I have a niggling worry about the plans to get rid of carbon by pumping carbon dioxide into old oil wells; how certain are we that it will stay there?
Presumably if we pump in too much it will start to come out again. If it came out quickly that would be a disaster; if it came out slowly could it turn the oceans into carbonated water?
There was a disaster in Africa a few years ago where the water in an ‘extinct’ volcano crater became carbonated by gasses bubbling up through the water.
All was well until one day a landslide caused the deep — and therefore highly pressurised — carbonated water to rise to the surface and release its carbon dioxide, gassing the countryside for miles around.
Could we be storing up problems for the future? At least nuclear waste gets safer with time — carbon dioxide is forever!
Denis Sharp
Arundel
West Sussex
Fusion inches closer as ITER completes magnet system
The problem with a Tokamak shape for the fusion plasma, is that the magnetic field from the central solenoid reduces from the centre outwards, leading...