A New Idea For Fighting Rising Sea Levels: Iceberg-Making Submarines (nbcnews.com) 226
To address the affects of global warming, a team of designers "propose building ice-making submarines that would ply polar waters and pop out icebergs to replace melting floes," reports NBC News:
"Sea level rise due to melting ice should not only be responded [to] with defensive solutions," the designers of the submersible iceberg factory said in an animated video describing the vessel, which took second place in a recent design competition held by the Association of Siamese Architects. The video shows the proposed submarine dipping slowly beneath the ocean surface to allow seawater to fill its large hexagonal well. When the vessel surfaces, an onboard desalination system removes the salt from the water and a "giant freezing machine" and chilly ambient temperatures freeze the fresh water to create the six-sided bergs.
These float away when the vessel resubmerges and starts the process all over again.
A fleet of the ice-making subs, operating continuously, could create enough of the 25-meter-wide "ice babies" to make a larger ice sheet, according to the designers. Faris Rajak Kotahatuhaha, an architect in Jakarta and the leader of the project, said he sees the design as a complement to ongoing efforts to curb emissions.
"Experts praised the designers' vision but cast doubt on the project's feasibility."
These float away when the vessel resubmerges and starts the process all over again.
A fleet of the ice-making subs, operating continuously, could create enough of the 25-meter-wide "ice babies" to make a larger ice sheet, according to the designers. Faris Rajak Kotahatuhaha, an architect in Jakarta and the leader of the project, said he sees the design as a complement to ongoing efforts to curb emissions.
"Experts praised the designers' vision but cast doubt on the project's feasibility."
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Thermodynamics is HARD! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Thermodynamics is HARD! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Thermodynamics is HARD! (Score:4, Insightful)
Floating ice does not the sea level reduce, what the fuck are they even talking about.
There is only one reasonable solution, irrigate the worlds deserts, they are all heat producing, grow plants and soak up carbon dioxide. All you need is arrays of vertical axis wind turbines a high efficiency design is no problem at all. These done offshore, connected together by below sea level reverse osmosis, artificial reef arrays (you need pressure to make reverse osmosis work, and hence inside the system it is at air pressure and as it is well below the surface natural water pressure forces water through the system, as you are filtering out soluble salts, higher concentrations are diluted by current flows and reverse pressure, can be readily generated to generate back flow and clear the filters) and you harvest the desalination arrays of marine life to help pay for their maintenance (the artificial desalination reef would be in deeper water, where light does not reach properly to the sea floor limiting growth and the artificial desalination reefs would effectively raise the sea floor in those locales, to more readily access sunlight and be very commercially productive, not just what grows on the reef but the associated growth in marine life, note this growth would also absorb carbon dioxide from the water). You pump the fresh water inland (also making use of excess electricity to power those lands) and grow food and fibre upon a mass scale (natural carbon containing fibres to be used for paper, construction and clothing, lots of hemp). You are pumping sea water inland, cooling those regions hugely (light absorbed and radiated as heat bad colour, red, replaced with good reflective colours) and absorbing lots carbon dioxide and in some locations like Western and Southern Australia, the prevailing winds will take the evaporated water produced by the transpiration of the plants inland, where being moist rather than dry, it will generate rain and that rain will in the most part fall in inland Australia, which will drain to the lowest inland point, filling outback Australia, until it is deep enough to overflow, quite deep (the plants themselves will act as above sea dams holding water over large areas).
Australia the best locale because of trust issues, lots of investment has to be trusted with that country and those other countries that invest need to know they will have access to the resources they produce both at the artificial desalination reefs and inland agriculture from the irrigated lands.
Why does everything need to be explained to the nth degree.
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lots of hemp
Sums it up well :-)
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Oddly, floating ice does have a tiny effect on sea level, due to the lesser salinity of the ice. I can't remember which way the effect goes, though.
Irrigation is usually not a long-term solution to deserts. Sometimes it can help, e.g. when the desert is the result of human activity in the first place, and you just need to break a feedback loop where the existence of the desert is what's preventing rainfall. But usually there's a problem with geography that we're not going to solve, such as land being in
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Re:Thermodynamics is HARD! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Thermodynamics is HARD! (Score:5, Funny)
Someone please explain to these idiots how refrigeration works before they talk a government into funding them.
-jcr
Duh, they already know. You do realize these are powered by solar roads right?
