Retrotechtacular: Better Living Through Atomic Bombs

Usually, if you listen to people discuss nuclear issues, it's one of two topics: how to manage stockpiles of nuclear weapons or whether we want nuclear power plants in our backyard. But there was a time when the United States and the USSR had more peaceful plans for nuclear bombs. Although peaceful nuclear bomb projects may sound like an oxymoron, there was a craze for all things nuclear at one time, and it was not clear that nuclear power and explosives would not take not controlling many industries like the transistor did, or the vacuum tube that preceded it.

You may have heard of Project (or Operation) Plowshare, the American effort to find a peaceful use for all those atomic bombs. The Atomic Energy Commission video below touts the benefits "for all nations." What advantages? Mainly moving land, including widening the Panama Canal or creating a new canal, cutting highways through mountains, helping with mining and natural gas production and the creation of an artificial harbour. There was also talk of using atomic explosions to create new materials and, of course, furthering the study of the atom.

Lawrence Livermore Lab also commissioned a movie of part of the project which you can watch below (you might think it's the wrong video until you get about three minutes.) If nothing d other, there is a great video of vintage test equipment in lab footage.

So what really happened?

You might think that didn't work. After all, detonating nuclear weapons in ports and mines would leave a messy radiation field. But there were 27 test explosions, some of which used more than one bomb, between 1961 and 1973. Most of the devices were quite small, but at least one exceeded 100 kilotons. For reference, the bombs used in Japan were around 16 kilotons and 21 kilotons.

As you might expect, some of these explosions didn't go well. A test explosion vented radioactive steam onto a press gallery packed with reporters. A subsequent explosion threw a huge cloud of radioactive dust 12,000 feet into the air which began to move eastward.

One of the reasons the stimulation of oil and gas production was interesting is that oil and gas are sometimes naturally radioactive, so the treatment already takes this into account.

Meanwhile, in Moscow

It wasn't just an American thing. The USSR had the program typically named "Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy" with similar goals. Since their original stance was to ban all testing, they were a bit late for the party, starting their program in the mid-1960s.

However, they compensated with 156 explosions through 1989. This includes six actual uses that were not considered tests, including plugging stray gas wells. They also had misadventures. An explosion was supposed to unearth diamond-rich ore, but the results were disappointing and the water in the area was polluted with plutonium. Other explosions released radioactive steam, and monitors in Japan and the United States were able to detect some of the radioactivity.

You can find a US report on the Russian program that includes a history on Plowshare online.

Consequences

Although we are always fans of futuristic technology, we are happy that our next highway will not be dug with an atomic bomb. Of course, a common excavation project in the 1960s was, in fact, a backyard bomb shelter, so there would have been some irony in using bombs to dig bomb shelters. /p>

However, the nuclear craze has not been limited to digging and mining. Even Ford showed off a concept nuclear-powered car in 1958. And we talked more about the science behind plugging oil wells with nuclear weapons if you want to learn more.