The grid-to-beam efficiency of greater than GEV particle accelerators ranges from kess than 5 % for high current systems , to as little as 0.02% for superconducting colliders like the LHC. As the global cosmic ray flux is of the order of 5 GW, matching it might therefore take anywhere from a hundred GW to several tens of terawatts.
At the high end of that power range one runs into a serious feedback- the cloud nucleation cooling might be overwhelmed by extra CO2 radiative forcing from the thermal plants in the grid powering the accelerators. On Sunday, August 19, 2018 at 10:17:58 AM UTC-4, Andrew Lockley wrote: > > Cosmic rays cause cloud condensation nuclei. They are therefore believed > to affect cloudiness, and therefore climate. If we made more cosmic rays, > that would likely make it more cloudy. Whether this was a warming or > cooling effect would depend on whether it was cirrus or cumulus clouds (NB, > sometimes making cirrus ultimately removes water, resulting in less cirrus) > > Cosmic rays are almost all protons, with an typical energy peak > distribution of 0.3GEv. (4.8×10−11 J). No idea if that's the right energy > for CCN, but we can tweak that later. > > Creating artificial cosmic rays is possible, using a linear particle > accelerator. This is similar to an ion thruster, as used in space probes. > > To affect climate, you'd probably have to get densities of the order of > 1/s/sqm (more on that, later). > > 360 million square kilometers of ocean is 360tn sqm or 3.6x10^14sqm. You > don't really want to send particles into people, and the cleaner air over > the oceans makes them more effective. > > A kilo of hydrogen contains 6x10^26 protons. > > That means 1kg of H2 gives you enough material for 1.6x10^12s = roughly 50 > years - so a satellite could easily carry enough material to do the job. > > Power is 3.6x10^14 x 4.8x10^-11J/s = 17kW - again, well within what a > satellite could muster (roughly 100sqm of solar panels, at around 20% panel > efficiency (conservative) and 50pc conversion (made up) efficiency). > > Cheap satellites are about $50m - well within the capabilities of a rich > philanthropist. Even if this is not cheap, it's still only perhaps 500m > > If I'm out by 5 orders (1 ray per sq cm, not per sq m each second), then > that's only 10,000 satellites. That's expensive, but not outlandish. > Superficially, that would be $500bn at the lower cost, but there is likely > a 10x or 100x experience curve cost reduction, meaning the whole programme > would be about $5-50bn max. > > As an alternative, you could use aircraft or balloons, but beam > attenuation would be a serious issue. 40km balloons can be launched, albeit > with small payloads. They would fly at the bottom of the mesosphere, over > 99.9pc of the atmosphere. So maybe beam attenuation would be tolerable, at > that height. I don't know how to calculate it, but I'm guessing it would be > cms to kms - so not really far enough to make a difference to climate. You > could perhaps have mountaintop accelerators with very high powers, and a > sweeping beam (like a lighthouse). If the power requirement was GW-range, > then maybe the beam range would be a hundred km, or so. That might be > enough to work, but it would have some pretty significant effects on local > atmospheric chemistry - so probably not a good idea. > > Any thoughts from anyone? > > Andrew Lockley > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
