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Civil Engineering with Atomic Detonations 183

Posted by michael from the earth-shattering-news dept.
ThesQuid writes "I just caught this article about China possibly using nuclear blasts to help build a hydro project in Tibet. I've always wondered why nobody has ever actually used nuclear explosives in civil engineering projects, if (and this is a BIG if) the blasts can be made reasonably radiologically clean." Several U.S. nuclear tests were devoted to exploring the feasibility of this; obviously we decided it wasn't such a great idea.
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Civil Engineering with Atomic Detonations More

Civil Engineering with Atomic Detonations

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  • Re:It's called nuclear excavation (Score:3)

    by MousePotato ( 124958 ) on Sunday October 22, 2000 @12:59AM (#685801) Homepage Journal
    If IIRC it wasn't a resevior that the Russians made it was a natural gas storage facility. One of the very first issues of Discover Magazine had an article on this back in 81 I think complete with a picture of an engineer standing inside of one. I believe that the article also pointed out that the US had done the same back in the late 60's or early 70's. The nuke made for an ideal underground excavator: the cavern created would have walls several feet thick of rock that was made molten for a few seconds and therefore could be airtight (a huge glass bowl so to speak). What I wonder is why noone has done this on the moon yet. After venting the space it would make an ideal sealed container for colonization projects. If we had done this during some of the Apollo missions (or at least during that era) the caverns created would have had 30+ years to vent already. I know there would be some issues regarding the radioactivity afterwards but I believe that the use of a Hydrogen bomb (vs regular A bomb) would considerable bring down the level of radiation afterwards. This could be done with asteroids as well using small devices. Some scifi author had a few stories about this but I can't remember who. This could be a useful way of bringing down the quantity of nukes that had been stockpiled during the cold war but that is totally a subject for debate in and of itself.

  • "The United States looked into using nuclear devices for civil engineering in the 1950s and 1960s. For example, string a line of devices and you can make an instant shipping canal."

    See "Project Plowshare".
  • not the Panama canal, which dates from the early part of this century, but a second canal nearby i think u mean?
  • to be fair to the chinese the russians and british have also sacrificed their soldier's lives to see the effects of nuclear weapons on man. states are wonderful eh?
  • First I am not from Kiev but I lived there for some time.
    Second it is not smart to consider that you mess a lot to get a lot more. Nuclear explosions are not the same as nuclear power plants. You don't see my point. I am no pacifist and accept the use of nuclear weapons in certain cases. However I perfectly know that after making some mess with a nuclear bomb you get a whole radioactive waste field for tens or hundreds of years. Hiroshima & Nagasaki took years to get cleaned. Nevada is till now a waste field and the place takes tens of years to get cleaned. Bikini is till now a place "under question" because some places are still radioactive. But if you think this is all BS than take a trip to Lake Death in Semipalatinsk and drink a cup of water on my health.

    What is dangerous here is that the use of a nuclear device will obligatory leave waste. This waste will be washed out by this new dam and fall over all Southeastern Asia. To avoid this you need to make a serious cleanup that may last tens of years. I don't think chinese will have the pacience to do this, first blow and then wait 30-40 years to build the dam.

    And what considers people at my local university... Well I'm sitting right in the place where one of the first medical labs for radiation studies was created. The lab moved but people remember why it was formed... Part of the Soviet A-Bomb was planned/tested a few hundreds of meters from here... That's for the troll...

  • 1 roentgen: the intensity of gamma radiation that will deposit 100 erg/cm2 in dry air.
    this unit is really only used for X-rays. All radiation can be measured in rads. 1 roentgen of gamma radiation = 1 rad.

    Rads are a measure of energy deposited.
    Rem is a unit of biological damage. Different kinds of radiation will cause different ammounts of damage to a person's cells even if they deposit the same amount of energy in the body. A quality factor is used to convert rad to rem.

    gamma: 1
    fast neutrons/beta: 2
    thermal neutrons: 10
    alpha: 20

    most people get 50 to 200 millirem from natural background sources every year. 30 R/hr is a very unhealthy level to be in for very long. For a comparison, the Navy considers 100 mR/hr a high radiation area.
  • I agree that gammas will always be there, but as long as you are inside a building during the blast, you are pretty much safe from them. High energy alphas have a range of a few centimeters in air and are stopped by the dead layers in your outer skin. Betas have a range of of several (~10) meters in air and are also stopped by clothes and skin. As I said if you happen to eat food that has byproduct isotopes in it, it's bad. For example milk has some Strontium-90 in it which came about during atmospheric testing of fission devices, fallout fell to the ground, cows ate the grass, Sr-90 got into the milk. It's still around because of its long half life. Also, the thing you were exposed to was not necessarily radioactive. It could have been some sort of other higly toxic substance, because a piece of radioactive material is unlikely to emit that strongly if it was just sitting there, because if it was it would take very little time for it to stop (because of decay).
  • There was also a project for the development of an intercontinental nuclear weapons delivery system (read "missile") powered by a nuclear SCRAMjet. The idea was to use it to deliver several bombs at various targets and then zig-zag around the countryside spewing radiation until it ran out of fuel - extremly nasty.
  • uh read your chinese history again dude
  • Let's not forget the BOMARC, a surface-to-air nuclear weapon stationed here and there along
    the US's borders (Upstate NY was one place, somewhere in MN was another) designed to shoot
    straight out to the oncoming (Soviet) bombers, and *poof*. Even if it didn't get close
    enough to destroy the bombers, it would at least blind and irradiate the crews, pretty much
    ending the mission.

    IIRC, they were removed from service in the 70's sometime, and some ended up at Vandenberg
    AFB as radar calibration and target drones.

    --Ben
  • Yep, the Soviets made several gas and oil reservoirs for cities in the far east and southcentral regions of the S.U. through nuclear explosions. In present-day Kazakhstan, they built several *drinking* water reservoirs by detonating small devices a small distance under the ground, resulting in the creation of a large crater at the surface. A good source for info on nukes in civil engineering is the IAEA's bibliography booklet "Peaceful Uses of Atomic Explosions." (gosh that is a paradoxical sentence.) It's available at most UN Records Depositories (i.e. university law libraries). If you can't find it, the University of Wisconsin Physics Library has one for sure!
  • In the novel Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, they ground-launched an Orion spacecraft. The risk was justified, as they were trying to get up into space where they could fight the aliens that had taken over Earth -- but it did a number on Seattle in the process.

  • First of all, nukes are expensive, as is a trip to the moon. But...

    The US Air Force did have plans to nuke the moon. [observer.co.uk]

    Still, it seems like a lot of hassle to make a useless hole. The engineering might also be a bit different, reducing the experimental value. Obviously the gravity is much lower. And, would the lack of umpteen tons of air sitting on top of the area make a difference?

  • The Genie (AIR-2) had a 1.5 KT W-25 atomic warhead. It was live fired in 1957 and 4-5 engineers and a film guy from the Army Unit that did all the atomic bomb filming stood right under it as it was command detonated at 19,000. Shot John of operation Plumbob. It was deployed on the F-101, F-89, F-106, and F-102. The Canadian Air Force also deployed them on CF-101s until the 1980s.

    Falcon (AIM-26A) had a .5 KT W-54 warhead. That Air to Air missile that was in service before the Sparrow. Most had a conventional warhead but it could be fitted with the nuke if need be.

