I always get a kick out of those stories... Prior to Frances rolling through here, this one nut kept calling the local radio station covering the storm, ranting and raving about how the technology exists to seed hurricanes and weaken/dissipate them.

Heh.

Fist of all, a major hurricane consumes about 8000 megatons of thermal energy in one day. The world's complete nuclear arsenal, on the other hand, is about 5000 megatons. If this energy isn't dissipated by the hurricane, it's only going to remain for the next storm (this would be a monopoly of hellish magnitude).

The government actually experimented with hurricane seeding from the 60s through the 80s (project STORMFURY), with no consistent results. There's a local company here (google for Dyno Gel or something like that) that claims to be able to dissipate cumulus clouds with a diaper/kittylitter type material, but they don't mention that it would take hundreds of fully-loaded C5's (the largest military transport in the Air Force) running non-stop sorties to even put a dent in a hurricane.

The idea that you can alter one of nature's strongest forces, stronger than all of man's weaponry, by sprinkling something on it is just laughable.