Can You Stop a Hurricane by Nuking It?

When I taught Intro Chemistry at university, I had a fun bonus project for the students when we got to the unit on thermodynamics. The assignment was to assume that an ideal nuclear device was set off in the eye of a major hurricane such that all of the thermodynamic energy of the explosion was converted to expansion work (and to treat the eye as a closed container). The question was to figure out by how much the diameter of the eye would increase as a result.

The correct answer is: about 8 inches.

tptacek• 14 years ago

One idea that rears its head almost every hurricane season recently is the notion of bombing a hurricane into submission.

...

Finally, whether the bomb would have a minor positive effect, a negative effect, or none at all on the storm's convection cycle, one thing is for sure: It would create a radioactive hurricane, which would be even worse than a normal one.

engtech• 14 years ago

Does this idea seriously raise its head almost every hurricane season? Is there any citation for that?

Who (other than Michael Bay) is talking about nuking hurricane?

edit: tried some google news searches, I can't find any discussion about bombing a hurricane other than this article.

ohashi• 14 years ago

That was my first reaction. I've never heard people about nuking hurricanes. This is a first.

Also, the guy's name was Landsea. It's always fun when someone's name seems relevant to what they do.

Lexarius• 14 years ago

As a Florida resident, I can anecdotally confirm that the "What if we nuke it?" question circulates fairly often. Usually in years where a powerful or damaging storm appears, especially when places that don't usually get them are hit.

dalke• 14 years ago

Yes, it does raise its head. NOAA even has it as part of its FAQ, at http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/C5c.html :

> During each hurricane season, there always appear suggestions that one should simply use nuclear weapons to try and destroy the storms. Apart from the fact that this might not even alter the storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems. Needless to say, this is not a good idea.

Here the question is asked in 2004: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=255086

scrumper5• 14 years ago

Hmm, there's quite a lot out there actually. Try a regular search (not news) for "Nuclear bomb hurricane" and see what turns up. A good hour or two's reading at least.

Here's an authoritative discussion from the NOAA: http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/C5c.html

Some wacky ideas here, including using submarines to pump cold water from the ocean depths to the surface to disrupt convection currents: http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/meteorology/news-subver...

As to the origin of the idea, all I could find was that it was first proposed in the 1950s (but no source.) That makes sense given that it's an obvious thing to try with a new H-bomb toy. I couldn't find any evidence that the Ploughshares program* in the '60s ever considered it, so I expect the idea was shot down after the first back-of-the-envelope calculation.

*Ploughshares was an exploration of peaceful uses of nuclear explosives. Turns out they're only really good at digging really gigantic holes that you can't use for 50,000 years.

(Edit: ChuckMcM, commenting below, has actually been to a Ploughshares crater and since he didn't die I'll admit that "50,000 years" is poetic hyperbole, not scientific fact.)

Apocryphon2• 14 years ago

The concept of using technology to change weather has been around since the '50s, at least, with the advent of cloud seeding. Shooting a-bombs at storms seems to fit the gee whiz nuclear-positive culture of the '50s.

danielweber2• 14 years ago

If something is going to cause $10 billion in damage, it's not nuts to consider nuking it to stop it.

jagermo• 14 years ago

Yeah, "radioactive hurricane" should be mentioned a lot earlier. Is anyone really that crazy to consider something like that? It sounds like the idea of a Bond villain.

jnadeau• 14 years ago

Would have enjoyed this more if it were an xkcd "what if?"

danielweber2• 14 years ago

I'd like to see the answer of opening a portal from a normal- pressure area to a low-pressure area applied to the eye of a hurricane.

http://what-if.xkcd.com/14/

scrumper5• 14 years ago

Human ingenuity is quite good at delivering enormous amounts of energy over a very short time. Nature deploys merely huge energies, but does so for very long periods. She wins, every single time.

guylhem4• 14 years ago

Nature wins until we manage to get better models and find ways to leverage so that we won't even have to deliver an enormous amount of energy but just the right amount at the right moment in the right place.

We created dams, removed marshes, harnassed hydraulic power, etc - feats unbelievable hundreds of years before. And before us, Romans did also uncredible feats - such as the aqueducts. We keep on improving. Nature more or less remains the same. The end result seems quite clear to me.

The human race has something nature lacks : a mind, which comes with a will and the capacity to understand.

If we haven't bothered to fix something yet, maybe it's because the problem is not so important. But I'm sure that if it tilts in the other way, we can find solutions - or wait until we have the technology to achieve it.

scrumper5• 14 years ago

And dams burst, reclaimed marshes flood, aqueducts collapse. We can carve out a tenuous effect but it'll only last as long as we expend energy to maintain it.

