Modify Australia climate

[Baron von Richthofen]

:rain:Who is in favor of flooding the center of Australia to modify our climate, this is not a new idler, it was contemplated by the government in the 1950th

[pgc hunter]

Only if Sea Surface Temps are 32C so there'll be fuel for hot humid heat and huge storms.

[marki]

How do you propose we get the water into the middle Vars?

Mark

[DavidU]

Maybe re channel the Darling ? Are you serious about the Govt had plans?

[renormalised]

They had plans and ideas to do this since about the late 19th Century. During the 20's, Bradfield had proposed diverting most of the large northern rivers inland to flood the centre. Most of the water would've ended up in Lake Eyre, Frome and Gairdner, but they'd have had a lot of water in them... their surface would've been at sea level at least. Probably had over 100,000sqkm of water or more. What's more, it'd be permanent water.

[mithrandir]

Lake Eyre is below sea level. Dig a canal from the St Vincent and/or Spencer Gulf.

[renormalised]

Yes it is, but to dig a canal from either gulf would entail going uphill several hundred metres before you got to the lake area. You'd have to pump water uphill and then let it flow back down...or put through a series of pipes about 10 times larger than the Snowy Scheme.

[mithrandir]

When did I say it would be cheap? Kev seems to have deep pockets.

[Enchilada]

They sure did. The plan was to blow up a series of nuclear weapons across the continent from northern Western Australia and roughly on a line towards Alice Springs. This would make an irrigation channel to feed the inland with water.
It didn't come to fruition because of the cost of the plutonium required, and of course the pumped radioactivity directly in the ground water - which was overly polluted for near eternity with radioactivity by the stinking British twits, who rather contaminate Australia than do it in their own backyard! :P (During the cold war, the British thought it better, as first choice in Antarctica!! :screwy::screwy:)

However, there is a great article on other more sensible :question: alternative Australian water proposals, which you can download as a pdf.

http://www.farmhand.org.au/downloads/106-118_Engineering_the_weather_Part_10 .pdf

[renormalised]

True...he could do it as one of his "Nation Building" schemes. Put people to work for a goodly length of time too. Take at least 10 years to complete.

[Talyn]

As a Brit, I can't let that pop at us go. While I don't agree with the testing of nuclear weapons at all, I would point out that the UK detonated those weapons - presumably - with the consent of the Australian government of the time. In that case the stinking Australian twits were just as guilty as the stinking British ones. :rolleyes:

The British were wrong to test nuclear weapons in Australia, indeed anywhere for that matter, and so were the Australian government of the day for letting them.

[Barrykgerdes]

As Lake Eyre basin is below sea level fill it with sea water. I think this was also proposed once.

What Australia misses is a giant Central Massive to bring rain.

Baz

[multiweb]

If central Australia is under sea level then all you need is to get the water there. Build a couple of nuclear plants on the WA coast to generate energy to pump sea water in land. The water flow will cool the reactors in the transit and once it's started it'll keep going. They might even want to plug a couple of desalination plants in there too for local water usage as there would be plenty of spare power. And Australia had plenty of Uranium so the fuel is not an issue. :thumbsup:

[AstralTraveller]

True, too true.

And, as far as I know, neither in Britian nor Australia were any voices raised in protest. That movement didn't develop for about a decade.

[marki]

I don't think the reactors should be built in WA, I think they should be built in Hinchinbrook myself ;).

Mark

[AstralTraveller]

I suppose I could start by commenting that if the govt was considering it then it must be a hair-brain scheme. Some problems to consider.

1) How to get the water to the lakes and keep it there?

Naturals flows rarely make it to Lake Eyre. The water just soaks into the sand. Diverting the Darling R won't work because (a) the water will soak into the sand, (b) most of the water entering the Darling is consumed by human activity anyway and (c) the environmental vandalism wouldn't be tolerated. Flooding with sea-water requires at least a few hundred km of channel to connect St Vincents Gulf with Lake Torrens and then Lake Torrens with Lake Eyre. Once the water is in the lakes how do you plan to stop evaporation causing it to become hyper-saline. Unless you can flush it out regularly it would be like the Dead Sea.

