Laser-Guided Lightning May Help Prevent Wildfires | Hacker News Reader

Laser-Guided Lightning May Help Prevent Wildfires

breakingasia.com

80 pointskposehn55 comments

Is preventing wildfires even a desirable thing in the first place? Wasn't one of the major lessons of California's wildfires in recent years that if you don't have a small fire every once in a while, you'll have a HUGE fire instead after brush builds up enough?

Yes, preventing a wildfire from starting on a 40 degree (celsius) day with no rain forecast for weeks and several others burning simultaneously is a desirable thing.

We try and manage the bushland with hazard reduction burns in the cooler months when weather patterns allow. These reduce the available fuel loads so that an uncontrolled fire in the area will be less intense.

There will always be fire in our landscape. Our job is to manage it as best we can to protect the trees, the wildlife and the homes that have been built near them.

The point about managing when fires happen is a good one. Reducing fire overlaps frees up resources.

Still I don't see public responsibility for people who buy homes in fire-prone areas; that should be a private cost (insurance).

If we’re going to draw a distinction between homes in and out of fire prone areas, maybe we shouldn’t let people build them in the danger zone in the first place.

Fire risk is a gradient, possible to price but impossible to be certain about.

If someone wants to build on a volcano let them, and let them pay for it.

OK but let's pretend that volcano has a really nice view of the ocean, and a super stable climate all year round! All of a sudden that one crazy guy building a home there becomes thousands, they become millions. Now let's give this volcano a name, something random like "California".

At what point can the "if someone wants to build on California, just let them" be squared away against the inevitable humanitarian disaster of thousands of displaced families in our hypothetical location?

At what point does the government step in and say: we'll the first guy was dumb, but we let him do it, then other followed and now we have thousands and thousands and can't ignore it anymore.

Well, step 1 in any scenario where the government is essentially forced to bail out a group if something goes wrong is to force the members of the group to pay for appropriate insurance. Alignment of incentives is essential. People who live in wildfire prone areas should be required to hold adequate fire-related disaster insurance that the government will, on not, not spend money subsidizing their poor decision making. This may make it financially unviable for many of those people to remain in those places, which is good and an intended effect.

An interesting related example is Federal Deposit Insurance. The Great Depression made clear to the Federal government that deposits had to be insured against bank failure or nobody would ever trust banks to hold savings again and the banking system would never recover. So it introduced a mandatory insurance system that all banks would pay into to insure the deposits of any bank that failed.

Here in New Zealand homes are not required to be insured, but all home insurance plans are required to pass on a levy to the government, which will cover the first $150,000 worth of earthquake damage. Insurers are only liable for an amount more than that, which the average home is unlikely to exceed given our building standards.

If your home is not insured (with a private insurer) the government says they will not help you financially after an earthquake.

California could do the same, but I suspect there would be protests from people living in low fire zones, while here in NZ pretty much everywhere is at risk of earthquakes.

It's also possible to develop home building techniques that are resilient to fires.

I can't see how insurance companies wouldn't simply exclude fire-damage from fire-prone areas in their policies. It would be crazy not to, given the risk of large numbers of simultaneous claims. I would even speculate that insurance companies have teams of specialized actuaries who model fire risk all over the place and use that to shape the policies they offer. To not do that would be either foolish or nefarious (in the case of an insurance company with no plan other than to declare bankruptcy in the event of a catastrophic fire).

That makes sense in high risk areas, which makes the private cost the whole house rather than the insurance.

I assume you're located in the US? I don't know how your system works over there but here in Australia it's a bit of a hybrid. Most of the fire service's funding is taken from the private insurance industry then the rest is taken from governments. [1]

1. https://www.fire.nsw.gov.au/page.php?id=48#funding

Good point about private insurance. Market forces might sort that one out. The other coin is public.

FEMA bails out people who built in risky storm and flood zones like New Orleans. At the very least, I feel FEMA should be a one-time thing, if you insist on rebuilding in the same place, the government shouldn't be there for you again next flood.

The reason for federal flood insurance is the “100 year flood”. As major floods are correlated private insurance struggles not to simply go bust.

Given that most buildings are built for 30-40 year spans, forcibly rebuilding once per century can be done economically.

The problems arise when hundred year floods become 10-30 year floods.

We've all heard of controlled burns, but they've obviously not been used effectively in California. It's estimated that around 4M acres burned annually in CA before modern firefighting, so unless you're proposing controlled burns on the order of millions of acres I don't see how that makes it sensible to deploy this particular technology in any widespread way.

