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A Physicist Says He Can Tornado-Proof the Midwest With 1,000-Foot Walls
meghan elizabeth writes: Temple physicist Rongjia Tao has a utopian proposal to build three massive, 1,000-foot-high, 165-foot-thick walls around the American Midwest, in order to keep the tornadoes out. Building three unfathomably massive anti-tornado walls would count as the infrastructure project of the decade, if not the century. It would be also be exceedingly expensive. "Building such walls is feasible," Tao says. "They are much easier than constructing a skyscraper. For example, in Philadelphia, the newly completed Comcast building has about 300-meter height. The wall with similar height as the Comcast building should be much easier to be constructed." Update: 06/28 04:14 GMT by T : Note: originally, this story said that Tao was at Drexel rather than Temple -- now corrected
...kaiju protection.
Now we know why there are no Tornados in Westeros.
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Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
One can only hope.
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That it only works for square tornadoes on an infinite plane of uniform density?
As an earthmoving project, each kilometer of wall is 18M cubic meters. The Panama Canal was about 250M cubic meters of earthmoving. So every 14KM of wall is one Panama Canal. The proposed Arabian Canal near Dubai (to create "valuable waterfront property" accessable by yacht) would require about 1100M cubic meters of earthmoving. So one Arabian Canal is about 60KM of wall.
In terms of speed, one Bagger 288 can move about 250K cubic meters of earth a day. That's 5KM of wall per year. With one such $100 million machine for every 100KM of wall, the project would take 20 years.
It's a big project, but not impossibly big. Just expensively big.
On the other hand, building a concrete *anything* that is a thousand feet tall and 165 feet thick isn't easy. They're claiming that a one-mile stretch of the wall would cost $160 million, which comes out to 871.2 million cubic feet of concrete, or a cost per cubic foot (including labour and materials) of about $0.18. That sounds really unlikely to me.
Let me put it this way, the hoover dam is actually relatively similar to what we're talking about here. It's roughly 700 feet tall, varies from 45 to 600 feet thick, and is about a fifth of a mile wide... So let's say that the cross section of the hoover dam has about the same area as this proposed wall.
OK, so now we just need the length of the wall. Well, the circumference of the American midwest is roughly 3900 miles (cutting through the great lakes, because what the hell). So basically, what we need to do, is build the equivalent of roughly 20,000 hoover dams.
The hoover dam cost the equivalent of about $750 million to build. I suspect it would cost a lot more today than pure inflation would account for (unions, health and safety standards, etc), but let's say that technological progress would counteract all that...
So, $750 million, times 20,000... and we come up with $15 trillion.
I always thought the best method was to create inverted solar heated funnels with built in wind turbines at ground level and at the outlet, to basically create safety valves to enable hot air at ground level to continually vent to upper atmosphere and as a bonus provide energy to pay for the system. This to prevent the destructive funnel that would otherwise occur. You would need to space them so as to substantially reduce the risk of the natural funnel forming. You could also use them as communication towers, wireless and microwave broadband and mobile phones. As an additional bonus dependent upon region they can also collect water via direct rainfall as well as condensation.
So rather than just attempting to solve one problem badly. A little out of the box thinking and funnel, 'heh' 'heh', many problems into one solution and achieve a far higher level of cost efficiency.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen