Atomic Machines: An Atompunk Sampler Part 2

Guest post by Mark J. Appleton. Check out Part 1.

I present, for your reading pleasure, further excerpts from the stranger side of atomic history.

Project A119
What: A top-secret proposal by the US Air Force to drop an atomic bomb on the moon – specifically, a 1.7-kiloton W25 warhead.   Allegedly, the regolith thrown up by the blast would provide insights into lunar geology, but mostly the Air Force wanted to do something to respond to the Sputnik launch and show the US wasn't going to be left behind in the Space Race.

When: May 1958 through January 1959.

How Far: A119 never left paper, although most of the components for the project were being developed anyway for other programs.

Why Not: At some point, someone realized that while nuking the moon is impressive, it's not necessarily the sort of impression you want to make.

How It Could Happen: It probably couldn't, but if for some reason the US government suffered a fit of collective insanity, it would certainly be technically feasible by the early 60's at the latest.   Alternatively, if you're willing to take a somewhat broader view, the Plowshare program did briefly investigate using underground nuclear explosions to extract water from the lunar regolith, as Project MOSES.

Further Reading: US planned one big nuclear blast for mankind.

Nuclear Hurricane Steering
What: Detonating twenty-megaton hydrogen-bombs in the eyes of hurricanes, so that the heat would loft air into the upper atmosphere, reducing the hurricane's power. Yes, really. Preliminary calculations by Dr. Jack W. Reed of Sandia Laboratory suggested that one bomb could slow a 150-knot hurricane to 120 knots, and a 100-knot hurricane to 50 knots.

When: Dr. Reed first proposed the idea in 1956, and continued pushing it until 1961.   Shortly afterwards the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty made it illegal.

How Far: Some very low-level theoretical work was done, but no real work on hardware.

Why Not: Even in the 1950s, modifying the weather with hydrogen bombs was a little too Buck Rogers-ish to be taken seriously.

How It Could Happen: It's not clear if this would actually work (although as of 2004 Dr. Reed still believed it would). But a world that had already embraced the other Plowshare programs for nuclear earth-moving and resource extraction might give this a go as well.

Further Reading: Nuking Hurricanes.

The X-12 Atomic Locomotive
What: A nuclear-powered locomotive. The X-12 was a class project for a group of nuclear physicists at the University of Utah, under the instruction of Prof. Lyle Borst, a Manhattan Project alum. It would be powered by a 6 MWe aqueous homogenous reactor, running on weapons-grade uranium and producing 7,000 horsepower, and would need a separate radiator car to dispose of waste heat. Massing 720,000 lbs., at the time it would have been the fifth biggest locomotive ever built, and the third most powerful.

When: The class was held in 1953 and the results published in 1954. Articles appeared on the concept in Life, Popular Science, and other major magazines.

How Far: Borst took out a patent for the proposal in 1955, and claimed Babcock & Wilcox were interested in developing the concept, but it never seems to have gone any further.

Why Not: The class's economic analysis claimed that a nuclear-powered locomotive could be competitive with diesels, but pretty much no one else agreed with them. A more plausible estimate by a railway engineer, Bruce Gunnel, in 1955, concluded an atomic engine would be about two and a half times as expensive as a diesel to operate, even without taking into account safety and liability issues – even the engineers of the 1950's were uncomfortable with the thought of nuclear trains cruising the railways of Middle America.

How It Could Happen: The atomic locomotive is most cost-effective over very long routes, preferably through barren regions. It also helps if diesel fuel is very, very expensive. That's a mix that's not likely to happen historically, but might in a post-apocalyptic future or an alternate world. Alternatively, in 1955 Senator John Butler proposed that the Atomic Energy Commission build a nuclear-powered “freedom train” as a public relations exercise, a locomotive equivalent of the NS Savannah nuclear-powered merchant ship; that's unlikely to lead to widespread use of the technology, but it might conceivably be built as a one-off demonstration.

Further Reading: To Peoria by Atom.

The Nuclear-Powered Swimsuit
What: It's technically not nuclear-powered, nor a swimsuit, but that sounds better than a “radiothermally heated wetsuit”. The suit had a network of small tubes woven through it, connected to a small capsule worn on the diver's back.   Ocean water would be heated by the radioactive decay of a small charge of plutonium-238 – this is not the stuff in bombs, it's the material that powers the Mars rovers – and then circulated by a small pump through the tubes, keeping the diver warm even in the briny deeps.

