Jennie Lay’s very nice piece on gas drilling near the
1969 Rulison Plowshare nuclear blast shows a slightly misplaced
concern of local residents that radioactive materials might be
released by the new drilling (HCN, 3/7/05: Drilling could wake a
sleeping giant). Their bigger concern should be contamination of
groundwater by the nasty stuff put in the ground for
hydrofracturing. Although it seems a fool’s errand to be
seeking gas by the same technique that failed to produce
significant quantities using nuclear dynamite, that will not stop
them from trying. Both the crude models attempting to explain
behavior of gas flow beneath the surface, and the company’s
claim that all the radioactive gas was burned off in 1971, should
not be believed. How either the radioactive contamination or the
new contamination from drilling and hydrofracturing will be
distributed underground is a big unknown.
Howard
Wilshire
Sebastopol, California
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Rulison drilling may spread contaminants.
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