Given how calfire abuses the tools they do have (e.g. aggressively stopping wildfires that pose minimal threat to human settlements), I wouldn't trust them not to abuse this one as well.

But how much does it even really matter? Far more fires are started by humans than lightning.

also think it's a bit laughable to think that it's our job to protect trees and koalas from lightning strikes

We don’t need to necessarily protect the trees as they are today. At least in America, the high tree density in our forests is unusual. Historically the forests were sparser and featured larger trees that could survive fires and also kept underbrush down, which prevented big continuous sections of dry fuel. This means small healthy fires took place without need for intervention.

Modern forest management regulation has backfired by making it too hard for land owners to log and thin forests, and at the same time, neither the federal or state governments are doing the job themselves. And so we have dense forests. This has other side effects like increased pestilence, which spreads in dense stands, results in dead trees, which then dry up and turn into fuel. The resulting big fires then keep trees from growing into maturity (“old growth”) and the cycle continues.

Like you, I’m not in favor of unabated giant fires - we need to break that pattern - but once we do, we also need to return the forests to how they were 1-200 years back, when they managed themselves.

See https://youtu.be/O6Vayv9FCLM for a talk by a US Forest Service researcher on this topic.

As long as people exist, they will insist on building in places with high fire hazard. And when their houses burn down, they will blame the forest for burning, instead of themselves.

I think someone could build an innovative electrical power plant using this technology at Relampago del Catatumbo (Venezuela's everlasting lightning storm): https://www.atlasobscura.com/videos/see-venezuela-s-everlast...

This was my first thought while reading the article - surely if we can intentionally get hit by lightning, we can find a way to harness that energy.

https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/is-there-... discusses the idea a bit. TLDR is: it probably isn't worth it :/

An electrolaser is designed to briefly pulse a high power beam that creates a conductive plasma channel (atmospheric conduit). If natural lightening is being coaxed, then we are essentially redirecting natural electrostatic balance into some focused work (Wardenclyffe?).

The only "capacitor" I know of large enough to handle this amount of instant power is the one used to "spark" JET tokamak fusion [1]. There are two 775 ton flywheels that can dispense over 3 GJ instantly and "charge" via grid feed rate of around 8MW.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_European_Torus

Lightning does not actually transmit that much energy. Primarily because it's so brief.

In case anyone else's first thought was "we've heard this years ago and nothing came of it":

> In the past, high-powered lasers were needed to achieve similar results, making the technique dangerous, costly and inaccurate.

So does this mean we'll have idiots buying cheap lasers off Aliexpress and sending lightning strikes down on their neighbors?

There is nothing new about this. There has been a huge body of literature about replacing the taser wire with a laser.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolaser

GURPS even has comprehensive rules for using one!

Out of curiosity if the method of grounding lightning clouds is considered a viable one, what would be wrong with a weather balloon and a reel of conductive wire; too much height required? too costly?

I'd heard of high altitude parasail kites being used for power generation (tie the kite to a winch and a generator) so it can't be completely impossible.

Edit: Or is this the XKCD search and rescue robot justification!

Maybe the violent winds of a thunderstorm would be a problem for tethered kites or balloons? I guess it worked for Franklin though.

There was at least one government backed (NOAA?) project, some while back, that was using rockets with ground wires to draw lightning for study.

Here is the Nature Communications article. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19183-0 Before we get too excited: "In particular, we deliver light-absorbing graphene particles (100–1000 μm in size) to the space between the electrodes using a slowly diverging laser vortex beam (see “Methods” section) propagating through a round hole in the first electrode." This is far from self contained. I know that in the past people seeded clouds [0] to get rain but this is a lot of extra work that's needed. At that point it may be still easier to use the high power laser and guide the discharge. Saying this technology can help reduce wild fires is a bit premature but I wish them all the best of luck.

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

If you watch planet earth, or other nature programs, you will find out that a forest fire is part of the natural forest life cycle. Some seeds, like pine code seeds, grasses, and so on, will only generate after a fire. Then there is succession of plants that grow out. Nature has this figured out. And the forest benefits from fires. Fire kills off parasites, and diseased trees. The new forest will be healthier.

I understand preventing fires around human habitation. But it will probably be used to preserve the forest for logging too. Logging is not at all a natural process.

Not all forests, just ones in drier/hotter regions (Canada's boreal forests don't regularly burn, for example).

The forests in the Western USA were purposefully burnt by the inhabitants for thousands of years prior to the ~1950s so I believe we don't know how much or if they relied on fire prior to man inhabiting the Americas.