When: Mid- to late 1960s.

How Far: A full prototype was built and tested.

Why Not: It didn't work. Specifically, it didn't produce enough heat to keep the diver warm. That problem could probably be overcome with a larger Pu-238 charge, but that stuff is expensive.

How It Could Happen: We decide to spend the money. A Pu-238 wetsuit heater will never be cheap, but if the military wants it badly enough, it could happen and the price of Pu-238 could probably be brought down if we decided to produce it in quantity.

Further Reading: The Nuclear-Powered Swimsuit.

Lockheed CL-1201-1
What: See those little things hanging off the wings? Those are fighter jets. It's a nuclear-powered flying aircraft carrier.

The CL-1201-1 would be a massive flying wing, weighing about 5,500 tons – about eight and a half times more than the Antonov An-225 Mri.ya, the biggest airplane ever built. Flight power would be provided by a 1.8 GW nuclear reactor, linked by liquid-sodium coolant loops to four gigantic turbofans on the back of the wing; these could be augmented by 182 conventional jet engines that would pop out of the hull to allow it to take off vertically. 22 jet fighters would be carried under the wings, with another 2 in a central hangar, plus 10 “long-range missiles” of unspecified type and “defensive laser weapons.”

A typical mission would see a CL-1201-1 escorting seven CL-1201-3's – a troop transport version of the monster plane – to conduct combat operations in areas far removed from US bases or aircraft carriers. The “-3” suggests there were other types proposed as well, but unfortunately the original study has been lost.

When: 1969.

How Far: Paper only.

Why Not: Do I really need to explain?

How It Could Happen: If the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion program was successful...and if that lead to the construction of gigantic super-planes due to economies of scale...and if the US Navy, for whatever reason, lost a whole lot of budget battles to the Air Force...maybe, maybe then.

Extinguishing Gas Well Fires with Hydrogen Bombs
What: In 1963, a team of Russian gas drillers lost control of well number 11 in the Urtabulak gas field in southern Uzbekistan.   By lost control I mean it created a blaze so massive they were unable to extinguish it.

Over the next three years 12 million cubic meters of gas burned each day – enough to supply the entire city of Leningrad. Since all normal means of extinguishing the fire failed, and Russia was starting to get interested in this “peaceful nuclear explosions” thing the Americans had been going on about, they decided to try nuking it.

A diagonal hole was drilled from the surface to within 35 meters of the uncontrolled well hole. A 30-kiloton nuclear bomb from the Arzamas laboratory was inserted down the hole and detonated. Twenty-three seconds later the flow of gas stopped – the shock wave from the blast had pinched the well shut.   The project was so successful the Russians did it four more times.

When: The first was in 1966, the last in 1981.

How Far: All the way.

Why Not: Unfortunately, English-language information on the program is pretty scanty. The Russian version of the Plowshare project continued until the collapse of the Soviet Union, so it wasn't that. The final shot, PYRITE, apparently failed to stop the leak, and that may have been the reason why they stopped doing it.

How It Could Happen: It did.

Further Viewing: An Atomic Bomb will stop the Gulf Oil Leak, LOOK!

Project ICEWORM
What: A network of tunnels excavated in the northern Greenland icecap, covering 52,000 square miles – about the size of Alabama. 600 Iceman ballistic missiles would shuttle through the complex on mobile launch vehicles, controlled from sixty nuclear-powered control centers. Since the Soviet Union would not be able to detect the missiles through the ice, they wouldn't be able to destroy them.

When: 1960 through 1962.

How Far: Two paper studies were done. In addition, although this may not have been directly related to ICEWORM, the military operated an underground camp in the ice sheet, Camp Century, for several years, to develop techniques for living and working under the ice.

Why Not: One of the things the Army discovered at Camp Century is that the ice is not actually stable. It shifts. A lot. The tunnels would have to be continuously re-excavated to keep them from pinching shut, which made the whole project impractical.

How It Could Happen: It couldn't. Even if the ice didn't keep moving, the Danes would never agree to basing hundreds of nuclear missiles on their territory. However, while ICEWORM is impossible, a modified version of the idea using tunnels dug in rock is quite feasible, though expensive. It was one of the ideas proposed for basing the MX Peacekeeper in the late 70s and early 80s, and with some change in circumstances might well happen.

