hat is lacking in news reporting today isn't just accuracy. It's
perspective. It's a full-time job correcting all the hysteria about
risks that seems designed to terrorize people rather than inform them.
One example is how the UK media are hyping up the possibility that Russia
will attack them using an underwater nuclear bomb that would create a
tsunami that would destroy their country.
They're referring to the Poseidon, which is said to produce what our American news media, never one to skimp on the hyperbole, calls “a radioactive tidal wave of death.” Newsweek quoted some TV host in Russia named Dmitry Kiselyov who claimed that this torpedo can produce a 1640-foot high tidal wave of “radioactive seawater” that would drown England (average elevation 55 meters) and Scotland (36 meters).
That's proof that the Russian news media are no more science-literate than our own. First of all, would it really be radioactive? A nuke emits heat, light, and gamma rays, which would mostly be absorbed; and neutrons, which would react with water to produce deuterium and tritium; and many bad fission byproducts. Tritium (3H) is a weak beta emitter; despite the hysteria about Fukushima, it is not a terrible threat. If you must get exposed to radiation, I recommend tritium, which emits beta particles so weak they're stopped by a sheet of paper. A Geiger counter, which can weakly pick up carbon-14, has no chance of detecting tritium.
An aerial landscape photo of a camper van next to an ocean beach, with rocks and logs washed up on shore. But wait—what's that giant paper clip doing there?
As for a tsunami, the energy of even the largest H-bomb is tiny compared to the energy in an earthquake. The total energy of the March 11 2011 tsunami was estimated to be 3 ×1015 Joules. One Joule is 2.39×10−13 kiloton (kT), so the tsunami contained 717 kT of energy, which sounds like a lot, and it is. But it pays to remember that the tsunami energy is about 0.1% of the total energy in the earthquake that causes it. So the one that produced that 2011 tsunami must have had about 717 megatons of energy, far more than anything humans can yet produce. What percentage of the energy of a nuke would actually go to creating a tidal wave? My guess is nobody knows for sure. If it's 0.1%, an underwater 1 megaton nuclear explosion would produce a wave carrying the equivalent of 1000 tons of TNT, enough to make a gigantic splash (and a lot of contaminated water).
Scientists who worked on underground nuclear testing developed theories to explain why the rock above it didn't always fracture. As in the ocean, the biggest effect would probably be from the shock wave, which would stir up a lot of sand, evaporate a lot of water, damage any ships or subs in the area, and kill quite a lot of fish.
How much water is needed to absorb all that heat?
Water has a heat capacity of 4.1855 Joules per gram / degree C. From this, a 1 megaton blast (= 4.184×1015 joules) would heat 1 cubic kilometer (1015 grams of water) by about 4 degrees C.
Of course the heat isn't evenly distributed, so some of the water will evaporate and some will be radiolyzed into ·OH (where the dot means it's a free radical), ·H, ·HO2, H3O+, H2O2, OH−, H2, and electrons. Some of these radiolysis products, if produced inside the body, are highly chemically reactive and harmful to life. The heat of vaporization of water is 2256 Joules per gram (at its boiling point of 100°C; the exact number varies with temperature and goes to zero at 373.946°C, known as the critical temperature of water). The amount turned to steam will depend on many factors, but clearly a lot of water would also be sprayed upwards from the massive amount of kinetic energy that is produced.
Actual underwater testing in Test Baker in 1946 (here and here) 90 feet below the surface created a 94-foot-high wave that sprayed water on the target ships, creating widespread radioactive contamination well above background levels, and sunk eight of them. Not a good thing to have, but not what knowledgeable people would call a tsunami. It was 1½ times as big as those sixty-foot rogue waves, which are unusually steep and focused, meaning the wave frequency is shortened—the opposite of what happens in a tsunami. There's no conceivable design that would increase the wave height by 17-fold. Any special geometric shapes designed to displace a larger mass of water (which you'd need to do to make a tsunami) would be totally ineffective because the nature of a nuke is to be a “point” source. Energy reflectors on the torpedo would just get vaporized. Even if it were possible to create a 1600-foot wave, the idea that it would destroy the United Kingdom is preposterous.
What they appear to be thinking is that 1600 is a bigger number than 180, so anything below 1600 feet ASL would be under water. This doesn't follow. Could a nuke trigger an earthquake or underwater landslide, thereby indirectly inducing a tsunami? Maybe, but believe it or not there are people out there who have fanatically strong feelings about such things, so I'll just say the volume of water displaced by all the bombs in the world wouldn't be enough without it.
Every country is going to invade every other country
Another “expert” claims that Putin plans to invade Finland, Sweden, Poland, Czechia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro and West Macedonia. These are all members of NATO except West Macedonia, which is not a real country, so invading any one of them would indeed trigger a conflict that Russia would almost certainly lose, nukes or no nukes. The expert also thinks president-elect Trump is planning to invade Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal.
Yet another “expert” says that satellites in geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO) are in “imminent” danger due to the so-called Kessler effect, where pieces of space debris smash into each other, which will knock out Wi-Fi and cell phones. The fact is that the volume of space at 22,236 ± 500 miles is huge—1.5 times the entire volume of the Earth and 32.4 times the volume of our atmosphere. Satellite operators know that defunct satellites are a potential menace and they take appropriate precautions. So space debris out there could someday become a problem, but to claim it's a problem now is only fearmongering. And it won't do shit to your Wi-Fi.
I suppose experts think nobody will listen if they just say “someday it might be a slight inconvenience.” But the inability to evaluate risks is widespread, and the media have trouble learning it. If government got involved, it would prove it wasn't a real crisis; government attacks only fake problems, which are easier to fake being solved; if they tried to solve a real problem, they'd only make it worse. As with environmental toxins, microplastics, gas stoves, and the supposed warming crisis, claiming there's a crisis when there is none merely discredits the media, the “experts” who profit from it, and the scientists who know better but let them get away with it.
No wonder people roll their eyes when they hear the word “expert.”
dec 29 2024, 6:57 am. updated and edited for brevity dec 30 2024, 6:37 am
