Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
Embedded Files
Sources – Plowshare
Sources – Plowshare
We thank our experts for their feedback:
Prof. Alex Wellerstein
Director of Science and Technology Studies, College of Arts and Letters, Stevens Institute of Technology
Read Prof. Alex Wellerstein’s latest book on the usage and lack of usage of nuclear weapons: “The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age”
https://alexwellerstein.com/writing/books/the-most-awful-responsibility/
Prof. Christine Keiner
Professor of Science, Technology, and Society; College of Liberal Arts, Rochester Institute of Technology
Read Prof. Christine Keiner’s latest book about the Panatomic Canal: “Deep Cut: Science, Power, and the Unbuilt Interoceanic Canal”
https://www.ugapress.org/9780820338958/deep-cut/
—This was Project Plowshare. It kept the US busy for two full decades, burned hundreds of millions of dollars and exploded dozens of nukes in the name of a bright future. All during the most feverish and mad years of the Cold War, when the world got terrifyingly close to blowing up itself.
This video is about the Plowshare Project, a U.S. nuclear weapons program that intended to use nuclear detonations for engineering purposes. A popular science summary of the project can be found at:
#Shea, Patrick H. (2024): “We’re Going to Work Miracles”, Distillations Magazine
https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/were-going-to-work-miracles/
—Our story begins with a brilliant Hungarian physicist named Edward Teller. He had been one of the key scientists of the Manhattan Project, the colossal effort that led to the first nuclear bomb. But almost from the beginning, Teller dreamt of destroying the world much harder.
#Encyclopedia Britannica: “Edward Teller” (retrieved 2026)
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-Teller
Quote: “By 1941 Teller had taken out U.S. citizenship and joined Enrico Fermi’s team at the University of Chicago in the epochal experiment to produce the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. Teller then accepted an invitation from the University of California, Berkeley, to work on theoretical studies on the atomic bomb with J. Robert Oppenheimer; and when Oppenheimer set up the secret Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico in 1943, Teller was among the first men recruited. Although the Los Alamos assignment was to build a fission bomb, Teller digressed more and more from the main line of research to continue his own inquiries into a potentially much more powerful thermonuclear hydrogen fusion bomb.”
—“Traditional” nukes, like the Hiroshima and Nagasaki ones, release energy by splitting heavy atoms, like uranium. But these are rare, expensive, and the resulting bombs are difficult to scale up. So Teller lobbied for a different approach – unleash the nuclear fire by smashing together hydrogen atoms. That would allow for bombs thousands of times more powerful.
Hydrogen bombs are not cheaper than “traditional” atom bombs in the abstract, but they are cheaper in the sense that they deliver a stronger explosive power per unit cost.
#Encyclopedia Britannica: “Thermonuclear bomb” (retrieved 2026)
https://www.britannica.com/technology/thermonuclear-bomb
Quote: “A thermonuclear bomb differs fundamentally from an atomic bomb in that it utilizes the energy released when two light atomic nuclei combine, or fuse, to form a heavier nucleus. An atomic bomb, by contrast, uses the energy released when a heavy atomic nucleus splits, or fissions, into two lighter nuclei.[...]
In a thermonuclear bomb, the explosive process begins with the detonation of what is called the primary stage. This consists of a relatively small quantity of conventional explosives, the detonation of which brings together enough fissionable uranium to create a fission chain reaction, which in turn produces another explosion and a temperature of several million degrees. The force and heat of this explosion are reflected back by a surrounding container of uranium and are channeled toward the secondary stage, containing the lithium-6 deuteride. The tremendous heat initiates fusion, and the resulting explosion of the secondary stage blows the uranium container apart.[...]
Thermonuclear bombs can be hundreds or even thousands of times more powerful than atomic bombs. The explosive yield of atomic bombs is measured in kilotons, each unit of which equals the explosive force of 1,000 tons of TNT. The explosive power of hydrogen bombs, by contrast, is frequently expressed in megatons, each unit of which equals the explosive force of 1,000,000 tons of TNT. Hydrogen bombs of more than 50 megatons have been detonated, but the explosive power of the weapons mounted on strategic missiles usually ranges from 100 kilotons to 1.5 megatons. Thermonuclear bombs can be made small enough (a few feet long) to fit in the warheads of intercontinental ballistic missiles; these missiles can travel almost halfway across the globe in 20 or 25 minutes and have computerized guidance systems so accurate that they can land within a few hundred yards of a designated target.”
#Shea, Patrick H. (2024): “We’re Going to Work Miracles”, Distillations Magazine
https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/were-going-to-work-miracles/
Quote: “The earliest proposals for using atomic bombs for excavation purposes were raised in the late 1940s. However, the high cost of uranium and plutonium and fears of fallout prevented any serious attempts at such projects. But things changed in 1952, when the United States detonated the world’s first thermonuclear bomb. This fusion, or hydrogen, bomb was considerably more powerful and cheaper to build then the fission variety. As Time magazine later declared, “If employed on a very large scale, atoms are the world’s cheapest workers, and they are getting cheaper year by year.” Hydrogen bombs also produced far less radioactive byproducts than atomic bombs, though the fission explosion needed to trigger a fusion device meant some radioactivity would always be present.”
—The problem was technically hard, but in the 1950s Teller solved it. The result was the thermonuclear bomb – a terrifying new weapon that made Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like firecrackers.
Although the first design for a nuclear weapon was Teller’s, his original ‘Super’ idea for a thermonuclear bomb could not work. Instead, a different ‘staged’ method for igniting a fusion reaction was worked out by Teller and Ulam, called the Teller-Ulam design.
#The National Museum of NuclearScience and History/Atomic Heritage Foundation (2022): “Stanislaw Ulam”
https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/profile/stanislaw-ulam/
Quote: “Ulam remained at Los Alamos until 1967. During this time, he worked on the development of the hydrogen bomb together with Edward Teller. After concluding that Teller’s design for the hydrogen bomb would not work, Ulam suggested that a compression model was needed. The eventual Teller-Ulam design, the details of which are still highly classified, was a two-stage implosion model and led to the large scale production of hydrogen bombs. It is believed to be the basis for all thermonuclear weapons existing today.”
