Better Living Through Nukes?

perkonis writes "So, you've got 23,000 nukes laying about and no one to use them on. What to do with them? Well, you blow up stuff for fun and profit. Some of the ideas range from good on paper (such as mining oil shale) to just downright bad (such as making a new Panama Canal). Making a big ditch by blowing up nukes — what could possibly go wrong?"

Comments

Been tried, major fail

[Ancient_Hacker]

It was tried back in the 60's with "project Plowshare". Blowing up new harbors, blowing up gas wells, etc, etc, etc. Did not pan out. Radioactive gas spewing into your home through the cooktop, not a big win. Radioactive dust and water from making a new harbor, not too keen either, and this was before peta and greenpeace et al.

Re:Security and Radioactivity

[Rei]

And the radioactivity is really problematic for some of these tasks. For example, oil shale. That was studied a lot in the 70s, and last I saw, it was deemed infeasible because it'd leave the oil too radioactive to be usable.

Oh, and as for using any relevant amount of nuclear weapons on the surface at once -- say, the amount that would be exchanged between India and Pakistan in a nuclear war -- um, no. That would be a Bad Thing(TM).

Engineering with Nuclear Explosives

[Animats]

The classic book on this is "Engineering with Nuclear Explosives". I have a copy, discarded from the Stanford engineering library, and I had the Internet Archive digitize it. It has the Panama canal plan, plus several other proposed projects.

The California Department of Highways seriously considered using 22 nuclear bombs to excavate for I-40 through the mountains between Barstow and Needles. Here's the environmental impact statement: The cloud resulting from each of the two row shots would be cylindrical in shape, about 2 miles high, and 7 miles in diameter. The density of dust in this cloud might be such as to obscure vision during its passage within the first 100 miles. While radioactivity levels in the cloud would not present a hazard, it might be necessary from a traffic hazard viewpoint to close any highways in the path of the cloud during passage within the first 100 miles.

Based on the Sedan experience, it is estimated that access to the channel for limited periods of time for inspection purposes would be possible within about 24 hours. Entry for an 8-hour work day or 40-hour work week without unusual safeguards should be possible within about 4 days.

Things were so much simpler then.

Alaska was a hotbed of this kind of stuff

[Alaska Jack]

...back in the day.

Project Chariot was a program to blast a new harbor near Point Hope, led by none other than Ed Teller.

Alaska was also the site of several nuclear test blasts, among them the largest one the U.S. ever conducted: Amchitka's Nuclear Legacy.

- Alaska Jack

Re:I don't know if someone proposed this but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a geology student, studying seismology, and it is a personal pet peeve when someone says that a small earthquake will relive the pressure of a large fault. The force of an earthquake is measured on the Richter scale*, which is a logarithmic scale. A difference of one magnitude on the scale is equivalent to 10 times the force. Lets say we had a fault that had built up the pressure for an 8.0. Let's also assume that with a single nuke you could create a small earthquake at a force of 3.0. This is a difference of 5 orders of magnitude, so 100 000 times the force, and you'd need 100 000 3.0 earthquakes to equal one 8.0 earthquake. Do you really wish to set off that many nukes?

Please do not say that a smallish earthquake is going to prevent a large one. To a geologist, this makes you sound about as stupid as the people who believe that California is going to fall off into the ocean the next time we have a large earthquake. http://www.usgs.gov/faq/list_faq_by_category/get_answer.asp?id=152

*We use the moment magnitude scale for the most part these days, but most non-geologist are more familiar with the Richter scale. MMS is 30 times the force for one degree of magnitude.

Re:Horrible idea.

[BitZtream]

Ignorance is bliss, isn't it?

Every time a nuke is detonated, the result is a dispersion of radioactive material into the environment. The environmental impact of this can be considerably negative.

Detonated far enough below the surface results in almost no environmental damage.

Oil shale mining has already been criticised in altering the hydrography of the environment and erosional and water flow patterns, perhaps causing a permenant change in wildlife habitation patterns and so on for many years to come.

Right, and the house and city you live in, they haven't changed the environment at all. Nor do the roads, rail and seaports that get you the PC you use to talk to slashdot, or the power plants that power that PC.

Unless you're living in a cave that already existed, pretty much everything about modern civilized human life changes the environment in a long term way. What you do in that cave will forever change the enviroment in the cave. The planet is constantly changing. New species are coming into their own, and others are disappearing. This is the way its always been and the way it always will be, regardless of how special you think you are, we're not doing anything that wasn't done long before we existed, nor will it stop when we cease to exist. Wind and rain change the environment, destory mountains, make valleys and change shorelines, are you going to stop them as well?

This idea belongs in the waste bin where it belongs with other bad, dangerous, ideas which show little concern or sensitivity for the environment and fail to recognise the effect of ecosystem loss, destruction of natural environments and ecosystems, and scenic quality of our planet, things which are of inestimable value. We need to recognise the intrinsic value in the earths environment and scenic beauty as is rather than looking at everything as something to exploit for profit for material greed.

You don't believe this, or your just a twit, not sure which really. If you had a clue and believe it you wouldn't be using a PC or electricty in general as it has massive effects on the enviroment, from the mines that the coal comes from to the pollution produced, to the power lines cutting across the country side right down to the heat used to cool and warm your home. You sir are a hypocrite.

Oil shale will be depleted in a few decades anyway but the environmental damage would be permenant, it should not be developed at all. When we destroy or alter the earths landscapes we are stealing the environmental legacy from future generation, an example are people displaced by mines or by dam projects who have lost their homes, land to which they were entitled which were stolen from them.

You really need to get some perspective. Change will happen regardless of what we do. Our children can not possibly inherit the planet in the exact same state as we did. It is not possible for you to live on the surface of the planet without changing it. If you truely believe what you say, you need to kill yourself now otherwise you are just perpetuating the problem, that too will change the planet however.

The rights of a native people who fish in a river and live off the land in a sustianable way with little impact on it, is more importnat than that of dams and other projects that would destroy the ecosystem which they have lived off of

I really can't stand this level of ignorance. You have no clue and live in a dream. Building a dam does not destroy the environment, it changes it. Its going to change no matter what happens. By building a dam we can actually help protect areas of the river downstream from the change that results from massive floods. We can prevent the deaths of people due to those floods. We can provide a more consistent source of water for everything involved in the rivers ecosystem.

I grew

Al Gore

[falconwolf]

Al Gore has made many millions of dollars off of fearmongering.

Al Gore has also made a lot from oil. He has had a long relationship and been an investor in Occidental Petroleum.

Falcon

Unclear to Nuclear Physics

[Roger W Moore]

Things like radon that are radioactive, and created by uranium have a shelf life of 2 days. So basically if you separate out leftover uranium, in 2 days I would expect your extracted oil would be radiation free.

Sorry but this is completely wrong. First uranium itself is not very radioactive (although it is toxic). The half-life for U235/238 (what you find in a Uranium bomb) is 0.7/4.5 billion years respectively. This means that even in large non-critical lumps the radiation is low. Secondly radioactivity after a nuclear explosion comes from the fission products of Uranium (or what they very rapidly decay into) like Strontium, Xenon, Caesium etc. which have varying but generally medium half lives (of order decades). Radon is a decay product of Uranium (after several steps), not a fission product.

Finally radioactive nuclei, particularly heavy ones, usually decay into other radioactive nuclei. Hence the fact that one isotope of radon has a short half-life does not mean that "all the radioactivity" will be gone because there is a decay chain. For example Radon-222 which has a half-live of 3.8 days (there is no Radon isotope with a 2d half-life that I could find) will eventually decay into Lead-210 which has a half life of 22.3 years.