On Russian TV the other day. Someone has suggested that instead of nuclear power the japs should go for geothermal power. They are on the ring of fire and deep drilling and injecting water would produce steam. Holes arounf 2 or3 miles deep would be needed. Also suitable presumably for the US West coast. The big debate is whether or no this would cause earthquakes. Maybe even stop them by lubricating the tectonic plates.
Now, how could this sort of risk possibly be assessed without doing the experiment?
It's already been done and geothermal sites have been shut down in Europe and elsewhere because it was clear that mucking about that deep in the earth does increase seismic activity: Basel, Switzerland's experience:
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"Basel, an industrial centre of Europe's chemical and pharmaceutical industry, borders France and Germany, and more than 700,000 people live in the area. It has a history of earthquakes; in 1356, the city was severely damaged by a magnitude-6.7 quake, the largest ever recorded in central Europe. . . . On 2 December 2006, GPB began injecting water into the well with increasing flow rates. As expected, thousands of micro-earthquakes were recorded. Because of the strongly increased seismic activity felt at the surface, injection was stopped on 7 December. A few hours later, a magnitude-3.4 event rattled the local population, causing fear and anger, and receiving international media attention."
I wouldn't put a lot of hope in geothermal heat for areas like Japan that experience M9.0 quakes. Efficiency demands such geothermal "wells" be placed close to areas of consumption. Japan's history of quakes tells us that could be a very, very bad idea.
Good post. Interesting article. But impossible to assess earthquake probabilties I think. Were these earth quakes that would have happened anyway sometime in the future? Some body, somewhere is going to have to continue the experiment to the bitter end.
Good post. Interesting article. But impossible to assess earthquake probabilties I think. Were these earth quakes that would have happened anyway sometime in the future? Some body, somewhere is going to have to continue the experiment to the bitter end.
I became aware of the issue when a non-profit in New York City drilled a deep geothermal "tap" and got the same results and had to close down. Whatever lives down there doesn't like it when we drill down to steal their heat. (-: I believe we'll see geothermal fade as a result of the number of sites that have demonstrably boosted the local seismic activity. What's more interesting to me is that China is sitting on information that could prove a definitive link between dam building and seismic activity. Apparently adding the weight of huge new lakes can cause some deep underground shifting and earthquake activity. At least when a dam breaks during an earthquake, it's all over pretty quickly. Nuclear power plant troubles could go on for years . . .
when they built a new dam near me about 25 years ago and started filling it, you could hear the ground making noises for about a year afterwards as the ground settled and all the subterranean crevices/caves filled up.
Until I started research man-made seismiscity, I had no idea about how much dams can affect the surrounding areas. It's a massive weight and the pressure of the water forces it into lots of places deep under the ground, often causing small earthquakes as the rocks and soil shift and compact. The Chinese are apparently surpressing information that shows that a recent major earthquake near a dam was caused by the dam itself.
Break/break. On a marginally related subject, I saw a fascinating geological "detective story" the other day. In a river bed consisting of the usual layers of sediment, they kept find granite rocks about the size of potatoes embedded in the layers of sediment. It had been formed long before any humans or apes might have been pitching rocks into the river and there were enough of them spread around the site to make it clear this was some sort of natural geological action but they couldn't figure out what.
By matching the granite through radio carbon dating and other methods, they discovered the rocks came from much farther north. They were too heavy to have swept along by the current - if they had, the sedimentation would not have been so evenly deposited around them. So current carrying was ruled out as a source. Finally, someone realized that the size and shape of the objects, and most especially the scratches on the rocks led them to conclude that the rocks had been carried far downstream on melting ice floes from an upstream glacier. When the ice melted enough, the rocks would drop through the floes' bottom and plop onto the river bed where they eventually became encased in sandstone.
Caesar Romano wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
Very bottom line - we'll have to wait another 25 years or so to find out (if we can) how many more people died from this or that cancer because of too much radioactive iodine or cesium, or whatever isotope.
The Japanese were grossly negligent in their planning and operation of those plants. Plus the plants were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I'm still in favor of nuclear energy, but alos of heavy duty drills for the operators and fines for upper management and stockholders in case something goes wrong, now orat any time in the future.
