Meanwhile, American scientists as part of Project Plowshare[1] were proposing to use nukes to blast a harbor in Alaska, "in the shape of a polar bear, if desired".[2]
They also wanted to use nukes to blast a canal through Central America, as an alternative to the Panama Canal.[2]
Several bombs were used to attempt to extract natural gas under Project Plowshare. Lots of gas was made extractable but due to contamination it was unsuitable for cooking or heating buildings. You can hike or drive to the detonation sites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Rulison
In those times i.e. nuclear age, scientists probably dreamed of every solution in terms of nuclear energy or explosions to solve things quickly, much as we think of ML today.
All these technologies have their limitations and it took some careful failures to realize and move to alternatives or tested traditional methods.
Increasingly it seems like people who should know better (i.e. HN) don't realize that the people of the past were just as smart and resourceful as us but with different resources at their disposal and that the people of the future will likely have some much better solutions for things you think you are solving intelligently now.
Of course, every iteration of technological revolution will bring us better tools - and probably just like how we are wondering about nuclear age in the current information age, the future scientists will wonder why and how we reached the means we are dealing with now.
Shape of a polar bear, if desired. You think that's a smoking gun?
Hey you gotta brag your wares. It ain't bragging if it's true.
And it's a really great way to dig, it's not blasting, it's boiling the rock, so the oxygen goes into the atmosphere, you crack it for a huge radius, it's a really good application of nuclear explosives. Explosives always had a dual use, war and mining, clearing rock.
> And it's a really great way to dig, it's not blasting, it's boiling the rock, so the oxygen goes into the atmosphere, you crack it for a huge radius, it's a really good application of nuclear explosives.
The Soviets actually got beyond the "talking about it" stage on such a project, and tested nuclear explosives to build a canal. AIUI it did not in practice work very well, and was abandoned.
Yeah one nuke, one canal. That nuke, that canal. They did get it to put out a gas well fire, perfectly at the first try, and gas well discovery--made good money off that. Don't talk about that, or like falsify the toxicology oh oh radioactive danger danger! Haha.
Like you know the guy who took the biggest direct risk with the Chernobyl regulus is still alive? Doesn't even have cancer.
EDIT: nobody talks about the metallurgy of plutonium in all of this, huge thing. People think nuclear bombs don't have any specific personality, just uniform atoms, when Pu has the most complex metallurgy.
No, they already knew about the dangers of fallout.
"the AEC established Project Plowshare amid growing public and political opposition to nuclear programs. Nuclear tests routinely produced unacceptably high levels of fallout, and the subsequent appearance in drinking water, milk, meat, and produce of strontium-90, cesium-137, and other cancer-causing radioactive elements had generated a movement demanding a worldwide ban on airborne nuclear tests."
But "the AEC believed the region [in Alaska where the harbor would be created with nukes] to be an uninhabited Arctic wasteland."
"Environmental scientists, as well as many Alaskan locals, were not sold. They doubted AEC estimates that a bomb crater harbor would be handling $176 million in annual exports within 25 years. Cape Thompson adjoined large deposits of coal and oil, but it also was iced in nine months out of every 12."
"And the cape was only 30 miles south of Point Hope, an Inuit village whose residents subsisted on the region’s abundant wildlife. Irked by critics, Teller vented to economist George Rogers, "We are not interested in preserving the Eskimo as a hunter. We are interested in giving him the opportunity of becoming a coal miner.""[1]
You're only saying that because of the political baggage that surrounds treatment of native Americans and coal mining and the way we view those things today.
The premise that a big infrastructure project will create a bunch of economic opportunity in the local area and people will be better off for it is not a controversial one.
"The premise that a big infrastructure project will create a bunch of economic opportunity in the local area and people will be better off for it is not a controversial one."
It certainly is controversial.
Some look at this process as economic opportunity, others as indentured servitude and exploitation.
There's been a long and sad history of such developments leaving the areas where it happens a polluted, barren carcass.
There was never a time when anyone involved in these projects didn't take fallout into account.
The thing is that fallout is something that can be controlled(to an extent). You can make a nuke that produces a lot of it, or a nuke that produces hardly any. Also(understandably) you don't get any fallout for underground explosions - we've used nukes for closing oil wells for instance, with zero environmental contamination outside of the initial blast zone.
That's not me saying that this is a good idea of course. But it's not like fallout wasn't planned for.
One of Plowshare's proponents was Edward Teller. Teller designed the bomb that was tested as Castle Bravo. Castle Bravo's yield was far above expected and was a fallout disaster that was known at the time[1].
Castle Bravo was in 1954. He began to push for for Plowshare in the late 50s. Here he is in 1965 advocating for it.[2]
Read "The Firecracker Boys" if you are interested in a lot more detail.[3]
Scientists didn't need to build a bomb, detonate it, and wait years to know that. Politicians just decided to ignore it because they thought that the economical gain for themselves outweighed the human costs for other countries. AKA Imperialism.
No, scientists like Edward Teller were pushing for Plowshare, it wasn't driven by politicians except the head of the AEC Lewis Strauss. They seriously thought they could do large scale engineering this way without much fallout, but couldn't make it work in practice.
Also, The North American Water and Power Alliance top bring water to California from Alaska by building nuclear powered pumps and atomic blasting out new channels. After failing to be adopted the plan in later years has been picked up and promoted by the Lyndon LaRouche Movement
> "the sheer arrogance and imperial ambitions of the modern hydraulic West"
and
> "the most outlandish water development scheme to emerge in the past 50 years".
Yet the Chinese South-North Water Transfer Project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Tran...) currently underway is (or at least was at inception) intended to move nearly half as much water--44.8 billion cubic meters vs 93 billion cubic meters. While still under construction, it's already moving 7 billion cubic meters per https://window-to-china.de/2022/02/20/china-reports-progress... That's only about 1/5 of their planned volume, but IIUC the final, western diversion would provide more water to be diverted for the first two completed (?) routes.
On the face those criticisms might still stand, but the context seemed to be an explanation for why NAWPA was an utter failure from inception, in which case they may soon seem merely short-sighted or at least myopic.
The Wikipedia article for the S–N Water Transfer Project states that nearly a third of a million people were forced out of their homes, environmental devastation is resulting, and that it could end up with large evaporation issues. Living in the US Southwest myself, any program to reshape the hydrology of a large region does seems myopic and arrogant, as the problems start to really show after decades of use. The destruction of the Aral Sea is another example. Just because it can be built does not make it a success.
There is a documentary on it somewhere that I watched many years ago. The main sticking point was the use of nuclear blasts to carve out water channels. For a brief time after WW2 this seemed like a good idea, but upon further reflection fell out of favor.
The Trinity test site was open to the public in 1953, less than 10 years after the blast took place. Nowadays, the radioactivity there is only 10 times the average natural radioactivity [1]. That may seem like a lot, but there are places in the world with much, much higher background radiation, and epidemiological studies failed to determine an increase in cancer rates or other health issues [2].
Would they wait for 70 years to let water in, to still get it irradiated 10x the normal background radiation? So that everybody, including small babies would drink it eventually? Or just say fuck it, progress is priority #1 and let the water in immediately, let the future generations solve the issues.
Yeah, I really wonder why even Chinese decided to not go that way...
Part of the answer is that atmospheric explosions generate a lot less fallout precisely because they move less dirt: that first link states that a 30m high tower was used in large part to minimise fallout and left a crater with maximum depth of 140cm. So "Trinity" 75 years later isn't a very good indicator of how atomic civil engineering on a short timescale will fare.
