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As you know, Ariat is the official Dirt Talk podcast sponsor. And at this point, we've talked plenty about their footwear, their workwear. But now it is winter and boy, is it cold. It was 17 degrees this morning. I had to warm the truck up. But just because it's cold does not mean the work stops. So to get the job done, you need the best, warmest workwear possible. And Ariat has a long list of outerwear, amazing jackets, pants and other goods available now. You can shop at their website, ariat.com dirtttalk that is ariat.com dirttalk hello, everybody. Welcome back Monday edition Dirt Talk podcast. Happy to be here with you all. Thanks for stopping by today. We're gonna get into a project feature, or not as much of a project feature. It's more of a government program. That's quite fascinating. Once I learned that this was a reality, I almost didn't believe it. But it is absolutely true. And hopefully we're here to teach you something today. We're here to talk about, as the title suggests, peaceful nuclear explosions. It sounds kind of like an oxymoron. I think it is an oxymoron, but allow me to explain here a little bit. I did some research over the weekend. I've researched this in the past, and let's see what we think here. So peaceful nuclear explosions are nuclear explosions conducted for non military purposes. Proposed uses include excavation for the building of canals and harbors, electric generation, and the use of nuclear explosions to drive spacecraft and as a form of wide area fracking. These were an area of some research from the late 1950s into the 1980s, primarily in the United States and the good old Soviet Union. In the United States, and this is something we'll cover in greater detail. A series of tests were carried out under Project Plowshare. Some of the ideas considered, including blasting a new Panama Canal, constructing the proposed Nicaragua Canal, the use of underground explosions to create electricity, and a variety of mining, geological and radionuclide studies. The largest of the excavation tests was carried out in the Sudan nuclear test in 1962, which released large amounts of radioactive gas into the air. By the late 1960s, public opposition to Plowshare was increasing, and a 1970s study of the economics of the concept suggested they had no practical use. Go figure. Plowshare saw decreasing interest from the 1960s and was officially canceled in 1977. My parents were alive when this was still going on, which is pretty surreal. The Soviets also had their own program modeled after U.S. efforts and explored many of the same concepts under their cleverly named Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy program. The program was much more extensive, eventually conducting 239 nuclear explosions. Some of these tests also released radioactivity, including a significant release of plutonium into the groundwater and polluting the area near the Volga River. A major part of the program in the 1970s and 80s was the use of very small bombs to produce shock waves as a seismic measuring tool. And as part of these experiments, two bombs were successfully used to seal blown out oil wells. The program officially ended in 1988 as part of ongoing arms control efforts. Both programs came to be controlled by a variety of agreements. The most notable is the 1976 Treaty on Underground Nuclear Explosions for Peaceful Purposes. I wandered into this whole topic for a little bit of context before we keep going, because we visited Ken Ross at Round Mountain last year. Round Mountain is in the middle of Nevada, not too far from Tonopah, which is a very well traveled area by the United States government. I always knew that there was government testing in Nevada, but I didn't quite understand the scale of the government testing until I got into it. And as I was looking around at the Nevada Test site on Google Earth, I started to notice all of these craters and was like, what are all these gigantic craters in the middle of the desert? And I came to find out that they're all nuclear explosion sites. So a lot of these tests were in at the Nevada Test Site, which is not all that far, just a few hours from Las Vegas, out in the middle of the desert. And they were done underground to not emit the radiation. But some obviously did, as previously explained. So that's how I fell down this rabbit hole. I'm glad I did, because like I said, it is just fascinating. So before we get into some of the specifics, just to talk Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty. In the treaty, the signatories agreed not to carry out any individual nuclear explosions having a yield exceeding 150 kiloton TNT equivalent, not to carry out any group explosion consisting of a number of individual explosions having an aggregate yield of 1500 kilotons, and not to carry out any group explosion having an aggregate yield exceeding 150 kilotons unless the individual explosions in the group could be identified and measured by agreed verification procedures. So they put together a treaty to govern the testing of peaceful nuclear weapons. The agreed statement that accompanies the treaty specifies that a peaceful application of an underground nuclear explosion would not include the developmental testing of any nuclear explosive. Right. So to get into specifically the United States program Operation Plowshare Operation Plowshare was the name of the United States program for the development of techniques to use nuclear explosives for peaceful purposes. The name was coined in 1961, taken from Micah 4. 3. And he shall judge among the nations and shall rebuke many people, and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. 