#Encyclopedia Britannica: “Thermonuclear warhead” (retrieved 2026)
https://www.britannica.com/technology/thermonuclear-warhead
Quote:“Teller and his colleagues at Los Alamos made little actual progress in designing a workable thermonuclear device until early in 1951, when the physicist Stanislaw Marcin Ulam proposed to use the mechanical shock of an atomic bomb to compress a second fissile core and make it explode; the resulting high density would make the burning of the second core’s thermonuclear fuel much more efficient. Teller in response suggested that radiation, rather than mechanical shock, from the atomic bomb’s explosion be used to compress and ignite the thermonuclear second core. Together these new ideas provided a firm basis for a fusion weapon, and a device using the Teller-Ulam configuration, as it is now known, was successfully tested at Enewetak atoll in the Pacific on Nov. 1, 1952; it yielded an explosion equivalent to 10 million tons (10 megatons) of TNT.”
For comparison, the Hiroshima bomb had the explosive power of around 15 thousand tons of TNT, and the Nagasaki bomb that of 20 thousand tons.
#Wellerstein, Alex (2021): “An Unearthly Spectacle: The untold story of the world’s biggest nuclear bomb” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
https://thebulletin.org/2021/11/the-untold-story-of-the-worlds-biggest-nuclear-bomb/
—The Soviet Union followed quickly, bombs got only bigger, and for a few years a weird madness for destruction took over the world.
#Wellerstein, Alex (2021): “An Unearthly Spectacle: The untold story of the world’s biggest nuclear bomb” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
https://thebulletin.org/2021/11/the-untold-story-of-the-worlds-biggest-nuclear-bomb/
Quote: “The Soviet Union had been interested in the Super for about as long, having received espionage information about the early American thermonuclear effort. The Soviets appear to have made their own path to the hydrogen bomb, though, first pursuing a single-stage design (“Sloika,” a reference to a layered pastry), tested in 1953, that could “only” be detonated at about half a megaton (though sub-megaton, it would still be 25 times as explosive as the Nagasaki bomb, and capable of killing millions if used on a major metropolis). In the spring of 1954, Andrei Sakharov, Yakov Zeldovich, and Yuri Trutnev, along with other Soviet physicists, developed their own version of a staged thermonuclear weapon, called RDS-37. The details of this are still somewhat cloudy, but it appears to have been a genuinely indigenous development, and it resulted in the test of a megaton-range weapon in 1955.”
#Encyclopedia Britannica: “Thermonuclear warhead” (retrieved 2026)
https://www.britannica.com/technology/thermonuclear-warhead
Quote: “By the early 1950s both the United States and the Soviet Union had developed nuclear warheads that were small and light enough for missile deployment, and by the late 1950s both countries had developed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) capable of delivering thermonuclear warheads around the world.”
The most powerful nuclear test ever made was that of the “Tsar Bomba” in 1961. Although no bigger nuclear bombs have been tested, both the US and the Soviet Union pursued designs of even bigger weapons.
#Wellerstein, Alex (2012): “In Search of a Bigger Boom”, Restricted Data
https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/09/12/in-search-of-a-bigger-boom/
Quote: “The largest nuclear bomb ever detonated as the so-called “Tsar Bomba” of the Soviet Union. On 1961, it was exploded off the island of Novaya Zemlya, well within the Arctic Circle. It had an explosive equivalent to 50 million tons of TNT (megatons). It was only detonated at half-power — the full-sized version would have been 100 megatons. It is thought to have been a three-stage bomb. By contrast, the largest US bomb ever detonated was at the Castle BRAVO test in 1954, with 15 megatons yield. It was apparently “only” a two-stage bomb. [...]
Far larger weapons were contemplated. By who else? Our friend Edward Teller.[...]
So he did what only Edward Teller could do: he tried to raise the ante, to be the bold idea man. Cancel my H-bomb? How about this: he proposed a 10,000 megaton design.
Which is to say, a 10 gigaton design. Which is to say, a bomb that would detonate with an explosive power some 670,000 times the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.”
—Teller was having the time of his life. And for a while he got to chase his nukiest dreams, like building a bomb so powerful that it would literally wipe out all of civilization in one single strike – a terrifying real thing the US actually started working on. We told this story before, if you want to watch it after this one.
#Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell (2023): “The Most Insane Weapon You Never Heard About”
—And as the perfectly sane man he was, Teller had other great ideas, like nuking the Moon just to show the commies who’s boss.
#Wellerstein, Alex (2012): Edward Teller’s “Moon Shot””, Restricted Data
https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2011/12/12/edward-tellers-moon-shot/
—The idea of "nukes for peace" was also pretty convenient. With public opinion increasingly opposed to the arms race and ever more terrified by WW3, nuclear engineering was a way to keep on testing nuclear weapons without saying you were testing nuclear weapons.
#Hewlett, Richard G.; Holl, Jack M. (1989):“Atoms for Peace and War, 1953-1961”, California Studies in the History of Science, University of California Press
Quote: “While the Bethe panel launched its technical studies, international pressure for a test ban continued to mount. In Cairo, the Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference called for the end of nuclear testing. Shortly thereafter on January 13, Linus Pauling presented an antitesting petition to the Secretary General of the United Nations. Pauling had now collected more than 9,000 signatures from forty-four countries, including those of 36 Nobel laureates [...]
Commission interest in Plowshare grew rapidly in 1958, not only in terms of its potential peaceful applications but also as an opportunity to put a better light on weapon development. As Strauss noted in February, Plowshare was intended to "highlight the peaceful applications of nuclear explosive devices and thereby create a climate of world opinion that is more favorable to weapons development and tests." Growing public demand for a nuclear test ban in spring 1958 also suggested that the Commission should move quickly to demonstrate the value of Plowshare devices while testing was still permissible.”
—-So in 1957, the US launched Project Plowshare, a bold plan to use nuclear explosions for peaceful engineering. And who would be put at the helm? Exactly.
#Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. ”The Plowshare Program” (retrieved 2026)
https://st.llnl.gov/news/look-back/plowshare-program
Quote: “The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) established the Plowshare Program in June 1957 to explore the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. The program took its name from the Bible (Isaiah 2:4), "they will beat their swords into plowshares." The purpose of the AEC program, instituted by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), was to develop the necessary technology for using nuclear explosions for civil and industrial projects, such as the creation of harbors and canals and the stimulation of natural gas reservoirs.”
