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Comment by gbronner | Hacker News Reader

I've met him and his other daughter. They are/were wonderful people.

There were a lot of "solutions" using nuclear weapons looking for a problem. There was a proposal to blow a new canal through nicaragua, to blast harbors into Alaska, etc. My roommate's father showed me his paper that anticipated fracking: drill a deep well in oil shale, through a small nuclear weapon in the bottom, blow it up and watch as the pressure and heat extract the oil and have it flow through the fractured rock back to your oil well.

He almost got to test it.

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Nuclear fracking was tested as part of the larger series of tests called Operation Plowshare. You can read about the first gas extraction test here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gasbuggy

If I remember correctly, the tests worked, in that they produced a large amount of gas from tight rock formations. However the gas was mildly radioactive and it was thought that it would not be marketable.

In a similar vein there’s a story and YouTube video of Russians plugging an out of control burning oil well with a small nuke.

Edit. It was a gas well here’s the link https://youtu.be/S57Xq03njsc

RIP Freeman Dyson. Apologies for drifting from main thread, fell for the oldest trick in the HN book.

Successfully. I wonder if that trick will ever be needed again in the future. It sounds like they had a special situation with a thick layer of permeable rock on the surface preventing them from capping it.

Minor point concerning "anticipated fracking" - hydraulic fracking dates from no later than the late 1940s, as you can see from this 1949 paper: https://www.onepetro.org/journal-paper/SPE-949001-G .

"THE ATOM UNDERGROUND" is an educational video, available from https://archive.org/details/32212AtomUnderground (undated; likely late 1960s). It includes some video from the 1967 test of Project Gasbuggy that matthewmcg mentions.

Total was floating the idea of doing just this in Alberta a recently as the past decade. The science really seems to work but the idea of a small nuclear explosion in your backyard (on purpose is a hard sell (even for the relatively open-to-nuclear French!)

> I've met him and his other daughter.

This seems somewhat impolite. If you've met her one would presume you would remember her name. I would expect she wouldn't like being referred to as simply an 'other daughter'.

Also, Dyson had five daughters including Esther. Not two.

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