[ortusdux]

Re: the first paragraph's reference to nuking the Deepwater horizon's oil leak, Soviet engineers demonstrated that this was a viable technique back in the 60's. Plenty of wild non-war applications have been proposed for nuclear bombs over the years, but this is the only one I can think of that is actually somewhat of a good idea. Any fallout is minor and contained under 1km+ of bedrock, and the harm prevented is worth the cost. I am surprised that the author dismisses it so rapidly.

https://interestingengineering.com/soviet-engineers-detonate...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S57Xq03njsc

[jjk166]

The author's logic is that only things comparable in scale to a volcano can cancel out the volcano by brute force, and nuclear detonations are thousands to millions of times smaller than volcanic eruptions. Proposals for things like this involve using nuclear detonations to make small but critical disruptions to systems, so the logic doesn't apply, but without actually digging into it you generally wouldn't know that's what the plan entails. Admittedly, it's unintuitive to think of nuclear detonations as a precise scalpel instead of a blunt cudgel. It also doesn't help that the well thought out proposals often get crudely parroted, so "collapse the well 1 km down to choke off the flow of oil" becomes "blow up the well".

[Brian_K_White]

I would think the biggest point about collapsing a well is that the well IS a human-made, human-scale object. It IS a blunt instrument not a pin prick in that case.

[ryanmercer]

>Plenty of wild non-war applications have been proposed for nuclear bombs over the years

Yup, Project Plowshare (US) and Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy (USSR) looked a lot of interesting/crazy ideas for non-military applications for nuclear weapons.

Some of the ideas were just nuts for use on earth (like making bays) but if we ever do start setting up shop on another planet, like Mars, nuclear detonations could probably be used for construction efforts early on to get some serious work done quickly - Project Orion, especially if done with materials mined from the asteroid belt, could be an extremely viable option for interstellar travel even if just for probes.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Project_Plowshare

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Nuclear_Explosions_for_the_Natio...

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsio...

[upwardbound]

Relatedly: apparently it would be a good idea to destroy the Martian moon Phobos before settling the planet. It's a fascinating proposal and makes sense; you can read about it here:

https://marspedia.org/Bringing_down_Phobos

[ortusdux]

If we are going down that rabbit hole, I love the plan to create an artificial Martian magnetosphere by placing a magnetic field generating satellite between mars and the solar winds. Generating an atmosphere on mars is all well and good, but it will just blow away again without some protection. The generator would only require roughly 583.9 exajoules, or roughly the world's total energy consumption in 2020.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.06887.pdf

[db65edfc7996]

>Generating an atmosphere on mars is all well and good, but it will just blow away again without some protection.

NASA estimates the Martian atmosphere is ~2.5e16 kgs[0]. Current estimate[1] is that the Martian atmosphere loses 2-3 kg/s. Presently losing something on the order of 1e-9 percentage per day. I think if humans ever have the ability to thicken the Martian atmosphere, we can cover the loss.

[0] https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/marsfact.htm... [1] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2018.05.030

[m4rtink]

A man made denser atmosphere after terraforming would presumably loose more due to higher pressure.

[ncmncm]

A superconducting tape girdling the planet's equator would suffice, and require after startup only the power needed to keep it chilled at all times below 70K.

[upwardbound]

That sounds actually quite practical and like an amazing option! Are there papers about this you could please share the links to?

[ncmncm]

Just a youtube video.

21340 km of superconducting tape could take rather some time to fabricate. Then, of course you need to get it there, and lay it out, and construct 20k refrigeration plants. Then, extract enough nitrogen from the atmosphere (1.89% concentration) for refrigerant; you'll need about 4M tons of it. You also need 21340 km of cryo-safe piping bonded to the tape, which probably weighs another 4M tons. Plus heat insulation.

Leakage from 21340 km of tubing, even if just migration of single molecules through the walls of the tube, would require continuous injection of fresh nitrogen.

And, I guess, you had better protect it from meteorite strikes. A planet-sized magnetic field suddenly imploding would seem to release enough energy to vaporize your whole tape. Maybe you should have two of them, parallel, 100km apart so they are unlikely to both be taken out by the same meteorite.

[ryanmercer]

>but it will just blow away again without some protection.

Not in any appreciable amount over human timescales.

[saalweachter]

Just out of curiosity, do you know to what extent the various applications (from making artificial bays to sealing wells) depend on it being a nuclear bomb versus "a big bomb"?

[KineticLensman]

> do you know to what extent the various applications (from making artificial bays to sealing wells) depend on it being a nuclear bomb versus "a big bomb"

Well, any of them where emplacing a million tons of TNT might be problematic

[mLuby]

They tried that in the excellent documentary The Core (2003) but as I recall they didn't all survive.

[ineedasername]

However a separate documentary (Armageddon, 1998) illustrated the successful use of nuclear devices on objects of a seemingly intractable scale with extremely few casualties.

The makers of the documentary also chose an excellent score to accompany their organic capture of a moving love story along with the antics of a plucky group of misfits that came together in a crisis. It's the sort of thing you can only shake your head at and say, "Only in reality!" because if you saw it in a movie you'd just think "Nah, that could never happen".

[test6554]

You just can't make this stuff up!

[KineticLensman]

> a plucky group of misfits that came together in a crisis.

The related 2000 documentary 'Space Cowboys' also provides excellent insights into how generation-Boomer skills can be invaluable when modern computer systems fail catastrophically.

[DonHopkins]

Nuking BP's corporate headquarters could have prevented another disaster like Deepwater Horizon in the future.

Maybe they should have nuked Exxon's corporate headquarters in response the the Valdez disaster, which might have prevented the Deepwater Horizon disaster by teaching all the remaining oil companies a lesson.