Alex WellersteinVerified account

For a still-in-progress project related to nuclear burning, I have a lot of datasets relating to land cover and urban build-up. Someday hope to integrate those into things (have a student working on it)...

“nuclear burning” is a fun phrase.

It's fun to be able to say, "ah, yeah, that comes out of the nuclear burning account."

Can someone define "nuclear burning"? Does this refer to things igniting?

Right. I'm interested in coming up with rough, on-the-fly numbers for how much smoke would be created from any given nuke going off, based on terrain parameters (e.g. grassland vs. desert), density and flammability of buildings, etc.

If I could get reasonable back of the envelope numbers on the fly (e.g., less than a second of calculation per detonation, like the casualty numbers NUKEMAP can already generate very quickly), I could do interesting things with that.

I've been working on this project for awhile, mostly in the summer (and have a very talented student working on it), and many angles of it are basically working but there are still a few things left to make work before the whole thing can work together.

I could probably get a single-detonation model working in a very short amount of time but the complexities of a multi-det model are too intoxicating and useful to avoid. Should be more time for the student to work on it this spring.