#Nevada National Security Site (2022): “Plowshare Program”
https://nnss.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/NNSS-PLOW-U-0028-Rev01-1.pdf
Quote: “Initial plans for Project Plowshare were approved by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1957. By the end of 1958, Dr. Edward Teller, the director of Livermore Laboratory - the lead for the project, outlined an ambitious Plowshare Program that included: construction of a channel through a reef at Kapingamarangi, Marshall Islands; harbors at Cape Thompson and Katalla, Alaska; a canal across the Alaskan peninsula at Port Moller; oil extraction from tar sands and oil shale; creating artificial aquifers;and mining by leaching.”
—In 1956 Egypt had nationalized the Suez Canal, a vital artery for oil delivery to Europe.
#Encyclopedia Britannica: “Suez Crisis” (retrieved 2026)
https://www.britannica.com/event/Suez-Crisis
Quote: “Suez Crisis, (1956), international crisis in the Middle East, precipitated on July 26, 1956, when the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, nationalized the Suez Canal. The canal had been owned by the Suez Canal Company, which was controlled by French and British interests. [...]
Britain and France feared that Nasser might close the canal and cut off shipments of petroleum flowing from the Persian Gulf to western Europe.”
#UK Imperial War Museums: “Why Was The Suez Crisis So Important?” (retrieved 2026)
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/cold-war/suez-crisis
Quote: “The Suez Canal in Egypt was an important asset for Britain after the Second World War. It was central to maintaining links with its remaining overseas possessions and the main source of oil in the Middle East. Britain had retained a series of military bases in Egypt located along the length of the canal in an area known as the Canal Zone.”
#United States Department of State: ”The Suez Crisis, 1956” (retrieved 2026)
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1953-1960/suez
Quote: “On July 26, 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company, the joint British-French enterprise which had owned and operated the Suez Canal since its construction in 1869. Nasser’s announcement came about following months of mounting political tensions between Egypt, Britain, and France. Although Nasser offered full economic compensation for the Company, the British and French Governments, long suspicious of Nasser’s opposition to the continuation of their political influence in the region, were outraged by the nationalization. The Egyptian leader, in turn, resented what he saw as European efforts to perpetuate their colonial domination. [...]
In discussions with the United States between August and October, the British Government repeatedly hinted that it might resort to force in dealing with Nasser. At the same time, the British and French held secret military consultations with Israel, who regarded Nasser as a threat to its security, resulting in the creation of a joint plan to invade Egypt and overthrow its President. In keeping with these plans, Israeli forces attacked across Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula on October 29, 1956, advancing to within 10 miles of the Suez Canal. Under the pretext of protecting the Canal from the two belligerents, Britain and France landed troops of their own a few days later.”
—So one of the first ideas of the new Build-With-Nukes doctrine was to blast open a new canal through the Israeli desert.
#MacCabee, H.D. (1963): “Use of Nuclear Explosives for Excavation of Sea-Level Canal Across the Negev Desert (Canal Studies Filefolder)”
https://www.osti.gov/opennet/servlets/purl/453701.pdf
Quote: “Another interesting application of nuclear excavation would be a sealevel canal 160 miles long across Israel, connecting the Mediterranean with the Gulf of Aqaba (and thus the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean). Such a canal would be a strategically valuable alternate to the present Suez Canal and would probably contribute greatly to the economic development of the surrounding area."
#Shea, Patrick H. (2024): “We’re Going to Work Miracles”, Distillations Magazine
https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/were-going-to-work-miracles/
Quote: “After studying topographical maps and computing blast yields, they concluded that with only 520 nuclear explosions they could, theoretically, cut a path approximately 160 miles long through the Negev desert and link the Mediterranean Sea with the Gulf of Aqaba.”
Note that the canal would pass through the city of Beersheba and close to the west of Gaza, as well as through other smaller populations.
—Scientists explored extension routes and found that the job would require removing 1.2 billion cubic meters of earth – as much as 500 Great Pyramids of Giza. A monumental task that would cost 6 billion dollars if done with shovels, but only 3.1 billion with nukes.
#Atlantic-Pacific Interoceanic Canal Study Commission (1970): “Interoceanic Canal Studies 1970”
https://ia601306.us.archive.org/3/items/interoceaniccana00unit/interoceaniccana00unit.pdf
Quote: “The estimated cost of Route 17 is about $3.1 billion, assuming nuclear construction to be feasible. This includes the cost of excavating about 20 miles by conventional means because of potential slope stability problems in the area. The cost of conventional excavation of the entire route would be prohibitively great, approximately $6 billion.”
Note that 1.6 billion cubic yards are 1.2 billion cubic meters. Since the Great Pyramid has a volume of 2.6 million cubic meters,
#Pearson: “The Great Pyramid of Giza” (retrieved 2026)
1.2 billion cubic meters/ 2.6 million cubic meters = 460, rounded up to 500.
—So the first miracle of Project Plowshare would be a new harbor in Alaska. In just a few glorious milliseconds, five nukes with the combined punch of 170 Hiroshima bombs would carve out a 550-meters-long and 200-meters-wide trench, opening the region to commerce and prosperity.
The numbers from this section are taken by an article authored by Edward Teller, who undeniably had an interest in making the project sound attractive. Since the project was never completed due to unfavorable environmental assessments (see next section of this document) , it is impossible to know how long, how many bombs or how much explosive power it would have actually taken to construct the harbor.
The region would not have been “open to commerce and prosperity”, this sentence is meant sarcastically. The harbor would have been frozen over for most of the year if it had been built, even without considering economic and human damage caused by fallout and other forms of radiative damage to people and goods.
#Teller, Edward (1960): “We’re Going to Work Miracles”, Popular Mechanics
https://books.google.ca/books?id=v9sDAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA97&pg=PA97#v=onepage&q&f=false
Quote: “If all goes well we expect to make an artificial model harbor on this bleak coast in the spring of 1961. It will be a small harbor, and yet it will be an experiment of great hope for the future. The harbor will be excavated in an instant — in a matter of milliseconds — by the explosion of five nuclear bombs having approximately as much power as 500,000 tons of TNT. In that tiny interval of time this energy will move 20 million tons of earth and rock. It will blast out a channel 1800 feet long and 750 feet wide and at the same time create an inner harbor a quarter of a mile wide and half a mile long. The minimum water depth will be around 30 feet.”
1800 feet ~ 550 m
750 feet ~ 200m
For comparison, the Hiroshima bomb had a TNT equivalent of around 15 KT
#Wellerstein, Alex (2021): “An Unearthly Spectacle: The untold story of the world’s biggest nuclear bomb” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
https://thebulletin.org/2021/11/the-untold-story-of-the-worlds-biggest-nuclear-bomb/
—So the first miracle of Project Plowshare would be a new harbor in Alaska. In just a few glorious milliseconds, five nukes with the combined punch of 170 Hiroshima bombs would carve out a 550-meters-long and 200-meters-wide trench, opening the region to commerce and prosperity.
