Re:A crater formed in Siberia's permafrost is growing
by M_Grey on Monday February 27, 2017 @11:36PM
(#13751229)
Actually you get 32-Phosporous from that. If you want 36-Cl you need cosmic rays interacting with 36-Ar, 39-K, 40-Ca, or neutron activation of 35-Cl.
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Re:A crater formed in Siberia's permafrost is growing
by mirimir on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @12:02AM
(#13751359)
Doh. S-32 + n -> P-32 + p
And then P-32 decays back to S-32 with ~14 day half-life.
I wonder if people are working on this. It'd be a minor tweak to nuclear weapons models.
Re:A crater formed in Siberia's permafrost is growing
by M_Grey on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @09:57AM
(#13754131)
The problem is that you're still going to end up with plenty of fallout from "unburned" Uranium and various byproducts. That pollution won't be especially associated with the S you want, but it's going to produced alongside it regardless.
Re:A crater formed in Siberia's permafrost is growing
by mirimir on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @10:22AM
(#13754339)
I was thinking of devices with ~100 tons sulfur each, lofted near the stratosphere in blimps. That yields persistent sulfur aerosols to decrease insolation. And yes, one challenge would be minimizing radionuclide production.
Re:A crater formed in Siberia's permafrost is growing
by mirimir on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @11:44AM
(#13755046)
The problem is that ground-level SOX gives you acid rain, and washes out too fast to be useful for GCC mitigation. Increasing volcanism would arguably be even iffier than nuclear sulfur blimps.
Re:A crater formed in Siberia's permafrost is growing
by M_Grey on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @11:52AM
(#13755112)
Good point about the acid rain, the washout. I wonder if there's some way to dope solid rocket booster fuel to produce SOX at higher altitudes? As we launch more and more, maybe we could harness that to ease the burden on something like your blimp idea... thus avoiding the need to nuke the planet.
Re:A crater formed in Siberia's permafrost is growing
by mirimir on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @02:47PM
(#13757175)
I was just riffing on the nuclear winter thing. But actually, blimps would be unworkable, because we would need to inject millions of tons of SOX per year into the stratosphere. And energy requirements are mostly for lifting, not dispersion.
Perhaps nuclear devices could be designed to produce upward-directed jets.
Re:A crater formed in Siberia's permafrost is growing
by M_Grey on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @11:26AM
(#13754897)
I wonder if a slower, but maybe safer alternative is just to increase the burning of SOX producing fuels. If we could scrub the carbon, we'd have a net-cooling effect.
That or we have to seriously consider induced volcanism.