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The NDA [Nuclear Decommissioning Authority] expects the clean-up of the Sellafield site to go on until 2125 and cost £136 billion ($184 billion), an estimate which has increased nearly 19 percent since March 2019.
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A young Microsoft engineer has proposed a radical idea to combat climate change — detonating an 81-gigatonne nuclear bomb beneath the ocean floor to pulverise basalt and sequester carbon dioxide. Drawing inspiration from both past nuclear experiments and modern climate science, this untested geoengineering concept aims to contain radiation while offsetting decades of carbon emissions.
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81 Gt is strangely specific…
Anyway, a bit of context for this load of bollocks:
The biggest nuke ever to this day is “product 602” (Nikita Sergeyevich’s “Kuzma’s mother”) at maybe a tad over 50 Mt.1)
There is no theoretical upper limit for the yield of a thermonuclear device;2) other than that if you keep going, at one point you’ll end up with a brown dwarf or something.
Sure, Eddie Teller lobbied for bombs in the Gt range. Because of course he did; Eddie just was like that.3) And while a one Gt bomb theoretically would destroy an area the size of France, there is a practical limit to actual weapons. Depending on how you model it,4) there is a sweet spot somewhere between 400 and 500 Mt where the upper atmosphere becomes the weak point in your bubble of thermonuclear destruction and every Mt added basically just vents into space.
There is no way5) to “contain” a 81 Gt yield. Period.
This isn’t geoengineering; this is terraforming.6) At scale.
I tried to put this yield into Alex Wellerstein’s excellent NUKEMAP7) - but it only goes up to 100 Mt.
Footnotes
1) The original design was ~100 Mt, but they scaled it down. The main reasons we’re to keep down the fallout (which is why it was an air drop rather than a shot tower) and the destruction. For one thing, the bomber dropping it wouldn’t have survived. The effects were still quite something. The flare was observed more than 1,000 km away, windows were shattered 700 km away, the mushroom cloud rose to a height of 67 km. The blast wave circled the globe three times (which was recorded as far away as New Zealand) and had a seismic effect at ground zero equivalent to an earthquake of 5 to 5.5 on the Richter scale. The seismic waves also circled the globe three times.
2) Product 602’s design team pointed this out in one of their early reports. With the technology they had at the time, 150 Mt would have been feasible. The possibility of devices in the Gigaton range was mentioned.
3) Nicely illustrating the old adage that it’s sometimes tricky to tell apart genius and madness. My take on Eddie Teller is that he wasn’t mad, but a colossal asshole.
4) High airburst, low airburst, on the surface, somewhat below the surface (like with a bunker buster), weather, topography, and so on.
5) No fucking way, to be accurate. Unless maybe you place the thing lower than the Earth’s crust. Which is beyond our capabilities right now, but it is a good premise for a silly, yet entertaining film.
6) Since I’ve brought it up: Andy Haverly’s notion may or may not have been inspired by the Fanbois’ dream of terraforming Mars by nuking its polar ice cap. Again, theoretically possible. Scott Manley did the math on that in one of his videos - you’d need 25,000 times the yield of all the nukes there were at the height of the Cold War.
7) How would your hometown cope with a 50 Mt nuke? Find out:
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The old version had no limit, but I doubt it is accurate after a certain point.
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Inflation or escalation?
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Both.
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El Reg doing a hit piece on clean power research?
That takes me back to their climate change denial days.
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Can I get that with a side of asbestos?
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Sure. It’s important to have enough fibre in your diet.
It should be relatively harmless, too - as long as you ingest it instead of breathing it in.
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