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  By then, though, Atoms for Peace was in full swing in the United States, in terms of both discovery and publicity. American scientists and engineers had brought the world previously unimaginable nuclear devastation and human catastrophe, but now those same scientists and engineers were working toward nuclear applications in energy, medicine, agriculture, and transportation. All for the good. And America’s most revered storyteller was on the case. In January 1957, Walt Disney’s Disneyland television show devoted an entire hour to a Tomorrowland episode called “Our Friend the Atom.” The story of the atom was like a “fairy tale,” Disney’s team explained. Specifically, the one where the fisherman casts his net and pulls up a bottle with a big scary genie inside. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “the atomic genie was freed, and his devastating force posed a fearful threat,” the narrator explained. “We are like the fisherman. When he first beheld the frightful form of the genie, he too wished that he had never found the vessel. But our fable had a happy ending. The fisherman had his means of making a friend of his enemy. And fortunately, science has its way of doing the same thing….It lies in our own hands to make wise use of the atomic treasures. Then the magic touch of the genie will spread throughout the world and he will grant the gifts of science to all mankind.”

  By 1969, with the Atomic Energy Commission spending more than half its budget on nonmilitary uses of nuclear power, the gifts were already beginning to move from the theoretical to the practical. A big one was the advent of nuclear reactors for producing electricity, which the head of the AEC, Glenn Seaborg, promised could stave off a coming crisis. “At the rate we are currently adding carbon dioxide to our atmosphere (six billion tons a year), within the next few decades the heat balance of that atmosphere could be altered enough to produce marked changes in the climate—changes which we might have no means of controlling even if by that time we have made great advances in our programs of weather modification,” Dr. Seaborg told a commencement audience in San Diego. “I, for one, would prefer to continue to travel toward the equator for my warmer weather rather than run the risk of melting the polar ice and having some of our coastal areas disappear beneath a rising ocean.” It was 1966 when he gave that speech.

  The head of the AEC was touting the development of portable nuclear plants and nuclear power plant barges that could be towed to emergency sites after a tornado or an earthquake or a hurricane. The commission was also at work on a nuclear-powered deep submergence research vehicle to open what Seaborg called the “new frontier of inner space,” which was actually the vast ocean depths, which might hold billions of tons of copper and gold and uranium. “When it comes to extracting and processing these and the many more valuable materials in the sea and the ocean floor,” Seaborg promised in 1967, “the extensive use of nuclear power will probably become essential.”

  The AEC was also developing some nifty outer space technology, like rocket engines powered by a launchable nuclear reactor. The mini reactor—the size of your average office desk and able to produce more power than Hoover Dam—would provide the propulsion necessary for interplanetary travel. There was research into atomic-powered supersonic jets (New York to London in thirty minutes!), and trains, and even automobiles. Nuclear cars? Really? An atomic-powered merchant ship was already churning through the high seas. There were studies on how to use controlled doses of radiation to keep meat, fruits, and vegetables fresh. We might double the shelf life of everything from a porterhouse to a peach with just the right amount of radiation. We still do that, to this day, by the way. The FDA says it’s especially effective for crustaceans and alfalfa sprouts. Look for the international symbol for irradiation, the Radura, on your local crawdad.

  Project Rulison fell under a specialized subset of the Atoms for Peace program, a bold attempt to harness the power of atomic bombs for industrial purposes—not just atomic energy, but the actual weapons themselves. This operation was named after a passage of the Bible, Isaiah 2:4: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks.” (The AEC wisely chose Plowshares, and not Pruning Hooks, for the project name.) The famed nuclear physicist Edward Teller was a big champion of Plowshares, and especially the possibilities it presented for “geographical engineering.” There were plans afoot in the early 1960s to use nuclear bombs for strip-mining, open pit mining, and quarrying; for redirecting the course of rivers and carving out giant man-made lakes; for a deepwater port in Alaska, a sea-level canal in Israel, even a new Panama canal. When you really opened your mind to the possibilities, what couldn’t be done with nuclear bombs?

  Dr. John Gofman, head of the Biomedical Division of one of the AEC’s key labs, tried to pump the brakes. Even just nuclear testing had already introduced potentially harmful levels of radioiodine into the fresh milk supply in Utah. He wasn’t at all comfortable with the Federal Radiation Council’s fix for that problem, which was simply to recalibrate its own edict on what constituted an “acceptable health risk.” The FRC, Gofman lamented, “solved it by announcing that the safe level of radioiodine in milk was three times higher than they thought.” Gofman was acutely aware of the long-term effects of radiation. Two of his colleagues in a wartime weapons lab had died of leukemia, way too young. “In about 1965, I decided that I ought to talk at the Directors’ meeting on the Panama Canal,” Gofman explained in an oral history years later. “I said, ‘The conclusion of our Biomedical Division is: The idea of digging the Panama Canal with hydrogen bombs is biological insanity.’ Edward Teller was unhappy but nobody else said a word about it.”

