In the past there has been good participation in threads about nukes. I hope someone knows enough physics to answer this.
Nukes have been tested underwater (Wigwam), in space (Argus), in caves (Gnome). What would happen if one was set off 300m. deep in the ice of Antarctica?
I know at first it would create a ball of hot plasma. I think that at some point, this ball would cool enough that it would not be able to make plasma out of the ice, it would just be steam. This cloud of steam would rise upward might make it all the way to the surface if the detonation was shallow enough. Would a shock wave travel through the ice ahead of my hypothetical steam cloud? Would the resulting boundries of the hole created by the explosion be rough or smooth?
That question is motivated by the thought of using a succesion of nukes to dig a cylindrical hole of large diameter down into the ice. Then that hole could be used for the launch of an Orion type rocket, and a smaller amount of fallout would go into the atmosphere than in the usual type of surface launch that was originally envisioned for an Orion-type ship.
Ok, even if that last part doesn’t work, still wonder what nuking Antarctica would be like…
And wouldn’t Antarctica be about the last place you’d want to launch anything from, given that you’d be getting virtually no extra kick from the Earth’s rotation? Or is that only a factor for chemical propellants?
It should be possible to dig a hole using nuclear weapons, apart from the radioactivity, but not a very neat one. There is the issue of what will happen to the matter in the hole: turning it into steam and letting it drift off into the atmosphere is one way of avoiding this. However, there is nothing in this plan to stop the sides of the hole from caving in or the hole filling with water.
Nuclear weapons are excellent heat sources, reaching a temperature of tens of millions of degrees (Celsius/Fahrenheit/Kelvin): Cite: FAS. Heat from a blast travels faster than the shock wave, because the shock wave travels at the speed of sound, whereas radiated heat travels at the speed of light (the cite states even with absorbtion and re-radiation this happens with ground bursts, and although sound travels faster in ice, I believe it would still be true). However, it’s harder to predict the behaviour of the steam.
Shallow underground explosions will launch a large amount of debris into the air, leaving a large hole, but it won’t give you a nice cylindrical shape.
Yes, Antarcitca is a bad spot to launch from in terms of the added velocity. You get most velocity if you launch from the equator going East.
One advantage of launching an Orion from Antarctica is that it is not in anyone’s back-yard… Or is it? I do realize that under treaty Antarctica is in some sense shared territory, so perhaps it is really in a lot of people’s “back yard”.
As to the issue of water flooding hole, I don’t think that is a problem. After first blast, there may be some water, but it gets turned to steam by further blasts. After last blast, either the remaining water re-freezes, or you pump it out.
The advantage to launching an Orion like this instead of from the sea (I assume you don’t mean to try and go through the water, but from a cylindrical caison pumped free of water and open at the surface) is that you don’t have to build strong walls in the “launch area” in Antarctica: The walls are the ice.
As for rotational boost, yeah, it’s useful for any sort of launch. But if you’ve got an environmentally-viable way of launching an Orion, then you’ve got so much power to spare that it doesn’t matter. And I won’t say whether Antarctica would be environmentally viable (I don’t know enough about the matter to say), but it’d almost have to be better than a sea launch. I would not want to set all of that fallout afloat on the seven seas. Heck, launching from a hole in the ice, you could even fill the hole back in when you’re done, and let all of the radioactive material freeze in place.
Ted Taylor, a theoretical physicist and bomb designer who worked on Orion, proposed just such an experiment, as described in John McPhee’s The Curve of Binding Energy. It’s been years since I last read it, but, IIRC, the purpose of the experiment, which he referred to as MICE (for megaton ice-contained explosion), was the creation of radioisotopes, not propulsion.
I would think, if Orion is ever launched, it’d be from the Moon (or orbit)…
Related question:
What would the acceleration be on an Orion ship (I realize we’d have to know the force of the nuke and the mass of the ship–so I guess the first step of the question is “what are the specs”)? Would it be too many g’s for astronauts to withstand without some sort of harnesses or something?
Heck, what is the acceleration on the space shuttle (how many g’s do the astronauts have to withstand)?
People interested in Orion ships have got to read “Project Orion” by George Dyson, the son of Freeman Dyson. It is not a great book, organizationally, but it has a lot of facts.
One design of an Orion was a ship of 4,000 tons. It would have a shock absorber to change the bomb-blasts into a more managable acceleration, say around 2g. See P.O., pg. 163.
Thanks for reminding me about discussion in “Curve of Binding Energy”. I had read it a few years ago, bought the book after finishing P.O. I will read what TT said about MICE.
What good would this do? As I understand it Orion type ships require successive explosions to launch into space. Sure, you may be able to contain the first nuke, but what about the ones that follow?
To ensure that Antarctica is used for peaceful purposes, for international cooperation in scientific research, and does not become the scene or object of international discord.
yes, it does not contain all the fallout. If I remember correctly from “Project Orion”, each bomb was supposed to add 10 m/s velocity to the ship. This would vary accordingly with the size of the bomb. I think when they were thinking about launching from Jackass flats, Nev. they were envisioning using small bombs to start. Part of this might have been due to fallout. In the case of ice launch then, you could start bigger.
Orion was also going to use something like 1-2 bombs a second. Thus maybe you could get several explosions’ fallout contained in the ice tube before you break the surface. When you reach there, you uhh… light up a nice solid rocket booster and fill the air with nice friendly burnt chemicals rather than those evil Strontium atoms. Then when ya hit the Stratosphere… Flame on!