A co-worker told me about this thing called Project Gasbuggy. You can search for information about it online pretty easily, but if you're too lazy to do that, I'll give you the gist of it. If you don't trust Google results, check out the last page of this .pdf from Sandia. Back in the 1960's, the government tried to find peacetime uses for nuclear weapons. After all, we had a lot of them and really weren't finding a lot of uses beyond turning them into interesting centerpieces. One of the ideas that they came up with was to try fracturing a gas well with a nuclear device. Thus, in 1967 they detonated a nuclear explosive 4227 feet down in a well about 55 miles east of Farmington. Suffice to say, you may be able to guess the success of this experiment based on how often you hear about that practice being used today. (Hint: not at all.) The fracturing achieved was not as much as had been hoped, plus the high cost of a nuclear explosive made the project economically unviable. One the problems and I'm sure there were many to choose from, is that the heat of the explosion turned much of the sandstone into glass rendering the formation far less permeable than desired. If you ever want to go there, there's a plaque that sits by the site to commemorate some excellent outside-the-box thinking that was unfortunately implemented.
Now that September is ending, does this portend to end of radio playtime for the Green Day song Wake Me Up When September Ends?
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