I'm not the only one imagining the danger in misuse of this technology, right? This seems like figurative deity-level power in handheld form if I understand it right. The type that could direct a lightning bolt to hit your neighbor's fancy new electric car, or a nation state could use to target nuclear or power grid infrastructure. I'm sure the accuracy isn't 100% and requires an existing electrical storm but... still.

> The type that could direct a lightning bolt to hit your neighbor's fancy new electric car, or a nation state could use to target nuclear or power grid infrastructure

No, that is not possible. The idea is to have a tower made out of metal and use a laser attached, inside or nearby to create a heated, ionized path of particles from the cloud to the tower. This path offers a lower resistance to the ground for the electric voltage difference which means that the lightning strike will prefer to safely follow the already ionized channel and hit the tower than to hit some random tree that ends up ablaze and igniting other trees nearby.

It's like taking a helium balloon, attach a grounded metal wire and letting it rise into the midst of the cloud - just with the laser replacing the wire.

Which part of this are you saying is impossible to accomplish in an adversarial situation? Is it that you need to have control of where the laser starts out?

I can imagine a covert operation sneaking in a helium balloon into the enemy's power grid infrastructure, or tying it to his fancy car, even in a situation where you can't do the same with barrels of high explosives.

It's certainly possible but, as you say, you'd need tie/attach the laser to whatever of your neighbor's property that you want to effect. You can't do this from afar because the lightning strike is coming toward the laser emitter.

Expect your door to get knocked in soon thereafter.

Unless if you use two connected lasers. One pointing to the cloud and another to the target.

Yeah, you might have something there.

Could the laser be split to strike multiple targets simultaneously? Put a tower like this outside an outpost, when hostiles are spotted create a laser beam to each one then unleash a lightning strike somehow killing them all damn near instantly or at least incapacitating them.

Surely you could do more damage with a small explosive device than a large helium balloon and some wire, and maybe lightning will strike? The attack you suggest sounds like something a comic book villain might do. It speaks to the imagination but is impractical and inefficient.

All power grid infra is already hardened against lightning strikes because power lines are, trees aside, usually the highest point and thus the best target for lightning.

Usually there is one or two lines at the top that are grounded at each pole to dissipate lightning, and in the event that lightning does hit a power-carrying line there are arc "spikes" at the isolators so that the lightning energy can again dissipate over the masts to the ground safely.

> create a heated, ionized path of particles from the cloud to the tower.

How does this mesh with the "handheld device" the article mentions?

> target nuclear or power grid infrastructure

No nuclear power plant is vulnerable to lightning strikes, and only last-mile power grid infrastructure is really vulnerable to lightning strikes, the rest has redundancy and safety mechanisms that will probably prevent prolonged outtages. Even in underdeveloped places with stuff like overhead last-mile power lines, the damage from lightning strikes is generally nothing major or lasting.

Plus you don't need anything that sophisticated and wait for bad weather. A bunch of guns will do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack

That would make it so much easier to get 1.21 Gigawatts into the Flux Capacitor. What else could be powered by wrangling lightning bolts?

It’s cool but it won’t help prevent that many wildfires... The overwhelming majority of wildfires in the continental US are man made.

I found this unbelievable, so I searched for a source. Measuring by number of fires, it is true. However, fires started by lightning burn a larger area: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/IF10244.pdf

I think your post is pretty misleading.

88% are human caused and I'll bet a large sum that those fires generally burn lands closer to human civilization. That lightning strikes ignite millions of acres in remote Alaskan wilderness is not relevant, unless you think we should be out there protecting nature from itself.

Anyone else thinking what I’m thinking? Let’s grab a raspberry pi and a laser pointer and make a lightning strike weapon!

So instead of getting swatted, one gets lit.

prevent them in the short term while building up material for the next wildfire

Prevent them on hot and dry days with existing fires. Allow controlled burns on colder non-windy days.

We haven't been doing a very good job with those controlled burns it seems.

>it is yet to be tested outside a lab

Sounds useful! Shame that it breaks Asia in the process...

As per Hans Rosling lightning kills poor people. ( IE we will see more now because of the coronavirus )

170 a year in Thailand according to http://lightningsafety.com/nlsi_pls/lightningstatistics.html

Will we ever learn that tampering with nature isn't good in the long run? We keep build systems, organizations, and structures that aren't naturally robust, then we try to bends nature's will to maintain our creations. If a wildfire breaks out, it was the most optimum event to balance natures equilibrium.

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