    Nike Hercules (SAM) - Carried a 20KT W-31 warhead

    Talos (SAM) - carried a 5KT W-30 warhead

    BOMARC (SAM) - carried a 7-10 KT W-40 warhead - US and Canada

    Terrier (SAM) - carried a 1KT W-45-0 warhead

    Spartan and Sprint - nuclear tipped ABMs. Sprint was really neat. It could acclerate from 0 to 3,200 feet/sec.

    The US Navy also had a number of anti-submarine nukes like the ASROC or the Sea Lance.
  • Finally someone has an idea for a worthwhile tourist attraction!
    I'll pay to view the blast!

  • Re:Hmm (Score:1)

    by don.g ( 6394 )
    Simple, really: it's not their country... they want to blow up bits of Tibet, not China.

    --
  • ...especially after they say "oops, we didn't MEAN to nuke that heavily-populated city, hehehe!"

    I'm surprised they would even consider trying something like this.
  • rural China. The point he is trying to make is that they are using Tibet as a guinea pig. I dont know if I agree with it, but it might be a partial explanation.

  • ...are you a fan of Ozric Tentacles? If not, you're probably really confused right now. :)
  • Gaffe!

    I meant the expansion or replacement of the Panama Canal. Either Popular Science or Popular Mechanics is where I first saw it as a kid, and I've seen other variations of it since. 1960's or later, but not later than the end of Reagan (and the death of the "Nukes are Safe" era).

    Other posters here have corrected me. The newer route was going through some other area between North and South America. The idea was to bury nukes, then use them to push huge volumes of earth up and out of the way.
  • Moderate that @%#^ post down!
  • "I've always wondered why nobody has ever actually used nuclear explosives in civil engineering projects, if (and this is a BIG if) the blasts can be made reasonably radiologically clean."

    it amazes me a little that someone talks about "radiological clean" blasts. There are no radiological clean nuclear blasts in nature and it is stupid to claim such thing.

    The poster to whom you refer said reasonably clean, and made it a hypothetical. It'd be fine if it only produced a little residual radiation, since small amounts of radiation are good for you and might even reduce the local cancer risk. See any book or study on radiation hormesis; radiation is one of the many things that are deady in high doses but beneficial in low doses.

    Here's the medical definition of hormesis [graylab.ac.uk].

    Here's a Japanese study [denken.or.jp] verifying radiation hormesis in laboratory animals.

    Here's a page [wpi.edu] on radiation hormesis in humans.

  • China has shown a remarkable ability to totally ignore environmental concerns with their grandiose projects; the Three Gorges dam for example, is an environmental nightmare.
    --
  • Yep. The NIKE series of anti-aircraft missles were usually nuclear-tipped. Remember, these were built at the dawn, pre-dawn really, of the solid state age, and guidance systems were in their infancy.

    Even smaller nulcear weapons were developed! A few weeks ago I was doing an on-line search for information on the Nike-X system, and the Sprint missle in particular. I found, in addition to what I was looking for, notes on nuclear MORTAR SHELLS! Imagine a ten-pound shell with the power of Timothy McViegh's bomb!

    Jeff

  • uh read your chinese history again dude

    Hmm, OK.

    http://www.cernet.com/beijing/GreatWall.html:

    "It was intended by the early emperors of China to serve as a barrier against the marauding nomads of the barbarial North. Although it failed to keep out the Mongols it did establish a border within which the Chinese developed their distinctive civilization."

    I realize they didn't simply walk around it, I was just kidding around about the details... the main point of my comment was quoting the geologist who claimed their irrigation tunnel was running dry before it's even started.

  • What's the smallest possible size for a nuke?
  • If you are going to quote Zaphod (or Douglas Adams), please have the courtesy to credit the quote. BTW, that is probably my favorite line in the whole 5 book trilogy :)

    Enigma
    .sigless


    Enigma
  • Back in the '50s I believe it was, the united States did experimental research in this area. The effort was called Project Ploughshare. Below ground work and above ground may have been explored back then. The work eventually stopped due to the fact that everything near the blast area was highly radioactive.
  • I'm aware of regular shaped charges, and to my understanding they rely on the delay time of the explosive wave front, something inherent in the chemical process. I believe that there is also something to do with the concentration of a shaped charge producing a superhot tongue of flame that does some of the work. I'd expect that the timeframe for a nuclear explosives wavefront propogation is much shorter, so I'd expect such a device to be pretty tricky to build.(In other words you wouldn't catch me standing "behind" one...;*)

    As you mention I understand most shaped charges are used to punch holes through an intervening barrier, and thus relying on the acoustic shockwave to blow a "scab" off the other side of the material, so I wonder just what effect a shaped charge has against a truly massive and thick object, but then I'm not an explosives expert so I have no way of knowing.(I've read/heard accounts where they describe what happens inside a tank that gets hit by a shaped charge that doesn't penetrate the armor, but instead blows a chunk off the inside of the armor... quite messy.)

    While they might get some better efficiency from shaped nuclear explosives, which you mention are still apparently theoretical, I still doubt that they could do this in one shot, in other words there would still have to be several nukes used and so my arguments about repairing damage done by later nukes are probably still valid. An additional thought comes to mind if they are using shaped nukes; wouldn't the explosion front tend to follow the weakest/lowest melting point rock, which might not be the same direction as you want the explosion to go?

  • Yes you're right, states are just marvelous!

    However I believe the scale was a bit different. I think the documentary movie that came out just a hear or two showed some of the initial stupidities on all sides. And while I don't consider most "Western" nuclear nations "perfect", I think they would be way more concerned with the bad PR of having mining engineers irradiated than China seems to be. After all China is still trying very hard to stop anyone publishing anything about human rights violations... so I'm a bit more concerned about the shoddy treatment that their folks might receive.

  • yes, the Free Tibet movement would be most upset. Not to mention the rest of the Indian subcontinent that is dependant on the runoff.

    this is truly an abomination against the gods and nature. It is said that the chinese people have many hells. I condemn the chinese government to experience each of them.

  • MAD (Score:1)

    by astar ( 203020 )
    Leaving aside the technical virtues or defects, which are only engineering issues after all, I think the failure of the Atoms for Peace program had more to do with its policy incompatibility with MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), than the above mentioned tech attributes. For instance, if nukes were generally useful, then you would have a hard time playing non-proliferation policies out. MAD was an evil idea to start with and its persistence has more to do with preserving our empire than with reasonable policy imperatives. China never bought into MAD, never bought into nuclear non-proliferation, and perhaps its leadership is in some dimensions more sane than ours. I would cite aspects of the response of our elite to Reagan's much aligned "Strategic Defense Initiative" which at the root was an attempt by Reagan and others to end MAD. I would contrast this with the Chinese leadership committment to great development projects, analogous to for instance, our development of a transcontinental railroad among many others. Obviously, they will consider use of new engineering techniques. There will be dangerous problems. It is well to remember both that once upon a time in our country, bridges regularly fell down, and that now they do not.

  • You can read about this in a fairly good book by Dan Neil, The Firecracker Boys [amazon.com]. An interesting look at our attempts to move beyond civil engineering and into Geographical Engineering.

