The USSR Once Tried Reversing a River's Direction with 'Peaceful Nuclear Explosions' (bbc.com)
(Sunday May 25, 2025 @03:34AM (EditorDavid)
from the big-bang-theory dept.)
- Reference: 0177729871
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/05/25/0040259/the-ussr-once-tried-reversing-a-rivers-direction-with-peaceful-nuclear-explosions
- Source link: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250523-the-soviet-plan-to-reverse-siberias-rivers-with-peaceful-nuclear-explosions
"In the 1970s, the USSR used nuclear devices to try to send water from Siberia's rivers flowing south, instead of its natural route north..." [1]remembers the BBC .
> [T]he Soviet Union simultaneously fired three nuclear devices buried 127m (417ft) underground. The yield of each device was 15 kilotonnes (about the same as the [2]atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 ). The experiment, codenamed "Taiga", was part of a two-decade long Soviet programme of carrying out [3]peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs).
>
> In this case, the blasts were supposed to help excavate a massive canal to connect the basin of the Pechora River with that of the Kama, a tributary of the Volga. Such a link would have allowed Soviet scientists to siphon off some of the water destined for the Pechora, and send it southward through the Volga. It would have diverted a significant flow of water destined for the Arctic Ocean to go instead to the hot, heavily populated regions of Central Asia and southern Russia. This was just one of a planned series of gargantuan "river reversals" that were designed to alter the direction of Russia's great Eurasian waterways...
>
> Years later, Leonid Volkov, a scientist involved in preparing the Taiga explosions, recalled the moment of detonation. "The final countdown began: ...3, 2, 1, 0... then fountains of soil and water shot upward," he [4]wrote . "It was an impressive sight." Despite Soviet efforts to minimise the fallout by using a low-fission explosive, which produce fewer atomic fragments, the blasts were [5]detected as far away as the United States and Sweden, whose governments lodged formal complaints, accusing Moscow of violating the [6]Limited Test Ban Treaty ...
>
> Ultimately, the nuclear explosions that created Nuclear Lake, one of the few physical traces left of river reversal, were deemed a failure because the crater was not big enough. Although similar PNE canal excavation tests were [7]planned , they were never carried out. In 2024, the leader of a scientific expedition to the lake [8]announced radiation levels were normal.
"Perhaps the final nail in the coffin was the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, which not only consumed a huge amount of money, but pushed environmental concerns up the political agenda," the article notes.
"Four months after the Number Four Reactor at [9]the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded , Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev cancelled the river reversal project."
And a Russian blogger who travelled to Nuclear Lake in the summer of 2024 told the BBC that nearly 50 years later, there were some places where the radiation was still significantly elevated.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250523-the-soviet-plan-to-reverse-siberias-rivers-with-peaceful-nuclear-explosions
[2] https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Events/1945/hiroshima.htm
[3] https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs07nordyke.pdf
[4] https://elib.biblioatom.ru/text/vesi-gosudarstvennaya-programma-sssr-7_2021/p36/
[5] https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs07nordyke.pdf
[6] https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/jfk-in-history/nuclear-test-ban-treaty
[7] https://elib.biblioatom.ru/text/vesi-gosudarstvennaya-programma-sssr-7_2021/p35/
[8] https://vk.com/id3693910?from=search&w=wall3693910_5284
[9] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-know-chernobyls-true-death-toll
> [T]he Soviet Union simultaneously fired three nuclear devices buried 127m (417ft) underground. The yield of each device was 15 kilotonnes (about the same as the [2]atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 ). The experiment, codenamed "Taiga", was part of a two-decade long Soviet programme of carrying out [3]peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs).
>
> In this case, the blasts were supposed to help excavate a massive canal to connect the basin of the Pechora River with that of the Kama, a tributary of the Volga. Such a link would have allowed Soviet scientists to siphon off some of the water destined for the Pechora, and send it southward through the Volga. It would have diverted a significant flow of water destined for the Arctic Ocean to go instead to the hot, heavily populated regions of Central Asia and southern Russia. This was just one of a planned series of gargantuan "river reversals" that were designed to alter the direction of Russia's great Eurasian waterways...
>
> Years later, Leonid Volkov, a scientist involved in preparing the Taiga explosions, recalled the moment of detonation. "The final countdown began: ...3, 2, 1, 0... then fountains of soil and water shot upward," he [4]wrote . "It was an impressive sight." Despite Soviet efforts to minimise the fallout by using a low-fission explosive, which produce fewer atomic fragments, the blasts were [5]detected as far away as the United States and Sweden, whose governments lodged formal complaints, accusing Moscow of violating the [6]Limited Test Ban Treaty ...
>
> Ultimately, the nuclear explosions that created Nuclear Lake, one of the few physical traces left of river reversal, were deemed a failure because the crater was not big enough. Although similar PNE canal excavation tests were [7]planned , they were never carried out. In 2024, the leader of a scientific expedition to the lake [8]announced radiation levels were normal.
"Perhaps the final nail in the coffin was the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, which not only consumed a huge amount of money, but pushed environmental concerns up the political agenda," the article notes.
"Four months after the Number Four Reactor at [9]the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded , Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev cancelled the river reversal project."
And a Russian blogger who travelled to Nuclear Lake in the summer of 2024 told the BBC that nearly 50 years later, there were some places where the radiation was still significantly elevated.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250523-the-soviet-plan-to-reverse-siberias-rivers-with-peaceful-nuclear-explosions
[2] https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Events/1945/hiroshima.htm
[3] https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs07nordyke.pdf
[4] https://elib.biblioatom.ru/text/vesi-gosudarstvennaya-programma-sssr-7_2021/p36/
[5] https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs07nordyke.pdf
[6] https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/jfk-in-history/nuclear-test-ban-treaty
[7] https://elib.biblioatom.ru/text/vesi-gosudarstvennaya-programma-sssr-7_2021/p35/
[8] https://vk.com/id3693910?from=search&w=wall3693910_5284
[9] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-know-chernobyls-true-death-toll
The 60s were crazy in the US (Score:2)
by reanjr ( 588767 )
The US got into the planning stages of some pretty crazy nuclear bomb projects, I think mostly in the 60s. Hell, just recently Trump was talking about nuking hurricanes, an idea that did not originate with him, but with cold war era atom warriors.
China actually did something similar (Score:3)
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ... despite worries about relocating people (at least 330,000) and environmental impact. For better or worse, the Chinese are still carrying the torch of Soviet ideology, and the result is that they get a lot more done more quickly than anywhere else, because "resistance is futile" when a project gets the green light from on high. At the very least, we can look to China to see the cutting edge of what various experiments in grand-scale infrastructure projects can achieve, or fail to achieve. It's like a real-life simulation of pie-in-the-sky ideas that would never get past the political quagmires in the West.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Transfer_Project
Re: China actually did something similar (Score:1)
The US also tried it. The problem is that under water (or wet ground) explosions cause serious nuclear pollution
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, just another example of Northern China stealing from the South.
Re: (Score:2)
You can't really compare the two though. The Soviet effort was more of an experiment, where as China is using well established engineering principles, just on a scale that hasn't been seen anywhere else.
It's not just China that is good at these kinds of infrastructure projects though, there are countries in Europe that get them done too. It's really down to politics screwing things up or not. Countries that are good at infrastructure do regular projects, which allows the government institutions to build up