The numbers from this section are taken by an article authored by Edward Teller, who undeniably had an interest in making the project sound attractive. Since the project was never completed due to unfavorable environmental assessments (see next section of this document) , it is impossible to know how long, how many bombs or how much explosive power it would have actually taken to construct the harbor.
The region would not have been “open to commerce and prosperity”, this sentence is meant sarcastically. The harbor would have been frozen over for most of the year if it had been built, even without considering economic and human damage caused by fallout and other forms of radiative damage to people and goods.
#Teller, Edward (1960): “We’re Going to Work Miracles”, Popular Mechanics
https://books.google.ca/books?id=v9sDAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA97&pg=PA97#v=onepage&q&f=false
Quote: “If all goes well we expect to make an artificial model harbor on this bleak coast in the spring of 1961. It will be a small harbor, and yet it will be an experiment of great hope for the future. The harbor will be excavated in an instant — in a matter of milliseconds — by the explosion of five nuclear bombs having approximately as much power as 500,000 tons of TNT. In that tiny interval of time this energy will move 20 million tons of earth and rock. It will blast out a channel 1800 feet long and 750 feet wide and at the same time create an inner harbor a quarter of a mile wide and half a mile long. The minimum water depth will be around 30 feet.”
1800 feet ~ 550 m
750 feet ~ 200m
For comparison, the Hiroshima bomb had a TNT equivalent of around 15 KT
#Wellerstein, Alex (2021): “An Unearthly Spectacle: The untold story of the world’s biggest nuclear bomb” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
https://thebulletin.org/2021/11/the-untold-story-of-the-worlds-biggest-nuclear-bomb/
5×500 KT/15 KT =167
There are other estimates of what amount of power the bombs would release and how many of them would there be:
#Shea, Patrick H. (2024): “We’re Going to Work Miracles”, Distillations Magazine
https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/were-going-to-work-miracles/
—The local communities weren’t exactly thrilled, but Teller insisted that the dangers of nuke engineering had been “greatly exaggerated”.
Official U.S. government environmental studies were carried out as a result of the pressure exerted by Inupiat and Inuit groups in the area to assess the impact of the project on the local population and environment. The environmental studies decisively concluded that the radioactive fallout would cause devastating environmental damage and lead to the inhabitants of the area to be exposed to unacceptable levels of radiation. For a retrospective of the movement and the environmental studies, check:
#O’Neill, Dan (1989): “Project Chariot: How Alaska Escaped Nuclear Excavation”, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
https://books.google.de/books?id=8wUAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA28&redir_esc=y
#Shea, Patrick H. (2024): “We’re Going to Work Miracles”, Distillations Magazine
https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/were-going-to-work-miracles/
Quote: “Members of the small Inuit and Inupiat communities near Cape Thompson were puzzled by the proposal. They were deep in western Alaska and had no need for a harbor, particularly one that would be frozen solid nine months of the year.[...]
As planning continued, Teller struggled to justify the project on any grounds other than simply proving it could be done. When locals realized this, they organized to oppose the plan, pointing to a debacle caused by one of Teller’s H-bombs just a few years earlier—the Castle Bravo test conducted on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands.[...]
A repeat of the Castle Bravo incident in Cape Thompson, residents declared, would be devastating for Indigenous communities that had lived off the land for thousands of years.
Teller, meanwhile, insisted the operation could be conducted safely, but conceded that the release of some radiation was inevitable. AEC officials backed Teller. “While it is appropriate to expend considerable effort to minimize radiation hazards that may result from the use of nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes, it also may be appropriate to assume some additional risk to the health and safety of the public,” they wrote. These were not comforting words to the Inuit and Inupiat communities.”
Teller insisted on the safety of the operation:
#Teller, Edward (1960): “We’re Going to Work Miracles”, Popular Mechanics
https://books.google.ca/books?id=v9sDAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA97&pg=PA97#v=onepage&q&f=false
Quote: “I believe that the dangers from fallout in the weapons-testing program have been greatly exaggerated; nevertheless, this worry exists and so we are trying to develop ‘clean’ bombs.”
—Canals and harbors were great, but nobody wanted them to be glowing with radioactivity for thousands of years.
Please note that this sentence is meant sarcastically. As explained in the above sections of this document, the Alaskan harbor in Project Chariot would have been frozen for most of the year, and Teller failed to offer a credible economic justification for the project.
—But Teller had a plan – nuking the land from below. In a nutshell, you drill a hole hundreds of meters deep and place the nuke at the bottom. When it goes off, the blast hollows out a cavern in the rock and flash-melts its walls into magma. The molten rock pools at the bottom, the ceiling collapses, and the collapse ripples upwards until it reaches the floor, where it forms a crater. The result is a massive hole on top with the radioactive debris sealed under hundreds of thousands of tons of rock. With the theory looking flawless on paper, the time had come to actually test it.
Note that "flawless on paper” is meant ironically, in order to lampshade that the theory would fail once put in practice. Teller seems to have genuinely believed it would work for the Alaska harbor:
#Teller, Edward (1960): “We’re Going to Work Miracles”, Popular Mechanics
https://books.google.ca/books?id=v9sDAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA97&pg=PA97#v=onepage&q&f=false
Quote: “The remote site was chosen deliberately to allay any fears of radioactive contamination. However, there will be very little contamination. To accomplish this, we will use a trick to prevent the possible escape of fission products.
If the nuclear devices were to be exploded at shallow depths, almost all radioactive particles would be thrown up into the atmosphere. So we will bury the bombs deep—about 400 feet below the surface for the small ones and possibly 700 feet for the larger ones. Each blast will transmit its energy to the rock above it, flinging only the surface materials into the air.
We expect that all except 10 or 20 percent of the radioactive byproduct will be trapped at the deep zero points and we hope that it will remain practically immobilized in the fused rock. It is possible that we shall succeed even better and that all but a very small percentage of the radioactivity will be safely contained underground.[...]
The mechanics of this are based on several underground test shots that have been made at our Nevada test site. The bombs ranged from one tenth of a kiloton to 23 kilotons in power and were detonated at different depths below the surface. From these experimental shots, we learned a great deal about underground blasts and how much fallout to expect.”
