Soviets put out a burning gas well with a nuclear explosion (1966) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Soviets put out a burning gas well with a nuclear explosion (1966) [video]

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186 pointscma62 comments

The American peaceful nuclear explosion program was called Project Plowshare[0] and seems to have been mostly tests, with practical applications to come later. In contrast, the Soviet Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy[1] claims almost a hundred non-testing uses. Most likely both programs were ultimately for weapons development, but it's interesting that the Soviets did manage to actually use some explosions for real non-weapon uses, while the American program never went that far.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Explosions_for_the_Nat...

Check out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28205620

There was real hype about terraforming and redirecting rivers from North to South.

nothing could possibly have gone wrong there...

How do we avoid fallout in that case?

Underground detonation.

A lot of fallout comes from detonating over the ground so that the force smacks into earth and spins up a ton of debris which is breathed in and causes all those nasty diseases. How long a place is irradiated is pretty much tied to how long those particulates float around causing mayhem. After that, sweeping up all the debris and containing it is a solid way of preparing the area for humans again.

"After that, sweeping up all the debris and containing it is a solid way of preparing the area for humans again."

Sounds like lots of effort. And would still leave me wondering at every rock I encounter, of whether I should avoid this one, because it was overlooked.

> Most likely both programs were ultimately for weapons development

Seems unlikely, the weapons used were pretty well understood. There was a real hype about the idea of non-military use of nukes as explosives back then, as it offered explosive energy in scales simply unfeasible with conventional explosives.

For reference, Minor Scale (the largest non-nuclear explosion in history, as far as I know) was 4kT, the average NEftNE explosion was 12.5, and they went as high as 140. Plowshare ranged from 0.3 to 104, but most tests were in the range of Minor Scale.

The people in the comments of the video purporting it’s “lack of propaganda” weird me out. You’re just frighteningly bad at detecting propaganda. The entire video, and the entire government program that spurred the video were propaganda.

The entire Soviet system only released information through a strong propaganda filter. There was simply no room for any action of the government to be reflected poorly. These tests by and large ended up radiating populations and not telling them.

Do you think American nuclear tests and news reels from the era were propaganda free?

This was an active natural gas well and drilling area. No one was living near it--it would have been a nightmare of potential deadly gas exposure to do so, even ignoring the nuclear blast. The blast was 1000+ meters underground so no cloud or fallout was thrown into the air. The really dangerous radioisotopes from most bombs have a half life less than a decade so everything underground is likely pretty benign now. But again, no one is going to be digging a hole 1000 meters down into a former natural gas well to go live there.

> Do you think American nuclear tests and news reels from the era were propaganda free?

did he claim that?

It's an extremely well made film – and extremely effective propaganda. Having seen this as part of the intended audience, you're probably proud of your country and eager to contribute, and at ease with the technology involved.

These tests by and large ended up radiating populations and not telling them.

Proof? It was an underground explosion in a very sparsely populated location. How exactly and whom it ended up radiating?

And yet the same video mentions the H2S release earlier in the process as dangerous to nearby populations (timestamp 3:34)

I understood the H2S was leaking through much more superficial ground than the one that received the nuclear blast.

Of course, we don't actually know the details about any of it. But there were plenty of underground nuclear explosions, and people are usually quite good at controlling them.

H2S is from oil and gas wells, not the nuclear explosion.

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Глобус-1

Another test - a nuclear blast in the vicinity of Moscow, which caused small contaminated area (100x150 m) as well as risk of polluting the Volga basin.

I like (well, maybe the wrong word) the one video that was made for the leadership only, and has an image of a couple of guys walking down a street near a nuclear test site. The narrator says something like: “These people think they are safe because they’re far enough from the test site. They will soon learn the error of their ways.” They’re then promptly bowled over when the blast front hits (or ripped to shreds, the video doesn’t say).

I keep wondering if it was deliberate or just a “happy little accident”.

Do you have that video somewhere?

Apparently it was the last video I watched on Youtube: https://youtu.be/EHRLEMTsLyA

Turn on CC if you don’t know russian.

Exactly, there were no free publication and information in the soviet era.

In fact, the whole existence of the Soviet Union and everything that was done inside it was merely a propaganda stunt stretched into 67 years, that had no other purpose except showing the greatness of the Soviet Union as an actual country (while in reality, of course, it was but a humongous film set, with a propagandistic theatre play being performed on it).

Man, that was a fun paragraph to write.

I cannot tell if you're being facetious or not, but it was a fun paragraph to read as well. All communist regimes are Potemkin villages.

Sputnik was quite real, though. As were lots of other things. For example the industrialisation of a big country that was in poor rural state before, while being blocked by the west.

Not everyone in the sowjets was forced to be there. Idealism is a strong driving force, otherwise the sowjet empire would not have sustained itself for so long on propaganda alone.

I don't mean to imply that Soviet Union did not have lots of propaganda. But do you have any proof that this particular underground explosion caused radioactive pollution for some populations?

@17:13

Russian narrator: Radiatsy..... nyet.

English closed captions: Radiation levels are within natural background limits.

Might have taken a little while for gases to get up to the surface.

The geysers were showing in the video, there was hot gas outpouring from the ground everywhere. That makes it difficult to believe that there was no radiation leak.

3.6 roentgen?

