Earth Science: Plowshares, or Getting the Gas Out

EARTH SCIENCE: PLOWSHARES, OR GETTING THE GAS OUT

A-Bombs for Peace

Throughout the 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) pursued a series of projects called the Plowshares Program, an attempt to find peaceful uses for atomic bombs. In 1961 the first peaceful nuclear blast occurred. It was detonated underground twenty-five miles from New Mexico's Carlsbad caverns. The purpose of Project Gnome was to conduct various scientific experiments; the explosion was expected to supply a vast underground salt cavern and to produce steam for generating electricity. The blast occurred prematurely, and the explosion knocked the top off the underground chamber, ruining the steam "teakettle" and letting clouds of radioactive waste into the atmosphere. Gophers chewed through cables connecting some of the scientific instruments. Nonetheless, the scientists present declared Project Gnome a great success.

Project Sloop

Project Sloop, a government and industry partnership, took place near Safford, Arizona, where two billion tons of rock containing .4 percent copper lay under five hundred feet of volcanic rock. Project Sloop, designed to get the copper out, cost $13 million over thirty months. Sloop required drilling a twenty-inch shaft twelve hundred feet straight down. Then a twenty-kiloton nuclear device was exploded, leaving a two-hundred-foot-diameter cavity at the bottom. The rock inside melted with the blast and resolidified, taking 90 percent of the radioactivity from the bomb with it in a solid form. The fragmented wall of the crater below contained the copper ore. It took eight months or more for the radioactivity to cool off a bit, after which sulfuric acid (H₂SO₄) was pumped into the crater. The copper dissolved in the acid, which was pumped back out. The H₂SO₄ could be recycled as the copper was extracted.

Project Gassbuggy

Project Gassbuggy in New Mexico, a collaboration between the AEC and the El Paso Natural Gas Company, involved a twenty-six-kiloton blast 4,200 feet below the surface. Natural gas was trapped in 285 feet of sandstone unsuitable for the usual recovery methods. The nuclear device shattered the rock to let the gas escape so it could be drilled out later. Gassbuggy produced 214 million cubic feet of gas in 15 months; during the same period a conventional well would be expected to provide perhaps 80 million tons, but the Gassbuggy gas contained radioactive krypton and tritium, which was pumped into the homes of unsuspecting gas company customers.

Sources:

A-Bomb in the Gas Field," Science News, 92 (23 December 1967): 610;

"Going Deep for Gas," Science News, 96 (20 September 1969): 236;

"Once More for the Money," Science News, 95 (19 April 1969): 376;

"Swords Into Plowshares," Time, 78 (22 December 1961): 29.