In this article, Teller probably refers to the Rainier shot, the first ever contained underground nuclear test.”
He probably based his design and optimistic prediction on the results of a much smaller shot achieved with little contamination a few years prior to his article:
#The National Museum of Nuclear Science and History/Atomic Heritage Foundation (2014): “Operation Plumbbob – 1957”
https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/operation-plumbbob-1957/
Quote: “The Rainier shot, conducted September 19, 1957, was the first fully contained underground nuclear test, meaning that no fission products escaped into the atmosphere. This test of 1.7 KT could be detected around the world by seismologists using ordinary seismic instruments. The Rainier test became the prototype for larger and more powerful underground tests.”
The results, as reported by a member of the Livermore Laboratory that Teller directed, were the following:
#Lombard, David B.(1961): “Plowshare: a program for the peaceful use of nuclear explosives”, Physics Today
https://aip.brightspotcdn.com/PTO.v14.i10.24_1.online.pdf
Quote: “The Rainier event of September 19, 1957, has been the object of extensive postshot exploration. A reconstruction of the phenomenology of this event gives the following picture: Rainier, a 1.7-kiloton nuclear explosion, was detonated in a mesa composed of a rock called volcanic tuff, about 900 ft below the mesa top and 790 ft from the nearest point on the sloping mesa face. The device was located at the end of a tunnel curved in a short spiral at the shot end so that it would be self-sealing (Fig. 1). The tunnel was plugged with sandbags for about 15 ft near the device. The original shot room was about 6X6X 7 ft. About 0.1 second after the device was set off, there was a cavity about 125 ft in diameter, lined with about 4 inches of molten rock. Most of the radioactivity from the explosion was trapped in this 700 tons of slag. The lining had begun to drip and flow to the bottom of the cavity, and after a period of 30 to 180 seconds the puddle at the bottom was about 7 ft deep. During this time the cavity had cooled considerably and the steam pressure had dropped to a few atmospheres. Then the roof fell in. The top of the cavity collapsed into the puddle and, by a process of collapse of successive layers of rock, a "chimney" (or stope) was produced which extended upwards about 400 ft above the original shot point and contained some 200 000 tons of crushed and broken rock. Figure 2 illustrates this chain of events. Postshot exploration has also determined that the tunnel was tightly sealed, having completely collapsed to a radius of 200 ft (Fig. 1), and was damaged out to about 400 ft. However, the ground shock was so attenuated by the time it reached an observation point 2.5 miles from the mesa that few observers felt it. Air blast was reduced to a muffled boom at this range. From the results of Rainier and subsequent confined explosions, it was concluded that safety considerations do not preclude the industrial use of underground nuclear explosions.”
—Plowshare debuted in 1961 in the desert of New Mexico. A nuke with the power of 3,100 tonnes of TNT was buried 360 meters deep, right into a salt deposit. The goal was to explore a new idea to generate electricity – the explosion would melt the deposit into a pond of red-hot, liquid salt, whose heat could then be pumped up to power turbines. A revolutionary hybrid of fusion and geothermal power, brought to you by H-bombs.
The official goal of the project was the exploitation of the salt mines for generating energy, though its context and the measurements carried out suggest it was also used as a test for nuclear weapons and the detection of underground nuclear explosions.
#Shea, Patrick H. (2024): “We’re Going to Work Miracles”, Distillations Magazine
https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/were-going-to-work-miracles/
Quote: “Gnome was designed to explore the feasibility of using a deeply buried nuclear explosion to deposit heat underground and then later recover that heat to generate electricity, with the radioactivity produced remaining safely below the surface. The test was widely publicized, and news reporters, foreign officials, and members of the public were all invited to witness the explosion at a site about 25 miles outside Carlsbad, New Mexico.[...]
At noon on December 10, 1961, scientists detonated a 3.1-kiloton nuclear device set 360 meters below the surface of the earth. The AEC’s carefully laid plans went awry almost immediately.”
#Atomic Archive: “Project GNOME” (retrieved 2026)
https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/atomic-tourist/gnome.html
Quote: “The Project GNOME detonation on December 10, 1961 near Carlsbad, New Mexico was the first nuclear test with the objective of developing nuclear explosives for peaceful applications. Along with expanding the data on an underground nuclear detonation in a salt medium, the primary objectives were to:
Study the possibility of converting the heat produced by a nuclear explosion into steam for the production of electric power
Explore the feasibility of recovering radioisotopes for the scientific and industrial applications
Use the high flux of neutrons produced by the detonation for a variety of measurements that would contribute to scientific knowledge in general and to the reactor development program in particular.[...]
GNOME was developed with the idea that a nuclear detonation in a salt deposit would create a large volume of hot melted salt from which heat might be extracted. The possibilities to be investigated for the production of power were the tapping of the steam created by detonation itself and the generation of high-density, high-pressure steam by the circulation of some heat-absorbing fluid, like water, over the heated salt. This generated steam would be used to drive a steam or hot gas turbine coupled with an electric generator.”
—Deep below, in the salt deposit, the explosion had carved a cavern the size of over ten Olympic swimming pools. But Teller and his team had missed one tiny detail: the salt contained far more water than expected. In an instant, that water turned into superheated steam that massively amplified the blast. The hole used to lower the bomb had been designed to collapse and seal itself after the explosion, but the unexpectedly monstrous pressure broke through.
#Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (1964): “Project Gnome: The Environment Created by a Nuclear Explosion in Salt”
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4612556
Quote: “An estimate of the total void volume produced by the explosion was made, using a combination of three :points from drill holes penetrating the top of the cavity, photographic guides for extrapolation from survey control within the cavity, and und-rground drill holes which defined the cavity below the working point in 10 places. This volume was calculated to be 27,200 cubic meters (Appendix D) and is in very good agreement with a measurement made by pressurizing the cavity with compressed air. A known volume of air at a known pressure was introduced into the cavity. From these measurements the cavity volume was calculated to be 28,000 ± 2,800 cubic meters (J. Tracy, LRL - verbal communication).”
An Olympic-size pool has a volume of 2,500 cubic metres (or 2.5 million litres). That means that the volume of the cavity was equivalent to
28,000 cubic meters / 2,500 cubic meters =11.2,
or over ten Olympic pools.