28 nuclear blasts were then detonated between 1961 and 1973. One of the first US proposals for peaceful nuclear explosions that came to being carried out was Project Chariot, which would have used several hydrogen bombs to create an artificial harbor at Cape Thompson, Alaska. It was never carried out due to concerns for the native populations and the fact that there was little potential use for the harbor to justify its risk and expense. There was also talk of using nuclear explosions to excavate a second Panama Canal as well as an alternative to the Suez Canal. They decided it wouldn't work. Uh huh. That was, I think, wise. The largest excavation experiment took place in 1962 at the Department of Energy's Nevada Test site, the one I referenced earlier. The Sedan nuclear test carried out as part of Operation Storax, displaced 12 million tons of Earth, creating the largest man made crater in the world, generating a large nuclear fallout over Nevada and Utah. Three tests were also conducted in order to stimulate natural gas production, but the effort was abandoned as impractical because of cost and radioactive contamination of the gas. Again, that's very curious. There were many negative impacts from Project Plowshare's 27 nuclear explosions. For example, the project Gas Buggy site, and I love these names, located about 55 miles east of Farmington, New Mexico, still contains nuclear contamination from a single subsurface blast in 1967. Other consequences included blighted land, relocated communities, tritium contaminated water, radioactivity, and fallout from debris being hurdled high into the atmosphere. These were ignored and downplayed until the program was terminated in 1977 due in large part to public opposition after $770 million had been spent on the project. And that's a lot more money today than it was back then. So that is our good old United States of America. Our government's endeavor to try to apply nuclear weapons for civil engineering purposes. As explained, the Soviet Union also had their very cleverly named nuclear Explosions for the Natural National Economy Program. They conducted a much more vigorous program with 239 nuclear tests compared to our 27, some with multiple devices between 1965 and 1988, but they were testing similar stuff ultimately, then decided to call it a day after 1988 when they had similar issues because again, it was discovered that using nuclear weapons to dig holes was not the best way to go. However, reports on the successful Soviet use of nuclear explosions and extinguishing out of control gas well fires were widely cited in United States politics policy discussions of options for stopping the 2010 Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Other Nations Germany at one time considered manufacturing nuclear explosives for civil engineering purposes as well. In the early 1970s, a feasibility study was conducted for a project to build a canal from the Mediterranean Sea to the Qatar Depression in the western desert of Egypt using nuclear demolition. This project proposed to use 213 nuclear devices with yields of 1 to 1.5 megatons detonated at depths of 100 to 500 meters, which is 330 to 1,640ft, to build this canal for the purpose of producing hydroelectric power in Australia, nuclear blasting was proposed as a way of mining iron ore in the Pilbara as well, which is. Yeah, glad that didn't happen. Apart from their use as weapons, nuclear explosives have been tested and used in a similar manner to chemical high explosives for various non military uses. To get into more of the canal project, the Qatara Depression project was developed by a professor during his appointment to the West German Ministry of Economics in 1968. He put forth a plan to create a Saharan lake and a hydroelectric power station by blasting a tunnel between the Mediterranean Sea and the Qatar Depression in Egypt, an area that lies below sea level. The core problem of the entire project was the water supply to the depression. Calculations by Basler showed that digging a canal or tunnel would be too expensive. Therefore, Basler determined that the use of nuclear explosive devices to excavate the canal or tunnel would be most economical. However, the Egyptian government declined to pursue the idea. I love how they write this stuff. Also, the repeated detonation of nuclear devices underground in salt domes in somewhat analogous manner to the explosions that power a car's internal combustion engine, has also been proposed as a means of fusion power in what is termed pacer. Other investigated uses for low yield peaceful nuclear explosions were underground detonations to stimulate by a process analogous to fracking the flow of petroleum and natural gas in tight formations. This was developed mostly in the Soviet Union, with an increase in the production of many wellheads being reported. Now this is where it starts to go even crazier. In 2015, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk popularized an approach in which the coal planet Mars could be terraformed by the detonation of high fusion yielding thermonuclear devices over the mostly dry ice caps on the planet. Musk's specific plan would not be very feasible within the energy limitations of historically manufactured nuclear devices, therefore requiring major advancement for it to be considered. In part due to these problems, the physicist Michio Kaku instead suggests using nuclear reactors in the typical land based district heating manner to make isolated tropical biomes on the Martian surface. Alternatively, as nuclear detonations are presently somewhat limited in terms of demonstrated achievable yield, the use of an off the shelf nuclear explosive device could be employed to nudge a martian grazing comet toward a pull of the planet. Impact would be a much more efficient scheme to deliver the required energy water vapor, greenhouse gases and other biologically significant volatiles that could begin to quickly terraform Mars. So we could use off the shelf nuclear explosives to shoot an asteroid or a comet into Mars to make it inhabitable. What could go wrong? So there's plenty more here, plenty more uses to nuclear weapons. I wanted to or nuclear