It's interesting and perhaps a little reassuring that the 2009 review of natural background exposure didn't find conclusive effects other than for radon, but the enthusiasm in the US for peaceful nuclear explosions had already ebbed more than 40 years earlier after some quite cavalier experiments, so it's not so much "why is it unpopular?" as "why couldn't the topic be reconsidered in the light of newer research and less as a cheerleading exercise for nuclear weapons development?". Probably it's hard to judge the economics of PNEs Vs conventional civil engineering since the nuclear industry is quite coupled to the military.
Were they proposing surface detonations to dig the channels? From my limited knowledge of blasting, the conventional explosives are placed in holes drilled into the rock in order to fracture it so it can be easily removed. Would you not do the same with nuclear explosives but just on a larger scale?
That's exactly what you do, but that means some finely pulverised irradiated material probably gets ejected. The notorious example of this was the Sedan nuclear excavation test [1] which created a usefully big hole (100m deep, 390m diameter) by removing some 11 million tons of soil, but "the radioactive fallout from the test contaminated more US residents than any other nuclear test."
Much of the fallout was due to the fraction of the yield that was from fission, and WP notes that "had this test been conducted after 1965 when improvements in device design were realized, achieving a 100-fold reduction in radiation release is considered feasible". But the public enthusiasm for the program was naturally impaired.
There's no such thing as relative comparison of "radioactivity". You cannot describe a radionuclide contamination by a single number. For starters, radioactive emissions come in three forms (alpha, beta, gamma), all with different properties. Different nuclides accumulate differently in living tissues too.
There can be almost no elevated gamma background, but nevertheless harmful to live there (e.g. Chernobyl).
Oh man... ANOTHER "Cadillac Desert" reference. I just finished re-reading it, a month ago, and this is like the 20th time I've overheard some random comment about something related to the book. Might not just be the Frequency Illusion, I think maybe I got inspired to re-read it because of all the news about water politics, lately.
Anyhow, NAWPA is some fascinating stuff... It's completely insane and a terrible idea, but it's hard not to be impressed by the sheer size of it.
Kinda got me wondering now... Would the biggest version of NAWPA exceed the size of the Atlantropa idea, in terms of how much land area they each would flood/drain? I mean, the Mediterranean Sea is pretty big, but...
“Cadillac Desert” has been recommended on the site by a bunch of random people many times throughout this last year on basically every thread involving the Colorado River, flooding of other US rivers, or droughts. It’s one of those books that gets laypeople fired up and causes them to become armchair experts and recommend it to others with fervor.
Oh, you again! It's like I mention "Cadillac Desert" and you pop out of the bathroom mirror like Bloody Mary.
I'm glad you're working on finding a more polite way to talk about things you disagree with... Your new comment is an improvement, but it's still hella low-key argumentive, and needlessly insulting to the people around you.
You need to learn how to disagree with people without making other people out to be jerks.
I'd've thought that all the downvotes on your last comment would've helped drive the point home, but I guess not. Maybe it just takes time to learn this stuff.
But as for me... Until you take some responsibility for the words you're choosing, and start making better comments, I'm still not interested in trying to have any kind of conversation with you. LMK when you want to try again.
Not sure if it's in the same league but in South Africa we have considered towing icebergs to Cape Town as a possible water supply as recently as 2019.
From the article I see that in the past that's something they considered for San Diego as well.
> "So in the middle of the Cold War, the Soviet Union found itself trying to pit its land and resource advantage against the continental United States' more temperate climate. With space and the atom having been harnessed, why not the world's oceans? Why not the weather itself?"
Soviets always wanted a warm water port and to warm the Arctic for trade routes and making Russia more able to have an advantage on their land which is 63% frozen.
> It's important to note that Borisov wasn't a mad scientist or anything of that sort, and his work was of interest to the Soviet government, which was already funding a wide range of research looking to warm the Arctic. It was all aimed at solving a simple problem: Russia is too damn cold.
