(April 17, 2011 at 6:43 pm)Aerzia Saerules Arktuos Wrote: Does tactical nuking a tornado disrupt it enough to stop it? My thoughts would suggest yet, but does anyone know if this has been tried?
I swear... my 90-ish year old grand mother in the throes of dementia suggested the same insane shit... WTF universe...
I award you the You Fail Physics Forever award.
(April 17, 2011 at 7:31 pm)Ace Otana Wrote: Has it been tired? : Yes.
Does it work? : No.
Turns out, dropping a nuke into it does fuck all. Just leaves a load of radiation around. When considerable heat and cold temperatures mix, they react by causing a funnel effect (tornado). A nuke produces a huge and powerful wave with large amounts of thermal energy, but does nothing to slow or stop a tornado. All you can do is get the fuck out of it's way, and hope it doesn't hit your home, or harm anyone of course.
Correct Ace. This is because a) nukes scatter material, including radioactive materials, and a hurricane, even somehow severely "damaged", scatters materials like a mother fucker and b) not enough energy.
The energy required to disrupt a hurricane theoretically? Not good. A hurricane amasses energy
NOAA Wrote:... at a rate of 5 to 20x1013 watts and converts less than 10% of the heat into the mechanical energy of the wind. The heat release is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. According to the 1993 World Almanac, the entire human race used energy at a rate of 1013 watts in 1990, a rate less than 20% of the power of a hurricane.
If we think about mechanical energy, the energy at humanity's disposal is closer to the storm's, but the task of focusing even half of the energy on a spot in the middle of a remote ocean would still be formidable. Brute force interference with hurricanes doesn't seem promising.
Finally, why any explosive will not work:
NOAA Wrote:In addition, an explosive, even a nuclear explosive, produces a shock wave, or pulse of high pressure, that propagates away from the site of the explosion somewhat faster than the speed of sound. Such an event doesn't raise the barometric pressure after the shock has passed because barometric pressure in the atmosphere reflects the weight of the air above the ground. For normal atmospheric pressure, there are about ten metric tons (1000 kilograms per ton) of air bearing down on each square meter of surface. In the strongest hurricanes there are nine. To change a Category 5 hurricane into a Category 2 hurricane you would have to add about a half ton of air for each square meter inside the eye, or a total of a bit more than half a billion (500,000,000) tons for a 20 km radius eye. It's difficult to envision a practical way of moving that much air around.
Attacking weak tropical waves or depressions before they have a chance to grow into hurricanes isn't promising either. About 80 of these disturbances form every year in the Atlantic basin, but only about 5 become hurricanes in a typical year. There is no way to tell in advance which ones will develop. If the energy released in a tropical disturbance were only 10% of that released in a hurricane, it's still a lot of power, so that the hurricane police would need to dim the whole world's lights many times a year.
REF: http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/C5c.html