#Shea, Patrick H. (2024): “We’re Going to Work Miracles”, Distillations Magazine
https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/were-going-to-work-miracles/
Quote: “Again, AEC scientists had underestimated the force of their explosion. Planners hadn’t noticed that substantial amounts of water were trapped in salt domes below the surface. When the bomb went off, the water flashed to steam, which greatly increased the blast’s size. Though Gnome’s engineers had set the device at the end of a hooked tunnel designed to seal itself after detonation, the blast’s unexpected strength caused it to break through. Radioactive steam and smoke shot from the access tunnel and billowed around the observers.”
—So a few minutes after the blast, a plume of radioactive steam erupted from the shaft – damaging cameras and instruments and bathing everyone in a strangely itchy sauna. The US government tried their best to convince everyone that things hadn't been that bad. But for some reason, the masses had a psychological problem with clouds of radioactive fallout, even when they came from peaceful nukes.
#Atomic Archive: “Project GNOME” (retrieved 2026)
https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/atomic-tourist/gnome.html
Quote: “GNOME was detonated at noon local time with a yield of 3.1 kilotons. Although it had been planned as a contained explosion, GNOME vented to the atmosphere. A cloud of steam started to appear at the top of the shaft 2 to 3 minutes after the detonation. Gray smoke, steam, and associated radioactivity emanated from the shaft opening about 7 minutes after detonation. Radioactive materials vented to the atmosphere about 340 meters southwest of ground zero. Within 11 minutes after shot-time, both the shaft and the ventilation lines were issuing large quantities of steam. During the next 30 minutes, the large flow continued and then began to decrease gradually.”
#Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (1995): “Fallout from Plowshare Peaceful Nuclear Explosions and the Environment 1956-1973”
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/udit1/docs/llnl-conf-464374.pdf
Quote: “Radioactive steam and smoke geysered from the access shaft 300 feet into the air. High readings of external exposure rate and high tritium concentrations in air and under water in
the shaft delayed recovery of experimental data for several days, and final recovery operations for several months. But project workers escaped unscathed as did members of the nearby public. With little fallout from the gas cloud, radionuclides nowhere measured more than a hundredth of the published maximum concentration permitted offsite populations. Disaster narrowly averted, however, scarcely boded well for Project Plowshare. Exposures both onsite and off, even if judged harmless, still caught the test organization by surprise and raised hard-to-answer questions about future Plowshare tests.”
#Shea, Patrick H. (2024): “We’re Going to Work Miracles”, Distillations Magazine
https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/were-going-to-work-miracles/
Quote: “Radiation exposure to those on site was higher than anticipated, AEC officials stated, but was still within what they considered an “acceptable” range. Nevertheless, officials blocked exits from the test site until cars could be washed of any fallout that had settled on them.
Disaster had been averted, but the test did not bode well for Plowshare’s prospects. As AEC officials would soon learn, the public had little tolerance for surprises when it came to nuclear explosions.”
—In July 1962, while Cuban officials were visiting Moscow to negotiate a missile deal that would almost spark WW3 three months later, a thermonuclear bomb worth 7 Hiroshima nukes exploded 200 meters underground in the Nevada desert. This time the goal was to test the idea of nuclear excavation itself and check how big the resulting crater could get.
#United States Department of State: “The Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962” (retrieved 2026)
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1961-1968/cuban-missile-crisis
Quote: “After the failed U.S. attempt to overthrow the Castro regime in Cuba with the Bay of Pigs invasion, and while the Kennedy administration planned Operation Mongoose, in July 1962 Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev reached a secret agreement with Cuban premier Fidel Castro to place Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba to deter any future invasion attempt.”
#US National Security Archive (2022): “Getting to Know the Cubans: Khrushchev Meets the Castro Brothers”
#Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: “The Sedan Event (Project Plowshare)” (retrieved 2026)
https://st.llnl.gov/news/look-back/sedan-event-project-plowshare
Quote: “On July 6, 1962, the Sedan Event, the largest of the Project Plowshare experiments, was conducted at the Nevada Test Site. This 100-kiloton blast produced a crater approximately 1,200-feet-in-diameter, with a depth of 320 feet into the desert floor.”
For comparison, the Hiroshima bomb was 15 KT:
100 KT/15 KT =6.7 ~ 7
#Shea, Patrick H. (2024): “We’re Going to Work Miracles”, Distillations Magazine
https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/were-going-to-work-miracles/
Quote: “Sedan was designed as a “cratering shot” to demonstrate one of the most promising applications advanced by Plowshare’s boosters, nuclear excavation. The blast would need to be precisely shaped and placed at a carefully calculated depth to create the crater while simultaneously trapping the bulk of radioactivity underground. Once again, ideas that seemed sound on paper proved difficult to pull off in the real world.”
#U.S. Department of Energy (2011): ”Sedan Tested Use of Nuclear Explosives to Move Earth”
Quote: “The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) conducted the nuclear excavation experiment "Sedan" on July 6, 1962.
The detonation was part of the AEC's Plowshare Program to develop peaceful uses for nuclear explosives. Sedan was the second in the Plowshare series; the first test, Gnome was fired, on December 10, 1961.
Sedan was a 104-kiloton nuclear device detonated 635 feet underground to develop the technology to use nuclear energy for earth moving projects.
The explosion displaced about 12 million tons of earth, creating a crater 1,280 feet in diameter and 320 feet deep.
The force of the detonation released seismic energy equivalent to an earthquake magnitude of 4.75 on the Richter Scale.”
—The blast displaced 12 million tonnes of soil and hollowed out a gargantuan crater 100 meters deep and 400 meters across – to this day, the largest artificial crater in US history.
#U.S. Department of Energy (2011): ”Sedan Tested Use of Nuclear Explosives to Move Earth”
Quote: “The explosion displaced about 12 million tons of earth, creating a crater 1,280 feet in diameter and 320 feet deep.”
#Online Nevada Encyclopedia (2009): “Sedan Crater”
http://www.onv-dev.duffion.com/articles/sedan-crater
Quote: “Sedan Crater is the largest ground depression resulting from a nuclear detonation in the United States.”
#Hood Museum of Art: “Sedan Crater, Area 10, Northern End of Yucca Flat Looking South, Nevada Test Site” (retrieved 2026)
https://hoodmuseum.dartmouth.edu/objects/2011.46
Quote: “The resulting explosion emitted radioactive fallout reaching as far as Illinois and the largest man-made crater in the US—approximately 1,280 feet in diameter and 320 feet deep.”
—But digging with nukes is tricky. Bury the bomb too deep, and you’ll only get a disappointing dent. Bury it too shallow, and you risk launching a radioactive cloud into the sky.
