That is my guess too. They are using nuclear warhead implosion technology, precision detonators and shaped charge high explosives to generate the right sort of shockwaves. It might be possible but it will certainly be much more inclined to generate earthquakes than hydraulics.
It probably is crazy and not cost effective but it is a fairly safe way of disposing of these redundant ex-nuclear bomb components (and giving the ex bomb makers something interesting to do that isn't bombs).
-- Regards, Martin Brown
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I've not idea whether they can or not, but they do spend a while outside th e atmosphere, could latch onto specific stars to work out which way they we re going pretty accurately, and could use GPS to work out where they were, and it wouldn't take much in the way of a gimballed thruster to improve the impact point.
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This might not be a valid assumption.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
China's not like Russia and the US, they only made hundreds of nukes, not tens of thousands, just enough to make the fine folks in Moscow and Washington think twice before starting anything.
So I don't think surplus or putting idle folks to work is a thing, but the shock wave technology and algorithms (and their supercomputers) might be put to good use here.
--Spehro Pefhany
I find it hard to believe that a fission bomb set off underground would make natural gas dangerously radioactive.
(a) Essentially all the direct radiation from the blast would be shielded out by a few metres' of rock.
(b) You don't put the well into the blast cavity
(c) Fission doesn't produce a lot of radioactive light elements.
I'd be more worried about radon in the basement.
Fusion bombs are another matter.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 http://electrooptical.net https://hobbs-eo.com
People should probably read the article, no nukes will be used in the fracking.
George H.
I would never think anything that silly. It's hard to compress metal. The explosive lens design is famous.
I sold timing gear to Los Alamos, for testing implosion devices on their gigantic xray machine. The museum at Los Alamos has models and actual bomb casings, and shows wire and thin-film detonators. And the
The Los Alamos Thursday surplus sales were awesome. I got a krytron.
I've heard that modern nukes don't use bridge wire (or thin film) detonators.
The Chinese thing apparently didn't use explosives, just capacitive energy storage. Caps don't store much energy compared to chemistry.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
Think about a submarine missile launcher, folks! The Trident II is nearly as accurate as land-based ICBMs, and a submarine is hardly a stable platform and it's rockin' and rollin' all over when it ejects big missiles up and out of the water.
The missile's internal inertial platform can align itself to true north very accurately on its own and does this in milliseconds just prior to launch. Land-based are the same way.
They've thought of this one quite a while ago pretty sure, just the silo structure getting jarred and bumped around from near-misses is not gonna put it out of action, physical destruction of the missile is what's required which with a hardened silo you have to be pretty on-target to accomplish even with a nuclear warhead, missing by thousands of feet is not good enough even with a warhead 50-100 times Hiroshima-sized.
The article doesn't mention explosives, just energy stored in capacitors.
The USA does not use nukes for fracking. We use hydraulics and chemical explosives.
With that much natural gas, they probably will find a way to frack it.
There is probably massive amounts of ng all over the world, just too deep for current technology to access.
(I speculated here, not too long ago, that China has a lot of coal so should have a lot of natural gas.)
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
Where's the fun in that?
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 http://electrooptical.net https://hobbs-eo.com
It's all inertial AFAIK on the Minuteman III and Trident II - no star trackers, GPS corrections or receivers, none of that.
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the atmosphere, could latch onto specific stars to work out which way they were going pretty accurately, and could use GPS to work out where they were , and it wouldn't take much in the way of a gimballed thruster to improve t he impact point.
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It is. The entire U.S. missile field will be wiped out. The only way to sav e them is to launch them prior to arrival of the incoming.
CEP is 200m for these behemoths:
200m should be fine for physical destruction of the silo if that counts as "rocked out of alignment" I would say so.
LOL- it's a missile not a canon.
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save them is to launch them prior to arrival of the incoming.
Silo will become part of the crater. These will be altitude bursts. The pub licized damage of a 1MT detonated at 10,000 feet above the U.S. Capitol, is to leave a 400 ft deep crater and burn everything inside the beltway charc oal black. And they'll have a lot more than just one coming into that prize .
I met him once, in the security shack at LLNL. He was very old and got VIP treatment; I had to wait to get checked in. They treated him like God.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
It is a fact radioactive natural gas messes up all the electronic control of the distribution system, so you definitely don't need that!
He was a career bs artist, but he did have influence with really stupid politicians.
A 1MT warheaded detonated on the ground doesn't leave a 400 foot deep crater, much less 10,000 feet in the air
to save them is to launch them prior to arrival of the incoming.
spublicized damage of a 1MT detonated at 10,000 feet above the U.S. Capitol , is to leave a 400 ft deep crater and burn everything inside the beltway c harcoal black. And they'll have a lot more than just one coming into that p rize.
Probably just media sensationalism then... we can relax now that we know th e truth.
My dad worked for El Paso Natural Gas (EPNG) during that time (he worked for EPNG from just after he got home from the war until he retired in 1984). There were EPNG news letters about the project, it was the talk of the company. If I remember correctly the idea was to fracture the rock and create a chimney from the collapse and drill into the chimney. The radiation would be "within safe levels" but the problem was what happens when you have a 100s of wells feeding into a main line. The result vs cost was not there either. Even with the DOD giving you a device it was still too expensive.
-- Chisolm Republic of Texas
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