Science: Peaceful Gnome

Fallout from the latest and largest Soviet nuclear test was still drifting toward the U.S. last week when President Kennedy gave the go-ahead signal for Project Gnome, the Atomic Energy Commission’s long-planned underground experiment in the peaceful applications of nuclear energy. Southeast of Carlsbad, N.Mex., a shaft has already been sunk 1,200 ft. in the ground to penetrate a thick formation of rock salt. From the shaft’s bottom, a 1,116-ft. horizontal tunnel leads into the salt and curves back on itself in a giant hook. At the tip of the hook a small (5-kiloton) bomb will be exploded in December. If all goes well, the explosion will seal the horizontal tunnel by collapsing the hooked end, and it will leave a cavity partly filled with molten salt.

The hot (1400° F.) liquid salt, the AEC hopes, will prove an energy reservoir from which power can be extracted, probably by injecting water into the cavity and taking it out as high-pressure steam, capable of running a turbine. No one expects that the first small explosion (cost: $5,500,000) will yield power cheap enough to be economically competitive. Even if all the energy in the 5-kiloton Domb were recovered as electric power, it would cost nearly $1 per kwh. Conventional coal-fired power stations produce electricity for less than ½¢ per kwh.

But big nuclear bombs, even up to 100-megaton size, cost little more than small ones. By successive experiments the AEC lopes to learn how to store the energy of large explosions in salt or rock. If a multimegaton explosion can be safely confined underground, the power it produces may be cheap enough to compete with electricity from conventional sources.

Other goals of Project Gnome:

> To gain experience with nuclear explosives as blasting agents for digging har->ors, canals, or passes through mountains.

> To experiment with large-scale production of artificial isotopes. Isotopes that do lot exist in nature are generally made by bombarding natural elements with neurons in a reactor. A nuclear explosion underground will supply a vast number of neutrons for this purpose.

>To test the oilman’s dream of using nuclear heat and shock to bring inaccessible oil deposits to the surface.