#U.S. Energy Commission (1968): “Plowshare”
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/udit1/docs/plowshare.pdf
Quote: “A surface or nearsurface explosion expends most of its energy in the air without doing useful work. A much deeper explosion fractures and lifts a lot of rock, but much of it falls back, leaving only a shallow crater. [...]
Cratering explosions, the depth at which the explosion occurs is important. If it is too close to the surface (B), much of the energy escapes into the air and only a shallow crater results. If it is too deep (D) , much rock is shattered and moved, but most of it fails to clear the crater rim and again only a shallow crater results.”
—Which was exactly what happened. Someone had miscalculated the depth of the explosion and a plume of radioactivity punched through. Fallout was detected as far as South Dakota and Illinois, and panic broke in Utah when radioactive iodine was found in the milk. It turned into one of the dirtiest tests on American soil ever.
#Shea, Patrick H. (2024): “We’re Going to Work Miracles”, Distillations Magazine
https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/were-going-to-work-miracles/
Quote: “On July 6, 1962, the 104-kiloton explosion blasted away 6.5 million cubic yards of sand and gravel and left behind a crater 330 feet deep and 1,280 feet across. But efforts to contain fallout from the blast failed, and twin dust plumes shot into the sky. Winds deposited detectable concentrations of radioactive material as far away as South Dakota and Illinois.
In Utah, public health officials were particularly alarmed when radioiodine-131 began appearing in milk samples. Indeed, since 1952, much of Utah had been showered with radioactivity from the Nevada test site. As Time reported,
One of the most active elements in the fallout has been iodine-131, which gets into grass, then into cows, then into milk, and then into children who drink the milk. In children, even more than in adults, the radioactive iodine (like ordinary iodine) is selectively attracted to the thyroid gland.
AEC officials tried to persuade locals that the relatively short-lived radioiodine did not pose any great danger, but that did little to alleviate local anxieties. State officials vowed to pull contaminated food from the market and bill the AEC for the damages.
In a 1963 report on Plowshare, Teller dismissed growing concerns, writing, “the discussion about fallout has resulted in exaggerated and unwarranted fears so that even small quantities of radioactivity which are themselves not harmful are viewed with alarm.”
Teller’s arrogance did nothing to persuade the public that its fears were unfounded. The U.S. government had even acknowledged the seriousness of the fallout issue when it signed on to the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which banned nuclear testing in the atmosphere, space, and underwater.”
#Adams, Lilly (2022): ”Resuming Nuclear Testing a Slap in the Face to Survivors”, Union of Concerned Scientists
https://blog.ucs.org/lilly-adams/resuming-nuclear-testing-a-slap-in-the-face-to-survivors/
Quote: “The 1962 “Sedan” test in Nevada was the second most fallout-intensive nuclear weapons test in the continental US, exposing millions of Americans to radioactive fallout.”
—Liquify tar sands in Canada, with nukes. Blast a new highway through the mountains of California, with nukes. Connect rivers in Mississippi, with nukes.
Project Oilsands, a plan to mine oil out of tar sands in Canada, was not proposed by Teller, but by the Richfield Oil Company. It was presented to Teller in 1959 and incorporated in Plowshare.
#Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Government of Alberta: “Project Oilsand” (retrieved 2026) https://history.alberta.ca/energyheritage/sands/mega-projects/setting-the-stage/the-second-athabasca-oil-sands-conference/project-oil-sand.aspx
#U.S. Department of Energy: “Executive Summary: Plowshare Program” (retrieved 2026)
—But the crown jewel of all nuclear dreams was still the Pan-Atomic Canal. A legion of scientists worked on it for years and plans got disturbingly far. One of the top contenders was Route 17, an 80-km trench across pristine Panamanian jungle that was short, flat, pretty empty and perfectly nukable. 250 bombs with the power of 8,000 Hiroshimas would do the job.
The land needed for the construction of Route 17 was not in any way "empty" and neither was it “pristine jungle”. This is said sarcastically. It included a considerable stretch of rich uninhabited jungle ecosystems, much of the territory of indigenous tribes like the Guna, and more dense human settlements like La Palma. As explained below, around 43,000 people would have been displaced by the construction of this canal.
#Keiner, Christine (2025): “The Nuclear Sea-Level Canal Engineering Feasibility Field Studies and Epistemic Risk in the Darién, 1965–1970”, Journal for the History of Knowledge, vol. 6, 209–232
https://journalhistoryknowledge.org/article/view/19175/25876
Quote: “To determine the feasibility of excavating a nuclear route across the remote Darién landscape of either eastern Panama or western Colombia, around 900 workers collected geological, hydrological, me‐teorological, biological, ecological, and medical data from1966 to 1968.”
#Keiner, Christine (2016): “The Panatomic Canal and the US Environmental-Management State, 1964–78”, Environmental History, vol.21, 2, 278-287
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24691587
Quote: “During the Cold War, fifty years after the Panama Canal opened, the US government invested millions of dollars researching the feasibility of using nuclear explosives to replace the aging megaproject and its quasi-colonial enclave, the Canal Zone, with a technologically and politically modern waterway."
#Atlantic-Pacific Interoceanic Canal Study Commission (1970): “Interoceanic Canal Studies 1970”
https://ia601306.us.archive.org/3/items/interoceaniccana00unit/interoceaniccana00unit.pdf
Quote: “In October 1962, the Secretary of the Army formed a Technical Steering Committee to
review prior studies and to develop a new canal study plan for presentation to the Congress. The sea-level canal routes recommended in this plan were selected from those found most promising in the 1947 study conducted by the Governor of the Panama Canal which identified 30 potential routes and assigned them numbers that have been used in all subsequent studies (Figure 2). Those recommended for investigation in the plan proposed to the Congress by the Secretary of the Army, with consideration of the potential of nuclear excavation, were
— Route 8 in Nicaragua and Costa Rica for a sea-level canal constructed primarily by nuclear excavation.
—Route 14 in the Canal Zone for conversion of the present lock canal to sea level by conventional construction methods.
— Route 17 in Panama for a sea-level canal constructed primarily by nuclear excavation.
— Route 25 in Colombia for a sea-level canal constructed by a combination of nuclear and conventional excavation methods.[...]