  The AEC directors didn’t do anything about it either. Gofman later explained that he and his Biomedical Division became known around the commission as “the Enemy Within.” The AEC directors and scientists were more comfortable with the can-do thinking of the deputy chief of staff of radiological health at the U.S. Public Health Service. Dr. James Terrill told a symposium on public health and nuclear explosives, “The potential applications of atomic energy are many and varied indeed….As meritorious as clean air, clean water, and clean food may be, the term ‘clean’ must be translated into criteria and standards.” In other words, what was clean, really, and who could say?

  In 1969, as Terrill was making those kinds of public statements, and despite Gofman’s warnings against it, the nuclear excavation of a second Panama canal (or maybe a Nicaraguan canal?) really had become a serious discussion in the Under Secretaries Committee at the National Security Council in the White House. According to Seaborg, though, the thinking of the undersecretaries was that they should maybe execute a couple more nuclear test shots before giving any final go-ahead to start using nuclear bombs to cut a new hole clear across Central America. They were all watching Project Rulison, of course, to see how that turned out in Colorado. And so was President Richard Nixon, who explained his feelings to the AEC chief, Seaborg, just eight days into his first term in January 1969. “[President Nixon] said he has a special prejudice for this program—the way all people have special quirks and prejudices,” Seaborg later wrote. “He thought this was something that should be accelerated.”

  Project Rulison had its naysayers out in Colorado, as you might expect. To effect the release of 317 trillion cubic feet of natural gas from the shale beds in the Rockies, one expert from the Colorado School of Mines told an audience at a public meeting, would require not just one big blast but more like thirteen thousand detonations of fifty-kiloton nuclear bombs. Nobody could really be certain how much radioactive effluent—people in Garfield County, Colorado, were becoming familiar with radioisotopes such as krypton-85 and tritium—would be floating in the natural gas, or left at the site once the gas was extracted. They weren’t much calmed by an AEC spokesman who tried to explain away the relative dangers of radioactivity by comparing it to iodine. Of course you wouldn’t drink it “straight from the bottle,” but “one drop diluted in a glass of water is harmless…even kills germs.”

  A lawsuit filed b
y a concerned citizens’ group delayed the Rulison blast until early September 1969. Weather delayed it another week, because AEC technicians worried that any radiation vented into the air by the explosion might be carried into population centers by high winds. And then, on top of everything, when D-day finally came, on September 10, 1969, there were protesters in the mountains near the blast site. When the Atomic Energy Commission spokesman had announced that the agency’s abiding interest in public health and safety would forestall detonation if anybody was in the quarantine zone, local hippies and environmentalists had taken that as an invitation. Chester McQueary wrote about it twenty-five years later for High Country News. “We scattered over the mountain in twos and threes, so that we could not all be removed in one fell swoop by authorities,” he wrote. “At 30 minutes before blast time, we set off smoke flares to confirm for AEC officials that we were still on the mountain and inside the quarantine zone. A blue, twin-rotor Air Force helicopter soon hovered fifty feet above the aspen clearing where Margaret Puls and I stood.” McQueary says that although some of his fellow protesters were yanked off the mountain at gunpoint, that blue Air Force twin-rotor couldn’t land easily on the steep slope where he and Puls had set up camp, and the chopper let them be. He told one interviewer that an airman on board flashed him a peace sign as the helicopter flew off.

  The protesters had consulted a geologist who told them that when the detonation countdown started, they should get away from cliff faces that might fall or large trees or boulders that might bounce. They should prepare their own bodies for the blast as well. “We lay down positioned so our feet, knees, and arms would absorb the shock and motion,” which basically means they got into push-up position, or the dreaded “plank.” “Then a mighty WHUMP!” McQueary remembered, “and a long rumble moved through the earth, lifting us eight inches or more in the air. We felt aftershocks as we lay there looking at each other, grateful that we were still breathing and all in one piece. Seismic detectors at the National Earthquake Center in Golden registered 5.5 on the Richter scale.”

  The jarring seismic motion shook the liquid tanks at the nearby Union Carbide plant so badly that the chemical manufacturer had to shut down for three hours to unclog drains. A rock slide took out the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad’s signal system, but it was quickly restored. Damage to local structures was what the Rulison project manager called “of a minor nature and center[ed] around cracked walls and ceiling plaster, cracked and broken chimney bricks, broken windows, lamps and the like.”

  The pre-shot estimates envisioned more than 400 damage claims, for which Austral had budgeted $200,000. But the big fears were not realized. The two nearby dams escaped uncracked. I-70 had not been damaged by rock slides. Austral did end up paying a total of $110,000 on 322 separate claims, including $124.50 to a “nonresident hunter” who had been miffed at being forced off the mountain on detonation day. The protesters who had been taken off the mountain by force were released without charges. “There have been no reports of injury to people or livestock,” the AEC reported to Congress’s Joint Committee on Atomic Energy.