Further Reading: Nukes on Ice: ICEWORM and the Army's Quest for Strategic Nuclear Weapons.

The Schoharie Valley Townsite
What: Dubbed “A Protected Community for the Nuclear Age”, the Schoharie Valley Townsite was a project by a class of graduate architecture students to design a factory town that could maintain war production while under nuclear attack. The town was not designed to withstand a direct hit, but would (they hoped) be able to keep the production lines running after a detonation by a 20-megaton hydrogen-bomb at a three mile distance. The community of 9,000 would feature a network of underground shelters linked by a “seatway” network, an electronics factory dug into a limestone cave, and, of course, a nuclear reactor for power.

When: The class itself was in 1959. The professor teaching the class, F. W. Edmondson, presented it at conferences into at least 1961.

How Far: They made some models and diagrams.

Why Not: Schoharie Valley was always just a class project. Besides that, though, the concept occupies an uncomfortable position between being too hardened to be cheap, but not enough to survive a direct attack.

How It Could Happen: Something like Schoharie Valley could easily happen if the US was more interested in civil defense – it would be a considerable piece of engineering, but not on the Olympian scale of the Manhattan Shelter Study. Perhaps if Nelson Rockefeller, who was a strong supporter of civil defense, was elected president we might see projects like this happen.

Project ROCKSITE
What: Undersea bases built by digging a vertical shaft into the sea floor, installing an airlock in the shaft, and then keeping on digging down. Powered by small nuclear reactors, ROCKSITE installations would provide one-atmosphere shirt-sleeve environments under thousands of feet of water. Proposed uses included petroleum and mineral mining, submarine resupply depots, scientific laboratories, and sonar and weapon installations.

When: Mid to late 1960s.

How Far: Paper studies only.

Why Not: There's still enough ore deposits on land that we don't need to mine underwater. I'm not sure why the scientific and military applications weren't pursued, unfortunately. I've found one statement that an undersea base project was dropped after a review by outside researchers concluded that they were radically underestimating the cost (which was compared unfavorably to the Apollo project), but I'm not sure if that is referring to ROCKSITE. A simpler explanation may just be that nobody wanted an undersea base badly enough to build one.

How It Could Happen: While undersea mining is currently too expensive to bother with, that may not be true forever. Once oceanic mining becomes cost-effective, ROCKSITE might be a viable approach.

Project EXCALIBUR
What: An X-ray laser for shooting down incoming Soviet missiles.   Specifically, an X-ray laser deriving its energy from an exploding hydrogen-bomb.

The details of the project are still deeply, deeply classified. What we know is that a nuclear explosive, either pre-placed in orbit or launched on quick-reaction ballistic missiles, would be used to “pump” a cluster of X-ray lasing rods. Each EXCALIBUR bomb would, in theory, be able to shoot down multiple incoming warheads – possibly as many as fifty.

When: The 1980s, with the project shut down in 1992.

How Far: There were at least ten underground nuclear tests.

Why Not: It's not entirely clear to me why the project was abandoned. A popular explanation is that it didn't actually work, and that may well be true – there are good reasons to be skeptical of whether the system could even theoretically do what its backers claimed, but the end of the program also coincides with the US moratorium on nuclear testing, and that may be the real reason it was shut down.

How It Could Happen: It depends on if it could actually work or not. If it could, all we need is for the Cold War to go on a bit longer. An ABM system that is even partially effective against a massive missile barrage would be irresistible to either side.

That's all for now. I hope you've enjoyed this tour through atompunk history, and remember: the atom is your friend.

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Mark J. Appleton blogs on atompunk history at Atomic Skies.

Atomic Machines: An Atompunk Sampler

Guest post by Mark J. Appleton.

The dawn of the atomic age in 1945 inspired myriad proposals for ways to apply this terrifying new force.   Some of these – power plants, ships, and submarines – were actually built.   Many more were not.