> You might laugh, but while Soviet Russia was blessed with the largest land mass of any nation on Earth, much of it resource rich, putting that land to use was stunningly difficult. Currently about 63 percent of Russia is buried under permafrost, and as the CIA World Factbook notes, even today it is a significant barrier to development of Siberia.
It wouldn't have been good for climate for everyone else, even Russia long term.
It also seems climate change and global warming Russia thinks benefits them at least then, maybe now as well. [1]
That is an interesting idea considering the oil/gas export leads to that and all that permafrost which would cause massive carbon releases.
Their population never boomed like it did in the US post WW2, possibly because of the massive loss of lives in the war. I feel like all that development would be pretty useless if there were no people to actually do anything.
According to Wikipedia, the population increase of the USSR in that time period is mostly due to territorial expansion during WW2 rather than indigenous population growth.
You have seen that in stats or just assume? Because civilian causalities in WWII outnumber military ones. Old people, kids and sick people are extremely vulnerable during wars and die a lot.
Especially in WWII. First, obviously holocaust - most victims were from Eastern Europe and old, sick, kids had even lower chance to survive then physically strong people (not that it was high there, but). Second, German army was cleansing Eastern Europe for German settlement. That meant whole villages routinely burned out to ground. Third, famines and such, cause military extracts resources from people.
USSR occupied areas during that time frame with their pooulation.
Still a population growth on paper but I believe parent poster meant something else by boom.
26 millions Soviets were not killed in WW2, as Soviet Union (and Russia today) adding to the WW2 kills victims of Soviet Gulag system (about 2 millions) and 6-10 millions Ukrainians starved to death during Holodomor genocide.
BTW: WW2 losses are still exorbitant, even if we subtract those 10 millions, but no longer that "impressive" (Poland lost 6 millions people, which was almost 20% of the population, killed by Germans and Russians - till 1941 Hitler and Stalin were best pals).
>6-10 millions Ukrainians starved to death during Holodomor genocide
Ukraine's Holodomor happened in 1932-1933, and the census I mentioned is from 1939-1959. If you are implying that they were hiding Ukrainian losses in the 1930's and secretly added it to WW2 kill count then it's not quite true, censuses in 1926 and 1937 registered a drop in Ukrainian population from 31 mln to 26 mln. The results of the 1937 census were declassified only in 1990 and the revised number (26 mln) was estimated in the 1990's after the collapse of USSR and on the basis of declassified documents in Soviet archives.
>adding to the WW2 kills victims of Soviet Gulag system (about 2 millions)
Documents from the Soviet archives number the total deaths of prisoners in the Gulag from 1941 to 1945 at 621,637 (Evdokimov, 1995)
That + killing/imprisoning a lot of your own population + creating an economic climate where it was hard to sustain your family + creating a political climate favoring emigration?
And population growth in the pre-WW1 Russian Empire was even higher, despite having regular food shortage and hunger period. In general, pre-industrial agrarian societies tend to have much higher birth rates than industrial and post-industrial ones.
For some strange reason the US nowadays is comparable in the percentage of prisoners in USSR in worst Gulag years:
>For some strange reason the US nowadays is comparable in the percentage of prisoners in USSR in worst Gulag years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_United_States_in...
I don't have an explanation here, TBH. The US is a rich and socially advanced country. In comparison to Europe this feels very wrong.
The US justice system is very broken. No matter where one stands politically (e.g. be more lenient or be tougher on crime), the current system is suffering from bureaucracy, ineffectiveness, ineptitude and slowness. It's caught in an endless feedback loop.
not totally clear if this is the point you’re trying to make, but the US today fits that description exactly
> killing/imprisoning a lot of your own population
the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world
> creating an economic climate where it was hard to sustain your family
the cost of housing has far outgrown the median household income and in many places you need 2+ income earners to sustain a household meaning nobody has time to raise children
To add to what other person responded, birth rates fell down after communism fell. They were higher during USSR times then now. Not just in Russia, but everywhere in post communist world.
> It also seems climate change and global warming Russia thinks benefits them at least then, maybe now as well.
