As reports emerge of secret British Government
plans to deploy 1000 troops on the ground in Libya, to take on the growing
threat of ISIS fighters, created by the coalition attack to remove President Gadaffi
in October 2011(http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3544716/UK-deploy-1-000-troops-Libya-bid-fight-growing-ISIS-threat-migrant-smuggling-crisis.html), here is a story
from an earlier age concerning the Western Saharan desert, when scientists planned
to use megatonnescale (“peaceful”) nuclear explosions to excavate a huge canal
or ‘seaway’ to open up huge lakes in the
Tunisian/Libyan desert
The notion emerged as part of the
prevailing idea of the time that atomic explosions could be used for civil
engineering purposes under the rubric of “Project Plowshares”, driven by the
US, but also undertaken by Soviet scientists to move mountains in Siberia.
The authors of the paper open by conceding
“One of the difficulties confronted in advancing explosives-engineering is that
experimentation is both hazardous and expensive. This is particularly true of
engineering experiments employing nuclear explosives, because there is a
possibility that personnel located many miles from the center of the atomic blast
may suffer from fallout or the migration of radioactivity through groundwater to
public sources of drinking water.”
The paper emerged from a report
submitted by a student team in the course of Engineering with Nuclear
Explosives at Georgia Tech in the summer of 1968. The academic overseeing it
observed it includes an “ expression of
deliberate concern for the betterment of mankind.”
The students
named the study "Project Pecos Bill" after an American folklore
character, a
mythical super cowboy who invented roping and other cowboy
skills. During
a very dry spell, Pecos Bill is said to have used a pointed
stick to dig
the Rio Grande River and bring water from the Gulf of Mexico.
The poignant
results of his work can be seen in the agricultural splendor
that is the Rio
Grande Valley.
After the US
Atomic Energy Commission established the Plowshare Program
in 1957 to
investigate and develop peaceful uses for nuclear explosives, several
possible
applications were considered that were primarily large scale excavations
of a magnitude
greater than was economically feasible with conventional
explosives.
This led to experimental blasts in several different media and depths, two
of which included the gas-sands ‘shot’ at Rulison, Colorado and
the deep
blast in the
igneous rock of the Aleutian Islands. Until early in 1969 it
was hoped that
it might be possible to make a real excavation for a harbor on
the west coast
of Australia to aid in the shipping of newly proven deposits of
iron ore.
The author
ruefully observed: “Unfortunately, that
development was postponed rather indefinitely.”
The area chosen
for this study was the chott region in central Tunisia and Algeria, North
Africa, a region is characterized by the series of so-called
dry lakes or "chotts" which stretch across a considerable section of the northern
Sahara desert region from the Gulf of Gabes in Tunisia on the east to the
eastern borderlands of Morocco on the West.
The immediate
benefits of such an excavation were identified as several:
1) A plentiful
water supply could turn this arid land into a more
useful
agricultural area. New developments in arid-agriculture
in Israel have
shown that the problematic sand dunes can be a
blessing in
disguise when combined with irrigation from salt
water sources
such as seawater.
2) Tunisia has
about one-third of the world's phosphate deposits.
The proposed
canal would provide a sea route to within 25 miles
of those
deposits and could conceivably make them more economical
to mine and
market.
3) Such a canal
would provide ready access to vast petroleum deposits
in east-central
Algeria At present the petroleum produced
in this area
must be moved via pipeline over the Atlas
mountains to
the coastal cities of northern Algeria.
Potential
changes in humidity, the authors argue “could enhance rainfall probabilities
not only in Tunisia and Algeria but possibly in other countries such as Libya
and Egypt.
Salt farming,
for centuries the prerogative of legendary Timbuctu, could take
place in
various locations across north Africa with better production methods
and products.
Indeed, cave paintings found in the southern Sahara suggest that
well
established agriculture and much game (now restricted to savannah country
far to the
south) once existed here. Obviously, the economic potentials could
be as great as
there are imaginative minds and ambitious capital to bring them
about.”
In such a project,
it is desirable to conduct pre-shot and post-shot
environmental
surveys, the authors set out.
Of the two, the
pre-shot survey is more likely to be time consuming and
expensive, for
it must set the stage for the post-shot survey. Such an
environmental
study must include such topics as a qualitative and quantitative radioactive
analysis of typical surface soils, plants and animals to determine
the various
routes taken by radionuclides into the food
chains. This
should include all elements possible that might be produced in
the nuclear
reaction (at least as groups) even though they have not been
established as
necessary constituents of the nutritional (micro- or macro-)
requirements of
living things.
The proposed
canal would form an inland embayment from the Mediterranean
Sea from what
is now the Chott Djerid and possibly sections of Chott Djerid.
The
micro-organisms most likely to be involved in concentration of radioactive
traces of
various nutritional elements are the phytoplankton. These
simple plants,
characteristic of all aquatic environments, serve as food to
almost all
levels of fish and other aquatic life. After they have died or
been killed by
some environmental change, their organic and inorganic remains
serve as
nutrients for other sea plants and bottom feeders.