You named the Tsar Bomba, so I think you have heard at least something about at, at least its name.
Its name is a Russian style name meaning "King of Bombs". It was the most powerful nuclear bomb ever widely mentioned to be detonated. It was supposedly designed (downsized from 100 megatons) for 50 megatons and supposedly actually yielded 57 megatons. There is a Wikipedia article on this bomb.
This bomb was a large beast that sounds impractical to drop from any actively available aircraft or spacecraft easily findable in any major noted public channels such as Wikipedia. And, I don't consider Saturn V to be a practical strategic missile due to cryogenic liquid fuels and oxidizers such as liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen.
It was unusually clean - its wiki article says 97% of its energy output was from fusion as opposed to fission.
Its Wiki article says it weighed 27 tonnes (metric tons). That's no typical aerial bomb even as far as MOAB and FOAB go. (Mother Of All Bombs" and "Father Of All Bombs" respectively). No submarine-launched missile can carry it, no aircraft-launched missile whose existence or name is unclassified can carry it especially usefully, and it was a bear for military aircraft to carry and deploy within a kilometer of aircraft takeoff point.
You named the Tsar Bomba, so I think you have heard at least something about at, at least its name.
Its name is a Russian style name meaning "King of Bombs". It was the most powerful nuclear bomb ever widely mentioned to be detonated. It was supposedly designed (downsized from 100 megatons) for 50 megatons and supposedly actually yielded 57 megatons. There is a Wikipedia article on this bomb.
This bomb was a large beast that sounds impractical to drop from any actively available aircraft or spacecraft easily findable in any major noted public channels such as Wikipedia. And, I don't consider Saturn V to be a practical strategic missile due to cryogenic liquid fuels and oxidizers such as liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen.
It was unusually clean - its wiki article says 97% of its energy output was from fusion as opposed to fission.
Its Wiki article says it weighed 27 tonnes (metric tons). That's no typical aerial bomb even as far as MOAB and FOAB go. (Mother Of All Bombs" and "Father Of All Bombs" respectively). No submarine-launched missile can carry it, no aircraft-launched missile whose existence or name is unclassified can carry it especially usefully, and it was a bear for military aircraft to carry and deploy within 1000 kilometers of aircraft takeoff point.
There you go, Don, lighting candles instead of cursing the darkness. "Yotta" guy! (-:
As for delivery methods - a piece of cake to sail something like that into the harbors of many large cities on a surface ship with a robotic pilot or suicide crew (or one that's got a nearby rocketplane waiting). Unlike the case of pregnancy, close does count with 50 megatons of TNT worth of bomb. The scary part, as you point out, they throttled back on the original design capacity of 100 megatons.
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Says that "such weapons are virtually useless for military purposes" but when you read the radius of destruction - A 100 Mt weapon can level urban areas in a zone 60 km wide, cause heavy damage in a zone 100 km across, cause 3rd degree burns in a region 170 km across (only a bit smaller than the width of West Germany) and eye damage to 220 km. "Such a weapon," they say "can only be used as a means of destroying an entire urban region - a major urban complex including suburbs and even neighboring cities. This scale of destruction is much larger than any discrete urban area in Western Europe."
So? As if Russia would not have tried to get one near Berlin if they had developed such a device during WWII. Sounds like just the thing to end the Third Reich in a third of a minute. Stalin would have nuked them twice with Tsar Bomba if he had two. Just to be sure. Probably would have wanted to chalk "Hello Adolph" on the casing himself.
During the cold war, the Sovs could have parked a freighter outside the 12 mile limit, coptered away and demolished New York or Los Angeles. It's probably what China has in mind for a first strike.
Any of the nuke-E's know if there's a functional limit to the size of such a bomb? They built Tsar Bomba in 16 weeks with what the site above says was a lot of guessing.
Huh? I copied the words from the OP. Like I said, never heard of it before the OP, the OP didn't give any useful description, and it is a useful point of reference for almost nobody.
IMO whoever can't understand 10^24 isn't likely to go look up Tsar Bomba.
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