As a connoisseur of atompunk – retrofuturism based on the 50s and 60s, standing to Robert Heinlein and rocketships as steampunk is to Jules Verne and zeppelins – I have collected some of the more entertaining possibilities thrown up in those heady early years.   I've decided to limit my selection to American proposals for the moment, but similar projects were launched in other countries as well.   These were not merely the musings of fanciful journalists, but serious proposals put forth by scientists and engineers that, with a change in circumstances, might perhaps have been built.

The Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion Program
What: ANP aimed to build a plane with jet engines powered by heat from a nuclear reactor instead of burning oil.   The massive radiation shielding needed meant the A-plane would be expensive, slow, and huge – more than twice the size of the B-52 – but it could potentially stay aloft for weeks.   A nuclear-powered airplane could orbit over the oceans continuously, beyond the reach of Soviet attacks, and then approach and strike its targets from any direction.

When: 1945 to 1961, with some research continuing into the early 70s.

How Far: Convair installed a low-power nuclear reactor in a B-36 and flew it 47 times – followed by a plane carrying paratroopers.   If the NB-36 crashed, their job was to jump down and secure the wreckage – the 2 MWth reactor was too small to contaminate a large area, but the intense radioactivity would make the crash site extremely dangerous for unprotected onlookers and would-be rescuers.

GE also built and static-tested three nuclear-powered turbojets in Idaho, known as the Heat Transfer Reactor Experiments.   HTRE-3 was essentially a prototype of a flyable atomic jet engine.

And Oak Ridge National Laboratory built and briefly operated a prototype molten-salt-fueled reactor for a more advanced indirect-cycle propulsion system, although it wasn't connected to a jet engine.

Why Not: The Air Force kept changing their mind through the 1950s about whether or not they actually wanted a nuclear airplane; the resulting oscillations in the budget seriously delayed development.   By the time Kennedy was elected the government had spent $2 billion on the project – more than $15 billion in modern money – and expected to spend a lot more before an A-plane could see combat.   Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara decided that the money could be better spent on intercontinental ballistic missiles.

How It Could Happen: The simplest point of divergence would be more consistent support from the Pentagon; with stable funding, a low-power prototype could fly before 1960, although it would not be suitable for combat.   It's harder to find a way to keep A-planes flying, given the obvious safety and environmental problems, but they could perhaps find roles as ballistic missile carriers and airborne command/communications posts.

Further Reading: Giving Wings to the Atom

Project PLUTO
What: A nuclear-powered cruise missile.   Actually, it was more like a nuclear-powered unmanned bomber – powered by a direct-cycle nuclear ramjet, and without the need for any wussy “radiation shielding”, the Supersonic Low-Altitude Missile (SLAM) could reach Mach 3.   Boosted to its operating speed by strap-on solid rockets, the SLAM would penetrate Soviet airspace at treetop height, carrying 12 hydrogen bombs and spraying radioactive fission products behind it.

When: 1957 through 1964.

How Far: Two nuclear ramjets, Tory-IIA and -IIC, were static-tested in Nevada.   Tory-IIC reached 513 MWth power for five minutes, cooled by pressurized air supplied by 25 miles of oil well casing.

Why Not: PLUTO, like ANP, found itself outclassed by cheaper, simpler ballistic missiles.   An extra problem was that no one could figure out a way to test such a machine without running the risk of the guidance computer going haywire and, say, taking it on a tour of downtown Los Angeles, spraying fallout behind it.   One engineer proposed flying it over Nevada tied to a gigantic tether.

How It Could Happen: Stall the development of ballistic missiles long enough and PLUTO might have a chance.   PLUTO was as fast as the planned B-70 Valkyrie, could remain on airborne alert for weeks, and could penetrate Soviet airspace via circuitous routes at low altitude.   Perhaps if the Nazis had put the money for the V-2 into more V-1's instead, leading to less post-war support for ballistic missiles, ballistic missiles could be delayed long enough for PLUTO to fly.

Further Reading: The Flying Crowbar

Project Orion
What: A spacecraft propelled by nuclear explosions.   The ship would be mounted on top of a giant “pusher plate”; small hydrogen bombs would be ejected out the back, and the ship would ride the shockwave.   An ideal spaceship drive has both a high thrust, so that it can push out of the Earth's gravity, and a high fuel efficiency, so that it does not need a massive fuel tank.   Existing spaceship drives can only achieve one or the other; Orion is one of the few proposals that could offer both.   Project engineers envisioned 10,000-ton spaceships making three-year cruises of the Saturn system or putting thousands of tons of payload into Earth orbit.