  • Of course it would be in Tibet... (Score:3)

    by AdeBaumann ( 126557 ) on Saturday October 21, 2000 @11:21PM (#685834) Homepage
    Obviusly, the Chinese aren't completely sure it's a good idea either... Otherwise, why would they do it in Tibet instead of their... umm... "mainland"?
    I wonder what international "free Tibet" movement will say to this.
  • There will be no fallout from a high air blast. By _definition_, "fallout" is material swept up into the fireball which then "falls out" of the blast. Fallout can only occur when the blast is low enough for material to be swept up into the fireball, and high air blasts are, again by definition, too high for this to be significant.

    FG Powers plane was brought down by conventional explosives. He survived the blast and was eventually swapped for a Soviet spy.

    Other than that, you're correct. The main idea is that you don't have to score a direct hit to bring down the bomber. You just gotta be close. As they say, Close enough for atom bombs or hand grenades.
  • The craters--intended for water storage or for construction--were so radioactive that they never went forward with the program beyond the test site.

    Not quite. Plowshare [fortlewis.edu] was killed by public opinon, and a lack of overriding need. If the US really needed to build a great canal tomrow, you bet this would be on the table. Of course, the irrational opposition would be there too.

    People die digging canals but they don't have to. Weigh it up.

    Oh my God, a stray alpha particle! Get a rope! There are acceptable levels of exposure. It's a shame that the rules are guided by people who are ignorant of

  • Anybody else remember that movie, Seven Half-Lifes in Tibet? :)
  • This is pretty close to the Japanese way of hunting whales for 'research' and later on marketing the meat. Now China can legitimately export the 'dam-building' technology to the 'rogue nations'.

  • I'm not a weapons designer, but to my knowledge, all current thermonuclear packages require an initiator stage consisting of 1+ "ordinary" nuclear devices (U-235 or plutonium squeeze devices). So while the main stage may not kick out a lot of (long-term) radiation, you can bet your bottom dollar the initiator device(s) will.

    The earliest H-bombs got over two-thirds of their output from fission. The reaction is in three phases. First a relatively small fission bomb, inside the main bomb casing, releases X-rays which excite a medium (plastic?) to plasma; this medium is arranged as a cylinder around an inner "pusher" cylinder of U-238 (depleted uranium, from which the more readily fissionable U-235 has been separated). As the cylinder of X-ray absorption medium becomes plasma it reradiates X-rays which vaporize the outer surface of the "pusher" cylinder; the "pusher" cylinder collapses inward, compressing another cylinder nested inside containing fusion fuel (liquid deuterium on the first H-bomb, or lithium deuteride, much easier to handle as it does not require special cryogenic devices to keep it liquefied, on later ones). As the explosion progresses, the inner fusion-fuel cylinder collapses upon a rod of plutonium, the "sparkplug," compressing it to a critical mass. The central plutonium rod explodes, making a shock wave in the fusion fuel coming out from the radius of the bomb. Along the surface of that shock wave, the fusion fuel fuses, releasing helium, a flood of fast neutrons, and a great deal of energy. Those fast neutrons induce fission in the U-238 of the "pusher" cylinder. The critical mass of U-238 is > infinity, one can't get a bomb-like chain reaction in pure U-238 (in a reactor it is necessary to slow down the neutrons with a moderator like graphite or heavy water), but you can induce U-238 to fission at a bomb-like rate by flooding it with fast neutrons. Of the ten-and-a-half megaton yield of the first H-bomb, eight were contributed by fission in the U-238 "pusher." In terms of leaving radioactive waste, fusion is not clean - it emits a tremendous flood of neutrons, which when they irradiate matter in the vicinity of the explosion, turn stable nuclei into radioactive ones - but that U-238 fission leaves a tremendous residue of chemically exotic radioactive poisons.

    What I describe above is the old-style multi-megaton bomb that SAC stockpiled in the fifties to deliver with manned bombers. I'm looking at a picture of the Mark-17 bomb, which weighed twenty tons and had a yield of eleven megatons. With the advent of intercontinental ballistic missile and high-accuracy guidance systems, the U.S.A. switched over to larger numbers of smaller warheads; here is a picture of a Minuteman II "warhead bus," with three conical bombs of 350 kilotons (still, about twenty times the power of the bombs which flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki). These bombs are 5.9 feet long and 21 inches in diameter at the wide end, which works out to about five cubic feet total. If their specific gravity is ten, then they weigh about a ton and a half each. There may be fundamental technical changes in the design of these bombs which the general public is not allowed to know; I couldn't estimate what fraction of their output, if any, is attributable to that third-stage U238 + n reaction.

    These technical details and pictures are in a best-selling book by Richard Rhodes titled Dark Sun. Hey FBI! Yo, I'm not Chinese! So I hope this means that I don't have to expect to spend the best part of the next year shackled in solitary confinement, for "revealing" to "rogue states" information accessible in any well-stocked university library. Gee, I sure hope so. I mean, this election campaign's nearly over anyway, so we can cut the bullshit until the next time it becomes necessary to distract the voters with a phony nuke-spy panic.

    Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

  • I wonder how long it will be before we start seeing experimental military technology such as beam weapons (lasers and stuff) being used for civil engineering purposes. That could be really cool, like having a laser drill to make deep holes in the earth and stuff like that.
  • And lets extend your logic a bit further:
  • ...they aren't planning to use above ground explosions.

    PROTESTERS- "Free Tibet!"

    CHINA- "Sorry guys, we got rid of it Thursday"
  • Uh, because that's where the water is? Besides, they've already done it (to a supprising amount of rural damage) throughout the rest of China. Why leave Tibet out of the fun?
  • Granted rights in China are very poor, but the American attitude that everybody should have guns incase you need to start blowing up the government doesn't have much fact behind it.
    Was the people's recent uprising against Sloberdan M. done with guns? Or just with the support of all the people?

    On the other hand, there was an uprising against the government with guns, in Fiji. Where a dicriminated ethenicity was able to be taken out of government by a gun weilding mob.

    Other than the American revolution (which was about taxes not rights) little good politics have been done with guns.

  • Background Info on Tibet (Score:3)

    by gnarly ( 133072 ) on Sunday October 22, 2000 @02:20AM (#685845) Homepage
    For those not familiar with the invasion and occupation [tibet.com] of the independent nation of Tibet, here are some useful web resources:

  • Re:small doses of radiation (Score:4)

    by Ektanoor ( 9949 ) on Sunday October 22, 2000 @02:38AM (#685846) Journal
    Once again I note:
    "there are no radiological clean _blasts_ in nature"

    A: Nuclear fission in an explosive device ALWAYS creates byproducts

    B: Do not compare controlled energy event with UNCONTROLLED one. An explosion, even from a petard is ALWAYS UNCONTROLLED within the radius of the event. You may try to control the limits of the explosion not the explosion itself. and on what concerns nuclear devices this becames more problematic, due to the fact you are dealing with atoms and making a large blow of energy.

    C: Nuclear blasts also IRRADIATE the environment through the whole spectre of light. So there can be several consequences, ranging from heat burns on living beings to formation of short-living isotopes. You may try to reach an "optimal" burn of the nuclear device. But what about the rest? Anyway you can't get rid off the gamma, alpha & beta rays.

    D: A nuclear device creates isotopes. Several of them. They will live a N time. This N time ranges from hours to thousands of years. They are not only dangerous because they irradiate soemthing. They are also dangerous because they decay and are consequently the ground for mutations. Mutations that may not happen with you or your children but which will appear on your granson or grandchild.

