Battlement Mesa – It takes Wesley Kent two minutes to walk from his log cabin to the deserted nuclear test site.
Using his snowshoe as a shovel, he scrapes bare a patch of ground to reveal a remarkable commemorative plaque. On Sept. 10, 1969, it states, a nuclear explosion “was detonated in this well,” 8,426 feet below.
The “nuclear gas stimulation” blast, intended to crack rocks shielding a billion-dollar lode of methane, was nearly three times as powerful as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and yielded the same deadly byproducts.
So when a new methane boom erupted across Garfield County, Kent figured his weekend retreat would be the last place anyone dared to drill.
He was wrong. In March, Colorado regulators will decide whether to let a Texas gas company bore holes as close as 900 feet to the radioactive blast site below Battlement Mesa.
The company’s application jolted neighbors like Kent, who say the quest for mineral riches beneath their land seems to accept no limits.
For enough money, “they’d drill through Abraham Lincoln’s brain,” he said.
In recent years, no gas company has proposed drilling this close to a nuclear test site anywhere in the United States.
The applicant insists its Colorado plan is safe. The U.S. Department of Energy is studying the risks, a project expected to take three years. Nuclear experts say the hazards, if any, would vary with the particular geology of the site.
Typically, many radioactive elements “would be pretty much held in the glassy melt” of rocks around the blast, said Darleane Hoffman, a nuclear chemist who studied their movement from a Nevada test site. But “if I lived there, I would want to see them test the gas samples.”
In Garfield County, gas companies are permitted to drill 9,600 feet down, well below the blast site, but must avoid a buffer zone around it.
The application to penetrate that zone comes from Presco Inc., a small, private company based in The Woodlands, Texas, that specializes in unconventional gas projects.
Kim Bennetts, Presco’s vice president for exploration and production, said independent experts will provide evidence in Colorado that its plans pose no public health threat.
“There’s no risk of any safety hazards to anyone,” he said. “We’ll be presenting testimony at the hearing to hopefully prove that.”
According to Bennetts, the worst hazard was expelled long ago, when a different company drilled directly into the blast cavity to collect methane freed by the nuclear test.
“That would have been the most dangerous thing anyone could have done, and it was done 35 years ago,” he said.
In Colorado, Presco has been drilling only in the rugged hills near the nuclear test site, at locations a mile or two away. The company focused its efforts there, Bennetts said, because when it arrived in 2001, “it was the only place there was open acreage that we were able to attain.”
“Things do go wrong”
The question before the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission: How close is too close to ground zero?
Two years ago, the commission established a half-mile buffer zone and required a hearing before anyone could drill within it.
It plans to hear Presco’s request in Garfield County, to give local residents a chance to speak. “We try to do that if there’s a great deal of public concern,” commission director Brian Macke said.
He said one-half mile “was believed to incorporate a very large safety factor,” and if the commission agrees to shrink it, Presco’s application “could potentially be approved with other conditions” to ensure public safety.
Presco is volunteering to test the water and gas and plug any well where radioactivity is detected.
Critics are wary of company assurances that its drills will not disturb a dormant monster. They note that another gas driller has been delivering bottled water to Garfield County homeowners near a creek polluted by a leak.
“We’re very dubious of their claims that nothing can go wrong,” said Duke Cox, president of the Grand Valley Citizens Alliance. “Things do go wrong. They go wrong all the time.”
Presco had one recent accident near the existing buffer zone. According to a state report, its drilling mud hit an underground spring and spilled into Battlement Creek, where an inspector found discolored water 3 1/2 miles downstream.
That alarmed Pat Warren, the nearest full-time resident to the nuclear test site.
“I went out one day, and the water was white. Holy mackerel,” she said.
Three years ago, she and her husband moved to a 37-acre ranch above Battlement Mesa with a stunning view of the Colorado River valley and the imposing Book Cliffs. They hung an arched sign over their piece of paradise, calling it Take a Break Creek.
Now they joke bitterly about renaming it Glow-in-the-Dark Park.
“We’re devastated. Totally devastated,” she said. “We cannot figure out why they’re pushing so hard to do this.”
Peacetime engineering
Edward Teller, the physicist known as the father of the H-bomb, launched the project that left the plaque by Wesley Kent’s cabin.