peaceful nuclear explosions. Excuse me, I wanted for the sake of this podcast, just to highlight for fun the civil engineering applications. I think back in the 50s, 60s, 70s, we were developing so many nuclear weapons. I think some saw that, hey, we need another use for these nuclear weapons. So I think that's where all this came from is, well, if we've got thousands of warheads, why not do something with them? Why not make the world a better place with our nuclear warheads and bombs? But fortunately for us, none of this went beyond the testing phase, which already included hundreds and hundreds of explosions happening without a lot of people's awareness, which is in a lot of ways very, very terrifying. Now, before we wrap this episode up, I wanted to cover also Project Carryall, which was a 1963 U.S. atomic Energy Commission proposal to use nuclear explosives to excavate a path for Interstate 40 in the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway through the Bristol Mountains of Southern California. This was part of Project Plowshare, but was separate as it went pretty far into the planning stage. The project advanced to planning in 1965, but the California Division of Highways withdrew from the project in 1966. However, the railroad proposal continued until 1970, after which it was quietly abandoned. In the early 1960s, the AEC worked to publicize the Plowshare program for peaceful use of atomic devices. The idea caught the attention of the railroad, whose route through the Bristol Mountains of Southern California was longer and more undulating than desired. The railroad was studying a tunnel that would address the problems but was unhappy with the project's cost. At the same time, the California Division of Highways was planning the route for I40 through the same area and was facing the same problems as the railroad. In 1963, the railroad approached the AEC for help and a joint project was initiated with the AEC and Division of Highways. The study then proposed an alignment serving both the railroad and the interstate highway in the same cut using railroad grading standards as a guide. The new location was about 10 miles north of the existing alignments of the railroad and US Route 66. The excavation was proposed to be 11,000ft long and at its maximum would be about 360ft deep. A series of 22 nuclear devices ranging from 20 to 200 kilotons. An explosive yield would create the excavation as well as a separate device to create a crater that would contain drainage from the Orange Blossom Wash which crossed the site. Detonations would take place in two groups of 11 simultaneously fired devices. Predicted consequences of the detonation included a dust cloud 7 miles wide extending up to 100 miles downwind that would require the immediate area to be closed for four days after the explosions. Occasional rock missiles were also expected up to about 4,000ft from the explosions. The nearest town was Amboy, which was not expected to be affected by the blast to any significant extent. A greater concern was the effect on a nearby natural gas pipeline for which testing would be required in advance of excavation blasts. After an initial period, the site was expected to be suitable for regular 40 hour work weeks with no special safeguards, with the stipulation that post shot surveys would be needed to locate and remediate any radiological hotspots. Projected combined costs for the railroad, tunnel and highways were $21.8 million, which were the equivalent of about $220 million in 2023. The nuclear method was projected at 13.8 million, a significant savings not including the costs of the nuclear devices. Big caveat there. Conventional excavation of the cut was estimated at $50 million and the cost of the nuclear devices was not quantified but assumed to be less than the difference between conventional and nuclear techniques. Of course it was assumed to be less. The actual cost though of the device was classified. Go figure. A 1967 proposal for a different project within Plowshare listed the costs of nuclear devices to be in 1967 about $390,000 for a 24 kiloton device or $460,000 for a 100 kiloton device. Project planning started in 1964, proposing site preparation in 1965 and detonations in followed by design work. Construction was to start in 68 and be completed in 69. In 1966, the nuclear proposal was abandoned for the highway cut since the highway program was moving faster than the AEC testing at the Nevada Test Site. The highway cut was made conventionally about a mile north of the proposed nuclear cut and the railroad project continued. In 1970 the railroad cut was mentioned as one of three proposed projects, but in subsequent years the project was no longer mentioned. The 67 mile Bristol Mountain section of I40 was completed and opened to traffic in April of 1973. So that is a real fun one. The United States was almost using atomic bombs, nuclear bombs to build i40, but instead they went with conventional drill and blast and shovels, which I think was a great idea, a really good idea. So that is a real brief explanation on peaceful nuclear explosions for civil engineering applications. Do not expect nuclear explosions to be used to build canals or be used for fracking or dig harbors or tunnels anytime soon. I think we're going to stick with traditional earthmoving for now, but you never know. There could be a resurgence in nuclear explosions for peaceful applications. Who knows? This was a fun one. If you have any other suggestions, feel free to write us dirttalkillwit.com we would love to hear from you. I love researching fun stuff like this. Somebody sent me an idea the other day. It's this giant Mississippi project I'm really excited to cover soon, but if you have any other ideas, feel free to send them my way. Even if we don't put them on the podcast. I love learning about this stuff. So with that, thank you for listening and we'll see you on the next one. Stay dirty everybody.