Oil and gas fracking is big business in America, with more than two million hydraulically fractured wells across the country producing 43 and 67 percent of our national oil and gas outputs, respectively. These wells also nearly played a secondary role as nuclear waste storage sites, had the Atomic Energy Commission had its way with Project Plowshare.
Hydraulic fracturing (or "fracking") is the process of pumping water deep into the Earth, specifically into underground oil and gas reserves, at tremendous pressures in order to break apart the surrounding rock and free the energy product, which can then be pumped out and used.
Cities popping up in the middle of nowhere. Blackened landscapes of industrial runoff, including…
However in the mid 1950s, scientists from the Atomic Energy Commission and officials from the U.S. Bureau of Mines began experimenting with an alternative method of fracking, one that employed nuclear bombs more powerful than anything we dropped on the Japanese.
Dubbed Project Plowshare, this insane undertaking explored two industrialized—or "peaceful"—applications for nuclear explosives:
Conceptually, industrial applications resulting from the use of nuclear explosives could be divided into two broad categories: 1) large-scale excavation and quarrying, where the energy from the explosion was used to break up and/or move rock; and 2) underground engineering, where the energy released from deeply buried nuclear explosives increased the permeability and porosity of the rock by massive breaking and fracturing.
In 1967, the AEC teamed up with the U.S. Bureau of Mines and El Paso Natural Gas Company for what would be the first of a series of underground experiments. In a remote gas well outside of Farmington, New Mexico, researchers lowered the 29-kiloton "Gasbuggy" nuclear device 4,000 feet into the Earth and set it off. The results were spectacular.
"The 4,042-foot-deep detonation created a molten glass-lined cavern about 160 feet in diameter and 333 feet tall," according to the American Oil and Gas Historical Society. "It collapsed within seconds. Subsequent measurements indicated fractures extended more than 200 feet in all directions—and significantly increased natural gas production."
This initial success led to numerous additional tests in the following years—27 experiments and 35 nuclear explosions in total. While most of the experiments were small, above-ground explosions were detonated in Nevada with the goal of forming craters and canals. Indeed, two additional underground tests in '69 and '73 proved even more massive than Gasbuggy.
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https://gizmodo.com/the-u-s-government-once-fracked-oil-wells-using-nuclea-1511758335www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GJwjxWUnRk