> If we haven't bothered to fix something yet, maybe it's because the problem is not so important.

This is rather callous. The catastrophic tsunami in Japan was a problem of some importance, yet with all our art we could barely predict its arrival, much less affect it.

Your first sentence makes a good point - the 'three rights.' So, can you name an example where the directed application of energy has affected - in a predictable fashion - some natural process of the scale of a hurricane? Earthquakes, climate change, tsunami, storms... Not much of a track record as far as I can see. (Cloud seeding, perhaps? Hardly predictable.)

I think your faith in humanity's power is premature at best, more likely misplaced.

> Nature more or less remains the same. The end result seems quite clear to me.

> ...or wait until we have the technology to achieve it.

Nature might well remain the same, but it's still hardly within our comprehension. The end result you're talking about, that mastery of nature, would appear to be many thousands of years in the future if we ever achieve it.

bitwize2• 14 years ago

If we ever get to the point where the dominant culture truly wins over nature, we're looking a mass extinction event that will make the dinosaur extinction of the late Cretaceous seem like -- well, a fart in a hurricane.

Rastafarian• 14 years ago

You seem to be forgetting about the billion or so human-made combustion engines, that are easily capable of altering the global climate in a few years.

Or about the tens of thousands of nukes, that can strip the poles of ice caps if properly deployed and again completely change the climate.

Or the probably achievable proposed projects of building solar mirrors or seeding the south oceans with iron.

One can look at the amount of energy humankind was commanding 300 years ago and now, and than extrapolate that to the next 300 years. That power would be enough to move stars around, not talking about a single planet surface fluctuations in gas pressure.

weego• 14 years ago

Finally, whether the bomb would have a minor positive effect, a negative effect, or none at all on the storm's convection cycle, one thing is for sure: It would create a radioactive hurricane

If that isn't an awesome opening scene of a superhero film I don't know what is.

krapp• 14 years ago

Wow... an Aquaman movie that I might actually watch...

ck2• 14 years ago

It's funny how even if you could do this (and thank goodness you cannot) people would be for it, but shutting down coal plants to possibly reduce frequency and energy level of hurricanes, nah that's too much inconvenience. Radioactive hurricane, much less hassle.

anewguy• 14 years ago

What is the evidence that this is true? How much would it cost? (Coal provides ~30% of US electric power. It's not a trivial inconvenience to shut that down)

As I recall, environmentalists went all doom-and-gloom after hurricane Katrina, and that was followed by many years of below average hurricane activity. How many hurricanes per year could we prevent by spending, say, 10% of our GDP on carbon reduction? How many more hurricanes occur today than 100 years ago?

noiv• 14 years ago

> How many more hurricanes occur today than 100 years ago?

Rhetorical question. It's not about the amount of hurricanes, but their strength and their path. Apparently Sandy was blocked by an anti-cyclone south of Greenland and instead of turning right it turned sharply left and made landfall. These highs are linked by latest research to the loss of ice in the Arctic. And connecting higher ocean temperature with more powerful hurricanes is trivial.

So, it is not about preventing hurricanes it is about preventing damage and victims and keeping the infrastructure functional. In this context you can easily justify closing fossil power plants.

kapuhy• 14 years ago

Hurricanes would not be a problem if you Americans really understood fairytale about three pigs and bad wolf and start to build your houses from bricks instead of paper. Then you would need to just ensure that you have full fridge of food and a lot of books to read, no need to evacuate.

TheCowboy• 14 years ago

A fridge full of food isn't that useful if it's flooded full of water.

I can also anecdotally verify that New York City is not built from paper, but I doubt a more scientific study is required to back up my experience.

(The tone of your post is also not in the spirit of Hacker News and its Guidelines.)

bdunbar• 14 years ago

"and start to build your houses from bricks instead of paper"

Funny - I was thinking about my service in Okinawa, years ago. You know how in Karate Kid 2 they had paper houses because 'Japan'? Not so much.

Homes in Okinawa are built of cinderblocks and concrete with flat roofs because they get typhoons on a regular basis. So regular that 'typhoons' are how they replenish their water supply.

I suspect that one reason more homes in the US are not built like hurricane bunkers is that for any given locale in 'hurricane' range the odds of having an actual hurricane blow over are not 'will happen' but 'may happen'.

Think of it this way: every single home in the US within X miles of the coast from Maine to Texas would have to be 'hurricane' proof. That's a lot of construction.

bitwize2• 14 years ago

A flooded house is difficult to live in, even a flooded brick house. The calls for mandatory evac were made because of coastal flooding.

