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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

First thing I thought of was that tweet asking why we can't just fill volcanos with concrete to stop eruptions.

The answer why not is here. [1]

[1] https://www.iflscience.com/yes-you-can-plug-a-volcano-with-c...

What about doing the opposite of this? Like, if you can tell pressure is building up in a volcano just blow a few holes in it or around it. Preferably with nukes because I don't believe in half-assing this sort of thing.

What's worse than a big cloud of volcanic ash? A big cloud of fallout.

Modern nuclear weapons do not have significant fallout. Fallout is lost yield.

That's mostly wrong, particularly in the context of the proposal above. Fallout comes not only from the unfissioned nuclear material of the bomb, but also from the fisson byproducts and from neutron activation of other bomb components, such as the bomb case. And with a ground burst, or worse a bomb buried deep enough to create a very large crater (the above proposal), a huge amount of fallout is created through the neutron activation of the ground itself. This is true even with extremely efficient fission-fusion-fission bombs (e.g. thermonuclear bombs which use depleted uranium tampers), which produce a massive amount of neutron radiation and a great deal of fallout from the fission of the tamper which is caused by the fusion stage.

I think the nukes are going to be a lot more dangerous than the volcano, and now we have fallout and an erupting volcano.

I've heard a suggestion that we aggressively harvest geothermal power from a volcano in order to cool it. But geothermal power can itself trigger earthquakes, and I'm not sure it's realistic we could harvest power at a rate to move the needle on cooling a volcano.

"I think the nukes are going to be a lot more dangerous than the volcano, and now we have fallout and an erupting volcano."

Oddly the eruption might help mitigate the resulting fallout.

> But geothermal power can itself trigger earthquakes

Did not know this and it took me down a rabbit hole, starting at this article from the Scientific American: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35561206

Also shown in this documentary https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0757745/

The tectonic plates would just laugh at a nuclear explosion. They have infinitely more pressure and force at work vs. a bomb blast.

Nukes can be comparable to small earthquakes. This fault doesn't even have small quakes, it's locked so tight.

https://www.math.wichita.edu/~richardson/earthquake.html

says a magnitude 9 earthquake is equivalent to 189 MT-tnt, so the largest atomic bomb detonated by mankind would be the energetic equivalent of an 8.6 magnitude earthquake.

But it's not really a fair comparison, since the atomic bomb is fast and probably wouldn't couple its energy into the earth particularly well compared to an earthquake.

Is that really true? Fusion weapons scale well and don't have an upper limit, their primary fuel is extremely inexpensive. I'm a total idiot, but I'm not aware of any reason why humanity couldn't build a thousand mile long hydrogen 'bomb' with a gigaton yield as some kind of mega-engineering project.

Sure, and the sun is technically the biggest hydrogen bomb in our solar system. But practically we are not going to build a bomb big enough to disrupt the tectonic plates beneath us.

Not nuclear, but the U.S. Army Air Corps once tried this in Hawaii: https://www.historynet.com/army-tried-to-stop-mauna-loa-erup...

> Volcanoes like Mount St Helens explode with huge amounts of pressure, making the added concrete a danger to health as it is easily scattered around. "The dust from concrete," YouTube channel What If notes, "would lead to fatal lung diseases and cancer."

Whereas volcanic ash and gas (released in large amounts) is safe to breathe? \s

Would you rather have X amount of carcinogenic material in the air, or X+Y where Y>0?

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