    E: Don't mess things between a controlled irradiation of humans/animals and such things as atomic weapons for military/engineering purposes. You stopped short here on claiming on small amounts are beneficial. Even some of the harshest levels of gamma rays are used to cure people with cancer. Levels that, if produced over the whole body, would give a few minutes/hours of life. Nearly enough to ask for the coffin, kiss your wife, and say bye to your kids...
  • The Chinese will not be insipid enough to actually use nuclear detonations to create this tunnel. Instead this is just a bargaining chip. Obviously, I'm not privy to the discussions regarding what China will get in in return for not using these nukes.

    However, while IANAD (I am not a diplomat) I would guess that it would be something along the lines of: "If we don't use nukes you agree to stop hassling us about our occupation of Tibet/This ecologically irresponsible dam/the MSG put into your General Tsao's Chicken last week at Panda Express." or something like that.

    Furthermore, I think this is also China's way of thumping its chest like an angry gorilla, reminding India and Taiwan of just how easily it can use their nuclear devices.

    Thats just my opinion, of course. Its always possible the Chinese leadership has gone completely batshit and will use them. :)

  • it is not clear from the context that 'gook' was meant as a racial epitath.

    I think you meant "epithet". I hope you didn't mean "epitath".If you really meant "epitath" then one of us needs a dictionary.

    Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
    Thought exists only as an abstraction

  • I'm quite sure is, "All generalizations are dangerous, even this one." -- Alexandre Dumas.

    Of course it's a translation, so there's no perfect english.

    Oink,
  • Large portion of a planned channel to divert some Russian northern river south WAS completed with nuclear explotions near Ural mountains !! Also, there were test to build gaz storage in Kazakhstan, and for mining in Siberia. It has been done - probably Chinese just bought off those russian experts..
  • And lets extend your logic a bit further: i) People of European descent have no claim on North American Land ii) The Isrealis have no right in Palestine iii) The Turks have no right to Istanbul All land has changed hands at some point in time, but that doesn't give the original inhabitants automatic rights to get it back.
  • For what it's worth, in the novel "Richter 10" by Mike McQuay and Arthur C. Clarke, they try to use nukes in a large engineering project. One guy wants to stop earthquakes (!) by fusing the tectonic plates with nuclear explosions deep, deep down where the blast won't do any damage to life on the surface. Quite the idea.
  • Well it's an good post but with that "News for Gooks..." bit, it should be scored as "5, Flamebait"

  • Why not the Moon? (Score:3)

    by rgmoore ( 133276 ) <glandauer@charter.net> on Sunday October 22, 2000 @08:07AM (#685854) Homepage
    What I wonder is why noone has done this on the moon yet. After venting the space it would make an ideal sealed container for colonization projects. If we had done this during some of the Apollo missions (or at least during that era) the caverns created would have had 30+ years to vent already.

    There would be some practical problems, too. The most important is that in order to get one of these nice deep bubbles, you need to get the nuclear explosive deep enough under ground that it won't blow the top off your new chamber. That means a moderately large drilling project; at the very least you're going to have to make a hole 100+ meters deep to put the nuke in. There was no way that the Appolo missions could have brought along enough equipment to do that kind of drilling. The were just barely able to get to the Moon and back, so dragging along a few tons of drilling equipment was pretty much out of the question.

    There were obviously some political issues, too. For one thing, even if they could get by the issue of detonating a nuke in space, this would have looked like an American declaration of interest in colonizing the Moon. That's understandable because it would have been. That probably wouldn't have sat well during the depths of the cold war. Possibly more important, as you correctly point out this is a long term project; you aren't just going to do your nuclear excavation one day and move in the next. It's going to take a decade or two for the radiation to fall to acceptable levels, and I've never particularly noticed the U.S. government to be particularly competent at planning beyond the next presidential election, much less the next decade.

  • Naughty Chinese, tell them to use a nuke in Shanghai.... Imagine...... a Beowulf Cluster of, what else, Slashdot! Seriously, I know this is off-topic, but I have uncovered another slashdot mirror! Yes, it's true, you can find it here Slashdot Mirror [lunateks.com].
  • Nuclear excavation (at least on a planet with a biosphere) is in my "probably a bad idea" category. But there are two others I categorize as smart and dumb, respectively.

    I give the "Homer Simpson award for dumb nuclear projects" to the one that would have disposed of nuclear waste by mixing it with paving material in concentrations capable of producing significant heat, and using it to pave roads in the northern tier of states. The object being to create superhighways that didn't need plowing in the winter.

    On the other side: suitably encapsulating a low-level alpha or beta emitter with a flourescent material. Imagine a fluorescent light tube that didn't need electricity and lasted decades or longer. (Now imagine one that doesn't break. B-) )

    The latter was apparently researched. It would have been as safe as smoke detectors - individually. (That still might not have been good enough: The "benefit" side of the cost/benefit ratio is higher for smoke detectors than for lamps.) Unfortunately, working in a warehouse full of them - at least with the original design - would have been quite another matter.
  • "Time for you people to seriously think about this or soon this will be News for Gooks. Stuff that mutters."
    I thought that we in America had made at least a little progress away from seeing asians as the "yellow peril" I guess not.

    The original poster appears to be from the former Soviet Union, not America. Furthermore it is not clear from the context that 'gook' was meant as a racial epitath. More likely the poster was groping for a generalized derogatory term and didn't realized the racial connotations.

    Think before you react.

  • Tritium releases low-energy beta particles as it decays. A beta particle is an electron -- no different from normal electrons other than its source. Low-energy beta particles can be shielded by skin, paper, or 6mm of air.

    Tritium is already used in iso-luminence products, usually taking the form of EXIT signs and aisle marker lights in movie theaters. No batteries, no wires, easy installation.

    Tritium has a half-life of ~12.6 years IIRC, so your EXIT sign will be half as bright every ~12.6 years. Lots of informative websites on this. Simply type in *tritium exit* and you'll get a bunch of good hits (though they might be a little weak on the science, since most of the sites are wholesalers selling iso-lights).

    Here's a decent science intro site on Tritium:
    Brookhaven National Laboratory: Introduction to Tritium and Radioactivity [bnl.gov].

    One last thing: I suspect that if radiation exposure standards were lower, tritium isoluminent products could be made for less money, perhaps cheap enough to allow their ubiquitous spread through society and reducing night-time/low-light accidents to a point where the safety they provide would outweigh radiation dangers. Example, clothes would be made with isoluminent things sown into them -- when you are driving your car or riding your bike around at night, every ped/biker out there with you would be glowing. Much safer IMO!

    (Free the tritium!)
    -Zoyd
  • It was indeed Project Plowshare. They fired a lot of test shots in Nevada. One of the most famous is the Sedan crater:

    http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/trinity/article s/part2.html

    I actually visited this crater on a tour of the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. It was one of the most amazing things on a mind-blowing tour. (Yes, you can go on a tour. Just call their public affairs office and represent your club or whatever. You too can stand 1000' from ground zero at an above-ground test, or look into the Sedan crater.)