Teller inspired a federal campaign to show how the death-dealing power of atomic bombs could be used for peacetime “geographical engineering” as well.
Proponents crafted an impressive list of jobs demanding something stronger than dynamite: Blasting a wider ocean canal near or through Panama. Harvesting shale oil and deep deposits of natural gas. Moving mountains for highways.
The campaign set off more than two dozen nuclear explosions, mostly at the Nevada Test Site, before it was halted. For Project Rulison, it ventured to Colorado – an agricultural community in a Colorado River valley that held oil locked in shale and gas buried in thick sandstone formations.
In 1969, the Atomic Energy Commission announced that the government and a Texas company would detonate a tube of uranium at the bottom of a deep shaft in the hills above Rulison, cracking rocks shielding a gas field worth a hoped-for $1 billion or more.
The project brought a federal lawsuit and a small band of protesters who tried to halt the test by occupying a 5-mile evacuation zone. Dick Lamm, a young lawyer who would become Colorado’s governor, vainly pleaded for a U.S. Supreme Court injunction on the day of the blast.
On town streets and at an official viewing area, government and industry leaders gathered with curious citizens for the countdown.
Vi Searcy, who drove from Grand Junction to Parachute for the big event, remembers “the ground kind of rolling” beneath her feet as the shock wave from a 43-kiloton explosion 1 1/2 miles below generated an earthquake measured at 5.5 on the Richter scale.
In Parachute, gas-station owner Betty Letson noticed bricks tumbling from the walls of the post office next door.
Craig Hayward, the grandson of the test site’s landowner, remembers “rocks falling on both sides of the river” from the cliffs above. Across the ground, “there was a wave; you could see it coming,” he said. “Cars were swaying back and forth.” Afterward, he found his grandfather’s cabin had moved several inches off its foundation.
Chester McQueary, a protester occupying the site, lay facedown with a companion just 2 miles from the shaft. “We were lifted, we guess, 6 or 8 inches in the air,” he said.
The explosion produced dozens of damage claims, mostly for lost chimney bricks and cracked foundations. It also succeeded in cracking the sandstone formation below, but the natural gas it released proved too radioactive to sell. For years afterward, the gas flared and burned into the air of western Colorado instead. Then the shaft was plugged.
Testing for radioactivity
The Rulison test left a hole about 150 feet wide, rock fissures extending hundreds of feet from the cavern and about 50 radioactive isotopes. Some have half-lives measured in seconds or days and quickly dissipate their toxicity. Others would remain highly radioactive 37 years later. One troubling element, from a drilling standpoint, is tritium, or radioactive hydrogen, which can travel in gas or water.
The Department of Energy, which inherited the Rulison site, forbids any activity below 6,000 feet in the 40 acres surrounding it and requires notice of any drilling within 3 miles.
The agency believes the blast encased many of the long-lived radioactive elements in a layer of melted sand. But it expects to have a clearer picture when a geologic study of the site is completed, possibly in late 2008.
“Keep in mind, it’s kind of a dynamic system. It cracks. Other rocks fall into it. It’s not a nice, smooth glass,” said Peter Sanders, the agency’s project manager.
The federal study aims to gauge whether radioactive byproducts have migrated from the blast site, and if so, how far. Secondly, it will inquire whether “some man-made new influence” could affect their subterranean movement, Sanders said.
One Garfield County commissioner, Tresi Houpt, argues that Presco’s drilling plans should be postponed in the meantime. “As long as there’s a need to conduct the study, I think it’s beneficial to see what the results are,” she said. “I think it’s irresponsible to do otherwise.”
At Presco, Bennetts disagrees.
First, “there’s no guarantee that they’ll finish it,” he said. Secondly, “we’ll provide modeling by independent engineers that will be superior to anything the DOE can do.”
Wesley Kent knew the Rulison site was nearby when he bought 15 acres on a wooded hillside above Battlement Mesa. But he loved the area – he had led hunting trips for deer, elk and bear on this land – and water tests showed no signs of the radioactive elements below.
He spent two years building a cabin by hand below the Rulison plaque. Though he lives in Rifle, it became his vacation retreat, the place his family celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas and, he hoped, a retirement home.
“You’ll never have anything to worry about up here,” he said the testers assured him, “unless they drill or something.”