They asserted:”
The radioactive materials produced by the nuclear explosions probably
will not
present any hazard to the workmen concerned with construction of the
canal. However,
once the seaway has water in it, the radioactive nuclides will
have the
opportunity to diffuse into the aquatic environment. Since fish tend
to concentrate
the ferrous metals, zinc and manganese, it would be advantageous
to minimize the
content of these materials in the explosive devices. Use of
borated
materials in the explosive devices might also help reduce the development
of induced
activity in soil minerals. A continuous survey on the economically
important fish
species for about one year after introduction of water
into the area
would be imperative.”
It continued: “
The fraction of radionuclides formed that would escape from
the crater
would be small; nonetheless surveillance of the plant consumption
in the area
should be maintained to minimize the possibility of radionuclides
reaching the
food chain of man.
Complete
quarantine for human and animal consumption of any vegetation until the
completion of the project (2-5 years) would be an expensive and probably
unnecessary
restriction to
avoid contamination.”
On a long term
basis, they concluded, the advantages
definitely outweigh the disadvantages. With the seaway
would come shipping, development of industries along the waterway and general
development of harbor areas. Resort areas could be made widely
available and a
great expansion of the olive and citrus groves that thrive on
the near-shore
night humidity could be undertaken. Fishing in the relatively
shallow basins
that were the chotts could become as rich an industry as that in
the Caspian,
Black, or Tiberian Seas.
The optimum
yield for the devices, optimum depth of burial, and row spacing were
calculated The proposed canal route
covered about 107.5 miles in Tunisia from north of Gabes to the Chott Djerid
and consisted of five straight-line segments. With the
exception of the village of El Hamma, the [planned detonation areas] were, they
judged, “well removed from population
centers” and thus “the proposed route might have to be evacuated for a few
weeks.”
For the most of
the proposed route, the minimum device yield required would be on the
order of 150 kilotons. Therefore, the required spacing of several 150
kiloton devices iT a row charge such that a smooth channel will be formed is
approximately 715 feet. Under such presumptions, a minimum of 790 devices with a
total yield of 119 uiegatons would be required to cut the desired 107-mile long
channel
The authors
observed “radiation levels resulting from the larger devices are not
substantially
greater than that from the 150 kiloton devices, since activity
release is
produced primarily from the fission "trigger" and not from the
energy-producing
portion of the nuclear interaction. The fission trigger is
relatively
constant in size and relatively similar amounts of activity are
released for
dissimilar yields.”
Based on these
and other considerations, a device yield of two megatons
was chosen for
the canal construction. This decision was made primarily
because a two
megaton device is not so unduly large as to complicate handling
and (according
to published AEC specifications) is capable of being emplaced
in a 30 inch
diameter hole. In addition, the depth of burial for cratering applications of
a device of this size is approximately 1500 feet ... a reasonable depth for
drilling at a remote location, and certainly for one which is
near well
developed oil fields.
Each row of
five devices would “ excavate 1.4 miles of canal. The detonation
order would be
in alternate blocks of five devices returning to detonate
the remaining
blocks after a short period allowed for activity decay.”
The concluded
that: ”The cost of such a project is, of course, enormous from the layman's
point of view, but an overall project cost of the order of one billion dollars does not seem so
great when measured against the financial gain this will
represent as an
investment. “
The concluding
summary of the 1970 Las Vegas conference on the peaceful use of nuclear
explosions stated: “…This country is dedicated to a positive program for improving
the quality of our air and water. These are right and proper goals and should
be carefully
analyzed and
systematically approached, but I think we need a yardstick, a
measure of
pollution. "Why not use the ratio of the pollutant to natural background?
The pre-man
level? By that yardstick, the nuclear energy industry has a very
proud record indeed. Improving the quality of our air and water will be very
costly.. but the way for that improvement is through technology. If we have the
foresight to set aside emotional irrationalities, we can move forward using
nuclear energy and nuclear explosions to improve our environment. The papers
presented at this symposium have recognized the importance of the environment.
If smog can be reduced, if
mining dumps can be avoided, if waste can be disposed, and if non fossil fuel
energy can be tapped, indeed, Plowshare will have made a most important
positive contribution to cleaning up the environment.”
I wonder if the
citizens of Libya and Tunisia would have agreed.
* AN INTERIOR SEAWAY FOR NORTHERN
AFRICA
J. B. F. Champlin*
Westinghouse Electric Corporation
Environmental Systems
J. W. Poston, J. A. Lake
Georgia Institute of Technology
** AMERICAN NUCLEAR
SOCIETY-ATCMIC ENERGY COMMISSION
SPONSORED SYMPOSIUM ON
"ENGINEERING WITH NUCLEAR
EXPLOSIVES"
. DUNES HOTEL, LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
JANUARY 16, 1970