2) What possible difference would it make?

Australia already has a basically maritime climate. The flat topography means that maritime air masses can move across the whole continent. What difference could adding a few thousand square km of evaporating area make to a continent surrounded by ocean? I think not much at all.

[Enchilada]

As this site is so ultra-sensitive to criticism or controversy, political or otherwise, I can only recommend you read some of the links below.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,24946617-401,00.html or
http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,,25594080-2682,00.html

As to the cover-up, read the BBC view (and associated linked articles on this page) at; http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1324771.stm

Naivety is one thing, the facts are another. As they say;

"Satire is the magic word that wipes away any culpability." :sadeyes:

[stephenb]

Sorry, I must have missed the bigger picture here. Not wanting to sound sarcastic, but after we flood the inland with sea water, then what? Tourism? Desalination plants? What is the point of this??

Bob Hawke's "Multifunction Polis" had more merit.

[multiweb]

:lol: Doesn't matter. I grew up next to one. I don't have 3 eyes and my name's not blinky. :) I also live within 20m of a high voltage power line. :scared: "Oooh! Watch out for those electro-magnetic fields". You're gonna wake up with two heads one morning :whistle: People have to start realising that properly managed nuclear energy is the cleanest source of energy. Looks like it's going to take a couple of generations down under still ;)

[marki]

Marc where I grew up we were not far from the Monte bello Islands. So far my sister has had leukaemia, my mother had cancer and I was sick with an unexplainable illness when I was a kid. Yes they have got better at building in safety features to nuclear power stations but would I want one within several thousands miles of where I live? Hell no, we haven't got that much fuel in any case. If it was going to be in the NW of West oz why not use solar? The sun is about at least 14 hrs a day 365 days a year (excepting cyclones) and on a cold day it may get to 25 degrees Celsius.

Mark

[Baron von Richthofen]

:wink2:Any level of radiation is bad I know because I have been exposed to high level of radiation, not good

[FredSnerd]

And people have to start realising that every once in a while there will always be an accident (not just any accident - a nuclear accident). Its mathamatics. If human history shows anything its that there are always mistakes and always accidents. Got to fight this kind of shortsighted reasoning

[pgc hunter]

Maybe someone should modify our climate for the better by inventing a cloud eradication device.

[multiweb]

Sorry to hear about all that - sounds like you had a real bad deal there so I understand where you're coming from.


Agreed - S**t happens believe it or not when people cut corners. That happens in any field. But I just think nuclear energy got a real bad wrap. I won't argue that there are major risks & dangers associated with it but to me it's a still the cleanest and most efficient source of energy. A gas plant or coal powered central or even a petrol refinery will spew way more c**p around or in the air.

[Davros]

http://gentlebear.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/kate-bush-cloudbusting-43056.jpg

[FredSnerd]

Hi Marc,

I personally think this argument is also incorrect. Measured in the short term nuclear would be less polluting then coal and gas etc. But when you measure in the long term (factoring in the inevitable accidents and the evil doers and the damage that just one accident does) nuclear would most likely in my opinion be more polluting. The more nuclear plants the greater the odds of something going wrong and potentially more devestating when it does go wrong and the half life of this stuff is how many thousands of years?

[marki]

Biggest problem is what to do with the waste. There was some noise a while ago where the US was trying to set up a scheme (through the UN?) in which the country of origin had to take the waste back and store it. I don't know if they got their way but I think the safest place for the stuff is to leave it in the ground. There are other alternatives which are far cleaner.

