--- title: "The US detonated nuclear bombs under New Mexico and Colorado in three tests to free natural gas" url: https://badiyaa.com/project-plowshare-nuclear-blasts-natural-gas/ published: 2026-11-09T21:40:00+00:00 modified: 2026-11-09T21:40:00+00:00 section: History publisher: Badiyaa --- # The US detonated nuclear bombs under New Mexico and Colorado in three tests to free natural gas Project Plowshare's Gasbuggy, Rulison and Rio Blanco shots freed gas that came up radioactive. Roughly $82 million was spent by 1974, with at most 40 percent expected back. On December 10, 1967, the United States lowered a 29-kiloton nuclear device more than 4,200 feet into a New Mexico gas field and set it off on purpose, hoping to get more fuel out of the rock. That shot, called Gasbuggy, was the first of three attempts at what a modern driller would recognize as fracking with an atom bomb. The paperwork behind it is stranger than the idea itself. ## Beating swords into drill bits All three belonged to [Project Plowshare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare), organized in June 1957 to find civilian work for nuclear explosives. The name borrowed the old image of beating a sword into a plowshare. Over its life the program fired 35 warheads across 27 tests. The planners thought big. Proposals included widening the Panama Canal, carving a road and rail cut through California’s Bristol Mountains with 22 blasts, and blowing an artificial harbor into the Alaskan coast at Cape Thompson. None of those was built. Gas looked like the practical payoff. Some Rocky Mountain and Southwest reservoirs held fuel locked in dense rock that barely let it flow. Blast a big enough cavity, the thinking went, and the shattered stone around it would act as a giant well. ## Three shots, one problem - **Gasbuggy, New Mexico, 1967.** Run with El Paso Natural Gas in the Carson National Forest. It left a rubble chimney 80 feet wide and 335 feet high. - **[Rulison](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Rulison), Colorado, 1969.** About 40 kilotons, roughly 8,400 feet down. It did free large volumes of gas. - **Rio Blanco, Colorado, 1973.** Three devices fired at the same moment, each around 30 kilotons and more than a mile deep. The cavities failed to link up as designed. The technique worked, in the narrow sense. The catch was the product. Gas pulled from these wells carried radioactive contamination, and Rulison’s output was judged unfit for ordinary uses such as home heating and cooking. Rio Blanco’s still held unacceptable levels of radionuclides. Had that third test succeeded, planners intended to use hundreds of specially built nuclear explosives across gas fields in the western Rockies. ## The numbers never closed The accounting was unkind as well. Roughly $82 million had gone into nuclear gas stimulation by 1974, and the estimate was that 25 years of production would recoup only 15 to 40 percent of it. Run that range against the $82 million and the expected return comes to about $12.3 million at the low end and $32.8 million at the high end, which leaves a shortfall of at least $49 million. Scholars still argue over what actually killed the idea. The social scientist Benjamin Sovacool points to consumers refusing radioactive fuel. The historian Michael Payne stresses shifting public opinion, which fed protests and court fights. The program ended in 1977, and cheaper non-nuclear methods suited to most US gas fields followed. ## What is still down there The blast sites never went away. A monument at Gasbuggy carries a plaque barring drilling or digging without government permission. Colorado keeps a buffer zone around Rulison, which the Energy Department’s Office of Legacy Management still monitors. Ordinary gas drilling has crept toward those sites anyway. By mid-2009, 84 drilling permits had been issued within three miles of a Colorado blast site, 11 of them within a single mile. ## Further reading - [Wikipedia: Project Plowshare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare) - [Wikipedia: Project Gasbuggy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gasbuggy) - [Wikipedia: Project Rulison](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Rulison) *Illustrative image. Image: Federal Government of the United States, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*