One of the bigger local news stories here in Utah right now is an inversion squatting over the Salt Lake valley, turning the air quality into garbage. Worst air in the USA just now, in fact.

One of the reasons for this is the Wasatch Mountains (i.e. the walls of Mordor) that create a north-south barrier on the eastern side of Salt Lake City. It takes a good storm to blow the air in SLC up and over the mountains. In effect, climate and topography have teamed up to make things bad for humans. So since nature has gone to war against Mankind, we should fight back.

A simple solution would seem to present itself: the thousands of feet of damn-near vertical walls backing up SLC should be breached. Done properly, this would create an outlet for the air, like poking a hole in a dam. And what better way is there than nuclear explosives?

The last American nuclear detonation was way, waaaaaaay back in 1992. There are some blog readers who were surely born well after that (thanks for making me feel old, once again). There are people who were born after that who have achieved advanced degrees in nuclear engineering. Imagine it: a degree in something that hasn’t occurred in your lifetime, and it’s not a history degree.

So, an operation to nuke a hole in the Wasatch range would be useful on many levels. This is not something that could or should be slapped together overnight, but perhaps a five or ten year program. A great deal of study to determine how many nukes where to create what sort of breach. An operation to develop all-new nukes for civil engineering, with a series of tests in the Nevada test range. And then the actual operation to blast a channel through the mountains. I would tentatively suggest a hundred or so detonations along the current route of I-80 to lower the level and broaden it, and a similar series paralleling that, perhaps ten to twenty miles north and another to the south. The eminent domain issues would be pretty substantial, but Utah could, I think, generate the funds needed by the simple expedient of charging property taxes on Utah land currently controlled by the Federal government (the feds control 34.2 million acres of Utah… charge ’em a nominal $500 per acre per year, that’d be a nice $17.1 billion per year).

The detonations themselves would be most likely a slow process. Starting way off in the relatively unpopulated east and marching west, one blast at a time, with each westward blast adjusted based on the current state of things. The last blasts would have to be carefully calibrated and placed so that the mountains slide down to the east, rather than falling west into the cities… that would of course be non-optimal. There would be a vast amount of dirt and rock that would need to be hauled away, a process liable to take several years. An obvious place to put this slightly radioactive rubble would be in Bingham Canyon… humans dug a giant hole in the ground to pull out copper and other metals; what better for it afterwards than to fill it back up?

The new wind-channels carved through the mountains would not only let the crappy air flow out, but would also funnel winds though, making them good locations for wind turbines for power generation. And when the wind stops, you could feed power into the windmills from the terawatt-class nuclear powerplants floating in the re-worked Great Salt Lake to turn them into blowers to suck the air through…