That is curious idea. I wonder how the risks of thawing permafrost play into the equation. The thaw leads to newly available biomass, digested by microbes to release carbon dioxide and methane, and leaving a considerably altered environment including depressions filled with water [2]. Would those risks be outweighed by overall gains of a warmer Siberia?
Slightly worrying notion but, if Russia believes that global warming benefits them, they might keep on extracting and burning fossil fuels long after everyone else has transitioned to renewables.
Well the USA knows global warming does not benefit them, yet they continue extracting and consuming fossil fuels like there's no tomorrow. I'd first focus on that transition to renewables at home before worrying about what Russian energy consumption looks like in this post-renewable-transition utopia :)
My understanding is that global warming is only mildly negative to US as a whole long term. Coastal cities/region are obviously toast but they are only small % of landmass. Country will adjust just fine.
I'm not sure that's the case. Don't most of the population live on those coastal regions? And isn't there an ongoing drought problem that'll only get worse over time? These don't sound mild at all.
Unlikely. Fossil fuel extraction is expensive. It makes sense economically only because theres a lot of demand for it globally and companies can net huge profits. Without that kind of global demand, fossil fuel extraction will be limited to keeping the existing facilities open until they dry up.
For a preview of the future of oil, we just need to look at what happened to coal.
Is there a cheap way to create fertilizers without hydrocarbons? Otherwise there will be demand for them as long as they are available. In other words, it's very likely that we will use all available fossil fuels.
So, it's like we, the good guys, can decide to extract and burn fossil fuels as long as we want, but once we say enough is enough, everybody else must also stop doing what we have been doing for ages.
Indeed it might but its need for it is finite and renewables as more resources are sunk into improving them may eventually make doing so increasingly economically disadvantageous. As more of the world moves on it becomes easier to encourage different behavior as well as Russia ceases to have anything else anyone needs.
They are a large country but a smallish population that is actually shrinking. Their domestic needs for fuel are pretty modest. It's their exports drying up that will drag them into the future. Considering recent events, that might be sooner rather than later.
Then why not doing more things where coldness becomes an asset instead going against nature?
Geo-engineering should be made illegal. Their "bugs" would scorch the Earth. No geo-engineer knows what's he/she is doing. Any implementation there is a guarantee of having massive unintended consequences that are irreversible.
We'll need to do some serious geo engineering on purpose to reverse all the geo engineering we've been doing by accident. Current efforts are all about stopping the problem from getting worse. We reducing the pace at which co2 emissions grow. But they are still growing, not shrinking. But the point is that, unless we do some geo engineering, those levels are not coming down by themselves any time soon.
For the purposes of human life, extreme cold is never an asset. It is an absence of energy and will always require energy input to accomplish anything in such a climate.
That's cool but you don't need to use half the landmass of a country for those technologies. You'd be further ahead paying the cost for cooling in exchange for having that land used for agriculture, cities, and more easily accessed resources.
Yes but what you say has a premise the current statu quo of tech. What I'm saying is that some new tech requiring lots of coldness made ROI positive.
You don't need thaaaaat much. Think of having something strong enough to make cities around that industry prosperous. They will urbanize places that previously wasn't feasible to urbanize.
I come from a country where you can't walk a single kilometre without running into another damned river or canal. It's difficult to remember that water is a precious resource for most of the world population.
Large swathes of human population do experience issues with water availability.
However, richest parts of the world are where water was traditionally in abundance, and human settlements have been created around large bodies of (drinking) water. Confluences of rivers into (non-frozen) seas is the sweetspot: pottable water and cheap trade routes.
So you come from a rich part of the world because it's got a great balance of natural resources, but humans are there because of it: it is no accident!
Btw, canals (as in human built rivers) might have been part of the problem. They might also be part of the solution going forward.
