Michael E. Webber, a mechanical engineer at the University of Texas, Austin, wrote to Dot Earth, a New York Times blog, in early May that he had surprised himself by considering what once seemed unthinkable. Seafloor nuclear detonation, he wrote, is starting to sound surprisingly feasible and appropriate.Much of the enthusiasm for an atomic approach is based on reports that the Soviet Union succeeded in using nuclear blasts to seal off gas wells. Milo D. Nordyke, in a 2000 technical paper for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., described five Soviet blasts from 1966 to 1981.All but the last blast were successful The 1966 explosion put out a gas well fire that had raged uncontrolled for three years But the last blast of the series, Mr Nordyke wrote, did not seal the well, perhaps because the nuclear engineers had poor geological data on the exact location of the borehole.
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