Plowshare Symposium, 1964: Engineering with Nuclear Explosives Page: 5
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perfected. Experiments are now being carried
out routinely and tests up to about 200 kilotons
have been sucessfully and safely fired.
The success of the RAINIER event and its
analysis led to further speculations as to engi-
neering uses of contained explosions. The general
range of ideas were first reported publicly at the
Atoms for Peace Conference in Geneva in the Fall
of 1958 and further expanded in an article which
appeared in the Scientific American of December
1958. The ideas discussed were earth-moving,
water storage underground and recharging of aq-
uifers, shattering oil shale and retorting in place,
recovery of oil fromthe Athabasca tar sands, re-
covery of geothermal heat, generation of power
from heat deposited in formations like salt or
limestone, isotope production, and recovery of
copper by in-situ leaching. Evaluations and mod-
ifications of these suggestions as well as the status
of the technical background were discussed in de-
tail during the Second Plowshare Symposium,
which was open to the public, and was held in San
Francisco, California, from May 13 to 15, 1959.
These were the ideas and the avenues of ap-
proach being studied when the nuclear weapons
test moratorium began on November 1, 1958. In
defining the United States position on the discus-
sions at Geneva, President Eisenhower proposed
that the Plowshare experiments be exempted from
any agreement to suspend the testing of nuclear
weapons. These experiments were to open to ob-
servation by invited representatives of other na-
tions and the results were to be fully disclosed
through the scientific press.
But such was not to be the case--the mora-
torium in fact precluded all nuclear tests until the
resumption of nuclear weapons testing in the Fall
of 1961, three years later. Thus, the advance of
Plowshare was delayed for that period of time; and
as a matter of fact, no nuclear experiment had
been conducted for Plowshare purposes prior to
the moratorium. During the moratorium period,
however, detailed studies of several projects were
carried out, most notablythe Trans isthmian canal
studies, and a substantial chemical explosives
cratering program was executed. The cratering
program established scaling laws and provided an
empirical basis for the design of nuclear experi-
ments, as well as development of a theory. De-
tailed plans were developed to conduct a major
excavation experiment in 1960 on the northwestcoast of Alaska. That experiment was succes-
sively delayed through the moratorium period and
now has been largely overtaken by events.
President Eisenhower did authorize construc-
tion of a site near Carlsbad, New Mexico, to con-
duct a deeply buried shot in a dry salt bed to ex-
plore the feasibility of isotope and power recovery
and to conduct nuclear experiments. This event,
GNOME, the first Plowshare experiment, was
carried out on December 10, 1961. Also, during
the following summer, on July 6, 1962, a large
nuclear cratering experiment at 100 kilotons was
conducted at the Nevada Test Site. A military
shot early in 1962 at 400 tons in basalt provided
the first nuclear cratering information in a hard
dry rock. Thus, the resumption of testing per-
mitted the extension of nuclear cratering informa-
tion into the region of practical interest in one
medium, and also to a new medium. The atmos-
pheric test ban treaty has again apparently fore-
closed, for the time being at least, the opportunity
to proceed vigorously with the nuclear cratering
program.
The resumption of underground and atmos-
pheric testing in 1961 did provide the opportunity
to make progress in the development of much
cleaner nuclear explosives, a need that was rec-
ognized from the inception of the Plowshare Pro-
gram to be a necessary step toward practical uti-
lization of the explosives for excavation. After
two years of work, by the end of 1963, it had be-
come clear that this program had made a success-
ful start--the projected fallout in excavation proj-
ects could be 100 times less than that forecast at
the close of testing in 1958. Of course, had the
nuclear test moratorium not intervened, this re-
sult would have been available to us much earlier.
The improvement of explosives--to make them
cleaner and cheaper and to assure their perform-
ance and reliability in production prototypes--is
an important goal of the present program, and
much of this can be accomplished under the pres-
ent treaty.
At the onset of the moratorium in 1958 expe-
rience with contained nuclear explosions had been
obtained only in tuff at the Nevada Test Site. Ex-
ploration and analyses of these tests provided con-
siderable insight into the effects of nuclear explo-
sions in this medium and did form the technical
basis for suggestions of possible applications of
underground explosions. Serious limitations in5
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Plowshare Symposium, 1964: Engineering with Nuclear Explosives, report, 1964?; Washington D.C.. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc784228/m1/15/?q=%22Chemistry%22: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.