As the United States (and the world at large) found itself staring at tons of nuclear bombs that it wanted to threaten to drop but not actually drop on anyone after World War II, various scientific and civilian institutions tried to come up with creative, peacetime ways to use the weapons of mass destruction.
The most prevalent of these programs was Project Plowshare (alternatively sometimes referred to as Operation Plowshare or the Plowshare Program) from the United States' Atomic Energy Commission. From 1958 to 1975, the AEC conducted and planned a series of tests and uses for the arsenal the country had accumulated while the Soviets created and executed a similarly themed program.
Here's some of the suggestions for using nukes for peaceful purposes that came out of that time, almost all of which were (fortunately) abandoned before fruition.
1Blow up part of Alaska to make a harbor
Project Chariot, part of the greater Plowshare Program to use nukes for non-war purposes, proposed using six hydrogen bombs to create a deep-water harbor near Cape Thompson, Alaska. The plan was shelved in 1962 after much public criticism about not only the ecological impact, but also the feasibility considering that the harbor would have been frozen for a large part of the year.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory/Wikimedia Commons
2 Blow up gas wells to stop runaway fires
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In 1966, the Soviets successfully used nuclear explosions to stop at least two runaway gas well fires. The idea is that an explosion located tangential to the well can close off the source the same way you might squeeze a straw and stop the flow. Obviously this is pretty much the last of last resorts, and there's some speculation that the reasons to Soviets wound up at this extreme solution is because they flubbed all the steps to stopping the fire any other way.
3Blow up rocks for fracking
Both the United States and the Soviet Union considered using nuclear explosions to accomplish the same goals as hydraulic fracturing (or just "fracking"): fracturing rock formations for the purpose of extracting natural gas.
Project Gasbuggy, part of the larger Plowshare Program, put a 28 kiloton device some 4,000 feet underground at a site in Carson National Forest that was known to contain natural gas deposits below sandstone. This test and two subsequent proved fairly successful, but the bombs left too much radiation in the gas and the method was ultimately abandoned.
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4 Blow up the Panama Canal to make it bigger
The Atomic Energy Commission definitely considered using "nuclear excavation" to make a bigger version of the Panama Canal as part of the Plowshare Program, which Popular Mechanics covered in detail at the time. The plan was ultimately scrapped for the same reason as many others: nuclear bombs are dangerous and unpredictable, and you actually need a whole lot of them to do any appreciable digging.
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5 Create a canal from scratch
One of the big projects the Soviets considered using nukes for making a canal basically from scratch. The Pechora–Kama Canal had been discussed and considered for decades, and would have connected the the Pechora River to the Kama River to open new routes for trade. The Soviets used three nuclear explosions as a base test for this, but abandoned the idea when they figured out it'd probably take several hundred charges to bomb out an entire canal.
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6 Blow up a mountainside to make way for a railway
Project Carryall, another subsidiary of the Plowshare Program, was never carried out in full, but it would have seen 20 bombs detonated to carve a path in California's Bristol Mountains for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe (ATSF) railway. But thanks to delays, uncertainty about the amount of potential fallout, and difficultly predicting blast patterns, the plane was ultimately scrapped. Probably for the best.
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7 Blow up the ground to divert water and make dams
Both Soviets and the United States considered using nukes to make craters and build damns to divert water for one reason or another. Several water reservoirs were created in this manner and some are still in use. and the Soviets were especially keen on the idea, but it eventually fell out of fashion due to associated costs and the general hassle of working with dangerous nuclear weapons. Some of the resevior attempts, like Lake Chagan, merely resulted in creating big, radioactive lakes.
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8Blow a big hole to put nuclear waste in
Nuclear explosions are great at making craters and underground cavities, so it's no surprise we once considered stashing nuclear waste underground cavern made using a nuclear bomb. The idea was that the cavity, created beneath a nuclear waste plant using a nuke, could be filled with waste, sealed, and then sit until the stewheated itself into a glass ball with the surrounding material, though ultimately the plan was abandoned.
Getty Department Of Energy (doe) / Contributor
