a lot cheaper using smaller, controlled blasts rather than dropping a single huge bomb and then trying to remove a vast amount unwanted ruble. Also the chance of screwing up some needed existing geologic infrastructure is much smaller using smaller blasts. A case in point of this is when they were building the Mt. Palamar (sp?) observatory they used too much explosive and consequently had to bolt (literally) the mountain back together to support the foundation.
Either give it away or get top dollar, but never sell yourself cheap.
Hehe, of couse dude, we all have always been wondering about this. :P
Obviously, the Chinese are planning to do some safety testing too.
In Tibet.
Reminds me of a propaganda song I heard somewhere - translated, it goes "Socialism is good, Socialism is good. In a Socialist country, everyone is happy."
Oh, those wacky Most-Favoured-Nation guys...
(a note: I don't mistake the Chinese government for a Socialist one, or for anything other than a monstrously corrupt, oppressive regime.)
I'm not a weapons designer, but to my knowledge, all current thermonuclear packages require an initiator stage consisting of 1+ "ordinary" nuclear devices (U-235 or plutonium squeeze devices). So while the main stage may not kick out a lot of (long-term) radiation, you can bet your bottom dollar the initiator device(s) will. Further more, the earth around the device will become irradiated and amplify the fallout effect of the original device (and contaminate rain on its way to the water table). This is why the fallout from a military target like missle silos was always assumed to be much worse because the device would have to detonate at or near ground level as opposed to miles up for a "soft" civilian target like a city.
The United States looked into using nuclear devices for civil engineering in the 1950s and 1960s. For example, string a line of devices and you can make an instant shipping canal. The only problem is that the environmental side effects would be extreme. A rough rule of thumb I've heard quoted is that the amount of earth eliminated by the detonation in cubic meters was equal to the yield of the device assuming it was placed properly (100kT device = 100,000 m^3 earth gone). The devices used for this sort of thing were not in the thermonuclear yield range (megaton TNT equivalent or above). If the Chinese are thinking along the lines of the earlier plans, I'd guess their charges will be
As a side bit of trivial, you'd be amazed at the number of things we (US) thought of using "small" devices for during the 50's and 60's: civil engineering, fighter-deployed anti-aircraft missles (sure, 1 missle = a squadron of Russian bombers, but I'm sure the folks down wind of that will be _real_ happy...), anti-tank mines, and Jeep-mounted nuke rockets where the range of the missle was less that the lethal radius of the device (I think weapon system was refered to as the Patriot or the Bowie or something like that).
Random rambling at 3am...
--
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
"I've always wondered why nobody has ever actually used nuclear explosives in civil engineering projects, if (and this is a BIG if) the blasts can be made reasonably radiologically clean."
First - the article mentions Soviet Union as the only country who used nuclear devices for civil pruposes.
Second - Yes USSR did it. And the consequences have shown that it is not worth to do it again. Radiaton and several other factors make the use of nuclear devices a big problem. Until now there are a few places on the Urals and Ukraine that give trouble due to the levels of radiation. One of them is located right on one of the biggest coal basins of the world where population density is quite high.
Third - curiously, during this year, I have noted several references on the net related to civil use of nuclear explosives. So it amazes me a little that someone talks about "radiological clean" blasts. There are no radiological clean nuclear blasts in nature and it is stupid to claim such thing.
Fourth - Some people may not be aware of this. The problem with nuclear explosions is not only related to radiation but also to how you can control it. Nuclear blasts cannot be fully predictable. Sometimes calculations make errors of of 2-3 times or even more. Second the blasting of a device and the failure of the fission/fusion process can be of unpredictable consequences. Imagine if such situation happens in this dam(n) project. You risk to poison the entire Eastern Asia, the most populated place on Earth.
Fifth - If you know History than you may see that China's government has a harsh dossier on what relates to use of nuclear devices. During Cold War they made an experiment where they dropped thousands of soldiers near an atmospheric nuclear blast. If we compare the pictures to American and Russian military "rabbits", these guys were completely naked to radiation effects. Now I know what radiation may cause to someone. I had a neighbor who slowly died from radiation from exactly one of these military "experiments". He was equipped according to all standards and still radiation caught him. The picture is horrible. Think about a guy that pushes one leg while walking, lost nearly all teeth, nearly cannot speak, his skin completely burned and having cancer slooooooowly eating his bones. The most horrible is that he is living 20 YEARS with this.
Radiation is a snipper you see only two late. Myself I got burned from a radiation "hot spot" near Kiev, less then two years after Chernobyl. I never guessed what was happening on my right limb until one friend told me they had found the spot in that place (I got the equivalent of a 1 degree burn that took just 6 monthes to heal).
Sometimes I wonder if people do read the articles before posting here. Sincerly the average IQ, quality and quantity of Slashdot articles have downgraded drastically for the last time. Time for you people to seriously think about this or soon this will be News for Gooks. Stuff that mutters.
Didn't China come on to the test ban treaty? Wouldn't that prevent this, as it prevented US/Project Orion, etc.?
Question: Doesn't the Proton Bomb (Or is it a Nutron Bomb?) have the ability of leaving no dangerous radioactivity a few days after an explosion? You know, the bomb that only destroys organic materials?
Back when no one really understood the dangers of radiation and atomic blasts, instead seeing it as a miracle energy form, the US was a lot freer in using it. As a matter of fact, I remember seeing a video back in high school of a small atomic bomb being used to dig something out- I think it was (or is now, anyway) for a parking lot... don't ask me why they were nuking a parking lot in the us somewhere, but... even if we were to think it would be safe, I think that most people these days wouldn't want it to be a method used- just like a rehabilitated criminal wouldn't be accepted as a teacher, "clean" a-bombs might not be viewed as a good substitute for TNT. It's the public mentality.
