Talk:Climate control/An artificial " tornado" to supplant the real thing

The title should read: " An artificial man-made " tornado " to supplant the real thing.

The essential idea is to prove the existence in the laboratory of a point of minimum aerodynamic energy in the vicinity of the device described in principle, that would tether the vortex tube of an actual tornado to a fixed location, that of the device.

The passive device, if this happens to function as required, would have flutes spiralling in a direction consistent with the rotation of the air around the tornado vortex.

The active or passive version of the device could be developed theoretically and practically and then tested under lab conditions.

Almost needless to say, in the first instance theoretical research and laboratory experiment should always take precedence over the spending of large amounts of money and resources on such at present hypothetical machines that would control tornados and perhaps generate electricity at the same time. The feasibility of such devices would first need to be proved but this would not be nearly as costly in resources as compared with the price tag of a full scale machine.SHAWWPG19410425 19:13, 25 May 2011 (UTC)SHAWWPG19410425 15:04, 29 May 2011 (UTC)


 * SHAWWP, you state that a tornado started in this way would be "trapped" at the location of the device. Yet a tornado would move with the air mass containing it. This device would presumably only be used when conditions were ripe for a tornado, so, what would keep the tornado from "escaping" and then causing damage?


 * Tornados can occur over vast regions, and to "attract" other tornados, even if that worked, many, many such devices, kept in place for use, would be required, which would be very expensive as conceived,. As to costs, thus, this solution could be more expensive than tornado damage!


 * It is possible to conceive of managing to disrupt a tornado, but it's far from simple. --Abd 13:29, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

" ... far from simple. " [ to disrupt a tornado ] but has the possibility ever been theoretically explored? The whole point of a program of theoretical and practical research is to discover under the controlled conditions in a laboratory whether or not in the active version of the machine there could exist a region where the tornado would remain dynamically stable above the location of the machine. Already it has been stated that research should always precede spending any serious resouces on such machines. At some stage after the theory had been shown to be valid it would be necessary to find out how to create what in effect would be a laboratory scale "tornado" and be able to study the effect of moving the fluid medium relative to a scaled down working model of an an electric motor driven impellor that would be used to impart a rotation about a vertical axis to the fluid. I have heard that there are tornado "corridors" in the Southern US where severe weather in the form of tornados occur with regularity every year - the tornado season. If it proves feasible to induce a tornado by artificial means then that would certainly be progress. This, in my opinion, is a much better use of resources [once the technology had been proved and laboratory tested] than for example sending missions to the Moon and Mars. Such space ventures could surely be deferred until problems on Earth had been properly addressed. Just ask the people of Joplin and now Massachusetts what they think. No one knows if it is feasible to disrupt a naturally occurring tornado until some theoretical research has been done. This would be putting a powerful computer to good use. By " amplifying " the tornado at a particular locality, this should dissipate the atmospheric energy in the neighborhood [Br. neighbourhood] and reduce the probability of further tornados in the area over a large radius. I am not familiar with the mathematical equations of atmospheric systems involving variations of temperature and humidity, but I am sure that there are experts who could discover if the problem of controlling tornados is solvable. A lightning conductor protects a large area from an electrical storm so likewise why not see if a locality can be protected from a severe weather event - a tornado? I would certainly be very cautious about the use of resources until it became apparent that there was the virtual certainty of a successful outcome. Never venture never gain. I am sure that a fraction of the annual value of food wasted in the US or Europe would more than finance such research.SHAWWPG19410425 20:43, 3 June 2011 (UTC) [User:SHAWWPG19410425|SHAWWPG19410425]] 20:33, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I don't think you have looked at any estimate of what it might cost, and of the risks of actual deployment. It's one thing to study climate and to study possible climate engineering, but tornados are not where priority would go, I suspect. A seat-of-the-pants estimate of tornado control cost through the method you propose is that it would be far beyond the cost of the programs you suggest are of lesser value. Doing something to disrupt a live tornado seems not inconceivable to me, though dangerous in itself. Creating a new tornado on the theory that it would attract other tornadoes and thus fix or control them seems totally speculative, first of all, and runs the risk of simply creating two tornadoes where there was one; what I pointed out was that the forces that control the position of a tornado are great, probably larger than we could control.
 * By all means, research and examine climate control possibilities, there are aspects to climate that we can control. But there are also aspects where the forces involved are very large and unruly, very difficult to contain. To alaborate on the one that stands out for me:
 * A tornado is a massive rotating updraft. It moves with the overall wind, i.e., with the atmosphere. It is powered by warm air rising, so it requires conditions where there is an inversion: warm air nearer the ground, cooler air above. Atomic weapons, apparently, do create tornadoes, when they create a large mass of hot air near the ground. A tornado that is not continually fed by energy from the rising hot air will dissipate rapidly. To artificially create a tornado, one would still need the conditions, "tornado weather," or all you are doing is dumping a lot of energy into rising air. So if you do create a tornado, it must be in a place where one might be about to happen anyway. Now, how are you going to keep this tornado from moving? Have you considered or calculated how much energy would need to be continually supplied to keep the tornado in place? What force will resist lateral movement of the tornado, as the column is displaced by wind?
 * If you want to think about tornado control, I'd suggest thinking about how to disrupt and stop a tornado. A large release of heat near the top of the tornado looks like a more promising approach to me. Problem is, how to release so much heat rapidly enough to snuff the tornado. A nuclear device could, my guess, do it, but at what cost, what collateral damage?
 * Beyond that, if the inversion layer could be disrupted, by moving the warm air up in ways that don't create a funnel, tornadoes could be prevented. The problem here is one of scale, how much air movement would be needed. It would be enormous, but, side-benefit, such movement could generate energy.... --Abd 17:08, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

Clearly, preventing a tornado is out of the question. However, containing a tornado could be an attainable goal. The purpose of Wikiversity I understand is to make original ideas known and containment of a tornado appears to be such an original concept.

Controlling a tornado using some kind of machine has been described as speculative. The Random House College Dictionary gives " theoretical" as a synonym for "speculative". If there is a mathematical model in existence that represents a tornado, then why not modify the equations to include explicitly time dependent terms to account for a man-made input. This would improve the meteorological understanding of tornados and after so much [worthy] use of computer time, the results could be shown on the computer monitor as computer graphics. This would be a theoretical study of tornados that would resolve every pertinent matter such as the effect of the general drift wind speed and the energy input required to fix the tornado and particularly the stability.

In this way, all the speculation could be settled using computer models for a tornado.

There are two possibilities: [1] to leave the question of whether a tornado can be contained as an unanswered question [2] to study the matter theoretically as above.

In the case of decision no [2] then either the hypothesis that a tornado can be contained using a machine of some kind will be proved to be true or otherwise proved to be false.

Meterologists by profession are continually constructing and improving theoretical models of the weather so as to predict the weather at a future time, starting from the present state of the weather. Surely it would not be too difficult or costly to find a way to help the weather behave itself better.

Having seen pictures of people climbing over the wreckage of their homes in recent tornados, need more be said. It should be remembered that a machine for amplifying the energy of a tornado, built to military specifications, would be not significantly more costly than a robust vertical axis wind turbine which it becomes ninety-nine percent of the time. This dual purpose machine would be driven by electricity during a tornado but most of the time would supply electricity to the locality. The details would need to be worked out in the laboratory using small experimental models to verify the principle in the first instance. Judging by recent events, " dugouts " to shelter from a tornado in Oklahoma have been worse than useless. Perhaps serious research on a dual purpose vertical axis wind turbine would be more appropriate at this juncture. SHAWWPG19410425 21:06, 5 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Wikiversity isn't for "new ideas," as such, but for educational resources. Studying new ideas, even coming up with new ideas, can be part of an educational resource, just as it can be part of a university seminar, for example. I suggest, for a start, looking at . There are some interesting things noted there, by experts. One piece of information that I found surprising was that the energy involved in a tornado was only about 10 MWh, compared to 10 TWh (a million times more) for a hurricane or hydrogen bomb.
 * As to the damage caused, yes, much more need be said. The cost of damage must be weighed against the cost of preventing damage. Notice that even deploying sensors in the path of a tornado has been extremely difficult, and future sensing will probably be done by probes fired into the tornado. The page cited mentions setting up shelters at amusement parks and the like, and notes how expensive this would be. Anything to be done over a wide area can be extremely expensive. How close would an artificial tornado machine have to be to a tornado to "suck it in." My sense is *very close.* If the machines could be made portable, to be driven to the tornado path quickly, there would still have to be many of them, and compared to the cost of shelters, these things would be very expensive. The cost of prevention could vastly exceed the cost of tolerating damage (but taking steps to protect lives, as with shelters). By the way, there were tornadoes a few days ago, just a few miles south of where I live, four or five people were killed. This is a place that almost never sees tornadoes.... --Abd 04:00, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

About Wikiverity " not a forum for new ideas ". This is has to be almost vacuously true since genuinely new ideas are very rarely discovered and mostly only existing ideas are restated and then applied to new situations.

The contribution on the containment of tornados should be deleted - but only if the underlying concept is invalid. This invalidity must be proved first.SHAWWPG19410425 14:17, 7 June 2011 (UTC)


 * There is no process here for "proving" the "invalidity" of a concept. Rather, if you are seriously interested in this, I'd suggest you start looking at details. What determines the location of a tornado, what forces would influence that? In a more practical line, how would one of these machines work, more specificially? What would it cost? How much energy would it supply, and what would be the source of this energy? What range of influence would it have? From that, how many machines would be needed to protect, say, two million square miles of territory? How much damage do tornadoes do, per year?


 * Just to approach one of these elements, it seems to me that a tornado's location depends on the movement of the mass of air in which it is located. In order to move the tornado (or keep it in the same location, same issue), one would have to move (or keep stationary) the air mass. A tornado itself does not move that much air, compared to a hurricane, for example. Moving a large mass of air, now, that's difficult. From this analysis, it would seem that creating a tornado might not be the hard part. Keeping it fixed in location, that would be the difficulty. It would keep blowing away from the source, so what the machine might end up doing is spawning a series of tornadoes that would move down-wind. If it is tornado weather, these would then be self-sustaining, for a time. Talk about Tornado Alley! --Abd 15:06, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

The question as to cost of a machine to control a tornado would be highly premature. Experts in meteorolgy apparently have only tried to forecast tornados with varying degrees of success but have never as yet even imagined a means of actually controlling this form of extreme weather. Prevention would be impossible.

If it is really the case that the concept [validity neither proved nor disproved] outlined in the principal contribution is absolutely new and Wikiversity is not a forum for such an idea, then it would be perfectly justifiable to delete the Contribution and the associated Talk Page. The Contribution and the Talk page may then be safely consigned to oblivion. The concept had been proposed as a serious idea for discussion.

Here are some ideas that have been forwarded for " combatting " that dubious time worn subject: " climate change ": [a] having sailing ships criss-crossing the oceans and on their decks setting up jets of sea water to spray into the atmosphere and cause cooling of the atmosphere. [b] Perturbing the Earth's orbit so as to increase the Earth - Sun distance with an obvious effect on climate. [c] Removal of all the atmospheric carbon dioxide and storing it underground for aeons.

How do this these appallng rediculous ideas compare with the idea of a small scale weather containment research project? - surely a rhetorical self-anwering question.

There are many extremely competant scientists in the US who I am sure would soon find all the answers to the above questions on schedule and within budget.SHAWWPG19410425 16:47, 7 June 2011 (UTC)


 * The concept is here being seriously discussed, is it not? Climate change concepts have been proposed, and the cost of such proposals, as well as possible or even likely side-effects, have also been discussed, in various places. The concept of climate control is not ridiculous, but cost is a major consideration. For example, drought: no problem, just fly air tankers, the kind used to fight forest fires, over the dry region and dump water. But, of course, the cost would be prohibitive, I think I don't have to do the actual math....


 * Here, it's proposed, without the slightest evidence, that a "tornado machine" might protect some area. The idea is that it would attract tornadoes, but attract them through what force? Tornados create inward winds at the bottom, but outward winds at the top. To keep a tornado stable, there would have to be no overall movement of the air mass involved. That is far from normal, tornadoes move, this is seen in the path of destruction, and the movement can be predicted, I believe, from wind speed and direction. The energy involved in a tornado is only about 10 MWh, but the energy involved in massive control of wind would be far, far more. If the machine created a tornado, the inward winds involved -- being "sucked in" by the machine, would stabilize only the base, and as the wind moved the upper parts of the tornado, eventually the rotating tube would become unstable, as the path becomes more and more inefficient, eventually the upper part would break away, at the bottom. It might extinguish rapidly, with a new upper part being formed at the machine location. However, it might also, if there is an inversion -- tornado weather! -- simply create a new, uncontrolled base. Thus one might see, from such a machine, the spawning of a series of tornadoes that would move down-wind. Instead of protecting against tornadoes, the machine would, indeed, create many of them.


 * So, suppose, though, an area could be protected. How large an area might a single machine protect? I find it very difficult to imagine that a tornado machine could "suck in" a tornado from a mile away, so, for this napkin calculation, suppose it can protect a square mile of area. What would a machine capable of tornado control cost? Considering how expensive heavy equipment can be, I'd be surprised if it was less than a million dollars. That's a million dollars to protect a square mile, from what risk of damage? Even in high risk areas, where the risk to each square mile is still low, that's way too much, my sense.


 * Those are *optimistic* estimates. If optimistic estimates show that an idea is way outside practicality, not to mention possible risk, how much effort should be put into further consideration. Right now, just investigating the conditions inside a tornado is quite difficult. For example, how low does the air pressure go, inside a tornado? It's not known, I believe.


 * It's not that controlling tornadoes is intrinsically impossible. However, a more likely approach would be the use of a small thermonuclear device, designed for minimum radiation and blast, and maximized heat, delivered into a tornado (near the top?). That, obviously, has its own difficulties and issues. For anything like the near future, improving tornado warning systems and developing more effective public response, seems more productive. A tornado strike on a major public event would be a horrible disaster, there are inadequate shelters and inadequate time to evacuate. Just having "dugouts" -- basically holes in the ground -- could make a huge difference. --Abd 17:48, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

If the contribution has been carefully read then indeed it will be seen that there is no evidence as YET to substantiate the proposition that such a dual purpose machine could be constructed to function as required. The purpose of theoretical research is to discover if such a machine could be invented and designed to produce electricity as a wind turbine during normal breezy weather and when a tornado was imminent at other times to initiate and contain the tornado in one place, that of the machine. This would involve an automatic redeployment and reconfiguration of the machine by remote control.

There is a proposal to delete the contribution on Monday July 4, 2011: " Climate control/An artificial "tornado" to supplant the real thing. " [A more accurate title has already been presented for this contribution. This is: " The Containment of Small Scale Intensive Meteorological Events - Tornados "]

There is a saying: "If the people lose their vision they perish." This means that if there is a persistent failure of imagination then every possibility for advancement is precluded.SHAWWPG19410425 08:58, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

Should the original contribution be deleted as proposed, then of course the associated Talk Page would logically also be expunged on the same date.SHAWWPG19410425 10:31, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

Proposed deletion
Above, the creator of the attached page is proposing deletion of the page, while, at the same time, seeming to fault a failure to take proposals like this seriously. I don't find those positions consistent.

In any case, this isn't how to propose deletion of a page. If it seems that deletion will not be controversial, you may propose deletion of the page by placing at the top of the page. Talk pages are often deleted together with mainspace pages. However, I'll say that if I see a tag like that for this, on the attached page, I'll probably remove it, because this topic has been discussed, and the discussion can be educational, and this would be lost for public view if the page is deleted. The page is no longer at the top in mainspace, but is now underneath a possible relevant resource, Climate control (which should be created and improved), where it becomes what the creator seems to want, a discussion of, "research" into, a proposed possibility.

If, then, someone still believes that a page should be deleted, follow the directions at Requests for deletion, so that there can be a deletion discussion. --Abd 17:50, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

The proposal to delete the contribution was only a proposal that might never happen. This was only written because of the extreme skepticism [Br. scepticism] with which the idea of initiating and containing a tornado was received.

There is a quotation from President Obama [please verify]: " You can do it! " [I would only use exclamation marks in literature, where they occur in quotations as above and as the mathematical symbol for the factorial of a positive integer.] The course of action by implication would have to be achievable and not produce harm in the process of accomplishing a good outcome. The sincerity with which I wrote the Climate control/ ... contribution should be judged by setting this alongside my other Wikiversity contributions. These were: [a] DIVISION ALGORITHM POLYNOMIAL QUOTIENTS [b] Matrices of Binary Remainders [c] The Distribution of Addition and Subtraction over Multiplication in Elementary Algebra [d] The resolution of the problem of the Prime Sequence. Contributions [c] and [d] are as yet unfinished.

The only risk involved here is the small initial financial outlay and effort involved to discover if in fact such a machine is theoretically possible. This would further the understanding of the mechanism of tornados so that the research would not be wasted. Having seen the devastation caused in townships the conclusion is self evident.

I happen to think that a dual purpose machine to generate electricity and contain a tornado could be devised to work very efficiently. Adapting recycled existing hardware [after and only after the basic theory had been established], then the total cost of a prototype might hardly be more than the transportation and setting up costs of say $1000 total. You could put in another significant zero into the cost if you like - I wouldn't.

One should always remember that American English and British English while superficially almost indistinguishable are in reality very different languages. The semantics are different.SHAWWPG19410425 13:41, 9 June 2011 (UTC)

A practical design has been described in the contribution. Testing this device in the air turbine mode could be done using a scale model in a wind tunnel. The efficiency of the device as a turbine could readily be estimated. Two contra- rotating cylindrical rotors connected by an epicyclic gear would probably be much more efficient than just one rotor. Proving the device in the tornado control mode would be more difficult but could be done using a prototype where a real tornado was about to occur. However lab experiments could be set up to show how such a device might behave in the climate/weather control function.

The wind turbine function producing electricity most of the time might more than pay for the machine.SHAWWPG19410425 17:39, 9 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Criticism based on obvious engineering problems isn't "extreme skepticism." Extreme skepticism would completely ignore the proposal, or criticize it as impossible without providing reasons. I'm seeing, here, a lack of appreciation for engineering challenges, and the cost and difficulty of meeting them, but, instead, a belief that the concept is practical, without addressing the real situation. Let's look at details:

[1] Does the "prototype" actually create a tornado? How, then, does it confine the tornado to a location? Even a low wind speed would cause the tornado to move. [2] From what I know about engineering costs, a million dollars *just for a prototype* would be low. Remember, prototypes are *more expensive* than production devices, much more expensive. [3] Running the device in power-generation mode would eliminate any possible confinement effect, because the location of the device would now present higher resistance to the updraft than what surrounds it. [4] A tornado dissipates about 10 MWh, perhaps. Tornadoes are rare. What would be done with the generated power? To keep costs down, it would presumably not be stored locally, but would be transmitted to the grid. If the power needed to create and maintain the tornado is of that order of magnitude, and if a tornado lasts an hour, that's power of 10 MW. Do you have any idea what a 10 MW generator costs? A 2 MW generator is priced at a half million dollars! [5] You are focusing on details of the rotor design, but completely ignoring the most serious problem, that it's quite unlikely that a generated tornado would stay confined to the machine site. There is no way proposed that would have this effect, you seem to imagine that a tornado will be "sucked in" to the vortex created by the machine. The machine will create an inward wind at the base, so it would attract, I'd think, the base of another tornado, sufficiently close (quite close, I'd think, much less than a mile). But what would happen to the rest of the tornado? We do see how tornadoes respond to wind, they move with it. If you have vortices in a body of water, caused by one of a series of drains, and the body of water moves, what happens to the vortices? You could do this experiment pretty cheaply, if you are willing to do more than just think in a vacuum. [6] How much wind would the machine have to create to "suck in" other tornadoes, and how would this wind extend to the upper region of the tornado? The energy involved in the overall wind is much more than the energy involved in the tornado itself. You might more directly think of controlling tornadoes by controlling the wind. Or by controlling the updraft, by controlling the relevant air temperatures and moisture content. [7] A more fruitful approach might be to look at the possible effect of a large energy release in the vicinity, or within, a tornado. It might be possible to snuff out a tornado with an explosion of some kind, but, then, there might be collateral damage. And another tornado might form just down the road.... [8] The idea that occurs to me would be, indeed, using a "chimney," with some level of flow assistance (i.e, a blower in the base), to conduct hot air from near the ground and replace it with cool air from above (through natural return flow?). It might be possible to extract power from these, routinely, during temperature inversion conditions? These would not be designed to create a tornado, they would dissipate (and possibly extract) the power that feeds tornadoes, and they would not, my guess, cause destruction, and they might be relatively cheap. The chimney would be a thin-wall plastic tube held aloft with a balloon. How long would it need to be? What would be the dynamics? Even a small temperature change caused by such devices might take the locality below tornado conditions. Many of them might function to cool whole cities.... --Abd 18:55, 9 June 2011 (UTC)

Answering the points serially:

[1] The prototype could either quell a nearby tornado or initiate a tornado over the machine. A single vertically mounted unconventional wind turbine of several hundred kilowatt rating fed with this same power would impart a rotation to the air below a region where the meteorological condition of the atmosphere indicated the imminence of a tornado. A single rotor would be much easier to engineer than a contra-rotating pair of rotors, where one outer rotor would turn in the opposite direction to the other inner rotor.

However this is speculation for the present. An experiment could be set up to test the hypothesis that a turbine having a vertically mounted rotor would contain a tornado and at other times become a vey efficient source of electricity. The rotor envisaged consists of vertical vanes set on the periphery of an open cylinder such that the wind, irrespective of direction, would blow right through the rotor and impart a torque to the rotor. This is because the geometrical line through each vane and lying in a plane normal to the rotation axis does not pass through the axis of rotation but is a chord of the circle that is a section of the cylinder forming the turbine rotor where every blade would make the same angle to a tangent to this circle. In practice the vanes would be curved.

The experiment done in a fluid other than air would consist of floating an aqueous solution of salt over pure water in a long tank. The upper heavy layer could be dyed with potassium permanganate to show up any vortex that might be formed in the lower layer of pure water. A miniature version of the machine could be started and drawn along the base of the tank to find out if a vortex could be initiated and caused to follow above this miniature rotor. If this happens then the hypothesis is more or less established.

Repeats of this experiment with different simulated speeds of translation of the rotor would confirm the hypothesis. Copies of the machine could be switched on and then off in the vincinity of the machine to see whether or not the principal machine would nullify a neighbouring vortex in the lower aqueous layer.

The practical establishment of two layers of differing density could be done by having a thin film of say cellophane resting on the layer of pure water and then filling up with a common salt solution with some KMnO4. After a time any agitation in either layer would cease and then the cellophane could be carefully wound into a roll at the end of the tank. The depths of the layers would be such that there would not be much time for significant diffusion to take place of one layer into the other in comparison to the time required to start a vortex.

The efficiency of the energy producing mode of the machine could be tested by causing a constant uniform flow of water along the tank and measuring the power produced using variations of design of the vanes and their number.

[2] A prototype could be built from sheet metal bolted together using a standard off-the-shelf alternator of suitable rating and tested in each mode using light paper streamers to show up the air movement. This could be done in a large disused aircraft hangar. The research on the wind turbine mode of the machine would provide valuable data on optimizing such a wind turbine to generate electric power. Clearly having essentially free energy is a plus as far as cost is concerned.

[3] In the first instance, the device could be tried in an open situation fairly distant from buildings or natural landscape features such as trees and low hills.

[4] The device would generate electric power of the same magnitude as the mode where electric power is being fed into the device. This might only need be a few hundred kilowatts. This is to stir the atmosphere vertically in a vortex and confine the tornado. Of course, the machine would have to be built proverbially like a battleship to withstand the forces on it during an actual tornado. The machine would be placed where past records have shown the greatest ferquency of tornados in a tornado prone region.

[5] This question is answerable by experimentation outlined above.

[6] Again, resort to experiment would answer this question.

[7] Having an explosion to quench a tornado might do just that but could cause damage over a considerable radius and no energy would be available at other times. This idea is not at all practical in my view.

[8] This idea would still need to have a source of power to initially start the replacement of warm air near the ground with cold air from the upper atmosphere. This could be tried, but would not produce electricity at other times of normal windy weather. There would be so much superimposed turbulance associated with the tornado that any non-robust means of tornado control would quickly be reduced to wreakage.

I hope that all the points have been properly answered. Answering point [7], I have never been a fan of explosions. No - quite simply, a robust vertical axis wind turbine having the area above it open, would be a source of " green energy " most of the time. Having verified the principle in the laboratory that feeding into such a turbine electrical energy to impart rotation to the surrounding air to amplify the energy of a tornado but fix its position, then a line of such turbines might not be any more costly than the same number of wind turbines, but built to [answering point [8]] military specifications. The best people to ask as to whether or not the above contribution should be deleted [without being read first] are those who have lost family, friends, houses and livelihood in the recent Oklahoma tornado, in view of the fact that " Wikiversity is not a place for new ideas " .SHAWWPG19410425 18:23, 28 June 2011 (UTC)SHAWWPG19410425 20:34, 28 June 2011 (UTC)SHAWWPG19410425 (discuss • contribs) 21:35, 25 May 2013 (UTC)