Are They Useless? XIV--Project Plowshare: How Did That Work Out?
And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. — Isaiah 2:4.
As General Colin Powell said in 2011, nuclear weapons are useless for military purposes.
Not for all purposes, of course. Terrorists would find them useful.
What about using the energy released in nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes? What were the prospects there?
In December 1953, President Eisenhower delivered at the United Nations the speech that came to be called his Atoms for Peace Speech. It was a little more than a year after the Ivy Mike test at our Pacific Proving Ground. That was the test where we exploded our first staged hydrogen bomb device. It had a yield of 10 megatons—666 Hiroshimas.
First, President Eisenhower laid out the great progress we’d made in developing our nuclear weapons.
Everything about this had been top top secret. But now he proposed that we get civilian contractors involved by allowing them to design nuclear reactors that could generate energy for peaceful purposes. We knew nuclear reactors could generate energy. We needed to find out if they could do it economically and safely.
Up to this moment, our Atomic Energy Commission had been keeping super secret everything we knew and were discovering about atomic energy. The Atomic Energy Act Congress had passed in 1946 required this. It had even required cutting out Great Britain. Great Britain had sent scientists to work with us in the Manhattan Project that was building the first atomic bomb. Cutting them out now didn’t seem to make much sense. But that’s what Congress did in the Atomic Energy Act of 1946.
The British just decided to go ahead and build an atomic bomb themselves.
In 1949 the Soviets successfully tested their first atomic bomb, and in 1952 the British had done it. The “secret” of the atomic bomb obviously wasn’t a secret any more, if it ever had been. Manhattan Project scientists had tried to convince our leaders that how to make an atomic bomb wasn’t a secret, especially now that we’d dropped the two bombs on Japan. That any country that wanted to and had a big enough industrial base to make the fissile fuel would soon be able to make atomic bombs. If they wanted to.
In any case, President Eisenhower now asked Congress to revise the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 to allow civilian contractors to try to develop nuclear power for peaceful purposes. The revised Atomic Energy Act of 1954 gave them the necessary permission. Even other countries would be allowed to participate in developing nuclear power for peaceful purposes. We would help by making available some of the enriched uranium nuclear fuel we had accumulated by now. Not the highly enriched weapons grade stuff, of course. But enriched enough to be used in a power reactor.
In 1954, Lewis Strauss, the businessman President Eisenhower had appointed as chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, had claimed in a speech to the National Association of Science Writers that soon “Our children will enjoy in their homes electricity too cheap to meter.” He got a little ahead of himself there. He had access to all the secrets, of course, but might not have known what he thought he did.
That’s not how it turned out, not even close.
Strauss might have been thinking, with the encouragement of physicist Edward Teller, that we’d soon figure out how to use nuclear fusion to generate energy. We knew we could generate energy by means of nuclear fission, in reactors and bombs both. Unfortunately, fission produced as waste highly radioactive fission products that would remain dangerous for generations.
After the Ivy Mike test, we also knew we could produce explosive energy from fusion, the way the sun does. Unfortunately, a fission bomb like the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki had to be used to create the heat and pressure necessary to get the fusion process going. To use fusion to create energy for peaceful purposes, we’d have to figure out how to get the fusion going without using an atomic bomb to do it. And keep it going. In a controlled way.
Almost seventy years later, we’re still trying to figure out how to get a controlled fusion reaction going.
Another feature of the atoms for peace effort would be Project Plowshare. Plowshare was the brainchild of physicist Edward Teller of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Teller was the Manhattan Project scientist who had gotten the ear of the Eisenhower administration.
Teller thought nuclear explosions might well be used for peaceful purposes. In 1957, Congress made funds available for Teller’s Project Plowshare to test the propsition.
Some of the Plowshare tests would be conducted in our country on the Nevada Test Site, where we also were testing our nuclear weapons. Some would be conducted in other places in our country.
On December 10, 1961, the first test in Plowshare, Gnome, was conducted in southern New Mexico, not far from where the first atomic explosion ever had taken place on July 16, 1945. In a salt cavern a little over a thousand feet underground, a 3.1 kiloton device (explosive power equivalent to 3.1 thousand tons of TNT) was detonated. The test was done to see if enough heat would be retained down there for long enough to produce steam that could be used to generate electric power.