Not great, not terrible

Past threads. Others?

How the Soviets Put Out Oil Well Fires by Using Nuclear Bombs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26756899 - April 2021 (2 comments)

The USSR used a nuclear charge to stop a gas well fire in 1966 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8397750 - Oct 2014 (124 comments)

While it might slow down the site, is it possible for a list of previous threads to added by a bot?

In principle yes, but it's good to have someone look over the previous thread to make sure it's interesting. Also, there are often previous related threads which don't have similar titles or URLs and yet relate to the same story—hard for a bot to find those.

I think maybe coming up with an initial list mechanically and then having a way for community members to curate it may be the sweet spot.

"Statistically improbable phrases" are one way to branch such searchs.

So, the bot looks for the URL and title matches, then looks for tuples within those sets (2--3 word chains seems to be a sweet spot), and which of those seem to cluster on those aprticular articles and comments, but not a tremendous number of others.

"Operation Trojan Shield" would be a good match for the An0m sting being discussed elsewhere. "The FBI" or "First Amendment", though not highly prevalent, are still sufficiently used elsewhere that they probably would not be.

Someone would have to keep tally of the tuples, though.

(Tiptoe Through the Tuples...)

We've worked on things like this in the past without success. Even just saving the html of the web pages that get submitted to HN is a nontrivial problem, and extracting text from them for similarity searches even more so. If people wanted to work on this as an open-source thing, we'd be open to supporting it somehow, but it'll be quite a while before we get back to working on the problem at this level ourselves. I think relying on the community to co-curate related-links lists (and duplicates) is likely a better and easier strategy.

Hey dang, I always find these mentions to past threads particularly useful.

Should it become a small feature to add to HN? Perhaps a sticky comment on top of the others?

There's already the ‘past’ link.

It will turn into a feature eventually, yes!

Fires of Kuwait. IMAX film. Highly recommended. Fascinating all the methods they used to extinguish the oil well fires that Saddam Hussein ordered to be set on fire.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fires_of_Kuwait

It is really good, the full thing is on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aM-ZpC0luvA

The older thread recommended Lessons of Darkness (I haven't watched it yet):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lessons_of_Darkness

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aM-ZpC0luvA

Saw bits of it, will watch more later - it does look beautiful and well done.

However, the thing that struck me the most is that no one is wearing gas masks. It must have been stinking and pretty harmful, but I guess that is the oil and gas industry..

It was also the 60s. Asbestos was still a thing, as was leaded fuel, ubiquitous smoking etc

The linked film, "The Fires of Kuwait", documents events that took place in 1991.

This topic makes me think of:

"underground coal-seam fires are the most persistent fires on Earth and can burn for thousands of years, like Burning Mountain in Australia"

"The oldest coal fire in China is in Baijigou (白芨沟, in Dawukou District of Shizuishan City, Ningxia) and is said to have been burning since the Qing Dynasty (before 1912)."

"The Centralia mine fire is a coal-seam fire that has been burning underneath the borough of Centralia, Pennsylvania, United States, since at least May 27, 1962"

"In 1979, locals became aware of the scale of the problem when a gas-station owner, then-mayor John Coddington, inserted a dipstick into one of his underground tanks to check the fuel level. When he withdrew it, it seemed hot. He lowered a thermometer into the tank on a string and was shocked to discover that the temperature of the gasoline in the tank was 172 °F"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire

Also on the subject of unusual firefighting methods:

"The Górniczy Agregat Gaśniczy (GAG) is a jet engine inertisation unit developed for use in mines, controlling and suppressing coal seam fires and neutralising firedamp situations. The unit was designed in Poland in the 1970s, its name roughly translates as "Mine Fire Suppression Apparatus""

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorniczy_Agregat_Gasniczy

Big Wind probably appears in the movie. It is two MiG jet engines strapped to a T-34 frame: https://www.badassoftheweek.com/bigwind

Was that written by some 16 year old?

Possibly! :) But I think this is just a writing style for this particular website.

hah wow, saw this in a school field trip in the 90s, really loved it, thanks for reminding me.

Soviet, propaganda, whatever. These people have done a breathtaking job at the cutting edge of technology backed by paper and pencil. Let’s appreciate that for a minute.

If you only want to spend one minute on it, footage of the actual event starts at about 15:52 and is followed immediately by an animated diagram of how it worked (detonation 1.5km below the surface which collapsed the well from the side).

The CC works for English. It is not only diagrams, there is actual attempts too. Every second of it is informative.

Given that the fire burned for over two years, I was wondering why they didn't drop some kind of bell over the well and piped the gas somewhere useful. It certainly seems doable within a couple of months. Of course I'm sure nobody expected the fire to resist for so long.

The animation at 16:30 is beautifully designed.

The discordant musical score in parts adds a layer of eeriness that's quite effective, you certainly don't see it in pop cinema. It's genuinely uncomfortable.

Neat, but what a waste. They needed a Red Adairski.

They drilled another pipe close by right after that explosion.

Wouldn't this cause radiological pollution in the gas itself, making it useless? At least for sale to foreign countries...

That's a wild story!

Thanks so much for sharing it.

I suspect that it also doubled as a test of a low-yield warhead.

Wadsworth point is 15:55

"The most peaceful and helpful nuclear explosion " lol

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