David E. Hoffman: You Know What Would Make the Spill Worse? Nukes
[David E. Hoffman writes "The World of Threats" for Foreign Policy.]
...Didn’t the Soviet Union once use nukes for [capping an oil well]? Not exactly. Both the United States and the Soviet Union did have a programs of using nuclear blasts for peacetime purposes. In the Soviet case, it was primarily excavation. All told, the Soviet Union carried out 715 nuclear tests, of which 156 were labeled as “for peaceful purposes.” (The U.S. total tests were 1,030 with 35 for Plowshare, the overall name for the program to use nukes for peaceful purposes. A pdf about the U.S. tests is here.)
According to a study published by the Russians in 1996, the first time they used a nuke to close a “gas plume borehole” was the 30-kiloton explosion on September 30, 1966 in Uzbekistan. Several additional blasts were used for excavation. On September 26, 1969, they set off a 10 kiloton nuke in the Stavropol region for “oil recovery intensification.” And in 1970, there was another blast in the Orenburg region for creating “reservoirs” for storage of natural gas.
As nuclear historian Robert S. Norris notes in the Times, all these Soviet were on land and did not involve oil. Eventually, both superpowers gave up trying to use nukes for peaceful purposes, and one of the reasons was the environmental hazards.
Didn’t we already learn this lesson from history?
Read entire article at Foreign Policy
...Didn’t the Soviet Union once use nukes for [capping an oil well]? Not exactly. Both the United States and the Soviet Union did have a programs of using nuclear blasts for peacetime purposes. In the Soviet case, it was primarily excavation. All told, the Soviet Union carried out 715 nuclear tests, of which 156 were labeled as “for peaceful purposes.” (The U.S. total tests were 1,030 with 35 for Plowshare, the overall name for the program to use nukes for peaceful purposes. A pdf about the U.S. tests is here.)
According to a study published by the Russians in 1996, the first time they used a nuke to close a “gas plume borehole” was the 30-kiloton explosion on September 30, 1966 in Uzbekistan. Several additional blasts were used for excavation. On September 26, 1969, they set off a 10 kiloton nuke in the Stavropol region for “oil recovery intensification.” And in 1970, there was another blast in the Orenburg region for creating “reservoirs” for storage of natural gas.
As nuclear historian Robert S. Norris notes in the Times, all these Soviet were on land and did not involve oil. Eventually, both superpowers gave up trying to use nukes for peaceful purposes, and one of the reasons was the environmental hazards.
Didn’t we already learn this lesson from history?