Engineer Memoirs
You weren't talking about a proposition where you were simply going to loosen the
rock and later move it with earth-moving machinery. Where you were going to save
money was that the force of the explosion was going to make a big enough hole that
you would have to do nothing more. If you put the explosives in a row, they would
make a clean ditch.
Nuclear excavation wasn't going to work unless it would make a clean hole, and that
hole would be deep enough for the canal. That was a fundamental issue. The scientists
knew nothing about this, but the minute the engineers got there--when I got there and
Bill Wray and others--we immediately started raising this issue.
As it turned out, ultimately the study commission consulted some of the top soil
mechanics people in the United States, including Arthur Casagrande and others. Their
judgment was that, for much of the route in Panama--the SasardiMorti route--the
soil was a clay shale in which a nuclear crater would not be stable. The experts would
not support the proposition that nuclear explosions could be used.
The part through the continental divide was basalt. So there was much less question
there. A nuclear crater in such volcanic rock would probably be stable. But the clay
shale, which is a sedimentary rock and was the type of rock that had caused all the
trouble in the present canal, occupied a long section of the valley where the canal was
to be excavated.
There were a lot of safety issues, too. But just from a strictly engineering viewpoint,
one of our concerns about the feasibility of the canal proved, at least for this particular
route, to be well founded.
Q:
Was it basically for engineering reasons that the project was abandoned, or that the
nuclear aspect was abandoned?
A:
That was the up-front reason given. By the time they substituted conventional
excavation for nuclear excavation for the long stretch of clay shale on the nuclear route,
the cost advantage wasn't anywhere near as great.
The other major thing was the whole problem of evacuating this area where this canal
would be. We estimated there were at least 30,000 Indians living within the area which
would have been severely impacted by these explosions--impacted as far as air blast,
ground shock, and low-level radioactive debris.
The theory was that the explosions could be made clean enough that, while there would
be a problem right at the time of the explosion, it would decay fairly quickly, and then
it could be re-entered.
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