I'm to understand that very few tropical cyclones reach inland Europe; if you're European, I doubt that you understand what it's like. Why don't you spend a few years living in coastal Florida, and see how your snark holds up after surviving a few of these storms?

astine• 14 years ago

Funny, the opposite lesson is sometimes true: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Royal

In fact, there aren't a lot of paper homes in the United States (There are none.) Most Americans prefer brick homes but they're relatively expensive and don't really protect you from the worst of hurricanes. They also don't protect your power supply so that fridge full of food better not be perishable.

jordanb• 14 years ago

I've heard this sort of sentiment come from Europeans before. Apparently it's part of the "stupid americans" myth in Europe that American construction is "shoddy" and that's why weather is so destructive here.

Of course Europe receives very few hurricanes because they typically move from east to west from the intertropical convergence zones and Europe has no east coast exposed to an ITCZ. Some parts of Europe (such as Britain) receive many tornado strikes but ones with the intensity of those in America are rare. The USA is the only country that receives several F5 strikes per year, and the British tornado scale starts classification of cyclones at much lower wind speed, were we'd just describe it as an 'F0' or not even classify it as a tornado.

An F2 on our scale (T4 on theirs) struck Birmingham in 2006 and caused forty million pounds of damage to many brick buildings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Tornado_%28UK%29

Brick is actually a poor material to use against high wind loads because has little tensile strength. When high loads are applied to a brick wall, the two ends of it are supported by the adjoining walls, which cause bending stress on the wall, and tension on the interior of the wall between supports. The wall then buckles inward.

The only truly suitable building materials are ones with high tensile strength: steel, reinforced concrete, and core-reinforced cinderblock. Practically speaking, the odds of any one building in the midwest getting hit by a tornado are very small and so people understandably don't want to live in a concrete bunker on the very slim chance that they get hit. Florida, however, does seem to have a great deal of concrete and masonry construction, even in homes. Although it's worth keeping in mind that the majority of the damage from a hurricane comes from flooding rather than wind.

scarmig• 14 years ago

I don't think this is solid reasoning. The amount of energy in a system may well dwarf a given input, but that doesn't mean that the system doesn't have multiple equilibria that a sufficiently large delta could shift it to.

For example, the energy to fly a plane into the sky is small compared to what's released in a rainfull, but that doesn't prevent cloud seeding from being (somewhat) effective. The energy from a lit piece of magnesium is much smaller than what results from touching it to a thermite block.

It is of course the responsibility of the pro-nuke-on-hurricane folks (do they even exist?) to offer the mechanism that a nuke uses to shift the hurricane system to a lower energy state in a controlled manner.

schoper• 14 years ago

If they considered it in the 60s, my inclination is to think there was something to it. It sounds like an idea of Teller's (not a dope). In fact, a quick Google search just confirmed this to me.

The first approximation energy considerations quoted in the article and elsewhere in the comments here are not the same as a model of what happens in a physical system when you set off a bomb in a hurricane.

What a hydrogen bomb tends to do is to expel a cylinder of atmosphere straight upwards. Why didn't they ever build bombs greater than a 100 megatons? Not because it would have been too hard. It is easy to do. Instead, past 100 megatons, the extra energy just expels that cylinder of air into outer space even faster. So there is no reason to build a larger bomb.

What happens to a hurricane when a chunk at its center is launched into outer space? Or several chunks? Teller thought it was worth finding out. And there are very few physicists fit to lace up that man's boots. So it might be worth investigating.

brownbat• 14 years ago

Intellectual Ventures has an anti-hurricane project, deploying little rafts that cool the surface of the ocean: http://intellectualventureslab.com/?p=321

Freakonomics discussed it on marketplace, (I think it's in one of the books too): http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/09/06/the-hurricane-vaccine...

tomjen3• 14 years ago

If they are so energy dense, why nuke them?

Harvest them.

laserDinosaur• 14 years ago

tldr; no.

anonymouz• 14 years ago

Follow up story from the department of really utterly terrible ideas: Can you cure headache by shooting yourself?

padobson• 14 years ago

I haven't read anything here about the environmental effects of stopping hurricanes. Yes, it sucks that they show up and flood our cities and destory our houses, but they are definitely a common part of the carribean ecosystem.

It seems imprudent to try and stop them without considering this. Who knows what kinds of disasters we'd be trading for hurricanes - regardless of the technology we use to stop them.

Dove• 14 years ago

Given that the answer is 'no', perhaps a better question would be "How many nukes would you need to stop a hurricane?"

Can You Stop a Hurricane by Nuking It?

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