oil baron insanity in Colorado

[donsu]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/latimests/drillingnearnuclearblastcavitycalledriskybusiness


Drilling Near Nuclear Blast Cavity Called Risky Business

On a bright fall afternoon 36 years ago, the Atomic Energy Commission and a Texas oil company detonated a 40-kiloton nuclear device inside an 8,000-foot shaft on a high meadow, an effort to crack into a bounty of natural gas trapped in a dense subterranean rock formation.

-snip-

Here on Colorado's energy-rich Western Slope, the nuclear experiment yielded mixed results. A rich lode of gas was indeed shaken out of its rock casing, but the gas that rushed to the surface was too radioactive to be commercially useful.

Federal officials assured the community that the Rulison test site, named after a nearby community, was safe. Still, they forbade oil or gas drilling on 40 acres surrounding the blast. Last year, the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission added another half a mile to the federal off-limits zone.

But now, another Texas energy company has proposed drilling within the half-mile zone. The company, Presco, says it will extract the gas using a nonnuclear process called hydraulic fracing, which like the original experiment is designed to shatter underground rock and tap into embedded stores of natural gas. The company says this can be done without disturbing the radioactive material that remains buried in the blast cavity.

-snip-

. The residue from the 1969 blast contains some of the most radioactive and toxic substances on Earth, including tritium, carbon-14 and krypton-85.
-snip-
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if you have to lay your body on the ground to stop them - do it! don't let them drill and thus spread this poison.

the oil barons are insane but we are not.

[spooked911]

1. Wow. That's wild-- I never heard of such a thing. Surely there's got to

be better places to tap natural gas.

Those guys are crazy.

[Syncronaut Seven]

2. They don't know that.

"The company says this can be done without disturbing the radioactive material that remains buried in the blast cavity."

Liars.

I hope the locals meet them with pitchforks.

Perhaps a $10B liability bond, you know, just in case they're wrong.