The Man Who Wants to Save the Planet by Nuking the Earth’s Crust

What hope now for avoiding catastrophic climate change? As all of the data on emissions, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and global warming point emphatically in the wrong direction, returning president Donald Trump has given the call to “drill, baby, drill”—a pledge to fast-track new fossil fuel projects and ramp up production. One presumes it’s an order that the world’s oil and gas giants, already backsliding from their previous commitments to transition to green energy, will be only too happy to heed.

Against this backdrop, the dark premonitions that haunt the minds of those persuaded by the scientific consensus on climate change—and the myriad horrors of a burning world—only intensify. With every tried and tested climate fix looking like a busted flush, radical new ideas are being explored with increasing urgency.

One of these is geoengineering. The large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to mitigate the impact of man-made climate change is seen by some as a technical challenge that will draw out the very best of human ingenuity and ultimately save the world. Others see it as the latest example of our deluded faith in technology.

You may be aware by now of solar geoengineering, which in most cases means reflecting sunlight before it has the chance to reach and heat Earth’s surface. Some believe we could pump sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere to form a protective fug of sunlight-reflecting sulphate aerosols. Other theories, such as Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW), involve carbon sequestration. Rock weathering is actually a totally natural process in which carbon dioxide is drawn out of the atmosphere when a chemical reaction occurs between rainwater and rocks. With ERW, you accelerate this through mechanical means, allowing you to sequester significantly more CO₂.

“This explosion would be well over a thousand times larger than the 50 megaton ‘Tsar Bomba’ test, the current largest nuclear explosion in history, which itself was around 3,800 times the strength of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.”

It’s this process that forms the basis for perhaps the most extreme geoengineering proposal to emerge yet. In January, a paper appeared on arXiv, a website of non-peer-reviewed scholarly articles. Written by Andy Haverly, a 25-year-old Microsoft software engineer from Washington State, its proposition was a modest one—that we should try firing the largest nuclear bomb in history into the Earth’s crust in order to sequester 30 years’ worth of CO₂ emissions in underwater rock.

In Haverly’s mind, the 81 gigaton nuclear bomb would be buried somewhere between 3 and 5km beneath the seabed of the remote Kerguelen Plateau, where the surrounding waters of the Antarctic Ocean themselves have a depth of 6 to 8km. This explosion would be well over a thousand times larger than the 50 megaton ‘Tsar Bomba’ test, the current largest nuclear explosion in history, detonated in 1961 by the Soviet Union in the Arctic Circle. (For reference, that explosion was around 3,800 times the strength of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima during World War II. Apparently recycling isn’t going to cut it any more.)

According to Haverly, who doesn’t have a background in climate science or nuclear engineering but is currently studying for a PhD in quantum computing at Rochester Institute of Technology, the bomb would pulverize a vast amount of basalt rock (3.86 trillion tons, to be precise) into tiny pieces. Theoretically, this would then react with CO₂ in the ocean to form stable carbonate minerals that lock the carbon away permanently. The deep ocean waters would, he claims, safely contain the blast.

Speaking to me over Zoom, Haverly—who is now working with a professor to put together a full-blown paper on this idea—explains that the idea came to him as he was “reading about all the different methods of carbon sequestration and hearing about how they are not sufficient. We are orders of magnitude lower in capability and plans than is needed for most carbon models or for most climate change models.”

“Seeing the movie Oppenheimer really brought nuclear power to the front of my mind,” he continued. “There are elements of this idea that are already well known—like Enhanced Rock Weathering, and detonating nuclear weapons underground—but combining all of these ideas has not been considered seriously before. And that’s the reason I posted this paper. I was hoping it had already been considered so I could focus on other solutions or other problems, but it was clear to me after research online that no one has ever considered this as a possibility.”

Perhaps this doesn’t come as a massive surprise. The huge risks and potential for unforeseen consequences are regular critiques of geoengineering—and in this case, concerns about both would surely be off the charts. What impact might this kind of experiment have on tectonic plates? Or ocean currents? What would be the effects of the nuclear radiation? “We don’t want these isotopes to spread,” Haverly counters, “and we could keep it in what is essentially a desert under the ocean. All of those radioactive isotopes would, to a very large extent, stay in that area.”

How big an area? He can’t say. And the characterisation of the seabed as a ‘desert’ seems to skirt around the huge amount of local marine life that would surely be wiped out. But he says it’s one of the many aspects that needs input from specialists. Haverly stresses that his slim paper is simply a starting point for discussion.

“This idea is not a thorough presentation of what we should do, right? I’m not saying, ‘Sure, let’s just greenlight this idea, let’s detonate a nuke tomorrow.’ I’m saying this idea has never been seriously considered. This idea is clearly a novel idea, and we need to properly consider if it could even be implemented.”

Critics of geoengineering say that to even entertain ideas such as Haverly’s is dangerous. They argue that it helps justify a lack of action on fossil fuel emissions in the present, legitimizing the idea that the damage of global warming can be undone at a later date. It also conveniently feeds into the structural imperative of industrial and political elites to maintain business as usual, when letting warming happen means reaching irreversible tipping points. If ecosystems such as the Amazon rainforest collapse, or the Greenland ice sheet disappears, there is no techno fix for that and no going back, and the runaway consequences would be devastating for human life on Earth.

Wim Carton, Associate Professor of Sustainability Science at Lund University, Sweden, and co-author of Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, sees the Haverly plan as having “a concerning continuity with the very earliest geoengineering proposals, which also advocated the use of nuclear bombs to do everything from earthmoving for harbor construction to blowing up the Arctic sea ice.”

“These schemes were insane and irresponsible when they were proposed in the 1940s and 50s, and they are if anything more insane and irresponsible now that we actually know the consequences of nuclear detonations,” he says. “There is almost nothing here on the likely effectiveness of using nuclear weapons for enhanced weathering, and no serious discussion of the very many political and geopolitical barriers, not to speak of the likely enormous public opposition you would face.”

“There’s heaps to say on this, and indeed on the kind of climate politics—likely undemocratic, tech-fix focused, militarized etc—that would follow from going down a route like this,” says Carton. “But to be honest, dwelling on it would be to treat this ill-conceived proposal with more consideration and seriousness than I feel is warranted.”

“There have, at least in my opinion, not been any fatal flaws of this idea pointed out.”

Yet for Haverly, carbon sequestration on this scale potentially affords a window of opportunity in a world of diminishing options. “We should still of course keep working on green energy, but we can’t ignore that there are impacts from every action that we make,” he says. “Minimizing these impacts on the environment should be our goal and this is just another tool to help us do so. Climate change is here; climate change won’t just go away if we hope for it. And by adding in a way to properly and feasibly sequester carbon, that could help us transition to green energy more carefully.”

Haverly says he’s already received a lot of feedback on his proposal, a lot of which has basically been “please stay away from nuclear weapons.” But there has been positive interest from physicists in Germany and the U.S., as well as marine experts who have been working on unexploded ordnance around the UK coastline.

“There have, at least in my opinion, not been any fatal flaws of this idea pointed out,” Haverly says. “We will need more work, more research, more simulation to properly figure out if this is something that can be done.”

Detonating a nuclear bomb buried in the Earth’s crust seems like an unforgivably brutal and ungrateful act of violence towards a planet that patiently created the conditions for human existence over the course of 4.5 billion years. But as the climate crisis intensifies, the question of whether Haverly and the geoengineering vanguard come as death, destroyer of worlds, or the last hope at preserving human life, is one that is only going to heat up. 

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