Project Gasbuggy Atomic Explosion Site, Dulce, New Mexico - Nuclear Fracking




By the late 1960s the U.S. government was eager to find some use for its stockpile of unexploded nuclear bombs. Its friends in the oil industry had an answer: blow them up underground to release natural gas! They said it would be a lot faster and cheaper than old-fashioned drilling.

On December 10, 1967, that's what the U.S. government did. A 29-kiloton bomb was exploded almost a mile underground here, which knocked observers off of their feet over two miles away. Unfortunately -- and you knew this was coming -- the gas that was released was too radioactive to ever be used, and the ground was so contaminated that it had to be hauled away, or most of it, anyway. Today, ground zero is marked by a plaque on a small concrete block in the middle of an otherwise peaceful field, and visitors are warned not to dig anywhere. https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story...

Gasbuggy was carried out by the Lawrence Livermore Radiation Laboratory and the El Paso Natural Gas Company, with funding from the Atomic Energy Commission. Its purpose was to determine if nuclear explosions could be useful in fracturing rock formations for natural gas extraction.  The site, lying in the Carson National Forest, is approximately 21 miles (34 km) southwest of Dulce, New Mexico and 54 miles (87 km) east of Farmington, and was chosen because natural gas deposits were known to be held in sandstone beneath Leandro Canyon.  A 29 kilotons of TNT (120 TJ) device was placed at a depth of 4,227 feet (1,288 m) underground, then the well was backfilled before the device was detonated; a crowd had gathered to watch the detonation from atop a nearby butte.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project...