The portions of Route 17 which appear to be suitable for nuclear excavation are currently estimated by the United States Army Engineer Nuclear Cratering Group to require about 250 separate explosives with a total yield of 120 megatons. ”
The Hiroshima bomb had an explosive power of 15 KT, so in comparison:
120 MT/15KT=8,000
—43,000 people across 17,000 square kilometers would still have to be evacuated. You know, just in case. And shockwaves might shatter windows as far as Costa Rica and Colombia.
#Atlantic-Pacific Interoceanic Canal Study Commission (1970): “Interoceanic Canal Studies 1970”
https://ia601306.us.archive.org/3/items/interoceaniccana00unit/interoceaniccana00unit.pdf
Quote: “Fallout predictions based upon meteorological conditions in the vicinity of Route 17
indicate that a land area of approximately 6,500 square miles containing an estimated 43,000 persons would have to be evacuated during the period of nuclear operations and for several months thereafter. This includes most of the area that might be affected by ground shock or air blast, but precautions against glass breakage and other damage in built-up areas would be required over a large area extending out approximately 300 miles from the route. The AEC is confident, however, that a significant reduction in the size of the area affected is possible.”
“300 miles from the route” would mean that glass breakage was expected in a good part of Colombia and at the border with Costa Rica.
—So let’s rewind history… and press the button to see what might have happened if Teller actually got his way. Ready to push the button? 3… 2… 1…
The events of the following scenario are fictional. They are meant as an illustration of the scenario that could have developed if the nuclear excavation of a canal following Route 17 had taken place. They are loosely based on the risk assessments for the project.
—Luckily, at some point the US blinked and began to sober up. In 1970, a final report killed the Pan-Atomic Canal.
#Keiner, Christine (2025): “The Nuclear Sea-Level Canal Engineering Feasibility Field Studies and Epistemic Risk in the Darién, 1965–1970”, Journal for the History of Knowledge, vol. 6, 209–232
https://journalhistoryknowledge.org/article/view/19175/25876
Quote: “As the canal study commissioners announced in 1970, despite their confidence that “someday nuclear explosions will be used in a wide variety of massive earth-moving projects,” that time was not now.”
#Shea, Patrick H. (2024): “We’re Going to Work Miracles”, Distillations Magazine
https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/were-going-to-work-miracles/
Quote: “Support for Project Plowshare was at an all-time low heading into the 1970s. Activists and citizen groups had begun suing the AEC in federal courts to stop the tests, and although the AEC prevailed in that setting, the court of public opinion was another matter altogether. Even Time, which in 1961 had cheered Plowshare’s “hopeful dream,” dubbed the program “Project Dubious” in 1973. For the next four years no tests were conducted, until the program was officially canceled in 1977.”
—But Teller ready to let go, so he turned to nuclear fracking. Not because the idea really made sense, but rather as a way to keep Plowshare alive. Just one more nuke and I will build the future, bro. But several explosions later, the result was ultra-expensive, radioactive gas that was impossible to sell.
#Shea, Patrick H. (2024): “We’re Going to Work Miracles”, Distillations Magazine
https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/were-going-to-work-miracles/
Quote: “The first attempt at developing these technologies was Project Gasbuggy, a joint experiment by the AEC, Department of the Interior, and the El Paso Natural Gas Company. The plan called for a nuclear explosion equivalent to 29 kilotons of TNT placed about 4,200 feet underground in a section of Lewis Shale in northwestern New Mexico. The detonation on December 10, 1967, blasted open an underground chamber 335 feet high and almost 165 feet in diameter and successfully fractured the rock, spurring a vast increase in gas production rates at the site. Unfortunately, the blast also contaminated the gas with radioactive tritium, making it unsellable to consumers.
In 1969 Plowshare’s scientists tried again, setting off a 40-kiloton nuclear device in a remote area of northwestern Colorado along the Colorado River. Initially, the AEC celebrated the test as a success, but a study by the National Science Foundation (NSF) released a few years later found otherwise. NSF researchers reported that Project Rulison cost nearly $11 million but only yielded $1.5 million worth of gas at most. Making matters worse, the gas was inferior to gas removed from the same field by conventional methods and yet again contained radioactive byproducts. Although Plowshare officials declared the gas safe for residential consumption, the public wasn’t buying. The taint of radioactivity, however trace, was a nonstarter.
Four years later the AEC made one last effort to demonstrate the viability of natural gas–stimulation projects. This test, Project Rio Blanco, aimed to free gas reserves under a section of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains by simultaneously detonating three 33-kiloton bombs in a single well. Once again, the shot went awry and contaminated the recovered gas with strontium-90, a dangerous radioactive byproduct of fission.
By 1974 approximately $82 million had been invested in projects Gasbuggy, Rulison, and Rio Blanco. Although the experiments demonstrated some small technical success, they were by all other accounts failures—financial, environmental, and political.”
#Anonymous (1973): “Dr. Edward Teller backs Rio Blanco nuclear test”, The Rocky Mountain News
Quote: “Physicist Dr. Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, says he favors an energy stimulation‘ program that would mean 1,000 nuclear blasts a year in oil shale beds in Colorado. Teller, speaking to the nation’s Republican governors at New York, said the nation's richest oil-shale deposits are located in the Western United States. He said development could help end the U.S. energy crisis. Teller, who also spoke in favor of Project Rio Blanco, said the Piceance Basin of Eastern Colorado was a ‘‘jackpot”of oil-shale reserves. He said he envisoned detonations of nuclear devices 10 seconds apart below the earth's surface. l According to Teller, gasification of oil shale required nuclear devices and he believed ‘‘that we must explore this avenue.” He 'said the Piceance Basin deposits were ‘‘deep underground in an area where very few people live.””
—In 1977, after 20 years and dozens of nukes across the US, Project Plowshare was finally cancelled without achieving a single one of its goals. No canal, harbor or tunnel had been built.
#Shea, Patrick H. (2024): “We’re Going to Work Miracles”, Distillations Magazine
https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/were-going-to-work-miracles/
Quote: “Support for Project Plowshare was at an all-time low heading into the 1970s. Activists and citizen groups had begun suing the AEC in federal courts to stop the tests, and although the AEC prevailed in that setting, the court of public opinion was another matter altogether. Even Time, which in 1961 had cheered Plowshare’s “hopeful dream,” dubbed the program “Project Dubious” in 1973. For the next four years no tests were conducted, until the program was officially canceled in 1977. [...]
Between December 1961 and May 1973, the United States detonated 35 nuclear devices as part of 27 separate Plowshare projects, burning through $700 million in the process. In the end, Plowshare did not achieve a single one of its aims.”
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