Comment by rafaelmn

Comment by rafaelmn 20 hours ago

3 replies

>Carbon capture of course technically works. But you typically end up dumping the CO2 back in the air for things like fuels and plastics after they are expended. So, it's not that meaningful ultimately. You take fossil carbon, you burn it, you capture it, you create another fuel, and you dump it in the air. Because we simply don't capture the overwhelmingly vast majority of fossil carbon that we process and use. Using the carbon twice is a modest improvement. Three times even better. It's not that much of an improvement. Most carbon capture is stupid like that but it sounds nice if you are trying to green wash your CO2 intensive business. Optics and marketing are the main driver for carbon capture schemes. But technically it's just adding cost to things that are already quite expensive.

I have heard about a proposal to blow up a huge nuclear bomb in deep sea basalt deposits that would dissolve massive amounts of CO2 to the bottom of the ocean. Bomb scale proposed is SF for now but would be interesting to see a PoC experiment with a large warhead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGPKpx6pMko

x______________ 16 hours ago

It would require 3,000,000x the power of hiroshima or 81gt and the negatives involve steam and other materials going into the atmosphere ( like the recent Hunga Tonga volcanic explosion), radioactive nuclear fallout helping the ocean getting a nice glow, and an ocean full of debris which would likely kill of most ocean life in the region for a while. Not to mention the sudden cooling of our planet by 1.5C affecting climate in unpredictable ways.

..and to top it off, my money is on "that's exactly how we get Godzilla"..

There must be better ways.

  • rafaelmn 11 hours ago

    >radioactive nuclear fallout helping the ocean getting a nice glow

    Fun fact - thermonuclear bombs have relatively little fission products - eg. Tsar derived only 3% of its yield from fission. Paper argues there would be no significant radiation impact, and while the ocean life in the region would get wiped author argues global warming will is worse.

    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/387975147_Nuclear_E...

    Anyway would be interesting if they did a smaller scale experiment to measure the impact - always good to have options.

maxhille 16 hours ago

That sounds like a good way to essentially poison our oceans - maybe we should try leaving some part of the planet somewhat intact?