Re:Thermodynamics is HARD! (Score:5, Funny)
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Obviously, they're going to use this technology [slashdot.org] to beam the heat out into space, otherwise they've painted themselves into the thermodynamic paradox corner (not that that ever stops dumb investors from parting with their money). Of course, I have my doubts about that shit working as advertised, too.
I'm guessing someone watched that Stargate Atlantis episode where they try to fix global warming by sending heat through a dimensional bridge, and that Futurama episode with the giant ice cube, and figured what
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I'm guessing someone watched that Stargate Atlantis episode where they try to fix global warming by sending heat through a dimensional bridge, and that Futurama episode with the giant ice cube, and figured what the hell, it worked on a TV show...
Probably. Stupidity in this extreme level is hard to come by any other way than by some fundamental misunderstandings.
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The concept is similar to mining the ocean for gold. While "cooling the ocean with submarines" may be thermodynamically possible. the cost and wasted resources compare to that of refining gold from sea water.
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Those chairs would need to be powered by fusion, driven by quantum-processor-based AI and connected via blockchain.
Also, something something string theory.
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Indeed. That was pretty much my first thought.
How can these people be so uneducated and at the same time think they can design things like that? Must be extreme Dunning-Kruger sufferers.
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Object Oriented Programming is one reason for such foolishness. Developers in various fields are taught to not look beyond their own particular "level of abstraction", and are penalized in class if they question the underlying architecture or its requirements. I'm also afraid that thermodynamics is not being taught from first principles, but rather as another arbitrary set of numerical abstraction to be be run through a computer.
Re: Thermodynamics is HARD! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Or how about we don't explain it to them and instead ask them for a billion dollars to research the breeding of ice dragons.
Re:Thermodynamics is HARD! (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes thermodynamics is hard, which is part of why it is a potentially good idea.
As a liquid the ocean absorbs a bunch of energy to heat, but as ice it reflects much of that energy back to space. Transition zones of ice and seawater have scientifically-interesting thermal properties as a result. Spending a small amount of heat to increase reflectivity can have a net reduction in temperature. The hope is to reflect much more energy back to space than the spend in creating the ice.
A key point of their presentation is desalination of the water, since the ambient polar temperatures are cold enough to freeze freshwater even when saltwater remains liquid. They mention the possibility (not requirement) of leveraging a solar power cooling system, noting that it does increase the total temperature but includes the hope that the solar powered cooling pumps can be highly efficient and the energy be offset by the reflective nature of the ice, which they are hoping to restore.
Re:Thermodynamics is HARD! (Score:5, Interesting)
When it comes to albedo, it's hard to see how desalinization submarines can be cost/energy competitive with buckets of white paint.
Governments are Stupid (Score:2)
Someone please explain to these idiots how refrigeration works before they talk a government into funding them.
-jcr
They'll latch onto any BS "science" to look like they're doing something, they don't care if it's actually feasible, it only matters if it looks "good". See Solar Roadways.
Re: Thermodynamics is HARD! (Score:2)
I thought this was dumb at first until I read the line about desalination: Saltwater has a higher freezing point than freshwater, depending on the salinity. If they simply desalinated it and brought it to the surface, the ambient air could freeze it where it can't normally freeze saltwater. Refrigeration could speed up the process, and I don't think the electricity needs would be too big of a deal in a nuclear powered submarine. This ice would also be further resistant to melting again. The problem, IMO, co
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I think you mean that saltwater has a *LOWER* freezing point than fresh water. Dam this thermodynamics thing is really hard :-)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Thermodynamics is HARD! (Score:4, Insightful)
Put another way, you would need 30MW times 23,000, or about 690GW of power
Alternatively, put that 690GW of nuclear generation on land, and use it to replace 30% of all coal-powered electricity generation. And since you don't have to spend all that money on ships and manpower, you could probably afford to install 5X as much nuclear generation capacity (~3.5 TW) and replace basically all fossil fuel-powered electricity generation worldwide.
Re: Thermodynamics is HARD! (Score:2)
Ice is white. Over its lifetime it could reflect much more energy back into space than the energy required to make it.
The scale is still massively impractical. Perhaps a couple or hundred nuclear-powered freezer submarines operating over 20 years might make some impact.
The proposal of sending relective aerosols into the high atmosphere above the arctic is a way more realistic method of climate engineering.
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Perhaps a couple or hundred nuclear-powered freezer submarines operating over 20 years might make some impact.
