For the poor worldwide, this is a virgin spring. It starts becoming news when it affects our booshwah. Nevertheless, Dickless needs to be sued for it.

In the late 1960s the first plans for fracing to develop deep tight gas sources came from the one time Manhattan atomic bomb project scientists with their Plowshare projects. Today's fracing techniques had not yet been developed. Three experimental underground atomic explosions were done, one in NW New Mexico and two in Colorado at Project Rulison and Project Rio Blanco in west Central Colorado. The Atomic Energy Commission and its corporate co-sponsors claimed that if these experiments were successful they could then move on to develop a huge amount of new natural gas supply estimating as much as 73 trillion cubic feet. A natural gas expert at the Potential Gas Agency at the Colorado School of Mines examined their data and calculated that to produce this much gas would require around 13,000!! underground nuclear blasts across a vast area of the US Southwest where these deep tight gas formations exist. As typical the AEC scientists and their corporate buddies were not concerned with the collateral damage that a massive number of earthquake producing atomic blasts would produce: landslides, damage to bridges, buildings, highways, disruption of daily life, effects on groundwater, and many others.
The first Colorado blast was set off just exactly 40 years ago on September 10, 1969 after a protracted effort to get the federal courts to stop the blast failed, and an action by civil disobedient protests inside the strict quarantine zone around the blast site also was ignored, despite prior public AEC claims that their newly found, deep concern for human health and safety would not permit setting the blast off if anyone was within the 5 mile radius quarantine zone. And questions about the new natural gas being radioactive were brushed aside. After all these were the same folks who had been conducting hundreds of atmospheric nuclear tests in the South Pacific Marshall Islands and at the Nevada Test Site and sending spreading clouds of radioactive dust out into the world. Not one of these AEC scientists had the human decency, integrity or compassion to ever publicly express regret or doubt about this massive "experiment" with the health of all living things and their genetic heritage.

Now the area near the Project Rulison blast site is in the center of massive frac drilling using the new technology and toxifying domestic water wells and supplies, making people ill with the intense fumes and gases when wells are flared, and creating a dead moonscape of drill pads and pipelines. There are active proposals to drill near the Project Rulison blast site. As typical these days, regulatory agencies like the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission and the federal EPA are largely compliant with letting the industry do as it does with little or no direct oversight. People, the land, water, and the overall environment be damned. Anything for some more bucks. The new film, Split Estate, gives a sharp look at all this.

The late John Kenneth Galbraith once said that capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of reasons will somehow work for the benefit of us all.