They also wanted to use nukes to blast a canal through Central America, as an alternative to the Panama Canal.[2]
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare#cite_note-...
[2] - https://www.historynet.com/an-explosive-plan-to-use-atoms-fo...
edit: linkage https://www.amusingplanet.com/2018/09/how-soviets-put-out-oi...
All these technologies have their limitations and it took some careful failures to realize and move to alternatives or tested traditional methods.
Hey you gotta brag your wares. It ain't bragging if it's true.
And it's a really great way to dig, it's not blasting, it's boiling the rock, so the oxygen goes into the atmosphere, you crack it for a huge radius, it's a really good application of nuclear explosives. Explosives always had a dual use, war and mining, clearing rock.
The Soviets actually got beyond the "talking about it" stage on such a project, and tested nuclear explosives to build a canal. AIUI it did not in practice work very well, and was abandoned.
Like you know the guy who took the biggest direct risk with the Chernobyl regulus is still alive? Doesn't even have cancer.
EDIT: nobody talks about the metallurgy of plutonium in all of this, huge thing. People think nuclear bombs don't have any specific personality, just uniform atoms, when Pu has the most complex metallurgy.
"the AEC established Project Plowshare amid growing public and political opposition to nuclear programs. Nuclear tests routinely produced unacceptably high levels of fallout, and the subsequent appearance in drinking water, milk, meat, and produce of strontium-90, cesium-137, and other cancer-causing radioactive elements had generated a movement demanding a worldwide ban on airborne nuclear tests."
But "the AEC believed the region [in Alaska where the harbor would be created with nukes] to be an uninhabited Arctic wasteland."
"Environmental scientists, as well as many Alaskan locals, were not sold. They doubted AEC estimates that a bomb crater harbor would be handling $176 million in annual exports within 25 years. Cape Thompson adjoined large deposits of coal and oil, but it also was iced in nine months out of every 12."
"And the cape was only 30 miles south of Point Hope, an Inuit village whose residents subsisted on the region’s abundant wildlife. Irked by critics, Teller vented to economist George Rogers, "We are not interested in preserving the Eskimo as a hunter. We are interested in giving him the opportunity of becoming a coal miner.""[1]
[1] - https://www.historynet.com/an-explosive-plan-to-use-atoms-fo...
Wow and they say old times were better lol
They were so careless with nature and people
The premise that a big infrastructure project will create a bunch of economic opportunity in the local area and people will be better off for it is not a controversial one.
It certainly is controversial.
Some look at this process as economic opportunity, others as indentured servitude and exploitation.
There's been a long and sad history of such developments leaving the areas where it happens a polluted, barren carcass.
The thing is that fallout is something that can be controlled(to an extent). You can make a nuke that produces a lot of it, or a nuke that produces hardly any. Also(understandably) you don't get any fallout for underground explosions - we've used nukes for closing oil wells for instance, with zero environmental contamination outside of the initial blast zone.
That's not me saying that this is a good idea of course. But it's not like fallout wasn't planned for.
Castle Bravo was in 1954. He began to push for for Plowshare in the late 50s. Here he is in 1965 advocating for it.[2]
Read "The Firecracker Boys" if you are interested in a lot more detail.[3]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo#High_levels_of_fa...
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oa-IqOHDr_k
[3] - https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Firecracker_Boys.ht...