    The guys giving the tour -- retirees who likes to come back and play tour guide -- had a LOT of cool stories, and even more that they couldn't tell us because they are still secret. They did mention that Project Plowshare had tested a multiple-detonation channel-digging project. We didn't get to see that... I have been trying for years to find photos, but no luck.
  • The Yugoslav people are remarkably well-armed compared to most other societies. It's notable that many of the worst scenes of armed repression have been against UNARMED people; the fact that both sides were armed may well have AVOIDED mass bloodshed due to the ambiguity of the outcome at the personal level (namely, soldiers/police knowing they CANNOT attack with impunity...).
  • I'm not surprised. The U.S. seriously considered using buried nukes to build/expand the Panama canal. Luckily, cooler heads prevailed.
  • "uhm the sun?"
    Cool. You don't need the Ozone layer. You don't even need the atmosphere maybe...

    well what the hell were you touching? you dont get burns like that from air contamination.

    Laying on the sand... Nothing more than laying on the sand near the Dnepr river on a hot Summer Sun. When the sunburn didn't go after two weeks I got worried. And got the happy news. The place was highly radioactive and only then people noted it. One friend got it over a larger portion of the body and two others had it on the legs. As far as I know no one suffered from it longer than a year.

  • Re:The reason is simple (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The principle fusion reaction is d+d -> 3He + n. The neutron then gets captured by surrounding material activating it. Short half-life products are irrelevant (they decay quickly), but long half-life components will indeed be radioactive.
  • I was under the impression that the waste radioactive material from a nuke detonation was actually reasonably small, and sufficient amount of material remains within about 400m of the detonation site, but that the problems really stem from the shockwave, the EMP generated, and the other high speed particles (X, Gamma)-rays generatd?


    How every version of MICROS~1 Windows(TM) comes to exist.
  • I would like to add a link to this overall discussion to an article by Zbigniew Jaworowski that appeared in a recent "Physics Today" issue.

    http://www.riskworld.com/Nreports/1999/jaworowski/ NR99aa01.htm

    I personally think it will help folks baseline their general understanding of some of the scientific issues regarding radiation, risks, and ethics. [Yes - there is a relationship between the rhetoric of the radiation debate and ethics]

    This read should follow well the link from Zoyd above regarding the history of radiation limits by J. Samuel Walker.

    I would also like folks to refer to comments posted elsewhere (sorry - I don't know how to do links yet) by MikeLRoy

    "Project Plowshare . . . . by MikeLRoy on Sunday October 22, @05:35AM EDT (#30). . . . . Back in the laste '50, when nuclear power was still all "new and wonderful", the US Government embarked on Project Plowshare, with the goal of using atomic and thermonuclear weapons for the purpose of digging.


    For those trying to keep with the rhetoric on where the "truth" is in this complicated discussion surrounding radiation, risk, environment and regulatory issues, it is often very difficult to understand enough background to base a decision. Even the fairly straightforward issue of a simple risk analysis [based as it can be on mathematics and the experiences of human life] is a tough one and is often performed at such an unconscious level that we folks don't even perceive we are evaluating risks. For instance - some folks drive hundreds of miles to remote locations to protest the dangers of nuclear power - BUT those same folks don't for an instant consider the "risk" of the drive, the complete chain of "pollution and dependance (think Middle East)" that goes into filling their tanks, or the fact that the power plant they are going to protest at is about the only really "green" power source they will ever see in their lifetimes. All that they are are considering on their journey is the rhetoric of activism that they have embraced from some anti-environmental group with a political agenda. [ for the doubters - follow the money from your donations - and follow the scientific reasoning of the anti-environmental rhetoric]

    Damn - pay particular attention to what Zoyd says, the nuclear power plant they are protesting at can even burn Nuclear Weapons into electricity, and if that is not a sword vigorously beaten into a ploughshare I don't know what is. As Zoyd further states,
    It's use has been explored by the U.S., but, obviously, they decided against it. There are some concerns about radioactive fallout, but I believe they are overblown -- the risks would be overshadowed by the rewards.


    I believe that in the case of using nuclear explosions to dig channels, Zoyd is possibly correct. The United States exerted considerable effort to make "clean" bombs, partly because they did not want to crap up the environment of a potential target and partly because of Project Plowshares' Civil Engineering uses (why just nuke someplace if you can't go there and use it somehow, plus folks eventually have to live there again . . . . someday).....

    But, and it is a really big "but" here, imagine the value to commerce and culture if you could somehow construct a sea level passage between say the Pacific and the Atlantic, a really wide one. Especially, if you didn't have to lose all of those workers to malaria and accidents making this sea level passage. The risk analysis for this one would have been interesting to develop, potential loss of life to slight increase in background radiation versus malaria deaths and heightened accident rate for lock operation over - say about 100 years of operation....Hmmmmmm.

    But all of this is - of course - not even on the table to discuss since we have so politicized, and emotionalized the rhetoric of all things radiation that a reasoned discourse is all but impossible.

  • While I am strongly against the occupation of Tibet by the PRC I would like to add some colour to this: I would like to point out that the regime that the Chinese replaced was almost as repressive. So much for Buddhist harmony.

    Elgon
  • uh. i'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that you and your friend burned yourselves on the sand which was being heated by the "hot summer sun". sand can easily reach over 150C on a summer day, easily capable of producing nasty burns. the nuclear radiation needed to give you the burns youre talking about would have to be UNBELIEVEABLY high for a public beach and you would've almost certainly noticed other effects at the dosage necissary to create burns like that; notably hair falling out, nausea-puking your guts out, and diahreaa. you did not burn yourself on "radioactive sand" you burned yourself on hot sand.

  • false. the pricipal fusion reaction is D+T=He+N+energy, the Tritium is created in situ in the bomb from Neutron irradiation of Lithium Duteride. The Li absorbs a neutron and decomposes into Tritium via alpha emission. The tremendous x-ray photon pressure/temperature then initiates the D+T reaction.

  • >...fusion bombs are always ignited with a fission primer

    True, but I remember reading about the Russians trying to develop a "pure fusion" bomb with something called red mecury (I think).

    It's a shame they didn't succeed (or a least didn't release the technology) as large construction projects utilizing H-bombs is an interesting idea, but it's not much use if you irradiate the area while doing so. I guess it's just too difficult to get enough power out of chemical explosives
  • I did my BS in math at UCD. Edward Teller had a joint appointment at Berkeley and Davis, so he used to have a seminar at Davis. I remember one session where he talked about his ideas for civilian uses of nuclear explosions. They had to be specific projects where a very large underground explosion would be useful.

    Later, I worked on one of the ballistic missile defense systems, Site Defense. SD and its predecessors used nuclear kill at low altitude. Originally, these systems were intended for city defense, but Congress was somehow bothered by the use of dozens of small nuclear bursts to defend a city against incoming reentry vehicles. Something about collateral damage.

    If you've ever played that video game where you used missiles to defend against an attack from space, it has an interesting background. It was originally written by a friend for the Commodor Pet as a serious study of battlespace management in ballistic missile defense, based on a study I did soon after I left grad school and started work.

  • If they need a site to do more tests.... (Score:3)

    by Fross ( 83754 ) on Sunday October 22, 2000 @08:51AM (#685883)
    i suggest Redmond, WA. ;)

  • My proposed new moderator requirement:

    All Slashdot moderators should have taken at least one junior-high-school course in any subject except P.E.

    Now, I know this is going to sound hard, but, moderators, when you are moderating, please attempt to read and understand the candidate post. Troxey was trying hard here to let you know he was not intending to be informative or interesting. In other words, the post was...a joke. It was intended to test the moderation system. Can you dig it? Can you dig what it means when a poster includes a phrase like, "But, and it is a really big "but" here..."?