"They (radioactive isotopes) are also dangerous because they decay and are consequently the ground for mutations."
And why is this a bad thing? If you believe evolutionary science is correct, as a large portion of western society does, you should see mutations as a good thing. How are we supposed to evolve further if we don't mutate?
---Larryboy out
It is truly a shame that nuclear power is regarded as some kind of frankenstein monster. Though for the record, I would rather have 19th century (or earlier) living standards and be content than to live in a world poisoned by a few nuclear mistakes.
That said, the only way we will ever make nuclear power safer, and I haven't seen any proof given as to why it can't be, is to use it, experiment with it, research it etc etc. Imagine if the VC money & vertile minds that have been busily making ghz chips & fps games had been working on nuclear power - on second thought don't imagine that...
"You new laptop uses a Uranium VII 235 ghz processor and in an emergency personal defence situation the entire cpu can be launched on a rail at near light speeds to pick off blue campers. A supply of spare cpu's are included but keep in mind the 1 second reload time.."
But seriously, our fear of nuclear power hinders our ability to learn about it. If we can't learn about it, we can't make any improvements. I wasn't around in the 50's but from what I've heard nuclear power was pretty exciting and our knowledge of harnessing fission expanded by leaps and bounds - can we say the same today?
Note that when I mention safety, I mean it in a fairly wholistic sense, from workers killed, to the chance of catastrophic accidents to disposal of waste. I don't personally think that workers killed per kilowatt-hour should be the dominant measure of on energy source's safety.
It's never been tried, but Ted Taylor, one of the top US designers of nuclear weapons, once proposed shaped nuclear charges for tunneling. Conventional shaped charges are used in anti-armor weapons, and can punch holes in steel with modest amounts of explosive. Apparently it's possible to do something similar with nuclear devices. Presumably the Chinese have something like that in mind, rather than just blowing chamber after chamber.
The History Channel did a story a while back on a project the US goverment looked into which basically used A-bomb's to launch something into space.
:)
:)
It was kind of interesting, basically we're talking a very large vehicle capable of holding like say 500-1000 people. On the bottom was a dome, and a chute. Drop a bomb through the chute, it detonates and launches the vehicle upward.
When you start loosing momentum, drop another bomb down the chute.
They had some video of a working prototype using small explosives, like dynamite or whatever. It was kind of cool.
The project was ultimately dropped because it was bad idea. There was the immediate concern of how to keep the occupants of the vehicle safe from the explosion and radiation.
Then of course there was the unhappy people who were on the ground when the vehicle launched into space.
Well, sorta...
This Report states that in Colorado, during the years 1969-1971, Project Rulison, tried to stimulate natural gas production. In 1969, a 43 kiloton fission-type nuclear device was detonated at a depth of 8,426 feet, on Colorado's western slope.
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
As a side bit of trivial, you'd be amazed at the number of things we (US) thought of using "small" devices for during the 50's and 60's: civil engineering, fighter-deployed anti-aircraft missles (sure, 1 missle = a squadron of Russian bombers, but I'm sure the folks down wind of that will be _real_ happy...), anti-tank mines, and Jeep-mounted nuke rockets where the range of the missle was less that the lethal radius of the device (I think weapon system was refered to as the Patriot or the Bowie or something like that).
You're thinking of the "Davy Crockett" nuke. The concept, I think, was something similar to shoulder-launched SAMs like the Stinger. The weapon was the M-388 recoilless rifle; the warhead was the Mk-54:
http://www.fas.org/nuke/he w/U sa/Weapons/Allbombs.html
Also check out a comment from a member of a unit that was to have used them in the event of attack (entry of 2000 June 25, 00:25:12).
-- Old Man Kensey
Davy Crocket -
155mm recoiless rocket with a W-54 20-250 ton yield nuclear device on the tip. Range of a 1000 feet to 2.5 miles.
400 warheads were built.
It was designed to give an Army infantry unit the ability to assault large units of Soviet armour.
It was first live fired on 7 July 1962 with the Little Feller II test. It was in servie from 1965 till 1971.
I think the planning for the US Civil Engineering using atomic devices was Project Plowshare. I think the first use of this was going to be up on the coast of Alaska and they wanted to dig a large harbor north of Nome.
The US never did this...but the Soviets did between 50-60 times. I need to look in my National Geographics...they did a story about this in 1994.
Back in the laste '50, when nuclear power was still all "new and wonderful", the US Government embarked on Project Plowshare, with the goal of using atomic and thermonuclear weapons for the purpose of digging.
I believe the project was abandoned, but the idea was highly publicised to the public at the time (since they had to be convinved it was safe if they were going to make canals and such near populated areas). I'm not sure what they decided about safety though. Atomic weapons would clearly not be safe (which is why you can't just go strolling around Murcury, Nevada nowadays!).
I come from a nuclear weapon free country (go Canada!), and ass for as i'm concerned, anyone trying to build rivers and resevoirs, regardless of where, with nuke's is nuts. All i can say is that your old weapons is just fuel for our reactors.
-MR
-MR
-Michael Roy Some people are like Slinkies. Not really useful, but you can't help smiling when you see one tumble down
Or a BIG portion in this case.
Those wacky Chinese are at it again! "IF" they can do it whithout radiating everyone Fallout style. BIG IF!
Is it really worth it, China?
It's not for everybody
Dear India,
I loved Count Chocula and Cap'n Crunch not to mention CocoaPuffs or Lucky Charms, keep up the excellent work.
---America
Their watchdog press will raise a big stink and...no wait...their church leaders will rally against such an immoral...no wait...the people will take their firearms and rise up against the tyrants and...no wait...it's an election year in China and the politicians would never risk...no wait...hmmm........offhand, I'd say them Tibetans are screwed.