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Russia did not use nuclear explosions to fix oil leaks

all these Soviet nuclear blasts  were on land and did not involve oil. Eventually, both superpowers gave up trying to use nukes for peaceful purposes, and one of the reasons was the environmental hazards.

Just Because Someone Else Did It, Doesn’t Mean It’ll Work As the New York Times pointed out, the whole idea came from something the Russians tried back in the 1960s to stop a natural gas fire. Historian and nuclear non-proliferation expert David E. Hoffman tears down the idea that “if it worked for them it’ll work for us”: But didn’t the Soviet Union once use nukes for this? Not exactly.

Both the United States and the Soviet Union did have a programs of using nuclear blasts for peace time purposes. In the Soviet case, it was primarily excavation. All told,the Soviet Union carried out 715 nuclear tests, of which 156 were labeled as”for peaceful purposes.” (The U.S. total tests were 1,030 with 35 for Plowshare, the overall name for the program to use nukes for peaceful purposes.

According to a study published by the Russians in 1996, the first time they used a nuke to close a “gas plume bore hole” was the 30-kiloton explosion on September 30, 1966 in Uzbekistan.Several additional blasts were used for excavation. On September 26, 1969, they set off a 10 kiloton nuke in the Stavropol region for “oil recovery intensification.”

And in 1970, there was another blast in the Orenburg region for creating “reservoirs” for storage of natural gas. As nuclear historian Robert S. Norris notes in the Times, all these Soviet nuclear blasts were on land and did not involve oil. Eventually, both superpowers gave up trying to use nukes for peaceful purposes, and one of the reasons was the environmental hazards.

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June 7, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Russia, safety | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear costs, nuclear secrecy, nuclear spin, nuclear weapons