Urban Fuel Loads in Potential Nuclear Targets

Urban settings are generalized by concentrated resources, large-scale infrastructure, and the high-density populations that they serve. All these factors intertwine to make these environments dynamically complex systems to study and understand, especially when it comes to energy. In traditional life-cycle segments, urban energy research is predominantly shifted towards material acquisition, transportation, construction, and operation while the demolition, or destruction, of urban buildings and infrastructure systems may be viewed as probabilistic. However, with the threat of nuclear war heightening with international tensions, quantifying the global repercussions of even regionalized urban firestorms is paramount. To advance the knowledge, we utilize land-use data to compartmentalize buildings in target cities and apply reviewed fuel load densities to generate corresponding energy release, which can be converted to mass of fuel based on material distributions and caloric values. The mass of fuel serves as a primary input for the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model to simulate fire spread and, ultimately, soot production. The amount of aerosols injected into the upper atmosphere is the governing agent when analyzing subsequent climatic and environmental effects. The urban fuel loading portion of this research also provides a procedural and comparative foundation for future studies to include 3-dimensional, graphical informational system (GIS) data.