Cant we just nuke the tornadoes? | Hacker News Reader

Cant we just nuke the tornadoes?

8 pointscryptozeus12 comments

Ok thats a hypothetical question but every year more and more massive tornadoes kill hundreds of lives. Does anyone know if any research is being done to stop or disrupt them from happening ?

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This question is so common that NOAA actually has an answer for it on their website:

http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/C5c.html

Short, pithy answer: nuking tornadoes would just create radioactive tornadoes.

Not quite. "While both tropical cyclones and tornadoes are atmospheric vortices, they have little in common."

http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/L1.html

Oh, I missed that! Sorry, I remembered this link from before, but I must have first learned about it during hurricane season instead of tornado season.

Long story short: go ahead and nuke the tornadoes!

Yeah, although I'd love to see numbers I would be far less surprised if a nuke could disperse a tornado. Having said that, I'd worry about the nuke doing a good deal of damage to the surrounding area itself, and also (quite obviously) about fallout and such.

Sure, but the consequences would be significantly worse. In order to be a threat to people, a tornado must be near a populated area. A nuclear blast near a populated area would inflict upon that population: a blast wave, firestorm, catastrophic winds from pressure differences, ionizing radiation, and radioactive fallout, the latter of which would result in poisoning and irradiation of inhabitants for decades, resulting in cancer and genetic mutations.

http://www.epa.gov/radiation/rert/nuclearblast.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_nuclear_explosions

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Would_a_nuclear_bomb_destroy_a_tor...

Every year tornadoes become more prevalent and massive? Source?

No. Source: http://www.spc.noaa.gov/publications/mccarthy/tor30yrs.pdf: Finally, it will be seen that the number of strong and violent tornadoes has not varied much since 1970, and that long-track and very-long-track tornadoes as defined by the Illinois State Water Survey remain a very low percentage of all tornadoes reported. [...] The increase in reported tornado frequency during the early 1990s corresponds to the operational implementation of Doppler weather radars. Other non- meteorological factors that must be considered when looking at the increase in reported tornado frequency over the past 33 years are the advent of cellular telephones; the development of spotter networks by NWS offices, local emergency management officials, and local media; and population shifts.

Ok I admin, this is more of an reactive post to the today's headline about oklahoma. Even if they are not happening more compare to past, they are still very deadly and kills hundreds of people.

Blast it with beams of microwaves from a fleet of satellites heating the cold downdrafts. Covered in PopSci 10 year ago. http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2003-07/how-destroy-to...

Considering that there are on average 1,300 tornados in USA per year moving people consistently is just too much resource drain.

A better solution would be to move people out of harms way quicker. You can't stop them, but you can certainly avoid them.

Yeh but we still have millions of dollar in damages. These people have to start their life from scratch. Insurance dont even cover everything and takes months before they get the money. (Saw enough people talk about this on news interview). By the way previous tornado came and ppl had only 16 min to get out. That is not enough time for anything.

Or you can just nuke the tornado. Kill everyone instead of moving them ;-)

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