A Blank for Blanco

The project is part of the Atomic Energy Commission's Plowshare program and seemed like a promising peaceful use of nuclear energy. It calls for exploding small atomic bombs deep beneath the earth's surface to release trillions of cubic feet of natural gas trapped in subterranean rock formations. Now, after the latest in a series of test explosions in New Mexico and Colorado, AEC officials may be forced to acknowledge what some scientists predicted from the start: nuclear blasting for gas is neither economical nor practical.

Last May, in an operation named Project Rio Blanco, the AEC exploded three 30-kiloton devices that had been placed about 450 ft. apart in a vertical tube more than a mile underground near the hamlet of Meeker in western Colorado. The goal was to crack the surrounding sandstone and create a huge cavern into which the escaping gas could seep. But when the AEC and its private-industry collaborator. CER Geonuclear Corp. of Las Vegas, began test drilling at the site after the explosions, they made an embarrassing discovery. The blasts had apparently created three separate gas-filled caverns instead of one. Thus the amount of gas that flowed through the hole drilled into the uppermost cavern was disappointingly small.

Rio Blanco sponsors say that they are willing to spend another $1.5 million for additional drilling to recover gas from the lower cavities. But even if they can, the future of nuclear blasting for natural gas looks quite bleak. The program is already under attack from environmentalists who fear that the atomic explosions may damage buildings on the surface, trigger earthquakes and leave behind dangerous radiation. The General Accounting Office recently noted that nuclear recovery of gas could be costlier than its proponents originally thought; the cracks created in the sandstone by the A-bombs may close faster than the AEC'S experts had predicted, limiting the amount of gas that could escape. In addition, the GAO touched on a subject worrying many oil companies. The natural gas deposits lie under much of the nation's reserves of shale, from which the companies hope some day to extract large quantities of oil. But the shale could become radioactive or otherwise damaged by the blasting, making it dangerous to mine.

Undaunted, the AEC has gone so far as to propose the use of nuclear explosions to get at the shale. Commission experts say that it would take some 50,000 separate nuclear explosions to help free the oil from the rock. Yet even the AEC's nuclear diehards may be having second thoughts about nuclear blasting. Last month the commission announced that it will help foot the bill for testing an alternate, nonnuclear gas recovery scheme called hydraulic fracturing. Employing high-pressure fluids rather than explosions to crack the gas-bearing sandstone, the test will take place only about a mile from the site of the multikiloton Rio Blanco fiasco.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.