Fixing the Climate with a Nuclear Bomb

Intro

A few days ago I received, along with my colleagues in the physics department, an email referring to a paper posted on the scientific archive by an RIT student, Andrew Haverly. Andrew is a masters student in computer engineering at my university, and his preprint was titled 'Nuclear Explosions for Large Scale Carbon Sequestration'.

The email I received was a forward from our department head of a request from Andrew for professional help from physicists in fleshing out the ideas in his paper. What caught my eye was his revelation that his original intention had been to just put the idea out there; but after posting the paper, he had been contacted by the Gates Foundation, researchers at MIT, and other physicists. They had asked him to elaborate on the work. A couple of days later I saw that Sabine Hossenfelder, the well known science popularizer had also picked up on his paper and posted a YouTube video on it (her channel has 1.6M subscribers).

The Plan

The main motivation behind Andrew's proposal is to remove (excess) carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The path chosen is the known process of carbon capture from the atmosphere which occurs when rainwater interacts with silicate minerals in rocks like basalt; the carbon is stored in the form of carbonates during the process. This happens naturally during weathering and therefore the effects become noticeable only over geological timescales.

If humans were to implement this carbon capture process on a timescale faster than geological using modern technology, the challenges would include the large scale mining, crushing and transportation of immense quantities of basalt. Andrew's proposal aims to accelerate the process by detonating a nuclear bomb placed inside seafloor basalt. This would make the oceanic water capable of sequestering large amounts of CO2.

Aiming at addressing CO2 emissions from the last 30 years, Andrew estimates it would take a nuclear detonation a thousand times more powerful than ever implemented. In his paper he discusses the concerns regarding safety, ecology, politics, and finance that such a plan inevitably raises. To make things concrete he identifies a suitable spot under the Indian Ocean for the explosion.

Conclusion

The preprint is freely available (linked above), is about 5 pages long, and clearly written. It's worth a read, even if only for the amazingly large numbers involved (e.g. nuclear explosion yield in gigatons, project price in billions of dollars, human lives saved from climate related problems in tens of millions, etc.). I am not expert enough to say if the proposal is feasible, but this is certainly thinking on a grand scale.