    The word "rhetoric" appears five times. Hello?!? Is anyone in there inside that moderator head?!? Have you ever taken an essay exam unprepared, but decided, "What the heck. It can't hurt to try and fake it." Did you notice any similarities between what you wrote on your faked exam and what troxey wrote here? Have you ever read a peanut's strip? Marcie always B.S.s her way through essay exams. Does it remind you of something? Hmmm?!?

    One more question: How is cannabis this time of year? It's good, isn't it?

  • The United States also tried using nukes for civil purposes. The "plowshares" program tried using atomic weapons for excavation at the Nuclear Testing site in Groom Lake, Nevada.

    The craters--intended for water storage or for construction--were so radioactive that they never went forward with the program beyond the test site.

    Apparently the Soviets actually made some reservoirs with their bombs.

    Regarding your last statement...Slashdot is going downhill. There are a lot of kiddies here who are quick to fly off the handle, or take some minor point that is insignifigant to the argument of a discussion and use it to flame a poster.

  • They'll be bringing down the mountain... (Score:3)

    by Tinker23 ( 241434 ) on Sunday October 22, 2000 @09:13AM (#685902)
    When she blows...

    Aside from all the water and associated political issues, which are not exactly small, just how big of a tunnel are they wanting to burrow through the mountain? Does anyone know what the geological strata are, ie. is the mountain made of granite?

    From my understanding nuclear explosions such as that used by Project Plowshare are great at moving earth but even better at fracturing rock. So when they cutting that tunnel, just how are they going to avoid creating a huge fault line right through the mountain, let alone the possibility of enlarging any existing faults? And I also not that it sounds like this tunnel is going to be slanted... just where is the mountain going to slide to? (Hmmm, does this count as increasing the boundaries of Tibet? ;*} When they excavated Cheyenne mountain for NORAD with regular explosives they had to bolt the core of the mountain back together. Just how much of Mount Namcha Barwa are they going to have to bolt back together?

    And they're talking about building a 10 mile long tunnel with nukes? Which means that they're going to have to light off, say 10 small nukes to excavate the tunnel? And just how are they going to secure already excavated tunnel sections against the next, and all the subsequent nuclear blasts and how many million degree plasma? Don't forget that the explosion is going follow the path of least resistance, which is going to be straight out the already bored tunnel. So doesn't that mean that you're going to have how many metric tonnes of rock forcing their way down the already bored tunnel sections, at how many kilo's an second, neatly scouring off any anchoring bolts, shotcrete or ferrocement reinforcing that you've got...? So each time they light one off, they're going to have to re-inspect or resecure how much of the already bored tunnel?

    If they want any precision, they're probablly going to have to go to smaller devices, which usually means that they're going to be dirtier(in the nuclear sense), especially in closed confines. Think of the neutron pulse that the surrounding rock is going to recieve. Wanna bet that there's going to be increased radioactivity? Sure you do...

    And just who are they going to convince to go work in the radioactive, dangerously fractured tunnels? Gee, I sure wouldn't want to be the ones drafted to go down there, not for several thousand years. But then of course they could always just grab a few thousand Tibetans or radiation ignorant Chinese villagers and get them to do the dirty work, after all it wouldn't out of line with their human rights policies...After all wasn't this the same government that after lighting off a test nuke, had troops go charging into the test area with only gas masks? What's a few thousand dead or dying when you've got how many billion to water?

    This whole idea of theirs is foolish from several dozen angles, I sure hope it doesn't go through. If they start this I wouldn't be surprised to see another war start... between China and India, not that China wouldn't mind the additional territory.

    The international community should have stopped them from invading Tibet a long time ago, now they're just paying the piper..

  • "Americans invariably do the right thing. After all, they have tried every other alternative" - Churchill
  • Unless Hollywood has lied to me (and they never have before), we could acomplish the moon excavation mission with a week's planning. We send Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck up to the moon with a nuke, keep Billy Bob Thornton back on the ground (with beeskits and mustard), and have Liv Tyler cry and look hot the whole time. They can dig that hole in like 4 hours and have time left over for witty banter.

    -B
  • Digging a new Panama Canal with nuclear bombs. Blasting out an instant harbour. Launching a giant rocket with nuclear explosions. Science fiction? No. Actual plans.


    Between 1957 and 1988, American and Soviet scientists used nuclear bombs in more than 150 civilian engineering experiments around the world.

    (From the N ature of Things website [tv.cbc.ca].)

    There was an episode of the Nature of Things a couple of weeks ago called "Nuclear Dyanamite" about proposed and actual uses of nuclear bombs for civil engineering projects. Unfortunately my local CBC affliate has decided to run Walker, Texas Ranger instead of this show this season so I wasn't able to see this episode. I believe the show is also seen in the U.S. on PBS. Check your local listings.

    Trickster Coyote
    Even illusions are real.

  • Nuclear explosives for Interstate highways (Score:4)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Sunday October 22, 2000 @09:53AM (#685911) Homepage
    Back in 1964, the California State Division of Highways seriously considered using nuclear explosives. The plan was to use 22 nuclear devices to help punch I-40 through the mountains between Barstow and Needles. Total planned yield was 1730 kilotons. The devices were to be emplaced in 30" diameter holes 340 to 780 feet in depth drilled into granite, with sand or pea gravel filled in after installing the bombs. It was expected that within four days after the explosions, workers could enter the site and start work on the highway.

    The basic idea was that the radiation would mostly be contained inside the debris cone. Previous nuclear tests indicated that would happen. By modern standards, the release of radiation would have been unacceptable, but in the era of above-ground nuclear testing, this would have been considered a modest level of contamination.

    Ref: 1964, "Engineering with Nuclear Explosives", Proceedings of the Third Plowshare Symposium, TID-7695, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Division of Technical Information. (Available from NTIS)

  • I've always wondered why nobody has ever actually used nuclear explosives in civil engineering projects....

    The russians used nuclear detonations to help change the path of a river, and on some other civil engineering progects. Some years ago there was an article in either Nature, or New Scientist that detailed what the russians did, and what the result were years later.

  • Dnepr sands, in that place were irradiating the equivalent of 30 roentgens/hour. That's how the doctor we talked with "translated" for most of us the level of radiation. Usually such types of radiation are measured with other units. Roentgensas far as I know are a measure of intensity of elctromagnetic rays but most people don't understand Beckerels & other stuff so he told us this way. - Measure was taken in place by a special team of the Medical Institute at Kiev.

    The effect was much like the one you get on a 1 degree fireburn. After a few days, if I didn't touch the burn, skin forms something that looks like snakeskin. A pass of the hand through it drops the whole skin and I got back on the same reddish/pinkish area I had from start. It does not depend on time, few hours or days and I got the same. It was quite painful and sometimes it glued to my clothes (the thing layed on my upper limb, so I had to hold up). Meanwhile, around the burn, I had small deep wounds that didn't heal at all. These wounds were the last that disappeared. No medications connected to fireburns did help. Covering the area with plasters or equivalent produced quite painful results (it produced a lot of lymphatic moisture & blood). The thing started to recede by itself and after six monthes it ended. For nearly two years this area continued to produce a funny skin. I just pick it up and get a 3-4 square centimeters of skin out of my body. Now I have nothing special except that capilars grow a little weird there (they keep growing under the skin). The initial affected area was nearly 5 square centimeters.