The ice isn't going to survive 20 years. Most Arctic ice survives less than 3 years before it melts again.
Efficient desalination takes 25 MJ/cubic meter, or about 1 gigawatt for an entire year to produce 1 cubic kilometer of ice, assuming it's already cold enough to freeze fresh water in open air.
You'd need a few million cubic kilometers to make a difference.
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Areas of sea ice slush could in theory create hard ice from desalinated water. How they are going to manage to desalinate without expending heat is the big question here, some advanced form of membrane osmosis? Either way other posters are correct in
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That is why designer should consult engineer (Score:2)
So apparently is buoyancy (Score:2)
The rising sea levels are due to ice on land melting and flowing into the sea. Frankly, if you're going to try for a harebrained scheme like this, it'd be more effective to seed clouds over the polar regions to cause more snow to
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are sea levels actually rising? (Score:2, Interesting)
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The paper he links to in Nature [nature.com] is really interesting though, showing that AGW largely won't hurt atoll nati
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Perhaps this year, but I woudn't bet on it. For most of the past decade most of the rise has been because warm water is less dense than cold water, and so takes up more room. I'll agree that that's not the only reason, but it was the major one.
P.S.: The sea level is not rising equally all over the globe. IIUC the North Atlantic is rising faster than most other places, but that's just something I read in passing. But the naive assumption that it's rising equally everywhere is false. IIUC this has som
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For most of the past decade most of the rise has been because warm water is less dense than cold water, and so takes up more room
If that is your hypothesis, then you need to explain why the sea level rise hasn't correlated with sea temperature.
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Well obviously if you take two extremely buffered values that are rising together (annual global average sea level and annual global average CO2) and only take the last 26 data points you'll get an almost flat line. Almost as if this Ned Nikolov is some kind of pseudoscience shill who likes to publish climate papers under fake names...
Poor marketing (Score:2)
They should call them ICEBERG-MAKING FREAKIN' SUBMARINES. Then you could make everyone opposing them look stupid and get backing.
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They should call them ICEBERG-MAKING FREAKIN' SUBMARINES.
I was thinking more like "Ben & Jerry's Nuke Sub Made Ice Cream"
That would sell!
Probably.
OK, maybe.
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"Ben & Jerry's Diesel Sub Made Ice Cream"
Which sells better?
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"Ben & Jerry & Vin Diesel's Sub Made Ice Cream"
Which sells better?
That would sell the best.
It would pull in the "Hard Guy" market.
Re: Poor marketing (Score:2)
Re: Poor marketing (Score:2)
if its going to desal it anyway, (Score:3, Interesting)
How is this supposed to help? (Score:5, Informative)
What's the goal here? I'm guessing it's to increase how much sunlight is reflected into space but I did not see that made clear in the article. There's also a matter of thermodynamics, desalinating and freezing water takes energy.
âoeWhat are you going to do, put out a flotilla of 10,000 submarines?â he said. âoeWhoâ(TM)s going to build them and how much energy does it take, and how are the submarines powered?â And unless theyâ(TM)re powered by wind or another clean energy source, he added, the submarines would need to burn fossil fuels, releasing even more planet-warming greenhouse gases into the air.
Yes, how will they be powered. Solar power at the poles is a bit scarce, which is why they are so cold to begin with. Wind power on a submarine just doesn't sound feasible.
Unless these things are nuclear powered then this is beyond fanciful. It's already sounding like fantasy but without nuclear power it's an engineering problem without a real world solution.
Any discussion on building ice structures in the arctic would not be complete without mention of pykrete.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Let's go up there with some nuclear powered "seed" ships that contain the engineering section of what will become a pykrete island. The "seed" contains the nuclear power plant to drive the desalination and other processes needed to mix the pykrete into a larger floating island of sorts. Turn this into a science station, vacation spot, some kind of search and rescue outpost, or whatever. This makes about as much sense as floating a big ice cube machine up there.
Re:How is this supposed to help? (Score:5, Insightful)
doesn't matter what the subs run on
if you have something underwater that makes ice cubes, you will be radiating the heat removed from a container of water into... the water around your sub. The net effect will be heating water. What diploma mill printed these "engineers" their worthless diplomas?
Re:How is this supposed to help? (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's even worse than that. The floating ice cubes still displace the same amount of water, so the net effect of all this effort on the sea level will be precisely zero.
