On Sept. 10, 1969, six and a half miles south of Rulison, Colorado, a 40-kiloton nuclear bomb exploded in the subterranean depths of the Piceance Basin.
The device, more than twice as powerful as the weapon at Hiroshima and with muscle equivalent to 40,000 tons of TNT, was an unorthodox tool in a grand experiment to free natural gas and kickstart a boom. The nuclear age wanted to give the oil and gas age a hand up.
It’s fortunate that this never caught on.
Yeah, it’s better now that we use good safe nitroglycerine.
“It boggles the mind that people would believe in this stuff, but if you put yourself in the minds of the Plowshares people, this is progress, this is modernity, this can be done,”
Maybe i’m just cynical, but I always sort of thought this was something of a smokescreen for nuclear weapon development. I have a hard time seriously believing that they thought we’d really want to use nukes to mine rock or that we could dilute radioactive natural gas enough to burn it in our homes. I always felt it was a politically convenient way to funnel even more money into nuke development.