  • FYI, the anti-aircraft missile was called the Genie, and was meant to be carried by the F-102 or the F-106 (it may be one or the other, or both, I forget). I remember seeing a picture of some of the workers on the project standing at "ground zero" during a test. I'd be curious to see how they fared over the years. Fallout probably wouldn't be much of a problem with the Genie since the explosions would have been at high altitude. EMP might be another matter.

    Some additional devices were a nuclear howitzer meant to destroy Red Army armored columns (just be sure the shells don't land short...) and spacecraft propulsion. I think that project was called Orion (don't hold me to that) and the idea was to toss out one small nuke after another from the back of the spacecraft, using the kick from each detonation to gain velocity.
  • Correct, maybe I didn't differ them quite well in the text. Beta & Alphas are called rays because they are emitted at high velocities. In this point they look similar to light. Besides they were found in a time when people still didn't make big differences between particles and light. If you take a look, a lot of people talk about gamma & beta rays. Betas are nothing more than electrons at high velocity. Alpha, as far as I remember are helium nuclei.

    You are not correct abou inhaling them. The danger of these particles is on the fact that they are launched at very high velocities. And so their energy becomes quite high. You are correct that clothes may stop them. But I wouldn't risk...

    On what concerns "you can make a device". I don't think so. As far as I remember alphas are one of the main actors on the first levels of fission. Air is mostly enough to stop their path beyond a certain radius. Betas are usually originated by the interaction of air with gamma rays. Yes I could be really mistaken here because I studied this 15 years ago. But as far as I remember, while you can get rid of alpha the same doesn't go for beta and gamma rays.

  • Project Chariot (Score:5)

    by keil ( 83681 ) on Saturday October 21, 2000 @11:30PM (#685926)
    The U.S. gave up on a project to blast a harbor into park of Alaska using nuclear explosives.

    http://arcticcircle.uconn.edu/VirtualClassroom/Cha riot/chariotindex4.html [uconn.edu]

  • Re:U.S Wanted to build Panama Canal This Way (Score:3)

    by dvdeug ( 5033 ) <dvdeug&email,ro> on Sunday October 22, 2000 @10:00AM (#685930)
    That would be news, to the rest of the world, who believe that the U.S. only had nukes after ~1943, not back in 1904 when the Panama Canal was built.

  • It's called nuclear excavation (Score:3)

    by Zoyd ( 13778 ) on Saturday October 21, 2000 @11:35PM (#685931)
    IIRC, it's been used by the USSR to help make a reservoir.

    It's use has been explored by the U.S., but, obviously, they decided against it.

    There are some concerns about radioactive fallout, but I believe they are overblown -- the risks would be overshadowed by the rewards.

    The problem is, limits for radiation exposure are too low. Coincidentally, there is a new book out on the history of radiation limits: Permissible Dose: A History of Radiation Protection in the Twentieth Century [amazon.com], by J. Samuel Walker. I haven't read it, but I know Walker is an outspoken critic of current radiation policy and I know he knows his stuff.

    Unbiased it won't be, but this book is almost guaranteed to give you an education.

  • A possible Indian "Ahem." (Score:4)

    by Apuleius ( 6901 ) on Saturday October 21, 2000 @11:35PM (#685933) Journal
    Dear Zhang:

    We note with great interest that you have revived your program to divert waters from the Brahmaputra River. We note with similar interest that your Three Gorges Dam is nearing completion. You may care to note our recent success in joining the nuclear club. Allow me to explain how these are related:

    Assuming your diversion project even works without a hitch, we have grave reasons to be displeased with it. Although Assam and Bangladesh usually do not lack for water, they will suffer several adverse consequences: you plan to retain these waters during dry spells and let them spill in their original course during we spells. This lets you stabilize your water supply. But it gravely destabilize ours, and we have enough trouble with flooding in the region as it is. Furthermore, your foolish idea will cause Bangladeshis to be increasingly reliant on their artesian waters, which are contaminated with arsenic. I'm sure that your PR flaks will bombard the Western media with promises that China would never, ever, use her dams in a way that would adversely affect India or Bangladesh. However, we note that your dams on the Mekong River have been quite the curse for Vietnam.

    We don't need this. We're an emerging economic power, and after a long struggle for this we just this year became a net exporter of cereals. Now, the world is a little upset that we just developed a nuclear capacity. But the world will forgive us, especially the West, because we just had an orderly transfer of power from the Congress Party to the BJP, and the BJP has just made fools of many Chicken Littles who described India's new rulers as being to the right of Atilla the Hun. The world will note that an orderly transfer of power has not happened in your country's entire history.

    Back to nukes. Wouldn't it suck if one of those things fell near the Three Gorges Dam? We think it would.

    Call me up, Zhang, and we'll discuss better ways we can cooperate over water issues. We know how bad the water situation is in northwestern China, we know that people there have such salty water that they don't bother with table salt. We sympathise, we are not heartless. But don't be a fool.

    Regards,

    Vajpayee.

  • I can't think of why it would be of any use aside from destroying a path through the mountains. Consequentally, if they do it right, they could have a nice countryside very similar to this [rama-usa.org]BR> If you annihilate it, they will come....

  • Re:The reason is simple (Score:3)

    by logicnazi ( 169418 ) <gerdesNO@SPAMinvariant.org> on Saturday October 21, 2000 @11:38PM (#685937) Homepage
    This isn't quite true about the radiation. I am not quite sure about the byproducts of the fusion itself (to generate a stable helium atom it would appear that it must be a dueterium dueterium fusion and I am not sure what type of hydrogen is used) however regardless of this question fusion bombs are always ignited with a fission primer (the x-rays from this primer bomb ignite the hydrogen) this bomb will certainly have radioactive leftovers. How much is another matter
  • I would like to point out that the regime that the Chinese replaced was almost as repressive.

    This is, of course, not true. The previous regime did not burn the temples, massacre villages, and, most of all, did not invade a sovereign nation. The Chinese have no more claim on Tibet than they do on Vancouver.
  • "Time for you people to seriously think about this or soon this will be News for Gooks. Stuff that mutters." I thought that we in America had made at least a little progress away from seeing asians as the "yellow peril" I guess not.
  • Well it seems I achieved the heat I wanted. But I think I should explain a pair of things.

    First I'm living near Asia. and I have a lot of asian friends. Btw I have a son living near the place supposed to benefit from this project.

    Second the context of the phrase was racial. The way I use the word gooks may carry a taste of Russian idiomatics that may not fit well in the American context. News for Gooks - why? Well try to follow my line. This project is supposed to help a desertic and less populated region of China. Meanwhile this same project affects directly or indirectly the basins of three major rivers: Mekong, Yangtse and Brahmaputra. If something gets wrong it is the people living in these basins that will suffer most. It would be like calling gooks to everyone living in there.

    News for Gooks. News about a new Wonder of the World that discares the welfare, health and future of billions of Asians (that's exactly what you see - billions). What is the fate of these gooks in front of a Super-dam made with nukes? Who cares about people with leukemia, deformed limbs, tumors and laking eyes when we face a new technological progress?

    Frankly even during the discussion here I noted that people concentrated more on the local problems the dam may cause and benefits/dangers of the objective. However I saw little about the consequences that will happen when this nuclear trash will follow down the rivers. So tell me if this is not news for gooks: "Ok gooks, we are having here some funny time nuking mountains, so wait for the trash..."