  The bomb was exploded 8,426 feet beneath the earth’s surface, where it vaporized enough rock to open a 300-foot-high, 152-foot-wide cavern. The “fracture zone” radiated out 433 feet. The team had to wait a few months to allow the giant new cave to cool down and the detonation-produced radioactivity to decay a little. But it soon seemed apparent that our new friend, the atom, had performed an industrial miracle. That gas was stimulated! In 108 days of flow testing, according to the Project Rulison Manager’s Report, the “volume is the equivalent of approximately 10 years of production from a conventionally stimulated well in the Rulison field.” The report noted “very little flow restriction through the penetrated fractures, thus confirming that an effective path between the chimney and the reentry wellbore had been established.” Mission accomplished! Almost.

  Turned out there were two problems. First and most fundamentally, this new method of drilling-for-gas-by-atom-bomb left the gas itself enhanced by its nuclear experience. “Mildly radioactive” was how the scientists put it, contaminated with krypton-85 and tritium. But—here’s the second problem—it was hard to say just how much tritium was in the gas (or at the blast site), because the machine the scientists had brought to measure krypton and tritium contamination, a machine referred to by the excellent acronym STALLKAT, didn’t actually work. In the otherwise cheery 265-page Project Manager’s Report on Rulison, this was the part where a little palpable sadness crept in. “Though certain drawbacks with STALLKAT were readily seen, not the least of which was a poor sensitivity to tritium, it was clearly the best available system.” You go to the bomb site with the STALLKAT you have, not the STALLKAT you might want or wish to have at a later time.

  The project manager noted that “some quite active tritium material fell near the base of the stack early in flaring” and that the bomb site also tended to get littered with tritium when it snowed. But nobody honestly knew how much tritium that little slice of Garfield County had just been saddled with, because the damn STALLKAT couldn’t sniff it out. Under “Recommendations,” the project manager was blunt: “The STALLKAT should not be used for monitoring tritium.”

  Now, from a public relations standpoint, the mystery of just how much radioactive contamination Project Rulison had burped up into Colorado was a problem that might have been overcome. Once they started to get reasonable measures of how much radioactivity was actually around, public health officials could always just raise the level of radioactivity that was considered safe for humans—problem solved. That’s how it worked with the hot milk in Utah.

  But for all its technological dynamism, the cost-benefit balance of the program was daunting. It was going to require more and bigger bombs to make bigger caverns and greatly expanded fields of fractured rock if nuclear stimulation was going to be commercially viable. And atomic bombs don’t come cheap. The boys at the AEC retained their can-do attitude, buoyed by the country’s accelerating energy demand and by President Nixon’s quirks and prejudices. He wanted more natural gas, in a hurry, including the bombed kind. Nixon’s 1971 report to Congress on energy issues included the promise of more “nuclear stimulation experiments which seek to produce natural gas from tight geologic formations.” In 1973, the AEC tried again in Colorado, in Project Rio Blanco, where this time it was three thirty-three-kiloton nuclear bombs, detonated simultaneously, at three separate depths within 851 feet of one another. Radioactivity increased. Commercial prospects did not.

  In all, these gas-happy experiments cost about $82 million. The accountants figured that at the assumed rate, even with costs coming down, even if they took that entire coveted 317 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, the best they could hope to recover was about 40 percent of the cash outlay.

  And so died our nation’s experiment in nuclear fracking, way back in 1973, after four glorious years of trying really, really hard.

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  Nuclear stimulation equipment was mothballed at just the moment when Americans were beginning to get good and jittery about the guarantee of an ample and never-ending supply of fuel sources. The dire prophecy of the geologist and futurist M. King Hubbert, who said that oil production would hit its apex in around 1970 and then begin a long despair-inducing decline, seemed to be coming true, at least domestically. “The era of low-cost energy is almost dead,” lamented the U.S. secretary of commerce at the end of 1972. “Popeye is running out of cheap spinach.” This realization was followed by OPEC’s surprise 1973 embargo that nearly tripled the price of oil. Filling stations became places of actual rage. Gas shortages, gas lines, and gas rationing were things. Teenagers were called into middle school assemblies to hear apocalyptic messages about the energy crisis from earnest missionaries from the church of “Peak Oil.” And natural gas was not going to save us in the 1970s, because there just wasn’t enough of it around to buy.
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  The frigid winter of 1977 brought a state of emergency in New York, with Governor Hugh Carey ordering schools shut down for a week. Banks opened for only five hours a day, and in New York City the power companies shut off natural gas supplies to anybody with access to other fuels. Con Ed asked its customers to drop their thermostats to sixty-five degrees, while New Jersey’s governor flat-out ordered the drop to sixty-five in all public buildings. General Electric just told its workers in the area to stay home. Columbus, Ohio, had it worse. The city closed 145 of its 172 public schools for an entire month, for want of natural gas to heat the classrooms. Local media stepped up for a “School Without Schools” program that drew nationwide attention: “The three major commercial television stations and several radio stations have canceled regularly scheduled programming for as much as six hours a day to provide teachers with 15-minute sessions of air time for class programs. These are buttressed by publication in the Columbus Dispatch, the city’s morning daily paper, of at least two pages of school lessons and a schedule of the classes to be taught on television as well as other school-related activities in the city.”