Drilling holes to test nuclear bombs
Parker Drilling Co. first came to Alaska in the late 1960s, not to drill oil wells, but to drill giant holes for the testing of nuclear devices by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.
Lowell Reed, who has worked for Parker Drilling “goin’ on some 42 years, now” as a start-up and trouble shooter, told PNA recently what it was like in those early years.
“Nixon was President,” Reed said, “and Parker Drilling had been working for the AEC at the Nevada test site. We were the successful bidder for the project in Alaska. We took four rigs up — the three big rigs were, at that time, the biggest rigs in the world. We still own the record of 6,000 feet of 72 inch hole. We actually started to drill several holes. One hole was 14 feet in diameter.”
As soon as the crew drilling the 72 inch hole reached 6,000 feet “all the rest of the big drilling was shut down, and they concentrated on running casing,” Reed said. The 64 inch diameter, 1 inch wall casing was set all the way to 6,000 feet.
“It’s the heaviest string that’s ever been run,” said Reed. “We could pick up a joint with the rig, but (the string) had to be lowered with jacks. Running that pipe took over a year. Every joint had to be welded, tested and pre-stressed.” Miners were brought in next After the casing was set, Parker moved the drill rig off of the hole. The Atomic Energy Commission then brought in miners who descended to the 3,000 foot level, cut through the casing and excavated a 30 foot diameter room. The drill rig was brought back onto the hole.
“The bomb,” Reed said, “looked just like a missile Ń just like something you’d shoot out of a silo.” They attached the bomb to the end of the drill pipe to let it down in, Reed said. “There were over 100 cables for instrumentation that went down with it so the whole process (of setting the bomb at the 3,000 foot mark) took over 100 days.”
The device was released from the 3,000 foot mark to free fall the remaining 3,000 feet for detonation, Reed said: “It only fell about 200 to 300 feet” before it was detonated. “That 30 foot diameter room was 300 feet in diameter in a matter of just milliseconds. Then in so many microseconds, all the hole became a vacuum and all the ground just sucked in. The surface of the ground sunk down about six or seven feet.”
A few weeks after the detonation, Parker went back and drilled into the detonation cavity so the Atomic Energy Commission could run more tests.
“I never went back after detonation,” Reed said, “because we were going full blast on the North Slope by then.” Prudhoe Bay is discovered Reed said he remembers that Parker brought the second drilling rig to the North Slope, followed shortly by another six rigs.
“We had a Hercules leased for an entire year from an outfit in Florida. There was a time when that Hercules made a round trip, every three hours, from Fairbanks to the North Slope. Probably two-thirds of everything we hauled up was dirt moving equipment to build roads,” said Reed.
“When we first went up we could only land on ice lakes. There were no roads. Of course when the thaw came on, all the activity was all over; you couldn’t do anything. But that went on only about two years, then the roads started coming in,” he said.
“That first winter, it was more than 60 degrees below zero for several weeks,” said Reed, “and I thought that was just normal, everyday winter on the North Slope. Come to find out, that was probably one of the worst. It took us over a month to rig up. We were actually out in whatever temperature we had. That’s where we worked for 12 hours.”
“Boy, by the time you’d come in after being out there 12 hours working, you’d come in so tired, it didn’t even seem like you went to bed. You’d wake up even more tired — day after day of the same thing,” he said.
In those early days of drilling on the North Slope all communications were scrambled so that oil company competitors could not gain any insight as to what was being tried or accomplished. In response, Reed said that some companies had personnel camped out in pup tents on the tundra to report on who was coming and going.
The rest, as they say, is history.
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