RE: "Indeed so, particularly because of the seismic evidence. This is not easily discounted."
IMO it's fairly easy to discount if the spike was caused by a few million pounds of core slamming into the bedrock after it was severed. If you'll pardon me for saying so, the Jim Hoffman piece is pseudo intellectual nonsense. I'd also question the credibility of anyone who claims 80,000 pound charges of ANFO are used to mine rocks, or that such a charge would only produce 1 to 2 magnitude quakes.
Let's have some fun with math. A 5 pound bag of sugar measures 4 X 5 X 7 for 140 cubic inches. That gives you approximately 60 pounds for a cubic foot of sugar. Divide that into 80,000 pounds to find out how big a pile of sugar that comes to, and you have 1333 cubic feet. Take the cube root of that to get a sugar lump 11 feet on a side. If you have trouble stacking it that high, you might try a pile 5 1/2 feet high, by 11 feet wide, and 22 feet long.
Now let's try the problem from another direction. Instead of sugar, let's use bags of fertilizer from the hardware store. Pick up three 20 pound bags at five bucks each to make up a cubic foot for $15. Multiply that by 1333 to get $20,000 for the cost to make big rocks into little rocks, that sell for $130 per truck load.
As I'll freely admit, I honestly don't know enough about this kind of thing to enjoy a high confidence level on expressing views on the subject. I'm basically stuck with trying to categorize my views into what strikes me as reasonable, or unreasonable.
Aside from my impression that using 80,000 pound charges to mine rocks would be inefficient, impractical and uneconomical, and that the resulting explosion would do no more than rattle the dishes, we already know nothing of the sort was used on the towers. If it had been, we would have seen an explosion that blew holy hell out of the base of the towers, and they would have tipped over like a falling tree.
IMO the duck rule applies: If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and acts like a duck; it is a duck.
If it looks like an implosion, makes noise like an implosion and acts like an implosion; it is an implosion. Mini nukes need not apply. |
