Fracking – 1967 Style

In 1967, I remember my school in Los Alamos shaking. Our teacher then calmly told us that it was just a nuclear bomb which had been detonated 80 miles away – to stimulate natural gas production.

ScreenHunter_218 May. 05 17.21

Project Gasbuggy Seeks A Wider Source of Fuel – A-BLAST IN EARTH PLANNED FOR GAS – View Article – NYTimes.com

About Tony Heller

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8 Responses to Fracking – 1967 Style

  1. Pathway says:

    I have been to the Rulison site but there is nothing to see but an overgrown drill pad. A friend of mine has the downstream property and they have never detected any radioactive seepage. It appears that the walls of the blast hole were turned into glass, so rather the fracking they actually sealed the space.

  2. Pathway says:

    Here is a link to info on Rulison. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rulison

  3. KevinK says:

    So, exactly how much useful, dependable (i.e. I can have it when I want it) energy has the US Government produced with all these follies (Gasbuggy, Syn-Fuels, Solyndra, etc, etc…) ??? A couple thousand BTU’s a month, maybe.

    And the whole time those evil fossil fuel companies just keep cranking it out !!!

    When you need energy; Who are you going to call, The government ?

    Cheers, Kevin.

  4. Bob Knows says:

    There is a small marker a short way off the road that runs between Carlsbad, NM and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. The nuclear weapon use for fracking worked, but the gas produced was radioactive.

  5. geologyjim says:

    These were among several underground nuclear tests of the Plowshare Program – – as in “turn our swords into plowshares” – – to investigate the peaceful uses of nuclear devices. The natural gas stimulation experiments didn’t produce enough useful fracture networks, but did succeed in producing too much tritiated water.

    The Sedan Crater in northern Yucca Flat at the Nevada Test Site was created by a shallow nuclear detonation to evaluate their use for big engineering projects – – like a Pacific-Caribbean canal through Nicaragua. I remember seeing a black-and-white slow-motion film of the Sedan explosion in physics class way back when (you can find it on YouTube). Watching unconsolidated alluvium blister like an adolescent pimple and then split open and gush incandescent rock debris was amazing. The upper layers of alluvium actually flipped over and landed intact, upside-down next to the crater.

    Material behaves in unexpected ways at those strain rates.

  6. SMS says:

    Both the Rio Blanco and Rulison nuclear detonations were used to try and release the tight gas trapped in the Williams Fork formation. Both detonations released energy at an instantaneous rate nearly infinite to what is produced in a conventional water frac. No radioactivity was released from either the Rio Blanco or Rulison explosions. But the nutters are convinced that conventional fracing is destroying the Earth. Most people don’t realize that when a woman puts on make-up (one time) in the morning, she has exposed herself to more carcinogens than she will be exposed to, in her lifetime, through fracing.

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