Remembering a Nuclear Explosion to Close a Gas Well in the USSR

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Thirty-seven Years Ago

   A nuclear explosion was set off 37 years ago, near Krestishche village in Krasnograd district, Kharkiv Region. It was the first in Ukraine and probably the only one in the European part of the Soviet Union. Scientists had determined that a large gas condensate field in the area which was discovered in 1970 could hold up to 300 billion cubic meters of fuel. In 1971, 17 wells were already operating in the Krasnograd district. But an accident occurred when drilling a new well at the field in July 1971. Gas came to the surface before the well reached its planned depth and the force of the spewing gas condensate reached 400 atmospheres, throwing two workers into the air.

   Engineers took days deciding what to do to stop the well. The nearest village was just 500 meters away. Residents were told to not light any fires and to stay out of their homes and not turn on any lights. Unable to stop the gas, the engineers decided to light it. By the next day, the burning flare was tens of meters high. Several attempts were made during the next year to put out the fire. Filling the well with tons of concrete slabs did not work - they flew apart like toys. Such flares are normally put out by capping the well. But for this case, specialists from Moscow offered an original solution – an underground nuclear explosion.

   The country's leaders approved the idea and Communist Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and Council of Ministers Chair Aleksey Kosygin signed off on the project. Troops from the KGB and Interior Ministry were brought in to help officials from the Ministry of Medium-sized Machine Tooling. No locals troops were brought in and local specialists were forced to sign non-disclosure agreements even though they were not told what was going to take place.

   Preparations took several months. A lateral bore had to be drilled to the exploration well at a depth of two kilometers. And then the nuclear detonator had to be installed. Everything was under the command of a general from an all-Union agency in charge of underground nuclear explosions.

Ready to Blast

   About 400 people lived just 400-500 meters from the well in Pershotravneve village. Local residents knew the commotion around the well meant it was being prepared for closure, but they knew nothing of the planned nuclear blast.

   The site was fenced off at a radius of 400 meters all the way around and filled with a 20-centimeter layer of river sand. The command center was guarded by KGB troops and other sites were overseen by troops from the Moscow Interior Ministry. All of the other wells at the field were plugged and everyone involved was given special clothing to protect them from radiation.

   By mid-summer 1972, everything was ready. On July 10, 1972, countdown began and at exactly 10 o'clock in the morning, the ground shook and everything around moved. A huge, dirty radioactive mushroom cloud arose over a kilometer high and then quietly floated off towards Sanzhar (Poltava Region, Ukraine). Eye-witnesses recall that as the shadow passed everyone felt as if the world was ending.

   And then there was a deathly silence. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief, convinced the attempt to plug the fiery well had succeeded. But just 20 second later, a boom shook the ground a second time: the gas volcano unexpectedly came back to life, shooting a powerful kilometer-high stream of gas and rock into the air.

   Animals lay stunned as if dead. Chickens flew sideways and roosters upside down. Bees flew out of their hives crash landing near-by. Glass windows blew out of homes and chimneys and stoves were overturned. Surrounded by summertime and green, the village looked like a deserted ruin. It took a year to rebuild, and still the villagers did not know what exactly had happened.

   People living in other villages nearby said no-one ever warned them of the danger of radiation or told them not to eat their fruits or vegetables or drink their cows' milk. But they learned later - apparently someone in the village was tuning in to the Voice of America.

The Soviet Union's "Peaceful atoms"

   Beginning in 1965, the USSR carried out a wide ranging program using nuclear explosions in the interests of industry. Of 124 peaceful explosions (all of them underground) 117 were technically detonated outside of nuclear testing fields (Semipalatinsk and Novaya Zemlya).

   Under this program, just 22 percent of nuclear tests (industrial explosions and processing nuclear cores for them) were conducted. That is, one-fifth of the Soviet Union's nuclear test program was carried out specifically for civilian objectives.
Statistics about the nuclear program which were unclassified in the beginning of the 1990s, showed that nuclear explosions were conducted in Ukraine. The above explosion was the 28th for non-military use (the 363rd test in the USSR overall). It was 3.8 kilotons in magnitude.

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