Mark

[glenc]

"All nuclear plants in the United States today are Light Water Reactors (LWRs), using ordinary water (as opposed to ‘heavy water’) to slow the neutrons and cool the reactor. Uranium is the fuel in all of these power plants. One basic problem with this approach is that more than 99% of the uranium fuel ends up ‘unburned’ (not fissioned). In addition to ‘throwing away’ most of the potential energy, the long-lived nuclear wastes (plutonium, americium, curium, etc.) require geologic isolation in repositories such as Yucca Mountain.
There are two compelling alternatives to address these issues, both of which will be needed in the future. The first is to build reactors that keep the neutrons ‘fast’ during the fission reactions. These fast reactors can completely burn the uranium. Moreover, they can burn existing long-lived nuclear waste, producing a small volume of waste with half-life of only several decades, thus largely solving the nuclear waste problem. The other compelling alternative is to use thorium as the fuel in thermal reactors. Thorium can be used in ways that practically eliminate buildup of long-lived nuclear waste..."
also
"Blees makes a powerful case for 4th generation nuclear power, the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR). IFR reactors (a.k.a. fast or breeder reactors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor)) eliminate moderating materials used in thermal reactors, allowing the neutrons to move faster. More energetic splitting of nuclei releases more neutrons. Instead of using up less than 1% of the fissionable material in the ore, a fast reactor burns practically all of the uranium. Primary claimed advantages are:
a) The fuel is recycled on-site, incorporating radioactive elements into new fuel rods. The eventual ‘ashes’ are not usable as fuel or weapons. The radioactive half-life of the ashes is short, their radioactivity becoming less than that of naturally occurring ore within a few hundred years. The volume of this waste is relatively small and can be stored easily either on-site or off-site.
b) The IFR can burn the nuclear ‘waste’ of current thermal reactors. So we have a supply of fuel that is better than free – we have been struggling with what to do with that ‘waste’ for years. We have enough fuel for IFR reactors to last several centuries without further uranium mining. So the argument that nuclear power uses a lot of fossil fuels during uranium mining becomes moot.
c) IFR design can be practically failsafe, relying on physical properties of reactor components to shut down in even the most adverse situations, thus avoiding coolant problems of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, as well as the earthquake problem. The terrorist threat can be minimized by building the reactor below ground and covering it with reinforced concrete and earth..."
http://bravenewclimate.com/2008/11/28/hansen-to-obama-pt-iii-fast-nuclear-reactors-are-integral/

[glenc]

Underground coal gasification
"UCG has advantages, both clean and simply economical, that extend beyond just the ultimate production of a cleaner form of diesel fuel. For starters, let's just say firstly that as the process of gasification occurs within the underground coal mine itself, the carbon dioxide by-product can be contained within the coal mine before being dealt with. Your common or garden power station simply releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as coal is burned, meaning before you get to the geosequestration part, you have to actually convert power stations so they can first capture the CO2. Another cost.
Secondly, the gasification of coal does not require for the coal to first be "mined". The coal simply sits where it is - underground - and then the UCG process turns it into gas. The energy input to achieve this is thus far less than the energy input required to extract coal and send it off to a power station..."

"During the 1980s when South Africa was under the rule of an apartheid regime, oil imports were subject to international sanction. In order to overcome a lack of fuel, one company, Sasol Ltd, took advantage of the country's vast coal reserves and revisited the earlier German technology.
It was a long road, but for the last seven years [before 2006] aircraft flying out of Johannesburg International Airport have used a blend of jet fuel containing 50% converted coal. After decades refining the technology, and in a new oil price regime where US$70/bbl is beginning to feel like the norm [that was prescient], Sasol is making windfall profits. It hopes to win approval for a 100% synthetic jet fuel this year [it did so in 2008]."
http://money.ninemsn.com/article.aspx?id=983406

[AstroJunk]

I take it you don't:

Get out of bed,
Cross the road,
Pull your socks on,
Drive a car,
Talk to strangers,
fly!!!!!!

Oh what a sheltered world we live in :rofl: