Assuming one could harness and store the energy released by the recent earthquake, you could do truly amazing things with it. We’re talking about a release of energy sufficiently significant to noticeably alter the Earth’s orbit: Energy sources like that just don’t come along every day. Of course, capturing such energy would be immensely difficult: You’re basically have to build a device that uses seismic waves to drive a generator, which would then store the energy as electricity. And then your magical device has to withstand the earthquake. As does your generator. And your electrical storage and distribution network. And they also have to survive the knock-on effects on the surface, like another monster tsunami. So it shall never come to pass, alas.

Though my favorite example of Awesome But Impractical power sources was Project PACER, which came out of Los Alamos in the 1970s. I believe the acronym was for Peaceful Atomic Captive Explosion Reactor or some such. Basically, the idea was to find a stable geologic formation such as a salt dome, flood the walls with molten salt, and then detonate a thermonuclear device every forty-five minutes or so. The molten salt would act as a heat transfer medium, whose flow would pass through a heat-exchanger on the reverse face of the salt dome. The program could never make the economics work with the relatively small pulse units they were using, and the engineering required to make the idea work for pulse units that were economic were mind-blowing. (Since nucelar ordinance gets more efficient the bigger the yield, to maximize PACER’s efficacy you’d really want to use big bombs. I once participated in the crunching of the numbers to try such a thing with a Czar Bomba: Using rather conservative thermal efficiency numbers, it came in at an installed generating capacity of ~10TWe, or two-thirds of contemporary global power production.)

Of course, as awesome as PACER is, folks kind of get their panties in a bind about the idea of there being a power station that runs off of a continuous stream of atomic detonations. Especially if you go beyond what Los Alamos was trying with low-kilotonne yield warheads and start using stuff in the megatonne range, where seismic shock becomes a genuine issue.

It was part of Project Plowshares, a program designed to explore the potential uses of “peaceful” nuclear bombs in the Fifties and Sixties. Most of the programs were busts: There just isn’t much need for the actual explosive power of atomic bombs in civilian projects, with most of the really useful nuclear-related gains coming from the power generation side of the equation rather than actual bombs.

Ironically the two most viable peaceful usages of nuclear bombs weren’t associated with Project Plowshares at all: PACER, as described above, was the work of Los Alamos years after Project Plowshares ended. The other was Project Orion, a USAF black project from the mid-Fifties to early-Sixties, which studied the feasibility of using a string of small pulse units to boost heavy payloads into orbit. The project culminated in the Space Battleship Orion, a 4,000tn cis-lunar-inhabiting death machine armed with a crew of 50 and 900 20MT warheads to rain death on an unprecedented scale down upon the Soviets. General Atomic, the primary contractor, built a Corvette-sized mock-up, one which was sufficient to make JFK physically ill at the firepower it possessed and which subsequently caused the program to be canceled. Orion’s boosters at General Atomic had always intended for the lifting system to be used for space exploration, with “Saturn by 1970!” being the rallying cry for a mission to Encheladus with a positively obscene 1,300tn of payload to play with. (The Saturn V could put 100 tonnes into LEO: Modern missions to Saturn are giddy if they can get 10 tonnes of payload to play with.)