> Edward Teller's idea to use a nuclear bomb to destroy a hurricane.

But of course he did. Teller really loved the bomb. He proposed using the bomb for every problem.

* build a canal. just use a H-bomb.

* mining, a H-bomb.

* need a new a harbor in Alaska, a H-bomb.

* reflection seismology, use a H-bomb

* stimulate natural gas from tight fields, use a H-bomb.

Sadly, Teller's 1968 "The Constructive Uses of Nuclear Explosives" is not available online, at least not in an easily accessible form.

Interested folks should check out Project Plowshare.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare

[1] https://www.osti.gov/opennet/reports/plowshar.pdf

To get into the mindset, give Dwight Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" a listen:

"I feel impelled to speak today in a language that in a sense is new - one which I, who have spent so much of my life in the military profession, would have preferred never to use.

That new language is the language of atomic warfare."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B8R-umE0s0

Well at least those are peaceful uses. Must be sad when your greatest invention can only be used to kill inordinate amounts of people.

We use it for nuclear plants too

Teller is known as the father of the "Hydrogen" bomb specifically, rather than nuclear weapons in general.

Dis this man not understand radioactive fallout?

A very large H-bomb can be made almost arbitrarily clean, if you are willing to compromise (a lot!) on other qualities. It would be possible to use bombs for excavation work and have the resulting added radiation to be hard to distinguish from the natural background.

Not that this makes using bombs for excavation a good idea...

If there are no bad after effects, then why is it not a good idea? We already use explosives for all the things listed. Stopping hurricanes sounds pretty useful about now.

Firstly, stopping hurricanes with bombs will not actually work and will instead make them worse.

Secondly, because clean nukes need to be so huge that they are simply too dangerous for their utility. Think at minimum "more powerful than all conventional explosives ever produced" level huge.

While doing things like channeling to the Qattara depression sounds promising, the actual practical problems of operating with true city-busters are just too great. There are plenty of industrial accidents caused by explosives every year, you don't want to live in a world where a really bad accident can wipe out a city.

There's still fallout and there's the problem of nuclear proliferation.

There's a reason the world looks in askance when nations start enriching uranium, even if it can be used for good.

Is it just politics that makes this a bad idea or are there other engineering problems?

With all due respect, there is a discete element to fallout. The radiation on aggregate might be at a particular (and assuming you're correct, I don't know) low/background level, but that won't help you in in inhale a small Pu particle.

There is not going to be any Pu left over after you initiate fusion on 10x the mass of the primary worth of DT right next to it. The amount of fast neutrons that releases will fission every last heavy atom found in the core. This is precisely why arbitrarily large bombs can be made arbitrarily clean. As you increase the proportion of energy produced by fusion, you reduce not just the proportional fallout in relation to the size of the bomb, but the total amount of fallout.

The second problem is of course those very energetic neutrons -- to make them not activate enough material to produce even worse fallout, you need to wrap the bomb in something that absorbs them and produces something benign.

Also, just as a minor nit that always bothers me: Plutonium is never your problem with fallout. If a bomb goes off or a reactor burns, the other things that are released will always be many orders of magnitude more dangerous than the plutonium. No-one has ever died of, and no-one will ever die of cancer because of plutonium released in a nuclear explosion, reactor leak or a reactor failure; simply because to have enough exposure to plutonium for that to be likely, you will have developed a thousand other cancers caused by other, more dangerous isotopes that you would also have been exposed to.

(People might have died cancers they got from working on plutonium for bomb, rtg or other use, but that was only possible because the plutonium was first separated from the more dangerous isotopes and well purified.)

What are the kinds of compromises that would need to be made?

Mostly, they need to be very powerful, more powerful than is practical for most use, and they need to be physically very large.

Can you provide more detail on this? I have never heard such a thing.

I think it's likely, having just harnessed the power of the atom after growing up w/o electricity, Teller assumed the problem of fallout was a simpler one to solve than what he'd just worked on. We see the standstill, where radiation was unresolvable... but wouldn't he see it as a smaller hill after he just climbed a mountain?

As has been variously pointed out, this is extraordinarily unlikely to work. But, the discussion did get me wondering if it is possible to _cause_ a hurricane (or tropical storm). If you could cause them to happen on a more frequent basis, presumably each one would have a lot less energy. In other words, if the energy built up in the temperature imbalance of warm water on the surface is more regularly dispersed by storms, perhaps you could reduce the chance of a level 4 or 5 hurricane ever forming.

The "only" problem being you're creating hurricanes, of whatever size, and they will eventually hit somewhere, and that's not a neighborly thing to do. :)

Hurricanes transfer heat energy from the Tropics to the temperate North. Suppresion of them would cause the energy imbalance to build up, making the next storm worse. Directing the storms away ftom land would be safer.

I’d need to see a source for the claim it would make the next storm worse. Sounds logical but weather is complicated.

For example maybe trade winds and currents simply speed up a bit if there’s no storm.

There could be a replenishing or beneficial aspect of hurricanes on land. By depriving a particular region of an occasional hurricane, we might unknowingly be setting up an ecological disaster.

Just like how we worked hard to prevent wildfires and then realized that wildfires have a rejuvenating and positive effect on forests and the local environment.

Now tornadoes. That seems like the mosquito of storms. It doesn't seem to serve any purpose. Wouldn't mind if we got rid of or could direct tornadoes to save lives and resources.

>Directing the storms away ftom land would be safer.

Not too long ago a hurricane or some big storm was off the US east coast. It didn't land but it veered northeastward.

I remember the weatherman saying with relief the storm has gone out to sea so everyone is safe.

Only it wasn't going out to sea it was headed directly for my region the Maritimes in Canada.

Directing a hurricane away from land may just be sending it to someone else.

What would be some examples of ways to redirect a hurricane?

And that is the 64 dollar question.

Huge walls aka “mountain ranges”.

I've wondered if you could do something like that at airports that have problems with crosswinds. Could you build tall walls on both sides of the runway to block crosswinds?

I'd expect there would be turbulence around the entrance to the walled area which might be dangerous, but that could probably be addressed be having the walls flair out near and beyond the end of the runway, and also past the end have the height ramp down to 0 instead of just stopping abruptly.

I fly out of an airport that used to have a lot of trees along one side of the runway. It had both of the effects you mention, of moderating the wind but also causing turbulence. The problem isn’t just the ends, but also the top, as the wind curls over. Overall I think the benefit is fairly small, and you’re a lot better off building perpendicular runways if you can.

They do that (for ships) in the Netherlands but extending it to planes seems impractical

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rozenburg_wind_wall:

”Rozenburg wind wall in Rozenburg, Netherlands, is a wall built to block wind from entering the Calandkanaal, and ease the passage of large cargo ships through the narrow canal, particularly through the Calandbrug bridge. The wall blocks about 75% of the wind and allows the ships to pass smoothly. The wall is 1600 meters long and it is made up of 125 rectangular and cylindrical slabs, each about 25 meters tall and 18 meters wide.”

Edit: beter photos at http://googlesightseeing.com/2013/05/rozenburg-wind-wall/. That page points to a dutch-language video that shows hoe tight that passage is: https://youtu.be/H4ZIMXjMRJk?t=3m5s

If the energy of the hurricane is not allowed to be released where does it end up?

Do hurricanes release enough energy to cool down the ocean?

Well I have read that it is a heat engine of at least the 12th power so there must be some accounting of where all that energy goes.

There's a more recent thread [1] where the consensus seems to be that no, it's not possible to stop hurricanes this way, or with nukes. According to the thread, the energy in a hurricane is simply too great.

1: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/165281...

I think pumping cold water to the surface from lower depths could be very effective. I wish we’d try it out.

Edit. Bill gates actually filed a patent on this.

There was quite of bit of discussion about this last year. The goal was to activate the cold water bubble/mist field around a 1000 miles from the shore. The theory is that before the storm hits warm shallow waters that increase the strength of the storm, the cold mist could collapse the thermal convection turning a major hurricane into a tropical storm at landfall.

I doubt that you’d be able to do this at a large enough scale to make it worthwhile. And any storm is a moving target, so you’d need to have pumps all over the ocean.

Storms actually move fairly slowly. I would suggest placing the pump boats in the eye as it’s forming before it gets to hurricane strength.

Remember you’d just be moving already cold water which takes orders of magnitude less energy than cooling the water.

If a nuclear bomb is a trivial amount of energy compared to a hurricane, I think we can say with confidence that the amount water you're going to have to pump around will be absurd, as will be the environmental impacts.

And you'd be pumping warm water lower, thereby making the next storm worse.

I’d need to see a source on that. I’m not sure how you can assume that.

I will not provide you with a source, I don't have the time. I consider what I said basic, first-principles stuff. We two layers deep discussing an idea that is not feasible, anyway. Here is a source that the pumps will not work: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/08/28/hurricanes.gates....

Awesome. I don't know why they stress over the need for a skilled pilot, this could easily be a drone/AI project.

> I don't know why they stress over the need for a skilled pilot, this could easily be a drone

The article was published in 2008. It’s actually neat to consider a technological solution to hurricanes that became viable in the last ten years.

Wow this could be fantastic, a peaceful application for what are otherwise over-engineered instruments of war.