The Man Who Wants to Save the Planet by Nuking the Earth’s Crust

Posted on by Azra Raza

Joe Banks in Vice:

In January, a paper appeared on arXiv, a website of non-peer-reviewed scholarly articles. Written by Andy Haverly, a 25-year-old Microsoft software engineer from Washington State, its proposition was a modest one—that we should try firing the largest nuclear bomb in history into the Earth’s crust in order to sequester 30 years’ worth of CO2 emissions in underwater rock. In Haverly’s mind, the 81 gigaton nuclear bomb would be buried somewhere between 3 and 5km beneath the seabed of the remote Kerguelen Plateau, where the surrounding waters of the Antarctic Ocean themselves have a depth of 6 to 8km. This explosion would be well over a thousand times larger than the 50 megaton ‘Tsar Bomba’ test, the current largest nuclear explosion in history, detonated in 1961 by the Soviet Union in the Arctic Circle. (For reference, that explosion was around 3,800 times the strength of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima during World War II. Apparently recycling isn’t going to cut it any more.)

According to Haverly, who doesn’t have a background in climate science or nuclear engineering but is currently studying for a PhD in quantum computing at Rochester Institute of Technology, the bomb would pulverize a vast amount of basalt rock (3.86 trillion tons, to be precise) into tiny pieces. Theoretically, this would then react with CO2 in the ocean to form stable carbonate minerals that lock the carbon away permanently. The deep ocean waters would, he claims, safely contain the blast.

More here.

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