http://rsd.gsfc.nasa.gov/rsd/images/andrewSequence_sm.jpg



While some activists worry about the effects of nuclear reactors on the environment, a scientist in India is thinking about how reactors might be used to control the weather. Moninder Singh Modgil of the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur has shown that nuclear-generated heat might be used to produce low-pressure regions that could pull moist air from oceans into desert areas to support agriculture. He also suggests that such heating could create cyclones, or be used to melt glaciers and control the flow of rivers.

I can't locate the original source for this at the Boston Globe. I assume the page no longer exists.

Any city produces significantly more heat. For example, New york city tends to create a permanent low pressure area around itself due to the heat from its multitudes of cars, people, and electrical lights. This severely effects weather but only in the immediate area. It dissipates rapidly as you get further away.

Hello Cthulu,
I thought you would be interested in the original article I had written on the subject, so I am sending it as an attachment.
Your comments are true, but certain differences between the effect of methods of heat transfer to atmosphere, in the two artificial weather systems (New York heating, and Nuclear heating of atmosphere), have to be accounted for. For instance, hot air rising from New York is of relatively low temperature (say average 50 degree), but is spread over a large area. This moderately hot air rapidly cools on rising, and spreads radially outwards. It eventually comes down shortly outside the city, and thus self-dampens, any suction generated by the heating. On the other hand, if an extremely hot jet of hot air at say 500 degrees C is injected into atmosphere, it will rise much higher. Exact height can be determined using basic equations of atmospheric physics. It will not be in a position to self-dampen the suction generated by nuclear heat. These questions have to addressed by numerical simulations on computers, and analytical models. I am working on these. Please be in touch with me on these issues. I would like to continue to have your feed back on them.
Regards,
Moninder Singh Modgil





http://rsd.gsfc.nasa.gov/rsd/images/andrewSequence_sm.jpg



While some activists worry about the effects of nuclear reactors on the environment, a scientist in India is thinking about how reactors might be used to control the weather. Moninder Singh Modgil of the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur has shown that nuclear-generated heat might be used to produce low-pressure regions that could pull moist air from oceans into desert areas to support agriculture. He also suggests that such heating could create cyclones, or be used to melt glaciers and control the flow of rivers.

I can't locate the original source for this at the Boston Globe. I assume the page no longer exists.

A grand vision, Mr. Singh Modgil... it sounds like it could be yet another terrifying weapon, however. A way to use nuclear energy for mass destruction, without fallout, radiation sickness or a nuclear winter.

Doesn't the World already have enough cyclones and monsoons, without creating artificial ones? I can imagine the way deep ecologists would hyperbolize on this, saying that you can't cause a beneficial downpour in a desert region without unintentionally wreaking ruin somewhere else.

I'm not a habitual paranoic myself, and it's clear that the local application of this nuclear weather control would be very different from the random effects of global warming. Still, pumping so much heat into the atmosphere can surely only exacerbate the climate change problem, in the long run.