First came history. On September 10, 1969, about 18 miles SW of Silt on Doghead Mountain (near Rulison), a 43-kiloton underground nuclear bomb was detonated at the bottom of an 8,426-foot deep shaft to experiment with the possibility of using nuclear explosions to extract natural gas from low grade deposits. The test, a Plowshare Program experiment named Project Rulison, was conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission (now Dept of Energy), and CER Geonuclear and the Austral Oil Company. The blast did cause the gas to collect in the cavity and fissures produced by the bomb, however the gas was too radioactive to be sold commercially. According to the Dept. of Energy (DOE), 455 million cubic feet of gas was burned and no radioactivity was found above background levels.
Chester Mcqueary was there. He described his experience in a 1994 essay. He concludes that it’s a good thing their experiment failed. If they had succeeded, it’s hard to imagine what a barren wasteland this valley would be today.
He felt the earth move when scientists nuked western Colorado
by Chester McquearyTwenty-five years ago Americans walked on the moon for the first time, and a federal agency set off an atomic bomb 8,426 feet underground in rural western Colorado.
I was there at 3 p.m. on Sept. 10, 1969, a stowaway on the surface, you might say, when our government detonated the 43-kiloton bomb. It released 2.6 times the destructive power of the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima, Japan …
Fast forward 35 years to February 2004. Presco – a Texas gas operator – applied for permits and began drilling six wells in the area of the Project Rulison blast. According to Presco’s VP of Exploration and Production Kim Bennetts, the closest well is about a half mile from the blast site. Three of the wells are producing gas. “We monitor the gas from every well, and we’ve never found any radioactivity,” he said. Presco has 6 more drilling permits ready for approval with plans for 12 more wells.
Now it’s 2006, and a second company, Apollo Energy of Denver has requested permission for 10-acre down hole spacing for 12 directional wells off two pads on a 220-acre parcel near the Project Rulison blast site. Colorado Oil and Gas Commissioner Brian Macke said the closest well will be about a mile and a half way from the blast site. The DOE bans all drilling below 6,500 feet on a 40-acre parcel and requires notification of any surface activity within a 3-mile radius of the blast site. Nonetheless, Apollo’s request was approved on April 24.
The DOE is currently conducting a subsurface study of the blast site which is expected to be complete in 2008. According to Project Manager Peter Sanders the force of the nuclear detonation vaporized rock and created a glass-lined blast chamber that still has low levels of radioactivity.
However Presco’s paid geologist Brian Richter has conducted his own study of the data and research, meaning he hasn’t actually conducted any on site testing on his own. Richter concluded: “There’s nothing to be alarmed or concerned about. We truly believe drilling can be done safely, and I feel the data supports this. We feel it’s extremely unlikely that any well fracturing will reach the chamber. Even if it does, we don’t think there’s any gas left to worry about.”
Perhaps. But that’s not what folks are worried about. It’s that word – RADIOACTIVE – that makes people’s skin crawl. Even if fracturing (aka fracing — pronounced fraking) does reach the chamber, the DOE subsurface study has already determined the chamber is radioactive. Fracing uses water pressure to release the gas. That wastewater is hauled away to who-knows-where. Nonetheless through accidents, spills and dumping, thousands – maybe even millions – of gallons of wastewater have already made their way into the Colorado River, our water supply. And then there’s that whole pesky issue of air quality. But hey, what tangible harm can come from teeny tiny radioactive particles in the wind anyway? Shh. No one will even notice.
Last year this article was published in High Country News:
Drilling Could Wake a Sleeping Giant
by Jennie LayIn Colorado, a gas company edges in on a radioactive blast site
DOGHEAD MOUNTAIN, Colorado — Cary Weldon bought a 26-acre spread in rural Garfield County, Colo., in 1976. It was his own slice of rugged Western paradise, in a landscape he had come to love during annual hunting trips. Weldon’s secluded spot on Doghead Mountain is on a wooded rise above Battlement Creek, reached by a dirt road that climbs through thick stands of aspen and pine en route to the White River National Forest. These days, Weldon spends five blissful months each summer at his stately log home, high above the bustle of Parachute and Battlement Mesa, small towns that have ridden the roller-coaster of oil and gas booms and busts over the decades.
Like most Western landowners, Weldon has a deed to his property, but he doesn’t own the rights to the minerals underneath it. Energy companies lease the subsurface mineral rights from the person or agency that owns them — often the federal Bureau of Land Management. A landowner has little say in whether or not drill rigs roll onto the property, aside from often hard-fought agreements to contain surface destruction. But Weldon’s land is different: His ranch sits atop the site where, in 1969, scientists with the Atomic Energy Commission detonated a 40-kiloton underground nuclear explosion.
