There is no silver bullet - you can't just build a 10bn$ nuclear bomb programm and call it a day. All the other means are still needed to transition away from fossil fuel.
I find it interesting ever more risky way to sequester carbon are invented.
Instead of making adding biochar to farm land an agricultural subsidy. A simple, extremely low risk policy, that is a local subsidy and does create international trade conflicts like other subsidies can.
And it does not affect any wilderness.
And in hot humid climates is proven to increase fertility.
Or a bit risky we could fertilize the open ocean, very significantly increase ocean life. And it has been proven that a significant percentage of fish poop sequesters carbon in the deep ocean.
Instead efforts seem to be focused on shading the sun. And new ideas using nukes....
There's zero technical analysis in this paper. Is there no better source for this discussion?
edit: It doesn't even make much sense. It asserts, without any engineering rationale, that a large fusion bomb will efficiently pulverize 4 trillions tons of basaltic rock—the volume of a sphere of basalt 20 km (!!) in diameter—into a fine silt.
81 gigaton bomb?! Holy cow! It sounds like a planet buster! It seems to be the energy equivalent somewhere around an 8.5 magnitude or higher earthquake if the internet is to be believed?
The nuclear winter premise is that burning cities will produce enough smoke to cover the sun for temperature to drop. AFAIK, there are no cities in deep ocean floor and even if there were, you'd have a little bit of a problem starting fire there.
This would only give a 30yr break on just one factor of the ecological collapse. I get it's tempting to think of a technological fix (even one as risky as an Earth-shattering nuclear explosion), but we have to question ourselves more.
fascinating. Ignoring the ecological questions, I admire the "outside the box" thinking.
For the sake of the calculation: $10^10 for 10^12 tons is an implied cost of one cent per ton. So three orders of magnitude cheaperish than current approaches around $100 per ton.
The long term value of this paper may twofold - 1. to spark other ideas. This illustrates that carbon removal might be able to be done for orders of magnitude cheaper, even if just on the back of a napkin (most napkins today point to $100/ton). 2. to demonstrate the scale and seriousness of the carbon removal issue. yes, we need to do this, and yes, maybe there are better/safer ways.
For folks pointing out "we need to decarbonize": yes, we do. However, carbon removal is also needed at this point alongside decarbonization. We have to reduce emissions and clean out what's already in the air. Without decarbonization and carbon removal together, there's no pathway to stay below 2˚C of warming. (and given that both decarbonization and removal aren't growing quickly enough, we also need to cool the planet too, which is another whole topic)
also: http://airminers.com/connect - we have a Slack channel of 3,000 people focused about removal solutions. come join!
This is insane shit. Some CCS is needed, probably using biomass, possibly using oceanic life, but this absurd like nuking the moon or using nukes for dam construction.
This would likely be less damaging if the bomb could be largely based on H-11B fusion rather than DT or DD fusion. The latter inevitably produce large numbers of neutrons.
At gigaton scales, thermonuclear devices become easier to build in a sense, because the assembly has more time to react as it expands. More stages are needed to compress that very large final stage, though.
The argument reminds me of Freeman Dyson's H bomb propelled interstellar concept, which exploited the fact that per unit of energy output, deuterium was (at the time of publication, in 1968) thousands of times cheaper than fossil fuels.
An 81 Gt nuclear device would seem rather risky and expensive being greater than the world's nuclear arsenals combined. However trying it on a smaller scale could combine nuclear disarmament with an interesting experiment which could help reduce global warming. Win win.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 38.8 ms ] threadThere is no silver bullet - you can't just build a 10bn$ nuclear bomb programm and call it a day. All the other means are still needed to transition away from fossil fuel.
The earlier we start the better.
More seriously I'll refrain from judgment until I've read it all. But it's interesting thus far.
Instead of making adding biochar to farm land an agricultural subsidy. A simple, extremely low risk policy, that is a local subsidy and does create international trade conflicts like other subsidies can.
And it does not affect any wilderness.
And in hot humid climates is proven to increase fertility.
Or a bit risky we could fertilize the open ocean, very significantly increase ocean life. And it has been proven that a significant percentage of fish poop sequesters carbon in the deep ocean.
Instead efforts seem to be focused on shading the sun. And new ideas using nukes....
IMO, this idea is very poorly thought out.
edit: It doesn't even make much sense. It asserts, without any engineering rationale, that a large fusion bomb will efficiently pulverize 4 trillions tons of basaltic rock—the volume of a sphere of basalt 20 km (!!) in diameter—into a fine silt.
So many strange assumptions going into that.
They were also planning to use nukes for that. Thankfully it never happened
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGPKpx6pMko
For the sake of the calculation: $10^10 for 10^12 tons is an implied cost of one cent per ton. So three orders of magnitude cheaperish than current approaches around $100 per ton.
The long term value of this paper may twofold - 1. to spark other ideas. This illustrates that carbon removal might be able to be done for orders of magnitude cheaper, even if just on the back of a napkin (most napkins today point to $100/ton). 2. to demonstrate the scale and seriousness of the carbon removal issue. yes, we need to do this, and yes, maybe there are better/safer ways.
For folks pointing out "we need to decarbonize": yes, we do. However, carbon removal is also needed at this point alongside decarbonization. We have to reduce emissions and clean out what's already in the air. Without decarbonization and carbon removal together, there's no pathway to stay below 2˚C of warming. (and given that both decarbonization and removal aren't growing quickly enough, we also need to cool the planet too, which is another whole topic)
also: http://airminers.com/connect - we have a Slack channel of 3,000 people focused about removal solutions. come join!
At gigaton scales, thermonuclear devices become easier to build in a sense, because the assembly has more time to react as it expands. More stages are needed to compress that very large final stage, though.
The argument reminds me of Freeman Dyson's H bomb propelled interstellar concept, which exploited the fact that per unit of energy output, deuterium was (at the time of publication, in 1968) thousands of times cheaper than fossil fuels.