CBS News cites report that Soviets "Nuked" Gas Well Fires.

[Karmadillo]

I guess we'll soon be advised to move beyond the "stale" debates over nuking the Gulf.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20004828-501465.html

They've tried nearly everything else to seal the disastrous oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, so why not just nuke it?

No, that's not an original idea. In fact, you can read that suggestion on the pages of one of Russia's leading daily newspapers, Komsomoloskaya Pravda, which claims that the Soviets deployed specially-designed nuclear explosions to extinguish well fires on at least five separate occasions.

The idea was to harness the impact of the explosions that, among other things, would push tons of rocks into place and seal any leaks. The newspaper reports that authorities used a 30 ton atomic explosion triggered at an underground depth of six kilometers on Sept. 30, 1966, to extinguish burning gas wells in Urt-Bulak, an area about 80 kilometers from Bukhara.

A second 'success' made Soviet scientists confident about "the use of this new technique for rapidly and effectively controlling ran away gas and oil wells," according to a U.S. Department of Energy report on the Soviet Union's peaceful uses of nuclear explosions.

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On Edit: fixed typo