When: Although first proposed in 1946, real development work began in 1958 and continued until 1964.

How Far: Several small model-scale demonstrators using conventional explosives were flown; one reached a height of 56 meters.

Why Not: Orion always faced a number of challenges, but the proximate cause of the project's demise was the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which forbade nuclear explosions that were not contained deep underground.

How It Could Happen: It's not entirely clear even today if Orion would actually work – several serious technical problems remained, such as pusher plate ablation, misfire recovery, and coping with the EMP generated during launch.   Leaving those aside, the simplest way to get Orion flying is for the human race to need to launch a lot of payload into space as quickly as possible.   Say, if aliens showed up, or we discovered the Earth is going to explode.

Further Reading: Project Orion

The Pan-Atomic Canal
What: A new canal excavated through central America with hundreds of hydrogen bombs.   The new canal would be wider than the Panama Canal, allowing bigger ships to cross, and located at sea level, so it would not need the Panama Canal's complicated system of locks to carry ships over the mountains.

When: The late 50s through mid 60s.

How Far: Several nuclear cratering tests were conducted at the Nevada Test Site, most famously the 100-kiloton SEDAN test.

Why Not: Like Orion, the project was scuppered by the Partial Test Ban Treaty.   Work continued for some time after the PTBT was signed, since the Atomic Energy Commission hoped the Soviets might agree to a revision of the treaty for “peaceful nuclear explosions”, but this was not to be.   Besides this, it was rather questionable if the US could find a partner in Central America willing to host several hundred thermonuclear detonations.   Panama was certainly not interested – in addition to the obvious issues, a new sea-level canal would mean the thousands of Panamanians employed operating the existing canal lock system would be laid off.

How It Could Happen: Not only do you need a very different public attitude towards radiation, but also a reason for why the Panama canal could not be used.   That means somehow detaching Panama from the American orbit and attaching it to someone else's, presumably Russia.   A communist-aligned Panama under the Soviet nuclear umbrella, though implausible, would definitely lead to a new canal of some kind.

Project PACER
What: Electrical power generated from nuclear fusion has been a holy grail for physics since the mid-1950s, but so far we've only been able to produce fusion energy in bombs.   So a group of Los Alamos scientists proposed a simple solution to the problem: detonate hydrogen bombs in enormous underground chambers filled with steam, and use the heat produced to drive a turbine.   Two 50-kiloton blasts per day would power a 2 GWe generating station, enough to power 1.6 million American homes.

But electricity would really be a side-benefit; PACER's main product would be neutrons from the blast, which would transmute thorium into fissile uranium-233 to power conventional nuclear reactors.   The U-233 would produce ten times as much energy as the PACER machine itself.

When: The concept was proposed in 1957 and studied off-and-on by the Plowshare project.   PACER itself lasted from 1972 to 1974.

How Far: One nuclear test in 1961, GNOME, had power generation as a secondary purpose, but PACER itself was largely limited to computer modeling and nuclear charge design.

Why Not: PACER would only be cost-competitive if it could produce U-233 fuel more cheaply than conventional uranium fuel could be mined – and an outside review in 1975 concluded the price of uranium would have to rise by a factor of eight before that happened.

How It Could Happen: It probably couldn't happen historically – but it's imaginable it might come into use some time in the far future, if all other resources are depleted and no better alternative is found.

The Manhattan Shelter Study
What: A system of underground bomb shelters deep enough to survive (hopefully) a direct hit with a high-yield thermonuclear weapon and the ensuing radioactive fallout.   Although the study used Manhattan as a case study, the plan was to build them in every major urban area in the country, with space for 200 million people in total – the system would make Fallout's Vaults look like broom closets.   The Manhattan shelters would have enough supplies for two months of underground living, and be powered by four submarine reactors.

When: 1956 through 1958.

How Far: A preliminary study with some concept art.

Why Not: It would be insanely expensive – the study estimated their proposed national shelter system would cost $1.6 trillion in 2012 dollars, and I have it on expert authority that that is likely an underestimate by a factor of six.   Also, one in every ten people in the country would be recruited as quasi-military “civil defense cadres”, and the Eisenhower administration was unwilling to endorse such a permanent militarization of American society.