  • H-Bomb Re:The reason is simple (Score:5)

    by StandardDeviant ( 122674 ) on Saturday October 21, 2000 @11:57PM (#685960) Homepage Journal

    I'm not a weapons designer, but to my knowledge, all current thermonuclear packages require an initiator stage consisting of 1+ "ordinary" nuclear devices (U-235 or plutonium squeeze devices). So while the main stage may not kick out a lot of (long-term) radiation, you can bet your bottom dollar the initiator device(s) will. Further more, the earth around the device will become irradiated and amplify the fallout effect of the original device (and contaminate rain on its way to the water table). This is why the fallout from a military target like missle silos was always assumed to be much worse because the device would have to detonate at or near ground level as opposed to miles up for a "soft" civilian target like a city.

    The United States looked into using nuclear devices for civil engineering in the 1950s and 1960s. For example, string a line of devices and you can make an instant shipping canal. The only problem is that the environmental side effects would be extreme. A rough rule of thumb I've heard quoted is that the amount of earth eliminated by the detonation in cubic meters was equal to the yield of the device assuming it was placed properly (100kT device = 100,000 m^3 earth gone). The devices used for this sort of thing were not in the thermonuclear yield range (megaton TNT equivalent or above). If the Chinese are thinking along the lines of the earlier plans, I'd guess their charges will be

    As a side bit of trivial, you'd be amazed at the number of things we (US) thought of using "small" devices for during the 50's and 60's: civil engineering, fighter-deployed anti-aircraft missles (sure, 1 missle = a squadron of Russian bombers, but I'm sure the folks down wind of that will be _real_ happy...), anti-tank mines, and Jeep-mounted nuke rockets where the range of the missle was less that the lethal radius of the device (I think weapon system was refered to as the Patriot or the Bowie or something like that).

    Random rambling at 3am...


    --

  • RTFD (Score:5)

    by Ektanoor ( 9949 ) on Sunday October 22, 2000 @12:33AM (#685961) Journal
    "I've always wondered why nobody has ever actually used nuclear explosives in civil engineering projects, if (and this is a BIG if) the blasts can be made reasonably radiologically clean."

    First - the article mentions Soviet Union as the only country who used nuclear devices for civil pruposes.

    Second - Yes USSR did it. And the consequences have shown that it is not worth to do it again. Radiaton and several other factors make the use of nuclear devices a big problem. Until now there are a few places on the Urals and Ukraine that give trouble due to the levels of radiation. One of them is located right on one of the biggest coal basins of the world where population density is quite high.

    Third - curiously, during this year, I have noted several references on the net related to civil use of nuclear explosives. So it amazes me a little that someone talks about "radiological clean" blasts. There are no radiological clean nuclear blasts in nature and it is stupid to claim such thing.

    Fourth - Some people may not be aware of this. The problem with nuclear explosions is not only related to radiation but also to how you can control it. Nuclear blasts cannot be fully predictable. Sometimes calculations make errors of of 2-3 times or even more. Second the blasting of a device and the failure of the fission/fusion process can be of unpredictable consequences. Imagine if such situation happens in this dam(n) project. You risk to poison the entire Eastern Asia, the most populated place on Earth.

    Fifth - If you know History than you may see that China's government has a harsh dossier on what relates to use of nuclear devices. During Cold War they made an experiment where they dropped thousands of soldiers near an atmospheric nuclear blast. If we compare the pictures to American and Russian military "rabbits", these guys were completely naked to radiation effects. Now I know what radiation may cause to someone. I had a neighbor who slowly died from radiation from exactly one of these military "experiments". He was equipped according to all standards and still radiation caught him. The picture is horrible. Think about a guy that pushes one leg while walking, lost nearly all teeth, nearly cannot speak, his skin completely burned and having cancer slooooooowly eating his bones. The most horrible is that he is living 20 YEARS with this.

    Radiation is a snipper you see only two late. Myself I got burned from a radiation "hot spot" near Kiev, less then two years after Chernobyl. I never guessed what was happening on my right limb until one friend told me they had found the spot in that place (I got the equivalent of a 1 degree burn that took just 6 monthes to heal).

    Sometimes I wonder if people do read the articles before posting here. Sincerly the average IQ, quality and quantity of Slashdot articles have downgraded drastically for the last time. Time for you people to seriously think about this or soon this will be News for Gooks. Stuff that mutters.

  • It's never been tried, but Ted Taylor, one of the top US designers of nuclear weapons, once proposed shaped nuclear charges for tunneling. Conventional shaped charges are used in anti-armor weapons, and can punch holes in steel with modest amounts of explosive. Apparently it's possible to do something similar with nuclear devices. Presumably the Chinese have something like that in mind, rather than just blowing chamber after chamber.
  • The History Channel did a story a while back on a project the US goverment looked into which basically used A-bomb's to launch something into space.

    It was kind of interesting, basically we're talking a very large vehicle capable of holding like say 500-1000 people. On the bottom was a dome, and a chute. Drop a bomb through the chute, it detonates and launches the vehicle upward.

    When you start loosing momentum, drop another bomb down the chute.

    They had some video of a working prototype using small explosives, like dynamite or whatever. It was kind of cool. :)

    The project was ultimately dropped because it was bad idea. There was the immediate concern of how to keep the occupants of the vehicle safe from the explosion and radiation.

    Then of course there was the unhappy people who were on the ground when the vehicle launched into space. :)

  • It HAS been used in civil engineering (Score:4)

    by Capt. Beyond ( 179592 ) on Sunday October 22, 2000 @06:49AM (#685972)
    Well, sorta...
    This Report [state.co.us] states that in Colorado, during the years 1969-1971, Project Rulison, tried to stimulate natural gas production. In 1969, a 43 kiloton fission-type nuclear device was detonated at a depth of 8,426 feet, on Colorado's western slope.
  • Davy Crocket -
    155mm recoiless rocket with a W-54 20-250 ton yield nuclear device on the tip. Range of a 1000 feet to 2.5 miles.

    400 warheads were built.

    It was designed to give an Army infantry unit the ability to assault large units of Soviet armour.

    It was first live fired on 7 July 1962 with the Little Feller II test. It was in servie from 1965 till 1971.
  • I think the planning for the US Civil Engineering using atomic devices was Project Plowshare. I think the first use of this was going to be up on the coast of Alaska and they wanted to dig a large harbor north of Nome.

    The US never did this...but the Soviets did between 50-60 times. I need to look in my National Geographics...they did a story about this in 1994.
  • Back in the laste '50, when nuclear power was still all "new and wonderful", the US Government embarked on Project Plowshare, with the goal of using atomic and thermonuclear weapons for the purpose of digging.

    I believe the project was abandoned, but the idea was highly publicised to the public at the time (since they had to be convinved it was safe if they were going to make canals and such near populated areas). I'm not sure what they decided about safety though. Atomic weapons would clearly not be safe (which is why you can't just go strolling around Murcury, Nevada nowadays!).

    I come from a nuclear weapon free country (go Canada!), and ass for as i'm concerned, anyone trying to build rivers and resevoirs, regardless of where, with nuke's is nuts. All i can say is that your old weapons is just fuel for our reactors.

    -MR
    -MR
  • Their watchdog press will raise a big stink and...no wait...their church leaders will rally against such an immoral...no wait...the people will take their firearms and rise up against the tyrants and...no wait...it's an election year in China and the politicians would never risk...no wait...hmmm........offhand, I'd say them Tibetans are screwed.

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