DENVER—Garfield County is asking federal officials to drill test wells near a 1969 underground nuclear blast site to make sure that natural gas development won’t release any radioactive contamination.
The county commissioners have sent a letter to Colorado’s congressional delegation and the Department of Energy asking for field tests so companies drilling near Rulison in western Colorado don’t end up playing “a game of chicken.”
“We don’t really have adequate data in place to know how close we can get to the actual blast site without risking some kind of public health or environmental concern,” Commissioner Tresi Houpt said. “I haven’t seen the evidence that I’d need to say to landowners that it’s going to be OK.”
The area is in the Piceance Basin, a center of Colorado’s recent natural gas boom. Drilling has slowed as prices have dropped and credit has tightened, but wells are still being developed.
Federal officials say mathematical modeling and other investigations show that chances of contamination from the blast site are slim.
The DOE prohibits drilling within 40 acres of the area near Project Rulison, where a nuclear weapon was detonated 8,426 feet below the surface in 1969 to free up natural gas.
The gas was considered too radioactive to sell.
The state alerts the DOE when companies apply for drilling permits within three miles of the site 50 miles northeast of Grand Junction. The state imposes more stringent conditions the closer the well is to ground zero and requires sampling of the gas.
The closest well is seven-tenths of a mile from the blast site. The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which issues drilling permits, requires a hearing on permit applications within a half-mile.
A company withdrew an application to drill inside the half-mile zone in 2005 after objections from area residents and Garfield County.
Jack Craig of the DOE’s Office of Legacy Management said the agency believes it has enough data to say that it’s safe to drill within a half-mile if it’s phased in so the results can be monitored as activity gets closer to the site. His recommendation would have been “no” just a year ago, said Craig, project manager for Rulison.
“We’ve done significant, highly scientific modeling on the area,” Craig said.
The underground detonation of a 43-kiloton bomb was part of the federal government’s efforts to put nuclear devices to peaceful uses. The blast didn’t produce as much gas as expected.
The DOE says most of the radioactivity from the explosion was trapped in a glass dome that formed when melted and vaporized rock collected in a puddle with a diameter of about 160 feet and cooled. The government began deactivating and cleaning the area in the 1970s and monitored area groundwater.
A 2007 federal study using computer simulations found that no radioactive contamination above naturally occurring levels reached wells in the current buffer zones 95 percent of the time. The radioactivity in the other 5 percent was extremely low.
Garfield County officials want the DOE to go beyond computer modeling to define the nature and extent of the contamination. Judy Jordan, the county’s oil and gas liaison, said only one well was drilled after the blast to collect samples and data, and the county believes the DOE should do more on-the-ground investigating, which likely would include drilling test wells.
“We think it really deserves a little more comprehensive thinking,” Jordan said.
The county has questions about the potential impacts of hydraulic fracturing in the area. In the process, usually called “fracking,” fluids are forced down a well to create fractures so gas trapped in tight sands can flow.
The county commissioners have asked Colorado’s congressional delegation for help in forcing DOE to do more tests if it’s determined questions about possible contamination haven’t been answered. They said people who own minerals in the half-mile radius remain deprived of their property rights “as long as this stalemate involving undefined, potential contamination exists.”
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On the Net:
U.S. Department of Energy Office of Legacy Management, Rulison Site:
