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Comment by GolfPopper | Hacker News Reader

What, you mean, like American Machine and Foundry building nuclear reactors?

https://www.ans.org/news/article-1858/elk-river-rural-americ...

No, I mean using atomic bombs to manufacture these alloys at scale. In the 50s a-bombs were proposed for all sorts of workaday uses. Imagine using a small a-bomb for mining just as we use ANFO today.

I am sure that somebody will take up the task of reproducing these alloys using intense heat from a non-atomic source. New alloys can be quite lucrative but developing them requires just as much experimentation as making new drugs. I'd imagine that getting to an alloy of 7 metals through progressive experimentation would take awhile. Now we know it's possible and have a possible production path. That is enough to spur some experiments down that road.

>Imagine using a small a-bomb for mining just as we use ANFO today.

Nuclear cement kiln

Nuclear pile jetter

Nuclear tunnel boring machine.

Nuclear Toothpaste

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

> Nuclear tunnel boring machine.

Don't give Elon ideas.

Both the US and the Soviet Union actually experimented with "nuclear fracking" in oil/gas fields. The Soviet Union also used atomic bombs to put out fires in gas fields as late as 1981.

They what?! Can we please get a link to this to read more?!

And yes, I have the same Google as you, but I'd love a link to your preferred telling of the tale of how the Soviets nuked a gas well fire just a couple years before I was born.

I recall we were seriously talking about using one during the early days of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. For a variety of reasons it wouldn’t have worked in that instance.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-soviets-nuked-gas-well-f...

Wikipedia has an article about it[0]. Gas had been leaking for three years before they were able to use a nuke to seal the well. Estimated that it was burning 12 million m3 of gas daily.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urtabulak_gas_field

Interesting, however that was 1966:

> the explosive was detonated at a depth of 1,500 m (1,640 yd) on 30 September 1966. The hole that the explosive was lowered into had also been sealed with cement so as to prevent atmospheric radioactive contamination.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Explosions_for_the_Nat...

> The last nuclear explosion by the Program 7, codenamed Rubin-1, was performed in Arkhangelsk Oblast on September 6, 1988.

Although there is no separate page for that.

Soviets also blew up a 140kt bomb to make a lake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shagan_(lake,_Abai_Region)

My grandfather worked as the lead geologist on Project Rulison. That was the fracking shot in western CO.

Apparently the shot was quite successful as a natural gas fracking technique, but quite a bit of radon also was released.

See also: operation plowshare.

The idea was you could use nuclear bombs to dig canals. Or make harbors. Or really any large scale earth moving project. The U.S. did one test shot, a shallow buried bomb intended as a cratering charge. https://www.google.com/maps/@37.176944,-116.046111,4654m This ended up contaminating more people than any other test which put the breaks on that. The soviets had an equivalent study but tried a little harder and are now the proud owners of several new irradiated lakes.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedan_(nuclear_test)

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

That whole effort was predicated on success of efforts to develop fission-free bombs. That never worked out, although the inertial confinement fusion program is in a way its descendant. The scale of ICF reactors shows why it didn't work out. A slight shame, since this might have made Project Pacer (exploding bombs in caverns to make energy) more feasible. There still would have been enormous tritium production/pollution.

  >The U.S. did one test shot

I'm seeing 11 shots total,[0] though Wikipedia lists even more.

"Nine were for the purpose of developing an ultra-low fission thermonuclear explosive for use in nuclear excavation projects and one each was for the development of special emplacement techniques and for a small diameter, ultra-low tritium producing explosive for hydrocarbon applications such as Rio Blanco."

[0] Table 1 on page 7 (PDF page 11) https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/408695

There was some truly crazy shit happening in the late '50s-early '60s:

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...

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

Looks like every time a new “big thing” gets invented, the big thing becomes like a hammer and everything else turns into the proverbial nail. Then it was atomic everything, not its AI everything. Same pattern repeating.

IIRC in “Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman” he recalls being asked during Manhattan Project (?) for ideas to commercialize atomic energy and they patented whatever the scientists brainstormed up.

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