On January 15, 1965, an unusual thermonuclear bomb test took place at the Semipalatinsk test site. It was blown up not for the military, but for economic needs - to create a reservoir in an arid area. This was the first of more than 120 industrial nuclear explosions carried out in the USSR. As the deadliest weapon in the world, it can be used for peaceful purposes.
In the 1950s and 1960s, great expectations were placed on the energy contained in atoms. It was already known that radiation is actually dangerous, but this was not given much importance. In those days, mushroom clouds, rising to a height of several kilometers in the vicinity of Las Vegas, served as bait for tourists.
It was in the United States that the first industrial nuclear explosions were made (more on this below), but the Americans quickly curtailed their program, and in the USSR they used nuclear weapons in the interests of the national economy, even after the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The hydrogen bombs used for this were considered relatively "clean" from radiation and were much more convenient than conventional chemical explosives.
Explosion power is measured in TNT equivalent. For example, on a test on January 15, 1965, it was 140 kt, that is, instead of a thermonuclear bomb, 140 thousand tons of TNT would be needed. If you spread all this explosives on a football field, you get a uniform layer almost 12 m high. It needs to be produced, transported to the site, laid and carefully detonated. A thermonuclear bomb is much more complex, but it was about the size of two barrels, so it was cheaper to manufacture and fill.
The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1996 put an end to peaceful explosions, but half a century ago, such weapons were used in a variety of ways: geological exploration, the creation of underground gas and toxic waste storage facilities, the development of oil and gas fields, crushing of ore and something else.
Extinguishing fires
Putting out a fire with an incinerating explosion is, at first glance, a paradoxical idea, but sometimes it is really possible to cope with a fire only with the help of a nuclear bomb. This was the case at the Urta-Bulak gas field in southern Uzbekistan. At the end of 1963, drillers pierced the reservoir - a powerful flow of gas squeezed equipment weighing several tons to the surface, and a fire began.
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Every day, 12 million cubic meters of gas were burned in Urta-Bulak - in 2018 this would amount to more than 2% of Gazprom Export's daily supplies to Europe. They tried to put out the fire in the well in different ways: they drilled bypass shafts, fired at them from cannons, but nothing worked. In the third year, geologists came up with a radical solution - to detonate a nuclear bomb deep underground in order to dislodge the rock layers and block the blazing well.
At a distance from the fire, they dug an inclined adit with a depth of one and a half kilometers. A nuclear device with a capacity of 30 kt was lowered inside in a special design that can withstand enormous pressure and temperature. On the morning of September 30, 1966, the bomb went off. The earth was shaken by a shock wave, and then not even a minute passed as the fire went out. When the soil cooled down a little, the well was poured with concrete to be sure.
After Urta-Bulak, fires in Soviet fields were extinguished with nuclear bombs three more times: two were successful, one was not.
The turning of the rivers
Nuclear weapons were used in the construction of the Pechora-Kolvinsky Canal in the north of the Perm Territory. This canal was designed to send water across the Volga into the shallow Caspian. For the experiment, in the spring of 1971, in a sparsely populated swampy area, boreholes 127 m deep were dug next to each other. Three charges of 15 kt each were inserted into them (slightly less than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima) and simultaneously they were detonated.
At the site of the explosion, a pit 700 by 340 m and a depth of 10–15 m was formed, which was gradually filled with water. The resulting lake was named Nuclear. In some places along the shores of the lake, the radiation level is still elevated. Four more wells are visible nearby, which have not been used. A year after the Ural experiment, a cleaner bomb was tested near Semipalatinsk, but the construction of the canal was nevertheless curtailed in order to strictly comply with the 1963 nuclear test ban treaty. This agreement left the possibility for underground tests, if radioactive substances that could settle on the territory of another state were not released into the atmosphere. In the Urals, radioactive isotopes came to the surface.
Construction of the second Panama Canal
The United States had a program of peaceful nuclear explosions similar to the Soviet one. It was called "Plowshare", like the tip of a plow, referring to the expression from the Bible "Forge swords into plowshares." The first explosion took place in 1961 in New Mexico. Scientists wanted to find out four things: whether the released energy can be used to generate electricity, and the neutron flux - for physical experiments, whether it will be possible to extract rare isotopes of chemical elements and what will happen to the rocks.
Later, the main goals of the Lemekh program changed. As in the Soviet Union, they were going to extract and store minerals with the help of nuclear bombs, but most importantly, they saw weapons as a cheap replacement for excavators. With powerful explosions, the Americans wanted to cut a road through the mountains in California, create an artificial bay in Alaska, and the most ambitious project was the construction of a backup to the Panama Canal, where there would no longer be need for shipping locks to slow traffic.
