Project Rulison, named after the rural community of Rulison, Colorado, was an underground 40-

kiloton TNT equivalent is a convention for expressing energy, typically used to describe the energy released in an explosion. A ton of TNT equivalent is a unit of energy defined by convention to be (). It is the approximate energy released in the det ...

nuclear test Nuclear weapons tests are experiments carried out to determine the performance of nuclear weapons and the effects of their explosion. Nuclear testing is a sensitive political issue. Governments have often performed tests to signal strength. Bec ...

project in the United States on September 10, 1969, about SE of the town of Grand Valley, Colorado (now named

Parachute, Colorado Parachute is a home rule municipality in Garfield County, Colorado, United States. The population was 1,390 at the 2020 census. The town is the birthplace of Willard Libby, recipient of the 1960 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. History The town's ...

) in Garfield County. The location of "Surface Ground Zero" is . The depth of the test cavity was approximately below the ground surface. It was part of the Operation Mandrel weapons test series under the name Mandrel Rulison, as well as the Operation Plowshare project which explored peaceful engineering uses of nuclear explosions. The peaceful aim of Project Rulison was to determine if

natural gas Natural gas (also fossil gas, methane gas, and gas) is a naturally occurring compound of gaseous hydrocarbons, primarily methane (95%), small amounts of higher alkanes, and traces of carbon dioxide and nitrogen, hydrogen sulfide and helium ...

could be easily liberated from underground regions. This site remains under active monitoring by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Legacy Management. The test succeeded in liberating large quantities of natural gas; however the resulting radioactivity left the gas contaminated and unsuitable for applications such as cooking and heating homes. Although projected public radiation exposures from commercial use of stimulated gas had been reduced to less than 1% of background, it became clear in the early 1970s that public acceptance within the U.S. of any product containing radioactivity, no matter how minimal, was difficult if not impossible. This was the second of three nuclear demonstration projects for natural-gas-reservoir stimulation as part of the Plowshare program. The other two were Project Gasbuggy in 1967 in northern

New Mexico New Mexico is a state in the Southwestern United States, Southwestern region of the United States. It is one of the Mountain States of the southern Rocky Mountains, sharing the Four Corners region with Utah, Colorado, and Arizona. It also ...

and Project Rio Blanco in 1973 in Colorado.

Clean up and later proposals for site

The Department of Energy began a cleanup of the site in the 1970s which was completed in 1998. A

buffer zone A buffer zone, also historically known as a march, is a neutral area that lies between two or more bodies of land; usually, between countries. Depending on the type of buffer zone, it may serve to separate regions or conjoin them. Common types o ...

put in place by the state of Colorado still exists around the site. A January 2005 report by the DOE stated that radioactivity levels were normal at the surface and in

groundwater Groundwater is the water present beneath Earth's surface in rock and Pore space in soil, soil pore spaces and in the fractures of stratum, rock formations. About 30 percent of all readily available fresh water in the world is groundwater. A unit ...

, though a later report due in 2007 was expected to more fully explore if there was subsurface contamination and whether or not radioactivity was still spreading outward from the blast site itself. As of June 2005, the Houston, Texas-based company Presco was seeking to drill for natural gas within the buffer zone, putting in as many as four wells. The company had initially received approval to drill one well, but the county dropped its support when more extensive plans were revealed. A placard, erected in 1976, now marks the site where the blast took place. It is accessible via a gravel road, Garfield County Route 338.https://plus.google.com/102729802421002547137/about?gl=us&hl=en

References

External links

Rulison Site Environmental Management End State Vision
– January 2005 DOE report (

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

)
Rulison Site, Office of Legacy Management
{{coord, 39, 24, 19, N, 107, 56, 54.7, W, display=title, type:event Explosions in 1969 1969 in Colorado American nuclear weapons testing Rulison Underground nuclear weapons testing Rulison Rulison