The blast was part of Project Plowshare, an attempt by the Atomic Energy Commission (now the Department of Energy) to find peaceful industrial applications for nuclear explosion technology. This particular experiment, known as Project Rulison, was designed to release natural gas from the tight sandstone of the Williams Fork geologic formation. Crews drilled a well 8,426 feet into the earth, used a cable to lower the long, skinny, uranium-filled fission bomb into the bottom of the well, and detonated it. Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and optimistic mastermind behind Project Plowshare, was on hand for the excitement.
The experiment was only a partial success. According to one gas industry executive, it yielded “an economic quantity of gas — if you didn’t have to buy a nuclear device to (get it out of the ground).” But the gas was too radioactive to sell.
Weldon knew about the land’s history when he bought the property from longtime Grand Valley rancher Lee Hayward. A commemorative plaque marks the well cap, which sits like a gravestone in the front yard. But Project Rulison had a silver lining: The blast had made the property a guaranteed refuge from oil and gas development. The Energy Department had banned drilling on the 40 acres immediately around the site, including all of Weldon’s property. Later, it had created a three-mile buffer around those 40 acres; the state was supposed to notify department officials of any drilling proposed within the buffer.
Weldon says he wasn’t concerned about lingering radioactivity, because the blast had taken place so far underground and the well had been filled with concrete. Government records indicate that the site has slept soundly since the well was plugged in 1976.
“(Hayward) thought the government ruined (the place), but I thought they made it,” Weldon says.
Now, however, Weldon voices growing anxiety as drilling edges ever closer to the nuclear blast site and his property. Garfield County, home to a big chunk of the sprawling, gas-rich Piceance Basin, is second only to La Plata County in terms of gas production in Colorado. In 2004, companies extracted 165 billion cubic feet of gas from Garfield County, enough to supply nearly 200,000 American homes for a year.
In February 2004, Presco Inc., a Texas-based energy company, announced its plans to drill for natural gas in the area surrounding the blast site, and began applying for state permits. The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission has already granted some permits, and if all goes as planned, the company will drill at least 65 wells in the area, some as close as a half-mile from ground zero. Presco plans to use a technique called hydraulic fracturing to shatter the sandstone and free the natural gas inside its wells.
Both the gas company and state regulators say the drilling will be safe. But Garfield County residents have recently discovered gas seeping into local water supplies, and a company active in the area has found that its drilling techniques are not as accurate as it once thought. Some local residents are asking whether drilling so close to Project Rulison could unleash the radioactivity inside Doghead Mountain.
“Are they going to turn loose something deep down in the ground there that’s been asleep for a long, long time?” wonders Weldon …
Is it time to panic yet? As I mentioned in my April 26 post, we saw a white Halliburton panel truck with the word RADIOACTIVE in red letters on the side. We’ve never seen anything like that before. I don’t know what that means. When people do ask questions all they get is the gas company sales pitch or the gas company is protected by state laws or silence. Representatives of the gas companies say: “Trust us. Safety is important to us. We would never do anything to endanger our workers or the local people and environment.” Unfortunately there’s no evidence that we CAN trust them. Time and again they take actions that display breathtaking indifference to their workers and local people and the environment. Actions speak louder than words.
No, I don’t think it’s panic that sets in under these circumstances. It’s more like RED ALERT. While we’re getting screwed at the gas pump and Congress and the environmentalists’ attention is diverted to ANWR, it’s open season on the Rockies. The gas companies are raping and polluting our wilderness.
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Categories: Colorado, drill rigs, Garfield County, gas wells, nuclear test, Project Rulison, radioactive
From the Styx 
Humans have never learned, the will never listen. Future humans will be deer caught in the headlights when the past hits them square in the face with the reprecussions of stupid greed. Would it have been that much more difficult to figure out a green power source than make planet earth glow like an “Eat at Joe’s” neon in outer space?
This is absolutely the rape of the most beautiful side of the Western Slope of Colorado. The precious people of Battlement Mesa and Parachute need to rise up and defeat this “in cahoots” government. They have greased each others’ palms and done enough. I pray the children of the gas companies, the DOE, and the COGCC don’t have to suffer as those of us concerned about what is to come.
The people have risen up but defeating these energy companies will never happen. There’s too much money involved. In November 2006, Colorado went democratic. Democratic Governor Bill Ritter and Democratic Majority in the State Legislature. Now that they’re looking at overhauling the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to make it more balanced and not just controlled by the energy companies, we’re paying $3.00/gal for gas. They find ways to punish us all.
Peggy