American engineers surveyed several dozen locations in Nicaragua, Panama and Colombia. Depending on the location, the length of the canal would be 80-200 km. To cut through it, tens or even hundreds of thermonuclear bombs with a yield of more than a megaton were required. The development of the project took several years. During this time, people developed a fear of radiation, in 1968 the United States signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and in 1973 the last explosion was carried out as part of the Lemekh program. The second Panama Canal was never dug, but the old one was expanded over time.
Eliminating hurricanes
When the Plowshare program was first discussed in the late 1950s, meteorologist Jack Reid proposed another use for nuclear weapons - hurricane control. His plan was for the submarine to swim to the center of the air funnel and launch one or more thermonuclear missiles. The explosions were supposed to lift relatively warm air into the stratosphere, and in its place would rush cold, denser air masses. Because of this, the wind speed would drop, and the bad weather would subside, albeit not completely.
Unfortunately, this plan is no good. The point is not even that a strong wind will carry radioactive particles thousands of kilometers - it's just that even the most powerful weapon is powerless against the elements. To balance the energy of a hurricane, you need to detonate 10 megaton bombs every 20 minutes. Tropical cyclones can be bombed even before they turn into hurricanes, but, firstly, their strength is great even at an early stage, and secondly, only 6% of cyclones become hurricanes. In a word, even if nuclear explosions were not banned, they would not have saved from bad weather.
Saving the Earth from asteroids
On September 25, 2135, the half-kilometer asteroid Bennu will fly close to the Earth at a distance closer than the orbit of the Moon. The likelihood that Bennu will collide with our planet is 1 in 2700. For comparison: before the start of the 2015/16 England football championship, the chances of winning the champion Leicester were estimated almost half as low.
If the asteroid does fall, the energy from the impact will exceed a billion tons in TNT equivalent - 44 times more powerful than the earthquake near Sumatra in 2004, when the tsunami covered Somalia on the opposite shore of the Indian Ocean. Bennu will not destroy the Earth, but it will not seem enough to anyone. In addition, there are other dangerous asteroids in the solar system.
To ward off the threat, in 2018 engineers from NASA, Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories developed the concept of the HAMMER spacecraft, a modular probe weighing almost nine tons, which, according to the idea, either simply crashes into an asteroid or delivers a nuclear charge to it to deflect trajectory. Unlike the movie "Armageddon", if something happens, a bomb will detonate at a distance from a celestial body: a stream of X-rays will evaporate part of the asteroid on one side and turn it into a kind of rocket.
Almost simultaneously with the Americans, Russian researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and Rosatom calculated what charge is needed to detonate a 200-meter stone asteroid. To do this, they took a pebble of the same chemical composition, half a centimeter in size and directed a laser at it. It turned out that the asteroid would fall to pieces from an explosion with a power of 3 Mt - almost 200 times more than during the bombing of Hiroshima. Bennu is two and a half times larger, but much less dense, so in case of danger, you will not have to collect a new king-bomb to destroy it.
But, perhaps, in case of danger, it will not be necessary to blow it up at all. Engineer Michael Moreau of the NASA team that launched the probe to Benn believes that it will be enough to repaint the asteroid on one side - then the solar wind will move it from its current orbit.
Colonization of Mars
Of all the places in the solar system, Mars is probably the best for colonization. The flight there is relatively short - about six months one way. It's cold on the Red Planet, but on average not colder than in Antarctica in winter. The atmosphere is very thin, so water boils at temperatures lower than the temperature of the human body. One cannot do without a spacesuit on Mars.
How to fix this was suggested by visionary and entrepreneur Elon Musk. In his opinion, you just need to detonate thermonuclear bombs over the planet's poles. This should be done every few seconds so that small "stars" twinkle above the surface. The released heat will warm the atmosphere, melt the caps of dry ice, and carbon dioxide will cause a greenhouse effect - the planet will warm up even more. And then you can change into flip-flops.
The problem is that nothing will come of it. Most of the ice on Mars is water, not dry ice. It takes a lot more energy to melt it. But even if this succeeds, the steam will quickly cool down and snow will fall out. And the frozen carbon dioxide is not enough even to double the density of the atmosphere. For comparison: Earth's air is 150 times denser. And most importantly - drop at least all thermonuclear bombs in the world, the dry ice deposits will not melt to the end: more energy is needed. And bombs still need to be brought from Earth (and for this to lift the ban on nuclear weapons in space). In a word, Mars will have to settle down somehow differently.
Marat Kuzaev