> In current US dollars, that amounts to nearly $138 billion. But Borisov dreamed of enlisting the US, Canada, Japan, and Northern Europe in the plan, as all would theoretically benefit from a warmer climate. Surprisingly, the US was intrigued by the idea. In fact, in a response to a series of questions sent in 1960 by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to presidential candidates Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, Senator Kennedy noted, as part of a larger point about the value of innovation in fostering cooperation, that the Siberia-Alaska dam was "certainly worth exploring."
However, it turns out that it is much easier politically to just use advertising to convince Americans to buy and drive big, gas-guzzling SUV/Pickups and let the CO2 do the warming.
> However, it turns out that it is much easier politically to just use advertising to convince Americans to buy and drive big, gas-guzzling SUV/Pickups and let the CO2 do the warming.
Are you genuinely suggesting this or are you wasting people time?
Is your thesis American knew about CO2 and gauged how bad it would be and decided the positive effects from warming meant it was better to encourage greater CO2 output?
YES, the americans did know about CO2 at least as early as 1941. I didnt try to look that up but instead stumbled upon it while reading something else, and remembered your comment, so here you go:
> Ford’s 1941 bioplastic Model T was made of hemp, flax, wheat, and spruce pulp, which made the car lighter than fiberglass and ten times tougher than steel, wrote the New York Times on February 2, 1941. The car ran on ethanol made from hemp or other agricultural waste. Ford’s experimental model was deemed a step toward the realization of his dream to “grow automobiles from soil,” wrote Popular Mechanics in their December 1941 issue and reduce greenhouse gases—already known to occur by then.
Unfortunately that "Popular Mechanics" reference appears to be false: the December 1941 issue [1] did feature an article "Pitch Hitters for Defense" which included Ford's car experiments, but the entire focus was on supplanting the use of metals to free capacity for the military use. Carbon dioxide, greenhouse effect, or any environmental discussion is quite absent.
(The advertising in the issue is interesting since even just before Pearl Harbor there's a lot of military references. My (very limited) understanding was that isolationism was strong but apparently far from pacifism)
> Is your thesis American knew about CO2 and gauged how bad it would be and decided the positive effects from warming meant it was better to encourage greater CO2 output?
While I assume it was a joke, global warming was certainly known of at the time. It wasn't super-well understood (they couldn't make detailed predictions in the way they can today), but they would have known that adding CO2 would raise the temperature.
I remember the conspiracy theory that HAARP was a secret weather control weapon. Some argued that the US had used weather weapons during the Vietnam War to create rain and bog down the North Vietnamese.
The Americans were interested in the project too, according to the article. They just didn't want to fund it.
Remember that in the 50s-60s when Borisov was promoting this scheme, the consensus of scientists was that the big threat from climate change was global cooling and that the world was endangered by a new ice age. Climatologists were writing to the US President, telling him to prepare agriculture and industry for permanently colder conditions. Back then climatology did not have the same mindshare as today, but nobody would have objected to it on climatological grounds and if anything they would have supported it.
The most compelling climate engineering mega-project has to be the Qattara Depression project, which would create a super-saline inland sea, generate a few GW of electricity and dramatically increase water fall over large parts of the Sahara desert:
The immediate concern for them is melting of the permafrost in northern Siberia, which is already happening. This could cause collapses of entire cities, industrial/mining complexes, pipelines etc. This process will take decades, so can be potentially planned for, but Russian rulers aren't known for being long-term thinkers.
why the plural? it has been this one singular dude for quite some time XD and that contradicts (i mean, not contradict, but like... who are you talking about?) your "not known for being long-term thinkers". i dont think we know what putin is scheming
i admit that my what-if-s are not helpful, but it doesnt look to me like he is concerned of global warming at all. and this article here makes me think that might be no coincidence.
They also wanted to use nukes to blast a canal through Central America, as an alternative to the Panama Canal.[2]
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare#cite_note-...
[2] - https://www.historynet.com/an-explosive-plan-to-use-atoms-fo...