Peaceful Gnome

Fallout from the latest and largest Soviet nuclear test was still drifting toward the U.S. last week when President Kennedy gave the go-ahead signal for Project Gnome, the Atomic Energy Commission's long-planned underground experiment in the peaceful applications of nuclear energy. Southeast of Carlsbad, N.Mex., a shaft has already been sunk 1,200 ft. in the ground to penetrate a thick formation of rock salt. From the shaft's bottom, a 1,116-ft. horizontal tunnel leads into the salt and curves back on itself in a giant hook. At the tip of the hook a small (5-kiloton) bomb will be exploded in December. If all goes well, the explosion will seal the horizontal tunnel by collapsing the hooked end, and it will leave a cavity partly filled with molten salt.

The hot (1400DEG F.) liquid salt, the AEC hopes, will prove an energy reservoir from which power can be extracted, probably by injecting water into the cavity and taking it out as high-pressure steam, capable of running a turbine. No one expects that the first small explosion (cost: $5,500,000) will yield power cheap enough to be economically competitive. Even if all the energy in the 5-kiloton Domb were recovered as electric power, it would cost nearly $1 per kwh. Conventional coal-fired power stations produce electricity for less than 1/2-c- per kwh.

But big nuclear bombs, even up to 100-megaton size, cost little more than small ones. By successive experiments the AEC lopes to learn how to store the energy of large explosions in salt or rock. If a multimegaton explosion can be safely confined underground, the power it produces may be cheap enough to compete with electricity from conventional sources.

Other goals of Project Gnome:

> To gain experience with nuclear explosives as blasting agents for digging har->ors, canals, or passes through mountains.

> To experiment with large-scale production of artificial isotopes. Isotopes that do lot exist in nature are generally made by bombarding natural elements with neurons in a reactor. A nuclear explosion underground will supply a vast number of neutrons for this purpose.

>To test the oilman's dream of using nuclear heat and shock to bring inaccessible oil deposits to the surface.

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