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There were any engineers involved in this concentration of stupid? Fascinating. I do remember that we had a question in a Physics exam in 5th grade about what happens to room temperature if you leave the fridge open and running for a longer time. It seems these morons did not even make it that far.
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What diploma mill printed these "engineers" their worthless diplomas?
What makes you go on the attack at engineers? Or even "engineers"? They are architects, nothing more.
Engineers exist almost solely to tell architects their ideas are stupid.
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Thank you so much for teaching me about Pykrete!!
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Nuclear powered could be considerably worse. Most fission plants produce a great deal of waste heat.
Large scale desalination has proven impractical, partly due to the inevitable corrosion of the electrodes and pumps, and partly due to energy vody of every known process. It costs considerable energy to purify the water: Maxwell's demon describes the thermodynamic cost of purification very well.
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Large scale desalination has proven impractical,
What? Not sure what you are saying here. Large scale desalination works fine, it's just getting the water free from rivers is cheaper.
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Weird - the two huge desalination plants just down the road from the me which have been operating for a number of years, not to mention the ones in the Middle East running for decades, must be a complete figment of my imagination.
Re:How is this supposed to help? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear powered could be considerably worse. Most fission plants produce a great deal of waste heat.
Nuclear power would be worse than what? Wind or solar power? There are reasons why we don't power our submarines with wind and solar power. I'll let you think of those reasons.
Nuclear power plants produce a lot of waste heat because they produce a lot of power. Any power plant that boils water, like any modern power plant does, will have to dump waste heat to the environment. Because of how steam engines work the amount of waste heat produced does not depend on where the heat comes from, be that coal, nuclear, or even solar heat. What it does depend on is the power produced and the efficiency of the system. That efficiency is in many ways dependent on the temperature of the heat source.
A solar thermal system can get only so hot, because the sun is only so hot. Coal can also only get so hot. Nuclear fission can get hotter than both but this is not often done because of reasons of safety. We can make nuclear power more efficient by using something other than steam, or by adding additional safety measures to prevent another problem like those at TMI, Fukushima, and Chernobyl. (Yes, I know calling these a "problem" is putting it mildly.)
A hotter nuclear fission reactor would actually produce less waste heat because by getting hotter it gets more efficient. This means for the same amount of waste heat produced there is more useful energy produced. Or, for the same useful energy there is less waste heat.
Nuclear fission might be less efficient in converting heat to useful work because we run them at lower temperatures (again, not because we can't but because we choose safety over efficiency) than coal, oil, or natural gas but nuclear fission does not produce any where near as much CO2 and other greenhouse gasses.
Nuclear power is not only better than the other options, it may be the only option that is feasible in this case.
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If they're going to build small nuclear reactors to power all those then it would make orders of magnitude more sense to just build the reactors to replace existing fossil fuel-burning power plants and skip this otherwise Rube Goldberg-esque sounding nonsense.
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If they're going to build small nuclear reactors to power all those then it would make orders of magnitude more sense to just build the reactors to replace existing fossil fuel-burning power plants and skip this otherwise Rube Goldberg-esque sounding nonsense.
I agree. At a minimum we should first be well on the path of replacing fossil fuels with low CO2 energy sources before building nuclear powered floating ice cube makers to create artificial icebergs.
There's plenty of other sources out there but this article sums up the need for nuclear power very well.
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2... [blogspot.com]
This article on EROI drives home the need for nuclear power.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j... [forbes.com]
Both of those articles show that solar power is something we cannot rely upon for
Is it already April 1st? (Score:2)
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The Slashdot moron filter has been dead for 10 years, if not more, and it was never much of a moron filter in the first place. I mean, people here seriously discuss "nuking Mars"...
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Yep...April 1.
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That Magic Chair article was utter filth! The author railing at all the commenters was the worst, too! Shanen, I'm pointing at you.
Re:Is it already April 1st? (Score:5, Interesting)
My dream is to win the lottery and buy /. and return it to sanity. News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters. Hire "editors" who have college degrees, fire "editors" who can't do basic dupe detection or editorial functions, and post nothing asinine nor political.
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Why not go to Soylent news? Oh that's right because stuff like that isn't actually popular, doesn't create suitable discussion with most stories averaging less than 20 comments, and if you were actually that upset you'd be there already ... but you're not.
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The EDITORS constantly submit clickbait. It works.
moron filter is working fine (Score:2)
Slashdot's moron filter is working fine. This can be seen in the retentate stream (i.e. slashdot editorial staff).
Wrong direction (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem of rising sea levels is ice *on land* melting and flowing into the sea.
Now, find a way to take all that ice melt from Arctic land masses and transport it somewhere that needs fresh water instead of the open ocean, that might be worthwhile.
Re:Wrong direction (Score:5, Funny)
Ice rail gun: problem solved. Why is science so easy.
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To me, this is the main and most obvious problem. Converting water to floating ice will do almost nothing to sea level (does your glass of ice-water overflow when the ice melts?). If I had mod points I would mod you up, but I don't.
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Ok you win (Score:5, Funny)
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Human stupidity really is unlimited...
Apparently... (Score:4, Insightful)
Apparently the issue is we are running out of ice cubes at the poles, so this will fix it?!?!
And the reason THIS ice won't melt in the same climate that just melted icebergs is... what?
This is as stupid as attempting to reverse global warming by running your A/C full-blast and keeping your windows/doors open.
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Please do not suggest your air conditioning idea to Trump.
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Why was this moderated down?
Apparently the issue is we are running out of ice cubes at the poles, so this will fix it?!?!
And the reason THIS ice won't melt in the same climate that just melted icebergs is... what?
This is as stupid as attempting to reverse global warming by running your A/C full-blast and keeping your windows/doors open.
Seems like a nice summation of the problem to me.
Now that I think about this some more, why does the ship have to submerge to release the ice? Submarines are inherently difficult to build and dangerous to operate. They don't have to submerge completely to allow the ice to float free, leaving some part above the water could still allow the ice to float free. They could lift the ice out by a crane. They could have doors that open to the sea. They could pump water to the hole a
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Slashdotters don't know basic science.
https://www.windows2universe.o... [windows2universe.org]
drop below the thermocline, load up on nearly-freezing cold salt water
pull out the salt, doesn't need to be drinking pure, just most of the salt, so not an excessive energy requirement.
bring it to lower pressure at the surface.
it'll freeze into white, reflective blocks practically on it's own at that point.
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Slashdotters don't know basic science.
That is quite possibly true.
pull out the salt, doesn't need to be drinking pure, just most of the salt, so not an excessive energy requirement.
Yes, but it still takes energy. Energy that will be added to the water. Water that this ship is trying to cool.
I'm still curious on where they expect this energy to come from. If it's diesel engines then it's just adding CO2 to air when there is already too much from human activity. If it's solar power in a place that experiences night for months on end then they are not taking this seriously. This will have to be nuclear powered or it won't work.
What I see constantly with t
Didn't bother reading the article but (Score:3)
why not just add in some AI drones to pick up the ice and drop it where fresh water is needed? Or to fill in glaciers losing mass to melting?
You could probably just use the subs to desalinate sea water,and dump it into hot arid climates. Irrigation and drinking water for everyone, and if the water is only a little cooler than the area you're dumping it in, may be a long term global climate modifier.
Of course you will need sharks with frikin lasers attached to their heads to guard the off-shore facilities.
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Earth is a closed environment... the act of cooling itself is a net ad to the heat of the planet.
That isn't entirely true, a great deal of energy is pumped into the system by the sun, potentially you can remove energy from the system by blocking or reflecting that energy back into space.
Creating Ice In the Sea Will NOT Change Sea Level (Score:3)
Take a pail. Place in it a chunk of ice. Fill the pail to the brim with water such that the chunk of ice floats. The top of the ice will be above the brim of the pail.
Wait for the ice to melt completely. The water level is still at the brim of the pail. Neither did water overflow the pail, nor did the water level drop.
Water expands as it freezes. It then is less dense than liquid water, which is why it floats. The portion of ice below water displaces the volume of water that froze to make the chunk of ice. All this is inherent in the principle Archimedes discovered more than 2,000 years ago.
Thermodynamics is a bitch (Score:5, Insightful)
This is stupid. The power needed to desalinate the water and freeze it releases more heat to the environment. Even if you could magically avoid expending power to locally reduce the entropy, just freezing the ice requires removing heat from the water, which obviously requires releasing heat to the environment. Because they don't have a magic entropy-reducing mechanism, they're going to need power to make this happen, and if that power comes from fossil fuels, they're releasing CO2 faster than they're making ice. Even with renewable energy, this system releases heat to the environment.
