Environment: Is This Blast Necessary?

On the morning of Sept. 4, near the small Colorado town of Rifle (pop. 2,200), the Atomic Energy Commission will set off a 40-kiloton underground nuclear blast that will shake the earth for miles around. Project Rulison is part of AEC’s program for developing the peaceful uses of nuclear explosives. It is designed to release natural gas trapped in rock 8,000 ft. underground. If successful, it will be followed by similar detonations with a total explosive yield of 20 megatons, 500 times that of the first blast. The plan has also inspired another kind of blast — from those who are worried about what the detonations will do to the areas around them.

Opposition to the plan has been sparked by the Colorado Committee for Environmental Information, a group of 30 experts formed last year to supply citizens with facts for intelligent protest. The group includes leading lawyers, chemists, geologists and physicists, including Edward U. Condon, former chief of the National Bureau of Standards. In recent months, it has uncovered Army nerve gas stored casually near Denver’s airport and probed the whereabouts of radioactive plutonium lost in a fire at a Dow-operated nuclear plant near Boulder. But so far, nothing has worried the committee as much as Project Rulison.

The project will tap an estimated 10 trillion cu. ft. of natural gas under 60,000 acres largely controlled by the Texas-based Austral Oil Co., which is paying 80% of Rulison’s initial cost of $6,500,000. (Austral has contracted to sell the Rulison gas to the Colorado Interstate Gas Company). No one denies that the blast could be dangerous. To avoid injury from possible shockwave damage, 35 families living within five miles of ground zero will be evacuated. Residents up to nine miles away have been warned to stay outside of buildings; miners within a distance of 40 miles away will stay above ground.

What most worries the Committee for Environmental Information is the nuclear pollution that may result if the full program of detonations is carried out. They fear that the problem of disposing of the radioactive gas created by these explosions has not been sufficiently studied. Even more dangerous, in their view, is the possibility that underground water supplies might be contaminated by accumulations of long-lived strontium 90 and cesium 137.

In studying Project Rulison, the Colorado Committee cites the results of New Mexico’s Project Gasbuggy, the only previous explosion of this sort. “The Gasbuggy experiment caused about a sevenfold increase in gas yield,” they report, “but the value of the excess gas was much less than the cost of the nuclear explosive. More important, the gas released from Gasbuggy is too radioactive for use.” AEC spokesmen say that the Gasbuggy blast was designed mainly as an experiment to measure the resulting radiation, not necessarily to produce commercially usable natural gas. Because of new safeguards, they predict, Rulison’s radiation will be much lower than Gasbuggy’s.

It is precisely the Government’s wisdom that the Colorado scientists question. “It took the AEC three years to acknowledge that strontium 90 appeared in milk and was a hazard to human health,” says Biochemist H. Peter Metzger. “The last time they supervised anything in Colorado, they allowed uranium miners to leave radioactive tailings lying around that could be blown over homes, farms and grazing lands and carried hundreds of miles downstream by rivers. The AEC is always saying things are 95% safe. We worry about the other 5%.”

Metzger is pessimistic about the possibility of stopping the Rulison blast, but he feels that the Colorado Committee has achieved something merely by asking pointed questions. “We have encouraged the AEC and the Army to release information which ordinarily they wouldn’t release. In the process, we have created a tremendous amount of public awareness. People are beginning to realize they can do something about their environment.” The question is, what? The Denver Post has strongly criticized Project Rulison; the American Civil Liberties Union is seeking a court injunction. But Rulison’s nuclear device is now firmly in place for the blast next week. On Wall Street, the price of Austral’s common stock has more than tripled.