When the device was detonated, it “vented.” That is, the surface of the earth cracked open and some steam was lofted over the press gallery that had been invited to witness how safe these tests would be. Unfortunately, the steam was radioactive.
Not all that radioactive, but radioactive.
Five months later, workers went down and into the cavern that the explosion had created and found that there wasn’t enough steam left to make this idea work. The cavern was pretty radioactive too. A second test that had been planned adjacent to the Gnome site was canceled.
That residual radioactivity in the Gnome cavern made it doubtful that nuclear explosions could be used to excavate underground cavities for the storage of water or gas or oil. That had been another idea.
Maybe nuclear explosions could be used for large excavation projects like harbors, canals, open-pit mines, railroad and highway cuts, and maybe dam construction. The problem here, we knew by now, was that nuclear explosions on or near the surface would throw up a lot of radioactive fallout.
The second actual Plowshare test, Sedan in Operation Storax, was set off below the surface of the earth on the Nevada Test Site. In this one, a 104 kiloton device was placed in a shaft 636 feet underground. When the device was detonated, it lifted more than 11,000,000 tons of radioactive soil into the air. The clouds of radioactive fallout moved off east and northeast on the prevailing wind.
The crater the Sedan test left was impressive, over a football field deep and three football fields across. That part of it, the excavation part, worked.
Significant radioactivity from Sedan’s fallout was registered in Iowa and South Dakota, among other states. In fact, the Sedan test seems to have generated more radioactivity off-site than all but maybe one of the many weapons tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site.
The crater is still there on the Nevada Test Site if you want to go see it. It’s not as radioactive today as it once was.
In 1967, on the Nevada Test Site, in the Buggy test, five 1.3 kiloton devices were placed in a row 150 feet apart and 150 feet below the surface and set off at the same moment. A channel was created that was maybe 900 feet long, 300 feet wide and 80 feet deep. Buggy worked too when it came to the excavation part. Just not, again, when it came to the residual radioactity and fallout part.
In 1964, Paul Fannin, the governor in my home state of Arizona, which is southeast of the Nevada Test Site, created an Arizona Atomic Energy Commission to apply for some of those Plowshare funds. Several projects were considered by the AAEC, including using atomic explosions to help excavate the Central Arizona Project Canal to bring water from the Colorado river to Phoenix and Tucson. But in the end, no Plowshare test was ever conducted in Arizona. My state missed out.
Could Plowshare nuclear devices be made “clean” so that their detonations would not produce harmful levels of radioactivity? In a piece in Life magazine, Edward Teller had once claimed “clean” nuclear bombs were possible. We worked some on producing these clean bombs (our military could see no particular reason why we would want them), but never got there. Clean-er, maybe, just never clean. It looks like that when fission is involved, that’s not possible. Fission always produces radioactive fission products.
Another possible use of nuclear explosions was fracturing tight rock to release the natural gas that we knew it held. Starting in 1967, in gas fields west of the Rockies, several Plowshare tests tested this idea—the Gasbuggy test at Farmington, New Mexico, the Rulison test near Grand Junction, Colorado, and the Rio Blanco test 60 miles north of Grand Junction. In the Rio Blanco test, three 30 kiloton devices—each half again larger than the Nagasaki bomb—were placed at depths of 1,758, 1,875, and 2,015 meters, and set off simultaneously.
Gas was released in all these tests, but it was too radioactive to be used.
After the Rio Blanco test in 1973, Project Plowshare tests stopped happening. Funding for the program ended without fanfare in 1977. In all, starting in 1961, twenty-seven tests had been conducted to test Edward Teller’s idea. About $770 million had been spent. None of the experiments had been a success.
The Soviets started a similar project and had a similar experience.
The tests weren’t a complete bust though. We’d piggy-backed onto them some scientific and weapons effects tests to try to learn what we could about detecting underground tests. That might be useful when it came to negotiating the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty that some of us were hoping for by then.
Other than that, the tests had shown that nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes were as useless as nuclear explosions for military purposes.
There remained the question whether nuclear power reactors might turn out to be useful. Chances might be better there.
Next: Are They Useless? XIV-Nuclear Winter? Really?