And even then, those icebergs are floating in the water, and Archimedes discovered a long time ago, that icebergs displace exactly the mass of water that the iceberg weighs, so the sea level isn't affected. The only way that the iceberg lowers sea levels is if they raise the iceberg out of the water and put it up on land somewhere where it won't melt.
OK, so suppose you don't bother with freezing the water? Now, if you put a nuclear-, wind- or solar-powered desalination submarine next to a thirsty city, and make sure that the desalinated water doesn't run back into the ocean, you could make a tiny bit of progress, although the amount of sea level rise that global warming is causing is way out of proportion to the amount of fresh water that humans can drink and sprinkle on crops. But why are you doing this on a submarine? A desalination plant is easier to build at the shoreline.
Wylie Coyote, is that you? (Score:4, Funny)
Did you see the one where he was skiing, with the fridge on his back, with the ice-maker spitting cubes into a grinder, for that to lay down the "snow" in front of him? Also with no power supply... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Like that, but with a dive mask...
First prize (Score:2)
Just waiting for the kickstarter fund to start...just need 2 TRILLION dollars (comes with free freckin shark with a frecken laser on top) Buwhahahahahahah
Only two important questions (Score:2)
1. How much more heat does an area of ice reflect back than the same area of oceanic water?
2. What are they going to do with all the salt?
Since it's solar, they're not going to produce much more heat moving things from one form to another -- if they lack the energy from the sun, they're limited in their desalination. It should net to roughly zero (the panels may reflect less IR than the sea does). They don't use much energy to freeze the water because...
A. At start, the water was lower than freezing anyho
Attack the problem at its source! (Score:2)
The problem is about energy production, so, how about hooking a generator up to a motor, and then using the power thus generated to spin the motor!
See, I solved it in one try, the rest of you are all stupid.
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That's a "Perpetual Motion Machine",and they're banned in this universe. Parkinson's three laws; this violates #2 and 3.
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I did the hard part, I just need to have some science guys work out the details.
Geez, do I have to do everything around here?
Bollocks (Score:2)
Designed by an architect - try an engineer next time.
Slashdot really is becoming shit-awful at filtering out absolutely bogus shite.
Two MAJOR Problems To Start.... (Score:2)
There are many enormous issues with this "Mad Magazine"type scheme, but I'll mention only two.
1.. Ice floats on water. Freezing the ocean won't lower the ocean at all.
2. The power required to freeze that much water would be titanic. Solar power wouldn't be enough to do it. Where does the power come from?
nuclear subs power pumps around antarctica (Score:2)
An idea I like (which isn't to say I know it's workable) is to station nuclear submarines down around antarctica, and use the nuclear reactors to power pumps that drive water into the interior where it freezes and builds up the southern icepack.
It's no doubt harder to get this to work than it sounds, but I like it better than the variant Kim Stanley Robinson wrote about, using solar cells to power the pumps-- which obviously is only going to work for half of the year, and not very well, and during the ha
am I missing something? (Score:2)
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Get get cold you need to get hot somewhere else (Score:2)
Plus the extra heath needed to do the work.
So, overall result is that you get globally hotter and not colder.
That's the physics, baby, the physics and there's nothing you can do about it. Nothing! [Humphrey "ThermoGuy" Bogart]
The real solutions should be to stop producing heath, globally.
But that means that there should be global agreements, global plans, global fundings...
That's not for humans.
Buy an Iceberg (Score:2)
Why donâ(TM)t we convince Trump to buy an iceberg instead of greenland?
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Assumptions.... (Score:2)
Whoever came up with this idea is assuming that AGW is a serious danger (it is), and that a fleet of nuclear submarines making ice cubes is a partial solution.
How about trying something really novel? Instead of building a fleet of nuclear submarines to make ice cubes, let's just build the nuclear power plants that those subs would need on land, use them to make electricity, and completely stop using coal, natural, gas (yes, a submarine-type nuclear reactor can handle changes in load quickly enough to repl
Re:Diesel or Nuke (Score:5, Insightful)
irrelevant what the subs run on, removing heat from a block of water to make ice necessitates releasing that heat, plus more heat from motor and powerplant, into the water. Net effect is heating ocean and melting more ice. Plus arctic ice isn't on land, it floats and so has no bearing on sea level.
Pure distilled mental retardation is what those subs would make.
Re:Diesel or Nuke (Score:4, Insightful)
Pure distilled mental retardation is what those subs would make.
Actually it would seem like those subs would be made *by* pure distilled mental retardation.