How It Could Happen: Given the titanic resources demanded for such a project, it will only happen if the US government and populace believe nuclear war is not just possible, but actually imminent.   My suggestion would be that continued US neutrality in World War II allows the Nazis to defeat Russia; by 1960 the US has woken up to the threat and is furiously building up for an anticipated nuclear war with a genocidal Third Reich led by an increasingly unstable Hitler.

Further Reading: Rock to Hide Me

The Subterrene
What: A tunneling machine that would drill through the Earth by melting the rock in front of it with heat from a nuclear reactor.

When: 1970 through 1976.

How Far: Small-scale versions using electrical heating elements instead of an atomic reactor were built and successfully tested.   Patents were filed on the nuclear version, but no serious development work was done.

Why Not: I haven't found any record for the specific reason, but the 1970s were not a good time to be proposing new and exciting uses for the atom.   The Atomic Energy Commission was transforming into the Department of Energy and nuclear energy wasn't sexy anymore; there was no appetite in Washington for the effort needed to turn this into a working technology.

How It Could Happen: There's likely no way to rescue the subterrene in the '70s.   But a world that saw significantly more use of nuclear energy in general, and a public more tolerant of radiation hazards, could perhaps see the machines be built.   And even if it was never used on Earth, there have been several proposals to use it in space, such as on a probe to melt through the Europan ice cap to the ocean underneath.

Further Reading: The Atomic Subterrene

Thermal Radiation Attenuating Clouds (TRAC)
What: Massive smoke generators would cover cities with dense banks of smog.   The smoke would absorb the pulse of heat from an atomic bomb detonation, attenuating it and reducing the damage.   A bomb would still damage a TRAC-protected city, but to a lesser degree.

When: 1951 through the late 60s.

How Far: Prototype smoke generators were built and tested in two nuclear tests in the 1950s.

Why Not: I have not found a specific reason for TRAC's cancellation, but I suspect it was cancelled because while it did work, it only reduced (not eliminated) the damage, and only one type of damage – TRAC did nothing to shield against blast or radiation.

How It Could Happen: Like the Manhattan Shelter Study, TRAC is only likely to happen if the United States believes that a nuclear war is imminent, and is desperately trying to do anything it can to minimize the damage.

Chrysler TV-8
What: It's a nuclear-powered tank.   Yes, really.

When: 1955.

How Far: They made a really cool-looking scale model.   The TV-8 was a speculative tank design proposed more as a thought experiment than anything else.   The nuclear engine was just one possibility listed among a number of other propulsion options, and most of the work was on the unusual (and bizarre) hull design intended to resist near-misses by tactical nuclear weapons.

Why Not: It was determined the TV-8's unusual design did not actually offer any advantages.

How It Could Happen: It probably couldn't.   Even if the TV-8 was somehow built, it wouldn't have a nuclear engine – I'm skeptical a reactor could even be made small enough to move such a vehicle using 1950s technology.   It certainly could not be done at a price even the Pentagon would be willing to pay.

Further Reading: The Chrysler TV-8 Concept Tank

Nuclear Gas and Oil Stimulation
What: Using deeply-buried hydrogen bombs to break up rock to release natural gas or oil – think of it as nuclear fracking.

When: The late 50s through early 70s.

How Far: Three natural gas stimulation shots were conducted (GASBUGGY, RULISON, and RIO BLANCO), as well as several tests at the Nevada Test Site to develop nuclear explosives that would produce less radioactive contamination in the gas.

Why Not: Three reasons: because of worry about nuclear proliferation, because the biggest experimental test failed to actually produce much gas due to mistakes in site selection, and because by the early 70s people no longer thought that a little radiation in the morning put hair on your chest.

How It Could Happen: The Russians actually did it, setting off 25 oil and gas stimulation shots, so it apparently can be cost-effective (English-language reports disagree about whether the gas produced was radioactive).   However, widespread use of nuclear stimulation goes against the strong anti-proliferation inclinations of the US government since the 60s, and as long as simpler, less nukey options are available it's very unlikely the technology would be deployed even if radiation was not a concern.   Perhaps if the US became extremely desperate for oil it might be deployed.

Check out Part 2!

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Mark J. Appleton blogs on atompunk history at Atomic Skies.