

You might think of nuclear weapons as just the most fearsome weapon ever invented by humans, but that would be seriously underplaying their versatility.

Nuclear weapons aren’t only good for leveling cities, they’ve also been used throughout the last 50 years for a variety of civilian purposes like stimulating natural gas production — and all kinds of innovative proposals have been slapped on the table to harness the awesome power of the nuclear blast for economic benefit.

The U.S. government sponsored Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to come up with and research ideas for what was known as Project Plowshare (see video). While Livermore scientists tested new ideas through about a dozen explosions, Soviet scientists had a much larger program known as "Program No. 7 — Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy" which detonated more than 120 nukes to aid civilian aims.

Here’s a rundown of ideas, both tried or just proposed, for how we could put nuclear weapons to work outside war. After all, the world’s got at least 23,000+ warheads just laying about.

Creating a Harbor, or Just a Hole

If there is one thing nuclear weapons have been proven to do, it’s make big holes, and some scientists realized that could be a business proposition.

As Livermore Lab physicist Edward Teller, known as the father of the hydrogen bomb and a backer of Plowshare, wrote in 1963: "The discussion of the peaceful applications of nuclear explosives has produced some concrete ideas that surely can be realized and it has also produced some promising possibilities which for the time being we must consider as dreams. First, we shall mention those applications about which we can feel quite sure. They boil down to a single fact: We can make a hole in the earth — if anybody wants to do that."

And, as Teller continues, "as a matter of fact, there are some important reasons why one should want to move big quantities of earth."

Great big holes could be useful for mining, reservoir creation, or even creating, say a new Panama Canal.

Creating a New Panama Canal

There’s long been a problem with that engineering marvel of the early 20th century, the Panama Canal: It’s just too small. For decades, people floated plans to build a bigger, better canal that could accommodate supertankers and our other outsize transportation vehicles. No less a leader than President John F. Kennedy called for looking into the feasibility of using nuclear explosions to excavate such a canal.

A declassified letter (.pdf) between Atomic Energy Commission employees reads:

To the best of my knowledge, National Security Action Memorandum No. 152 (dated April 30, 1962, subject: Panama Canal Policy and Relations with Panama) signed by President Kennedy is still in effect. In particular, this memo states that, "The Chairman, Atomic Energy Commission, will establish within the Plowshare Program a research goal to determine within approximately the next five years the feasibility, costs and other factors involved in nuclear methods of excavation," (referring, of course, to the Trans-Isthmian Canal).

Natural Gas Exploration

One of the most extensive Plowshare programs was an attempt to increase natural gas production. Beginning in the mid-1960s, scientists used targeted nuclear explosions to stimulate natural gas production by fracturing the rocks in which the gas was locked to make them more permeable. It worked well enough to warrant progressively larger tryouts. In 1967 Time described the first demonstration, Project Gasbuggy in New Mexico, like this:

On a butte above New Mexico’s Leandro Canyon last week, chilled observers fell silent as a voice on the public-address system reached the end of the countdown. For a tense moment, nothing happened. Then the earth jolted underfoot and a dull, distant boom was heard, followed by a second, more gentle, rolling shock. Someone shouted: "We did it! We did it!" Hand shakes were exchanged all around. The U.S. had successfully set off the first nuclear explosion sponsored jointly by the Government and industry.

The natural gas work culminated in 1973 with the explosion of three 33-kiloton bombs thousands of feet underground in Rio Blanco, Colorado. The key problem was that the gas this produced had measurable amounts of radioactivity. Not surprisingly, that created political problems for the method, even though the scientists involved in the experiments claimed the radiation would not be detrimental to public health.

Mining Oil Shale

Any time energy prices go up, people start talking about transforming the carbon-rich sedimentary rocks of the intermountain West, known as oil shale, into liquid fuels. The problem is it costs a lot of energy and money to move all that rock and extract the useful stuff (kerogen). Solution: thermonuclear explosions.

In 1970, Milo Nordyke, a Livermore physicist in the Plowshare program, filed a patent for a Nuclear Explosive Method for Stimulating Hydrocarbon Production from Petroliferous Formations.

"It never went into the field, but we actually did experiments filling up a large chamber with oil shale and seeing how you could get the oil out," Nordyke said.

Disposing of Nuclear Waste

One of the most incredible proposed applications of a nuclear explosion is to help store nuclear waste itself. The idea was detailed in a 1973 article in Science:

This scheme was originally proposed at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. A hole is bored beneath the waste processing plant, and a nuclear bomb is set off in the hole. Then the radioactive waste is poured into the subterranean cavity so formed, over a 25-year filling period. The wastes heat up through their own activity, boil dry, and eventually melt themselves and some surrounding rock into a glassy ball. The cost is quite uncertain but was judged to be extremely attractive.

What could possibly go wrong with setting off a nuclear explosion underneath a nuclear waste processing plant? Ultimately, despite its creativity, the plan was abandoned.

Building such a cavity, though, was quite possible, as you can see in this video from the early operation Project Gnome in New Mexico. Nordyke actually walked the cavern in the video.

"I was one of the lucky people who got to go into that cavern," he said. "The week after I went in there, they shut the place down."

Why was it possible for people to walk around a few months after the explosion? Nordyke said the Plowshare team designed a series of weapons that contained very little fissionable material, which is what makes radioactivity dangerous to humans.

"For excavation, we put a lot of time and effort and money into developing nuclear explosives which had minimal fissionable material so that you could carry out a 100-kiloton cratering explosion and release the radioactivity equivalent to a 20-ton explosive of fissionable material," Nordyke said.

But despite the technical success of the Plowshare program, Nordyke doesn’t see nuclear weapons being used for excavation or mining anytime soon because it doesn’t seem politically feasible.

"I think its time came and went," he said. "I think reconciling it with the enhanced environmental concerns today and the inherent association with weapons is difficult."

Human Spaceflight

If we can’t use them on Earth, we might still be able to use them to get to outer space. Project Orion, spearheaded by Freeman Dyson among other eminent scientists, was to build a spaceship powered by atomic weapons (.pdf).

The large version of the ship could have housed a city full of people and would have disposed of 1,000 nuclear bombs in one go.

All sorts of declassified documents about the project are now available online at the NASA Technical Reports Server.

Defending Earth From an Asteroid

Many scientists aren’t so sure that nuclear weapons are the best way to defend Earth from a close call with a world-ending asteroid, but NASA maintains that in some circumstances, nuclear weapons could save the Earth.

See Also:

Image 1: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Video 1: U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Video 2: Nevada Test Site video collection.



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