Word: cfcs
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...States has pushed environmental issues far down on its list of priorities. The Russian people show no special interest in the ozone problem. Whatever aerosol cans and foam products make it to market in Moscow these days are immediately snapped up by buyers who either do not know about CFCs or do not particularly care...
Europe, Japan and the U.S. still need to set up a large, separate fund to help the former Soviet Union and other East European countries wean themselves from CFCs. That will be difficult to do during hard economic times. But what is the alternative? What price is too high to protect the irreplaceable atmosphere shared by East and West, by South and North...
...atmosphere. But the technology for designing and building the tens of thousands of big guns that would be required does not yet exist -- not to mention the fact that compressed ozone is dangerously explosive. Furthermore, neither of these solutions attacks the heart of the problem, those long-lived CFCs, which would break down any replacement ozone as well...
...result, some researchers are focusing their attention on the culprit molecules rather than the victims. Atmospheric scientists Richard Turco of UCLA and Ralph Cicerone of U.C. Irvine are exploring the idea of injecting into the stratosphere two chemicals -- propane and ethane -- that would combine with CFCs to produce an extremely weak, and therefore environmentally safe, solution of hydrochloric acid. That strategy would interrupt the CFCs' 100-year destruction cycle, and has the further advantage of requiring only 1,000 jumbo-jet flights over a single, critical 30-day period every year for the next several decades. The products involved...
...Princeton University, physicist Thomas Stix has suggested using lasers to blast the CFCs out of the air before they can reach the stratosphere and attack the ozone. His idea is to tune the lasers to a series of wavelengths so that only the offensive molecules would be destroyed. Admittedly, the energy requirement would still be exorbitant, but Stix believes that a 20-fold improvement in the overall efficiency of this approach could make it feasible. Even so, tens of thousands of lasers would have to be designed, tested and built before the first CFC molecule could get zapped. If this...