Last year, I posted several blog articles about the "Peaceful A-bombs." These articles recounted efforts by the U.S., Soviet Union and other countries to find a peaceful use for nuclear bombs. Some of the uses considered had to do with earth moving such as digging canals with a linear series of nuclear bombs. Another possibility was digging out artificial harbors with nuclear bombs. Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union were also interested in seeing if nuclear bombs could be used for fracking to release oil and natural gas from deep below the surface of the Earth. A recent article about this idea of nuclear fracking caught my attention. Since fracking is so much in the news these days, I thought that I would go in to a bit more detail about U.S. nuclear fracking tests.
In December of 1967, the Atomic Energy Commission (forerunner of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission), the U.S. Bureau of Mines and El Paso Natural Gas Company sent researchers to northern New Mexico near Farmington for a test that was referred to as Project Gasbuggy. A four thousand foot shaft had been drilled for the test. A twenty thousand ton nuclear bomb was lowered to the bottom of the shaft and triggered. The explosion created a cylindrical cavity that was over three hundred feet tall and about one hundred and fifty feet in diameter. The intense heat of the blast fused the soil and rock into a glass lining. Subsequent measurements indicated that fractures spread out two hundred feet in all directions and there was definitely an increase in the release of natural gas from the fractured rock.
There were two such more tests by the Atomic Energy Commission. In 1969 near Rulison, Colorado, a forty three thousand ton nuclear device was triggered in an eight thousand five hundred foot shaft. In 1973, a single shaft was used to detonate three thirty three thousand ton nuclear devices near Rifle, Colorado. All of these tests were part of the U.S. Ploughshares Program which sought to find practical civilian uses for nuclear bombs. The Ploughshare Program was cancelled in 1975.
The reasons given for the cancellation of the underground test series included the fact that the process was very expensive. It was estimated that if all of the gas that could be produced by such a well were extracted over a twenty five year period, it would only recover a maximum of forty percent of the cost of the fracking process. There was little public support and, hence, little congressional support for the program. In addition, there was also concern about the tritium contamination of the gas produced by the well. Underground nuclear detonations still release radioactive materials into the atmosphere. There is also the possibility of radioactive contamination of ground water as well. With the development of other technologies such as hydrofracking, the concern about cost and environmental issues, nuclear fracking was never implemented. To this day, the three test sites are still under the control of the Department of Energy Office of Legacy Management.
Project Gasbuggy sign:
