Word: kiloton
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...forces to defeat the combined Arab forces. But if Israel should find itself facing extinction, it is widely assumed that it possesses nuclear weapons, which its leaders might risk the wrath of world opinion by employing. Israel is thought to have an arsenal of low-yield bombs in the kiloton range that can be delivered by specially adapted Israeli air force planes...
Project Rio Blanco, as the May blast is called, is actually the third in a series of "nuclear wells." It follows the 1967 Project Gasbuggy, a 26-kiloton explosion in New Mexico, and the 40-kiloton Project Rulison in Colorado in 1969. The AEC has claimed that both of these previous tests were successful, since they proved the feasibility of nuclear drilling...
...refine the technique of nuclear drilling. As for radioactivity levels in the gas, the AEC says that improvements in bomb design will minimize the problem in future blasts. Those improvements would presumably be incorporated into both the Rio Blanco devices and Project Wagon Wheel, a five-bomb, 500-kiloton underground explosion scheduled...
...same blast served as a restraining dam. Soviet oilmen triggered another nuclear blast to revive the oil flow from a field previously believed to have run dry. Most surprising to Seaborg was a Russian technique of subduing runaway oil-and gasfield fires by atomic explosions. On two occasions 30-kiloton bombs deep beneath the surface succeeded in sealing fissures that fed the flames by carrying natural gas to the surface...